The Supreme Court rightly put a very high bar on success in libel suits for public people and entities. You have to be wrong. And you have to have known you were wrong or have had a malicious indifference to whether you were right or wrong. It's very hard to mete that ...

2/ standard. And even in the cases I can think of where juries have found for plaintiffs often it's a generous (toward the plaintiffs) interpretation of malice. The Smartmatic/Dominion cases are the first case at scale that seems almost to try out the Sullivan standard.

3/ Fox and various other pro-Trump entities made numerous, repeated and HIGHLY damaging claims which certainly in the cases of the institutions and almost certainly with the individuals (with Lindell he may simply be crazy) they were false.

4/ You don't even really need the 'actual malice' standard. It wasn't true and they knew it wasn't true. There's another prong of 1st amendment litigation. How do you quantify damages? If I say you're a liar, what is the monetary value of the damage?

5/ That can be hard to quantify. The conduct is so egregious that the punitive damages could be pretty extreme. But this is a case where you can likely quantify the damages and they're very, very high. You've managed to convince a substantial part of the population that a ...

6/ manufacturer of machines conducts intentional fraud AT SCALE. Imagine showing up to a county in rural Texas as a Dominion voting machine salesman. Good luck with that. Frankly imagine showing up in any jurisdictions where Republican commissioners or elected officials ...

7/ have an effective veto over voting machine decisions. That has to be AT LEAST two thirds of the country. There have been major libel settlements before. But again, I can't think of another case quite like this. It's almost like if the Sullivan Court had been looking ...

8/ for a hypothetical to illustrate their standard they would have come up with this. As the owner of a publication in a highly contentious space, I know a bit about this. You have lawyers who help you avoid getting into this terrain. And that's if your goal is not ...

9/ to lie. The first and most important advice your libel lawyer will tell you - if you need to be told - is don't knowingly publish highly damaging lies. That will create some exposure, as they say. Big companies with billions in revenue have armies of lawyers to prevent ...

10/ this kind of thing. That's why, even though we've seen egregious journalism and big settlements, I don't think we've ever seen anything quite like this. When you summarily fire you highest rated on air personality, you know they know how bad the situation is.

11/ correction thread, mete/meet (coulda been worse, meat)