Democratic Super PAC To Tangle With Trump Campaign In Court
Sunday, April 19th, 2020 -- 8:16 AM
A leading Democratic super PAC has promised it will tangle in court with the President’s reelection campaign to keep airing television ads the Republican president is trying to keep off the airwaves.The Associated Press reports that Priorities USA Action chief Guy Cecil said Thursday that his group will intervene as a defendant in a lawsuit that the President’s campaign filed in Wisconsin state court to block a local NBC affiliate from airing one of the super PAC’s ads that blasts the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. The lawsuit, filed against WJFW-TV, an NBC affiliate in northern Wisconsin, sets up a notable battle between the President’s financially flush reelection campaign and one of the biggest spending groups in Democratic politics. Priorities USA has spent much of the President’s term researching voters’ views in key battleground states, including Wisconsin, that delivered the President his Electoral College victory in 2016, and the PAC has committed to an extended television and digital advertising campaign to potential swing voters in those states. The ad in question pieces together audio clips of the president downplaying the threat posed by the COVID-19 virus, while a chart that is splashed across the screen gradually begins to shoot upward as cases of the virus skyrocketed across the nation.
“The coronavirus ... this is their new hoax,” the President is heard in the ad’s opening, with two clips that are different recordings. The President’s campaign alleges that the ad is “defamatory” because it splices together the clips in a way that makes it appear as though the president said the virus itself was a “hoax.” The President’s campaign argues that the president did not call the virus a “hoax,” but was referring to Democrats politicizing his handling of it. Cecil countered that the ad simply uses the president’s own words. The remainder of the ad features full quotes from the President dismissing or softening the COVID-19 threat. The President spent the first months of 2020 downplaying the pandemic, accusing Democrats and media of hysteria as he pointed to low numbers of confirmed cases and death from the virus. The President's full “hoax” quote at a Feb. 28 rally in South Carolina, however, came in the context of Democrats’ criticism of his response.
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