Anti-Trump PAC Funnels Millions of Dollars to Insider Firms

The Lincoln Project, the notorious and widely-condemned anti-Trump PAC, has allegedly been found funneling millions of dollars in donations to firms that are run by the PAC’s top operatives.

As the Daily Caller reports, records from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show that, of the $12.8 million spent by the Lincoln Project since January of 2023, over $4 million has been given to firms run by the leadership of the PAC. This continues a trend that was seen in 2020, where over half of the $90 million raised by the PAC that year was given to such firms.

One such example is Lever Communications, formerly known as Joe Trippi & Associates, which has received over $1 million from the Lincoln Project over the course of the 2024 election cycle thus far. Trippi himself, a Democratic strategist, is a senior advisor for the Lincoln Project.

Another one is Intrepid Media, the firm founded by Rick Wilson, one of the co-founders of the Lincoln Project. Intrepid has been paid over $664,000 by the Lincoln Project, primarily for “strategy consulting.” In addition, Wilson’s son Andrew was paid $105,750 for “corporate campaign management.”

Of the money that has actually been spent on what the PAC promised its donors it would spend on, just 31% was spent on consulting fees, while 16% was used to pay salaries for its employees, and another 10% went towards the production of advertisements.

“Their whole schtick is ticking off Donald Trump, and that’s what they sell. They’ve really come up with a unique way of weaponizing negative campaigning against their own donors, and that’s a lot easier of a thing to raise money [off of] than actually being effective,” said Capital Research Center Senior Investigative Researcher Ken Braun. “You can show your donors, ‘Look, we said this nasty thing about Donald Trump, don’t you like that? Here, give us more money!’ … I’ve got to hand it to them in a very cynical way, they’ve come up with a really effective way to raise money, without really being effective.”

Since the 2020 election, the Lincoln Project, already widely panned for taking the unpopular stance of opposing President Donald Trump, was further criticized for failing to have an impact on any race it got involved in. In 2020, the PAC spent $2.7 million to try to defeat Montana Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.), and another $1.7 million to defeat Maine Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine); both senators went on to win re-election by margins of 10% and 9%, respectively. In 2021, the Lincoln Project spent over $300,000 in support of the gubernatorial campaign of former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-Va.), who went on to lose to Republican Glenn Youngkin (R-Va.).

In the presidential election, despite Joe Biden still apparently winning over President Trump (with widespread credible evidence suggesting voter fraud was responsible), the 45th president still saw his voter base increase significantly, receiving over 11 million more votes than he did in the 2016 election. At 74 million votes, Trump received the highest popular vote total of any Republican presidential candidate in American history.