Embattled anti-Trump organization has been riddled with integrity issues

Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt resigned from the embattled anti-Trump organization Friday night, claiming he did so to “make room for the appointment of a female board member as the first step to reform and professionalize the Lincoln Project.”

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“Presently, the Lincoln Project is made up of four middle-aged white men. That composition does not reflect our nation, nor our movement. I am resigning my seat on the Lincoln Project board to make room for the appointment of a female board member as the first step to reform and professionalize the Lincoln Project,” Schmidt said in a statement.

Axios was first to report on Schmidt’s exit, which follows an exodus of senior staff since the Associated Press and New York magazine ran bombshell reports indicating that leadership at The Lincoln Project were aware of at least ten sexual harassment allegations against co-founder John Weaver in June 2020.  . . .

Schmidt himself issued a lengthy statement that began with him recalling his days as a 13-year-old and how he was allegedly molested by a camp medic at Rock Hill Boy Scout Camp, which he said left him traumatized and later revealed that he had struggled with depression.  . . .

Schmidt doubled down on his assertion he did not learn about Weaver’s misconduct until last month and insisted that an independent investigation “will validate this.” . . .

“My purpose in writing this isn’t to express what and when I knew about John Weaver, but how I feel about him, what he did and how many people he hurt,” Schmidt wrote. “This is my truth. John Weaver has put me back into that faraway cabin with Ray, my Boy Scout leader. I am incandescently angry about it. I am angry because I know the damage that he caused to me, and I know the journey that lies ahead of every young man that trusted, feared and was abused by John Weaver.”

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— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) February 13, 2021

While Schmidt said he is “enormously proud of the Lincoln Project,” he offered an apology to co-founder Jennifer Horn, who resigned from the group last week, over the public dispute that was launched. He called her “an important and valuable member of our team.”  . . .

He also addressed the controversial tweets that showed a private Twitter exchange between Horn and a reporter, claiming it came from “an anonymous source,” but said the private messages “should never have been made public” and that he “accepts responsibility.” . . .

The Lincoln Project, Facing Multiple Scandals, is Accused by its Own Co-Founder of Likely Criminality

The group of life-long Republican Party consultants who, under the name “The Lincoln Project,” got very rich in 2020 with anti-Trump online messaging has spent weeks responding to numerous scandals on multiple fronts. Despite the gravity of those scandals, its conduct on Thursday night was in a whole new category of sleaze.  . . .

That the primary effect of the Lincoln Project was to personally enrich its key operatives by cynically exploiting the fears of U.S. liberals has long been obvious. Reporting throughout 2020 conclusively demonstrated that the vast majority of the tens of millions of dollars raised by the group was going to firms controlled by its founders. One of its most prominent founders — GOP consultant Rick Wilson — personally collected $65,000 from liberals through GoFundMe for an anti-Trump film he kept promising but which never came; to this date, he refuses to explain what he did with that money.

A study conducted after the 2020 election found that the group’s effect on the election’s outcome was trivial to non-existent — not surprising given its penchant for spending money on ads that aired in electorally irrelevant places such as Washington, D.C. or which circulated almost exclusively in liberal cable news and social media venues, and thus had no purpose other than to enable its consultants to take large commissions from the ad spending.  . . .

Heading into the 2020 election, most of the U.S. media was uninterested in, if not outright hostile to, any reporting that might have helped President Trump’s re-election bid. As a result, the Lincoln Project continued to enjoy media veneration even as the magnitude of its scam became increasingly obvious. But with Trump now safely vanquished, the Lincoln Project is dispensable, and the protective shield it enjoyed against any real journalistic scrutiny is — like its reputation and prospects for future profiteering — rapidly crumbling.

On Monday, the Associated Press published a comprehensive exposé with new facts about two of the group’s growing scandals. It reported that “in June 2020, members of the organization’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” — directly contradicting the group’s emphatic denial that it knew nothing about Weaver’s misconduct until the New York Times reported on them at the end of January. . . .

(Excerpt from Fox News. Article by  Joseph A. Wulfsohn. Photo Credit: Unsplash.)

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