Democrat Terry McAulife’s Virginia campaign inadvertently sends an email to Fox News to ‘kill’ the story of hiring an election lawyer

Former Virginia Gov. and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. Find McNamee / Getty Images

• An email snafu from Terry McAulife’s governor campaign gave Fox News an easy story.

• “Can we kill this?” a campaign assistant wrote in an email accidentally with a Fox reporter.

• The reporter requested comments on the campaign to hire an election lawyer.

That heavily challenged Virginia’s gubernatorial race has come close to wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News over the past month, but an email error gave the network a different story than what the news team initially tracked.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor, is running against Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin as Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam – best known for his Blackface scandal in 2019 – is set to leave office as Virginia does not allow its governors to serve consecutive terms.

Fox News editor Tyler O’Neil sent the McAuliffe campaign a standard request for comment via email Thursday.

The McAuliffe campaign had recently hired Marc Elias, a go-to Democratic lawyer with experience in suffrage and controversial voting. O’Neil reached out to ask if Elias was hired for a potential trial in the election, given that Youngkin has partially embraced some of former President Donald Trump’s disproved election fraud lies and can challenge the results.

In response, a McAuliffe campaigner mistakenly included the Fox editor in a response email asking “Can we kill this?”

It did not take long for O’Neil to write one independent history on the email snafu to the Fox News website.

McAulife’s campaign gave no other response to the post, according to Fox.

The McAuliffe employee who sent the email did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.

During the presidential race in 2020, the Biden campaign hired election attorneys in preparation for the Trump team to challenge the results of the election in several states. Elias represented the Democrats in Texas that year.

Despite the Trump campaign’s repeated allegations of fraud and “irregularities” and after more than 40 lawsuits, the former president’s lawyers have been unable to win a single case.

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