Lawrence O'Donnell, Sen. Doug Jones & David Folkenflik

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tells us how to look at Fox after this week’s explosive leaks. Former Senator Doug Jones tells us how the Democrats regain power in the south. NPR’s David Folkenflik breaks down the greater implications of Fox & Dominion’s lawsuit.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders has rolled back
big portions of her state's child labor protections. We have
a great show today. NPRS David Fulkenflick stops by to

(00:22):
talk to us about the latest leaks in the Fox
News dominion lawsuit. Then we'll talk to former Senator Doug
Jones about how Dems can regain ground in the South.
But first we have the host of the Laurence O'Donnell Show,
MSNBC's Laurence O'Donnell. Welcome back to Fast Politics, Laurence O'Donnell. Oh,

(00:46):
great to be back with my new microphone that I'm
so proud of that I bought Jeff for this conversation. Yes,
we love that. Very excited. I want to talk to
you first about the dominion filing because this is not
your first rodeo and you have been in this business,
the business of politics and then the business of media.

(01:07):
I think a lot of us suspected that this was happening,
but were you just shocked that there were like actual
text messages documenting these things. No, I would have been
shocked if there was a shred of evidence of a
shred of decency there, including in the you know, Brett
Bayer department, which has always been corrupt. But you know,
the news media has never wanted to believe that there's

(01:31):
this impostor. It's not a cancer on the business. It's
just an imposter. You know. It's like the Wrestling Channel said,
he called itself Wrestling News, and the news media just
all it's news. It's been a fraud from the first day.
I remember before they opened their doors. I remember walking
down sixth Avenue and hearing from someone that, oh, you know,

(01:51):
Rupert Murdock's going to start a Republican TV channel. I,
because I'm brilliant about these things, said, well, no one's
gonna watch that. And you know, because Republican TV channel
to me sounded like more boring than c SPAN at
the time, because the Republican Party was Bob Dole and
you know that stuff. But you know, here we are.
It's always been what it is, and it's and the

(02:14):
It just horrifies me that people keep using the word
that Rupert Murdoch ordered them to use when he filled
out the corporate papers titling the business Fox News. That
is a classic case of what the Senator I worked for,
Daniel Patrick moynahan, would call semantic infiltration, and that is

(02:36):
infiltrating your language to force you to say what I
want you to say. And so there are these attempts
to do that in politics in various ways, with phrases
like pro life. I'm going to call myself pro life,
therefore you have to and the news business obeys those commands.
But I mean, I have not put the word news

(02:58):
after the word Fox in many years because it's just
a lie and the whole thing is a fraud, and
everybody working there, there's not a single person working there
is in the news business. There never has been. Yeah, No,
I mean, I think that's right. And I just want
to get back to what you said about Brett Bair,
because they had this distinction that there was a news
side and an entertainment side. But what's very clear from

(03:20):
this is that's not true. Yeah, I know Brett Bair
was horrified that Fox called Arizona first, and he was
horrified that they lost viewers because of it. That's never
happened in any of the real news divisions around there.
I can confess to you this may come as a
shock if I pull back the curtain a little bit,
but I personally, I won't speak for others at MSNBC,

(03:43):
but I personally was deeply disappointed when we realized Donald
Trump was going to win the Electoral College. And I
realized that about a half an hour before other people,
because I was sitting there with Steve Schmidt and James Carville.
We had our own little studio and we would do
our own little cut in and for twenty minutes at
a time, we were not on TV, and those two
guys were doing way more than the decision desk does.

(04:07):
They were texting and calling people they know in such
and such a county in North Carolina. And I would
hear James Carville talking to someone in North Carolina and say, well,
if we lose that, then we're going to lose Wisconsin.
And he's and all he's getting is a report from
one particular district in North Carolina that he knows mirrors
Wisconsin and all that. So so I kind of knew

(04:29):
the tragedy unfolding about a half an hour before everybody else,
And there wasn't a moment where it crossed my mind, well,
we can't as a network go out there and say
Donald Trump won. We can't do that. You know, It's like, no, sorry,
never crossed my mind. I think that's a really good point,
is that there they tried to shape the news to

(04:50):
fit the narrative. But I'm curious. It seems like the
larger problem that Fox ends up having, and you see
in these filings, is that they have given their listeners
viewers so much of what they want that they have
sort of been unable to shape reality to what these
people needed to hear. And so there is this sort

(05:11):
of almost I mean, I feel like it's like something
from a sci fi novel where they realize that they
can no longer shape reality to meet the demand. They
are continuing to deliver exactly what they believe that audience wants.
Here's the funny thing about it. You know when they
talk about, oh, we watched our ratings collapse that week. Yeah,

(05:33):
it was a rough week for Fox. But here's the
way it goes. And everybody knows this, and everyone knew
this ahead of time, and it would have been true
in two thousand and four, you know, with George w Bush,
and it was true in two thousand and eight, you
know one Obama won. So if the Republican wins the presidency,
the MSNBC ratings are going to drop because there's going

(05:53):
to be a depression in a majority of that audience. Okay,
then they don't want to they don't want to consume
this stuff anymore. And if the Democrats win the presidency,
there was always a drop, always, every time, a drop
in the Fox ratings that week, okay, And it didn't
mean Fox wasn't going to make billions of dollars. It

(06:13):
meant there was this kind of moment, you know, the
super Bowl is over and the fans are not watching
football the next week. That's just the way it works.
And so their panic about losing audience is just so
despicable on every level, including the money level, because they
were all all going to remain very, very rich. Fox

(06:35):
was going to continue to make billions, and they are
panicking over this relatively slight and totally predictable and temporary
drop in ratings. It's so interesting though, because they sort
of can't ride with it. But I also do think
it ended up being What I think is pretty interesting
is that they ended up this choice they made, which

(06:56):
they clearly made a choice. They knew what they were doing.
Clear they knew that the twenty twenty election was free
and fair. They did it because they just didn't have
a hold on the market. They did it because they
thought it was their job. It's a Republican party operation
and the doctrine of the Republican party in the twenty
first century, and this was not always the case, but

