Rick Wilson, a former Republican turned anti-Trump operative behind the Lincoln Project, said he has been brought in by the 2+2 Campaign in recent months to help the group with messaging and strategy. He said one of the group’s goals is to warn Fox News management and others against potentially spreading false claims about the 2024 election.

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

Wilson and others behind the group believe Fox News has reached a critical point of financial vulnerability after litigation from two voting systems companies over claims made in the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems has reached a $787 million settlement dollars with Fox News in April 2023, and a separate Smartmatic lawsuit 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 polling company accused of rigging the election despite being used by only one U.S. district in 2020, and Fox Corp., which has said it covered newsworthy events and people around 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 attract a handful of individuals: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox News board and key “influencers” in Washington, DC 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. It’s a victory for the country.”

Wilson said he plans to use traditional television commercials, digital advertising and social media platforms to get the message out in hopes of making sure the short list of people see it. “Advertising has become incredibly granular and allows us to target it almost on an individual level,” he said. “I can geofence around, around the Fox building, if I wanted to, I could geofence individuals inside the Fox.”

The television ad ran four times in the Washington market in the past week. Attempts to place the ad in the New York market were unsuccessful, a source familiar with the ad buy told NBC News.

Dmitri Malhoun, a former political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and a major Democratic donor, said his network of Oakland Corps donors donated about $100,000 to support the initial launch, coming from him and others in the circles its “technological and financial”. About $2,000 was raised through small individual donations on the site.

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