I agree fox settled because they knew the odds of a jury laying the smack down was very high but Fox News settled for about 6% of its yearly revenue. Seagate got fined about 2.5% of their yearly revenue of which they get to pay of with future inflated money.
Trade sanctions are generally an extension of national security policy whereas defamation isn't and it's difficult to argue that Dominion was actually impacted financially over this. The items Seagate sold in violation represented well over 10% of their yearly revenue.
So... Fox News negotiated a good deal, Seagate was just handed an amazingly good deal. I guess because it's easier for former government people to secure Fox News positions than to get cushy no shown jobs at Seagate.
Fox negotiated with Dominion lawyers not the US govt. Former government employees sliding into positions at Fox is irrelevant to the amount they paid. Dominion is a for-profit company so obviously they wanted to wring the most amount of money they could out of Fox.
If you don't believe that the government could have put pressure on Dominion to drop or reduce the scope of their suit then you might be surprised how the government actually works and who dominion primarily works with.
They may be 10,000% corrupt, but thinking that your local county election commissioner can make Dominion do anything with regards to the Fox News lawsuit is kind of silly.
I don’t see how comparing civil and criminal enforcement here is remotely apples to apples, and it’s not clear your arguments follow one another.
If you believe that the penalty for Seagate is too low, lobby the government for stricter penalties (most politicians should be receptive, I’d have thought).
If you believe the settlement for Fox is too high, ask their lawyers why they went for it.
I'm really not sure where people are getting this entire idea that one is civil and the other is criminal. I'm guessing they're just making it up or making an assumption that is completely wrong. The fine that is being levied against Seagate is not a criminal fine it is a civil fine. Criminal proceedings would have been launched and adjudicated in court likely resulting in a jail time for people. This is very uncommon and instead the civil penalties for the infraction are what is pursued which is exactly what was done in this case.
Except for one being a defamation case and the other being an export violation case these are apples to apples comparisons. These are both civil violations and these are both negotiated deals between the parties.
Fox News managed to settle for about half of what the case was asking for which is likely very decent to deal for them as I think they would have lost big time and you never know what a jury will award in a case like this. They got a pretty safe deal although quite costly.
Seagate on the other hand was given the deal of a lifetime for their violation. If you look up the maximum penalties allowed to be sought it is twice the amount of the transaction which is the basis for the violation. Reading the article the violation is 1.1 billion dollars. So the maximum penalty should have been 2.2 billion. They were let off with a measly 300 million.
This is not about a lobbying the government for stiffer penalties, because those penalties are on the books already, this is about the government giving Seagate a sweetheart deal because people in the department of commerce are setting up future positions to work in companies like this. I would suggest you take a long hard look and you see where a bureaucrats that work for these government organizations go to once they leave these organizations.
A judge can in fact do that, by giving (to both sides) about what evidence is going to be admissible, and what lines of questioning are going to be considered in-bounds. Both sides do their pre-trial maneuvering, and then they can make an estimation of how the trial is likely to go. Then both sides have a pretty good idea what the landscape really is (and they know that the other side knows it to). Negotiation often happens at that point.
The judge didn't force the settlement - just let people on both sides figure out what the range of likely outcomes was. Then both sides chose to give up their best-case outcome in order to avoid their worst-case outcome.
The question under discussion was, could the government put pressure on Dominion to drop the suit. Well, who would put that pressure on? Not the judicial branch.
Trade sanctions are generally an extension of national security policy whereas defamation isn't and it's difficult to argue that Dominion was actually impacted financially over this. The items Seagate sold in violation represented well over 10% of their yearly revenue.
So... Fox News negotiated a good deal, Seagate was just handed an amazingly good deal. I guess because it's easier for former government people to secure Fox News positions than to get cushy no shown jobs at Seagate.