Dominion Voting Systems, in winning a $787 million defamation settlement with Fox News, is no longer in the election technology business, says San Diego-based Herring Networks.
In a new countersuit, the owners of One America News Network argue that Dominion is in the suing-for-profit business.
Dominion has adopted a business model that has nothing to do with voting machines, software or technology, says OAN’s suit in its own election-lies case filed Friday in D.C. federal court.
“Financed by Staple Street and directed by [AT&T chairman William] Kennard, Counterclaim Defendants have retooled themselves as professional litigants,” says OAN. In August 2021, Dominion sued Herring and allied parties for $1.6 billion.
OAN lawyers said the Fox payout is about 15 times what Staple Street paid for a controlling stake in Dominion in 2018.
“Politically like-minded admirers now routinely speak highly of Dominion voting machines, software and technology without questioning or investigating how (or if) the technology works as it should,” OAN’s filing says.
OAN, updating a suit first filed in early February, says Dominion has a “well-documented history of very real problems.”
“It’s a clever trick,” writes attorney Blaine Kimrey for Herring Networks, who says Dominion has “turned core political speech earnestly criticizing them into a valuable return on investment for Staple Street.”
OAN doesn’t specify the amount of monetary punishment but is asking for compensatory and punitive damages, attorneys and other costs. (No trial date has been set.)
Asked to comment on Friday’s filing, a spokesman for Dominion on Tuesday quoted Dominion’s complaint against OAN:
“Over the course of several months, OAN manufactured, endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion. Throughout this time, OAN recklessly disregarded the truth; indeed, OAN knew the statements it repeatedly broadcast about Dominion were lies, as former OAN producer Marty Golingan confirmed to the New York Times. Dominion brings this lawsuit to set the record straight, to vindicate its rights, to hold OAN accountable, and to recover damages for the devastating economic harm done to its business.”
Times of San Diego asked Dominion how Judge Carl J. Nichols, overseeing the case, might view the countersuit.
The Dominion spokesman noted the summary judgment ruling by Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis in the Fox News case.
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis said.
Davis also rejected Fox’s First Amendment “newsworthy allegation” defense and held that Dominion’s lawsuit was consistent with free-speech protections, the spokesman said via email.
Also commenting is media-law expert Clay Calvert, emeritus law professor at the University of Florida,
“Characterizing Dominion’s settlement with Fox as part of a ‘business model’ for ‘professional litigants’ certainly is one way to publicly cast Dominion in a negative light, while simultaneously framing the case as a battle between a good ‘family-run business’ against an evil enterprise only concerned about enriching its ‘bottom line,’” Calvert said Tuesday.
He called these claims “headline-grabbing assertions.”
“That’s why they and others like them appear in the opening paragraphs of a 46-page amended pleading,” Calvert said via email. “Their relevance to the actual legal theories asserted by Herring much deeper into the pleading is another matter for the judge to decide if Dominion files a motion to dismiss the ones targeting it or further down the line on a summary judgment motion.”
Carl Luna is a San Diego political science professor who heads the Institute for Civil Civic Engagement.
He doesn’t think much of OAN’s argument.
“Corporations sue corporations all the time,” he said, “and in this instance, I should not [shed] a tear for news corporations [that brand themselves] as being fair and balanced” but are “happy to pay a price for putting ratings over the truth.”
Luna recalls how General Motors sued NBC for over $1 billion over proved-to-be-false allegations about one of their trucks.
“[But] the matters at hand here directly affect the integrity of the American election system,” he said Wednesday via email. “There is an even higher onus on Fox to report something that corresponded to the truth.”
“In this matter, whatever questions might still exist about Dominion Voting machines these questions do not really relate to the allegations Fox was making of the Dominion system being so corrupted that [they] change the outcome of a national election.
“To compare the two is not comparing apples to oranges — it’s comparing apples to platypuses.”
Herring lawyers note that they have sued AT&T, AT&T Services, Kennard and DirecTV in San Diego Superior Court for dropping OAN from their channel offerings.
“In contrast to and distinct from the San Diego litigation — which involves numerous different parties and different claims — the Counterclaim asserted here focuses on the unlawful efforts of [Dominion] to interfere with Herring’s business relationships, contracts, and reasonable business expectancies through [Dominion’s] unlawful influence and the unlawful influence of Staple Street and Kennard,” the suit says.
Among other things, OAN says in its new countersuit that:
- Staple Street is liable for “tortious interference” with Herring’s business relationships and
reasonable business expectancies. - Herring is confident discovery will further reveal that one or more Dominion entities or Dominion-affiliated entities used governmental entities to unlawfully censor speech. (“Counterclaim Defendants coordinated out of the public eye with the Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation … team at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency … to attack speech that one or more Dominion entities found troubling for selfish business reasons.”
- Kennard’s involvement in suing Herring is a violation of the non-disparagement provision of the relevant Affiliation Agreement.
That AT&T agreement is attached to the countersuit but is almost entirely redacted — as are parts of the countersuit.
OAN recalls that in 2013, “at the urging of AT&T, which wanted to compete with Fox News Network with an alternative conservative-leaning network, Herring launched OAN. AT&T Services and OAN entered into a Network Affiliation Agreement on April 10, 2014. AT&T was planning to take an equity stake in Herring to ensure that OAN gained carriage on DIRECTV…. The plan was terminated as AT&T began targeting DIRECTV for a possible acquisition.”
In exchange for Herring’s help in hiring lobbyist and meeting with FCC officials, the suit says, “AT&T promised to air OAN and AWE on U-Verse and DIRECTV.”
Along with Fox News and others, Herring Networks is being sued by Smartmatic, another voting technology company.
In that case, Judge Nichols on May 1 ordered Herring and Smartmatic to send his clerk a joint email briefly summarizing their discovery dispute by May 5 and outlining each party’s position.
“The email should also include proposed dates and times for a status conference,” Nichols said. The email isn’t yet public.
Updated at 1:30 p.m. May 10, 2023