Fox News filed to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation suit by vote-machine company Dominion. The suit claims Fox promoted baseless claims of election fraud from Giuliani and others.

• Fox News Media filed a motion to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in March.
• Fox said the lawsuit threatened freedom of speech.
• Dominion said Fox's coverage of its voting machines during the election had caused "enormous and irreparable economic harm."
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Fox News Media has filed a motion to dismiss the $1.6 billion lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.

Dominion filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox in March, accusing the cable network of promoting false claims that Dominion rigged its voting machines in the 2020 Presidential election so that they flipped votes to President Joe Biden over then President Donald Trump.

Dominion's lawsuit claimed Fox gave prominence to claims of election fraud by its guests, including Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, because it was in the network's business interests.

In Fox's motion, filed in federal court in Delaware on Tuesday, Fox said that Dominion's lawsuit threatened the freedom of speech of news organizations, and that "the American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss."

Fox hosted lawyers who pushed the vote-rigging conspiracy theory, which has been thoroughly debunked. Dominion also filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against Giuliani in January.

Fox said in the motion filed Tuesday that "a free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy."

"Especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts," it added.

Fox's legal team said in the motion that the security of Dominion's technology had come under scrutiny in the past, and that the cable network "had a free-speech right to interview the president's lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated."

At the time Dominion filed the lawsuit, Fox News said in a statement: "Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court."

Dominion's lawyers have projected that the company will lose more than $600 million in profit over the next eight years as a result of media disinformation about its voting equipment.

Smartmatic, another election-technology firm, brought a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox in February, which Fox has also filed to dismiss.

Insider contacted Dominion for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.