Democrat mega-donor Reid Hoffman – who became a billionaire by founding business networking website LinkedIn – is bankrolling the former Elle magazine advice columnist who accuses Donald Trump of raping her in a New York department store nearly 30 years ago.

Hoffman, 55, has told New York Magazine‘s Kara Swisher: “The short answer is I will spend as much as I possibly can and it takes and is effective [to beat Trump].”

This could involve aiding other GOP primary candidates, reports Puck News, to the point where Hoffman and his cohorts are investigating state primary rules, as well as the idea of supporting anti-Trump, right-leaning media. The issue was discussed at length in a late March podcast by the new, D.C.-based news site.

While Hoffman has demurred on specifically endorsing a Republican candidate, claiming “I’m almost certainly in the Biden camp,” those in his employ are said to be eyeing up Trump’s primary opponents, with a view to supporting them as the first way of stopping him retaking the White House.

E. Jean Carroll.

The portly plutocrat was also outed recently as the money man behind 79-year-old Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll.

Carroll has previously denied receiving outside funding for her litigation, but her attorney Roberta Kaplan has now conceded to Trump lawyer Alina Habba that the fired agony aunt “remembered just recently that she had been told at some point about outside funding by a nonprofit and that it was irrelevant to her claim anyway”.

Consequently, Habba wrote to the judge overseeing the lawsuit, Lewis Kaplan, raising significant concerns as to “the plaintiff’s bias and motive in commencing the [litigation]”.

Carroll’s lawyer Roberta is perhaps best known for her work on the “Time’s Up” movement, before turning on them and smearing sexual accusers of former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

“Hoffman is one of the largest donors to the Democratic party—reportedly ‘one of the most influential Democratic donors of the Trump era’ — and a vocal critic of Defendant and his political policies,” Habba argued.

“In fact, Hoffman is on record stating that he would ‘spend as much as [he] possibly can’ to avoid another Trump presidency, saying it would be ‘destructive to our society,’ and, since 2017, has reportedly been ‘funding groups to create a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s agenda.’

“Previously, Hoffman contributed more than $600,000 to the legal defense fund of Bean LLC — otherwise known as Fusion GPS, the company responsible for the creation of the Steele Dossier — and was the primary source of funding for an organization that launched an ‘elaborate false flag’ operation which involved spreading misinformation about a Republican senatorial candidate in the hopes that it would cost him the senatorial election,” Habba noted.

2024.

“Hoffman’s team is currently studying early voting states — party registration requirements, demographic groups, state GOP nominating rules, media ecosystems, et cetera — to see where they can move the needle,” noted Puck writer Teddy Schleifer in reporting which was subsequently picked up by POLITICO.

“And if they do inadvertently elect a President DeSantis? I’m told that Hoffman and [adviser Dmitri] Mehlhorn, at a high level, don’t view the Florida governor as an existential threat to democracy, unlike Trump, and believe he may even have the ability to successfully govern,” he added.

DeSantis, once popular with Trump’s base, has not officially announced a run at the Republican nomination due to Florida requirements that he resign as governor before doing so. He is currently engaged in an effort to change the law to allow him to keep his job if he loses in the primary. Insiders expect this to be wrapped up by May or June.

Hoffman will certainly not be the only Democrat seeking to muddy the Republican primary waters with injections of cash, and DeSantis’s team are scarcely alone on the right in accepting such donations.

In 2022, The National Pulse revealed that Matt Schlapp’s CPAC organization accepted six-figure sums from George Soros-linked funds in order to promote left-wing ideas. In the following months, CPAC lost thousands of attendees for its conference, and is rumored to have parted ways with a number of top staff.