Election 2024: Trump and Harris campaign in the Rust Belt

Rick Wilson, a former Republican turned anti-Trump operative behind The Lincoln Project, said he was brought on by the 2+2 Campaign in recent months to help the group with messaging and strategy. He said that one of the goals of the group is to warn Fox News leadership and others from potentially airing false claims about the 2024 election. 

“I view this as part of a broad part of an opportunity to have some accountability on organizations and people that have caused enormous damage to our democracy and to the republic,” Wilson told NBC News. “They are depending on a very pernicious lie that is going to potentially put us into a level of national chaos and destruction that is unparalleled. If we have big lie part two, I think the only outcome in this country is violence, and I am working very hard to prevent, both the election of Donald Trump, but also to prevent the big lie part two from dividing America even further … into violence and chaos.”

Wilson and others behind the group believe that Fox News had reached a critical point of financial vulnerability after litigation by two voting systems companies related to claims made in the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems reached a $787 million settlement with Fox News in April 2023, and a separate lawsuit by Smartmatic set to go to trial early next year could result in the cable channel having to pay billions in damages.

The court battle continues between Smartmatic, a voting company accused of rigging the election despite being used by just one U.S. district in 2020, and Fox Corp., which has said it covered newsworthy events and individuals surrounding the 2020 election. Smartmatic sued Fox and some of its hosts and guests in 2021.

Wilson said the strategy is to target “an audience of one” to appeal to a handful of individuals: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox News board, and key “influencers” in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere. “If Fox even looks over their shoulder and wonders, uh oh, maybe we shouldn’t go out and repeat Donald Trump’s lies again. That’s a win for the country.”

Wilson said that he planned to use traditional television advertising, digital advertising and social media platforms to disseminate the message in hopes of ensuring the short list of individuals see it. “Advertising has become incredibly granular, and allows us to target it almost at an individual level,” he said. “I can geofence around, around the Fox building, if I wanted to, I could geofence individuals inside Fox.” 

The television ad has aired four times in the Washington market over the past week. Attempts to place the ad in the New York City market were not successful, a source familiar with the ad buy told NBC News. 

Dmitri Malhoun, a former political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and major Democratic donor, said that his Oakland Corps donor network had donated about $100,000 to support the initial launch, coming from him and others in his “tech and finance” circles. About $2,000 had been raised via small individual donations on the website. 

A member of Smartmatic’s legal team told NBC News they had no involvement.