Fox's Jeanine Pirro is back in the hot seat in $1.6 billion election defamation case

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."Dominion is presumably looking to examine how the executives' compensation and bonuses are constructed, given those sharp ratings drops in late 2020. Dominion still has pending defamation suits against both smaller networks, Giuliani, Powell, and pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell, an avid pro-Trump propagator of unfounded conspiracies about the election.

The judge has set a deadline in mid-October for all discovery and depositions to conclude, with a few exceptions that could drag into November.

Trump and Pirro have a tight bond. When she was briefly banished from the air in 2019 over anti-Muslim remarks, the then-president publicly called for her return. In 2020, she attended his bellicose Election Night address refusing to accept the results.

Her weekend show did not air on Nov. 7, 2020, just after the elections, but the program resurfaced a week later, with the segment featuring Powell, and she repeatedly advanced Trump's cause in the weeks and months that followed. In January, Pirro was elevated to become a full host of The Five, Fox's popular weekday evening political chat show.

She was not alone at Fox in promoting such claims of election fraud.

A star-studded roster of current and former Fox News hosts have been deposed in the case, including Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The network announced former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs was leaving Fox the day after another election technology company, Smartmatic, announced its own $2.1 billion defamation suit over similarly spurious claims. (That suit is pending.) Dobbs sat for a deposition as well.

In addition to those of the Fox News executives, Dominion has petitioned to receive the employment contracts for Bartiromo, Carlson, Dobbs, Hannity and Pirro.

Pirro was originally a named defendant in the Smartmatic defamation suit. She was dismissed from that suit. But she remains at the heart of the Dominion drama, which has a trial date of next April."

Good luck Jeanine!