I've always said and believed that it wasn't just the disinformation and propaganda campaign, it was messing with the actual vote. Criminal trump always cheats, always has, and always will, no exceptions. He also does nothing but lie and steal. He said "he had a secret", "had plenty of votes", "all the votes we need" (before any definitive number could be obtained for such confidence) and they also had forensics done on the machines to know the inner workings of the machines. With the billions and Musk's help with all the technical resources and the technical advancements of today at his disposal to apply a scam on the electronics, very possible and probable given the history of criminal trump.
Here's the full transcript if someone is interested and can't open it on substack.
November 15, 2024
Honorable VP Kamala Harris
The White House
Office of the Vice President
1600 Pennsylvania Ave
Washington DC 20500
Dear Madam Vice President.
This is my second Duty to Warn Letter regarding hacking of the 2024 Presidential Election. The first letter on November 7 was directed to Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Officials. Both warnings are made per DNI Clapper’s 2015 directive to all agencies and contractors associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies to warn of suspicions of hacking.
Professionally I have worked as the CEO or CTO at seven high technology firms including two which specialized in hacking and counter-hacking operations. My clients have included numerous governments DoD, DHS, Dept. of State, F100 Financials and F500 Industrials.
I am a lifelong Republican who has long placed service and participatory democracy over party. In government, I have twice been invited to SoCom to give lectures on electronic warfare and techniques to find terrorist money laundering and gave a keynote speech of the National Counterintel Summit on this same topic. I served as an after-action reviewer of communications and data failures on 9/11 under the direction of Jim Woolsey and FDNY Commissioner Scopetta, and later co-wrote multiple hacking risk analysis of Smart Grid technologies for the Obama administration.
You should reverse your concession, call for both a full investigation of criminal activity and demand hand recounts in all seven swing states.
In my professional view there are multiple and extremely clear indications the Presidential vote was willfully compromised.
I wholly agree with the public letter of Duncan Buell, et. al. of Nov. 13th stating they believe there is a possibility of hacking and calling for hand-recounts.
This letter’s clear call to action is commendable, but its cautious tone may belie the severity of what I believe has happened. In my view it is a near certainty the results have been changed at a scale which reversed the US Presidential Election. They imply there is a chance a hand-recount will show you won more votes. I am stating a hand recount will most likely show you did win. Both letters call on you to act.
In my view, a capable and skilled series of exploits, electronic tools and hacks were used to change the Presidential vote in all seven swing states. These activities have reversed the outcomes in at least Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. I will lay out the basics of the attack, starting with unusual elements within the results. I will then outline two processes which could have been followed to insert these false results into the system. Finally I will outline how I would recommend investigating.
Unusual elements within the results.
The results of the attack are improbable in the extreme and well tailored to the sole benefit of your opponent.
Approximately 600,000 votes are for Donald Trump but with no down ballot choices. These are either inserted “bullet ballots” for the Presidential race or manipulated data fields. They are surgically added to totals in limited jurisdictions and within only the seven swing States. This historically unprecedented set of numbers found in the 2024 swing states is absent in every other state. In AZ, MI, NC and WI the effect of these drop-off votes reverses the voters' will and even more improbably always pushes the winning margin beyond the mandatory recount numbers. It is a result too perfect for belief. It is a bespoke and programmed outcome. In other states including PA and NV, removing these strange and bespoke added votes, it appears Donald Trump may have won the cast votes but within a margin which would force recounts. The inserted votes raise his totals, to avoid any scrutiny during mandatory recount results which would have slowed his claim on the Presidency. In GA and FL the same pattern exists with unclear impact on the results.
This attack is not technically difficult. It is modest in scale. It would require:
Modest and common computer programming skills.
Access to 10-100 tabulators or to the handful of facilities programming them in advance.
A credible database of voter IDs of non-voters around which to create false ballots.
Perhaps as few as 1, but more likely 3-5 human program managers.
Access to eBollBook Data during the election to determine who had not voted.
(Possibly) Human access to some tabulators during counting.
If I was asked to lead this hack, I would expect to have a core team of 6-10 people, and operating costs under $10M with a timeline of 3-12 months.
The tell: A historically absurd number of Trump-only bullet ballots or undervote ballots.
