Fox News will seek to have the lawsuit alleging network employees collaborated with the White House to push a story linking the death of Seth Rich with leaked Democratic Party emails dismissed or have the case thrown out of court in favor of arbitration.
Fox News made its litigation strategy clear in a motion filed Monday in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York. The legal documents respond to a suit brought by network contributor and former Washington, D.C., homicide detective Rod Wheeler, whose freelance investigation into Rich’s murder was crucial to the May 16 article.
Wheeler alleged in a suit filed in August he was misquoted twice in the piece about the Democratic National Committee staffer, who was slain near his house in D.C. in July 2016. He claims the story was published to distract from the ongoing Russia probe, and sullied his reputation.
But Fox News, along with co-defendants parent company 21st Century Fox and reporter Malia Zimmerman, said “he was neither misquoted nor defamed.”
“He made substantially the same statements on the air in several on-camera interviews, before and after the Fox News report, and even stated publicly that the article he now challenges as false ‘was essentially correct and worthy of further investigation,'” the motion read.
Wheeler is also suing Fox News for employment discrimination.
“Wheeler fails to plead the facts necessary to support such a charge, because there are no such facts,” the motion added.
The White House has pushed back on reports in August President Trump had reviewed the now-retracted piece before it was disseminated.
