The western half of Florida’s Panhandle, or the part directly under Alabama, is arguably the most pro-Trump part of the Sunshine State.
It’s also the congressional district represented by U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, inarguably the most pro-Trump member of Florida’s delegation.
But Gaetz still drew a Republican primary challenger, Mark Lombardo, a former FedEx executive, and Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam.
In an ad released last week, Lombardo tried to tie Gaetz to the late, disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “Send me to Washington, I’ll be a conservative fighter, a Marine who puts you and America first,” said Lombardo, who maintained that the Fort Walton Beach incumbent “could no longer get the job done” after he was connected to one of Epstein’s former lawyers.
Well, Lombardo may want to watch who he is trying to connect to alleged pedophiles.
That’s because the conservative website Gateway Pundit reported on Monday that Lombardo “just partnered with a Lincoln Project associate and already has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars in anti-Gaetz ads on the air.”
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That “associate” is Steve Hazelton, a Republican media buyer based in Washington. Hazelton’s company, SRH media, reportedly helped Lombardo buy $51,000 in TV ads this month.
According to a May 2020 post by the campaign-finance website Open Secrets, the Lincoln Project used another Maryland company founded by Hazelton, Ashton Media, to buy its ads.
The Lincoln Project was founded by former GOP political operatives who now openly root for Democrats. After the 2020 election, co-founder Reed Galen told Politico, “We’re as much Never Republican as we are anything else.”
But the group is renowned for two things.
One is separating liberals and NeverTrumpers from tens of millions of dollars with the promise to beat back the Trump menace with a different kind of “conservative,” and then promptly losing election after election.
So effective was the group in peeling off Republicans driven mad by former President Donald Trump that he got only 91 percent support from GOP voters in 2020, a higher ratio than in 2016, according to The Jacobin, a radical socialist magazine.
That same year, the group’s biggest cash outlays went to attempting to defeat seven GOP senators. Those lawmakers went undefeated against the Lincoln Project.
The other thing the Lincoln Project is known for is co-founder John Weaver’s penchant for grooming young men to give up sex for possible jobs in politics – nearly two dozen of them. In one case, he started grooming one at age 14.
Confronted by his antics, and left with little choice, the Lincoln Project turned on Weaver, dubbing its once-guiding light “a predator, a liar, and an abuser.”
Now, Lombardo, Gaetz’s challenger, wants to unseat the incumbent by using a close, DC-based ally of a super PAC that seems to believe bombast that makes Democrats swoon will cover over its record of electoral defeat and scandal.
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