LaCivita, Chris

===

mofo w manafort at rt eur

FREEDOM 250 FUCKERY

wow rev door?! susie wiles? don jr? cheung

see trump campaign 4

jan 6 hypocrit

---

-=-==

an 10 26

One of the political consultants who the New York Times recently reported received hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise the Russia-aligned government of Republika Srpska was previously named a senior adviser to Idaho Gov. Brad Little’s campaign in February.

On Oct. 6, the New York Times reported LaCivita and another adviser traveled to Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina to advise the country’s government before its recent election.

The Times and other national reports identified LaCivita as the co-manager of President Donald Trump’s 2024 election campaign and a senior adviser to the MAGA Inc. super PAC.

While LaCivita is more well-known for his work for Trump and MAGA Inc., he has also worked in Idaho.

In February, Little announced that LaCivita joined the Brad Little for Governor campaign as a senior adviser.

“Chris’ immense experience and understanding of political campaigns and strategy in races all across the country will be a huge asset to our campaign operation,” Little said in a written statement issued Feb. 26. “His insight and ability to deliver winning messages and tactics are unparalleled. I am glad to have him on the team.”

Efforts to reach LaCivita this week were unsuccessful.

Little’s campaign manager, Joan Vargas, did not respond to multiple requests from the Idaho Capital Sun asking if LaCivita still serves as a senior adviser to Little, and whether Little knew about the trip.

Back when he joined Little’s campaign in February, LaCivita issued a written statement saying he was excited to help Little get re-elected in Idaho.

“Joining the Brad Little for Governor campaign is a great honor and opportunity,” LaCivita said. “Gov. Little has been delivering results for Idahoans, and he is just getting started. I look forward to working with his team to keep Idaho one of the best states in the country.”

It was not immediately clear what work LaCivita did for Little’s campaign or if LaCivita still serves as a senior adviser on Little’s campaign.

In its story, the New York Times said it is common for political consultants to also work with foreign candidates and governments. However, the New York Times said LaCivita’s trip to Republika Srpska was notable because it occurred while LaCivita is working to help Trump-aligned candidates in the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

-=-=

Yet another person with close ties to Donald Trump’s White House has been linked to a pro-Russia Balkan regime.

Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, works for a political lobbying firm that has a $35,000-per-month contract to represent a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. She traveled there as recently as August.

A photograph circulated by Evi Kokalari, a conservative Albanian American activist, showed the younger Wiles wielding a rifle and standing next to a man that CBS News identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. The image appeared to have been initially posted to Wiles’s Instagram story with the caption “mostly work + some serious fun!”

Continental Strategy, Wiles’s employer, confirmed to CBS that she traveled to Republika Srpska in August, but said she has not lobbied the U.S. government on its behalf. Yeah, she probably wouldn’t have to do much—her mom would do it for her. As of Thursday afternoon, Wiles’s page on her company’s website was inaccessible.

This news comes as MAGA world has turned its ire on two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, who took time out of their presumably busy pre-midterm elections schedules to travel to the Balkans to assist in that territory’s elections. The two men were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to provide counsel on voting issues to the government, which is led by far-right nationalists. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Both LaCivita and Blair are connected to Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect them from the White House’s ire. Trump tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants,” but his chief of staff’s child may be harder to disown.

Key Findings

The President put himself at the center of the nation's birthday. Trump issued an executive order making himself and the Vice President Chair and Vice Chair of a White House task force, then staged his own birthday as a national event twice: the Army's 250th military parade on June 14, 2025, and a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn on June 14, 2026, run under the Freedom 250 banner.
The White House built Freedom 250 on deceit. Musical performers, among others, were misled about programming and connections to Trump’s political machine. Fundraisers may have misled donors who intended to support America250 and handed them Freedom 250's banking information, routing contributions meant for the nonpartisan foundation to the President's substitute entity instead. The report finds that, if true, this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.
Freedom 250 sold access to the President and courted foreign money in America's name. The organization circulated sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10 million, backed by a "historic photo opportunity" with President Trump. Its CEO solicited foreign governments, corporations, and individuals at the World Economic Forum in Davos to fund the President’s priorities. If foreign funds reach the President's vanity projects, the report finds the conduct would clearly violate the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause.
Trump and his operatives cashed in. Event Strategies, Inc., the firm that helped plan the January 6th rally, has collected tens of millions in federal contracts connected to the anniversary, including a master contract worth up to $100 million. Trump traded in the stock of companies that donated to Freedom 250 and staged a White House UFC fight that shamelessly promoted his own investments and business ventures. Freedom 250's event registration process was run through Campaign Nucleus, the firm founded by Trump campaign operative Brad Parscale, which uses artificial intelligence to score visitors and target "persuadable" voters. Thousands of unwitting fans handed over their personal information at a free FIFA World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall. Freedom 250’s official merchandise is sold by the Trump campaign’s official merchandise vendor, Ace Specialties, and agencies have purchased the merchandise and required employees to wear it.
The White House imposed a false, Christian nationalist history. Federally funded "Freedom Trucks" carried revisionism and outright falsehoods to schoolchildren, including an AI rendering of George Washington claiming, "our rights are a gift from God," a statement Washington is not documented to have made. The Interior Department also urged employees to wear Freedom 250 pins and threatened discipline against those who refused the pin, which anonymous employees took to calling their "Vichy pin," a reference to World War II-era lapel pins that served as loyalty and propaganda badges.
Freedom 250 created a blueprint for corruption. The report concludes Freedom 250 is "a blueprint, not a one-time abuse," already test-driven at the Department of Agriculture, where the administration steered companies with business before the government to donate through a conservation charity into a fund the Secretary controls.

The investigation drew on confidential disclosures from sources interviewed by Committee Democrats, internal Freedom 250 documents and talking points obtained by the Committee, sworn testimony from two Committee hearings, and written responses from the National Park Foundation and the National Forest Foundation.

Republicans on the Committee refused to conduct any oversight to hold the administration accountable, even when Democrats repeatedly raised evidence of wrongdoing at Republicans’ own hearing entitled, “All in for America250: Public-Private Partnerships Supporting America’s Semiquincentennial on our Public Lands.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum testified he was "not aware of the final decisionmaker" behind Freedom 250, and the Department has refused to provide that information since.

Read the full report here.

-=-=

REF 3 GUK

Trump hijacked US’s 250 anniversary to serve ‘political ideology and pet projects’, congressional report says

This article is more than 1 month old

House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes

David Smith in Washington

Thu 2 Jul 2026

Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday.

The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).

The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.

‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.

How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video

3:00

How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video

In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.

When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.

The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.

Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”

The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.

Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.

This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.

The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.

The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.

Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.

Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.

Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.

The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.

A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.

Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.

Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.

“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”

As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.

“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”

---

AN 5 26

President Donald Trump’s last-minute endorsement of MAGA Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton over conservative U.S. Senator John Cornyn in the Texas primary runoff for Cornyn’s seat was not only a surprise to many who saw the Texas senator as the stronger candidate, it turned out to be a targeted attack on Senate Republicans.

“Trump backing Paxton was an intentional ‘f—— you’ to a stalled Republican Senate, said a White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the president’s thinking,” reports MS NOW. Trump’s “endorsement of Paxton, people familiar with his thinking say, was aimed squarely at Senate Republicans who have not bent to his demands quickly enough.”

Senate Republicans “didn’t do anything with the filibuster, they’re doing nothing with the SAVE Act, they are a problem every step of the way and I think he just finally had enough,” the official told MS NOW.

The president made that clear in his announcement that he was endorsing Paxton.

“Ken is a Strong Supporter of terminating the filibuster and, very importantly, the Save America Act, something which polls at 87%, including Dumocrats, and yet can’t seem to get approved. Perhaps Ken can help move these important elements of Government forward,” he wrote.

Trump has repeatedly demanded Senate Republicans eliminate the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, which critics call voter suppression legislation.

Cornyn, a highly successful fundraiser who was in the running to become Senate Majority Leader less than two years ago, now faces a candidate he calls corrupt, who was impeached by his own party, faced numerous scandals including adultery allegations, and was behind in fundraising.

Trump’s endorsement of Paxton, especially this year, is expected to make a Cornyn win in Tuesday’s GOP primary runoff difficult. The winner will go on to face Democratic state Representative James Talarico.

“Paxton has faced allegations of corruption, financial malfeasance and infidelity,” The Washington Post reports. “He has also struggled to keep up with Cornyn or Talarico — both prodigious fundraisers — in raising money. Cornyn asserts that Senate Republicans would have to divert essential cash from other competitive races to propel Paxton if he became the nominee.”

“It would be hundreds of millions of dollars, and there’s still a good chance he would lose,” Cornyn said last week.

Trump’s endorsement of Paxton went against that of his own top advisor, Chris LaCivita, who was advising a Cornyn super PAC, MS NOW noted.

---

omfg

off bs

Today, Coinbase is announcing the addition of four new members to the Global Advisory Council: Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), Chris LaCivita, President Donald Trump’s winning 2024 co-campaign manager, Bill Dudley, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and global development and international finance expert Luis Alberto Moreno. The newest additions bring experience working with world leaders across the political spectrum, and will support the Coinbase executive leadership team as the company navigates new political and regulatory realities.

“Coinbase is fortunate to have some of the brightest minds across finance, tech, and politics supporting us through the Global Advisory Council,” said Faryar Shirzad, Coinbase Chief Policy Officer. “Our four new members are world-class leaders in their respective fields and we look forward to their contributions as the world enters a new era for crypto.”

New Coinbase Global Advisory Council Members:

Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) is a former Senator, U.S. representative, policy, and business expert. She has worked across the aisle on key legislative accomplishments like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Law, the CHIPS and Science Law, the Electoral Count Reform Law, and more. A native of Arizona, Sinema served as a local senator and representative before joining Congress. She is the President and CEO of the Arizona Business Roundtable and is a Distinguished Professor of Practice at the Arizona State University School of Social Work.

On joining the Global Advisory Council, Sinema said, “Americans believe in innovation and financial freedom; they want a financial system that reflects the reality of modern life and ensure they control their own financial futures. I’m excited to be part of Coinbase’s commitment to modernizing finance and being the world’s most trusted crypto exchange.”

Chris LaCivitais a seasoned political strategist who helped lead President Donald Trump’s winning 2024 campaign as co-campaign manager. He is currently Chief of Staff for the Republican National Committee. Prior political advisory roles include serving as political director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee for two cycles and as a partner at FP1 Strategies. LaCivita is a former United States Marine and Purple Heart recipient.

“The crypto industry deserves better than what it received from the previous administration. I look forward to working with Coinbase as our country transitions into a new political era–led by the first-ever pro-crypto president, and most pro-crypto administration and Congress in history–to help make America a crypto leader on the world stage,” said LaCivita.

Bill Dudleybrings decades of experience as a federal economic regulator, most recently as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he served from 2009 to 2018. He is currently a senior adviser to the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton University and Chair of the Bretton Woods Committee. Dudley also served as executive director of the Markets Group at the NY Fed and was the Chief U.S. Economist at Goldman Sachs.

“More and more consumers are looking to crypto as a way to engage with the broader financial ecosystem,” said Dudley. “I believe we’ve reached a pivotal moment in crypto’s evolution where smart political leadership and trusted, thoughtful business counterparts like Coinbase can ensure it is integrated into our financial system in a safe and beneficial way for Americans,” Dudley said.

Luis Alberto Moreno is a Colombian native and expert in global development and international finance. Currently a Managing Director at Allen & Co, he completed a 15 year tenure as the President of the InterAmerican Development Bank Group in September 2020. Before joining the Bank, Moreno served as the Colombian Ambassador to the United States from 1998 to 2005. He serves on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum, as a member of the International Olympic Committee, DOW, NUBANK, and other economic councils.

“Crypto removes burdensome financial barriers for people across the globe. I’m looking forward to working with Coinbase to unlock crypto’s potential and help increase economic freedom for all,” Moreno said.

The Coinbase Global Advisory Council was created to bring together accomplished leaders with strategic insights to advise Coinbase’s executive leadership team. In collaboration with members of the Coinbase Asset Management Academic and Regulatory Advisory Council, which comprises former regulators and industry experts, the Global Advisory Council actively contributes to advancing Coinbase's vision of ushering in a new era of the internet through crypto and blockchain technologies.

This is the dawn of a new era for American leadership on crypto. Nearly nine in ten Americans believe it is time to update the financial system. Coinbase looks forward to the guidance and insights the new members of the Council will provide as it navigates the changing landscape.

Sinema, LaCivita, Dudley, and Moreno join former Congressman Kendrick Meek (D-FL); former Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa; former Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms; former Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (D-FL); former Defense Secretary Mark Esper; former U.S. Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend; Dave Urban; former Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA); former Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH); former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Secretary of State George Osbourne; and John Anzalone, founder of Impact Research Polling.

an 1 25

During Donald Trump's first term as president, Paul Manafort was among the many Trump allies who faced criminal charges. The veteran GOP operative was sentenced to 47 months in prison in 2019 after being found guilty on multiple charges of tax fraud and bank fraud, but in 2020, Trump granted him a presidential pardon.

Manafort has a long history of lobbying for extreme far-right figures in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world. And in 2025, according to the **Daily Beast's Sean Craig, Manafort and "his team" have been offering their "services" to the far right in Ukraine and France (including a "billionaire backer of" National Front leader Marine Le Pen).

Craig, in an article published on January 13, reports, "A memo pitching the services of Manafort's team — including Trump's 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his 2024 pollster Tony Fabrizio — was circulated in Kyiv recently, the (New York) Times reported, to anxious reception….. Manafort told the Times that he has been contacted 'by numerous parties in Ukraine,' though said he 'never submitted a proposal on any matter to anyone in Ukraine.'"

READ MORE:['Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

Craig adds, "LaCivita said he and Fabrizio “are not currently under contract” with Manafort’s team, adding 'successful political consultants on both the right and left routinely do political consulting overseas.'"

Manafort served as one of Trump's campaign managers in 2016 before Kellyanne Conway joined the campaign. Craig notes that although Manafort's "connections to people with Russian intelligence ties" worried members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, his "prospects on the global consulting circuit have been revived by Trump's election victory in November."

"A pitch memo sent to French billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who plans to invest $150 million in the next decade in far-right parties in his country — including Le Pen’s —offered to 'develop a state-of-the-art and multidimensional campaign plan' that would target voters and use opposition research to discredit opponents," Craig explains. "Stérin’s associate Arnaud Rérolle told the (New York) Times that he held a call with Manafort, whose team agreed to provide the memo."

Craig adds, "They opted not to sign a contract with his team, however. Manafort may turn to Peru, where the Times said he spoke with a representative of Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga last month. Aliaga leads the conservative Popular Renewal and is a likely presidential candidate in 2026."

no lnx

Top Trump Campaign Aide Sues The Daily Beast for Defamation

The lawsuit accuses the news site of knowingly publishing false information about how much Chris LaCivita, a Trump campaign manager, was paid by the campaign.