(07:18):
by the twenty first century what it became, Republicanism simply
became we hate liberals. Right, It's nothing else. There's no policy,
there's no balance the budget, there's no eliminate the deficit.
There's there's no policy at all except tax cuts. And
we hate liberals. And we get our tax cuts by
convincing people who are not rich, who also hate liberals,

(07:42):
to vote for us. And that's the entire scheme. And
that's Murdoch's entire scheme. He has no other objective except,
you know, the demonization of liberals, and so that's the game.
So they're going to do that, and they're going to
do whatever is necessary to do that, and they're absolutely
you know, limits, and I promise you there have never

(08:02):
been limits There's never been a day at Fox, never
a day where they had any kind of moral or
ethical limit on what they might do or say. Yeah,
and all you're seeing if you see a difference between
Sean Hannity nineteen ninety seven and Sean Hannity twenty seventeen,
and there is it is simply what is acceptable? What

(08:24):
are the bounds of acceptability? And so those things change
in every sphere of life. You know, over time, over
a twenty year period, you know, what's acceptable to say
contracts and expands in different kinds of ways. And so
they're just playing within the zone that is now acceptable.
And what's acceptable now in Republicanism is literally anything. It

(08:46):
takes any anything to beat and destroy Liberals. So one
of the things that I've been continually having a argument
with even very smart Republicans but tend to be Republicans,
is this idea that DeSantis is somehow less dangerous than Trump.
Can you just debunk this? I mean, this just blows

(09:08):
my mind, this idea that somehow someone who is much
better at doing this is less dangerous than Trump. Yeah,
I don't think there's any real evidence for that case
that de Santis is less dangerous than Trump. I always
when I was watching Trump, I was always thanking the
luck of the draw every day. Just how lucky we

(09:30):
are that he's an imbecile. We are so lucky that
he is as deeply, profoundly and permanently stupid as he is,
because he was just a couple of nachees smarter. You know,
the things that he was trying to do could be
done with better premeditation, like even for example, I'm going

(09:50):
to need an attorney general. Well when re election comes,
who's going to do anything for me in the Justice Department?
He had, because he's stupid, reason to believe that Barr
was that guy. And Barr was disgraceful, and Bar disgraced
himself beyond what anyone who knew him could have imagined.
But still there were going to be limits, you know
for somebody who grew up in the law like Bill Barr.

(10:13):
And Trump found those limits in November, you know, of
twenty twenty. If he had planned a year ahead of time,
who is the idiot, the hack, the moral I want
as attorney general? For that moment, he could have basically
told Bill bar to quit right because you don't have
to get this guy confirmed. You don't have to get

(10:33):
him confirmed. As we saw with the crazy, you know
lawyer from the Justice Department who he temporarily for a
few hours made acting Attorney General. He could have gotten
a guy like that in in a smoother way, and
DeSantis would get that guy in in a smoother way.
He would have premeditated it. Trump is this imbecile who

(10:55):
is late with his homework every single time, right and so,
and we're lucky, you know, we're very lucky because of that.
DeSantis is the most premeditated of his kind I've ever seen.
Like he's way beyond, way beyond Trump and all of that. Yeah,
that's what I think too. I mean, the book banning
the education stuff. I mean, let me just add one

(11:17):
difference to DeSantis that could be a civilizing factor. Because
Donald Trump did something that has never been done before
in the history of the presidency. Every single person except
Franklin Roosevelt in our recent time who won the presidency
immediately tried to figure out, how do I get the
voters who didn't vote for me? And the reason I
say except Franklin Roosevelt is because his first election was

(11:40):
a landslide and his second election was even bigger right
and so, but everybody else is, you know, kind of
squeaking in there. You know. JFK won the presidency by
less than one percent of the vote. Eight years later,
Richard Nixon wins the presidency by less than one percent
of the vote. Both of them wanted to sound appealing
to people who didn't vote for them. Everybody has done that.

(12:03):
Ronald Reagan did that. Ronald Reagan won forty nine states
in the electoral college in his reelection because after he
got elected, and after he built a career as a
right winger, the most extreme right winger in the party,
every day of his presidency he was trying to appeal
to what came to be called the Reagan Democrat. Trump
gets elected, he doesn't. And all I did, I'm telling you,

(12:23):
when he was elected, all I did was sit there
and listen for what did he say today to the
people who didn't vote for him? And there literally was
not a sentence, not one day of the entire time.
And that is why he didn't get reelected. If he
wanted to get it to its most simplest point, that's
why he didn't get reelected. The guy who came in

(12:46):
second in the vote but got the electoral College. Anyway,
that guy didn't try to convert any voters. Guess what's
going to happen to him next time? He's gonna come
in second again. And so to say this, I suspect
I suspect may if he if he were to win
the White House, he might spend four years trying to

(13:09):
appeal to people who didn't vote for him and go
from forty eight percent of the vote up to fifty
one percent of the vote. Yeah. No, I think that's
a really good point. I also think and by the way,
and the way a Republican appeals to people who didn't
vote for him is obviously not with Republican ideas. It
is to soften the edges of Republican notions. You know,

(13:31):
it's the compassionate conservative stuff that the Bushes would talk about,
right well, and I also think it's sort of faking it,
right It depends. I mean, you know, George H. W.
Bush wasn't faking it in the sense that he did
reach legislative compromises with Democrats in Congress, and that some
of which were significant, you know, and he was condemned

(13:53):
for it by Republicans. By Pat Buchanan, you know, by
the lunatics. George W. Bush was very much concerned with
what you thought of him, very much, and he was
very much concerned about that, even if you didn't vote
for him, And that is a civilizing influence on politicians.
Trump has none of it, and in Florida, DeSantis has
none of it. We'll see what would happen if he

(14:14):
goes national. I wanted to stroll down on this for
a minute. Don't you get the sense that DeSantis he
lost a debate to Charlie Chris. I mean, don't you
think there's a lot riding on someone who no one
has ever really seen? No? I think, I actually think
he's had a great deal of exposure for a presidential candidate,
you know, way more than Jimmy Carter had as a governor.

