Steve Schmidt, the corrupt cofounder of the Lincoln Project, a left-wing organization that enriched its founders while shielding a credibly accused child predator, is now calling for the Lincoln Project to be disbanded and closed down.
Schmidt resigned from that grift in disgrace last year. Now, he’s looking to take down what’s left of the flaccid organization.
Although it seems pretty obvious he’s just grinding a personal axe against his former confederates, his excuse is a new Showtime documentary that apparently exposes the Lincoln Project for what it is: a greedy, mercenary outfit run by very bad and not very smart people who have accomplished nothing other than lining their own pockets.
Here’s a clip from a Variety review:
Cleverly, the series allows the principals to reveal themselves with their own words and deeds, all while framing them, at first, as if this is a hero’s journey. (Various media personalities who used the Trump era as a moment to vault to fame burble about: A favorite revealing shot is of George Conway, bounding onto a Lincoln Project video with that special gleam in his eye that denotes the truly camera-hungry.) We see election night from Lincoln Project members’ perspective, as though they were the protagonists, but already, more is at play. Dissension has entered the dynamic, with arguments over who’s winning the media coverage and how resources are being allocated. So, too, has arrived an aroma of outright callousness. “You are reaching emotional resonance with people,” Wilson tells an exhausted video editor who doesn’t want to use footage of George Floyd’s grieving family in an ad. “It’s not exploitative.”
It is, and that’s the point. The group eventually collapses under the weight of its self-styled stars’ egos. The bickering is gratifying, in that it reveals certain truths about human nature and about these humans, but, though well made, it’s also wearying. Five hours is a long time to get to the conclusion that a group that spent the 2020 election laundering the reputations of former GOP operatives may not have been on the level.
Not only is the Lincoln Project made up of bad people; it’s populated by losers… failures like Steve Schmidt and Stuart Stevens, who lost winnable presidential campaigns. Confederate-flag-waving Rick Wilson is such a loser that in the real world he was about to lose his house. An idiot. A bankrupt phony.
In today’s corrupt media climate, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to grift your way into “respectability” and riches: claim you’re a Republican and then attack the Republican party, especially the everyday Republican voters, the left especially hate.
So that’s what these marginal guys did…. while shielding a child predator, while scamming people out of tens of thousands for a movie they never made, while creating a toxic workplace filled with unearned swagger and machismo…
But because these guys are not terribly bright (see above), they made one crucial error. Instead of selling their souls to, say, cohost The View or whispering sweet nothings into Jake Tapper’s ear, they wasted tens of millions of dollars that would have otherwise gone to left-wing groups. That was dumb. And that’s why the Lincoln Project is under assault from their own allies on the left. We love it when you sell us your souls, but don’t steal our money.
And so it’s all falling apart, and now, Steve Schmidt, in his ongoing crusade to prove he’s not a total grifter and scumbag, is joining the pile-on against his former confederates…
“.@ProjectLincoln should either be professionalized and reformed or shut down,” Schmidt tweeted Wednesday. “I founded it. i left it a year ago. The @Showtime documentary documents some of the most despicable and unethical behavior I have ever seen.”
Weird how Schmidt fails to mention that much of the Showtime documentary was filmed while he was still with the Lincoln Project.
Schmidt also drops Rick Wilson right in the grease:
Before the [disgraced Lincoln Project] started[,] @TheRickWilson set up a GO Fund me to make a movie about Trump. He raised tens of thousands of dollars and never made the movie. I asked him about it 500 times. No movie. I was not comfortable with this. It is a big deal. Ethics matter. Integrity matters. I urge @TheRickWilson to find a way to return that money and make this right. No one is perfect and Rick has a lot going on. I have never met anyone who works harder. He has to fix this. I hope the donors to @ProjectLincoln will demand reform.
Remember, a big part of proving yourself to the left is to prove you are utterly shameless. So someone willing to do what Schmidt just did — make a grade-A fool of himself by pretending he had no role in the “despicable and unethical behavior” in the Showtime doc — sends a signal to the left that he is willing to denigrate and humiliate himself publicly. Basically, he’s performing a public job interview, hoping a CNN or MSNBC or New York Times or some super PAC comes calling, waving a big paycheck.
The good news is that we get to watch some of the worst people in the world get what they got coming… And the fact that it’s happening in slow motion as opposed to all at once is proof God indeed loves us.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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