The New York Times}:

Katie RobertsonDavid Enrich

By Katie Robertson and David Enrich

March 24, 2025

One of President Trump’s former campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against The Daily Beast over its reporting on how much he was paid by the campaign.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accuses The Daily Beast of creating “the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work on the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.”

It centers on an article published Oct. 15, 2024, with the headline: “Trump In Cash Crisis-As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.” The article was written by Michael Isikoff, a freelance journalist, who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The article stated that Mr. LaCivita, a manager of Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, had negotiated a series of contracts and was paid millions of dollars over two years from the campaign. The allegations were repeated in several follow-up articles and discussed on a Daily Beast podcast.

According to the complaint, Mr. LaCivita’s lawyers on Nov. 5 demanded a correction and a retraction, saying public records from the Federal Election Commission conflicted with statements in the article.

The Daily Beast corrected its article a few days after the demand by changing the amount to $19.2 million from $22 million and clarified that the funds went to Mr. LaCivita’s consulting firm rather than to him personally. The headline was modified, and an editor’s note was appended to the article.

After Mr. LaCivita’s lawyers demanded further retractions in January, The Daily Beast removed a podcast episode titled “How Has Trump’s Campaign Manager Made $22 MILLION?” from its platforms.

Mark Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. LaCivita, said The Daily Beast “should have investigated and followed the money before publishing lies in order to get clicks and push their political agenda.”

The Daily Beast said in a statement that the outlet stood by its reporting on Mr. LaCivita.

“His lawsuit is meritless and a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press,” the statement said. “The Beast will defend itself vigorously and looks forward to following the money to confirm where every penny flowed in LaCivita’s L.L.C.”

The lawsuit is the latest recent instance of defamation and other legal actions that Mr. Trump and his allies have filed against news outlets and journalists whose coverage they claim was misleading or inaccurate.

Mr. Trump, for example, has outstanding lawsuits against CBS News, The Des Moines Register, CNN and the group that awards the Pulitzer Prizes. Mr. Trump’s advisers have also repeatedly threatened or filed such lawsuits. As recently as Friday, Elon Musk warned that one was “inbound” after a former congressman criticized him on television.

The legal actions and threats have coincided with efforts by the Trump administration to constrain mainstream news organizations. The White House has restricted The Associated Press’s access to the president. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating broadcasters. And Mr. Trump and allies like Mr. Musk have railed against news outlets and individual journalists, including by falsely claiming that they are government propaganda outfits.

To win defamation lawsuits, public figures like Mr. Trump and Mr. LaCivita must prove that defendants knew that what they were writing was false or acted with reckless disregard for its accuracy. That high bar was erected in a series of Supreme Court precedents that Mr. Trump and his allies are pushing to overturn.

Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: katie.robertson@nytimes.com

David Enrich is the business investigations editor for The Times. His coverage has focused on law and business as well as the banking industry. He has reported on corporate law firms, the First Amendment and libel law, which is the topic of his latest book “Murder the Truth."

:{A version of this article appears in print on March 26, 2025, Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Daily Beast Defamed Him, Ex-Trump Aide Says in Lawsuit.

See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Daily Beast, The, Federal Election Commission, Donald Trump

---

ggl 10 25

[

The Wall Street Journal

Make Albania Great Again: Trump Campaign Manager Chris LaCivita’s Next Act

That American was Chris LaCivita, one of the architects of Donald Trump's 2024 political comeback from dozens of criminal charges. He's now...

May 6, 2025](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/albania-chris-lacivita-trump-campaign-manager-e1874d60?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=AWEtsqfAj7SKL7iF9XiLY-63U-znGJJZLnyN45IPr3jcBUsAXcpsQ5QSaKCy1BiRqBs%3D&gaa_ts=6907f336&gaa_sig=TaBGDhPoEY7BJKqTkq01MZlEQfgLT0raub0hJbvqmEYnwSGBVG2Wy0L6g7zKAf4hdBx7X88Mzr4HpmfH68MtoA%3D%3D)

[

Politico

Chris LaCivita Has No Patience for ‘Dumb’ Europeans and Stock Market ‘Bedwetters’

The former campaign adviser is perfectly fine with the “swift kick in the ass” the new president is delivering to the system.

Mar 15, 2025](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/15/chris-lacivita-trump-playbook-deep-dive-interview-00231220)

[

Axios

Cornyn taps LaCivita for super PAC in Texas GOP Senate primary

Texas Sen. John Cornyn has enlisted Chris LaCivita, a top political adviser to President Trump, to help him beat back a primary challenge from Texas Attorney...

May 22, 2025](https://www.axios.com/2025/05/22/cornyn-texas-primary-lacivita-super-pac)

[

The Hill

Trump ally LaCivita joins Graham’s reelection campaign

Chris LaCivita, who served as co-campaign manager for President Trump's 2024 presidential bid, is joining Sen. Lindsey Graham's (R-S.

Jun 30, 2025](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5377727-chris-lacivita-joins-graham-campaign/)

[

AP News

Trump campaign architects are now training their sights on Albania’s upcoming election

Albania's main opposition leader has hired Trump-linked campaign consultants and a lobbying firm to help him in the country's May 11...

May 8, 2025](https://apnews.com/article/albania-election-trump-consultants-lobbying-lacivita-manafort-931d49ab52e4cb15de0cc6b5d91407b7)

[

The New York Times

Trump Campaign Aide Chris LaCivita Sues The Daily Beast for Defamation

Top Trump Campaign Aide Sues The Daily Beast for Defamation. The lawsuit accuses the news site of knowingly publishing false information about...

Mar 24, 2025](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/business/media/daily-beast-chris-lacivita-lawsuit-trump.html)

[

Centre for Climate Reporting

Trump’s campaign chief claimed he secretly advised Australian Liberal Party ahead of general election

Chris LaCivita, Trump's 2024 campaign co-manager, told undercover reporters that he provided advice to the Liberals about their leader, Peter Dutton.

Apr 30, 2025](https://climate-reporting.org/trump-lacivita-australian-election/)

[

Florida Politics

Chris LaCivita hire deepens Ashley Moody connection to Donald Trump

Trump strategist Chris LaCivita will join a Moody-adjacent Super PAC. This follows on the heels of Tony Fabrizio doing strategy for Moody's campaign.

Jun 9, 2025](https://floridapolitics.com/archives/742279-chris-lacivita-hire-deepens-ashley-moody-connection-to-donald-trump/)

[

Balkan Insight

Albania Opposition Leader Hires Trump Campaign Manager

Democratic Party says it is 'honoured' that Chris LaCivita, co-manager of Donald Trump's successful campaign for the US presidency,...

Feb 10, 2025](https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/10/albania-opposition-leader-hires-trump-campaign-manager/)

[

POLITICO.eu

Trump’s election maestro works to topple Albanian prime minister

Trump's campaign adviser and Republican election guru Chris LaCivita is now backing the conservative Democratic Party of Albania.

May 9, 2025](https://www.politico.eu/article/chris-lacivita-donald-trump-election-fixer-sali-berisha-topple-albania-prime-minister-edi-rama/)

---

AN RAW 10 24

An ad buyer who said she was fired by the Donald Trump campaign after trying to expose alleged "grift and greed" by top campaign officials and deep distrust at the operation's highest levels has spoken out to the Daily Beast.

The fired worker told the Beast under the condition of anonymity that she wrote an email after she was terminated that laid out her concerns that the campaign's most senior leaders — Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles — appeared to be directing millions of dollars toward companies that may be overcharging the former president. One of them, she said, is run by a major Kamala Harris donor.

“The grift and greed I‘ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the campaign employee wrote to a former colleague after her Oct. 18 firing. “I‘m 100% on Team Trump — I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

The woman also alleged that campaign employees had become convinced that leadership had installed a "listening device" in a conference room at the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters, and she said chief financial officer Sean Dollman was so concerned that he and others rummaged through the conference room to find the device.

“[Dollman] has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation,” the woman said. “There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

Sources told The Daily Beast that the woman became so concerned over the summer that Wiles and LaCivita were sending large digital ad purchases to outside firms Strategic Media Services and Zeta Global instead of using the campaign's in-house Launchpad firm — for which she worked — and she concluded the outside firms were charging far more for the same work.

ALSO READ:Kamala's secret weapon against Trump: The F-word that's changing everything

The woman doesn't specify in her email what she meant by "grift and greed," but sources said she had raised concerns for months with Dollman about ad money spending by LaCivita and Wiles, and she was fired three days after The Daily Beast revealed last week that LaCivita's consulting firm had already raked in $22 million from the campaign and two Trump super PACs, although she was not the source of that report.

“Launchpad made the decision to terminate her for spreading rumors about clients, and repeatedly showing poor judgment," Dollman told The Daily Beast, but declined to comment further on her firing.

The whistleblower alleges that Zeta Global, a company run by Democratic donor David Steinberg that was chosen by LaCivita and Wiles, had charged the campaign $20 million for placing media ads, which she said was significantly more than the $13.9 million that Launchpad would have charged.

She does not directly accuse LaCivita or Wiles of receiving a cut from the higher commissions from outside firms, and a senior campaign officials tersely responded to questions about them receiving undisclosed payments.

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Chris LaCivita, Donald Trump’s current campaign co-manager, reposted statements on social media condemning the violent and deadly January 6, 2021 insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol—and blaming Donald Trump for that day’s violence.

“On January 6, 2021, LaCivita reposted several posts that harshly condemned Trump, suggesting that even some of his closest allies once viewed the deadly outcome as a direct result of Trump’s lies,” CNN‘s Andrew Kaczynski reports.

Among them, “a statement on January 6 from former President George W. Bush, who expressed ‘disbelief and dismay’ at the violent assault on the Capitol, calling it ‘a sickening and heartbreaking sight.'”

“I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election and by the lack of respect shown today for our institutions, our traditions, and our law enforcement,” Bush’s statement read. “The violent assault on the Capitol – and disruption of a Constitutionally-mandated meeting of Congress – was undertaken by people whose passions have been inflamed by falsehoods and false hopes.”

CNN reports it also “reviewed a video showing a screen recording of posts that LaCivita liked on January 6, including one from Republican former Rep. Barbara Comstock of Virginia, who called for Trump’s Cabinet to remove him from office via the 25th Amendment.”

“Anotherpost shared by LaCivita was a stark message from a Republican Senate aide, which John McCormack, then a reporter for the conservative magazine National Review, shared on X”:

“Text message from a GOP Senate aide: ‘This is a disgusting tragedy. Someone literally lost their life because of a lie that Trump told, Cruz/Hawley capitalized on, and fringe media echoed. This is in no way shape or form sustainable.’”

Some of LaCivita’s posts were deleted, but CNN was able to view them through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Another post, since removed from LaCivita’s feed, was from a Republican political operative. It read: “They are not protestors. They are thugs.”

On social media, CNN’s Kaczynski writes, “The posts clash with Trump’s attempts to rewrite Jan 6. While Trump is spreading conspiracy theories about it being an inside job, LaCivita’s tweets from that day blame Trump for the violence, calling it an ‘insurrection’ fueled by his election lies.”

LaCivita is the GOP operative responsible for what became known as “Swiftboating.”

Recently, Trump has referred to the violent and deadly January 6 insurrection as a “day of love.” He has called those who participated in storming the Capitol and were convicted and imprisoned, “hostages,” and has promised to pardon them. Trump has been criminally indicted on felony charges for his alleged role in the insurrection and surrounding election subversion.

In that indictment, prosecutors say, Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” and “perpetrated three criminal conspiracies,” according to Democracy Docket.

He is facing charges including:

Conspiracy to defraud the United States;
Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding;
Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and
Conspiracy against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.

HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte wrote: “The big question isn’t why LaCivita thought Trump’s coup attempt was an affront to America. It’s why he — like so many others — would choose to go work to return him to that office.”

Kaczynski also adds: “LaCivita now tells CNN, ‘Retweets and likes are not endorsements’ and some of the posts have since been removed.”

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Donald Trump's campaign team went on a behind-the-scenes meltdown mid-way through the former president’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, a new report revealed Monday.

As moderators fact-checked claims in realtime, his senior advisers began berating senior executives at the network, demanding the challenges stop.

Trump’s top aide, Suse Wiles, even made a call to ABC’s top president, the Washington Post reported.

“Trump’s advisers — including Chris LaCivita and Miller — erupted on ABC executives and journalists in the middle of the debate, according to the people familiar with the situation,” the Post reported.

“They implored the network to stop fact-checking for the rest of the event and said they had breached their promise, and a call was even lodged to the president of ABC News by Susie Wiles, the campaign’s top aide. At least one Trump adviser demanded to talk to the moderators during the debate.”

A contract signed by Trump’s team before the ABC debate and reviewed by the Post had no stipulation that he would not be fact-checked, according to the report.

But the team flipped as Trump received pushback over claims that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, with moderator David Muir interrupting to say the city manager “told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

ABC News did not comment on the Post’s report.

“Everyone who watched the ABC debate agreed that it was a 3-on-1 fight with 2 moderators who wrongly ‘fact-checked’ President Trump multiple times, but did not fact check Kamala Harris ONCE, even though she spewed multiple lies on the debate stage,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

“The ABC debate was widely viewed as one of the worst moderated debates in history, yet President Trump still won.”

The outburst from Trump’s handlers was unsuccessful at stopping the challenges, but it represents a clear move to make it acceptable for him to utter claims without expectations of fact-checking, the Post reported.

Earlier this month, he pulled out of a sit-down with CBS’ “60 Minutes” because, the show's producers said, he objected to being fact-checked.

“Within the political establishment on the right, it is now considered quite legitimate — and quite legitimate to say publicly and openly — that you disapprove of fact-checking,” Lucas Graves, author of “Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism," told the Post.

“Precisely because of Trump’s unusual relationship with the truth — even for a politician — it’s hardly surprising that he would object to it so volubly and so forcefully.”

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Loomer, who last year shared a video claiming that “9/11 was an Inside Job!,” accompanied Trump to a 9/11 memorial ceremony at Ground Zero. Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles were also present at the event. Media Matters, [9/11/24; Associated Press, 9/11/24] mma}:

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As Donald Trump’s Arlington National Cemetery scandal grows deeper and deeper, his campaign co-manager and senior advisor, Chris LaCivita, is lashing out at the Secretary of the Army, Christine Wormuth, after the Dept. of the Army issued a “rare” yet “stark rebuke,” as CNN reported, of the campaign’s efforts to politicize the cemetery where 400,000 service members, many of whom gave their lives for their country, are buried.

Secretary Wormuth is the first woman to become Secretary of the Army. The Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself have been attacking women recently. The cemetery official who filed a report allegedly stating they had been verbally and physically accosted is a woman. Trump himself made a sexual and sexist attack on Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic political opponent, just this morning. The Guardian described it as a “lewd” and “crudely misogynistic comment,” originally posted by another Truth Social user. On Wednesday, WIRED published a story titled, “The Trump Campaign’s Rhetoric About Women Sounds a Lot Like Andrew Tate’s.”

