Newsom demanda a Fox News por 787 millones tras disputa sobre llamada con Trump

A mysterious phone call between California's governor and the president has become the centerpiece of a sprawling legal battle, with Gavin Newsom now demanding that Fox News pay him 787 million dollars for what he characterizes as deliberate distortion of the facts surrounding that conversation.

The call took place on the night of June 6th, stretching into the early morning of June 7th on the East Coast, where Trump was located. It happened hours after federal agents conducted three significant immigration raids in the heart of Los Angeles. Neither politician has disclosed what was actually said during those sixteen minutes. What followed, however, was a cascade of conflicting public statements, selective editing, and now a defamation lawsuit that mirrors, almost exactly in its dollar amount, Fox News's 2023 settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

The backdrop matters. Trump deployed two thousand National Guard members to Los Angeles on June 7th to address what he saw as deteriorating civil order stemming from the immigration enforcement operations. Newsom immediately objected, insisting he had never requested military presence in the state and had not been consulted beforehand. When asked by reporters whether the White House had called to discuss the decision, Newsom said flatly: neither a call nor even a voicemail. This became his public position—that Trump had not reached out to him at all.

Then, on June 10th, Trump held an impromptu press conference in the Oval Office and called Newsom a liar. The president said he had spoken to the governor the day before—first in a call Newsom didn't answer, then in a second conversation lasting sixteen minutes. Trump provided what he presented as proof: a screenshot from his phone showing the call had occurred at 1:23 a.m. on June 7th. He gave this image to Fox News correspondent John Roberts. The network's coverage that followed treated Newsom's denial as a fabrication, with hosts like Jesse Watters asking on air why the governor would lie about never receiving a call from the president.

But here is where the lawsuit's core claim takes shape. Newsom's lawyers argue that Fox News and its hosts manipulated the timeline and omitted crucial context. Trump had said on June 10th that he spoke to Newsom "a day before"—meaning June 9th. Yet the screenshot he provided showed the call was actually on June 7th, three days earlier. Watters and others presented Trump's claim as current without noting this discrepancy, making it appear Newsom was denying a recent conversation when in fact he was speaking about a different timeframe. The network, according to the lawsuit, chose propaganda over basic journalistic practice.

Newsom filed his suit personally in Delaware, where Fox News is incorporated as a company. He is seeking 787 million dollars—a figure that is no accident. In April 2023, Fox News paid almost exactly that amount to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation case over false claims about election fraud. Newsom's demand carries a pointed message: if Fox News must pay that price for spreading lies on behalf of Trump regarding voting machines, it should face similar consequences for distorting his words.

When Politico asked Newsom about the lawsuit, he framed it as a matter of accountability. "If Fox News wants to lie to Americans on behalf of Donald Trump, they should face consequences, just as they did in the Dominion case," he said. "I will keep fighting this propaganda machine until they decide to tell the truth." Fox News responded with a statement calling the suit a frivolous publicity stunt designed to silence critics, and vowed to defend the case vigorously.

Newsom holds one more card. During a press conference weeks into the tension with Washington, he said he would love to share the full transcript of the June 6th call but won't because he respects the presidency too much. "He's a liar. He never discussed the National Guard with me. Period. I'd really like to tell you what he said to me... it would give you chills," Newsom said on June 13th. The contents of that conversation remain sealed, a mystery that deepens as the legal machinery grinds forward.