(Reuters) -The judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News said on Wednesday that he was imposing a sanction on the network and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had withheld evidence, the New York Times reported.
In sanctioning Fox, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis ruled that if Dominion now needed to conduct additional depositions or redo any already done, that “Fox will do everything they can to make the person available, and it will be at a cost to Fox,” according to the report.
Fox did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Dominion alleges that Fox, which is owned by Fox Corp, destroyed its business by knowingly airing false claims that its ballot-counting machines were used to flip the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election against Republican then-President Donald Trump, who lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
The trial has been widely viewed as a test of whether Fox’s coverage crossed the line between ethical journalism and the heedless pursuit of ratings, as Dominion alleges and Fox denies.
Jury selection in the case is set to begin Thursday, with opening arguments beginning on Monday.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil in Ottawa and Helen Coster and Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Jonathan Oatis)
