Political strategist Steve Schmidt took to Twitter Wednesday to blast disgraced never-Trump advocacy group the Lincoln Project, an organization he co-founded in 2019.
Schmidt stepped down from leadership at the Lincoln Project after reports surfaced that co-founder John Weaver allegedly sent sexually explicit messages to several young men.
“.@ProjectLincoln should either be professionalized and reformed or shut down. I founded it. i left it a year ago,” Schmidt wrote in the first of a series of tweets.
Among his many proposed reforms, Schmidt called for co-founder Reed Galen and high-ranking figures Ron Steslow and Mike Madrid to step down from their roles at the organization. (RELATED: Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt: Jan. 6 Riot ‘Profoundly More Dangerous’ Than 9/11 Attacks, ‘Likely To Kill A Lot More Americans’)
Schmidt claimed that Galen — whose firm received $27 million in Lincoln Project donations from anti-Trump liberals — “cost millions of dollar [sic] of @ProjectLincoln money and bankrupted the organization.”
.@ProjectLincoln should either be professionalized and reformed or shut down. 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.
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) October 12, 2022
“I want to see complete and total financial transparency around the organization,” Schmidt wrote, calling for salary caps and an independent CFO, among other reforms.
“I want this organization, that I founded, to operate at the highest ethical standards. The reason I left @ProjectLincoln
was because I gave them an ultimatum. @reedgalen or me. Galen had appointed himself chair of the Board and controlled all the bank accounts,” Schmidt added.
Other former leaders of the group have called for it to be shut down, including Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella and Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway. (RELATED: Never Trump Conservatives Sober Up As Biden Approves One Trillion In Spending In Two Weeks)
“Just shut it down already,” Bardella tweeted, a sentiment Conway echoed.
Despite being composed largely of former Republicans strategists and officials, the Lincoln Project has continually criticized former President Donald Trump and has supported Democratic candidates in races across the country. In April 2020, a senior advisor at the organization called Trump “retarded” in a since-deleted tweet. In a Sept. 2022 ad, the group called Trump supporters “suckers,” prompting a lawsuit threat from the former president. Twitter locked the organization’s account in Nov. 2020 after it posted the names, photos and phone numbers of Trump’s lawyers.
During the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, the Lincoln Project admitted that it sent several people to a rally for Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin in an attempt to cast the now-governor and his supporters as racists. The operatives donned white button-down shirts and khaki pants and carried tiki torches, the same uniform white nationalist protesters adopted for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
The group has also criticized other Republican governors, releasing an ad in Aug. 2021 claiming that the COVID-19 policies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott would kill children.