At the eleventh hour, in order to settle the $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit and avoid a prolonged trial, Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems hired a guy who’s mediated international wartime disputes in the Balkans. Jerry Roscoe was on a European river cruise to Bucharest celebrating his 70th birthday when he received a call on Sunday to help mediate the monumental media case, mere hours before it was set to go to trial in Delaware, CNN reported on Wednesday. According to Roscoe’s biography, he has mediated “local and international political conflicts between Croat and Muslim factions throughout Bosnia”—yet he told CNN this particular case was “one of the more challenging cases because of the magnitude of the dispute and the visibility.” Ultimately, Roscoe spent all of Monday and half of Tuesday helping the two sides negotiate a $787.5-million deal to avoid what would likely have been an embarrassing trial for Fox News, which would have featured Dominion calling Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson to the stand to testify about their network’s willful participation in boosting election lies.