A judge in New York rejected a request by attorneys for Fox News to subpoena billionaire George Soros as part of the cable news channel’s ongoing legal fight with voting systems company Smartmatic.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David B. Cohen on Monday shot down a request from Fox to compel Soros to provide documents and testimony as part of its process of discovery in the case.
Soros is a progressive billionaire who often draws the ire of conservative media figures and Republican politicians.
Fox, in a court filing earlier this month, sought to depose Mark Malloch Brown, who is the president of the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation and served as chairman of Smartmatic’s parent company.
“I base that on the finding that the crux of Smartmatic’s claims is that Fox has asserted they were part of rigging [the election], not that Smartmatic was affiliated with George Soros, Alex Soros, or the OSF,” Cohen said in open court on Monday, CNN reported. “That’s a peripheral matter — at best, it’s a possible rationale for defamation.”
I agree with the decision. I take exception at calling ANY billionaire “progressive.” The author is bent.
I broadly agree, but Soros probably puts more money towards progressive causes than any other human being.
He shouldn’t be able to, because billionaires shouldn’t exist. We shouldn’t have to depend on the goodwill of an oligarch to fund progressive causes.
That said, Fox hates him for a reason.
Fox hates him because Rupert Murdoch spent a shitload of time and effort to artificially boost the Pound Sterling in 1992 as the Tories were fucking things up.
Soros bet against the Tories, publicly so, and made over a billion on Black Wednesday alone.
The Tories lost the next election in a landslide (five years later) and didn’t return to power until 2010.
September 1992 marks the beginning of Murdoch’s hatred of Soros.
No billionaires are innocent. I’m a longtime secular humanist and feel that my values espouse progressive ideology. Soros might fund entities that push left-leaning ideals, but not without their own agendas. I rankle at the idea that anybody with billions of dollars didn’t step on necks to get where they got… and that alone is enough to laugh when someone says he’s defending the common man.
He wouldn’t know struggle if it cried to him at his feet. Billionaires should not be defended.
That being said, he’s Fox’s most favored boogeyman. They love to blame everything on him. I would be surprised if 1/10 things they blame on him are his doing. Murdoch is the ant-Soros and they’re in a wrinkly billionaire supervillain fight. We’re all casualties.