Donald Trump threatened legal action against Fox News on Thursday in response to an ad from the conservative Lincoln Project.
The former president wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, that he would see the network and, apparently, the Lincoln Project “in Court” and blamed them for supposed “false advertis[ing]”.
As with his previous criticism of the network, Mr Trump’s statement once again targeted former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a conservative critic of his who supported impeachment after the Jan 6 riot and now sits on the Fox Corporation’s board of directors.
“The Perverts and Lowlifes of the Lincoln Project are back on, where else, Fox News. I thought they ran away to the asylum after their last catastrophic campaign, with charges made against them that were big time sleaze, and me getting many millions more votes in 2020 than I got in 2016,” said the ex-president in his rambling post.
“The Paul Ryun run Fox only has high standards for ’Trump’ ads, but not for anyone else. The Perverts should not be allowed to ’false advertise,’ and Fox News should not allow it to happen. See you all in Court!!!” he added.
It’s unclear which specific ad from the Lincoln Project set the former president off so severely, but an ad posted on the group’s YouTube channel on Thursday described his voters as suckers who were conned into believing lies about the 2020 election and other issues.
Mr Trump’s intended lawsuit would go nowhere, however. A Fox News spokesperson told The Independent that the ad in question was purchased on the air of a local Florida-based TV affiliate station, and had not actually run on Fox News. Local TV stations often have partnerships with larger national networks like NBC, Fox or CBS and tend to have their own advertising blocs following ads from the national network during commercial breaks.
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson responded in a separate statement to The Daily Beast, exclaiming: “Go for it, b****...I double-dog dare you.”
He then later released an expletive-laden video response, daring the ex-president once again to take legal action while predicting that the threat was just a bluff.
Any legal effort he launched would be piled atop the mountain of court battles in which Mr Trump already finds himself embroiled.
The ex-president is facing a criminal investigation into his retention of classified documents, some at the highest levels of classification, at his Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida. FBI agents have revealed that a number of top secret files were recovered from two separate locations at Mar-a-Lago in a raid last month, and Mr Trump is reported to have had at least one document pertaining to the nuclear defences of a foreign country among the stashes.
He also faces ongoing prosecution of his allies in Georgia’s investigation into their efforts to pressure state officials to aid their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as well as a third, separate DoJ investigation in Washington dealing with January 6 itself. Then there’s the New York investigations, where Manhattan’s district attorney is going after his company for allegations of criminal fraud and the state attorney general is pursuing her own, similar civil investigation.
Mr Trump continues to insist that his political enemies seek to persecute him on all fronts, but has yet to offer an explanation for the presence of top secret materials at his resort.
