Fox vs. Dominion Discovery Docs Show Employees Admitting Their Products Were "Riddled" With Critical Bugs Leading to Incorrect Results.

...and now they want $1.6bn from Mr. Murdoch.

Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News, and naturally all the coverage shrieks, “OMG FOX KNEW IT WASN’T TRUE BUT LIED!”

CNN chose to only report the Dominion filing, not the Fox response.

Actually, I think we all remember Tucker Carlson grilling Sidney Powell, and the fact that the news network scarcely dipped a toe into any investigative work in the area. As their lawyers argued in response to Dominion, Fox’s role was limited to reporting to its viewers the claims and counterclaims surrounding the election.

As an aside, the Fox filings you can read in full here and here (it’s 183 pages), also reveal that Dominion’s $1.6bn in claims are 42 times larger than what Staple Street Capital paid to acquire most of the company as recently as 2018. Staple Street has already made most of its money back, by the way, with discovery revealing “Dominion projects revenues of $98 million,” for 2022.

“When Staple Street invested in Dominion, it paid $38.3 million to acquire 76% of the company. Dominion’s claim of $1.6 billion in enterprise value is 42 times that amount.”

More galling, however, is the refusal to cover the admissions found by Fox, that Dominion employees themselves were not sure about the security of their own systems.

Page 15 of Fox’s filing reveals fascinating discovery material.

Some of the most critical examples include (with emphasis added):

Discovery in this case has revealed that Dominion’s own employees expressed serious concerns about the security of its machines. Mark Beckstrand, a Dominion Sales Manager, confirmed that other parties “have gotten ahold of [Dominion’s] equipment illicitly” in the past.

Beckstrand identified specific instances in Georgia and North Carolina and testified that a Dominion machine was “hacked” in Michigan.

Beckstrand confirmed that these security failures were “reported about in the news.”

And just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Dominion’s Director of Product Strategy and Security, Eric Coomer, acknowledged in private that “our shit is just riddled with bugs.” Indeed, Coomer had been castigating Dominion’s failures for years. In 2019, Coomer noted that “our products suck.”

He lamented that “[a]lmost all” of Dominion’s technological failings were “due to our complete f--- up in installation.” And in another instance, he identified a “*critical* bug leading to INCORRECT results.” He went on to note: “It does not get much worse than that.”

And while many companies might have resolved their errors, Coomer lamented that “we don’t address our weaknesses effectively!”

These were recent (2019) messages, which don’t just provide justification for a news network covering potential exploitation of voting machines, but are enough to warrant a wider investigation of Dominion, State Street Capital, and their products and services.

But no mention of these details by most news networks over the last 36 hours. The Associated Press, I suppose to its credit(?), put this in their 10th paragraph on the story: “[Fox lawyers] also point to an email from Oct. 30, 2020, just days before the election, in which Dominion's director of product strategy and security complained that the company's products were ‘just riddled with bugs’".

So long as Fox’s corporate media competitors continue to take victory laps over filings their correspondents have clearly not read, nor reported accurately on, they will find themselves guilty of precisely what they want Fox fined $1.6bn for: making routine editorial news decisions.

This is wanton endangerment and disregard of a so-called free press and America’s First Amendment. But then again, no one ever accused Oliver Darcy of believing in those things in the first place.