(Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)
Donald Trump, the king of earned media, is once again providing free publicity to the Lincoln Project.
The Trump campaign and its stable of amazing lawyers fired off a round of cease and desist letters to various media outlets who are running a Lincoln Project ad called “Failure” that needles campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita along with Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio for failing to anticipate President Biden’s withdrawal from the race.
Wiles is a longtime player in Florida’s smashmouth politics. LaCivita spearheaded the swiftboat smear of John Kerry. And Fabrizio has been kicking around with Paul Manafort since Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, including doing work for Manafort’s firm to prop up the pro-Russian Party of Regions in Ukraine. So, it’s safe to say that these guys didn’t fall out of the coconut tree yesterday.
The letter, posted online by the Lincoln Project, is from the Dhillon Law Group, headed up by Trump’s pal Harmeet Dhillon, the California Republican gadfly who unsuccessfully challenged Ronna Romney McDaniel for the top spot at the RNC and who is currently representing Elon Musk in his antitrust trollsuit against advertisers who dared to stop giving him money.
Addressed to Mario Jaramillo, political director at Effectv, the advertising sales division of Comcast, the letter purports to put the network on notice that the Lincoln Project ad is “false and defamatory” and purport to take great umbrage at the suggestion that they got caught flatfooted by the “coup” their client keeps complaining about, as well as the suggestion that they’re burning through cash with nothing to show for it.
“This falsehood defamatorily slurs the Campaign’s leadership as incompetent, ill-suited to their jobs, and wasteful with donors’ money. It harms Mr. LaCivita, Ms. Wiles, and Mr. Fabrizio by degrading their professional reputations, and it harms the Campaign by discouraging donors from contributing to it based on lies,” Dhillon partner David Warrington huffs, insisting that Effectv “Immediately cease and desist from all efforts to disseminate, broadcast, or republish” the offending ad, or risk being sued for defamation.
Lincoln Project founder Rick Wilson, who has also been around the block once or twice, was delighted, and made a beeline to the show’s YouTube channel to invite the campaign to stick its C&D in the candidate’s “fetid orange ass.”
“You can send every lawyer letter you want. You will never take us to court,” Wilson taunted the former president. “If you sue us, we’ll get in there and we’ll start talking about where all the money goes in the Trump campaign. Because you and I both know, Donald, that you are skimming off enormous percentages of the cash from your campaign. We know it. You know it.”
Then the Lincoln Project’s lawyers from the Elias Law Group fired off their own letter, and it’s a curbstomper.
Four weeks ago, the Trump campaign sat on top of the world. With their candidate leading in the polls against President Biden and marching into Milwaukee for the Republican convention, the campaign’s leadership did something that would have made Icarus blush: they took a midsummer victory lap in the pages of The Atlantic. The article, aptly named “Trump is Planning for a Landslide Win,” featured the Trump campaign’s leaders, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles’ vainglorious attempt to narrate themselves into the pages of history. The first sentence of the article pronounced: “The outcome of the presidential campaign, Republicans believed, was a fait accompli.”
Oof. One month later, things look, well, a bit different.
The referenced article in “The Atlantic” showed LaCivita and Wiles riding high pre-debate, only to be caught off guard when Democrats eased Biden out the door after his disastrous performance. And they weren’t the only ones.
“As for the campaign’s spending: Mr. Trump and Mr. LaCivita made that an issue of public debate when they underscored Mr. LaCivita’s budgetary prowess at the time of his hiring,” Elias Group attorney Jon Berkon continues, tweaking LaCivita for the $3 million he’s already billed the Trump campaign for his services.
“Lincoln Project’s ability to speak freely on crucial matters like abortion access and healthcare is at the heart of the First Amendment’s protections,” he concludes, noting that “While the campaign’s leadership may be bothered by Mr. Trump’s apparent doubts about his campaign’s direction and his decision to bring back his former campaign manager after watching his campaign leadership sputter, they should not be permitted to silence those who wish to communicate this disarray to the public.”
Floppers gonna flop.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
#Donald #Trump #Threatens #Sue #Lincoln #Project #Aggravated #Streisand #Effect