(14:37):
I mean, when Jimmy Carter announced that he was running
for president, everybody outside of Georgia said, who no one,
No one knew that name. The same thing with Bill Clinton,
people didn't know who that guy was. DeSantis's visibility as
a governor is as high as I've ever seen for
a governor who was not already a presidential candidate. You know,
Michael Ducacus nobody knew how to say that word outside

(14:59):
of Massachuset. It's you know, when he announced as a governor,
and so he's gotten a tremendous amount of visibility. And
you know, we're at the stage where debates have declined
dramatically in how much they matter. If they mattered, Donald Trump,
you know, would have gotten twenty percent of the vote.
That's an old notion that we all used to have

(15:20):
about how is this you know, candidate going to stand
up in the debates? You know, in presidential debates, it's like, wow,
it doesn't matter very much. The biggest clown in the
history of presidential debating, you know one the Republican nomination
in twenty sixteen, and then you know went on from there. Yeah,
it seemed to make no difference. Do you think that Biden,

(15:40):
this is an anxiety I have that taking New Hampshire
out of the lineup is going to hurt him in
the general election. Not in the least. That's just a
you know, it's a fetishistic thing that not a single
voter in a single state cares about. You have to
remember that most voters in America do not get a
chance ever to participate in a presidential primary that has

(16:03):
any impact whatsoever on the presidential election. That's the truth
for most American voters, and their spirit as voters is
not affected by it. I mean, I'd want someone to
find me the voter in New Hampshire, you know, in
November who says, yeah, I mean, I was gonna I'm
gonna vote for Biden. But then you know when they

(16:25):
just I mean, now, now, I've been to New Hampshire.
I've been to New Hampshire every year of the New
Hampshire primary for the last i don't know, way too
long a time. They're not exactly thrilled to see you.
You know, the people of New Hampshire, you know, the
political fans of New Hampshire love it. They line up
around the blocks to get into high school gymnasiums to

(16:47):
see Barack Obama. And it's and it is quite exciting
if you care about that. But you've got to understand
you're looking at less than one percent of the population
of New Hampshire, who ever bother to leave their sofas
to go see one of these presential candidates. Yeah, it
is a good point. Okay, here's my last prediction question.
I'm sorry to do this to you. What can we
just deal with all of your anxieties because I'm here,

(17:11):
as we know, to help you through your anxieties. So
that's we didentitely dealt with you New Hampshire. Ani, Well
I have another one, so we're in good shape. Okay,
and again, but I don't want to be wrong that
the dominion court case will go. Do you think that
they'll settle or you think they're gonna I mean, because
if it goes, I mean, this is going to be
a pretty big blockbuster. No, so the time to settle

(17:33):
has passed. The reason you settle these lawsuits is that
you don't want the damage to come out publicly. And
so that's why Fox settled every bill O'Reilly lawsuit. You know,
they settle all these things. Can you settle a lawsuit
before Rupert Murdoch has to sit down and testify under oath?
They didn't do it. Now, there's what people are neglecting
to remember about a settlement is that both sides have

(17:57):
to agree to it. So what we do not yet no,
and we might someday know, is that Fox made an
offer to Dominion and Dominion said no. And if your
dominion I personally believe my legal approach to the case.
Assuming they have twenty million dollars to spend on legal fees,
which I guess they do, my approach would be do

(18:17):
not settle under any circumstances, because winning the case in
court is not important to Dominion's viability as a business. Well,
they've already won what they needed to do to be
viable as a business. They have proven in all this
undergrowth testimony by Rupert and everybody else exactly the scope

(18:38):
and shape of the lies told about Dominion by Fox.
So Dominion as a business can go forward in the world,
you know, marketing its services anywhere, and no one will
ever have to say to them. But wait, you know,
Fox said you guys are criminals, Like that's never gonna happen. Ever,
as of today, that's all over. So the important thing

(19:01):
is Dominion has won. It has won its reputation, and
it has destroyed Fox's reputation. And the only way they
could do that is get to this point where we're
reading Rupert Murdoch's Undergrowth testimony on TV. And if they
had settled, you know, six months ago for one hundred
million dollars or three hundred million or five hundred million.

(19:24):
We would know none of this, and so Dominion has
had zero incentive to settle. That's the part people don't
understand when they talk about settlement. I'm sure Fox would
have loved to settle this a year ago for some
number that they thought was reasonable, or even for a
number they thought was unreasonable. But the jury verdict is tricky,

(19:46):
and it may well be that, you know, Dominion doesn't
quote win the case in court in the end, and
I personally, if I'm on the dominion end of it,
I don't care. I don't care. I already won. And
if the jury and if the judge you know, make
rulings that say, you know, this stuff lives within First
Amendment protections, or if you know, Fox establish it gets

(20:11):
a win like that from the Supreme Court that they
sort of own in their way, I don't care. It
doesn't change anything about what we know the facts to be.
So my strong suspicion about the inside of this is
if there was a settlement attempt by Fox, it was
refused by Dominion. Yeah. So interesting. Thank you so much, Lawrence.

(20:32):
I hope you'll come back a pleasure. Thank you. David
folken Flick is a media correspondent at MPR. Welcome to
Fast Politics, David. Thanks glad to join you. It's very
thrilled to have you. I just want to talk to
you about this continual drip, drip drip of the Fox

(20:54):
News dominion filing. You will have been a media reporter
for a while. You've written about the Murdochs, You've written
books about the Murdochs. I mean, what is your hot
take here? I wouldn't call it a drip drip so
much as a sort of a series of avalanches, you know,
in recent days. I think what is notable for somebody

(21:15):
who's covered it closely? Z I have for coming up
on twenty three years. You know the media and Fox
has been a big and growing part of that. You know,
it's really all part of covering media and politics as well.
Right is how dark it is, how blunt it is,
how blatant it is, and it is the degree to
which decisions are made by business imperatives, and those business

(21:37):
imperatives are ineluctably entangled in politics. And it's not just hey,
we've got a pander to a right wing or a
left wing audience. It's hey, we've got a tamper with
what we present to our folks's reality. It's not just
that we're Mother Jones and a left of center outfit
that does some reporting, or the Washington Free Beacon or whatever.

