Also announced their departures on Friday, spokesman Kurt Bardella and Nayyera Haq, who was hosting an online program for the organization. Tom Nichols, a columnist and professor of foreign affairs, announced on Twitter that he was stepping down as an unpaid consultant. Jennifer Horn, a senior figure in the organization, resigned earlier this month due to the way the Lincoln Project handled Weaver’s allegations.
Ron Steslow and Mike Madrid, two other leaders, left in December. George Conway, a former Lincoln Project employee and husband of former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, also left the group.
The Lincoln Project, made up of current and former Republican strategists who were vehemently opposed to Trump, was successful during the 2020 elections. and raised more than $ 87 million in donations. Its senior officials – including Florida-based agent Rick Wilson and Schmidt – have become regulars on cable news.
But the downfall of the organization was rapid. The New York Times reported on January 31 that more than 20 men accused Weaver, 61, who served as a strategist for the late Arizona Senator John McCain and later served in the 2016 presidency of former Ohio Governor John Kasich offering , sexual harassment through online messaging. In the days that followed, questions intensified about when Project Lincoln leaders learned of the accusations and what they did to resolve them.
People familiar with the organization’s internal dynamics say that specific complaints about Weaver’s conduct were brought to managers in the summer of 2020, although Schmidt rejected those claims. In his statement on Friday night, Schmidt said he “learned of John Weaver’s inappropriate conduct with an underage boy in January”.
The Lincoln Project released a statement earlier this week saying it was hiring “a best outside professional to review Mr. Weaver’s management at the organization”.
Weaver, who is married, has a wife and two children, acknowledged having sent “inappropriate” messages to men.
Then, on Thursday, the Associated Press reported that more than half of the organization’s funding had been directed to consulting firms that were controlled by Project Lincoln employees – a huge sum that fueled accusations that the leaders got rich. The crisis intensified later in the day, when the Lincoln Project’s Twitter feed posted screenshots of private messages online between Horn and Amanda Becker, a reporter for 19º News that had been working on an article about the organization’s work culture.
Lincoln Project excluded the screenshot, but not before provoking an intense reaction. Schmidt apologized for the episode in his statement, saying, “It is my job as a senior leader to accept responsibility for the tremendous error of judgment in releasing” the messages.
Funders for the Lincoln Project began to distance themselves. Senate Majority PAC, the leading external Democratic group focused on Senate disputes, and Majority Forward, an affiliated nonprofit, donated $ 1.9 million to the Lincoln Project in October, at the height of the election. The Lincoln Project had been spending on ads against Republican senators, including in critical disputes in South Carolina and Maine.
JB Poersch, Senate Majority PAC president, said in a statement that his organization would not work with Project Lincoln in the future amid allegations of harassment and other offenses that have emerged.
“In October 2020, Senate Majority Pac and Majority Forward supplemented a small set of Lincoln Project ads in the Senate’s campaign states,” said Poersch in the statement. “Current claims about the Lincoln Project operation raise alarming questions. Given the weight of these claims, SMP will not work with Lincoln Project in the future.”
James Arkin contributed to this report.