Fox’s Chief Legal Officer Will Depart

Fox Corporation’s chief authorized officer, Viet Dinh, will depart on the finish of the yr, in a significant shake-up on the firm after the landmark $787.5 million settlement it paid to Dominion Voting Systems in April.

Mr. Dinh, a former official within the George W. Bush White House who amassed appreciable energy inside Fox, will advise the corporate after his exit, Fox mentioned in an announcement on Friday.

Mr. Dinh gave what some inside the corporate thought-about flawed recommendation throughout the Dominion go well with, which uncovered a sample of misleading protection by Fox News after the 2020 presidential election. He insisted that Fox was on agency authorized footing and will take the case, if want be, all the way in which to the Supreme Court, the place he believed the corporate would prevail on First Amendment grounds.

Fox didn’t identify his successor.

“We appreciate Viet’s many contributions and service to Fox as both a board member of 21st Century Fox and in his role over the last five years as a valued member of Fox’s leadership team,” Lachlan Murdoch, the chief government, mentioned in a written assertion asserting the transfer.

Mr. Dinh’s departure raises questions on how Fox will deal with the main lawsuits it nonetheless faces for airing false claims about widespread election fraud after the 2020 election. Another elections know-how firm, Smartmatic, has sued Fox for $2.7 billion. And Ray Epps, the person on the heart of a widespread conspiracy concept concerning the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, filed a defamation go well with in opposition to Fox final month.

The firm additionally faces two shareholder lawsuits associated to its protection and the dealing with of the lawsuits.

The Dominion lawsuit has been destabilizing for Fox and the household that controls it, the Murdochs. The fallout is posing probably the most important challenges the corporate has confronted since allegations greater than a decade in the past that journalists employed by its British newspaper division had been hacking into the voice mail accounts of celebrities.

Emails and textual content messages that had been launched as a part of the invention course of within the Dominion case revealed that executives at Fox together with Rupert Murdoch, the corporate’s founder, and its news community hosts had been deeply skeptical of claims by former President Donald J. Trump that voter fraud was accountable for his election loss. Yet Fox News continued to offer a platform to quite a few on-air personalities and company who made such claims.

In April, the community canceled this system of its most-watched prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, whose personal messages confirmed him to be way more important of Mr. Trump than he was on his program. One textual content, containing a racist sentiment, led the Fox board to authorize an inner investigation that contributed to Mr. Carlson’s ouster.

This is a growing story. Check again for updates.