In a new attack ad, the anti-Trump activists of the Lincoln Project target corporate executives like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, suggesting their support for Donald Trump raises ethics questions.
But political observers are asking why the Lincoln Project — whose leaders have a notorious track record involving sexual harassment of teen boys, shady financial dealings, and a widespread need for Non-Disclosure Agreements – is picking a fight over personal ethics?
“The gang at the Lincoln Project have no interest in ethics. They’re only interested in one thing: Creating generational wealth,” said veteran Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett. “For themselves.”
The Lincoln Project vaulted into the national spotlight in 2019 thanks to its media-friendly anti-Trump messaging and its media-savvy team. Among them: GOP strategists Reed Galen, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson.
The latter summed up the Lincoln Project’s goal this way: “We’re here to kick the sh-t out of Donald Trump.”
But multiple media reports describe a different priority: Putting cash in the pockets of Galen, Schmidt, Weaver, and Wilson.
The New York Times reported that of the $87 million the Lincoln Project raised in its first year, at least $27 million ended up at Galen’s Summit Strategies firm, “from which the four men were paid, according to people familiar with the arrangement.”
And according to the Associated Press, “more than $50 million has gone to firms controlled by the group’s leaders.”
“The governance of the organization was an ethical disaster, with contractors who got paid also getting seats on the board of directors,” the progressive news outlet The Nation reported. “The nominal management of the organization was often kept in the dark about the financial dealings of the four founders.”
“It raises questions about where the rest of the money ultimately went,” Brendan Fischer, an attorney with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington said at the time. “Generally speaking, you’d expect to see a major super PAC spend a majority or more of their money on advertisements and that’s not what happened here.”
And then there are the sexual allegations.
On Jan. 31, 2021, The New York Times published an article accusing Weaver of sending “unsolicited and sexually provocative messages online to young men” and offering to help them get political jobs. The paper interviewed 21 men who received the messages, including a 14-year-old boy who received messages inquiring about his body.
The article included an interview with Schmidt who said the Lincoln Project’s leaders were aware as far back as summer 2020 about the social media posts but said the leadership had “no awareness” about the true contents of the messages.
As the group tried to put that behind it, “The 19th,” an independent, digital media publication that reports on gender in politics, published an article Feb. 12, 2021, describing a “toxic” workplace that escalated along with infighting about how to use the group’s $90 million war chest.
“There was language used in both the Lincoln Project’s ads and within its workplace about gender and sexuality that made many of them uncomfortable, the dozens of interviews revealed,” the outlet reported. The senior leadership frequently used anti-woman and gay slurs to describe their political enemies.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Rick Wilson – who sits on the group’s board – paid off the mortgage on his Florida home 16 years early. The New York Post unearthed Weaver’s registration as a foreign agent for a Russian uranium conglomerate. National Review renamed the Lincoln Project “The Grifter Project” and wrote that it became “little more than the most brazen election-season grift in recent memory.”
“What’s hilarious about Schmidt, Wilson, and Weaver attacking executives over Trump and ethics is that they have turned ‘the Lincoln Project’ into shorthand for ‘it’s a grift,’” one D.C.-based Republican campaign strategist told InsideSources on background. “If you were Donald Trump and someone tried to sell you the Lincoln Project, you’d probably say, ‘I don’t know – too sleazy for me.’”