It was obvious that Fox Business and Fox News host Maria Bartiromo was willing to entertain false theories about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. A month before Election Day, she hosted President Donald Trump for a full hour in which he delineated various untrue claims about the risk of fraud from mail-in ballots, rhetoric that Bartiromo didn’t challenge at all. Weeks after Joe Biden was declared the winner — including by Bartiromo’s employer — she again gave Trump extended airtime to allege unproven illegalities and describe evidence-free conspiracies.
But the extent to which Bartiromo flirted with the delusional world of alleged criminality is perhaps best demonstrated in an email obtained by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox. Electronic voting machines made by Dominion were a frequent target of conspiracy theorizing in the weeks after the election, including on Fox News and on Bartiromo’s own show. In making its case against the network, Dominion attorneys created a slide deck offering examples of the internal conversation at Fox in the post-election months.
That deck was made public Wednesday. Media Matters’s Matt Gertz shared a slide including an email sent by Bartiromo on Nov. 7, 2020.
It’s a mind-boggling document, not just because it alleges obviously false incidents of fraud but because Bartiromo was once a well-regarded journalist. It’s not simply that this is someone uncritically sharing nonsense; it’s...
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