“As the Trump campaign overtly appeals to the manosphere, a WIRED investigation shows that the view of women espoused by alleged rapist and trafficker Andrew Tate matches perfectly with that of Trump and his allies,” the news site reported.

Chris LaCivita is a Republican strategist perhaps best-known as the architect of the manufactured and debunked “Swiftboat” smear campaign against Democratic 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry and his military record.

On Monday, Trump and several of his top campaign aides attended a wreath-laying ceremony held by two Gold Star families whose loved ones were among the 13 service members who died three years earlier in the suicide bombing attack on Abbey Gate at the Kabul airport on Afghanistan. The Dept. of the Army, which oversees Arlington National Cemetery, had warned Trump he could attend but only as a private individual, and no campaign staffers would be allowed. It also informed him of other restrictions, in keeping with both ANC policy and federal law. It is a violation of federal law to use Arlington National Cemetery for political purposes or events.

But Trump ignored those rules and regulations, according to the Army, which defended a cemetery official who reportedly alleges Trump campaign staffers pushed her out of their way, in a physical and verbal assault as she tried to enforce the cemetery’s rules.

The Trump campaign also shot photographs and video, and released video on several social media platforms, in apparent violation of federal law.

“Arlington National Cemetery routinely hosts public wreath laying ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for individuals and groups who submit requests in advance. ANC conducts nearly 3,000 such public ceremonies a year without incident,” the Army’s statement reads, according to Talking Points Memo.

“Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside. Consistent with the decorum expected at ANC, this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further disruption. The incident was reported to the JBM-HH police department, but the employee subsequently decided not to press charges. Therefore, the Army considers this matter closed.”

“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked. ANC is a national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”

The Trump campaign on Tuesday edited its captured video from the Arlington events into a TikTok video (here), complete with music and Trump’s commentary as the narration.

On Monday, LaCivita had posted this short clip:

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MAGA figures are suddenly afraid that Trump will lose and are looking for someone to blame.

On July 30, Project 2025 Director Paul Dans suddenly stepped down, even after promoting his work on War Room earlier in the day. The Trump campaign, in a memo signed by senior advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, celebrated, even claiming they would welcome Project 2025’s demise.

But outside of the right-wing bubble, the PR move seems to have failed in its attempt to distance Trump from Project 2025.

As New York Times reporter Jonathan Swan noted, the Trump campaign reportedly has no transition plan — even compared to 2016 — and will need to rely on Project 2025 for staffing should he prevail in the election this fall. (This is also a reason why Project 2025 partner positions matter as much as what is in the official Project 2025 book: These are the people who would be in a position of power for staffing the federal government, especially if Trump follows through on threats to lay off thousands of federal civil servants.)

Other journalists and analysts reported similarly.

Project 2025 is the policy platform and staffing database organized by the Heritage Foundation for the next Republican presidential administration. The extreme policies have proved to be very unpopular with the American people, and this unpopularity seemingly led the Trump campaign to force Dans to resign.

The situation was already a tinderbox since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democrats' likely presidential nominee, replacing President Joe Biden, since Trump’s campaign was reportedly designed to face Biden instead of Harris; switching MAGA’s messaging on a dime was going to be no easy task.

Before Harris took the reins, Trump had complained about Project 2025, even as Project 2025 contributors were invited to speak at the Republican National Convention, a key Project 2025 figure was appointed to the RNC’s platform committee, and Trump himself named the elected official perhaps most closely tied to Project 2025 as his new vice presidential nominee.

Inside the MAGA bubble, recriminations and blame are growing as Trump’s electoral position apparently grows weaker.

Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, Holocaust denier, and groyper leader who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, has been railing at LaCivita for a while. Just days ago, Fuentes bragged that his audience is more loyal to him than it is to Trump and said that he would not vote in 2024 because the people closest to Trump, like LaCivita and Wiles, are not loyal to America First ideals.

Wiles and LaCivita’s decision to turn on Project 2025 so publicly has only made this wound larger.

Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich jumped in, writing that Project 2025 people were “loyal to the end” and that LaCivita is “preparing a coup against Trump.”

MAGA figures the Hodgetwins wrote that they don’t trust LaCivita and Wiles and that Trump needs “OG loyalists” to win the election.

Fuentes posted about the LaCivita/Wiles statement, and in replies and quotes, groypers directed rage against the pair. Groyper-aligned figure Tyler Russell reacted on a stream to Dans’ resignation, saying Fuentes was correct and LaCivita “needs to be the first person in jail.” He also added, “Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita — fuck both of you.”

White nationalist Vincent James Foxx also wrote that “Trump disavowing Project 2025 should be concerning because he's literally disavowing what he ran on in 2016.”

Daily Wire host Matt Walsh implored the Trump campaign to stop trying to disavow Project 2025.

Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway claimed that the Trump campaign was bowing to “left wing media lies.”

Noted extremist Pedro Gonzalez also criticized the decision.

This is not to say that all of MAGA is on the side of Project 2025 here. MAGA thought leader Catturd railed against the project, writing, “The Heritage Foundation doesn’t get to write this dumb 2025 project and get to pretend it’s Trump’s idea or something we real citizens (grassroots Trump supporters) support. Seriously, who in TF do these narcissists think they are speaking for us and Trump?”

Trump meme team leader Brenden Dilley simply wrote, “Fuck Heritage. Right in the ass.” (Bannon acolyte Grace Chong in turn harshly criticized Dilley.)

This is all quite reminiscent of 2016, when frequent turmoil roiled the Trump campaign, and he on a few occasions switched who was in charge, eventually settling on Steve Bannon less than 90 days before the election. Whatever solution Trump lands on this time will have to be different: Bannon is currently in federal prison.

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“Boogie Man” Atwater’s (mentor of Rove: LaCivita, Tony Feather, Ginsberg) Master of the Dark Arts Hit-Them-Where-They-are-Strongest scam

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Chris LaCivita Ran One of American Politics’ Most Notorious Smear Campaigns. Now He’s Working for Trump. – Mother Jones

may 2024

When he ran for president in 2004, Democrats were counting on Sen. John Kerry’s military service to define him as a strong leader after 2001’s terrorist attack and George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The decorated Vietnam War veteran headed into the party’s convention with a 3-to-6-point lead over Bush, who had dodged serving in the war by enlisting in Texas’ Air National Guard. But just a week after Democrats officially nominated him, Kerry found himself, and his military service, under attack from unexpected quarters: a group of veterans who, like him, had served on swift boats in Vietnam.

A brutal and deceptive series of ads featured the veterans accusing Kerry of lying about his military record and the injuries that had earned him medals. His lead soon evaporated. The campaign never recovered, and “swift boating” entered the lexicon as shorthand for a dishonest political smear. The man largely responsible for the ads was a Virginia political consultant named Chris LaCivita. He now works for Donald Trump as a senior advisor and co-campaign manager. And if history is any guide, Democrats should be very, very worried.

“Chris is one of the most effective campaign operatives I have ever known,” says his friend Mo Elleithee, a former Democratic operative who directs Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service. “He is a brass knuckle brawler who understands what moves voters better than almost any operative I have ever known on either side of the aisle. And he pulls no punches.”

“Chris is one of the most effective campaign operatives I have ever known.”

When Trump announced a presidential run in 2015, the reality TV star’s campaign was widely considered a joke; the Huffington Post made a show of covering it in its entertainment section. The effort was frequently a disorganized mess, run by a revolving cast of characters, several of whom would be convicted (and ultimately pardoned) for crimes related to the special counsel’s investigation into the campaign’s links to Russian efforts to influence the election. Their victory over Hillary Clinton seemed to come as a surprise even to Trump.

But 2024 is shaping up to be very different. “Donald Trump is a movement,” explains former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.). “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.” A lot of that, Davis suspects, can be credited to LaCivita, whom he’s known for decades from Virginia politics. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.”

Like most aspiring strongmen, Trump has a thing for military people, which makes LaCivita a perfect fit. The operative enlisted in the Marines after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1991, and soon deployed to the Gulf War, where he was wounded by shrapnel in the face.

Today he’s known for running campaigns like a take-no-prisoners military operation, looking around corners and war gaming outcomes. In 2014, for instance, when Republicans were on the verge of losing control of the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dispatched LaCivita to save the floundering campaign of Kansas Senator Pat Roberts, who no longer had a home in the state. When LaCivita unleashed a harsh negative campaign targeting Roberts’ opponent, the senator’s wife and daughter complained, according to the *Washington Post*, and asked LaCivita to dial back. He refused. Roberts ultimately won the race by more than 10 points, preserving McConnell’s GOP’s majority.

LaCivita got his start in politics helping future Virginia Senator George Allen get elected to Congress. He quickly earned a reputation for loyalty to his candidate. In 1992, when Allen ran for governor, state politicos were set to gather at the Virginia shad planking, an annual ritual where candidates, reporters, and partisans glad-hand and eat smoked fish. The night before, LaCivita stayed up with a friend blanketing the area with Allen signs.

LaCivita has long been associated with the dark arts of politics.

At 4 am, LaCivita realized they’d missed a spot: an island in a nearby millpond. He grabbed some signs, jumped in and swam out. The story is now the stuff of legend, with varying accounts putting the pond’s temperature at either 45 or 50 degrees; it was one sign, or maybe 10. LaCivita jokes that he pulled the stunt “with enemy bullets raining down and fire and there was a dragon.” In reality, he says, “It was about 100 yards. The water was cold. I did not jump in fully clothed.”

“I don’t do stupid shit like that anymore,” he adds.

News stories going back to that time describe LaCivita, now 57, as a “Republican hit-man”—“hyperactive,” “manic,” “renegade”—with a rough-and-tumble approach. He has cultivated this reputation with the media, making himself far more accessible than many MAGA figures. (Indeed, the gregarious conservative talked to me on the record for this story, while just weeks before, the Trump campaign had refused to give me press credentials to cover its Iowa caucus events.)

Take a 2011 interview he did with a reporter from theRichmond Times-Dispatch*, conducted over a salad topped with venison LaCivita had killed himself. He recounted pacing around the campaign office during Allen’s 2000 Senate bid “barking orders with my Marine sword, stabbing it into the wall.” When I asked if he still wielded a sword at work, he lamented that “they have these things called human resources now.” Another time, he shot a goose while on the phone with a *Washington Post reporter. (“I live in a rural area so I can do that,” he told me, laughing. “I would not last long in suburbia.”)

While Trump’s 2024 campaign is the first time LaCivita has directly worked for the candidate, he’s spent the previous two election cycles helping from the outside. In 2016, he began with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s presidential effort, and when it ended, went to the RNC, where he was put in charge of that year’s convention’s rules committee. In that role, he helped stave off attempts from Never-Trump Republicans, led by one of LaCivita’s former clients, former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, to hamper Trump’s path to the nomination.

During the 2020 campaign, he headed up Preserve America, a pro-Trump super-PAC whose $100 million-plus in spending largely came from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021. LaCivita says he was brought on the current Trump campaign by his longtime friend Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s pollster, who introduced him to Susie Wiles, a veteran operative who’d helped win Florida for Trump in 2016. Wiles was heading up the 2024 campaign and brought LaCivita more directly into Trump’s orbit. The two now work as senior advisors and co-campaign managers.

“I don’t really care what people think [about the Swift Boat ads]. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

LaCivita has long been associated with the dark arts of politics, a reputation that that has its roots in 2002, when he served as political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the midterm elections. That year, New Hampshire’s state GOP had hired a telemarketing firm to sabotage a get-out-the-vote phone bank run by Democrats and local firefighters who were arranging rides for voters during a hot Senate race between Republican John Sununu and then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen.

But when the phone bank started getting inundated with hang-up calls, Democrats called the police. While Sununu won the election, and the GOP recaptured the Senate majority, investigators traced the calls to an out-of-state telemarketing firm and brought in the feds. Three people connected with the phone-jamming scheme ended up pleading guilty to federal telephone harassment charges, including the state party’s executive director.

One of LaCivita’s direct reports, NRSC northeast regional director James Tobin, was indicted for hooking up the local party officials with a GOP telemarketing firm willing to jam the phones. Records in his case showed Tobin had made dozens of calls to the White House political office in the period around Election Day. The RNC paid millions of dollars for his legal defense, leading Democrats to raise suspicions the GOP was desperate to make sure he didn’t implicate any other party officials. Tobin refused to cooperate and fought the charges, but a jury found him guilty of conspiracy and aiding and abetting interstate telephone harassment. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison. An appeals court overturned his conviction in 2007, ruling it was unclear whether jamming phones constituted harassment; Tobin did not return a call for comment.

Prosecutors never charged anyone in the White House or other GOP entities outside of New Hampshire with any crimes, but they did include LaCivita’s name as a potential witness in Tobin’s case. He was never called to testify, but lawyers for the New Hampshire Democratic Party did depose him in a civil suit that was settled on the eve of trial without implicating LaCivita or any other GOP higher-up. “I was nothing but a witness” in the suit, LaCivita told me. Despite Tobin’s involvement, he calls the phone-jamming scandal “a stupid, half-brained, cockamamie idea” cooked up by “two local guys in New Hampshire who did not work for me.”

If LaCivita had been only on the periphery of the phone-jamming scandal, two years later, he would be smack in the middle of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy. A group of Vietnam vets who’d had it in for Kerry since his Nixon-era anti-war activism were organizing an attack on the candidate’s military record. “They came to me because I’m a combat veteran myself and I could identify with them,” LaCivita told the Times-Dispatch at the time.

“I’ve never known Chris LaCivita to make an empty threat.”

One of the veterans, John O’Neill, had co-authored a book with Jerome Corsi, then a reporter with the conspiracy theory website WorldNet Daily, called Unfit for Command. It laid out their allegations that Kerry had lied about his service captaining swift boats in Vietnam’s rivers. LaCivita helped turn the book into a series of ads, paid for by wealthy Bush supporters.

The spots were so devastating that years later, Kerry shared in an NPR interview that when he first heard one he told staff, “If I heard that ad, I wouldn’t vote for me.” But many of the allegations were contradicted by other witnesses or disproved by Kerry’s service records. Fellow Vietnam War veteran Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) denounced the attack as “dishonest and dishonorable,” and the Bush campaign sought to distance itself from the effort.

Elleithee says that while he respects LaCivita, he “doesn’t love everything he’s done,” and the Swift Boat campaign is the number one example. “I think they crossed a line.” But LaCivita makes no apologies. “We gave a group of veterans the ability to communicate a message,” he says. “I don’t really care what people think. I’d do it again tomorrow.”

The ads “became a template for the modern right,” says Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the liberal watchdog group Media Matters. “It’s the lightning in the bottle that GOP operatives have been trying to recapture ever since.”

