In a statement on Thursday, a Fox spokeswoman said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability.

On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.

“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

The details offer more than dramatic vignettes from inside a news organization where internal disputes rarely spill into public view. They are pieces of evidence that a jury could use to weigh whether to find Fox liable for significant financial damages. Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion as compensation for the damage it says it suffered as Fox guests and hosts claimed, for instance, that Dominion’s voting machines had been designed to rig elections for the Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez and were equipped with an algorithm that could erase votes from one candidate and give them to another.

Fox Corporation has about $4 billion cash on hand, according to its latest quarterly earnings report.

The burden in the case falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice — the longstanding legal standard that requires Dominion to prove that either Fox guests, hosts and executives knew what was being said on the air was false and allowed it anyway, or that people inside Fox were recklessly negligent in failing to check the accuracy of their coverage.

Rupert Murdoch, Fox Corporation chairman, in September 2017. Mike Segar/Reuters

That burden is difficult to meet, which is why defamation cases often fail. But legal experts said Dominion’s arguments were stronger than most.

“This filing argues a fire hose of direct evidence of knowing falsity,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. “It gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case.”

Many defamation suits are quickly dismissed because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial. The Dominion case has proceeded with a speed and scope that media experts have said is unusual.

For eight months, Dominion lawyers have taken depositions from dozens of people at all levels of the network and its parent company. Mr. Murdoch was deposed last month. (Dominion’s brief was written before that deposition and does not reflect its contents, which remain under seal.) Mr. Hannity, one of the most popular prime-time hosts and a close Trump ally, has been deposed twice. And the personal phones and emails of many midlevel employees have been searched as part of the discovery process, which people inside the company have said has created an atmosphere of considerable unease.

Both sides appear dug in and confident of victory. The judge has scheduled jury selection to begin in mid-April.

Fox has contested how Dominion arrived at the amount it is seeking in damages, arguing that the company has vastly overstated its valuation and the reputational harm it suffered.

In papers filed with the court on Thursday, lawyers for Fox called the $1.6 billion sum “a staggering figure that has no factual support and serves no apparent purpose other than to generate headlines, chill First Amendment-protected speech.”

Fox’s lawyers added that Staple Street Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns a majority share in Dominion, had paid about $38 million for its 76 percent stake in the company in 2018 and had never estimated Dominion’s financial value to be worth “anywhere near $1.6 billion.” Fox has made a counterclaim against Dominion seeking to recover all its costs associated with the lawsuit.

Dominion’s goal, aside from convincing a jury that Fox knowingly spread lies, is to build a case that points straight to the top of the Fox media empire and its founding family, the Murdochs.

“Fox knew,” the Dominion filing declares. “From the top down, Fox knew.”

The brief cites senior executives and editors responsible for shaping Fox’s coverage behind the scenes who weren’t buying the election denial, either.

“No reasonable person would have thought that,” said the network’s politics editor at the time, Chris Stirewalt, referring to the allegation that Dominion rigged the election. Bill Sammon, Fox’s managing editor in Washington, is quoted as saying, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”

Fox pushed out both journalists after the 2020 election.

Ron Mitchell, a senior Fox executive who oversaw the Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham shows, texted privately with colleagues that the Dominion allegations were “the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud,” referring to false claims that microchips were injected into people who received Covid-19 vaccines.

At times, Fox employees are described as disparaging one another. The president of the network, Jay Wallace, is quoted at one point criticizing the former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs — one of the biggest megaphones for Mr. Trump’s lies. “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Mr. Dobbs, the brief says.

On Nov. 6, 2020, three days after Election Day, as Mr. Biden pulled into the lead, Mr. Murdoch told Ms. Scott in an email that it was going to be “very hard to credibly cry foul everywhere,” and noted that “if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean especially,” referring to Mr. Hannity.

A correction was made on Feb. 22, 2023
An earlier version of this article referred incompletely to an episode in which the Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich deleted a fact-checking tweet about false claims made by President Trump about Dominion Voting. While she removed a tweet in which Mr. Trump had tagged her colleagues Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, she posted the same fact check in response to a different tweet from Mr. Trump that made the same false claim but did not tag her colleagues.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Jeremy W. Peters covers media and its intersection with politics, law and culture. He is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” He is a contributor to MSNBC.
Katie Robertson is a media reporter. She previously worked as an editor and reporter at Bloomberg and News Corporation Australia.

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 17, 2023, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fox Stars Voiced Voter Fraud Doubts.