XPost: rec.sport.tennis, alt.fraud

The Associated Press has a devastating piece detailing how
members of the Lincoln Project, the scam “GOP” PAC beloved by
the media, enriched themselves on gullible donors. This fact is
likely to be unsurprising to anyone with even a passing
familiarity with the organization. The AP reports that of the
$90 million Lincoln Project raised, more than $50 million went
to firms controlled by the group’s leaders and “exorbitant
consulting fees collected by members of the group,” an
“arrangement that avoids disclosure.”

The uglier revelation provided by the AP is that the leaders of
the project were repeatedly told about accusations of sexual
harassment against founder John Weaver but ignored them — and
then lied about it when they finally came to light. It matters
for the alleged victims, but it also matters because the Lincoln
Project was given a giant megaphone, predicated on the fiction
that it represented principled conservatives. It then leveled
some of the nastiest smears of 2020, accusing anyone who didn’t
adopt its hysterical tone of being complicit in the end of
democracy and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

In June, when the money was coming in, the group, according to
AP, had already been informed “in writing and in subsequent
phone calls” of at least ten specific allegations of harassment
against Weaver — some of them against its own employees. Weaver,
incidentally, had been a registered foreign agent lobbying for
Russia against U.S. sanctions until that May. Then again, Steve
Schmidt, as the New York Post reported, had only become the
darling of the MSNBC/CNN set after being rebuffed by the Trump
administration.

Recently, the founders of the group claimed they were “shocked”
by the Weaver revelations, but the AP has multiple sources who
contend that those ten allegations, and others, were discussed
on phone calls with leaders of the group in June and August. Not
to mention, according to many people in Washington, that
Weaver’s proclivities were something of an open secret anyway.

Yet in October, Weaver was sitting next to fellow shysters
Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Reed Galen on 60 Minutes lecturing
America about morality and a return to decency.

Honestly, if people want to send their money to bail out the
Lincoln Project’s founders, some of whom, as the AP notes,
“spent much of the past decade under financial distress,” that’s
on them. A big chunk of the funding came from big Democrat
donors, anyway. And I’ve got no problem with dark money. You’ve
helped Steve Schmidt buy a new mansion, congrats! But the rest
of us are under no obligation to pretend that the project was
anything but an ugly grift.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yes-the-lincoln-project-is- an-ugly-grift/

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