Trump and Harris are campaigning in the Rust Belt

In the days before the election, a political group has launched ads in Washington, D.C., with an unusual target: Fox News executives.

The slickly produced ad, set to music reminiscent of the score from the TV show “Succession,” features footage of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol along with Rupert Murdoch and other Fox News personalities.

“Two plus two is four, the earth is round. Donald Trump won the 2020 election. “Just one of those statements is a lie — a lie that Fox News and others have repeated hundreds of times,” the ad says. “A lie that led to death threats against election workers, violence on January 6, and untold losses for the people and companies that make our elections the cleanest in the world.”

A Wyoming-registered dark money group called “2 +2 = 4 LLC” — meaning they don’t have to disclose their donors — is funding the ad that was quietly launched in the weeks leading up to the election.

“The attempt by an anonymous far-left group to raise money for Smartmatic’s lawsuit is entirely predictable and we remain prepared to defend this case around highly newsworthy events when it goes to trial next year,” a spokesperson for Fox News. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims against FOX News are highly implausible, disconnected from reality, and prima facie designed to undermine First Amendment freedoms.”

Rick Wilson, a former Republican turned anti-Trump operative behind the Lincoln Project, said he was 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 alert Fox News leadership and others about potentially false claims about the 2024 election.

“I see this as part of a broad part of an opportunity to bring some accountability to organizations and people who have done tremendous damage to our democracy and the republic,” Wilson told NBC News. “They depend on a deeply pernicious lie that will potentially plunge us into a level of national chaos and destruction that is unprecedented. 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 both prevent the election of Donald Trump, but also to prevent the big lie part two from hurting America even further divides… into violence and chaos.”

Wilson and others behind the group believe Fox News had reached a critical point of financial vulnerability following lawsuits by two voting system companies regarding claims made during the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems reached 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 in damages.

The lawsuit continues between Smartmatic, a voting company accused of rigging the election despite being used by only one U.S. precinct in 2020, and Fox Corp., which says it captured newsworthy events and individuals surrounding the 2020 election. described. 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 start repeating Donald Trump’s lies again. That is a victory for the country.”

Wilson said he planned to use traditional television advertising, digital advertising and social media platforms to spread the message, hoping to ensure the short list of individuals would see it. “Advertising has become incredibly granular, allowing us to target it almost on an individual level,” he says. “I can geofence around the Fox building. If I wanted to, I could geofence individuals within Fox.”

The television commercial has aired four times in the Washington market in the past week. Efforts to place the ad in the New York City market were unsuccessful, a source familiar with the ad buy told NBC News.

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

A member of Smartmatic’s legal team told NBC News they were not involved.