President Trump re-election campaign is suing Northland Television which owns WJFW, an NBC affiliate in Wisconsin over a television ad.
According to the filing, Trump’s campaign sent a cease and desist letter to the station in late March to get them to stop airing a television ad entitled “Exponential Threat”. The ad is produced and funded by Priorities USA, a liberal Super PAC.
Today the campaign is filing a lawsuit after the station continued to run the ad.
The campaign says beyond it containing false and defamatory statements about the President it is “far more insidious and, ultimately, far more dangerous”.
Additionally, the campaign said the ad was produced by using digital technology to take audio clips from campaign events and piecing them together to make a “blatantly false statement” that President Trump never said.
The manufactured quote is “The coronavirus, this is their new hoax.”
The lawsuit alleges the TV station airing the ad has “perpetrated a fraud on the public by recklessly broadcasting [Priorities USA’s] defamatory and false advertisement, which [the station] knew or should have known was produced through the use of technology that depicted a clearly false statement.”
The letter the Trump campaign sent to WJFW-NBC in March informed the station that the advertisement was produced in a “fake, deceptive, and fraudulent manner.”
In the cease and desist letter, the campaign included information from fact-checker organizations that verified the campaign’s assertions about the advertisement.
The station continued to air the ad 36 more times over the following 11 days the cease and desist letter on March 25th.
Here is the ad:
Priorities USA is calling attention to the fact Trump’s team is trying to remove it from television to raise money, according to the organization’s Twitter account.
The television station has not returned a request to comment from the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel who wrote about the lawsuit, but did print comment from Priorities USA Chairman Guy Cecil:
“The truth is that Trump ignored warnings from experts and his own team and downplayed the coronavirus even as it spread unchecked across the country and the world,” Cecil said. “Americans are now suffering as a result of his inaction. We will never stop airing the facts and holding the president accountable for his actions.”
Priorities USA Super PAC was founded by former Obama aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney.
One of the largest funders of the organization is Paloma Funds founder Donald Sussman, who has given at least $8 million this election cycle to the Super PAC.
Other notable funders include the National Education Association, AFT Solidarity (an arm of the American Federation of Teachers), and Director Steven Spielberg.
