You may remember Rudy Giuliani railing about voter fraud from the lobby of the Republican National Committee’s headquarters a few weeks after the November 2020 election, with a stream of black hair dye running down the side of his face.
According to a new report by The Washington Post, a former Trump adviser and current executive at Fox News couldn’t hide his shock and let loose in text messages with his reaction to Giuliani’s appearance.
“This sounds SO F—— CRAZY btw,” wrote Raj Shah, who had served as a senior aide in Donald Trump’s White House for two years before his hiring at Fox. “Rudy looks awful,” a deputy wrote back, prompting Shah to respond that “he objectively looks like he was a dead person voting 2 weeks ago.”
As reported by The Post, “Shah’s job at Fox was to protect the company’s brand, then under pressure from Trump allies who wanted to push Giuliani’s wild claims of a stolen election and who were abandoning the network for more hard-line options like Newsmax and One America News. So when a Fox News reporter went live on air just after Giuliani’s news conference concluded and declared that some of what the president’s lawyer had said was ‘simply not true,’ Shah reacted with alarm.
“This is the kinda s— that will kill us,” he texted the deputy. “We cover it wall to wall and then we burn that down with all the skepticism.”
The messages are the latest in a series of internal Fox correspondence released in recent weeks as part of Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News for lying about them and spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, even when producers and hosts expressed private doubts about Trump’s false election claims.
“The emails and text messages involving Shah offer a particularly vivid example of the pattern, demonstrating how elements of Fox, the Republican Party and the then-president’s own staffers spent years accommodating some of Trump’s worst impulses and amplifying some of his lies,” The Post reported. “When it came to the baseless election fraud narrative — including that counting dead voters had lifted the Democrats to victory — many of these people were aware of the likely falsity of the allegations but were unwilling to anger Trump or his supporters by clearly stating so publicly.”
The lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in Delaware next month with Dominion arguing that Fox defamed the company by broadcasting falsehoods claiming its machines were used to help Joe Biden defeat Trump.
Fox has said it was covering newsworthy claims, not promoting or endorsing them, and has accused Dominion of “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”
