As Rudy Giuliani railed about voter fraud from the lobby of the Republican National Committee’s headquarters a few weeks after the November 2020 election, rivulets of hair dye running down the side of his face, an executive at Fox Corporation let loose in text messages with his reaction.
“This sounds SO F------ CRAZY btw,” wrote Raj Shah, who had served as a senior aide in Donald Trump’s White House for two years before his hiring at Fox. “Rudy looks awful,” a deputy wrote back, prompting Shah to respond that “he objectively looks like he was a dead person voting 2 weeks ago.”
But Shah’s job at Fox was to protect the company’s brand, then under pressure from Trump allies who wanted to push Giuliani’s wild claims of a stolen election and who were abandoning the network for more hard-line options like Newsmax and One America News. So when a Fox News reporter went live on air just after Giuliani’s news conference concluded and declared that some of what the president’s lawyer had said was “simply not true,” Shah reacted with alarm.
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“This is the kinda s--- that will kill us,” he texted the deputy. “we cover it wall to wall and then we burn that down with all the skepticism.”
The texts are drawn from more than a million pages of internal Fox correspondence released in recent weeks as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against the company by Dominion Voting Systems. The cache has revealed how Fox executives, producers and hosts expressed private doubts about Trump...
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