(21:59):
It's literally withholding the facts that you know to be
true because you know that this is a money gusher
and you don't want to turn off this bigot. In fact,
this bigot has been drawing up a bit. Right after
election night twenty twenty, and the original sin of Fox
calling Arizona for Joe Biden on that night before any
other broadcast network or cable network had done so. Trump

(22:22):
voters who had been tuned into Fox to hope that
they could celebrate, were like, not only celebrating, they're like, oh,
screw you guys, with the guys bringing us this news.
You guys are the ones doing this. And for days
other news outlets did not, And you see intimations from
people inside Fox saying, well, they're just doing that to
hose us by leaving us hanging out there. But they
were using different numbers because Fox, joined by the AP

(22:44):
had bailed after the twenty sixteen presidential call was so problematic.
That is, the polling data and everything else really just
didn't capture what was happening in some of these key
swing states. And so Fox kept telling reporters like me, oh,
we've come up with better math, We've come up with
a better way to do this, and they felt that
they had had some success in the off elections of

(23:05):
twenty eighteen, and then they went all in. Now, that
turned out to be a very close call, and in retrospect,
one wouldn't have begrudged them not making the call, given
how close it turned out to be. It was a
razor thin you know, there's an interesting statistical argument to
make about whether or not they were taking a little
bit of a leap of faith with their new numbers.
But they made the call and they trusted those their projections,

(23:25):
and then you see Fox people. A civil war erupted
within Fox as a result of that. So it was
I surprised. No, So much of this is based on
pairing what you see happen on the air with what
people from inside Fox are telling you. As a result,
I'm not really surprised. It's just so blatant. There's no
code words, there's no sleight of hand happening, and you know,

(23:47):
it really only occurred to me in recent days. How
much of this, probably this incredibly rich documentary record that
dominion is drawing on. We can talk about the merits
of the case in a set, but how much of
it's influenced by the fact that it's ocurring in the
age of COVID and so people aren't having these conversations
in person all that much. They're emailing and texting each

(24:08):
other more than they probably would have, not that they
you know, it's not like Tucker and Sean and Laura
are always going out to drinks at night. You know,
they can text if they want to text. It's not
that I think they particularly like each other, but they
have common interests in common grievances. And man, after that election,
they are on it. They think that Fox hates them.
They think that the news side hates them. They hate

(24:30):
the reporters who work for them for pointing out false
claims that are made on their shows on Fox and
more publicly, it is absolutely civil war happening internally at
that network. And it's it's a sight to behold and
to lift up under the rock and see how things behave.
And Molly, let's acknowledge that if NPR or the New
York Times or CBS or CNN or anybody had all

(24:52):
of its Somebody described this as being like an X ray.
You know, this is more like three dMRI of all
the organs at all the bones, a the muscles, right like,
this is everything pretty much. It's really ugly. Yeah, I
think it's kind of shocking. Were you surprised that Tucker
hated Trump so much or that he'd sent that text messager? Now?

(25:12):
I mean, if he was thinking hard, given how often
Dominion was sending notes saying the stuff isn't true, he
might have thought, Wow, there might be a lawsuit in
my future, and let's let's keep this. You know, let
me not express this, but Tucker, it is very hard
not to conclude that Tucker is a pretty cynical person.
Does Tucker actually believed there was no violence on January six,
twenty one the US Capital? Does Tucker actually think these

(25:35):
were just a pleasant, peaceful protesters ambling perhaps a little
too far past a velvet rope that they shouldn't have
the fact that you can find people not committing violence
at given moments of course the day, does that prove that?
Sworn testimony, videotape convictions confessions, all these things that have
happened from people who participated in those bloody events, that
we will just have that a race from our minds. No,

(25:57):
he's providing an hour where he can talk to the audience,
to them what they want to hear. And there's a
lot of misdirection. You know, he lows Trump. So what
he does is he goes after Trump's enemies rather than
having to go after you defend trumpet you know, Fox
during the second Bush term in office, a second George W.
Bush term obviously was kind of depressing to watch. It

(26:17):
was not fun. They had to defend things like the
war in a Rock which got increasingly ugly. They had
defend Katrina, they had defend the collapse of the global like.
There was a lot to defend, right, a lot more
fun going after Obama. And so the thing about Trump
was they kind of would have been happy to have
Hillary to go after for another four years, right, That
would have been fun for them. They could have replayed

(26:38):
all the hits of the Clinton years, and instead they've
got to defend Trump. But it turns out Trump is
artificially stirring the passions of their audiences to keep watching
because nobody knows what he's going to do next, and
he keeps calling into Fox, and he keeps choosing them,
and they just go along for the ride and hold
on as best as they can. So that's what you know.
Tucker is doing Tucker's counter programming. It's a TV thing

(26:59):
and and they're letting him do it because they have
no control. Right, he's too valuable. And also at this point,
the hosts are running the asylum, right, I mean, if
you're going to go to that analogy, I think you know,
the common wisdom is that in some ways the inmates
are running the asylum, that the viewers are that for
a long time, Trump kind of was, you know, with

(27:20):
his kitchen cabinet of Sean Hannity and Janine Perrow and
lou Dobbs bar Romo and others right where he's literally
pulling people into the administration off Fox from watching them
do things. Pete Hedgesith was up for I'm not mistaken
the Veterans Administration Secretary on the basis of what he
says on Fox and Friends. That's a guy who doesn't

