It certainly pays to hate Donald Trump. Especially if your name is Rick Wilson and you help create a business named after a former president to retail the hate.
Wilson helped found the Lincoln Project not just to defeat Trump but to elect Joe Biden, of course, and has made a fortune doing it. Just after cofounder John Weaver was exposed as a homosexual cyberstalker, Wilson paid off his home mortgage of $200,000.
Must be nice.
The latest revelation from the Washington Free Beacon is more proof that the Lincoln Project founders had an overriding goal well beyond fighting Trump and “protecting democracy.”
They hoped to milk gullible leftists and hate-Trump Republicans for millions, then get to the bank before anyone found out that most of the money, as the Associated Press reported last week, went to companies controlled by the founders.
Mortgage Payoff
The trouble began for the project after conservative writer Ryan Girduksy exposed Weaver’s Twitter stalking in The American Conservative. The New York Times followed that story with a report on January 31 about 21 men who say Weaver stalked them. One was 14 when Weaver began grooming him.
Other reports followed about Weaver’s dirty solicitations in exchange for jobs at the vaunted project, which wanted to do more than destroy Donald Trump. Even as Weaver solicited minors under their noses, project leaders announced plans to ruin anyone who supported or worked for Trump.
Since then — after multiple reports that founders knew about Weaver’s predations and did nothing — the site has shut down its donation page. The end, most likely, is near.
But before that happened, founder Wilson decided he better get his debts paid, the Free Beacon reported.
“Days after the New York Times reported on Lincoln Project cofounder John Weaver’s history of inappropriate sexual behavior toward young men, his colleague Rick Wilson paid off a mortgage for his Florida home a full 16 years ahead of schedule,” the website reported:
494914103 Rick Wilson Mortgage PaidPublic records show that JPMorgan Chase Bank recently issued a certificate of satisfaction on Wilson’s 30-year mortgage, which originated in 2007 for the amount of $200,000. The document confirms that the terms of the mortgage were satisfied on Feb. 5, less than a week after the Times printed its story on Weaver and almost three weeks after the allegations were first published online by the American Conservative and Forensic News.
As the Free Beacon reported in January, two days before that Times report, like Weaver, Wilson was a tax deadbeat. The Internal Revenue Service nailed him with a lien against the same house because he owed $389,420 in taxes.
492478880 Rick Wilson Tax Lien 2014“The self-described ‘digital assassin’ was also taken to court to resolve an unpaid $25,729 balance on his American Express credit card,” the website reported, citing the New York Post.
But that’s not all:
Wilson, who bought the 5-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom house near Lake Jackson in June 2004 for just under half-a-million dollars, has previously faced criticism for shady financial practices. In the early years of Donald Trump’s presidency, for example, he launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised nearly $65,000 to produce a film that was never made. Wilson has yet to provide an explanation as to where the money went.
Other Money
As The New American reported last week, citing AP, project founders have enjoyed quite a time at the expense of their naive contributors. The contributors, of course, thought they were helping deep-six Trump.
“Of the $90 million Lincoln Project has raised, more than $50 million has gone to firms controlled by the group’s leaders,” AP disclosed after combing financial reports.
Weaver paid off $313,000 in back taxes. Steve Schmidt, a founder who quit the group because of the scandal, bought a $1.4 million mountain hideaway in Utah that he is now trying to sell for more than twice that amount.
“A frequent quip from Schmidt overheard by multiple people was that the Lincoln Project was his vehicle to achieve ‘generational wealth,’” the 19th reported.
Now, we learn, Wilson pocketed enough to plunk down $200,000 to pay off a mortgage almost two decades early.
Undoubtedly, Wilson has an answer. Like the AP story, it’s probably just “another hit story from Trump world.”