There are always a handful of voters who cast a vote in one race which they care about, and do not make other selections on the ballot. These are called bullet ballots. In Presidential Races since 1980, these bullet ballots rarely account for more than 1% of the total votes including in Mr. Trump’s winning 2016 election and losing 2020 election, and when they do it warrants further investigation. In 2024 in the 43 non-swing states, bullet ballots make up a nominal >1%. In the seven swing states the numbers are so high to be unbelievable, unprecedented and demanding of further investigation. Here is analysis from totals as of late Nov. 12th
Here are the unprecedented results of drop-offs in the two western swing states:
AZ - 123K+ 7.2%+ of Trump’s total vote. Enough to reverse the outcome.
NV - 43K+ 5.5%+ of Trump’s total vote. Enough to exceed recount threshold.
It is my belief these two states have illegally added votes.
For comparison, examine Trump’s 2024 results in three states which border AZ and NV. They have equally passionate Trump supporters, but have the normal levels of drop off or bullet ballots.
ID <2K 0.03% of Trump’s total.
OR <4K 0.05% of Trump’s total
UT <1K 0.01% of Trump’s total.
In the case of Idaho and Utah, Mr. Trump was a run-away winner and had no need to add votes. In the case of Oregon, Ms. Harris was a run-away winner and adding votes to Trump’s total would add risk without adding value.
The same pattern of large numbers of drop-off votes or bullet ballots exists in the totals of MI, NC, PA, WI.
North Carolina is the most extreme. The public results indicate over 350K voters cast a ballot for Trump and no other race making up over 11% of Trump’s voters in NC drop off votes or bullet ballots.
Hack Part 1: Creating the pool of bullet ballot voters.
There are two possible methods to execute this attack. The simple version would only manipulate electronic totals and hand-counting the target precincts would discover this. The second involved ePollbook hacking and introducing bullet ballots. This would add the need to compare the ePollBook timestamps to find possible bad actors or other sources for these anomalous votes.
When Mr. Musk announced his $1M lottery for people to go online and sign a pledge to vote for Trump, I became personally suspicious of why such a promotion would be done. I signed up to see what information he wanted and what the pledge actually stated. He did not want to know people’s socials or send them texts. To sign up you had to provide your street address. That was all they cared about. Once they had the people’s names, and street address this would allow for building a pool of ghost voters who could logically be marked for fake ballots, structured in a manner which matched ePollBook and precinct data. You, as a member of law enforcement, understand criminals need certain pre-conditions to act. A database of pledged supporters with street addresses is required for this hack. Law enforcement should immediately find the team of programmers who pulled the lottery data capture. They will find those programmers immediately parsed the data into a system based on voting precincts and created macros to constantly update the pledged lists of who had cast a vote, and who had not. The programmers likely did not know they were working on a system to be used to steal the election. When confronted with that fact, law enforcement would likely gain cooperating witnesses.
Musk’s team used this system to build a list of voters pledged to vote for Trump. This list could also be used to make a ghost-ballot voter list. ePollBook data is nearly always linked to the internet, and in many jurisdictions this link was being made in real time via Mr. Musk’s Starlink or any available wireless network. Throughout the day, Musk’s team could compare existing turnout models to likely outcomes, based on well established voter profile databases vs. the actual voter turnout coming in from the ePollBooks. They would have been able to have a very good estimation in the closing hours of polls how many votes short Trump would likely be at the tabulation level. They would also have exact lists of the pledged voters for Trump and would know who had not shown up. The pledged voters who did not vote, became the bullet ballots. With any network connection to the ePollBooks, or via other compromised connectivity, they could be marked as voted.
Hack Part 2: Matching the tabulation to the ePollBooks.
The exact number of added voters to the ePollBooks as having voted would have to match the tabulation process. This attack could have been done in at least two different ways.
The easiest method to execute phase two, is also the easiest to discover by hand-recount. In a few jurisdictions where the tabulators either had network connectivity, approved or otherwise, or where a person on the team had physical access to the tabulation machine, the Trump votes that were added to the ePollBooks, would need to be added to the tabulators. At which point the ePollBooks and the tabulation totals would match, having been digitally stuffed with demographically credible voters for Trump. But there will be no paper ballot for these votes. A hand-recount will quickly discover the fraud.
