Following the explosive texts from Fox News hosts revealed in February as part of Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against the network, Hasan Minhaj is still a bit gobsmacked. On Tuesday night, the “Daily Show” guest host joked that, in reality, it seems Fox personalities are more like those on MSNBC.
A quick refresher on those messages: in a court filing on Thursday, February 16, Dominion Voting provided texts, emails and other forms of communication between Fox News hosts from after the 2020 election, in which they called out some of the network’s guests for perpetuating unsupported claims that voting was electronically rigged against twice-impeached former president Donald Trump.
Among the messages were ones that said things like “Sidney Powell is lying,” sent from Tucker Carlson to his producer Alex Pfeiffer on Nov. 16, less than two weeks after the election, and “Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is,” sent from Laura Ingraham to Carlson and Sean Hannity the day before.
“Oh my God. Do you realize what this means? These people are secretly … sane!” Minhaj marveled. “They also don’t respect anyone they have on their show. These guys are texting each other all day about how bulls— Fox News is. Their group chat is basically MSNBC.”
Of course, Minhaj wasn’t at all surprised that Carlson, Hannity and more then continued to perpetuate Trump’s election lies on-air anyway.
“What? Fox knew the election wasn’t stolen but they said it anyways? That’s not shocking!” Minhaj mocked. “If Brian Kilmeade ever completed a Wordle, that would be shocking.”
In response to the texts revealed by Dominion, Fox filed an amended counterclaim, and a network spokesperson said that Dominion “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.”
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” Fox News said in a statement. “But 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.”
You can watch the full segment from “The Daily Show” in the video above.
