Washington:
Last June, the Lincoln Project was on a high. Led by several prominent former Republican consultants, its slickly produced ads attacking President Donald Trump made it perhaps the best known of the so-called Never Trump organisations. The group tried to claim a higher moral ground in an effort to purge Trump from the GOP. Money flowed in by the tens of millions of dollars from donors eager to help.
But within the organisation, a grave threat was emerging.
In June 2020, members of the organisation’s leadership were informed in writing and in subsequent phone calls of at least 10 specific allegations of harassment against co-founder John Weaver, including two involving Lincoln Project employees, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the situation. The email and phone calls raise questions about the Lincoln Project’s statement last month that it was “shocked” when accusations surfaced publicly this year. It’s also the first known suggestion that Weaver targeted a Lincoln Project staffer.
Despite the early warning, the group took no action against Weaver and pressed forward with its high-profile work. For the collection of GOP consultants and former officials, being anti-Trump was becoming very good for business. Of the USD 90 million Lincoln Project has raised, more than USD 50 million has gone to firms controlled by the group’s leaders.
There is no evidence that the Lincoln Project buried the allegations against Weaver for business reasons. But taken together, the harassment allegations and new revelations about spending practices raise significant questions about the management of one of the highest-profile antagonists of Trump. The revelations threaten the stature of not just the Lincoln Project but the broader coalition of establishment-oriented Republican groups hoping to pool their resources to excise Trump from the party.
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt insisted that he and the rest of the group’s leadership were not aware of any internal allegations of wrongdoing involving Weaver. “No Lincoln Project employee, intern, or contractors ever made an allegation of inappropriate communication about John Weaver that would have triggered an investigation by HR or by an outside employment counsel,” Schmidt said. ”In other words, no human being ever made an allegation about any inappropriate sexualized communications about John Weaver ever.” Weaver declined to comment for this story, but in a statement released late last month to Axios he generally acknowledged misconduct and apologised.
“To the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time: I am truly sorry,” he wrote.
“They were inappropriate and it was because of my failings that this discomfort was brought on you.” The Lincoln Project launched in November 2019 as a super PAC that allowed its leaders to raise and spend unlimited sums of money. Its founders represent a who’s who of prominent Republican strategists on cable television, including Schmidt and Reed Galen, both former advisers to John McCain; conservative attorney George Conway; former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn; Florida-based veteran political ad maker Rick Wilson; and Weaver, who has long advised former Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Backed by its founders’ commanding social media presence, the organisation quickly attracted a massive following of Trump critics in both parties that exceeded even its own founders’ expectations. Since its creation, the Lincoln Project has raised USD 90 million. But only about a third of the money, roughly USD 27 million, directly paid for advertisements that aired on broadcast and cable, or appeared online, during the 2020 campaign, according to an analysis of campaign finance disclosures and data from the ad tracking firm Kantar/CMAG. That leaves tens of millions of dollars that went toward expenses like production costs, overhead — and exorbitant consulting fees collected by members of the group. “It raises questions about where the rest of the money ultimately went,” said Brendan Fischer, an attorney with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “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.” The vast majority of the cash was split among consulting firms controlled by its founders, including about USD 27 million paid to a small firm controlled by Galen and another USD 21 million paid to a boutique firm run by former Lincoln Project member Ron Steslow, campaign finance disclosures show. But in many cases it’s difficult to tell how much members of the group were paid. That’s because the Lincoln Project adopted a strategy, much like the Trump campaign they criticized, to mask how much money they earned. While several firms did collect payments, Weaver and Wilson are not listed in publicly available records. They were likely paid as subcontractors to those firms, an arrangement that avoids disclosure. Schmidt collected a USD 1.5 million payment in December but quickly returned it. ”We fully comply with the law,” Schmidt said.
