Vindman’s lawyer demands Fox News and Laura Ingraham retract slanderous segment
Laura Ingraham and her Fox News employers may finally be held accountable for the accusations that they have knowingly spread malicious lies about Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — the Director for European Affairs for Trump’s National Security Council who has provided devastating testimony in the House impeachment inquiry — if Vindman’s attorney has anything to say about it.
After hearing Ingraham broadcast a segment on her nightly program that implied that the decorated service member had committed treason, attorney David Pressman of the law firm of Boies, Schiller Flexner, LLP. sent a letter demanding that Fox News retract the segment and threatening to hold the Rupert Murdoch-owned cable news outlet responsible for defaming his client.
“We are compelled to write because of a deeply flawed and erroneous Fox News segment that first aired on October 28, 2019, the gist of which has since been republished countless times, including by the president of the United States to his 66.9 million Twitter followers. Laura Ingraham reported the Segment during her show, ‘The Ingraham Angle’ along with John Yoo, who was a panelist invited by Fox News to participate in its coverage of LTC Vindman,” Pressman wrote.
“While our client does not intend by this letter to discourage reporting concerning him or critical of him, the Allegations published in the Segment are false and defamatory. Fox News knew they were false when it published them. The Allegations have injured LTC Vindman and Fox News is responsible for any third-party republication of them,” the attorney threatened.
In addition to pointing out the harm that Ingraham’s slanderous allegations have caused for Lt. Col. Vindman, Pressman argued that the defamation actually hurt the credibility of the news outlet, although many media-savvy readers might dispute the existence of any such credibility for the right-wing propaganda machine that the network typically functions as.
“Fox News boasts that it is the ‘most trusted’ American TV news brand. It is undoubtedly aware of the enormous influence its words have on the minds — and actions — of millions of Americans. When Fox News reports, and fails to retract or correct, that a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, a Director on the National Security Council, has committed espionage, those words cause enormous and foreseeable harm — harm that has, as the above examples show, already occurred,” Pressman reasoned.
In addition to demanding that Fox News retract Ingraham’s statement, Vindman’s lawyer demanded that the network correct the record on-air in an attempt to reverse the already significant damage to his client’s reputation.
“It is not too late for Fox News to retract and correct the Allegations and help mitigate some of the harm the Allegations have caused,” Pressman allowed.
You can read an excerpt from the letter sent by the attorney representing Lt. Col. Vindman immediately below.
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Original reporting by Bob Brigham at RawStory.
