Court hearing centers on Newsmax CEO’s role in spreading election-fraud claims

WILMINGTON, Del. — Following the 2020 election, allies of President Trump found a warm reception on conservative media outlets for now-debunked claims about election fraud. More than four years later, lawyers are still sparring over the role cable news executives like Newsmax’s Christopher Ruddy played in broadcasting those claims, just as the company prepares to go public.

Ruddy’s name was mentioned nearly as much as Newsmax itself during a day-long hearing Friday in a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems against the conservative network. Dominion, a voting technology company, reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News in 2023 over similarly false claims on its airwaves.

This case hinges on the same basic allegations: That Newsmax hosts not only welcomed guests on their shows who peddled false claims of voter fraud, but that they supported those claims knowing they were false and did so to increase ratings. Conspiracy theory-laden claims about voter fraud and corruption at Dominion ushered it into a “slow death,” Dominion attorney Eve Levin, because clients no longer wanted to work with it. Newsmax argues, much like Fox did, that Dominion’s claims are “calling for censorship” and that its hosts were reporting on one of the biggest news stories of the moment.

Sitting in the front row of the sparsely attended hearing, Ruddy watched intently as Dominion’s lawyers displayed images of his emails and texts, and statements he and other Newsmax employees gave under oath. They outlined Ruddy’s hands-on role in the cable network’s coverage — and doubts that he and others had about their on-air guests.

“Sidney [Powell] needs to check into a hospital,” Ruddy said about a member of Trump’s legal team who became pivotal to the spread of conspiracy theories about Dominion and voter fraud following Trump’s 2020 election loss. (Powell has since pleaded guilty to charges of election interference in Georgia.) Dominion lawyers outlined other instances of Ruddy repeatedly pushing for guests like Powell to come on the network — and when Newsmax shows couldn’t book her, they aired clips originally broadcast by Fox.

Dominion lawyers argued that internally, Newsmax executives and staff knew guests like Powell, commentator Dick Morris and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell were “anything but reliable.”

Yet Newsmax “implored them to come on,” Dominion lawyer Davida Brooks said in court.

She also showed on screen an excerpt of a quote sent from top Newsmax executive Gary Kanofsky, senior vice president of news and operations, to Executive Vice President of Programming and Content Elliot Jacobson.

“Simply giving them a microphone to spew more anti-election rhetoric and advance their claims without being properly equipped to question the legitimacy or factual accuracy of their assertions may be fun, but it’s terrible journalism,” Kanofsky said.

“How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” Newsmax host Bob Sellers asked showrunner Jerry Burke in another excerpt shown in court.

Those were just some of the yet-unheard pieces of evidence brought to light in the case suggesting intimate involvement of Newsmax’s top executives and talent in programming decisions. Many of the legal documents filed in the case have been heavily redacted or filed under seal.

Outside the courtroom, Ruddy told NPR that Newsmax’s coverage has always been balanced, and that there were over “5,000 times” more incidents of “balanced” coverage than the dozen-and-a-half segments at the heart of this lawsuit.

“It’s very selective what they’ve been showing in court,” he said. “My view was that even though I had personal doubts about where it was all going, I didn’t have the power to subpoena, but I felt like, let’s get both sides.”

Newsmax’s attorneys on Friday argued that show hosts were solely responsible for their own statements on air and, in one case, a social media post. They say executives, including Ruddy, weren’t responsible for writing, editing or delivering any of the content that aired on any of those segments.

They argued that anchors like Newsmax star Greg Kelly are opinion hosts with opinion shows. As such, they are free to give their opinions under the First Amendment. Newsmax licenses another show that entertained election conspiracies, the Howie Carr Show; its employees are not involved in their production, the lawyers added.

Newsmax attorneys also made a technical argument that Dominion has sued the wrong company. Newsmax Broadcasting LLC, attorneys said, is the company that published all of the segments on the cable news channel, not its Newsmax Media Inc. parent company.

The court held the hearing on Friday to determine whether the case will go before a jury, or whether the judge will rule on some of the key arguments ahead of trial. A jury trial is scheduled to begin next month.

Newsmax recently settled another defamation suit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic USA before that case made it to trial. The cable channel agreed to pay out $40 million to settle that case. In recent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Newsmax said it will vigorously defend its case against Dominion, but that a loss in the case could hit the company’s finances hard. Dominion’s claims are estimated to be upwards of $1.6 billion against the company.

Historically, it has been difficult for plaintiffs suing news outlets for defamation to win. They must prove that the outlet spread defamatory statements with “actual malice” — that is, that it either knew what it was broadcasting was false and harmful, or had grounds to know it and acted with “willful disregard” of the truth.

Judge Eric M. Davis, who also presided over the other two voting systems cases in Delaware, is expected to issue a written ruling in the coming days or weeks. In Dominion’s case against Fox, Davis denied both sides’ requests for summary judgment — with one exception in Dominion’s favor. The part that Davis did grant, however, dealt a huge blow to Fox, as his ruling outlined that the conspiracy theories linked to the 2020 election, were in fact, false.

“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote in 2023.