(FiveNation.com)- During his deposition in the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News host Sean Hannity admitted under oath that he didn’t believe for “one second” that voting machines “switched” votes from Trump to Biden during the 2020 presidential election.
Hannity’s sworn testimony was included in court depositions released last Wednesday in a hearing in the Delaware Superior Court as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, according to a report in the New York Times.
In his deposition, Hannity was asked about allegations made by former President Trump’s then-attorney Sidney Powell on his show in late November 2020.
During an appearance on “Hannity” on November 30, 2020, Powell told the host that there was widespread during the election and Dominion voting machines helped to steal the election by switching Trump votes to Biden.
According to the transcript, when asked if he believed Powell’s allegations, Hannity said, “I did not believe it for one second.”
Dominion is alleging that Fox News knowingly spread false claims about its voting machines in the aftermath of the 2020 election, leading to financial loss for the company.
While Trump’s legal team and his allies appeared on Fox News and other conservative outlets to raise claims about Dominion’s voting machines, to win its case, the company will have to prove that Fox personnel knew the claims were false or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth.
Stephen Shackelford, an attorney for Dominion, argued at the hearing that the company has evidence that Fox News on-air personalities knew the voter fraud claims were false but chose to amplify them anyway, according to the New York Times.
Shackelford later told the Times that many of Fox’s “highest-ranking” people “admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies, including hosts Tucker Carlson and Meade Cooper.
A jury trial in the defamation case is scheduled to begin in April.
Fox is also facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic, another voting machines company targeted by Trump’s allies after the 2020 election.
