The deeper embarrassment in the newly released Fox News-Dominion tapes

MSNBC host Alex Wagner presented viewers with a scoop Wednesday night: Her network had obtained recordings of conversations between Fox News staffers and officials with Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign in which the campaign officials downplayed the idea that the election had been stolen using Dominion Voting Systems machines.

The question of when Fox News knew about the falsity of allegations of rampant fraud tied to those machines is at the center of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the company. That suit has dredged up an enormous number of internal emails and text messages that suggest Fox News staff knew that such allegations were false before hosting guests who repeated them — and that the cable channel’s staff was motivated to air the debunked claims anyway in part because Trump had built an enormous appetite for such claims among his and the channel’s shared consumer base.

What Wagner aired Wednesday night was a pair of conversations with Trump campaign staff, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, in which the Trump side admits that they don’t have evidence that fraud was committed using Dominion machines. The discovery of those tapes, which were recorded by former producer Abby Grossberg — herself now suing Fox — prompted the judge in the defamation suit to chastise Fox’s attorneys in court this week.

But what’s interesting about the recorded conversations isn’t really that it bolsters the specific argument that Fox News should have known better at large. It’s that it reinforces how one specific Fox employee — Maria Bartiromo — was eager to elevate any claim of fraud that she could.

There are two clips included in what Wagner broadcast.

The first was recorded Nov. 8, 2020, and involves Bartiromo and Giuliani speaking on the phone.

“What about software, this Dominion software?” Bartiromo asks, calling it “troubling.”

“It’s being analyzed right now,” Giuliani says. He claims that there were “a couple of races that have been reversed” because the voting machines “triple-counted” votes for Democrats, including “two [races] in Michigan.”

Bartiromo then asked if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had any interest in the company, which Giuliani says he’d heard but “can’t prove.”

The timing is important. Nov. 8 was a Sunday, the morning on which Bartiromo’s Fox News show airs. That day, she hosted one of Giuliani’s colleagues, attorney Sidney Powell, to discuss fraud claims generally and Dominion specifically.

Powell had sent Bartiromo an email the prior evening delineating a wide range of allegations about Dominion and other well-known political actors — a thoroughly noncredible email written by a woman who claimed that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost,” but she didn’t believe it, among other things. Bartiromo and Powell appear to have also spoken on the phone, with Bartiromo passing notes from the call on to her team.

The question that emerges is whether Bartiromo spoke to Giuliani before or after the show. While the allegations from Powell should never have been taken seriously, given the source, to move forward even if Giuliani had poured cold water on the idea would be even more irresponsible.

It’s important to note, by the way, that Giuliani’s mention of “reversed” races in Michigan includes human error in Antrim County that had been fully explained well before Nov. 8. His effort to give Bartiromo what she wanted included something he should have known was inaccurate.

The second clip Wagner aired was recorded Dec. 5, 2020.

Wagner described it as being between Bartiromo and a campaign staffer, and the voice on the tape sounds like Bartiromo, but the on-screen text identified it as a “Fox News producer.” Whoever it was asked the campaign staffer whether there had been scrutiny of voting machines in Georgia, which exclusively used Dominion tools in 2020. She cited former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s incendiary “War Room” podcast as her source.

“I don’t want us to say it if it’s not — that’s why we’re checking,” the Fox staffer/Bartiromo said.

The Trump campaign official downplayed the idea, noting that the state had completed an audit of machines. The audit, he noted, very closely matched the initial voting results. There were no “physical issues” with the machines, he added.

Wagner then went on to show various Trumpworld figures elevating allegations about Dominion over the next few days: Trump at a rally, Trump and his attorneys on Fox News.

This isn’t actually apples-to-apples. Yes, Trump and his team shouldn’t have been making claims about fraud since there was no evidence of fraud in any form. But Trump and his attorneys weren’t specifically claiming that they knew Dominion machines in Georgia were tainted, which is what the official asserted in the tape. There are documented examples of Fox News hosts dismissing the idea that Dominion was a conduit for fraud in private and then elevating such claims on the air. But this new tape doesn’t draw a similarly clear line.

Again, the important factor is instead the timeline. At the time of the Dec. 5 call, pro-Trump social media was buzzing about allegations made by a right-wing group in Georgia that votes were flipped in the state’s Ware County — a switch that, if it occurred similarly across the state, would give victory to Joe Biden.

That this letter cited Antrim County as an example of nefariousness should have been a tell. But it was also quickly explained: Human error triggered the mis-tallying of a mere 37 votes, a mistake that was caught during the statewide hand recount. That recount narrowed Biden’s lead in the state — but by nowhere near the number of votes needed for Trump to emerge victorious.

Again, though, here was Bartiromo/her team grabbing information from an obviously noncredible source — Bannon was still more than a month away from being pardoned by Trump for his arrest on fraud charges — and giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Powell’s assertions in November, Bartiromo doesn’t appear to have run with the claims about voting machines in Georgia. Instead, in her Dec. 7 broadcast, she highlighted a purported audit of Dominion machines in Michigan (implying nefariousness with the devices) and quickly debunked video of vote-counting in Georgia (implying that the results in the state were still dubious). This was her desired outcome at the end of the day: elevating doubt about the election results wherever possible.

That’s the important revelation from the tapes Wagner aired, really. It’s not that Bartiromo was told that Dominion machines were reliable and she told everyone else at the network, who then aired claims to the contrary anyway. It’s that Dominion was one of many avenues that Bartiromo was willing to explore in her eagerness to carry water for Trump’s argument.

On Nov. 8, one Fox executive sent a message to another warning that Bartiromo “has gop conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.” Bartiromo was eager to hear what they had to say.