Indeed, Gertz recalls, many of people involved with the Swift Boat vets, including LaCivita, tried a similar approach with Barack Obama in 2008. With funding from the late Harold Simmons, a Dallas businessman who had contributed $2 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, LaCivita co-founded a dark money organization called the American Issues Project. It paid for a series of ads based on another book by Corsi trying to tie Obama to the former ‘60s radical Bill Ayers. “Jerome Corsi, during his press tour for that one, decided to spend most of his time talking about Obama’s birth certificate,” says Gertz. “It all went downhill from there.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/us/politics/23ads.html

Despite the circles he travels in, LaCivita is known for being fairly transparent with his attacks. “I have found him, ironically, to be highly ethical,” Davis told me. “If he was going to go after you, he’d look you right in the eye.”

Take the case of Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), who in January became the chair of the far-right and generally pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus. Good has pushed the impeachment of President Joe Biden and helped oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But in mid-January, an upstart state senator announced he would challenge Good in a GOP primary. What had Good done wrong? He had endorsed Ron DeSantis over Trump.

Trump has made retribution a centerpiece of his campaign, and Good’s disloyalty didn’t go unnoticed. “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him,” LaCivita said in a text to a local reporter. Virginia politicos who know LaCivita didn’t see the message as posturing. “I’ve never known Chris LaCivita to make an empty threat,” tweeted University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. “Chris won a Purple Heart in the Persian Gulf war. Just sayin’.”

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In a 2014 interview, LaCivita told the Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, “My personal philosophy is, I don’t win campaigns. I just keep candidates from losing them. My job is to keep them from making mistakes… I have to keep a bigger picture focus.”

Trump’s mistakes would surely test the skills of even the most seasoned political warrior. The day before I spoke with LaCivita, Trump had insisted on taking the stand in the second defamation case filed by E. Jean Carroll. The judge introduced Trump by instructing jurors that a previous trial had already found that Trump “had inserted his fingers into [Carroll’s] vagina” in a department room dressing room. The jury then hit Trump with an $83 million judgement. How does anyone run a successful campaign where such episodes seem to happen every other week?

“LaCivita is…going to make this campaign operationally the strongest campaign that Donald Trump’s run.”

And who would really want the job? It hasn’t ended well for others who’ve tried. But when I asked LaCivita whether he had any reservations about working directly for Trump, he said with a hearty laugh that it only “took me about 5 minutes” to agree to come on. “It’s a great opportunity that President Trump gave me.” It’s the kind of response that would please a former president who puts a premium on loyalty among his close advisors. So was LaCivita’s answer when I asked whether he believed Trump had won the last election. “The Democrats rigged the election in 2020,” he replied, deftly dodging the question. “They’re not going to get away with it this time.”

Not even brandishing a Marine sword around Mar-a-Lago could keep Trump in line. That’s probably why LaCivita says he has focused on “boring cash flow and shit” that he stands a better chance of controlling. “Trump sets the tone,” he explains. “My job is to implement the vision that he sets. My focus is making sure that the campaign and the staff and the message are functioning flawlessly—which is never the case. Politics is never the art of the perfect. It’s the art of the possible.”

Indeed, it’s LaCivita’s focus on organization, rather than any skullduggery, that could be the biggest factor in getting Trump over the line—especially given that the candidate has no hesitations doing his own dirty work. “There’s no ‘dark arts’ with Donald Trump,” Media Matters’ Matt Gertz says. “He does it all himself. The guy got up in front of the American people and asked Russia to intercede in the election and they did. There’s not something he won’t do.”

While incompetent and undisciplined staff have kept Trump from being more successful—both in the 2020 campaign and during his time in the White House—LaCivita is by all accounts extremely competent. And he’s already mounted a defensive operation to block off the vultures who see Trump’s chaos as an opportunity to gain power and push their own agendas.

In November, the *Washington Post* reported that outside groups like the Heritage Foundation were mapping out a strategy for Trump to staff his next administration with people happy to execute his plans for political retribution. Other news stories followed detailing plans by other nonprofit groups to vet candidates to fill a Trump White House with loyalists willing to push for mass deportations, politicize the Justice Department, prosecute his enemies, and deploy military force against domestic protests. Together, the stories painted a picture of a second Trump administration that was dark, scary, and unlikely to appeal to, say, moderate suburban women.

LaCivita and Wiles took the unusual step of publicly chastising these prominent supporters, gently encouraging them to back off, while at the same time privately urging them to counter the impression that Trump’s second term would be an authoritarian one. Their candidate did not help when, a few days later, he declared at a Fox News town hall that he planned to be a dictator “on day one.”

When the media chatter continued, the campaign issued a sterner warning. “Despite our being crystal clear, some ‘allies’ haven’t gotten the hint, and the media, in their anti-Trump zeal, has been all-to-willing to continue using anonymous sourcing and speculation about a second Trump administration,” wrote Wiles and LaCivita. “Let us be even more specific, and blunt. People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump…and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction. Second term policy priorities and staffing decisions will not—in no uncertain terms—be led by anonymous or thinly sourced speculation in mainstream media news stories.”

The pushback was a sign that even if the candidate may be a loose cannon, LaCivita was intent on making the campaign a tight ship. “He may have found his perfect candidate in Donald Trump,” says Elleithee. “LaCivita is the kind of operative who will let Trump be Trump and figure out how to harness that and professionalize the operation around him. I think that’s going to make this campaign operationally the strongest campaign that Donald Trump’s run so far.”

LaCivita may succeed in keeping Trump’s campaign from going off the rails and fending off grifters. But I wondered if even his well-honed messaging skills could succeed in the hardest part of his job: selling Trump to people outside MAGA world. What does Trump have to offer, say, liberals who might read Mother Jones? LaCivita replied that everyone is affected by things like inflation and the border crisis, two of Trump’s signature issues.

“Liberals want to make America great again,” he told me with a laugh, “just as much as conservatives.”

===

wapo

Trump takes control of the RNC with mass layoffs, restructuring

The move has raised fears among some former officials about the party’s future support for down-ballot candidates

By Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey and Marianne LeVine

March 12, 2024

Donald Trump addresses the crowd at a rally in the Forum River Center in Rome, Ga., on Saturday, March 9, 2024 (David Walter Banks/For The Washington Post)

Former president Donald Trump took charge of the Republican National Committee this week with the political equivalent of shock and awe — leaving dozens out of work, revamping strategic priorities and raising fears among some former officials about the party’s future support for down-ballot candidates.

The senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs.

A nationwide network of community outreach centers, once a fixture of the party’s efforts to attract minority voters, will be shuttered or refocused on get-out-the-vote efforts. The much heralded “Bank Your Vote” program, aimed at getting Republicans to vote early, will shift to a “Grow The Vote” program focused more on expanding the party’s outreach to less likely Trump voters.

Trump’s team, led by campaign adviser Chris LaCivita, is bringing in allies with what LaCivita says will be a leaner, more aggressive operation with more political experience.

“It is about changing a mind-set,” LaCivita said in an interview Tuesday. “The RNC is as much a part of the Trump campaign as the Trump campaign is part of the RNC. It is really important from our standpoint that everyone understand in a campaign that will be unprecedented in history that everyone has the same stated goal.”

After demonizing mail-in and early voting during the 2020 and 2022 elections, Republican officials are now telling their voters to embrace it heading into 2024. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

The RNC’s political director, its lead data officer and communications director have all been replaced, according to people familiar with the moves. The chief of staff and top counsel voluntarily left before LaCivita took over.

One of the most experienced lawyers in GOP politics, Charlie Spies, who recently served as the architect of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s shuttered presidential effort, will take over as chief counsel.

Additionally, LaCivita is installing Christina Bobb — a former OAN reporter who has espoused false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — as senior counsel for election integrity. Bobb is the author of a book called “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024” and promoted the audit of Arizona elections.

“I’m honored to join the RNC and thrilled the new leadership is focused on election integrity,” Bobb said in a statement. “I look forward to working to secure our elections and restore confidence in the process.”

The new leadership at the RNC has discussed a broader effort over the coming months to challenge voter identification and signature verification rules that were put into place for the 2020 election.

“The RNC’s new posture as it relates to litigation is much more offensive and much less defensive,” LaCivita said in the interview.

Some Trump allies privately questioned the hiring of Spies, a longtime GOP lawyer who previously worked for super PACs that supported the presidential campaigns of Republicans Mitt Romney in 2012 and Jeb Bush in 2016.

LaCivita praised Spies as one of the party’s top campaign attorneys, who is well respected by donors for his fundraising innovations and actively involved in election litigation.

Some former Republican officials — caught off guard by the dramatic changes — have expressed concerns about the takeover, which normally happens in some form at the end of an open primary fight. Former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, long a close adviser to Trump, was described as blindsided by the scale and speed of the changes, which target her efforts to balance Trump’s interest with the rest of the party’s interests.

“There won’t be a RNC operation to help the greater party. They don’t care about the greater party,” said a former RNC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect future job prospects. “The RNC is important to lots of people in down-ballot elections. They’re cutting off any service that doesn’t provide help to anyone but Donald Trump. It’s just all about Trump.”

LaCivita said in response that the rising tide of Trump’s candidacy would lift all Republican boats this year, and that the RNC would continue to work closely with the Republican Party’s House and Senate committees.

Sean Cairncross, a former White House adviser to Trump who worked at the RNC during the 2016 campaign, is the new chief operating officer. And James Blair, a top adviser to Trump is also taking a senior political role at the RNC. Blair is a longtime Florida operative who is close with Susie Wiles, Trump’s de facto chief of staff.

“If you choose to not reapply, your last day of employment will be March 31, 2024,” Cairncross wrote in an email sent to some fired employees, which was obtained by The Washington Post. The changes at the RNC were described by LaCivita and eight other current and former party officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal changes.

Trump had made clear he wanted changes at the RNC even before he cleared the field of rivals for the Republican nomination. Trump had grown frustrated last year with McDaniel when she stuck by her pledge to remain neutral in the nomination fight and continued to sponsor primary debates long after Trump had made clear he would never participate. McDaniel called for the party to unite behind Trump after he won the New Hampshire primary in late January, but she was soon ousted.

At Trump’s direction, the RNC voted Friday to elect former North Carolina GOP chair Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to senior positions to replace McDaniel. Lara Trump is married to the former president’s son Eric, who now runs the family’s hospitality and branding business.

They have also decided not to use RNC funds over the coming months to pay for Trump’s ongoing legal costs, in part because his status as a candidate would likely mean the funds would have to come directly out of the party’s limited political budget that is coordinated with the campaign. Trump has long argued that his legal prosecutions are politically motivated, suggesting that any spending on his own lawyer is a form of political spending.

The RNC has a cash problem on its hands. The Democratic National Committee, which is functioning as a part of President Biden’s campaign, had $24 million in the bank at the end of January — almost triple the $8.7 million held by the Republican National Committee.

The entire revamp is being led by LaCivita, a combative and experienced strategist who during the 2004 presidential campaign led the group originally known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in an effort against Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, a massive outside spending effort on behalf of Trump in 2020 and countless other state and federal campaigns.

A former Marine Corps sergeant who earned a Purple Heart in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, LaCivita has functioned as the senior political consultant for Trump since the start of his 2024 campaign, though he has not taken a formal title. He will take on a new dual role, overseeing the coordinated campaign effort at the RNC while maintaining his position advising Trump’s campaign.

The new approach is aimed, in part, at avoiding the deep dysfunction in message and advertising coordination that hampered Trump in 2020, when animosity flared between McDaniel and Trump’s second campaign manager, Bill Stepien. Relations got so bad that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top campaign adviser in 2020, had to convene a meeting between the campaign and party teams in October of that year to set an advertising strategy for the final weeks of the campaign.

The firings, according to people familiar with them, were done by LaCivita, who met with employees in the human resource director’s office with the director. In some cases, LaCivita told the employees they hadn’t done anything wrong but he just wanted his own team. Most of the employees were gone within hours.

Intelligencer*, "Chris LaCivita, the Swiftboater Coming for Biden"](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-campaign-chris-lacivita-swift-boat-veteran.html) (February 22, 2024)

intelligencer

Chris LaCivita, the Swiftboater Coming for Biden With co-pilot Susie Wiles, he has brought discipline to the Trump campaign. Is that enough to win?

By David Freedlander, a writer covering New York and national politics for New York Magazine

Donald Trump

Donald Trump greets Chris LaCivita, his chief political strategist, during an event in Iowa. Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP

George Allen, the Republican former governor of Virginia, was debating Democratic senator Chuck Robb, and it wasn’t going well. Allen’s campaign wanted to tie Robb, a Virginia political institution, to President Bill Clinton, who in August 2000 was in the post-Monica political wilt, but Allen got off topic and hadn’t mentioned Clinton once in the first 15 minutes.

At the commercial break, Allen’s chief strategist, a burly Marine veteran named Chris LaCivita, approached him, getting so close their noses were nearly touching. Allen had just an hour of debate time left, LaCivita told him, and he needed to mention Clinton at least five times. LaCivita went back to his seat in the audience and held up five fingers, and every time Allen did what he was told, LaCivita lowered one finger.

“Allen,” the Washington Post wrote the next day, “used every exchange with Robb in their 90 minutes together to tie the two-term senator to ‘Clinton-speak,’ the ‘Clinton-Gore crew’ and a national agenda that he said is antithetical to Virginia’s cautious, conservative traditions.”

Even Robb seemed exhausted by it.

“I don’t know how many times he mentioned Clinton-Gore values, or whatever,” Robb said after the debate, pointing out that he had voted as often with President George H.W. Bush as he had with Clinton and accusing Allen of being “programmed.”

A longtime brawler and veteran of Republican politics, including the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004, today LaCivita is officially senior adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — but he is really the de facto co–campaign manager along with Susie Wiles.

Together, they have brought an unprecedented level of discipline to the campaign’s third iteration. (If you want to find drama these days, you’ll have to settle for former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski talking smack to reporters about former campaign manager Paul Manafort; Trump 2024 gossip, in other words, is about Trump 2016.) When Trump’s impulsive side comes out — like when he went on a tirade against Nikki Haley that made liberal use of a misspelling of her Indian first name four days before the New Hampshire primary — it is widely seen as evidence that he had slipped his minders.

LaCivita, speaking by phone last month at the airport where he was on his way to join Trump in Florida, insisted that this analysis was wrong.

“It’s the president’s name on the ballot, not mine,” he says. “My job in this campaign is no different than it’s been in any other. The president sets the tone, the president makes clear what the goals are; my job is to put together with Susie the rest of the team and to make sure that the plan is actually executed. That’s it.”

That said, there is some difference between them. When I ask LaCivita what will decide the 2024 election, he avoids the language of Trumpian grievance to make a bread-and-butter case for a second term.

“The message is built around inflation; it’s built around where the country as a whole stands on the world stage. It’s stopping endless wars, stopping World War III. It’s putting the issues that the people really care about back in the forefront,” he says. “It’s not some difficult-to-understand Washington, D.C., dreamed-up construct that a bunch of people cooked up in the White House that they have a hard enough time trying to get the candidate to actually say. People wake up every single day and they see the major issues facing the country and it’s the first issue that they have to deal with — the high cost of energy, the cost of groceries. Just insert the issue, but we view things through that lens.”