(27:41):
wash his hands, right, that is true. He said that.
I mean credit to his co host who was like, yeah,
that's probably something I don't want to know. But there,
I mean, it's such an incredible situation to be and
do you think that, I mean, who do you? You know?
Lou Dobbs is now out right, and it seemed like
he was kind of under the bus there by Rupert

(28:02):
who said he never watches him. That was kind of
great when he said he doesn't watch Fox Business Network,
although he called it a channel. You know, it was like,
you know, I can't imagine working for that network and
feeling very great about that. But you know, there are
a lot of them are in recent money to do,
so so what are you going to do? Right? Dobbs
was thrown over when not Dominion Voting Systems, but Smartmatic,
an election software company that essentially had almost no involvement

(28:25):
in the twenty twenty elections, filed suit on its own
where Dobbs was out the next day and Fox is like, well, no,
this is all previously a scheduled reshuffling and reconstruction and
Dobbs basically was out in his ear and at the
time it seemed implausible, too untrue, And now it just
is very clear what occurred. And my experience in covering
the Murdoch and various scandals over the years, of which

(28:47):
there have been a decent number. They'll throw people over
the back of the sled of the wolves at as
low a level as possible, but as high a level
as needed, and then if that doesn't go, they'll go
up the ladder a little bit. And right now I
think they're going to do anything because Fox has maintained
and Murdoch said in his speaking under oath to lawyers
that he saw no need to apologize. They were reporting,

(29:09):
and this is an integral part of Fox's legal defense,
they were reporting inherently newsworthy claims, Hey, the presidential elections
were rigged by an inherently newsworthy person, Hey, the sitting
president of the the United States, and people speaking on his behalf,
and that if you were to cut that off, then
the Washington Post, an MSNBC and everybody else will pay
a real price journalistically as well. What, of course, Dominion says,

(29:31):
and a lot of media lawyers I talked to say,
is there isn't that analogy, because what Fox did is
so egregious, and because we have not only the clarity
which is legally needed that key folks knew that what
they were putting on the air was untrue, and that
the people presenting it weren't credible either, but also that
they had a motive, which is, we have to win
back these Trump voters as our viewers. And you don't

(29:53):
actually need a motive proven in that way to win
defamation in a lot of states. But my goodness, you
certainly seem to have declared, and you know there's back
and forth. We can talk about the legal merits, but
as a supposed news operation, this is a business enterprise.
Talking about the brand promise and the politics are a
key element of it, and the journalism, although rupert of

(30:14):
all people occasionally waves the flag in these private correspondences,
is not just like a distant third, but like thirteenth
out of three. So interesting? Do you think that they
will go to trial? And also I have a question
for you. This is because it's in Delaware, they can
claim more damages right in the civil My understanding in

(30:34):
this case from following it so far is that they
are applying New York state law in terms of defamation,
but they're applying Delaware state law in terms of the
administration of the case and the flow of the case,
and that gets into some pretty picking un areas. And
I am not a member of the bar in either
state or any state, and not playing one on TV
or on this podcast, but I would say that, you know,

(30:56):
the judge hasn't laughed these damages out of court. Fox
has made a fairly muscular or at least rhetorically muscular
argument that the extent of these damages. Dominion voting systems
is asking for one point six billion dollars, but that's
sort of a notional figure that they're clearly inflated in
BS and Dominion is arguing, though, that we have reason
to say this, and there's, you know, the question of

(31:18):
reputational harm, there's the question of actual harm, and there's
the question of punitive damages. So they feel that it
all does that. So that's one world have to see.
But you know, it's interesting that Fox is stressing all
this stuff. It makes sense in the sense that they're saying,
you have to prove you or hurt, and one way
to prove reputational harm is financial harm, right, But that's
really an appellate question. That's the kind of thing you're like,

(31:39):
well we lost, now we've got to fight over how
much we actually have to pay and then you appeal it.
This is not uncommon. I don't want to be unfair
to Fox. They already have a very strong appellet team
in place, that is the people who will argue the appeals,
which says to you that they don't have Iron Clan
confidence they're going to win this thing. But when you
have as much money as the Murdocks do and as
Foxcorp does, you know you hire those people as a

(32:00):
routine anyway, I mean, does Fox eventually say like this
is too expensive or I mean Dominion clearly is going
for blood. Right, There's clearly some ideological like you can't
ruin USh ruin us kind of thing. I mean right,
So Dominion wants to come out of this with a
ton of money and preferably with some sort of prominent

(32:22):
retraction and apology. The Murdochs want to come out of
this without having to tell their audiences that they were
not only that they were misled, but that they were
intentionally misled and deceived and lied to. The Murdochs have
shown in previous scandals I've covered. There was the tabloid
scandals in Britain, and I started stopped counting after they
exceeded I think it was two hundred million dollars in

(32:44):
various things attached to that. It wasn't that they paid
that out as illegal fee for the people they wronged exactly,
but those were like a series of costs associated if
I'm remembering it correctly to that, and it's been a while.
They definitely paid more than two hundred million in the
Fox sexual harassment scandal that largely but not entirely focused
on Roger Ales, you know who they tossed out. Really

(33:05):
the week basically that Donald Trump got the Republican national
nomination for president in twenty sixteen, I was in Cleveland
at the RNC intending to write a bunch of stories,
and it was all Roger all the time, because these
allocations came out, and it was just it was the
biggest story on the floor, to be honest, beyond Trump.
And they paid, you know, many hundreds of millions of dollars.
You could argue close to a billion dollars for these

(33:28):
various settlements and payoffs that involved this completely unsexy part
of what's called News Corp, which is a Murdoch's publishing
side and used to be all unified under the same umbrella.
I think it's called something like News America, which was
basically a supermarket marketing thing that back in the day
made a ton of money where they placed ads and
coupons and supermarkets. When you go through the aisles, you

(33:49):
could pull off fifty cents here, and they have decals
on the floor or whatever. And it turned out they
did all kinds of things to basically run their competitors
into the ground that probably violated the law, and so
they paid hundreds of millions dollar there. So you know,
if Murdoch could cut a check tomorrow and pay two
hundred million dollars and just make this go away, I
imagine that would be a tough but fine deal for
them to strike. And I don't think that's what Dominion wants.

