The disgraced Lincoln Project co-founder John Weaver went on sick leave due to a cardiac episode shortly after the organization learned of a New York Post story investigating his inappropriate online behavior.
Weaver, a longtime political strategist and veteran of several presidential campaigns, has sexually harassed dozens of young people online over the years, leading to his resignation from the well-known anti-Trump group last month.
A man who sought a job at the Lincoln Project last summer told Fox News that he and Weaver exchanged sexually explicit messages. The man said he agreed with Weaver’s proposals out of desperation for a job. The man said he stopped receiving messages from Weaver on July 4, prompting him to contact Lincoln Project co-founder Mike Madrid about Weaver’s apparent job promise.
At the same time, conservative writer and journalist Ryan Girdusky and New York Post reporter Jon Levine were beginning to question Weaver’s behavior and contacted the man. After Weaver followed Girdusky on Twitter in May, he was contacted by several men who warned of Weaver’s habit of scouring Twitter’s direct messages, often called DMs, of young gay men.
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According to these men, Weaver used to make inappropriate comments or offer job opportunities in exchange for sexual favors. Another man who was harassed by Weaver told Fox News that Weaver also said he could use his great social media followers to help raise his profile.
On August 4, the man contacted by the New York Post informed Madrid that the media was working on an article about Weaver. The man acknowledged that he did not tell Madrid that Weaver had sent sexually explicit messages, telling Fox News that he was ashamed. He produced a direct message on Twitter as proof that he contacted Madrid. The man also told Fox News that he felt he had been cheated by Madrid and the organization and had not received a job offer.
Two days later, the Lincoln Project announced that Weaver had been hospitalized, although Fox News could not find out where or for how long. He never came back to the organization.
Requests for comments from Weaver, Madrid and several members of the Lincoln Project have not been returned. Weaver and the Lincoln Project broke ties last month, and Madrid left in December.
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There is no indication that Weaver’s health episode was related to investigations into his behavior. Washington Blade said on Tuesday that a source close to Weaver said the sick leave was not a ploy. However, the timing may have led to a delay in public accountability for their conduct.
Girdusky told Fox News that the story he was working on with Levine failed in the three weeks after Weaver went on sick leave, when Weaver got out of control and several sources gave up cooperating. At the time, the 2020 presidential campaign was in full swing, and the Lincoln Project received wide and often laudatory media coverage for its vitriolic anti-Trump ads and Joe Biden’s enthusiastic encouragement.
Mike Madrid, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt and Reed Galen during a ’60 Minutes’ interview about the Lincoln Project last year.
“Weaver had a health incident out of the blue, and it delayed the publication of the story … We had three young men on record, everyone gave up. They were very afraid of the ramifications,” said Girdusky.
Another reporter, who was working for Mediaite at the time, told Fox News that he was also working on a story about Weaver that went nowhere because the sources decided not to publish.
Girdusky said the Daily Beast general editor Molly Jong-Fast, co-host of a podcast with Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson, knew about the Post’s espionage and made calls to press against its publication. She denied it during a podcast episode last week.
“I don’t know John Weaver. I never met him,” she said. “Anyone who knows me knows that the New York Post does not care about what I think about anything, but also about the claims that I knew something that was not public knowledge [isn’t] true … I didn’t know anything. “
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Last month, after the Lincoln Project announced would make a database of Trump administration alumni aiming to make it more difficult for them to find a post-White House job, Girdusky, fed up with what he considered hypocritical behavior, tweeted: “Maybe I should start talking about a of the founding members of the Lincoln Project, offering boys jobs in exchange for sex … your wife is probably interested. “
The tweet went viral and led to a flood of men sharing their own stories of Weaver’s inappropriate messages to them. Girdusky, who now had registered sources confirming Weaver’s behavior, published a story in The American Conservative on January 11.
Weaver released a statement to Axios on January 15 in which he declared himself gay and apologized for inappropriate behavior. He added that he would move away from the Lincoln Project, and the group said that Weaver’s statement spoke for itself, despite unanswered questions about his knowledge of Weaver’s conduct.
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On January 31, the New York Times reported that one of Weaver’s victims of harassment was a 14-year-old boy, with whom he continued to contact for at least four years later. The Lincoln Project forcibly denounced Weaver as a liar and predator, and co-founder Rick Wilson said this week that he was disgusted by the behavior of his former colleague.
He added that he would have reported Weaver to the police if he had known about the 14-year-old, saying that while the other reported behavior attributed to Weaver was “sh — y weird and not legal”, conduct with a minor crossed a new line.
