Democrat Terry McAuliffe's Virginia campaign accidentally emails Fox News to 'kill' story on hiring an election lawyer

• An email snafu from Terry McAuliffe's gubernatorial campaign gifted Fox News an easy story.
• "Can we kill this?" a campaign aide wrote in an email accidentally including a Fox reporter.

The hotly contested Virginia governor's race has gotten close to wall-to-wall coverage on Fox News over the past month, but an error over email gave the network a different story than what the news team was tracking down in the first place.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor, is running against Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin as Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam - best known for his 2019 blackface scandal - is set to leave office, since Virginia does not allow its governors to serve consecutive terms.

Tyler O'Neil, an editor at Fox News, sent the McAuliffe campaign a standard request for comment over email on Thursday.

The McAuliffe campaign had recently hired Marc Elias, a go-to Democratic attorney with experience in election law and contested ballot counts. O'Neil reached out to ask if Elias was hired for a potential court challenge in the election, given that Youngkin has partially embraced some of former President Donald Trump's disproven election fraud lies and may challenge the results.

In response, a McAuliffe campaign staffer mistakenly included the Fox editor on a reply email asking "Can we kill this?"

It did not take long for O'Neil to write up a standalone story on the email snafu for the Fox News website.

McAuliffe's campaign did not give any other response on the record, according to Fox.

The McAuliffe staffer who sent the email did not respond to Insider's request for comment.

During the 2020 presidential race, the Biden campaign hired election lawyers in preparation for the Trump team challenging the results of the election in several states. Elias represented Democrats in Texas that year.

Despite the Trump campaign's repeated allegations of fraud and "irregularities," and after more than 40 court challenges, the former president's lawyers have been unable to win a single case.