(34:11):
I think they want to play to a higher pain threshold,
both in terms of money and to make him confront
what he did and the less that the Murdocks are
willing to acknowledge the higher dollar figure I would imagine
a settlement would take. But so far, you know, what
I'm told is that there are no signs of any
settlement talks happening, and that, to be honest, I think

(34:32):
that's almost entirely on the dominion side, that the Fox
Court would at least entertain the conversations. It's so interesting,
even though they acknowledged doing nothing wrong so far, amazeing
too soon to count Newsmax and OA n out de
fine counting them out. They've been dropped by cable company
as those two are sort of you know, they had

(34:54):
this moment and it's and it's sort of been now
kind of they've kind of fallen out of aber. I mean,
do you think there's a world in which Fox loses
those viewers and they go to Newsmax and o an.
I mean, if you look at this completely stripped of morality,
I think the biggest damage Fox could do to its
business model is to reveal to its viewers the contempt

(35:17):
in which they hold them. That is, they don't respect
them truth. You can't handle the truth, right. That's their
biggest damage outside of the question of their ratings. I
think they're going to you know, it's almost like a
seesaw where there's an inverse relationship between their reputation outside
and the reputation with their audience, where they're going to
just take a huge hit with establishment Washington, mainstream institutions,

(35:39):
the news part of Fox, which is really shriveled and
withered and lost some of its biggest figures. Chep Smith,
Karl Cameron, their long time guy, walked away saying it
was too much for him. Chris Wallace saying that the
fever fantasies of January sixth by Tucker Carlson was a
step too far for him. You know, these are a
thing you're seeing. There are very few figures other than

(36:01):
Brett Baer. You know Eric Shawn, you know as a
reporter and some time anchor, but you know he has
a quiet profile there. Right. They're just there's a diminishment.
They got rid of Chris Stirewald and Bill Salmon, who
were defenders of the decision desk and other things. They
just they've really widowed down the muscle that they have
on that side of things. And you can take issue
with those guys too, but at least they were there, right. So,

(36:23):
it seems to me that Newsmax and o N are
unlikely to be major challengers to Fox unless it somehow
breaks that brand promise that Ray Shaw and CEO Fox
News CEO Suzanne Scott were so focused on. In the documents,
that have been released and start backing away from this
kind of culture grievance coverage and attending to the needs

(36:46):
and the and the sensibilities and the fears of the
Trump voter. Even if they're not pro Trump, which they
aren't at the moment, they're really very run to santistish
at the moment. So that's what I think the real
issue is. I also think that their audience, if it fractures,
will probably go to things that may not be as
conventional TV. You know, you can go to whatever the

(37:07):
newest bripe part is, you can go to the Daily Wire,
you can go to other people who are going to
mainline the stuff into your veins if you want, without
the need to have any journalistic sensibilities at all. Thank
you so much, David. That was really depressing. I do
my best every little bit I can do to bring
you down allies. You know, look, there are people inside
Fox who think, hey, this is going to be a

(37:30):
wake up call, and after we emerge from it, you know,
Fox is going to have to revitalize its news coverage
and what have you. But at the moment they're not
saying anything like that because they're not able probably legally
or willing from a moral standpoint to say what we
did was wrong, and Dominion in its latest filings has
made a point of that. To say, Fox has basically
conceded the point because they haven't done anything to defend

(37:51):
an affirmative argument for why any of this stuff had
any validity or credibility to it. And that's just a
very different way of looking at what Fox did. Ah,
thank you so much, Thank thanks, Molly. Doug Jones is
the former junior Senator from the state of Alabama. Welcome

(38:13):
to Fast Politics, Senator Doug Jones. Thank you, Molly. It's
great to be with you. I really appreciate the opportunity here. First,
I think we should talk about this weekend in Selma.
Bloody Sunday weekend in Selma is always a very very
special commemoration and that's the best way to put this
as a commemoration. They have been doing this. The folks,

(38:34):
the organizers down there, have done a wonderful job of
having a jubilee every year on the first weekend in
March that culminates in a recreation of the walk across
the edmon Fettis Bridge. This year, President Biden came down
gave a fabulous speech at the foot of the bridge.
There was a great crowd, enthusiastic crowd. Molly. I think

(38:56):
it's so important that we continue those types of recognitions
and commemorations because you know, we have come so far
and turn so many pages on the Jim Crow South,
but we seem to be flipping some of those pages
back right now with voter suppression and so many other
laws that discriminate and make it more difficult for minority

(39:17):
communities to really get the full benefit of this country.
It's so important to remember where we've been so that
we try to make sure we don't go there in
the future. It's a fabulous weekend. It's quite a big
deal for Biden to come down for that. Can you
talk to us a little bit about his thinking. It
is a big deal. It's a big deal for any president.
The president's usually come when it is a signature commemoration

(39:39):
like the fiftieth or the forty fifth. President Obama was there,
President Clinton came, when President Obama came, even former President
George W. Bush came. But for this president to be
there at the fifty eighth, which is not a signature
event but just a commemoration. I think says a lot
about him and where his heart is and where he

(40:02):
wants to be and wants the country to be. He
sees and understands troubably be as good as any president
we've had, including President Obama, of where things are in
this country right now, and that is why he has
been appointing so many people of color, particularly women, black women,
to the federal bench, why his administration is perhaps the

(40:23):
most diverse of any administration in history. He sees that
the country is becoming more diverse every day, and he
is the president of that country, and he wants to
celebrate that. But again, he also sees that there are
proud boys out there, and there are oath keepers out there,
and there are those who commit mass murders in Buffalo

(40:44):
and other places around this country because of hate speech
and race. He's got the bully pulpit. He's the leader
of this country, and he wants people to understand the
significance of what happened, but also the significance of where
we are today as a country and where we need
to be and going forward as a country. So I
think his thinking is that this is Selma is the