As I write this letter, several hundred people are self organizing on Reddit and other forums. They include: data scientists, statisticians, and legal experts. They are examining the precinct level data of every swing state, and by Monday these teams will have lists of many precincts where these historically unprecedented Trump bullet ballots occur. The highest likelihood is that those ballots don’t actually exist. Those votes were electronically created but have no paper. This would be easily proven with a hand recount.
A second possibility involves the same compromise as described above, but is then combined with human ballot stuffing, or ballot substitution, at tabulation to match the epollbook numbers. This possibility is raised as it appears these historically unprecedented bullet ballots fall heavily in a few counties. Maricopa County AZ, seems to be the source of the vast majority, perhaps nearly all, of the AZ bullet ballot voters for Trump. If these ballots were introduced it would require co-conspirators working inside the tabulation center.
I appreciate that many people, even sophisticated people outside this field, think this hack is an impossible task. It is not. Just 8 weeks ago the world watched a vastly larger and more complicated one. Unknown hackers intercepted over 3000 communications devices over 24 months destined for use by Hamas across the entire Mideast. The devices all had additional software, hardware and explosives inserted. The devices were then delivered to users and functioned normally for months until the hackers triggered the inserted series of exploits and explosions. This hack, the entire world witnessed, was orders of magnitude more complicated than introducing Trump bullet ballots into - at most - 100 tabulation locations. I have personally managed full year long operations in which hundreds of credit card point of sale devices were rebuilt with added hardware and software and inserted in order to discover fraudsters and money laundering. No one knew we were there. The users never were aware. The devices did their normal job processing credit cards for merchants. While they also did a hacked job and helped my team and I root out criminals. The access, technical difficulty, and scale of the election hack I am describing is less than either of these. But the effect is vastly greater, and the FBI has excellent people who could address this very quickly.
Lastly, this hack methodology may or may not have some correlation with the series of Bomb Threats called in by Russian affiliated assets. The use of distraction or diversion of this kind is common. My first thought was, and my thinking remains, these bomb threats were called into tabulation centers and precincts where the hackers had already planned to conduct ghost bullet ballot introductions. I believe they wanted a disruption in the chain of custody, so lawyers could claim after the hacking events that the chain of custody on the ballots was flawed. The creation of the false-argument of a broken custody chain would be used as a pretext to prevent hand recounting, as hand recounting would not match the Trump favorable result. However, by a reverse of that logic, any jurisdiction which was subject to a bomb threat was forced to break standard operating procedure. This alone should be grounds for you to ask for a hand-recount.
Lastly, I have been advised by an attorney that Arizona and Georgia have mechanisms in place for members of the public to demand a recount, but only you have the ability to demand a recount across all the jurisdictions of concern.
A final formal note. This is principally a Duty to Warn letter. It is also a fulfillment of my constitutional oath of office as possibly the lowest level sworn office of public trust in America. I was appointed by my township to serve as a local Parks Commissioner. I am the public appointee to the Mt. Nittany Conservancy, a nature reserve. I have spent the last four years variously overseeing how public funds are spent on sports fields, kids playgrounds, hiking trails, and bike paths. To do this, I must make annual conflict and financial disclosures and I must swear nearly the same oath you did. I am under the sworn obligation to defend our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Which, I am honored to do.
I will continue to investigate with a growing group of volunteers. We are also planning to offer rewards for information. But our efforts to preserve the integrity of this election can not take this to completion. You, and only you, can call for a full hand-recount and engage the vast public resources at your disposal. I can’t. This is all I can do.
CC: Secretary. of States and Governors of AZ, FL, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA and WI. Additional PA representative Chris Dush (PA State Sen.), Paul Takac (PA State Rep.), Dustin Best (PA College Township Supervisor), and Robert Ziegler (PA Milhiem Township Supervisor.)
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I've been saying this forever. Repubs have total control of the right wing echo chamber and the dems have never learned to compete. When you feed people propaganda 24/7, they begin to believe it. The MAGAs bought hundreds of Hispanic radio stations and turned it into Spanish speaking Rush Limbaugh's all day and all night. Unless progressives learn this lesson, democracy is toast.
