- Top Fox News commentators skewered Rudy Giuliani in private text messages after the 2020 election.
- That's according to a new court filing in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation suit against Fox.
Fox News' primetime opinion commentators spent the months after the 2020 election pushing outlandish conspiracy theories about widespread fraud, rigged voting machines, and corrupt election officials.
But behind the scenes, many of those commentators and their producers excoriated the people primarily responsible for amplifying those conspiracy theories. Chief among them was former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who spearheaded President Donald Trump's effort to overturn the results of the election.
That's according to a new court filing in Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, which accuses the network of pushing bogus claims of election fraud in an effort to win back viewers who were angry with Fox for calling Arizona for Joe Biden and later for declaring Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
The 200-page court filing, a motion for summary judgment in the defamation case, includes previously unseen texts and deposition excerpts from Fox stars including Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity.
In one text, sent on November 11, 2020, Hannity wrote that "Rudy is acting like an insane person."
A few weeks later, on December 22, Hannity wrote that Giuliani and his cohorts were "f'ing lunatics."
Ingraham, meanwhile, described the former New York mayor as "such an idiot."
Network executives echoed that view.
On November 6, three days after Election Day, Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media tycoon who owns News Corp, wrote, "Rudy advising [Trump] really bad!" Ten days later, after the election had been called for Biden and Giuliani had become a fixture on right-wing networks including Fox News, Murdoch wrote that Giuliani should be "taken with a large grain of salt."
He also accused the former mayor of spreading "damaging" and "really crazy stuff," according to the court filing.
In a statement, a Fox News spokesperson said Dominion's case is a threat to free speech and that the company misrepresented the evidence it collected.
"Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law," the spokesperson said.
Giuliani, meanwhile, has faced public and legal blowback since aligning himself with Trump and championing the former president's effort to stay in power despite losing the election. He's in the midst of bar disciplinary proceedings and is in danger of losing his law license because of his false claims about the 2020 election.
Giuliani was also told last year that he was a target in the Fulton County DA's sprawling criminal investigation into Trump's attempts to nullify Biden's victory in Georgia. A federal judge on Thursday unsealed portions of the special grand jury's final report in the probe, which said that "one or more witnesses" may have lied under oath while testifying before the jury. It did not specify who those witnesses were.
A representative for Giuliani did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.