Republican favorite Fox News, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, will be sued in April for defamation of the 2020 presidential election in which Joe Biden won against Donald Trump, US justices said on Friday, according to AFP .

A judge in the state of Delaware (East) ruled in a decision released and seen by AFP that the television station had no standing to challenge a civil defamation complaint filed by a company that owns electronic voting machines.

Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.6 billion in damages and will take the case to a civil jury in Delaware court on April 17.

This complaint was filed in March 2021, and its content was disclosed last month.

Documents from this civil suit include text messages, emails between Fox News and News Corp. executives. – showed that in November 2020, behind the scenes and in the offices of the executives of the TV channel, up to its owner Rupert Murdoch, almost did not believe Trump’s lies about the presidential election, which was “stolen” by Joe Biden, especially through electronic voting.

But these doubts were expressed only in private, while these theories were born on television.

Fox News has vilified voting machine company Dominion after the network said its machines were used to sway the results of the November 2020 presidential election in several locations across the United States.

In his order, Delaware Magistrate Eric Davis found that “it is abundantly clear that none of the claims about Dominion in the 2020 election are true.”

Fox News responded on Friday that it was simply reporting the allegations against former Republican President Trump (2017-2021) and again invoked the “First Amendment (of the US Constitution) for the absolute right of the press to report the news (. . . ) and freedom of speech and press”.