That pretty much covers it. What can the country do? It's clear why shitface was allowed to say anything he wanted to. Because the other side 'thought' we had news sources to balance. But the author is dead on. Perhaps I need a different descriptor.
It's scary that so much of our news is supported by russia behind the curtain.
How disinformation defined the 2024 election narrative
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? "[...]It doesn't matter what the policies are or what the facts, numbers, and graphs say or show. It all just boils down to the perceptions gained from the traitors planned and orchestrated DISINFORMATION and Russian style Propaganda War. With their suppression of votes, billions$ of corruption, using lawfare against democracy, draining $$'s, resources, and time (using our citizens paid for court systems against us), and continuing culture wars of hate to divide and conquer are some of the forces we need to deal with." [my emphasis] It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
Darrell M. West November 7, 2024
* In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates.
* One video featured a Haitian man (although he was not really Haitian) saying he had just gotten to the United States and had voted in two counties—Gwinnett and Fulton—in Georgia, but it turned out to be a fake video made in Russia.
* Polling data suggest that false claims affected how people saw the candidates, their views about leading issues such as the economy, immigration, and crime, and the way the news media covered the campaign.
Social media icons logo displayed on a smartphone with disinformation on screen seen in the background of this photo illustration taken on October 15, 2023. Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto
Contact Governance Studies Media Office gsmedia@brookings.edu 202.540.7724
But we can’t ignore the ways in which disinformation shaped views about the candidates, affected how voters saw leader performance, and generated widespread media attention. As Elaine Kamarck and I argue in our Brookings Press book “Lies That Kill: A Citizen’s Guide to Disinformation,” there are systematic and organized efforts to shape public opinion in many areas, from public health and climate change to race relations.
So, we shouldn’t be surprised that the same thing happened during the 2024 election. Campaign examples this fall include the infamous stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, hurricane disaster relief funding going to undocumented immigrants, Kamala Harris in a swimsuit hugging convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and the supposed case of Tim Walz abusing a young man 30 years ago. Disinformation flowed into our info-ecosystem from other countries as well. One video featured a Haitian man (although he was not really Haitian) saying he had just gotten to the United States and had voted in two counties—Gwinnett and Fulton—in Georgia, but it turned out to be a fake video made in Russia.
These and other efforts were successful in shaping the campaign narrative because they were disseminated broadly on social media platforms, promoted through funny memes, picked up and publicized by mainstream media outlets, circulated by internet mega-influencers, and amplified by leading candidates during rallies, debates, and interviews. In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates.
Polling data suggest that false claims affected how people saw the candidates .. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/exit-poll-results-for-the-2024-election-show-democracy-economy-top-issues/ar-AA1tzcTS?ocid=BingNewsSerp , their views about leading issues such as the economy, immigration, and crime, and the way the news media covered the campaign. Take the case of immigration and border security. According to candidate Trump, there were hordes of migrants overrunning the country’s southern border, unfairly monopolizing scarce public resources and endangering public security through dangerous crime waves.
Actual border statistics consistently showed weak support for those claims, but that wasn’t enough to quell unfavorable views about Harris on border security. The idea that 10 million migrants had crossed the border and that many were released after capture was not true, according to independent fact-checkers. Apprehension and release numbers dropped during the Biden administration and were comparable to figures during the Trump administration.
In addition, crime statistics showed that native-born Americans actually committed crimes at levels three times higher than immigrants. According to the National Institute for Justice, native-born Americans committed around 1,100 crimes per 100,000 people, compared to 800 by legal immigrants and 400 for undocumented immigrants. But Trump’s false claims in this area made Harris look ineffective on crime and immigration.
On views about inflation and the overall economy, people in 2024 consistently reported very negative opinions compared to actual inflation, unemployment, and GDP figures. Europeans have been especially perplexed by American’s sour views of the economy. On the eve of the general election, the Economist magazine even had a cover story saying the U.S. economy was the envy of the world.