According to a dozen people working on and close to the campaign, Wiles and LaCivita have figured out that part of Trump’s appeal is the performance and that he can’t really be managed anyway — look no further than Trump randomly urging Russia to attack NATO members. Instead, Wiles manages internal matters (“She controls the checkbook,” as one person put it) while LaCivita plots the overall strategy. He ran the ground game in Iowa that crushed Ron DeSantis in the caucuses and pushed the Republican parties of Nevada and California to change their delegate-allocation rules to favor Trump.

“LaCivita is just a supremely competent nuts-and-bolts guy,” says Donald Trump Jr. “He doesn’t care about getting credit, he doesn’t care about stroking his own ego, he only cares about getting the job done and delivering for my father. He’s also not afraid to throw some bombs on Twitter when necessary, which is something I can obviously relate to and very much appreciate.”

Trump has notoriously liked setting aides against each other, vying for his affection, like when he made Reince Priebus his first White House chief of staff and Steve Bannon “chief strategist” with both of them leaving the new administration within seven months. But people close to Trump today say that even he is tired of the antics, and with the 2024 election now possibly determining whether or not he goes to prison, he has opted for a more professional approach.

“2016 was a totally shambolic operation, just a guy on a plane surrounded by a rotating cast of jokers,” says Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist. “By 2020, you had a more professionalized operation, but the campaign was led by his web designer until the home stretch. He came close with the B-team, and now we get to see what happens when you bring in some of the most shrewd, calculating, and ruthless operators in the party.”

The change is clear to one veteran of both of Trump’s prior campaigns. “It’s not like apples and oranges. It is like apples and elephants,” they say. “I honestly couldn’t tell you where Susie ends and Chris begins.”

Wiles has been more of an object of fascination from the press, largely because of her baroque backstory: She helped rescue the Trump 2016 operation in Florida, then left to join Ron DeSantis, then came back to the Trump fold after falling out with the governor. LaCivita, meanwhile, is just a campaign-trail hound, the kind of person who lives for political combat. Once this campaign ends, he is more likely to just swoop into the next race, then parlay his post into a cable-news contract.

LaCivita and Susie Wiles stand outside after Trump arrived at the federal courthouse in Washington to face charges alleging he conspired to subvert the 2020 election. Photo: Alex Brandon/APpix.

“In this business, it’s really hard to find people that think like you, and I’m not talking in a philosophical sense or an ideological sense; I’m talking about the way you view the world vis-à-vis expectations management, where the word ‘no’ doesn’t exist,” LaCivita told two Trump campaign veterans on the Line Drive podcast last month. “Don’t tell me ‘It can’t be done,’ tell me how it can get done. There’s no daylight between she and I. And if there is, we work it out privately, but there hasn’t been. We talk five or six times a day when we’re not actually physically together in the campaign headquarters or on the road. [It’s a structure] that traditionally would not work because everybody wants to be the top person in a campaign, but our goal is to win. I can give a shit about who’s first.”

LaCivita, 57, got his start in politics after serving in the Gulf War, where he took shrapnel in the chin and received a Purple Heart. In 1991, after the war, he was paid $500 to run the campaign for a board of supervisors of Chesterfield County, outside Richmond, and parlayed that into a job working on Allen’s congressional campaign. (He once swam in frigid water to plant an Allen campaign sign on a small island in the middle of a bay and stopped traffic on a turnpike so that Allen’s supporters could march across and attend a debate.) Almost immediately after Allen won, he turned around and ran for governor. That campaign was successful too, and LaCivita became the executive director of the Virginia GOP. A few years later, he ran political strategy for the Republicans’ Senate-campaign arm in Washington.

To the extent LaCivita has achieved any notoriety in his career, it is for his role helping run the Swift Boat campaign that has been credited with sinking Kerry in 2004. Early in the campaign, allegations were bubbling on the right that the Democrat, campaigning as a war hero against post-9/11 George W. Bush, was inflating his record in Vietnam. These same veterans were furious Kerry had denounced the war after returning home, and one named John O’Neill teamed up with Jerome Corsi, who would later inspire Donald Trump on his birther crusade, to write a book called Unfit for Command. But it was LaCivita who turned their fringe allegations into a campaign funded by millions of dollars in shadowy contributions. The operation cut campaign ads with vet testimonials questioning Kerry’s service.

“He just knew how to frame the message and how to deliver it,” says one person involved in the effort. “We could have done cookie-cutter campaign ads, but he knew that wouldn’t have worked. He’s a political animal, and he always wants to be in the fight.”

The Swift Boat campaign stretched the boundaries of what had been considered within bounds of acceptable politics, both by using an outside, dark-money vehicle in a presidential campaign in the pre-super-PAC era, and also for broadcasting what were later revealed to be demonstrably false claims against Kerry.

Still, today most Republicans operatives view the episode as one to be proud of, and it provides a template for how LaCivita will go after Joe Biden and the Democrats: not by attacking what is perceived as Biden’s weaknesses but his strengths. If Biden portrays himself as the person defending American democracy from Trump, then, as LaCivita told the Line Drive podcast, they will argue “it’s Biden that’s really against democracy, right? Biden against democracy — that stands for BAD.”

“You lose elections when you surprise the electorate,” says Hogan Gidley, a Line Drive co-host who was the Trump 2020 campaign’s press secretary. “Everybody knew Clinton was a dirtbag, and so the whole Monica thing didn’t shock anybody. And so the media and the left want you to think that Joe is just Ol’ Steady Hand Joe who keeps everything stable. But then you have all the instability, all the chaos, and the projection onto our party of the things that Democrats are guilty of doing. Chris has a way of reframing the argument so that it takes away their opponent’s strongest argument and takes away something that America believes about a candidate.”

After cutting down John Kerry, LaCivita started to develop a reputation of bringing a kind of devil-may-care attitude to politics. In 2010, during Rand Paul’s run for Senate, GQ published a story about a bizarre tale from Paul’s college days when he and a buddy, both stoned, allegedly forced a fellow female student to worship a made-up god, “Aqua Buddha.” The campaign considered suing GQ, but, according to McKay Coppins’s book, LaCivita laughed it off as “fucking hilarious. I love that.”

In 2014, he parachuted into Kansas to rescue Pat Roberts, a longtime Republican senator who no longer lived in the state. In the final weeks of the campaign, Roberts was losing to independent candidate Greg Orman. LaCivita went scorched earth, tying Orman to Barack Obama. In the race’s closing days, when the senator’s wife and daughter asked LaCivita to tone it down a bit, he told them no. Roberts won.

In 2022, LaCivita was brought in to help save the campaign of Ron Johnson, the firebrand Wisconsin senator running for a third term with a negative approval rating in a state that Biden won.

Johnson blitzed his opponent, Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, vying to become Wisconsin’s first Black senator, with a ruthless series of ads that blamed him for a rise in crime, accused him of wanting to defund the police, and tied him to members of the Squad. One ad called Barnes “different,” a word that melded into another onscreen: “dangerous.” Critics called it racist, but Johnson — one of the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbents — put away Barnes so early that national Democrats stopped funding the race by the end of October.

LaCivita has worked in just about every corner of Republican politics this century, helping run the Republican National Convention in 2016, where he beat back an effort by anti-Trump forces to deny him the nomination, but also with more Establishment-friendly figures like Charlie Crist, the Congressional Leadership Fund back when Paul Ryan was House Speaker, and Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio congressman drummed out of the party after he voted to impeach Trump. He was seen by many political observers as too much of a party regular to join the Trump 2020 operation or the White House — and so was spared getting involved in the later coup machinations of so many Trump officials.

Trump first became aware of LaCivita’s work when he came on late in the 2020 campaign cycle to work on a super-PAC funded mostly by Sheldon Adelson, which poured $84 million into the Trump reelection effort. In early 2022, Tony Fabrizio, a longtime Trump pollster, started having informal conversations with Wiles about who could come into Trump’s inevitable third White House run as a senior strategist.

Wiles and LaCivita clicked over several meetings together down in Florida, then he was introduced to Trump. Following their meeting, Trump called around to other Republican figures about LaCivita and liked what he heard: that LaCivita was an aggressive operator unafraid, as he showed in 2004, to unleash the occasionally dirty trick if necessary and a professional in a way that many of Trump’s previous political advisers had not been.

Working for Trump has also been a boon for LaCivita’s business. Since coming onboard in October 2022, the Trump campaign has paid his firm, Advancing Strategies LLC, $30,000 a month for “political strategy consulting.” At the same time, the company has both bought advertising time for the campaign and Trump-affiliated groups and produced ads itself.

If LaCivita had any reservations about joining Trumpworld, he never showed it.

“The dude is all in,” said one person close to the campaign. “You get in the trenches with Donald Trump and you very quickly become a true believer or you don’t last long. You come in and you start seeing the media incoming, you start seeing the lawfare and pretty quickly you are just in the foxhole with him. And for Chris, I think there is a part of him that just loves proving all the fucking assholes wrong about Donald Trump.”

Trump’s announcement this month that LaCivita would take over the RNC’s finances and spending mystified even many Republican operatives, in part because of how Trump announced it, saying in a press releases that “I have also asked Chris LaCivita, in whom I have full confidence, to assume the role of, in effect, Chief Operating Officer of the Committee.”

“‘In effect?’ Like, what the fuck does that even mean? Why not just announce it?” said one GOP operative. “It seems like Trump is just spitballing. Why would you send your ace over to the RNC?”

The move will put LaCivita at the center of a sprawling network of various fundraising operations for the 2024 campaign and is seen as further proof that the national party is just another arm of the Trump campaign with LaCivita effectively running both.

When we spoke, he said he was ready.

“I don’t know many people who don’t want to make America great again. Now there are some people that want to demonize or minimize the significance of that statement, but it has a real meaning and it is the core of what we do,” LaCivita said. “What I’ve done for the last 32 years in one form or fashion have been campaigns aimed at beating Democrats. That’s what I do. But I was given an opportunity where it’s not just about beating a Democrat, it’s actually being part of a movement at the highest level.”

===

Chris LaCivita

Chris LaCivita	Chris LaCivita	Chris LaCivita	Chris LaCivita	Chris LaCivita

Basic facts	Basic facts	Basic facts	Basic facts	Basic facts
Current Campaign:	Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign	Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign	Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign	Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign
Role:	Founder	Founder	Founder	Founder
Location:	Midlothian, Va.	Midlothian, Va.	Midlothian, Va.	Midlothian, Va.
Affiliation:	Republican	Republican	Republican	Republican
Education:	Virginia Commonwealth University	Virginia Commonwealth University	Virginia Commonwealth University	Virginia Commonwealth University
	[show]Prior Experience

Chris LaCivita is a co-campaign manager for Donald Trump's (R) 2024 presidential campaign. He was a senior advisor to U.S. Sen. Ron Paul's (R-Wis.) 2022 re-election campaign and Rand Paul's 2016 presidential campaign.^[1]^

He formerly worked on campaigns for Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia Republican U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell and the 2014 re-election campaign for Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts. LaCivita was a media advisor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, an organization that played a key role in the 2004 presidential election. Operating primarily from Virginia and South Carolina, LaCivita is a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf War, graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, and president of the consulting firm Advancing Strategies, LLC.

Career

George Allen U.S. Senate Campaign, 2000

In 2000, former Virginia Gov. George Allen successfully ran against incumbent Sen. Chuck Robb. LaCivita managed the 2000 campaign. He had also managed Allen's successful bids for the U.S. House in 1991 and Governor of Virginia in 1993. CNN noted that the 2000 campaign "was among the most expensive contests in the Commonwealth's history" and that the basic strategy was to put the two candidates' personalities in competition: "Robb stood in contrast with voters to Allen's more personable manner."^[2]^

IFrame Content

Swiftboat Veterans Ad on John Kerry

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, 2004

In the 2004 presidential election, LaCivita worked as a media consultant for the 527 group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, later renamed Swift Vets and POWs for Truth. The group encouraged voters to consider what they called Democratic nominee John Kerry's "false 1971 testimony that American troops routinely committed war crimes."^[3] The New York Times described LaCivita's role as a media advisor: "Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements."^[4]^

Ken Cuccinelli, 2009 and 2012

In 2009, then-Virginia State Senator Ken Cuccinelli ran for the office of attorney general on a message of reducing government spending, according to Richmond Biz Sense: "Cuccinelli’s approach to policy is to limit government as much as possible. The attorney general’s job includes enforcing the law of the land, but Cuccinelli adds that it is also about eliminating unneeded and overly burdensome regulation."^[5] LaCivita headed the campaign, which Cuccinelli won with 58 percent of the vote.

LaCivita also served as the chief campaign strategist for Cuccinelli's unsuccessful run for governor of Virginia in 2013. In that race, Cuccinelli struggled to find financial support, according to The Washington Post: "About two-thirds of Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell’s top donors in 2009 have given Cuccinelli little or nothing."^[6] After Cuccinelli lost the race, LaCivita put some of the blame on the lack of national Republican support for his candidacy: "There are a lot of questions people are going to be asking and that is, was leaving Cuccinelli alone in the first week of October, a smart move?"^[7]^

Scott Rigell, 2010 and 2012

In 2010, Scott Rigell defeated incumbent Democratic candidate Glenn Nye in Virginia's 2nd Congressional District. A former car dealer in Virginia, Rigell ran on a platform of reducing government spending. His campaign slogan was: "28 years of business experience to lead in making prudent reductions in spending."^[8] LaCivita served as a senior advisor on the campaign, which he saw as one that would "bring back commonsense conservative leadership to Virginia’s Second District."^[9]^

Pat Roberts, 2014

In September 2014, the National Republican Senatorial Committee dispatched LaCivita to Kansas in an effort to bolster the campaign of incumbent U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts. At the time of LaCivita's appointment, Roberts was running behind Independent Greg Orman. The Democratic candidate, Chad Taylor, dropped out of the race in early September.^[10]

When LaCivita arrived, he instituted a more aggressive media strategy, "relentlessly working to tie Mr. Orman to President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid," according to The Wall Street Journal.^[11] Although the campaign received some backlash for the negative ads, LaCivita defended his media strategy, saying: "If you're given two months to run a campaign and you're faced with two options—run a campaign based on what your incumbent accomplished, versus educating the electorate on your opponent, especially when your opponent is essentially unknown—it's not a hard decision."^[12]^

Presidential election, 2016

Rand Paul presidential campaign, 2016

In January 2015, LaCivita became a senior advisor to Rand Paul's 2016 presidential campaign. The Wall Street Journal reported that LaCivita was expected to work heavily in his native South Carolina. Of Paul's campaign, LaCivita told the paper: "We have to nominate a conservative who can win. Rand is first and foremost a conservative, but he’s not afraid to expand the party’s tent by competing for nontraditional GOP voters like young people and minorities."^[1]^

Paul suspended his presidential run on February 3, 2016.^[13]^

Republican National Committee

In April 2016, as the prospect of a contested convention became more likely, the Republican National Committee hired LaCivita, along with former Rand PAC advisor Steve Munisteri as a strategist to assist with state selection of delegates. According to The New York Times, the two were hired to manage the process by which each state selects its delegates to the national convention. The paper commented, "Mr. LaCivita and Mr. Munisteri, a former chairman of the Texas Republican Party, adds heft and experience to the committee’s work."^[14]^

Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2024

In 2022, LaCivita joined Donald Trump's (R) 2024 presidential campaign as a co-campaign manager.^[15]^

Profiles and interviews

*Reuters*, "Who are Trump's top presidential campaign aides?" (February 1, 2024)
*Intelligencer*, "Chris LaCivita, the Swiftboater Coming for Biden" (February 22, 2024)

- (June 20, 2023)

Key staff members

The table below shows a partial list of national campaign staff members, including the campaign manager, senior advisors, political directors, communications directors, field directors, and the national press secretary. They are presented alongside their positions in the campaign, their most recent positions prior to the campaign, and their Twitter handles. To recommend additions, please email us at editor@ballotpedia.org.

