The ongoing Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News took another turn this week.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has sanctioned the cable news giant for ‘withholding evidence.’ The Dominion lawsuit is scheduled for trial in the next few days.

Reports from someone who was present in the courtroom during the Wednesday pre-trial hearing indicate Davis was angry with Fox News, and suggested he might order an investigation into the network for withholding evidence.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis expressed anger with the network’s lawyers and suggested he could order an investigation into an effort to withhold evidence from Dominion’s team as part of its process of discovery, according to a person in the courtroom during a pre-trail hearing on Wednesday.

Davis’s ruling came after lawyers for Dominion played a never-before revealed recording they obtained from former Fox producer Abby Grossberg of Rudy Giuliani, a top aide to former President Trump, speaking with Fox employees. Dominion’s lawyers said Grossberg has more recordings from her time inside Fox that she has shared with the company’s legal team.

Grossberg, who is also suing Fox and was fired by the network earlier this year, has said she was pressured by Fox’s lawyers to give false testimony in the Dominion case.

At issue are the internal communications between Fox News personalities, management and other players at the media company. Dominion says Fox purposefully aired false claims about the software used to tally votes. The company claims that information was disseminated and amplified by Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Fox News insists internal communications are private and have been purposefully taken out of context by Dominion lawyers.

Fox has defended itself on First Amendment grounds and has said the internal communications of its top hosts and executives have been “cherry picked” to drum up press coverage of the case.

Former U.S. attorney general Bill Barr penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on Friday explaining why Fox may have a solid case, and why a Dominion victory could gravely injure the “media industry as a whole.”

Emotions seem to have gotten the better of the mainstream media’s judgment. The theory advanced by Dominion is profoundly dangerous to the media industry as whole. Memories are very short and imaginations very limited if the left thinks that only Fox would be vulnerable to lawsuits in a world where defamation liability could be incurred for simply reporting allegations made by others. Does anyone remember the endless false claims of “Russian collusion” that dominated the news from the 2016 presidential election through most of the Trump administration; or the false “Iraqgate” claims with which George H.W. Bush was bombarded during his 1992 re-election campaign; or the lurid allegations, which were given wall-to-wall cable news coverage, that Michael Avenatti made during the Senate confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh?

The press can report on these matters without incurring liability for defamation because existing laws give them wide latitude to do so to encourage uninhibited discourse on matters of public concern. The scope of this legal protection is well-settled, and Fox acted well within it for three reasons. First, it isn’t defamatory for journalists to report on newsworthy allegations made by others, even when those allegations turn out to be false. As long as claims are presented only as allegations and not asserted to be true, legal responsibility for any defamatory content rests with those making the allegations, not the news outlet. If you examine the relevant statements by Fox hosts in context, it is clear the company was simply reporting the allegations, not reporting that those allegations were true.

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