Steve Schmidt resigned from the Lincoln Project on Friday, amid scandal over the anti-Trump conservative group’s handling of alleged sexual harassment of young men by another co-founder and questions about its finances.
Lincoln Project: Steve Schmidt resigns from group hit by harassment allegations
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He went on to appear on Real Time with Bill Maher, where the HBO host said “I’m not here to prosecute you” – and did not ask about John Weaver.
Weaver is widely reported to have harassed young gay men, some seeking work with the Lincoln Project. One said he was 14 years old at the time. Earlier this year, Weaver said “the truth is that I’m gay” and apologised “to the men I made uncomfortable through my messages that I viewed as consensual mutual conversations at the time”.
Schmidt and other Lincoln Project co-founders have said they were not aware of Weaver’s behaviour until it was reported in the media, claims now subject to scrutiny. Having announced an external review, the group has said it will not comment further.
As Republican consultants, Schmidt and Weaver worked with John McCain. On Friday night Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late Arizona senator and Republican presidential nominee, issued a stinging rebuke. The two men, she said, “were so despised by my dad he made it a point to ban them from his funeral. Since 2008, no McCain would have spit on them if they were on fire.”
Schmidt’s resignation statement, which he titled “My Truth”, began by describing what he said was sexual misconduct by a “medic” at a Boy Scouts camp when he was 13. His resignation would make room for a female board member, he said, “as the first step to reform and professionalise the Lincoln Project”.
The only female co-founder, New Hampshire Republican Jennifer Horn, left the group this month. On Thursday night, the Project published to Twitter then took down private messages between Horn and a reporter.
The reporter, Amanda Becker of The 19th, subsequently published a story about “a culture of infighting, sexist language and disparate treatment” at the Lincoln Project. It was also reported that Ron Steslow, another co-founder who has left, had been denied release from a non-disclosure agreement.
Maher told Schmidt: “[Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] said [the] Lincoln Project, that’s your project, which ran a lot of great ads, liberals loved those ads, she said you were in ‘scam territory’. I don’t know. I liked the ads.”
Schmidt said: “I think we built the most successful Super Pac in American political history. We turned it into a movement, and I think we did tremendous damage to Donald Trump.”
“If that’s true,” Maher said, “why did he do 6% better with Republicans than in 2016? He got 94% of Republican votes and 88% the first time.”
“We were trying to win the election,” Schmidt said. “I really didn’t give a shit how many Republicans were voting for Trump or not.”
Maher asked: “And all the money went toward where it should?”
Schmidt said: “Out of $87m that was raised by the Lincoln Project, about $63-$66m of that money went into voter-contact programs.”
“Well, where did the other money go?” Maher asked.
The group did not disclose payments to subcontractors, Schmidt said, in order to “protect” recipients from “harassment by the Trump people”.
“Campaigns cost a lot of money,” he added. “All of this stuff, every Super Pac operates like this. And the Lincoln Project did it for a specific reason.”
Schmidt said he was “proud of the fact that we destroyed Donald Trump’s and Mike Pence’s relationship and took Pence out of public life. I’m proud that we decapitated [Trump’s] campaign manager from the campaign because of our ads … Since the election, we’ve helped lead a boycott of corporate America for those 147 seditionists.”
That was a reference to Republicans who objected to electoral college results on the same day Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, leaving five people dead.
A day ahead of an expected end to Trump’s second Senate trial, without conviction, Schmidt appeared with Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who was one of 10 party members to vote for impeachment in the House.
To applause, Schmidt said Republicans supporting Trump had “betrayed their oath, betrayed their juror oaths, betrayed their country and allow[ed] a president who sought to be a dictator walk out … the autocrats in that caucus are in the majority and anytime you have a coalition of convenience between conservatives and fascists, it is always the fascists who win.”
Schmidt also said he would be “taking some much needed time off”.
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