NEW TEXT MESSAGES RELEASED AS PART OF Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News show how much Tucker Carlson despised Donald Trump and his associates, despite publicly defending the former president’s election fraud.
“I despise him passionately,” Carlson wrote in a text message to an unknown recipient two days before the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol, “and I can’t take much more of this.”
Tucker Carlson on October 30, 2020: “Reporters hate Trump with an all-consuming mania. They hate him so intensely that at times it's been amusing to watch.”
Tucker Carlson on Trump in private on January 4, 2021: "I hate him passionately." https://t.co/4Icc3BgOxp pic.twitter.com/smrQzceMop
— Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) March 8, 2023
In one exchange, Carlson refers to Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as a “lying fucking bitch,” despite the fact that Powell was repeatedly brought on the network as a guest to promote election conspiracies. In another, he agrees with an unnamed sender who states that there’s no “evidence of voter fraud that swung the election,” and that there’s “certainly no evidence the election was stolen. “Yep. “Everything is correct,” Carlson replied.
With Tucker Carlson spreading January 6th and election lies.
Here's his internal correspondence Nov. 2020 (from Dominion lawsuit doc dump tonight).
– Tucker agrees that certainly no evidence election stolen
– Tucker says the stolen election conspiracy is bad for the country pic.twitter.com/pCLh2GEKvn— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) March 8, 2023
Carlson torched the entirety of the Trump administration, writing that “we’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But, please. There isn’t much to like about Trump.” Carlson referred to the former president as a “demonic” force in a separate exhibit filing released last week.
In another text exchange, Carlson and fellow primetime hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham call the network’s “news” side “pathetic” for responding to election claims made by the network’s “opinion” anchors. Carlson demands at one point that Fox’s White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after publicly fact-checking the network’s election claims. “Why would we let some 27-year-old phony reporter wreck our network?” Carlson asks. According to Hannity, he forwarded the complaint to network CEO Suzanne Scott.
Despite Carlson’s private criticism of Trump, the Fox host publicly supported Trump’s election lies and continues to do so to this day. On Monday night, Carlson kicked off a multi-day Jan. 6 propaganda blitz by telling his audience that the “2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy given the facts that have since emerged about that election. Nobody who is truthful can deny it.”
Fox News well-cultivated culture of blatantly lying to their audience may come back to bite them in the wallet thanks to the Dominion lawsuit. If things go wrong, the network could face more than a billion dollars in potential lawsuits. However, the hosts at the heart of Fox’s spin machine are unlikely to face any direct consequences. “I think the three of us have enormous power…more power than we know or exercise,” Ingraham said to Carlson and Hannity.
