This is pretty hilarious

At the Washington Post, a deeply ironic story about how a judge is citing Tucker Carlson's period of voter fraud skepticism as evidence that the network knew there was malice involved in the other hosts who went in boots and all.

It’s a pretty remarkable state of affairs when a judge is approvingly citing Tucker Carlson’s journalistic rigor, but that’s precisely the situation we find ourselves in now.

And rather ironically, that could be bad news for Fox News.

New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen has now ruled that voting-machine company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Rudolph W. Giuliani can proceed. The case involved numerous false and baseless claims made on Fox about voter fraud involving the company’s voting machines....

In the course of laying out the legal requirements for Smartmatic to prove its case, the judge noted that the company must prove Fox met the standard of acting with “actual malice” — i.e. not merely promoting false claims, but doing so with malice. And on that count, the judge says the best evidence that it did is Carlson.

That’s because Carlson, unlike the others, applied significant actual skepticism to the claims — and broadcast it.

It’s an episode many might have forgotten in the long and sordid run-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. But there was a time in which none other than Carlson stepped forward to question the “stolen election” narrative that had taken hold in the Trump movement and in certain corners of his network. Carlson said on Nov. 19 that Powell’s claims were serious, but he also (rightfully) noted that she had yet to substantiate them. He said he had asked, over the course of a week, for the evidence and offered her his platform, but that she had declined.

Carlson said Powell “never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.” He said that when he invited her on his show, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”

The episode alienated some Trump allies. But it also, in Cohen’s estimation, speaks to the possibility that Fox might meet the “actual malice” standard.