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Trump launches new 3am Truth Social rant at Rupert Murdoch

Former president and his closest supporters view Fox’s refusal to cover election lies as betrayal

John Bowden
Washington DC
Monday 06 March 2023 19:38 GMT
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Former President Donald Trump was up late into the night — or perhaps very early in the morning — seething at FoxCorp founder Rupert Murdoch over the continued fallout from the massive lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Testimony and evidence uncovered by the lawsuit and made public as a result has been astonishingly embarassing for Mr Trump, who continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him even after failing to produce any hard evidence in his multiple legal fights to overturn state results and his own attorney admitting that his team didn’t have any to speak of.

Mr Murdoch himself admitted under oath that numerous Fox hosts endorsed false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, including allegations of tampering by election workers and the claims spread about voting machines manufactured by Dominion and Smartmatic.

Early Monday morning, just before 3am, the ex-president lashed out at Mr Murdoch, whose network has undeniably been the source of the most pro-Trump voices in mainstream cable news.

Mr Trump’s Truth Social posting referred to the roundly debunked documentary filmed by Dinesh D’Souza, fraudster and conservative activist. The documentary relied on data from cell phone towers to hypothesise that a massive ballot-harvesting operation was run by Democrats during the election — though once again, no hard evidence was brought forth.

His campaign attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has admitted that the Trump campaign never had any hard evidence to prove the kind of widespread, massive fraud that they alleged had transpired throughout 2020 and 2021. That didn’t stop Mr Trump from insisting for months, in private conversations to supporters at Mar-a-Lago, that he would be reinstated as president (despite there being no mechanism in the Constitution for that).

Top US officials in his own administration also denied that they had seen any evidence to support his claims, including Republican appointees such as the US attorney general and head of the federal government’s top cybersecurity agency.

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