[Insert: I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote .. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024-10-19 .. The Economist in mid-October, is "the envy of the world." [Insert: Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won? [...]According to the economist our economy is the envy of the world... (Actually, Forbes and WSJ and others agree...) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175358785 .. and .. [...]The Historical Puzzle of US Economic Performance under Democrats vs. Republicans https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/historical-puzzle-us-economic-performance-under-democrats-vs-republicans We have heard much about the puzzle that US economic performance under President Joe Biden has been much stronger than voters perceive it to be. But the current episode is just one instance of a bigger historical puzzle: the US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. This fact is even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term. Indeed, some poll results suggest that more Americans believe the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175397257] But in the right-wing media, the horror stories were relentless.And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the "roaring Trump economy" will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175406309]
Yet voters had a dismal view of the economy and rated Harris negatively for the economic situation.
For coming political battles, people need to be aware of how the current information ecosystem regularly is promoting falsehoods and skewing views about important issues. But we do not need to stand back and accept widespread misperceptions as the new reality. There are several things people and organizations can do to protect themselves for what will be a continuing wave of misinformation, disinformation, and false narratives.
There needs to be meaningful content moderation by social media platforms. Right now, many leading platforms are cesspools of rumors, false information, and outright lies. They are widely disseminated and seen by millions of people. If that continues, it will become increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction—endangering our country’s ability to address major problems. Companies need to get far more serious about content moderation.
The disinformation risks have grown stronger in recent months due to new tech tools such as generative AI. There are easy-to-use tools that can create false pictures, videos, audio, and narratives. People no longer need a technical background to use AI tools but can make requests through prompts and templates and become master propagandists. We need digital literacy programs that train people on how to evaluate online information and spot fakes and deceptions.
We have to understand how changes in the contemporary political environment make people want to believe negative information about the opposition. In a highly polarized world, where people are divided into competing political tribes, millions of Americans admit .. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/who-knowingly-shares-false-political-information-online/ .. they themselves have intentionally spread information they know to be false. If that continues, it will lead to disaster for our country’s politics and governance.
Finally, many individuals and organizations have financial incentives .. https://www.amazon.com/Lies-that-Kill-Citizens-Disinformation/dp/0815740727 .. to spread blatant lies. Through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms, they make money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be hard to get a serious handle on the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system.
What I don't like is your constant attempts at gaslighting about fascism. Guessing you won't like the following. People are calling Trump a fascist. What does that mean? [...]Trump’s second attorney general, Bill Barr, slow-walked release of Mueller’s report to dilute its impact. Barr would later leave Trump’s administration after the 2020 election after refusing to support Trump’s unsupported election interference conspiracy theories. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175285241
A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Mr. Murdoch, who was trying to give full control of his empire to his son Lachlan and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant. The battle over the Murdoch family trust will go a long way toward determining the future of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire. Emily Najera for The New York Times
A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to change his family’s trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan’s control of his media empire and lock in Fox News’s right-wing editorial slant, according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times.
The commissioner, Edmund J. Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in “bad faith” in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust, which divides control of the company equally among Mr. Murdoch’s four oldest children — Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence — after his death.
The ruling was at times scathing. At one point in his 96-page opinion, Mr. Gorman characterizes the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust.
A lawyer for Mr. Murdoch, Adam Streisand, said Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan were disappointed with the ruling and intended to appeal.
In a statement, James, Elisabeth and Prudence said: “We welcome Commissioner Gorman’s decision and hope that we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members.” Image
Lachlan Murdoch in September. The decision was at times scathing, characterizing the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to “permanently cement Lachlan Murdoch’s executive roles” inside the empire. Emily Najera for The New York Times
The battle over the family trust is not about money — Mr. Murdoch is not seeking to diminish any of his children’s financial stakes in the company — but rather about future control of the world’s most powerful conservative media empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.
Mr. Murdoch, now 93, has long intended to bequeath these sprawling media conglomerates to his children, much as his own father had passed on his vastly smaller media company to Mr. Murdoch and his sisters. But he is also determined to preserve the right-wing bent of his empire, and reconciling these two desires has become a growing challenge for him.
Over his long career, Mr. Murdoch has made a point of fusing his family and his business affairs, with Lachlan, James and Elisabeth all at one point in consideration to succeed him. (His eldest daughter, Prudence, has been the least involved in the family business.) By 2019, though, it was clear that he wanted Lachlan to lead the company after his death. The problem was the structure of the family trust.
