Fox's top lawyer blasts judge in Dominion case, says trial would've been 'months of utter pain'

In his first public comments since Fox Corporation's historic settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Viet Dinh, the network's top lawyer, blasted the judge who oversaw the election defamation case, saying Monday that he issued "illogical" rulings that "hamstrung" the right-wing network and undermined the "fairness and integrity" of the legal system.

Dinh, the outgoing chief legal and policy officer at Fox Corporation, lashed out at Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who presided over the historic case, which ended with Fox paying a $787 million settlement to the voting technology company.

"We knew we were right in the law, (but) the trial judge put us in a situation increasingly where it was very obvious that we were not able to win the trial, but we were very confident we would prevail on appeal," Dinh said at a Harvard Law School event.

He continued, "As the judgment compounds error upon error, we would get more and more confident in our ultimate chances of prevailing on appeal - because at some point, it became not just a matter of reversible error, it called into the fundamental fairness and integrity of the Delaware civil justice system."

Dominion sued Fox News and its parent corporation in 2021 after Fox News hosts and guests repeatedly - and falsely - claimed on-air that Dominion voting machines rigged the 2020 election by flipping millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Fox denied wrongdoing and said its coverage was protected by the First Amendment.

Four months after the settlement, the network announced that Dinh would be leaving his post at the end of the year, though he would stay on as a "special adviser." Dinh was reportedly a vocal advocate for not settling the suit, and his exit is a significant shakeup for Fox after criticism of how he handled the case.

Dinh said Davis issued "really illogical" rulings in the pretrial phase, which "hamstrung" Fox's defense strategy. Davis' decisions meant the trial would have been "three to four months of utter pain" for Fox and its employees, who would be called to testify, Dinh said, and therefore, it was a "business decision" to settle the case at the last second.