Donald Trump launched into a bizarre rant on Truth Social about the payout to Dominion Voting Systems.
“So Dominion gets almost a Billion Dollars and I, after years of Fake News, Hoaxes, Scams, and Investigations, am entitled to NOTHING? Is that really the way it’s supposed to work? I don’t think so!” the former president wrote on Tuesday.
Just before a defamation lawsuit from Dominion against Fox was set to go to trial last month, Fox agreed in a settlement to pay the voting machine company $787.5m for broadcasting false statements about the company as Fox hosts and guests falsely claimed and insinuated that their machines had stolen votes from Mr Trump during the 2020 election.
Mr Trump still falsely claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.
The most recent revelation from the Dominion lawsuit the network revealed that fired Fox News host Tucker Carlson threatened co-workers who didn’t agree with his vision to make the network more supportive of Mr Trump.
On 19 November 2020, Carlson replied to a message from producer Justin Wells about a story thought to be critical of Mr Trump, regarding “the growing number of coronavirus cases nationwide and the ongoing upheaval over President Trump’s refusal to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden”.
“We’re not going to succeed if this continues,” Carlson is reported to have said in the messages, according to The Daily Beast. “The brand will be too damaged. We should jump on a couple of examples just to send a clear message. Let’s start with this one. Can we find out who did this?”
“I’m happy to start threatening people individually,” he added. “It’s too much. And again, it will hurt us badly if we let it continue.”
Many Fox viewers at the time were outraged that the network correctly called the election for President Joe Biden.
The former president’s numerous false claims of being the subject of lies and conspiracies have landed him in plenty of legal hot water.
Writer and former magazine advice columnist E Jean Carroll was awarded $5m after her civil rape trial against Mr Trump after she claimed that he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the mid-1990s and later defamed her as president when she went public with her story in 2019, prompting Mr Trump to reject her claim in personally insulting terms.
Mr Trump was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not for rape.
Ms Carroll has asked for further damages after the verdict following Mr Trump’s further attacks on her during a chaotic and controversial CNN town hall event earlier this month.
Mr Trump is also being investigated for his attempt to overturn the presidential election in Georgia, his actions during the Capitol riot, and additional attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The former president was indicted earlier this year on 34 counts of business fraud in connection to his hush money payments in the lead-up to the 2016 election following allegations that he had affairs with adult actor Stormy Daniels and model Karen McDougal.
Mr Trump appeared via video call in the hush money case on Tuesday as the judge in the case tentatively set the trial date for late March next year – in the middle of the GOP presidential primary season.
In January, the Trump Organization was fined $1.6m for tax fraud, and in September of last year, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a $250m lawsuit against Mr Trump and three of his children for a number of fraudulent business practices. Mr Trump has called the probe a “witch hunt”. He also faces several other lawsuits.
