When Donald Trump cuts you out of his inner circle for being a total creep (and possible murderer), you know you’ve got problems. But if you’re Total Creep Corey Lewandowski, you reportedly use the fact that no one wants you around to get paid to disappear. According to the Daily Beast, Lewandowski—a longtime Trump stooge who was got the official boot from MAGA-land about a week ago, after a major GOP donor accused him of sexual assault and stalking—attempted to leverage his ouster to squeeze one last paycheck out of Make America Great Again Action, the well-funded Trump super PAC he oversaw. It… didn’t work out the way that Lewandowski had hoped.
As Asawin Suebsaeng and Roger Sollenberger wrote for Daily Beast:
Lewandowski, at first privately and then publicly through a lawyer, denied the details of the alleged incident. When that didn’t work, he resisted leaving. Lewandowski then subsequently settled on pitching Trumpworld a not-so-modest proposal: in exchange for his resignation, the super PAC and the pro-Trump team would pay him a large sum of money to go away. Two of the knowledgeable sources said the former 2016 Trump campaign manager’s demand was for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But even though that Lewandowski super PAC—called Make America Great Again Action—currently sits on $6.58 million, mostly from Trump megadonors, he didn’t have the leverage he seemed to think he had. His fellow Trump lieutenants gave him a hard no.
“It doesn’t matter if he’d asked for five dollars, it wasn’t going to happen,” one individual familiar with the situation noted bluntly.
While Trump had to be convinced to dump Lewandowski in the first place, the former president apparently drew a hard line when it came to parting with even one dollar of the cash in that super PAC. According to Daily Beast, “The twice-impeached ex-president didn’t want to see Lewandowski slinking away with any of that money—which Trump views as his money, despite the patina of distance that is legally required between candidates and super PACs.”
So Team Trump did what they do best: Abandoned ship entirely. After cutting ties with Lewandowski they set up a new super PAC—this one called Make America Great Again, Again!, which they clearly put a lot of thought into—then sent out a press release announcing its existence and declaring it “the ONLY Trump approved Super PAC.”
Inbox: Announcement for a new Trump Super PAC MAGA, Again! to replace the Lewandowski run MAGA Action. The Super PAC will be led by @PamBondi and @kimguilfoyle: pic.twitter.com/cQVFXJ7FGv
— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) October 4, 2021
Neither Lewandowski nor his lawyers responded to Daily Beast’s request for comment.
(Via Daily Beast)