Former U.S. President Donald Trump repeated an unsubstantiated claim about voting machines during a taped interview that aired Sunday morning on the Fox Business Network.
When asked if Trump feels current President Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee, Trump said he presumed that to be the case before repeating a controversial claim about election-related fraud.
“Look, they have a Democrat machine,” Trump said. “They have a lot of votes that are automatic to a Democrat, even though they shouldn’t be.”
The claim went unchallenged by Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business Network host who was conducting the interview. The conversation was taped earlier in the week; it aired on “Sunday Morning Futures,” a program that runs on the Fox Business Network and the Fox News Channel on the weekends.
Trump’s statement comes about three months after the network’s parent company, Fox Corporation, settled a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. The case centered around controversial statements made about the 2020 presidential election by some Fox News and Fox Business commentators and guests, including suggestions that Dominion voting machines wrongly recorded votes for Biden when voters intended to pick Trump.
There has been no evidence to substantiate any theories that Dominion’s voting machines automatically switched votes, either accidentally or as part of a conspiracy. E-mail records and other documents disclosed during the Dominion case showed some senior-level Fox executives, including founder Rupert Murdoch, cast doubt on election-related claims while still allowing Fox News hosts and guests to air them out in public.
Bartiromo was one of the hosts who came under fire during the Dominion case, with text messages showing she was “depressed” about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and was hoping evidence would surface that would work in Trump’s favor, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“I told my team we’re not allowed to say [president-elect], not in scripts, not in banners on air, until this moves through the courts,” Bartiromo said in a series of text messages to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, the documents showed.