James and Elisabeth are both known to have less-conservative political views than their father or brother. If Mr. Murdoch fails to lock in Lachlan’s leadership of the company, he will be unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy the legacy of the conservative empire he had spent his life building. In seeking to consolidate Lachlan’s control over this empire, Mr. Murdoch has argued that maintaining the political bent of his outlets — and stripping the voting power of three of his children — is in the financial interest of all his beneficiaries.
News Corp. headquarters in New York City. The ruling leaves Mr. Murdoch unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy his legacy as a conservative media mogul. Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
The fight over the trust has further inflamed tensions inside the famously fractious family. Internal disputes have riven the Murdochs before — most notably, during the phone hacking scandal in Britain in 2010 and 2011, when Elisabeth tried to persuade her father to fire James, who was overseeing the company’s British operations at the time.
But this particular battle, which began with a stealth legal maneuver to change an inviolable trust, is unparalleled in the family’s history. It has surfaced decades of shifting ideologies and allegiances, while making Mr. Murdoch’s preference for his eldest son unmistakably and painfully clear to his other children. They have been forced into a courtroom in Nevada to retain some semblance of control over a family business that has become inseparable from the family itself.
The legal maneuvering came to a head during several days of sealed, in-person testimony in Reno in September by Mr. Murdoch, Lachlan, James, Elisabeth, Prudence and a number of their representatives on the trust. The proceedings revealed that Mr. Murdoch’s children had started secretly discussing the public-relations strategy for their father’s death in April 2023. Setting off these discussions was the episode of the HBO drama “Succession,” the commissioner wrote, “where the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos.” The episode prompted Elisabeth’s representative to the trust, Mark Devereux, to write a “‘Succession’ memo” intended to help avoid a real-life repeat.
The commissioner’s ruling, while significant, is not the final word in the case. The commissioner acts as a “special master” who weighs the testimony and evidence and submits a recommended resolution to the Probate Court. It falls to a district judge to ratify or reject that recommendation. Even then, the losing party is free to challenge the determination, which could precipitate an intensive new round of litigation.
If Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan do not succeed in court, they could pursue other means to consolidate Lachlan’s power. One way would be for Lachlan to buy out his siblings’ stake in the company.
After The Times reported on the legal battle over the family trust in July, the paper, joined by several other news outlets, filed a motion to unseal the proceedings, citing the significant public interest in its outcome. That case is ongoing.
Mr. Murdoch established the Murdoch Family Trust in 2006, years after he had married his third wife, Wendi Deng, and they had two children of their own, Grace and Chloe. Under the trust, he retains control over the business until his death, at which point his voting shares will be distributed equally among his four oldest children.
The initial trust arrangement was meant to be binding, the product of an agreement Mr. Murdoch negotiated with his second wife, Anna — the mother of Lachlan, Elisabeth and James — who was concerned that he would bequeath an equal share of control and equity to the young children he had with Ms. Deng. Those youngest children were ultimately given an equal financial stake in Mr. Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar empire, but no voting power. However, the language of the trust included a provision giving Mr. Murdoch the right to make changes to it as long as he was acting in the best interests of his beneficiaries.
It was that provision that Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan sought to exploit. In recent years, they have grown increasingly concerned that James — who has left the company and is hardly on speaking terms with his father and brother — was planning to lead a coup with Elisabeth and Prudence to oust Lachlan after their father’s death and change the editorial slant of the company. During the proceedings, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan’s lawyers pointed to a meeting that James, Elisabeth and Prudence held at Claridge’s Hotel in London in September 2023 as proof that they were scheming against Lachlan. But the commissioner ruled that accounts of the meeting were insufficient evidence of “plotting.”
It was Lachlan who initiated the plan to change the trust in the middle of 2023, according to the ruling. His and his father’s lawyers and advisers ultimately drew up a blueprint to consolidate Lachlan’s leadership by amending the trust. They called it — “perhaps too optimistically,” the commissioner quipped — “Project Family Harmony.” It singled out James as the “troublesome beneficiary.”
One of the options contemplated, according to the ruling, was to simply “sever” James’s “sub-trust” from the larger trust, limiting his power. But Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan ultimately decided that they could more effectively marginalize James by keeping his shares in the trust and thus under their control.