(41:06):
time and the place to be right now, probably before
he kicks off his his presidential campaign, to showcase the
countries and his commitment to diversity, to equity, to inclusion.
You have sort of been very central to try to
move the South out of you know, the sort of
terrifying Jim Crow in apartheid. I mean, this is exactly

(41:29):
called it like it is. That's what it was. That's
what it was, and that's what it is. And how
do you feel right now with America being where it
is and also just the sort of larger landscape. Well, look,
you know you have to qualify everything by saying America
is not the Jim Crow days that I grew up
in the fifties and sixties. Alabama is not the Jim

(41:52):
Crow time Alabama to the South, the country is not
the kind of country where lynchings take place as off
and as they did a century ago. And we have
come such a long way, however, we still have miles
to go before we sleep. And I think people should
recognize that and see that because if you look demographically

(42:13):
at the country and where things are moving, we are
becoming a more diverse country, and we've been becoming a
more diverse country Moley every since we were founded. I mean,
this country was always meant to be a multi culture,
multiracial society, even though some people did not want to
accept that. And so we're becoming more diverse from the

(42:35):
moment that we declared our independence from Great Britain. As
we move forward, though, while we're seeing so many people
fighting these culture wars and playing on the fears of
people across this country, and you see groups like the
Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and you see politicians
like Donald Trump and others kind of whipping that into
a frenzy. And it's not just Trump, by the way.

(42:57):
This whole anti woke movement that you see going on
in the magnifaction of the Republican Party really is troubling.
It's really frightening. Do you think it's really anti woke
or do you think it's really a kind of a
bait and switch way of getting back into the sort
of racism of the past. I'm not sure that it's that,

(43:18):
except for this, If getting into the racism of the
past helps the political future of people who want to
run for president, want to run for the Senate, who
want to run for governors, if that's what it takes.
Then there are people that will damn sure do that.
And that's what's frightening to me. They will take the
country backwards for their own political purposes. I don't think

(43:42):
that so many of those folks deep down are the racist,
not the kind of racist like I grew up with,
but they haven't their own form if they're doing things
that perpetuate those racist kind of issues for their own
political power. And I've said this for a long time.
These are not people who are going to lynch folks.
But there were people that Dangsher would put folks in

(44:04):
the back of the bus if they thought that that
would help their political career. And that's what we're seeing.
That is what we're seeing across the board. Something happened
in Alabama just recently, and this is I think typical
of where we are in this I say typical, I
don't know if it's typical or not, but we recently
had a group of high school students in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
that wanted to have a Black History Month program and

(44:27):
the school administrators said, fine, you can do that. We're
happy for you to do that, as long as you
don't discuss anything that happened before nineteen seventy. I wish
I was kidding about it, but I'm not. So these
students walked out. Nothing happened before nineteen seventies, So that
makes sense. No, of course, not everything started when I

(44:47):
was sixteen years old in nineteen seven. Those students walked out,
they were landed a little bit. But that's the kind
of thing that we're having face across the country. So
I don't think we're in a good place right now,
and I think we've got to work through do that,
and we've got to have some very serious conversations and
dialogues about it. Dialogues and not monologues. Yes, for sure,

(45:09):
quite interesting. So let me ask you, now, where do
you feel, and you have this long time experience with
civil rights and a long time experience of the Biden administration,
what do you think the Biden administration should be doing
next for voting rights, for civil rights, for the South
in general. You know, I think the administration has done

(45:32):
what they could do in terms of using the presidency
and the bully pulpit to try to get certain changes
to the voting rights bill across the finish line. We
couldn't do that for a number of reasons in the
last Congress. I think it will be more difficult in
this Congress. And by the way, I think the Justice Department,
in the Civil Rights Division and the folks like that

(45:54):
are also taking very careful looks, you know, where we
are with voting rights, and they're taking a very serious
look at how to protect the rights of people with
the laws that we have on the books. I'm hoping
that going into twenty twenty four, they're also going to
do an analysis of the Voting Rights Act and determine
that they can also perhaps use the Voting Rights Act

(46:17):
to potentially investigate and potentially prosecute people who refuse to
certify duly constituted elections. I think the Voting Rights Act,
and we've done some research my law firm on this,
I think the Voting Rights Act can be used to
make sure that free and fair votes are counted and
that they're certified by the appropriate officials. I talked to

(46:40):
some folks this weekend down in Selma about that. I think,
given the dynamics that we have in the Congress right now,
I think that the protection of the vote needs to
be very strategic. It needs to be more of a
rifle shot than a shotgun, and not a wish list.
It needs to be the things that have I believe,

(47:02):
and I believed this for some time, the possibility of
passing right now. For so long, people Republicans especially bought
at doing anything to establish standards for mail in voting,
for early voting, that every state should be required to
have some form of minimum standards and require the states

(47:23):
to do something on early votes and mail in votes. Well,
all of a sudden, after the last election, you know,
many Republicans were saying, you know, maybe this early voting
is not so bad because they were losing elections because
their folks weren't utilizing what they had any states, Well,
let's take this opportunity to say, great, why don't two
join us, and let's establish these minimum stand Instead of

(47:45):
having a hodgepodge of laws across fifty states, let's require
all states to do some form of early voting, some
form of mail in voting, and have the uniform standards
that can be enforced across the states. And as part
of that, Molly and a lot of people, I know,
a lot of your listeners probably don't want to hear this,
but as part of that you're going to probably have
to also do some form of national voter ID. But

(48:09):
the key to that, in my opinion, has always been
being able to require folks to be able to get
those voters and the states to provide those voters, not
just have one van like they've got in Alabama that
you can call for and go to, but really make
it an effort to get voter IDs out there that
the state will do, and give a broad range of

(48:32):
ideas that can be done. I think if we can
be really strategic, that's what I would like to see
the administration and my friends in the Senate and the
House do, And let's get something pass to protect the
right to vote, because at the end of the day,
we still there are still states and we still have
trouble getting people to the vault. Wow, you really think