*See also: Presidential election campaign managers and key staffers, 2024

Donald Trump presidential campaign national staff, 2024	Donald Trump presidential campaign national staff, 2024	Donald Trump presidential campaign national staff, 2024	Donald Trump presidential campaign national staff, 2024
Staff	Position	Prior experience	Twitter handle
Chris LaCivita^[16]	Co-campaign manager^[17][18]	Partner, FP1 Strategies	@LaCivitaC
Susie Wiles^[16]	Co-campaign manager^[17][18]	Chief executive officer, Save America PAC	@susie57
Brian Jack^[16]	Senior advisor	Political advisor, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)	@briantjack
Jason Miller^[16]	Senior advisor	Chief executive officer, GETTR	@JasonMillerinDC
Steven Cheung^[16]	Communications director	Advisor and spokesman, Jim Renacci (R) 2022 Ohio gubernatorial campaign	@TheStevenCheung
Karoline Leavitt^[19]	National press secretary	Spokeswoman, Make America Great Again Inc.	@kleavittnh

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms Chris LaCivita. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

Chris LaCivita - Google News

External links

Footnotes...

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Christopher Joseph LaCivita (born 1966) is an American political consultant, and partner in FP1 Strategies, a national public-affairs and campaign firm.^[1] LaCivita is currently a senior advisor to Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.^[2][3]^

LaCivita is often mentioned for his role as media advisor to the Swift Boat Veterans, an independent-expenditure group credited with a significant impact on the 2004 presidential election.

Since 2004, he has been president of the firm Advancing Strategies LLC. He was formerly with Crosslink Strategy, a conservative lobbying and political consulting firm founded by former John McCain advisor Terry Nelson, a founding partner of FP1 as well.

Early life and education

LaCivita was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, but grew up in the Richmond, Virginia area, graduating from Midlothian High School. His father was a first-generation Italian-American and his mother was a first generation Irish-American.^[4]^

He received his bachelor's degree in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1989.^[5] He joined the US Marine Corps, was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received while serving in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, and discharged a sergeant.^[6] Afterwards, he taught part-time at Regent University and began a new career as a political consultant.

Early career in Virginia politics

Active in Republican politics following his Gulf War service, LaCivita did field work for George F. Allen in central Virginia during his 1991 congressional campaign, then went with him to Capitol Hill, serving as a legislative assistant on foreign and defense policy.^[7] When Allen ran for Governor of Virginia in 1993, LaCivita organized in the Richmond area, Southside and central Virginia, then was appointed to serve as an assistant secretary of administration.^[8]^

He left state service in 1995 to help run Allen's political action committee, assisting legislative races that year (wherein the GOP captured a tie in the State Senate). LaCivita was named executive director of the state Republican Party in 1996, after Allen's allies won control of the RPV.^[7] LaCivita ran the party as Jim Gilmore succeeded Allen as governor in 1997, acting as overseer of 'internal squabbles,' but going on later to capture control of both houses of the General Assembly in 1999.^[9]^

LaCivita and former gubernatorial chief of staff Jay Timmons worked on Allen's successful campaign in the 2000 Senate election against two-term Democrat Chuck Robb, a race he won with 52% of the vote.^[7][10]^

In 2001, LaCivita was drafted in the final two months to shore up the losing campaign of Attorney General Mark Earley for governor against Mark Warner.^[11] As Fred Barnes wrote:^[12]^

"Earley wasted the summer and didn't find a message until September -- after party officials dispatched Chris LaCivita, the political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to run his campaign. The message, it turns out, is a hardy perennial for Republicans: taxes."

Earley, down by 13 points in mid-summer, closed the gap late in the campaign eventually lost by five points, 52%-47%, to the Democrat.^[13]^

National political career

2000s

During the 2002 midterm elections, LaCivita served as the political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) under the chairmanship of Senator Bill Frist.^[14] That November, the GOP scored a net gain of two Senate seats, recapturing control of the upper chamber.

While at the NRSC, LaCivita was the direct supervisor of James Tobin, another former employee of the DCI Group. In 2005, Tobin was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for his role in the 2002 NH phone jamming scandal for his activities during that campaign; LaCivita was on Tobin's witness list but never called. Democrats, who sought testimony from LaCivita for a civil suit tied to the same incident, recently settled that civil suit out of court. Tobin's conviction was overturned on appeal.

In 2003, LaCivita served as president of Progress for America, later giving that role to former DCI employee Brian McCabe while LaCivita became its executive director. LaCivita at one time worked for the Republican political consulting firm DCI Group, which had close ties both to Progress for America and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. During the 2004 US presidential campaign, LaCivita served as consultant and principal media advisor to the Swift Boat Veterans, writing and producing the group's memorable (and controversial) commercials in association with Rick Reed.

At the same time, LaCivita consulted for the NRSC, now headed by former client George Allen, as it scored a net gain of four Senate seats in the 2004 cycle. LaCivita continued his independent-expenditure work in 2005, producing ads in support of Attorney General Jerry Kilgore in his unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign.

In 2005 and 2006, LaCivita was a senior strategist for Vern Buchanan, who won a contested primary and general election in Florida's 13th congressional district by less than 400 votes. In the 2006 Florida gubernatorial election, LaCivita ran an independent organization, Floridians for a Better and Brighter Future, in support of Charlie Crist's Republican primary campaign against Tom Gallagher.[citation ^needed]

In 2006, LaCivita was a general consultant for Bob Corker's successful campaign for Senate in Tennessee. As Corker lagged in the polls behind Democratic opponent Harold Ford, LaCivita was later replaced by Tom Ingram who engineered a late-in-the-game turnaround to narrowly win the general election.

In 2007, LaCivita told reporters that the GOP could silence the press uproar over the sudden dismissal of eight US Attorneys by promoting stories about the most extreme among anti-Bush activists. "When are we going to make it about Code Pink and the rest of the liberal weirdos controlling the Democrat agenda?" he asked.^[15] That fall, he guided Jill Holtzman Vogel to her initial victory in the Winchester-based Virginia State Senate contest.[citation ^needed]

During the 2008 presidential campaign, LaCivita and Tony Feather launched a new 501(c)4 issues advocacy group, the American Issues Project, after a series of meetings with other Swift Boat donors. In August 2008, AIP began airing ads in battleground states seeking to raise questions about Democratic Party presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama's ties to former student radical William Ayers.^[16] The ad may be viewed. The American Issues Project had a sole donor, Harold Simmons, an 87-year-old Dallas billionaire who was also a principal donor, along with T. Boone Pickens, to the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth PAC. On October 10, 2008, a campaign finance watchdog group, Democracy 21, filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about the group's alleged violations of election campaign law.^[17] This went nowhere, and in 2009 AIP aired a second national TV spot (colloquially called the "Jesus" ad) targeting the Obama stimulus package as unprecedented in its size and wastefulness. The ad may be viewed. The spots were produced by Larry McCarthy under LaCivita's direction.

In 2009, LaCivita was the general strategist for State Senator Ken Cuccinelli's successful bid for Attorney General of Virginia. He also guided Jeffrey McWaters to victory in a December special election for Virginia State Senate, occasioned by the departure of longtime incumbent Ken Stolle in Virginia Beach.[citation ^needed]

2010s

In the summer of 2010, LaCivita returned to the NRSC as its Political Director, the same post he held in 2002.^[18] Under his direction, the GOP scored a net gain of five Senate seats in the November 2010 general elections.

Throughout 2010, LaCivita consulted for several GOP congressional campaigns, most prominently that of State Senator Robert Hurt who was elected in Virginia's 5th Congressional District over Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello. He also aided businessman Scott Rigell in his successful bid for election in Virginia's 2nd Congressional District over incumbent Glenn Nye.^[19] But his client in Missouri's 3rd congressional district, Ed Martin, fell short in his bid to unseat Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan.

In 2011, Virginia Republicans succeeded in ousting two Democratic State Senators, gaining a 20–20 tie (and an effective majority with GOP Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling acting in their favor). LaCivita was the strategist for Bill Stanley,^[20] who defeated longtime Democratic incumbent Roscoe Reynolds in a race between two Southwest Virginia senators thrown together by redistricting. Stanley prevailed by a margin of 644 votes, 46.80% to 45.54%.^[21]^

LaCivita helmed the 2012 Senatorial campaign of Linda McMahon in Connecticut, losing to Congressman Chris Murphy.^[22] At the same time, he guided Robert Hurt to his first re-election in Virginia's 5th Congressional District, defeating challenger John Douglass by 12 points.^[23] He also was consultant to black conservative Congressman Allen West of Florida,^[24] who was defeated for re-election in a heavily redistricted seat.^[25]^

LaCivita was the chief strategist for the 2013 gubernatorial campaign of longtime client Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia.^[26] The conservative Attorney General, heavily outspent and behind in every public survey from July to November, battled to a surprisingly close finish^[27] against former Democratic Party chair Terry McAuliffe, losing 45.2% to 47.7%, a margin of 56,000 votes of 2.2 million cast.^[28] Afterwards, LaCivita blamed the October 2013 government shutdown for slowing Cuccinelli's momentum in the final weeks, while praising the support received from the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association.^[29]^

In September 2014, Senate Republicans tapped LaCivita and his ally, Corry Bliss, to rescue the faltering campaign of incumbent Pat Roberts in Kansas, facing a serious challenge from Independent candidate Greg Orman (following the withdrawal of the Democratic nominee, in what was heretofore a three-way general-election contest).^[30] Roberts, behind or even with Orman in nearly all opinion polls that fall, won re-election with a surprisingly strong 53.1% to Orman's 42.5%.^[31] However, LaCivita's House candidate in Northern California, Doug Ose, fell just short of victory after a protracted count, losing by 1,400 votes to incumbent Ami Bera.

In January 2015, LaCivita was named a senior adviser to the exploratory presidential campaign of Senator Rand Paul.^[32] Paul suspended his campaign in February 2016, after finishing in fifth place out of 12 Republican candidates at the Iowa caucuses.

In April 2016, the Republican National Committee hired LaCivita as a senior adviser for what was expected to be a fractious National Convention in Cleveland.^[33] His longtime former Virginia client, Ken Cuccinelli, plotted a floor challenge to disrupt Donald Trump's path to the nomination.^[34] Working for RNC Chair Reince Priebus, LaCivita and others were instrumental in shutting down the "Never Trump" movement's floor challenge on the first day of the convention. According to Kyle Cheney of Politico, "The RNC and Trump campaign whips [went] to work. With the lists of insurgent delegates in hand, dozens of aides worked the convention floor for about 15 minutes, collecting their own set of withdrawal signatures. In the end, four of the initial 11 states saw enough delegates abandon the roll call effort to scuttle it."^[35] That November and December, LaCivita served as a national GOP liaison to Republicans named to the Electoral College.

LaCivita was Pat McCrory's strategist in his unsuccessful 2016 campaign for reelection as Governor of North Carolina.^[36][37][38] McCrory, outspent 2-to-1, lost by just 10,000 votes, 48.8% to 49.0% (confirmed only after a recount) to Democrat Roy Cooper.^[39]^

In 2017, LaCivita was hired as general consultant to the Kim Guadagno campaign for governor in New Jersey shortly before her victory in the Republican primary. Guadagno was defeated in the fall, part of the Democratic sweep in the Garden State.^[40]^

Throughout 2017 and 2018, LaCivita served as a consultant to the American Action Network and Congressional Leadership Fund, the SuperPAC allied with GOP Speaker Paul Ryan, reuniting with longtime campaign partner Corry Bliss.^[41] In that capacity, he captained several Independent Expenditure campaigns in House races,^[42] including GOP victories for Will Hurd (Texas's 23rd Congressional District) and Andy Barr (Kentucky 6th Congressional). He was also General Consultant to Anthony Gonzalez, the former NFL wide receiver and Stanford graduate who won the Republican nomination and was elected Congressman from Ohio's 16th Congressional District.^[43]^

In 2018, LaCivita advised Republican businessman and academic Bob Stefanowski in his insurgent campaign for governor of Connecticut.^[44] First-time candidate Stefanowski triumphed unexpectedly, skipping the state GOP convention and qualifying for the primary by petition (first candidate in state history to do so). Stefanowski won the nomination in the contested five-way primary.^[45] Running close in polls throughout the fall despite the anti-Trump tide in a Democratic state,^[46] Stefanowski was defeated 46.2% to Ned Lamont's 49.4%. Even in losing, Stefanowski achieved the second-highest vote for Governor (650,138) of any candidate in Connecticut history (Jodi Rell's 710,048 ballots in 2006 being the record),^[47] exclusive of Lamont.

LaCivita joined FP1 in January 2019.^[1]^

2020s

On August 31, 2020, LaCivita was announced as head of Preserve America, a new pro-Trump superPAC that began a $30-million advertising blitz in early September, focusing initially on the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia.^[48]^

In 2022, he was the general consultant for Ron Johnson's re-election bid for United States Senator from Wisconsin.^[49] LaCivita currently serves as a senior advisor on Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.^[2][50]^

As of 2023, LaCivita was the chief strategist of Trump's MAGA Inc. Super PAC.^{[51][52][53][54][55][56][57]}^

Personal life

LaCivita lives outside Richmond with his wife, Catherine, and their two children.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-republican-architect-of-the-2004-swift-boat-campaign-against-john-kerry-is-now-trying-to-swift-boat-biden-and-get-trump-reelected/

no vid

although Democrats have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, 2004 is remembered as the year in which George W. Bush became the only GOP president to win both the electoral vote and the popular vote in a post-1980s election. Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who coordinated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disinformation campaign against 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, can take some of the credit for Bush’s reelection — and in 2020, journalist Alex Isenstadt reports in Politico, LaCivita is overseeing a new super PAC designed to help President Donald Trump win a second term.}:

The super PAC is called Preserve America and, according to Isenstadt, “is poised to begin a $30 million advertising blitz” and “is expected to draw the support of a range of GOP megadonors, including Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus.”

