Inside the Lincoln Project’s secrets, side deals, scandals

By Danny Hakim,

Maggie Astor and Jo Becker

A few days before the presidential election, the leadership of the anti-trump Lincoln Project gathered at the Utah home of Steve Schmidt, one of the group’s co-founders, and listened as he plotted out the organization’s future.

None of the dissident Republican consultants who created the Lincoln Project a year earlier had imagined how wildly successful it would be, pulling in more than $87 million in donations and producing scores of viral videos that doubled as a psy-ops campaign intended to drive President Donald Trump to distraction. Confident that a Biden administration was on the horizon, Schmidt, a swaggering former political adviser to John Mccain and Arnold Schwarzenegger, pitched the other attendees on his posttrump vision for the project over a breakfast of bagels and muffins. And it was ambitious.

“Five years from now, there will be a dozen billion-dollar media companies that don’t exist today,” he told the group, according to two people who attended. “I would like to build one, and would invite all of you to be part of that.”

In fact, Schmidt and the three other men who started the Lincoln Project — John Weaver, Reed Galen and Rick Wilson — had already quietly moved to set themselves up in the new enterprise, drafting and filing papers to create TLP Media in September and October, records show. Its aim was to transform the original project, a super PAC, into a far more lucrative venture under their control.

This was not the only private financial arrangement among the four men. Shortly after they created the group in late 2019, they had agreed to pay themselves millions of dollars in management fees, three people with knowledge of the deal said.

A spokeswoman for the Lincoln Project was broadly dismissive and said, “No such agreement exists and nothing like it was ever adopted.”

The behind-the-scenes moves by the four original founders showed that whatever their political goals, they were also privately taking steps to make money from the earliest stages. Over time, the Lincoln Project directed about $27 million — nearly one-third of its total fundraising — to Galen’s consulting firm, from which the four men were paid, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

Conceived as a full-time attack machine against Trump, the Lincoln Project’s public profile soared last year as its founders built a reputation as a creative yet ruthless band of veteran operators. They recruited like-minded colleagues, and their scathing videos brought adulation from the left and an aura of mischievous idealism for what they claimed was their mission: nothing less than to save democ