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Fox News is in serious hot water. 

That's according to several legal experts who spoke with me this week following Dominion Voting Systems explosive legal filing against the right-wing talk channel, revealing the network's executives and hosts privately blasted the election fraud claims being peddled by Donald Trump's team, despite allowing lies about the 2020 contest to be promoted on its air.

While the legal experts I spoke with cautioned that they would like to see Fox News' formal legal response to the filing, they all indicated in no uncertain terms that the evidence compiled in Dominion's legal filing represents a serious threat to the channel.

"It's a major blow," attorney Floyd Abrams of Pentagon Papers fame told me, adding that the "recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation" in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. 

Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion's evidence as a "very strong" filing that "clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting."

A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump's claims "really crazy stuff," and the cable network's stars — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president's camp asserting that the election was rigged.

It also showed attempts to crack down on fact-checking election lies. On one occasion, Carlson demanded that Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing election fraud claims.

Tushnet said that in all of her years practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit. "I don't recall anything comparable to this," Tushnet said. "Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations."

David Korzenik, an attorney who teaches First Amendment law and represents a number of media organizations, told me that the filing showed Dominion's case against Fox News has serious teeth.

Korzenik stressed that while the law allows for bias and ratings-seeking behavior by media outlets, it does not allow for the publication of material one knows to be false. The filing, Korzenik said, "certainly puts Fox in the actual malice crosshairs and puts them in real jeopardy."

RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor and media scholar at the University of Utah, described the evidence as "pretty voluminous" and said that she too had never seen evidence like it collected in a high-profile defamation case against an outlet as enormous as Fox.

"This is a pretty staggering brief," Jones said. "Dominion’s filing here is unique not just as to the volume of the evidence but also as to the directness of the evidence and the timeline of the evidence."

"This 'out of the horse’s mouth' evidence of knowing falsity is not something we often see," Jones added. "When coupled with the compelling storyline that Dominion is telling about motivation — the evidence that at least some key players in the organization were actively looking to advance some election denialism in order to win back viewers who had departed — it makes for a strong actual malice storyline."

In a statement, Fox News accused Dominion of generating "noise and confusion," adding, "the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan."

"Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law," the network said. "Their motion for summary judgment takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law and rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record."

But the attorneys I spoke to said Dominion's filing showed it had built a powerful case against Fox.

"The dream for a plaintiff’s attorney is what Dominion claims to have here," Jones said, "smoking-gun internal statements both acknowledging the lie and deciding to forge ahead with perpetuating it."

———  BELOW THE FOLD  ———

Remembering Dylan Lyons: Spectrum News 13 was in mourning on Thursday. The Orlando television news station identified 24-year-old reporter Dylan Lyons as the journalist who was shot and killed while covering a shooting on Wednesday. "He took his job very seriously. He loved his career. He loved what he did," said Josh Miller, a Spectrum Sports 360 reporter and a friend of Lyons. "He loved the community, telling the stories of people, reporting on the news, and he was just passionate about what he did." Watch and read the station's full obit here.

► Lyons' girlfriend tweeted, "The love of my life was murdered. I will never be the same person ever again." She posted a link to a GoFundMe and asked, "Please help my family and I during this time." So far the fundraiser has raised $48,537 of its $60,000 goal. 

► Some good news: Spectrum News 13 photojournalist Jesse Walden, who was critically wounded in the shooting, is recovering and has been talking to colleagues, the outlet reported Thursday evening. He said Lyons was "a very, very wholesome person" who "had a very strong sense of justice." Walden added that he has "been blessed" with support since the shooting.

► "For all the occasionally sanctimonious conversations we have about the role of journalism in democracy, Lyons and Walden were just trying to gather facts and package those facts for the nightly news," Brian Stelter wrote. "In this case, facts about a far-too-common occurrence in a local community."

The 'Year of Building': Shares in Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN's parent) sunk about 2% in after-hours trading after the media conglomerate missed on revenue in its Q4 earnings report. CEO David Zaslav said that the advertising market remains challenging and that sales are still "very slow" this year. But he told investors that the company is succeeding in the "increasingly challenging environment." Here are some highlights from the earnings report:

► Zaslav said 2022 was the "year of restructuring" and vowed that 2023 will be the "year of building."

► CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels upped WBD's cost-savings projection in post-merger savings costs again, this time from $3.5 billion to $4 billion. 

► Zaslav announced that movie theater audiences are about to head back to Middle Earth. Zaslav said "multiple" new "Lord of the Rings" films will be developed by Warner Bros. production company New Line Cinema, which released the original trilogy directed by Peter Jackson. Jackson hasn't committed to working on the project with his two writing partners, but the trio released a statement saying they've been kept "in the loop every step of the way" and "look forward" to talking about the franchise moving forward. 

► Zaslav said that building out the DC Studios universe should be a "game changer" for the company and praised "The Flash." Zaslav said of the forthcoming film, "I saw it and loved it. It's a wow."

► Zaslav praised CNN for having dozens of GOP members of Congress on the network during the House speaker race, saying he wants a broad "range of voices and viewpoints" to appear on the channel. Zaslav said he wants CNN to "be the place for fact-based reporting and thoughtful discourse" and added that network boss Chris Licht is "focused on building an asset for the long term across cable and digital that is worthy of that great global brand." 

Ozy Over: Ozy Media boss Carlos Watson is a "con man whose business strategy was based on outright deceit and fraud," U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Thursday, announcing that the embattled digital media mogul had been arrested and charged with fraud. Peace said Watson "ran Ozy as a criminal organization rather than as a reputable media company." Watson is accused of having committed the fraud "through material misrepresentations and omissions" about the company on several fronts. The charges come more than a year after Ben Smith pulled back the curtain on Ozy Media and Watson in an explosive column for The NYT. Watson's attorney said Thursday he is "deeply disappointed" by the actions of federal authorities. Here's my story. 

Fundraising Off Fox: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wants to make clear that he is working hand-in-hand with 1/6 truther Tucker Carlson. The House speaker sent a fundraising email, telling supporters that they "deserve the facts." McCarthy added, "I promised I would give you the truth regarding January 6th, and now I am delivering." Of course, given the conspiracy theories that Carlson has promoted in the past, it's all but certain that Carlson will use the thousands of hours of footage to continue pushing that narrative forward. And McCarthy is now complicit in that.

► McCarthy defended his decision to hand the footage to Carlson in a phone interview with The NYT's Luke Broadwater and Jonathan Swan: "I promised," McCarthy said. 

Tucker and the Truth: On his television program, Tucker Carlson doesn't express contempt for Donald Trump. But in private? It's a different story, as messages uncovered by Dominion have revealed. In one set of messages, on the day of the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack, the Fox News talker called Trump a "demonic force" and a "destroyer." In other messages obtained by Dominion, Carlson showed disdain for the election lie narrative Trump was pushing. For instance, on one night, Carlson's producer told him that his audience was "upset" they didn't "cover election fraud" because it's "all our viewers care about right now." Carlson, according to the Dominion legal filing, conceded not doing so was a "mistake," but said he "just hate[s] this s**t." It's almost like Carlson privately holds views he hides from his audience, the same behavior he uses his prime time perch to accuse his political opponents of.

Going After Google: The Department of Justice is alleging that Google "systematically destroyed" messages that it was required to preserve for litigation in its antitrust case targeting the tech giant's search business. In a Thursday court filing, the DOJ said the failure to preserve such messages harmed its case and asked a court to sanction Google. In response, Google said it "strongly refute[d] the DOJ's claims" and had "worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation." CNN's Brian Fung has more here. 

Harvey in Hell: More bad news for Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced filmmaker was sentenced to 16 additional years in prison, meaning he will effectively live out the rest of his days behind bars. Before he was sentenced, Weinstein begged the court to show mercy on him, claiming that the allegations against him were false and driven by money. "Please don’t sentence me to life in prison," Weinstein said, adding, "I beg your mercy.” CNN's Eric Levenson and Cheri Mossburg have more. 

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino. Have feedback? Send us an email here. We will see you back in your inbox next week.