Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has sent a cease and desist letter to the Draft Tucker PAC, a political action committee that was formed to seemingly encourage him to throw his hat in the ring for the presidential election in 2024.
Mediate obtained the letter that was sent by Harmeet Dhillon, Carlson’s lawyer, to the PAC. The launch of the group was announced late last week as part of an ad that was set to run throughout the week with Newsmax.
The group sent a tweet on May 19 that read:
“Republicans need a new leader that can stand up to Biden. It’s time to draft Tucker Carlson.”
It seems that Carlson wants no part of it, though, and is demanding that the PAC stop what it’s doing. As his lawyer wrote in the cease and desist letter:
“It has come to Mr. Carlson’s attention that you are soliciting contributions and donor contact information from the public by representing that the funds will be used to draft Mr. Tucker to run for president in 2024.
“Mr. Carlson will not run for president in 2024 under any circumstances, and therefore your misrepresentations are damaging Mr. Carlson and defrauding his supporters. If you do not immediately cease and desist your efforts to solicit money to ‘draft’ Mr. Carlson, we will use every legal means at our disposal to vindicate his rights and protect his supporters from these misrepresentations.”
Media outlet The Hill reported recently that the PAC filed official paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to form as a group. That happened not long after Fox News fired Carlson in a sudden move.
In the first ad that the group ran, it compared Carlson to Rush Limbaugh, the late conservative radio host. It said:
“Tucker Carlson is witty, sharp, and mocks woke nonsense. Tucker will whip Biden in a debate.”
The group’s financial backer and chairman is Chris Ekstrom, a major donor to the GOP and a former congressional candidate himself from Texas. Ekstrom said that he only knows Carlson “vaguely.”
He said that others approached him about starting this PAC before Carlson was fired from Fox News, and he initially responded that he didn’t think it could be done while he was still working as a host for the network.
Now that he’s no longer employed by the company, though, Ekstrom said he believed a run for president was now a “realistic opportunity” for Carlson. He said that he doesn’t find either Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis or former President Doanld Trump as “fully satisfactory” as GOP presidential candidates.
As Ekstrom said of those two presumptive GOP frontrunners:
“I’m very concerned that they’re going to not move the debate as far right as it ought to be. If Tucker Carlson entered the race in a reasonable amount of time and just continued in the same territory that he was covering at Fox, I think that’d be a rude awakening for both President Trump and Governor DeSantis.”
Despite the confidence Ekstrom is placing in Carlson, it doesn’t appear the former Fox News host wants any part of official political life at this point.
