Gotta love it when infamous Never Trumpers blow each other up.
Lincoln Project founder Steve Schmidt let loose in a wild Twitter thread that got a lot of attention because he attacked his former group and said it “should either be professionalized and reformed or shut down” because of its “despicable and unethical behavior.” He also called for financial transparency from the group.
Schmidt called for Reed Galen, one of the co-founders of the group, to step down and Schmidt accused co-founders Mike Madrid, Ron Steslow, and Jennifer Horn of having “destroyed the organization” with “their fame seeking and narcissism.” “The Galen lie cost millions of dollar of @ProjectLincoln money and bankrupted the organization,” Schmidt claimed.
It’s not clear what he was referencing here. Some speculated that he was referring to the sexual harassment allegations against John Weaver, another Lincoln Project co-founder. The Lincoln Project paid $27 million to Galen’s consulting firm in 2020.
“There is a shocking and delusional scene at the end of the @ProjectLincoln documentary where Galen says he is the leader of a movement of millions. That makes him as deluded as Trump and MTG,” Schmidt claimed, referencing the documentary that just came out. Sounds like there are a whole lot of questions that one could raise about where the money was going.
Then Schmidt took on Rick Wilson, another co-founder. He called Wilson “a brilliant ad maker” but said he “should never have any leadership or management responsibilities whatsoever in an organization.” Schmidt said one of the reasons he left the Lincoln Project about a year ago was because of how Wilson handled raising money for a film he said he was going to do about Donald Trump. Schmidt said Wilson raised “tens of thousands of dollars” through a GoFundMe but then “never made the movie.” He said he asked him to return the money and make it right, saying he has to “fix this.”
Schmidt said he had confidence in the “integrity, competence and judgement” of Joe Trippi and Stuart Stevens, two of the remaining people involved in the Lincoln Project. Schmidt concluded by saying that the Lincoln Project has become a “self interested shell of that organization under the selfish and dishonest management of @reedgalen.”
The Weaver scandal wasn’t the only scandal the group was involved in.
Weaver was condemned by his co-founders after the reports and resigned last year, but things only got worse, as a flood of stories ensued about the organization’s self-dealing and financial mismanagement – the Lincoln Project paid $27 million alone to Galen’s consulting firm in 2020 – and a toxic work environment. Schmidt was widely panned when he said he would open the group’s books for audit only when the Trump organization did, and it was later revealed he ordered Kurt Bardella, now a Democratic advisor, to publish the private messages of Horn with a reporter in an effort to embarrass her.
Its woes didn’t end there, as the Lincoln Project was behind a hoax to smear Glenn Youngkin supporters in Virginia as racists last year. The group posed five people with Tiki torches outside the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s bus in Charlottesville, in an effort to invoke imagery of the White supremacist violence in the city in 2017. The stunt was widely panned as desperate, gutter politics, and Youngkin went on to victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
The guy that Schmidt claims has “integrity” — Stuart Stevens — defended the tiki torch scandal. As we reported there were also questions about Schmidt’s compensation.
Bottom line? Someone needs to look into all these questions, particularly the questions about money, and all these folks are scum, including Schmidt. The group got $90 million from tons of gullible Democrats with their anti-Trump routine. Schmidt’s just trying to distance himself from the group now that the documentary came out.