About this episode
A new trove of exhibits unearthed as part of Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News was released on Tuesday, including emails, text messages and transcripts from depositions by numerous Fox News personalities and executives. There are lots of interesting details in the documents that reinforce the allegations made in Dominion’s recent motion for summary judgment. But the main takeaways are: Most corners of Fox News — from reporters and producers to primetime hosts to the most senior executives — knew that the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election put forward by Donald Trump, his lawyers and their political allies were bogus. Despite this, Fox News executives and primetime hosts leaned into the election conspiracy theories after they realized their Trump-loving viewers were abandoning the network for more right-wing alternatives. The news and opinion divisions at Fox News, never great allies even in less stressful times, went to war with each other in the post-election period. Tucker Carlson hates Trump. And Speaker Kevin McCarthy's decision to fork over Jan. 6 footage to Carlson continued to reverberate around Capitol Hill yesterday following the Fox host’s first big dispatch, which drew prominent rebukes from Democrats and Republicans. It was “a headache of [House Republicans’] own making,” write Sarah Ferris, Olivia Beavers and Kyle Cheney , one that “reopened a painful fault line that his party has repeatedly tried to mend.” Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook newsletter Raghu Manavalan is the host and senior editor of POLITICO's Playbook Daily Briefing. Jenny Ament is the executive producer of POLITICO Audio.