Trump-Harris election campaign in the Midwest

Rick Wilson, a former Republican turned anti-Trump operative behind the Lincoln Project, said he was hired by the 2+2 campaign in recent months to help the group with communications and strategy. He said one of the group's goals is to warn Fox News leadership and others about spreading potentially false claims about the 2024 election.

“I see this as part of a broader opportunity to take some responsibility toward organizations and individuals who have done tremendous damage to our democracy and the republic,” Wilson told NBC News. “They are relying on a very damaging lie that will potentially plunge us into unprecedented levels of national chaos and destruction. If we have the big lie part two, I think the only result in this country is violence, and I'm working very hard to both prevent the election of Donald Trump and to prevent the big lie part two America anymore divides further…into violence and chaos.”

Wilson and others behind the group believe Fox News has reached a critical point of financial vulnerability following a legal battle between two voting system companies related to claims in the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems agreed to a $787 million settlement with Fox News in April 2023, and a separate lawsuit from Smartmatic set to go to trial early next year could result in the cable channel paying billions of dollars in damages must.

The court battle continues between Smartmatic, a voting company that is accused of rigging the election despite only being used by one U.S. district in 2020, and Fox Corp., which said it kept information about current events and people related to it to report on the 2020 election. Smartmatic sued Fox and some of its hosts and guests in 2021.

Wilson said the strategy was to target “a single audience” 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 is even looking over their shoulder and wondering, ‘Uh oh, maybe we shouldn’t go out and repeat Donald Trump’s lies again.’ That’s a victory for the country.”

Wilson said he plans to use traditional television advertising, digital advertising and social media platforms to spread the message in hopes of ensuring the shortlist of people sees it. “Advertising has become incredibly granular, allowing us to target it almost on an individual level,” he said. “I can geofence around the Fox building, and if I wanted to, I could also geofence people inside Fox.”

The television commercial aired four times in the Washington market last week. Attempts to place the ad in the New York market were unsuccessful, a source familiar with the ad purchase told NBC News.

Dmitri Malhoun, a former political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder and major Democratic donor, said his Oakland Corps donor network donated about $100,000 to support the initial launch, which he and others said in his “Technology – and financial circles”. About $2,000 was raised through small individual donations on the website.

A member of Smartmatic's legal team told NBC News they had nothing to do with it.