Team McAuliffe Accidentally Sends ‘Can We Try to Kill This’ Email to Fox News Reporter Who Reached Out

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A staffer for Democratic Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe mistakenly emailed a Fox News reporter about possibly killing a story on the candidate, FoxNews.com reported on Thursday.

Tyler O’Neil was working on a story about McAuliffe’s campaign hiring Marc Elias, a well-known and very online election law attorney. The reporter found that the campaign has paid Elias $53,680 for his services. That story is fairly humdrum, as Elias has represented scores of Democratic political candidates and organizations. Fox News described him as a “high-profile attorney known for masterminding election-related legal challenges.”

Georgetown University professor Jonathan Turley called the hire of Elias “astonishing,” and cited his former firm’s alleged link to the infamous Steele dossier.

O’Neil described how he reached out to McAuliffe’s campaign for comment on Turley’s take.

“Can we try to kill this,” replied Christina Freundlich, a spokesperson for the campaign.

Her email was apparently intended for a colleague. Moments later she sent another email, apparently to clarify her previous email. “To dispute the challenges of the election.”

Both McAuliffe and his opponent Glenn Youngkin said they would “absolutely” accept the results of Tuesday’s election were they to lose.

The Fox News story also highlighted McAuliffe’s comments on Sunday in which he said that Democrat Stacey Abrams “would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election.”

Abrams lost her 2018 race for governor to Republican Brian Kemp by nearly 55,000 votes.

“That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams, he added. “They took the votes away.”

Those remarks reflected a “partly false” claim that 1.4 million names were purged from the voter rolls.

McAuliffe has also called into question the legitimacy of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

A spokesperson for Youngkin told Fox News on Sunday, “McAuliffe’s continued claims that multiple elections were stolen raise serious doubts about whether he will accept his own impending defeat and concede when he loses to Glenn Youngkin.”

After the Fox News story dropped, Freundlich tweeted, “I think it’s clear based on this story that we did in fact… kill the story.”