Come on. Self-dealing is self-dealing, whether its LP officials directing donor funds to their own firms or Trump directing taxpayer funds to prop up his own properties. And given that they raised $87 million and more than half of that went to their own pockets, I’d say yes they were getting rich over this.
I buy a Gidget for $100
The CEO of Gidget takes my money and direct $90 of it to his 100% owned firm, Gudget, and they make my Gidget.
Gidget gets to book revenue and sales. And the expense of hiring Gudget to do a job Gidget was supposed to do.
Gudget makes $90 before expenses. It costs Gudget $50 to make my Gidget, so they book $90 and profit $40.
Had not the CEO self-dealt, Gidget would book $100, expend $50, and earn $50. But now Gidget books $100, expends $90, and earns $10 while Gudget books $90, expends $50, and earns $40… $40 which should have gone to Gidget, but instead goes into the CEO’s pocket.
See the problem? That’s what the LP was doing with its cash. Instead of the LP producing the product, the LP was a front organization which funneled money into its backers companies so they, individually could profit from the group.
I’ll leave the morality of this to others, but one can easily see that such dealings leaves the parent company in quite a financial bind.
So they were up to the style of doing things that they’d probably grown accustomed to in their earlier activities when they had the upper hand.
ISTM the Lincoln Project position was never really about High Civic Morals, though it was the branding they sought.
It was about a realization that if Trumpism were to take hard root as the standard, that would be bad for business for the existing “conservative” political/entrepeneurial ecosystem. Excluding and marginalizing potential consumer demographics, alienating current and potential market partners, unpredictability about long term plans, mismanagement of public health resulting in worse economic slowdown, disregard for expert opinion unless it just reaffirms what they want to hear, polarization leading to encouragement of violence, reliance on direct personal threat. A strategy of short run pandering so Team T gets set for life, and when anything fails set the angry rabble on “Those Others”.
That is not good for the sales projections. Nor safe for those on whom the rabble would turn.
And y’know what, that would a fine and perfectly cromulent reason to oppose Trumpism from the conservative side. I respect a clear statement that “I oppose this because it also costs and endangers ME”.
If you are however making your stand based on that you are advocating Civic Virtue, dammit, don’t expose yourselves to be called out. Find some people who ARE clean, and run the outfit clean. Or at least who at the very start will pour some ashes on their head and say “Yes, I WAS part of the swamp, as expiation I’m cleaning up and fighting this greater evil,” and be seen to walk the talk.
“What we need is a return to normal crony capitalism” is Mitch McConnell’s platform.
And is self dealing illegal?
No, there is no evidence that more than half of that went to their own pockets- it went to companies they have a interest in. I assume that those companies paid workers, made ads, bought TV time ect. Sure, those companies paid the CEOs etc, but do you have anything those shows that the founders of LP, as CEOs, Presidents of those companies made a great deal more, or just their normal salaries?
I was with you up until that very last line. “…but instead goes into the CEO’s pocket”. Are you of the impression that all profits of a company are paid to the CEO???
So in the first case, Gidjet earns $50, no? So why didnt that $50 **goes into the CEO’s pocket?
You have shown here that in this example, the LP people would earn less, not more.
Could you find larger type to post that meaningless piece of non-cited hearsay evidence? 
Even you own cite posts no evidence at all that the founders funnelled $ into their own pockets.
You are literally dismissing my argument because I didn’t derive SG&A numbers and place them within my hypothetical about 2 fake companies?
You’re smarter than that.
I’m not sure why you’re so het up over this. And please don’t strawman me – I never said that what they did was illegal.
And, if the reporting is correct that they owned these firms, then the money DID go into their pockets. Maybe not as cold hard cash, but it added to the value of an asset that they own. It’s difficult to say how much the founders actually collected in salaries and “consulting fees” because they apparently deliberately adopted a strategy of masking where funds ultimately go, such as paying themselves as subcontractors which avoids disclosure.