“The move comes as Republicans express mounting concern over the drubbing Trump has been taking on TV,” Isenstadt explains. “The president, in August, went dark in several battleground states and, in Wisconsin, was outspent more than 8 to 1, according to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics. In Florida, Trump was outpaced by Biden more than 3 to 1.”

Given LaCivita’s track record, the Democratic National Committee and the 2020 campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden should not take him lightly. In 2004, the George W. Bush Administration drew a great deal of criticism over the Iraq War and the overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein — one of the worst foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ran a campaign against Kerry that was both deceptive and effective. Although Kerry was a Vietnam veteran and Bush avoided the Vietnam War, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth managed to convince many gullible voters that Kerry was anti-military.

to this day, “Swift Boat” is used as a slang expression to describe a deceptive political takedown of an opponent. LaCivita, in other words, would love to Swift Boat Biden just as he Swift Boated Kerry 16 years ago.

Preserve America’s anti-Biden ads are veryTrumpian in tone, resorting to hysterical fear-mongering — something LaCivita has a long history of doing — and claiming that Biden is anti-law enforcement : [2 vids]

the super PACs that have been keeping busy in 2020 range from the pro-Trump America Action First to the pro-Biden Priorities USA. Trump supporters, Isenstadt notes, have been frustrated to see Priorities USA raising more money than America Action First — and Republicans are hoping that Preserve America will give Trump’s campaign a fundraising advantage.

Preserve America is already going after key battleground states. Isenstadt notes that its first commercials will begin airing this Tuesday, September 1 in “in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa and Georgia.”

“Roughly $25 million of the total buy will be invested on TV, a figure that nearly matches what America First Action and Priorities USA have spent on the airwaves over the course of the entire election cycle,” Idenstadt reports. “The remaining $5 million will appear on digital platforms.”

===

LaCivita's role as political director of NRSC in 2002 places him on the edge of a Republican phone-jamming scandal in which Democratic get-out-the-vote calls in Manchester, N.H., were blocked on election day.[2] In December 2005 James Tobin, who worked under LaCivita as the New England regional director, was convicted of two felony telephone harassment charges but was acquitted of the charge of conspiring against voters rights. He was sentenced in May 2006 to 10 months in prison, AP reported, that he "helped plan the phone jamming." Tobin was convicted in December of two felony telephone harassment charges. He was acquitted of a third, more serious charge, of conspiring against voters rights.[3]

On August 25, 2004 the New York Times reported that LaCivita was working for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as an adviser on media strategy. According to Federal Election Committee filings by SBVT, LaCivita received $35,700 for his media consulting work.[4] He received $39,897 for providing consulting services to Progress for America.[5]

LaCivita told the New York Times that he worked as a private contractor forDCIand Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and that there was no coordination between the firm and the group. "Obviously, I don't work for the Bush campaign," he said. Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements.[6]

---

LaCiv head of progress for Am 35m to beat Kerry,

===

Chris LaCivita heads Progress for America, a 501c4 organization founded in 2001 by Republican consultant, Tony Feather. He also works for the **DCI**Group, a Republican lobbying firm.

{nl}* 1 Background{nl}* 2 Affiliations{nl}* 3 Articles and Resources{nl}* 3.1 Sources{nl}* 3.2 Related SourceWatch Resources{nl}* 3.3 External links|

Background

A biographical note on LaCivita states that he was "political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the historic 2002 election cycle" and that he was "responsible for the day-to-day management and implementation of the NRSC’s $70 million issue advocacy campaign. This included nearly $60 million in purchased TV time, and over 155 individual 'issue ads' for 17 states. Mr. LaCivita was also responsible for implementing polling, mail and phone programs in conjunction with his regional political staff."^[1]^

"In the 2000 election cycle, Mr. LaCivita was campaign manager of George Allen's successful bid for the United States Senate. In a $10 million race the Allen campaign unseated a 12-year incumbent with a 4.6-point win. It was the only successful Republican U.S. Senate challenger race in the country," it states.^[1]^

LaCivita's role as political director of NRSC in 2002 places him on the edge of aRepublican phone-jamming scandal in which Democratic get-out-the-vote calls in Manchester, N.H., were blocked on election day.^[2] In December 2005 James Tobin, who worked under LaCivita as the New England regional director, was convicted of two felony telephone harassment charges but was acquitted of the charge of conspiring against voters rights. He was sentenced in May 2006 to 10 months in prison, AP reported, that he "helped plan the phone jamming." Tobin was convicted in December of two felony telephone harassment charges. He was acquitted of a third, more serious charge, of conspiring against voters rights.^[3]^

On August 25, 2004 the New York Times reported that LaCivita was working for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as an adviser on media strategy. According to Federal Election Committee filings by SBVT, LaCivita received $35,700 for his media consulting work.^[4] He received $39,897 for providing consulting services to Progress for America.^[5]^

LaCivita told the New York Times that he worked as a private contractor for DCI and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and that there was no coordination between the firm and the group. "Obviously, I don't work for the Bush campaign," he said. Mr. LaCivita described his role as providing advice on the news media and placing advertisements.^[6]^

In February 2005, the Times reported that LaCivita had been hired by the conservative group USANext to help with their campaign to support the Bush administration's Social Security privatization.^[7]^

Affiliations

LaCivita's resume includes the following:^[1]^

Graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with majors in political science and international affairs in 1989
United State Marines Corps including in the Persian Gulf War
legislative assistant handling defense issues and the Judiciary Committee for then-Rep. George Allen; served as his political director in his 1991 race for Congress;
Regent University adjunct instructor in campaign management 1991-1993
assistant Secretary of Administration under then Governor Allen, a cabinet post in which he had oversight of 5 state agencies, including the statewide procurement system.
Worked on Allen's 1993 campaign for Governor.
executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia
campaign manager of George Allen’s successful bid for the United States Senate in 2000.
political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the historic 2002 election cycle

Articles and Resources

Sources

↑ ^1.0^ ^1.1^ ^1.2^ "Bios - Panel 1: 2002 Election Analysis: Chris LaCivita, National Republican Senatorial Committee", University of Virginia Center for Politics, 2003.
↑ Zachary A. Goldfarb, "Depositions of GOP Officials Allowed", Washington Post, July 14, 2006; Page A12.
↑ Dems want to depose ex-RNC chief in phone jamming civil suit", Boston.com, June 8, 2006.
↑ Center for Public Integrity, "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth", Silent Partners, 2007.
↑ Center for Public Integrity, "Progress for America Voter Fund", Silent Partners, 2007.
↑ Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike, "The 2004 Campaign: Advertising; Veterans' Group Had GOP Lawyer", New York Times, August 25, 2004.
↑ Glen Justice, "A New Target for Advisers to Swift Vets", New York Times, February 21, 2005.

Related SourceWatch Resources

External links

Chris Cillizza, "GOP Group Joins Soft-Money Fray," Roll Call, November 24, 2003 (Cache file from PFA).
Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike, "Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group", New York Times, August 25, 2004.
Glen Justice, "A New Target for Advisers to Swift Vets," New York Times, February 21, 2005.
Steve Weissman and Ruth Hassan, "BCRA and the 527 Groups," Campaign Finance Institute, February 9, 2005; revised March 8, 2005: "When LaCivita departed PFA in the Spring of 2004 to work on two Republican Senate campaigns, he was succeeded as President by DCI partner Brian McCabe. LaCivita would soon be better known as senior strategist for the pro-Bush 527 group, Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth. The fledgling Swift Boat group had approached PFA for assistance, and it had recommended LaCivita. While handling the Swift Boat operation, LaCivita also returned briefly to PFA as a contractor."

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Chris_LaCivita"

Categories: Front groups portal | Social Security privatization | Politics | Republican Party (USA) | Front groups

http://216.92.66.74/index.php?title=Chris_LaCivita

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_LaCivita

tied to Brooks bros?

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South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer’s out-of-state consultant Chris LaCivita was caught this weekend trying to orchestrate pressure to force Governor Mark Sanford’s resignation.

Bauer’s move came after the governor admitted he had left South Carolina for five days to pursue an extramarital affair with a woman from Argentina. Sensing an opportunity to take over for Sanford, Bauer and company moved quickly behind the scenes to launch a coup.

The New York Times has published an email from LaCivita to a GOP activist pleading for him to encourage Sanford’s resignation.

“André Bauer is my client; I’ve been working this since Monday,” wrote LaCivita. “I need to get this guy (Sanford) out.”

LaCivita told The Times “this is me professionally seeking information and sources from people I thought I could trust.”

References:

Palmetto Scoop

New York Times

===

AFP

AFP is a corporate lobbying firm run by Tim Phillips, a former lobbying partner of conservative activist Ralph Reed, and funded in part by Koch Industries, the largest private oil corporation in America (see May 29, 2009). Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) is also involved, through his lobbying form American Solutions for Winning the Future, which is supported by oil companies.

tea partyhttp://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=americans_for_progress_1

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http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/527/americans_for_progress_opportunity.asp

vs?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity

global warming, exxon. koch

### Chris :{LaCivita:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_LaCivita‎

8 26

Christopher Joseph LaCivita (born 1966) is an American political consultant and former partner in FP1 Strategies,^[1]^ a national public affairs and campaign firm. He most recently served as senior adviser to Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.^[2]^[3]^

The Swift Boat Veterans, an independent-expenditure group, was credited with a significant impact on the 2004 presidential election by advancing a sharp attack on John Kerry's military record,^[4]^ described by Mother Jones magazine as a "smear campaign",^[5]^ and by NPR as discredited.^[6]^ Since 2004, he has been president of the firm Advancing Strategies LLC. LaCivita was formerly with Crosslink Strategy, a conservative lobbying and political consulting firm founded by Terry Nelson, a former John McCain advisor, and also a founding partner of FP1.

...

LaCivita was the chief strategist for the 2013 gubernatorial campaign of longtime client Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia.^[37]^ The conservative Attorney General, heavily outspent and behind in every public survey from July to November, battled to a surprisingly close finish^[38]^ against former Democratic Party chair Terry McAuliffe, losing 45.2% to 47.7%, a margin of 56,000 votes of 2.2 million cast.^[39]^ Afterwards, LaCivita blamed the October 2013 government shutdown for slowing Cuccinelli's momentum in the final weeks, while praising the support received from the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association.^[40]^ In September 2014, Senate Republicans tapped LaCivita and his ally, Corry Bliss, to rescue the faltering campaign of incumbent Pat Roberts in Kansas, facing a serious challenge from Independent candidate Greg Orman (following the withdrawal of the Democratic nominee, in what was heretofore a three-way general-election contest).^[41]^ Roberts, behind or even with Orman in nearly all opinion polls that fall, won re-election with a surprisingly strong 53.1% to Orman's 42.5%.^[42]^ However, LaCivita's House candidate in Northern California, Doug Ose, fell just short of victory after a protracted count, losing by 1,400 votes to incumbent Ami Bera.

In January 2015, LaCivita was named a senior adviser to the exploratory presidential campaign of Senator Rand Paul.^[43]^ Paul suspended his campaign in February 2016, after finishing in fifth place out of 12 Republican candidates at the Iowa caucuses.

In April 2016, the Republican National Committee hired LaCivita as a senior adviser for what was expected to be a fractious National Convention in Cleveland.^[44]^ His longtime former Virginia client, Ken Cuccinelli, plotted a floor challenge to disrupt Donald Trump's path to the nomination.^[45]^ Working for RNC Chair Reince Priebus, LaCivita and others were instrumental in shutting down the "Never Trump" movement's floor challenge on the first day of the convention. According to Kyle Cheney of Politico, "The RNC and Trump campaign whips [went] to work. With the lists of insurgent delegates in hand, dozens of aides worked the convention floor for about 15 minutes, collecting their own set of withdrawal signatures. In the end, four of the initial 11 states saw enough delegates abandon the roll call effort to scuttle it."^[46]^ That November and December, LaCivita served as a national GOP liaison to Republicans named to the Electoral College. LaCivita was Pat McCrory's strategist in his unsuccessful 2016 campaign for reelection as Governor of North Carolina.^[47]^[48][49]^ McCrory, outspent 2-to-1, lost by just 10,000 votes, 48.8% to 49.0% (confirmed only after a recount) to Democrat Roy Cooper.^[50]^ In 2017, LaCivita was hired as a general consultant to the Kim Guadagno campaign for governor in New Jersey shortly before her victory in the Republican primary. Guadagno was defeated in the fall, part of the Democratic sweep in the Garden State.^[51]^

During 2017 and 2018, LaCivita served as a consultant to the American Action Network and Congressional Leadership Fund, the SuperPAC allied with GOP Speaker Paul Ryan, reuniting with longtime campaign partner Corry Bliss.^[52]^ In that capacity, he led several Independent Expenditure campaigns in House races,^[53]^ including GOP victories for Will Hurd (Texas's 23rd Congressional District) and Andy Barr (Kentucky 6th Congressional). He was also a general consultant to Anthony Gonzalez, the former NFL wide receiver and Stanford graduate who won the Republican nomination and was elected Congressman from Ohio's 16th Congressional District.^[54]^ In 2018, LaCivita advised Republican businessman and academic Bob Stefanowski in his insurgent campaign for governor of Connecticut.^[55]^ First-time candidate Stefanowski triumphed unexpectedly, skipping the state GOP convention and qualifying for the primary by petition (the first candidate in state history to do so). Stefanowski won the nomination in the contested five-way primary.^[56]^ Running close in polls throughout the fall despite the anti-Trump tide in a Democratic state,^[57]^ Stefanowski was defeated 46.2% to Ned Lamont's 49.4%.^[58]^

LaCivita joined FP1 in January 2019.^[1]^

2020s

On August 31, 2020, LaCivita was announced as head of Preserve America, a new pro-Trump superPAC that began a $30 million advertising blitz in early September, focusing initially on the swing states of Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Iowa, and Georgia.^[59]^ In 2022, he was the general consultant for Ron Johnson's re-election bid for United States Senator from Wisconsin.^[60]^ LaCivita most recently served as a senior advisor on Donald Trump's successful 2024 presidential campaign.^[2]^[61]^

As of 2023, LaCivita was the chief strategist of Trump's MAGA Inc. Super PAC.^[62]^ In March 2024, LaCivita also became Chief Operating Officer of the Republican National Committee.^[63]^

Arlington National Cemetery incident

On August 27, 2024, an incident occurred at Arlington National Cemetery in which two Trump staffers, Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, shoved a female cemetery employee who was trying to stop the Trump team from photographing and filming a campaign promotion in a heavily restricted area of the cemetery known as Section 60, which is primarily reserved for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. A federal law prohibits the use of U.S. military facilities, cemeteries in particular, for political campaigns.^[64]^

LaCivita called the cemetery employee a “despicable individual”^[65]^ and, in response to a rebuke from the U.S. Army, posted a video on Twitter "hoping to trigger the hacks” at the Office of the Army Secretary.^[66]^

2025 Albanian parliamentary election

In 2025, LaCivita advised Albania’s Democratic Party and its leader Sali Berisha ahead of national elections. Party spokesperson Alfred Lela highlighted parallels between Berisha and Trump, both portrayed as embattled political figures facing establishment resistance. LaCivita publicly supported Berisha despite his U.S. blacklist designation over alleged corruption, stating his aim to "make Albania great again." Berisha, previously Albania’s president and prime minister, regained control of the party in 2024 after internal legal battles. His campaign against Prime Minister Edi Rama marked a bid to end 12 years of Socialist Party rule.^[67]^

...