Wilson, who addressed Weaver’s predatory behavior last week on his Daily Beast podcast and an episode of Lincoln Project’s YouTube show “The Breakdown”, admitted that the organization was aware last summer that the New York Post was investigating Weaver.
“In July last year, there were rumors that the New York Post was going to report a story about John being on the boys’ DMs,” Wilson said on the podcast. “And we heard about it because the Trump campaign was bragging about it, bragging that it was coming.”
“At that time, John informed us that he had a serious heart problem, a serious heart attack, while the New York Post story was one of 5,000 stories that come to us every day,” added Wilson. “[So we asked] ‘What can we do, how can we help your family?’ So John was on sick leave, and he was on sick leave until this story of many of these guys on the far right started circulating in recent weeks. “
Levine did not respond to requests for comment.
Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt also told the New York Times that he heard “conversations” about Weaver’s secret conduct, but nothing to indicate that he acted inappropriately.
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Wilson said Weaver, who has a wife and two children, was asked if the rumors about his behavior were true, since he could “provide a vector for Trump attacks.” Wilson added that Weaver’s behavior was apparently an open secret between “gay Twitter” as well as reporters in New York and Washington.
“I’m not on gay Twitter, so I don’t follow this set of dialogues. The fact that it is an open secret does not make it something that we are aware of, ”he said.
Girdusky criticized the Lincoln Project for not speaking out more strongly against Weaver before, although Girdusky says he didn’t know about Weaver attacking a minor until the Times report was published.
Girdusky was ignored by most major media outlets when he published his report on January 11.
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“When I wrote the story [for the American Conservative,] I contacted the Lincoln Project, “said Girdusky.” They did not respond with a comment. What they did was take the founder’s page off their website … So when Axios came out, he said ‘I’m gay’ and finally when the New York Times came out, they said, ‘No, he is a predator. ‘Well, where the hell have you been in the last month? “
As other sources told Fox, Girdusky said Weaver’s conduct had always been an “open secret”. He said one of his sources ended up going to the Times because he wanted to speak to a larger vehicle that would be taken more seriously. Girdusky said he didn’t blame him.
MSNBC skipped 17 interview opportunities to ask members of the Lincoln Project what they knew about Weaver’s behavior between the publication of The American Conservative’s Girdusky report and the publication of The New York Times article. When asked about it last week, co-founder George Conway said he was saddened by this, but said he didn’t know Weaver very well.
Wilson said that anyone who suggested that the Lincoln Project had prior knowledge of Weaver’s behavior towards a minor would be putting himself in “danger”.
“Do you want to criticize the Lincoln Project? … You decide,” he said in “The Breakdown”. “But when you try to impute that the type of behavior he engaged in is a universal constant in our organization, go f — yourself.”
The rush continued on Friday, when Jennifer Horn, the only woman among the Lincoln Project’s eight co-founders, abruptly resigned. She claimed it was about Weaver’s behavior and differing opinions about the future of the Lincoln Project, but the organization then released a statement claiming she had tried to shake him up during Weaver’s turmoil for a $ 250,000 signing bonus and a lucrative one. monthly payment.
The Lincoln Project received wide media coverage, especially by liberal media outlets that apparently support their efforts to defeat Trump and his Republican allies. Wilson, Schmidt, Conway, Michael Steele and others associated with the group are cable news accessories, and the Lincoln Project has received several profiles for its anti-Trump efforts.
Although Weaver has never been physically with his fellow co-founders since his formation, his name has appeared in numerous news stories about the Lincoln Project, and he was interviewed for a 60-minute segment that aired last fall.
Since Trump’s defeat, the truculent group has threatened to ruin Trump administration officials looking for a future job and has pledged to continue working against the Republicans who supported him.
While some on the left praised their leaders for a position of principle against their former party, liberals and conservatives criticized the group for its tactics and motives. Some, like Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., have labeled it a PAC scheme due to the channeling of money from liberal donors to suppliers controlled by the group’s founders and a general lack of return on investment.
The group failed to elect Democrats it supported in several 2020 Senate contests, including Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina, Montana, Kentucky and Iowa, and studies have found that its scathing ads, while attracting the liberal media, have in fact even conservative voters More.
Weaver worked for John McCain in 2000 and John Kasich in 2016 during his presidential elections. In a statement, a Kasich official denied any knowledge of Weaver’s predatory behavior, in which he engaged while working for Kasich’s campaign.