What they did is not terribly different from what other super-PACs do, but that doesn’t make it right.
I literally can’t parse out your meaning in the first sentence (the screenshot is the screenshot, I have no control over font sizes in gifs) and the 2nd is demonstrably false- they took money given to the LP and used it for their own companies benefit, not the LP’s
And this is how Republican political campaigns work. Pretty much all of them. It’s why Trump hires money-launderers like Paul Manafort and Brad Parscale as campaign managers.
I did quite a bit of research on this back in the summer. Republican political campaigns, at least the national ones, are primarily money making ventures and only secondarily about getting their candidate elected.
I feel this is a reason they lost. Not so much because of lack of funds to spend on the campaign, although it was rather funny when after months of raking in millions upon millions, the Trump campaign found itself broke. It’s because they focus their messaging on scaring their hard core voter base in order to get them to send money, rather than attempting to appeal to a wider range of voters, to get more votes.
I read Andrew Weissman’s book Where Law Ends, about the Mueller investigation - it’s worth a read, there are some interesting details that weren’t widely reported. One of those details was about Paul Manafort’s plea bargain and why it fell apart.
After several false starts, the investigators felt Manafort was being honest about the issues related to the Russia investigation. But the plea bargain required him to be forthcoming about everything. There was one financial transaction that he just would not be honest about, a transaction of about a half million dollars that made a circuitous journey, ending up in Manafort’s pocket.
He would lie about it, the investigators would bust that lie, and he’d make up another one. He never told the truth, would never admit what the investigators knew. The money was a kickback from the registered owner of a Trump PAC, a PAC Manafort had a hand in setting up even though he wasn’t legally connected to it.
The one thing he wouldn’t admit was that he stole money from the Trump campaign.
But, I digress, back to the Lincoln project, who I always thought of as “Republicans using Republican tactics to help Democrats.” I always had decidedly mixed feeling about them and their tactics.
Like their “audience of one” commercial that helped get Trump to turn on Pence, a commercial talking about how Pence was going to betray Trump on January 6th, putting the final nail in his coffin by voting for Biden.
You may have seen this commercial online, but you probably didn’t see it on TV, unless you watched Fox News in Washington DC in December. Because that’s the only place it ran. They only wanted one person to see it. And ultimately, it was sort of dangerous. But it was also freaking hysterical.
And I felt the same way about the commercials they ran about Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, when she refused to turn over the transition money.
So, mixed feelings. Sometimes it’s good to have a bad guy on your side, but you’re not supposed to like it.
Sure it did, and it did when it first came in, also, so??
Since your “gif” was a quote from the article, then you had all the control in the world.
Yes, they took $ from one company they controlled and paid it to others they controlled, who perform work for the LP.
again, show me how the LP OWNERS got richer here.
Steve Schmidt, one of the owners, cited about bragging how the LP is creating ‘generational wealth’ for him is not a citation about how the owners are getting richer off of LP donations?
Are you even reading the citations, or are you just reduced about whining about screenshots, what they imply about my eyesight, and complaining that I didn’t derive a functioning 10-k for a hypothetical company?
If you look at how much money they pulled in and then compare that to the number and quality of the video ads they put out it looks reasonable. Making and placing those ads wasn’t free or even cheap. The quality of the entertainment I recieved seemed worth it IMHO.
I enjoyed the LP videos too. But there wasn’t a chance in hell I trusted them enough to send them money.
Oh I didn’t send them a dime. I thought it was clear that they wanted money from republicans in order to siphon off funding to the Trump campaign. So I just sat back and enjoyed.
If you don’t see anything wrong here then we’re just of different opinions. I do hope that you will be consistent and see no issues with Trump using his various super-PACs to direct millions of dollars toward his own properties and companies owned by the Trump family and campaign aides.
No, a uncited article claimed that somebody said he said that. No cites and hearsay.
Entirely different.