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old

In 2005 and 2006, :{LaCivita:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: was senior strategist for Vern Buchanan, who won a hotly contested :{Republican}: primary, then the general election in :{Florida's}: 13th **...****---**

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christopher J. LaCivita (born 1966) is an American political consultant, and president of the firm Advancing Strategies LLC. He was formerly withCrosslink Strategy, a conservative lobbying and political consulting firm founded by former John McCain advisor Terry Nelson. LaCivita is often mentioned for his role as media advisor to the Swift Boat Veterans, an independent-expenditure group active in the 2004 presidential election.

LaCivita was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, but grew up in the Richmond, Virginia area, graduating from Midlothian High School. He received his bachelor's degree in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1989.^[1] He joined the US Marine Corps and was awarded a Purple Heartfor wounds received while serving in the :{Persian Gulf}::{ War}: in 1991. Afterwards, he taught part-time at Regent University.^[2]

Political career:

Active in Republican politics following his Gulf War service, LaCivita did field work for George F. Allen in central Virginia during his 1991 congressional campaign, then went with him to Capitol Hill, serving as a legislative assistant on foreign and defense policy.^[3] When Allen ran for governor in 1993, LaCivita organized in the Richmond area, Southside and central Virginia, then was appointed to serve as an assistant secretary of administration.^[4]

He left state service in 1995 to help run Allen's political action committee, assisting legislative races that year (wherein the GOP captured a tie in the State Senate). LaCivita was named executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia in 1996, after Allen's allies won control of the RPV.^[3] LaCivita ran the party as James S. Gilmore succeeded Allen as Governor in 1997, acting as overseer of internal partisan squabbles, but going on later to capture control of both houses of the General Assembly in 1999.^[5]

By then, LaCivita, and former gubernatorial chief of staff Jay Timmons, were guiding Allen's campaign for U.S. Senate, ultimately defeating two-term Democratic incumbent Chuck Robb with 52% in a hard-fought contest in November 2000.^[3][6]

In the fall of 2001, LaCivita was drafted in the final two months to shore up the losing campaign of Attorney General Mark Earley for Governor against Mark Warner.^[7] As Fred Barnes wrote, "Earley wasted the summer and didn't find a message until September -- after party officials dispatched Chris LaCivita, the political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to run his campaign. The message, it turns out, is a hardy perennial for Republicans: taxes."^[8] Earley, down by 13 points in mid-summer, closed the gap late in the campaign^[9] eventually lost by five points, 52%-47%, to the millionaire Democrat.

During the 2002 midterm election cycle, LaCivita served the political director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, under the chairmanship of Senator Bill Frist.^[10] That November, the GOP scored a net gain of two Senate seats, recapturing control of the upper chamber.

While at the NRSC, LaCivita was the direct supervisor of James Tobin, another former employee of the DCI Group. In 2005, Tobin was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for his role in the 2002 NH phone jamming scandal for his activities during that campaign; LaCivita was on Tobin's witness list but never called. Democrats, who sought testimony from LaCivita for a civil suit tied to the same incident, recently settled that civil suit out of court. Tobin's conviction was overturned on appeal.

In 2003, LaCivita served as President of Progress for America, later giving that role to former DCI employee Brian McCabe while LaCivita became its executive director.

LaCivita at one time worked for the Republican political consulting firm DCI Group, which had close ties both to Progress for America and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. During the 2004 US Presidential campaign, LaCivita served as consultant and principal media advisor to the Swift Boat Veterans, writing and producing the group's memorable (and controversial) commercials in association with Rick Reed. At the same time, LaCivita consulted for the NRSC, now headed by former client George Allen, as it scored a net gain of four Senate seats in the November 2004 general elections.

LaCivita continued his independent-expenditure work in 2005, producing ads in support of GOP Attorney General Jerry Kilgore in his unsuccessful campaign for Governor of Virginia.

In 2005 and 2006, LaCivita was senior strategist for Vern Buchanan, who won a hotly contested Republican primary, then the general election in Florida's 13th congressional district by less than 400 votes. LaCivita also ran an independent organization (Floridians for a Better and Brighter Future) during that state's gubernatorial primary election in 2005-06, whose target was former Insurance Commissioner Tom Gallagher. LaCivita's favored candidate, Charlie Crist, won the party’s nomination, and was subsequently elected Florida’s governor.

LaCivita also served as general consultant to businessman Bob Corker's successful primary and general-election campaigns for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee, succeeding his former boss Bill Frist. These successes were offset by the narrow defeat that November of George Allen for re-election in LaCivita's home state of Virginia by Democrat Jim Webb, a margin of 9,329 votes.

Interviewed in March, 2007, LaCivita told reporters that the GOP could silence the press uproar over the sudden dismissal of eight US Attorneys by promoting stories about the most extreme among anti-Bush activists. "When are we going to make it about Code Pink and the rest of the liberal weirdos controlling the Democrat agenda?" he asked.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, LaCivita and Tony Feather launched a new 501(c)4 issues advocacy group, the American Issues Project, after a series of meetings with other Swift Boat donors. In August 2008, AIP began airing ads in battleground states seeking to raise questions about Democratic Party presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama's ties to former student radical William Ayers.^[11] The American Issues Project has a sole donor, Harold Simmons, an 87-year old Dallas billionaire who was also a principal donor, along with T. Boone Pickens, to the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth PAC. On October 10, 2008, a campaign finance watchdog group, Democracy 21, filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about the group's alleged violations of election campaign law.^[12]

In 2009, LaCivita was the general strategist for State Senator Ken Cuccinelli's successful bid for Attorney General of Virginia. He also guided Jeffrey McWaters to victory in a December special election for Virginia State Senate, occasioned by the departure of longtime incumbent Ken Stolle in Virginia Beach.

In the summer of 2010, LaCivita returned to the NRSC as its Political Director, the same post he'd held in 2002.^[13] Under his direction, the GOP scored a net gain of five Senate seats in the November 2010 general elections.

Throughout 2010, LaCivita consulted for several GOP congressional campaigns, most prominently that of State Senator Robert Hurt who was elected inVirginia's 5th Congressional District over Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello. He also aided businessman Scott Rigell in his successful bid for election inVirginia's 2nd Congressional District over incumbent Glenn Nye.^[14] But his client in Missouri's 3rd congressional district, Ed Martin, fell short in his bid to unseat Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan.

LaCivita lives outside Richmond with his wife, Catherine, and their two children.

References:{:(style="margin-left:-0.25em;margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit source | edit:{beta:(style="vertical-align:top;padding-left:0.5em;display:inline !important"):}::{]}:

^ April 2002, Campaigns & Elections, “Rising Political Stars of 2002”
1. ^ http://www.nndb.com/people/753/000171240/**
2. ^ ^a ^b ^c 2 June 1999, Washington Post, R.H. Melton, “Virginia Notebook; Out of GOP Frying Pan, Into 2000 Campaign Fire”
3. ^ 3 June 1999, Associated Press "GOP director to manage Allen's campaign”
4. ^ 15 February 1999, Washington Post, R.H. Melton, “Va. GOP's Power Quest Beset by Internal Squabbles”
5. ^ 22 October 2000, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jeff Schapiro, “Skull Sessions Set Course Of Campaigns; Political Friends Sounding Boards”
6. ^ December 2001 / January 2002, Campaigns & Elections, David Beiler, “Mark Warner's Five-Year Plan”
7. ^ 29 October 2001, The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes, "Earley to Bed?; Democrat Mark Warner threatens the GOP hold on Virginia”
8. ^ 4 November 2001, Washington Times, Stephen Dinan, "Earley camp optimistic after poll shows closer race”
9. ^ 8 January 2001, Roll Call, Rachel Van Dongen, "In With the New: Allen Campaign Chief Joins NRSC As Political Director”
10. ^ "Group with Swift Boat alumni readies ads attacking Obama" September 13, 2008
11. ^ "Watchdog Seeks Probe of a Political Groups' TV ADs," Associated Press, October 10, 2008.
12. ^ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/campaigns-dont-coordinate-really/?hp "Campaigns Don’t Coordinate. Really." New York Times, 10/20/2010
13. ^ http://bearingdrift.com/2010/03/01/chris-lacivita-joins-scott-rigell-campaign/**

External links:

Categories:

-----

Shop Talk: :{LaCivita:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: Joins Akin in the Show-Me State : Roll Call Politics

www.rollcall.com/.../Todd-Akin-Missouri-Senate-Chris-LaCivita-207184...‎

Jul 12, 2011 - Veteran :{GOP:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: strategist Chris :{LaCivita}: has signed on as general **...** Warner Is Buying, Issa Is Counting · :{Florida's}: 2nd District: When You Don't **...**

### Allen West falls further behind - Alex Isenstadt - POLITICO.com

www.politico.com › Congress ‎

Nov 18, 2012 - **...** Birnbaum, Gregg, Boliek, :{Brooks:(style="font-weight:bold"):}:, Brannen, Kate, Bresnahan, John, Budoff Brown, **...** The :{Republican}: had argued that those votes had been accidentally **...**:{Florida}: has a Tuesday deadline for certifying the results from all three **...** Chris :{LaCivita}:, a top West strategist, said in a Sunday interview that Walker **...**

### Cuccinelli throws brushback at Cantor - POLITICO.com

www.politico.com/.../cuccinelli-throws-brushback-at-cantor-151200.htm...‎

Dec 5, 2012 - Virginia Attorney General and presumptive :{GOP:(style="font-weight:bold"):}: gubernatorial nominee Ken **...**Dan, Birnbaum, Gregg, Boliek, :{Brooks}:, Brannen, Kate, Bresnahan, John **....** Chris :{LaCivita}:, a Cuccinelli strategist who is also close to some in Cantor's **.....** Poll: Obama up 61 points with Nevada Latinos, up 30 points in :{Florida}:.

-----blog 2008 kos

God, do I love the internets...and do I love this cite.

Ask for a little open-source research, and yee shall receive. We shall not be swift-boated ever again.

As you may recall yesterday, Josh Marshall of Talkingpointsmemo.com put up a post about Chris LaCivita of 2004 Swift-boat fame. LaCivita has vowed to "attack Obama viciously".

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpoi...

So, going back to the heady days of the Valerie Plame affair, the call needed to go out to find out who exactly this LaCivita guy is and be ahead of the curve before anybody starts blindly listening to his 2.0 Swift Boat garbage against Barrack.

Within 6 hours, here is what people came up with:

Wikipedia Entry on Chris LaCivita by slinkerwink

http://www.sourcewatch.org/...

-DCI Group, a Republican lobbying firm

-Progress for America, a conservative 'grassroots' organization set up by Tony Feather, friend of

Karl Rove.

-CRC (Creative Response Concepts), a public-relations firm in Arlington

A biographical note on LaCivita states that he was "political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the historic 2002 election cycle" and that he was "responsible for the day-to-day management and implementation of the NRSC’s $70 million issue advocacy campaign. This included nearly $60 million in purchased TV time, and over 155 individual 'issue ads' for 17 states. Mr. LaCivita was also responsible for implementing polling, mail and phone programs in conjunction with his regional political staff."

campaign manager of [[George Allen]'s successful bid for the United States Senate in 2000

political director of NRSC in 2002 places him on the edge of a Republican phone-jamming scandal in which Democratic get-out-the-vote calls in Manchester, N.H., were blocked on election day.[2] In December 2005 James Tobin, who worked under LaCivita as the New England regional director, was convicted of two felony telephone harassment charges but was acquitted of the charge of conspiring against voters rights.

According to Federal Election Committee filings by SBVT, LaCivita received $35,700 for his media consulting work.[4] He received $39,897 for providing consulting services to Progress for America.

* Graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with majors in political science and international affairs in 1989

* United State Marines Corps including in the Persian Gulf War

* legislative assistant handling defense issues and the Judiciary Committee for then-Rep. George Allen; served as his political director in his 1991 race for Congress;

* Regent University adjunct instructor in campaign management 1991-1993

* assistant Secretary of Administration under then Governor Allen, a cabinet post in which he had oversight of 5 state agencies, including the statewide procurement system.

* Worked on Allen's 1993 campaign for Governor.

* executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia

* campaign manager of George Allen’s successful bid for the United States Senate in 2000.

* political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the historic 2002 election cycle

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Chris_LaCivita

And I have to confess that I like RubyGal's approach - remind me not to piss you off:

We should go directly to county records also..if (0+ / 0-)

anyone is in his area...a search of local lawsuits, divorce, property tax records, protective orders etc etc..that would be helpful..any local watering holes where he hangs..ex-girlfriends..the whole shebang.....

This one from DorothyT is kind of fun:

CANDIDATE LINKED TO MTV? NO BIG DEAL

Daily Press (Newport News, VA)

August 7, 1996

BYLINE: JIM SPENCER

LaCivita distributed to the media an RPV press release that slammed Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mark Warner because Warner's Internet homepage recently referred its viewers to MTV's Internet site.

LaCivita tried to smear Mark Warner because the MTV Internet site includes a section called "Authority Sucks" for people fed up with their bosses and a section soliciting lesbian fantasies about female rock stars for an MTV show called "Sex in the '90s." This, LaCivita announced, "shows just how hollow the Family First agenda of the Democrats really is."

Bob Dole appeared on the same cable network trying to do exactly what Warner was doing on the Internet - attract young voters.

He's on the Virginia Winegrowers Advisory Board (by VA Breeze).

generic name offered this advice:

This is how to hit a 527 (2+ / 0-)

527 organizations cannot collude with a candidate, so linking him very extensively to McCain might be a fruitful avenue of investigation

And Dorothy T also gave us this:

He's a consultant with CrossLinkStragegy in DC, at least as of their website in 2007. He was also with a 527 in FL that raised serious money to elect Crist.

We all know this guy. We just need everybody else to know this guy as well - I bet he is still smarting from there being a Senator Webb.

Names/entities to follow:

-Regent University and Pat Robertson

-George Allen

-Swift Boat Veterans For Truth (try not to gag)

-Virginia GOP

-National Republican Senatorial Committee / NRSC / Phone-jamming scandal / James Tobin

-Progreess for America

-CrossLinkStrategy

(please pick one you particularly dislike).

Thank you, Everyone. I will try to keep the conversation together and going, but by all means talk to each other.

More to follow.

TUG