We would never recommend anyone actually watching Newsmax, the cable outlet that loves Donald Trump, and vice versa. But take a couple of minutes and check this out.  After attacks against two voting machine companies, the channel aired a segment that basically said please try to forget all the bad things we said.  But we doubt the companies will forget the Newsmax segments that attacked two voting machine companies with baseless allegations. The companies are now threatening major legal action. So to avoid a lawsuit that could sink the Newsmax ship, we have a major mea culpa. Law & Crime calls it “a remarkable speech by host John Tabacco, insisting that the network never endorsed smears of the voting machines but offering a point-by-point refutation of the attacks it made.”

In the segment Tabacco said:

“Newsmax has found no evidence that either Dominion or Smartmatic owns the other or has any business association with each other. We have no evidence that Dominion uses Smartmatic software or vice-versa. No evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.”

This came a short time after The New York Times published a story stating that Dominion and Smartmatic are considering legal action against several right-wing media outlets and some Trump allies. Fox News and Fox Business aired a video over the weekend fact-checking the network’s claims against Smartmatic, but this Newsmax segment took it to another level.

Attorney Ken White told Law & Crime, “It’s kind of a way of rolling over and showing your belly and hoping that they’ll accept that. And it was, I thought, somewhat humiliating the way they did it… It can cut off damages to some extent, so you can say that afterwards, ‘We put the truth out there, and therefore, there were no continuing damages from what we said before’” 

Legal analysts say it’s unlikely that these mea culpas would stop companies from suing. Also, only time will tell if the hosts who pushed all these conspiracy theories will suddenly change their tunes.

This post contains opinion and analysis.