The anti-Trump Lincoln Project, co-founded by admitted sexual predator John Weaver, notified the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that they paid $35,000 to hackers who had posed as a vendor and sent fraudulent invoices. Two payments in February of this year totaling $20,000 and $15,000 were made on what the Lincoln Project believed were valid invoices. However, the anti-Trump PAC was subsequently informed that the vendor’s email had been hacked and the invoices were not legitimate. The funds had been directed to accounts controlled by hackers.
“A vendor’s email was hacked, with the hackers producing authentic-looking invoices that were sent from our vendor’s legitimate email account,” Lincoln Project spokesman Greg Minchak said when the FEC notice was made public, continuing: “The hack affected multiple clients of the vendor, including Lincoln Project.”
Once the Lincoln Project realized they had paid tens of thousands of dollars to hackers, the PAC says they notified their compliance firm to ” mitigate the problem.” Minchak claims that the “transactions did not impact our operations in any way.”
Since its founding in December 2019, the Lincoln Project has been plagued by controversy. The PAC’s founders — George Conway, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver, and Rick Wilson (among others) — have extensive ties to the failed John McCain and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns. In January of 2021, Weaver admitted to cultivating inappropriate relationships and sending sexually explicit messages to at least 21 men over the internet. He later confessed that he had engaged in grooming behavior towards a 14-year-old boy but claimed to have not engaged in exchanging sexual messages until after the teen’s 18th birthday.
The Weaver revelations prompted George Conway to call for the PAC to be shut down.