(48:52):
a voter idea is the way to go on that?
I think it has to be in order to get
something packed. I think you've got to do something to
get this pass. She gives them Republicans exactly everything about
our democracy right now is a divided government. A form
of national voter ID was part of the Freedom to
Vote Act, and I know a lot of the civil
Rights group, and a lot of my friends didn't particularly

(49:14):
like that. They kind of bit their tongue, but it
was there. It was necessary to even have that build
to have a chance. I think we're going to have
to look at that, and quite frankly, if you couple
that with resources and requirements that would require the states
to be able to get those voter IDs out there

(49:35):
to people, the biggest issue in my view, Molly, what
I've seen, the biggest issue is not the idea itself,
it's getting the ID. And that's a real problem in Alabama.
You know, when we have passed that voter ID, the
photo ID, thing, first thing that a former governor did
was shut down some of the DMBs in our black
Belt area and they had Justice Department had to come
in and ensum to get those things open back up

(49:57):
its access to the ID. And if we can get
resources and requirements that were to require the state to
get those voter IDs out there, then the idea itself
would be so much less of a problem, right I guess,
I mean, I don't know. I feel like voter ID
is just a way to make it harder to vote.
People have said that, and I agree with that, but

(50:18):
If you've got access to an ID, it is not
hard to pull it out at a poll. The problem
that we've got with voter ID is not the idea
itself in my view, except for access to it. Access
to photo IDs is a problem, and I agree with that.
That's why you've got to get folks and resources. In Alabama,
for instance, now in order to vote absentee, you have

(50:39):
to make a photo copy of your photo ID to
mail in with your absentee ballot application. Now, not everybody
in Alabama's got a damn printer, okay, and they're not
going to go down the street to the local Tinkos
or whatever the thing and make a copy of that.
It's the barriers that keep put up around those photoids

(51:02):
that are a huge problem, and access barriers of getting
the photo IDs and the kind of photoids. Now, Alabama
high school students that are state schools can't use their
high school issued student ID card for some reason. I
don't know why. It's a state Id's a state school,
they can't use that. If we expand what is out

(51:23):
there and the ability of states and requires states to
provide those upon requests, then I think that the voter
ID issue would not be as big a concern as
it seems to be, and it is a concern, make
no mistake. I don't want anybody out there to think
that I'm not concerned about the voter ID issues. I

(51:43):
think there's ways to solve it, and if we can
work with people, I think we can solve that particular
issue and give access to more people and get them
out to the police. Very interesting, Doug Jones. I sort
of disagree with you about the voter ID but I
understand where you're coming from. I also just don't think
of Republicans as being good faith negotiators. Well, that is

(52:07):
a problem these days. I think there is some problem
on both sides of the aisle of that, but I
particularly when it comes to voting rights. I think that
is especially true with folks on the other side of
the aisle. Senator McConnell has made it very clear he
does not want to see any kind of voting the
rights legislation or whether it's the John Lewis Voting Rights

(52:29):
Act or any others, the Freedom to Vote Act, He's
made that very clear. So there's got to be an
element of good faith. That doesn't mean we don't try.
I think we've got to try, and I think we've
got to continue to talk about it and how people
like you and I talk about it. I just am curious,
like there's a lot of stuff that Biden could just
do unilaterally. Do you think he should do more of that,

(52:50):
like through executive order? And I'm not sure what he
can do unilaterally about voting right now. I mean, we've
got the Voting Rights Act, and I think the Justice
Department is there, but they're in lawsuits all over the place.
They've got the Alabama Voting Rights Act case that's pending
right now that I'm very worried about because we've got
a Supreme Court that does not seem the Voting Rights Act.

(53:13):
So I think that the president's hands are somewhat tied
when it comes to voting since historically the federal government
has conceeded most of that authority to the states, and
it is only through the Voting Rights Act. And there
may be some mothers I'm not a complete legal scholar
even normal lawyer, that there may be some potential things

(53:35):
that they can do, but I think it's limited as
to what the president can do himself. And that's why
he has done as much as he could do at
every opportunity to use the bully pulpit of the presidency
and get people engaged because this is a state issue. Unfortunately,
I think it needs to be a little bit more
of a federal issue because we've got federal elections every
two years. And by the way, you know, there's a

(53:57):
lot of misinformation out there that he would think listening
to people that the Constitution gives the states the sole
right to manage elections. That's not the case. It does
give states the right to do that, but then there's
a qualifier to it that says that the Congress of
the United States can step in and modify those and

(54:18):
take some control. That's what the Voting Rights Act of
nineteen sixty five did. Dub Jones, thank you so much, senitor.
I hope you'll join us again. Would love to do
it sometimes. Molly, thanks so much for having me. It's
great to talk to you, Molly. Junk Fast, Jesse Cannon, Oh,

(54:39):
anytime you have to see Matt taiebe in a public
forum these days, it's just so depressing. It goes so bad.
I think that Elon should have to buy him a
horse after that performance. I'm just telling you, like, I
understand that to hebe thought, this is gonna do something

(55:01):
for him, But it's really embarrassing. It would take a
lot to get me up in one of those hearings
for a political party, but it would take a really
a lot to get me about those hearings for someone
as dumb as jacket list Jim Jordan. Magic. With the
way Jim Jordan's been leading these things going, I think

(55:21):
it's a good idea for me to show up, stay
and not fake scurvy or something. Well, you know, these
are all optional. I mean, these aren't even subpoena. I mean,
these are like, you know, you have the honor of testifying.
I mean, I don't know what to say about Matt Tihebi.
He's clearly I don't know. You know, it's really depressing
to see someone like this, who has done some good work,

(55:43):
amazing journalism for decades before this right turn into a
complete whatever that is, but a sycophat to a billionaire's bidding.
He is our moment of fuckery today, and I think
it's pretty well deserved. That's it for this episode of
Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to

(56:04):
your the best minds in politics makes sense of all
this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send
it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again,
thanks for listening.