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan appointed new representatives to the family trust — including Bill Barr, the former attorney general— to give them the votes they needed to disenfranchise James, Elisabeth and Prudence. They also offered voting power to the children Mr. Murdoch had with Wendi Deng, according to the ruling.
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan appointed new representatives to the family trust — including Bill Barr, a former attorney general — to give them the votes they needed to disenfranchise James, Elisabeth and Prudence. Emily Najera for The New York Times
Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan introduced their plan at a special meeting of the trust late last year. The ruling quotes a text message from Lachlan to Elisabeth on the morning of the meeting: “Today is about Dad’s wishes and confirming all of our support for him and for his wishes. It shouldn’t be difficult or controversial. Love you, Lachlan.”
At the meeting, Mr. Murdoch read a statement that said in part: “I love each of my children, and my support of Lachlan is not intended to suggest otherwise. But these companies need a designated leader and Lachlan is that leader.”
In order for their changes to the trust to pass legal muster, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan had to prove that they were being done in good faith and with the sole purpose of benefiting all of Mr. Murdoch’s heirs. In court, they argued that locking in Lachlan’s control would ensure that the empire remained on its highly profitable conservative course, which would be in the best interests of all of Mr. Murdoch’s beneficiaries.
James, Elisabeth and Prudence — referred to in the proceedings as the “Objectors” — strenuously disagreed. They argued that they were being disenfranchised from their own family trust under what they maintained was a false presumption. They “disavowed any plan to oust their brother,’’ according to the decision, which also did not find “that they shared any singleness of purpose in changing the management of Fox News,” or other outlets following Mr. Murdoch’s death.
In recent years, Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan have grown increasingly concerned that James, second from right, was planning a coup with Prudence, left, and Elisabeth, middle, to oust Lachlan after their father’s death and change the editorial bent of the company. Emily Najera for The New York Times
Mr. Gorman sided unequivocally with them, ruling that Mr. Murdoch and his eldest son had ulterior motives — specifically, to give Lachlan the power to protect his father’s posthumous legacy by keeping the family empire on its conservative course. The Nevada commissioner found that they had operated in bad faith, undertaking their plan in secret for months — and only notifying James, Elisabeth and Prudence days before a scheduled vote at a special emergency meeting of the trust’s representatives.
He wrote that Mr. Murdoch and Lachlan’s representatives on the trust, including Mr. Barr, “demonstrated a dishonesty of purpose and motive” in abetting their plan. Mr. Gorman criticizes another one of their newly appointed representatives for his scant knowledge of the family and trust, writing that his research had been limited to “Google searches and watching YouTube videos about the Murdochs (or the fictional family in the show ‘Succession’),” as well as listening to a book by Michael Wolff about the family.
Characterizing the effort to change the trust, Mr. Gorman concludes: “The effort was an attempt to stack the deck in Lachlan Murdoch’s favor after Rupert Murdoch’s passing so that his succession would be immutable. The play might have worked; but an evidentiary hearing, like a showdown in a game of poker, is where gamesmanship collides with the facts and at its conclusion, all the bluffs are called and the cards lie face up.”
He added: “The court, after considering the facts of this case in the light of the law, sees the cards for what they are and concludes this raw deal will not, over the signature of this probate commissioner, prevail.”
Jonathan Mahler, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, has been writing for the magazine since 2001. More about Jonathan Mahler
Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg
See more on: Fox Entertainment Group, Inc., Wall Street Journal, Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch
Inside the Media Industry
The Observer: Shortly after a 48-hour strike by journalists ended, the Guardian Media Group said it had struck a deal to sell The Observer, the U.K.’s oldest Sunday paper, to the digital start-up Tortoise Media.
The Los Angeles Times: Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the newspaper’s billionaire owner, said that he planned to introduce a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage as part of his campaign to overhaul the publication.
DirecTV: The company is calling off its plans to acquire the rival satellite TV giant, Dish Network, after Dish’s lenders refused to agree to the terms of the deal.
WNBC: Chuck Scarborough, a celebrated broadcaster who started at the New York station in 1974, announced that he would wrap up his anchoring career.
Comcast: The company said that it would spin off its cable networks, including MSNBC and CNBC, in a bid to unshackle its movie studio and theme parks from the waning fortunes of traditional television.
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