Byron York’s Daily Memo: Hard times for the Lincoln Project

HARD TIMES FOR THE LINCOLN PROJECT. In the glory days of long ago, when Donald Trump was president and the Lincoln Project was attacking him every day, the former Republican operatives who founded the Project received glowing notices in the press. They were the subject of loving profiles on “60 Minutes,” in The New Yorker, TIME, NBC, CNN, and more. Some got cable news contracts. Most importantly, millions of dollars in donations poured in to the Project’s aggressive fundraising operation. They were heroes of the Resistance. (If you want a quick rundown of just how worshipful the media coverage was, go to this Twitter thread from former Hill staffer and GOP consultant Drew Holden.)

But that was then. Now, Trump is gone. The news in Washington is filled with what the new Biden administration and its Democratic allies in Congress are doing. Life has moved on, as it always does.

That means the Lincoln Project is no longer useful to the media outlets that spent the years from 2017 to 2021 attacking Donald Trump. So now, sure enough, the Lincoln Project is receiving some of the scrutiny it should have received all along. And a picture is emerging of an organization beset by scandal and run by people determined to enrich themselves from all those Americans who sent the small and large donations to the Project’s campaign against Trump.

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First, conservative media broke the story that one of the Project’s founders, longtime Republican operative John Weaver, had allegedly sexually harassed dozens of young men online. Some Project leaders denied that they knew about Weaver’s actions, but documents later emerged to show that they were, in fact, aware.

But the Weaver issue was never the main story about the Lincoln Project. The main story was money. The Lincoln Project raised around $90 million, much of it from small donors. From the beginning, critics — although apparently few reporters at big media organizations — asked where the money was going. Was all of it being spent on the anti-Trump ads? That didn’t seem possible.

In the last couple of months, it has become clear that millions of dollars, possibly tens of millions of dollars, went to the Lincoln Project’s main founders, the former GOP operatives Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, Rich Galen, and Weaver. Now, the New York Times has published the results of a new investigation — remember, the Lincoln Project is no longer useful as a weapon against Trump and is now receiving the critical media attention it should have received last year — with the headline “Inside the Lincoln Project’s Secrets, Side Deals and Scandals.”

The paper reported that the core group — Schmidt, Wilson, Galen, and Weaver — had “agreed to pay themselves millions of dollars in management fees.” The plan was to funnel money from the donations to Galen’s political consulting company, and then to themselves. “Over time, the Lincoln Project directed about $27 million — nearly a third of its total fund-raising — to Mr. Galen’s consulting firm, from which the four men were paid,” the Times reported.

“Whatever their political goals,” the Times continued, “they were also privately taking steps to make money from the earliest stages, and wanted to limit the number of people who would share in the spoils.”

Who got what, and how much? The Times could not find out. “It is not known how much of [the $27 million] each of the four received,” the paper reported. “Their private arrangement shielded even from other senior officials the size of the individual payments.”

The Lincoln Project reacted defiantly when questions were first raised about its finances. “We fully comply with the law,” Schmidt said in February when the Associated Press first reported some of the Project’s financial details. “The Lincoln Project will be delighted to open its books for audit immediately after the Trump campaign and all affiliated Super PACs do so.” There appears to be little chance the founders will open up about the Project’s finances. Perhaps more information will leak out.

But one former top Lincoln Project member fears the public will never learn where the money went. “The Lincoln Project should shut down, absent full disclosure of its finances,” anti-Trump figure George Conway tweeted when the New York Times story was published. “As this detailed story shows, there’s simply too much money that hasn’t been accounted for, and, I fear, never will be.”

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