‘Master of the Dark Arts’ and Master Magician Lead Swamp-Filled Trump Election Team
If he is allowed another term in office, trump will hit the ground running by further filling the swamp. His trump campaign is being led by two of the most powerful political operatives you never heard of, including one with indirect ties to the Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election and another who was the mastermind of the notorious swift boat smearing of 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry.
The senior advisors include Virginian Chris LaCivita and Floridian Susie Wiles. LaCivita was described by Democratic strategist Mo Elleithee as, “the master of the dark arts and epitomizes all that is evil with Republican politics. But he is very, very effective and very, very good at what he does.”
Wiles was the master magician who coordinated trump’s critical 2016 victory in Florida. She also snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in Ron DeSantis’s 2018 race for Florida governor.
LaCivita has been a key strategist for decades for numerous GOP campaigns, including, currently as a consultant for the 2022 re-election of Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., a far right legislator who strongly supported trump’s discredited claims of voter fraud in 2020, denies the science of climate change and promoted bogus treatments for COVID-19.
But LaCivita’s most infamous and shameless political shenanigans came in 2004 in the midst of the heated presidential race between Kerry and Republican George W. Bush. LaCivita organized an effort called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, casting doubts on Kerry’s war record in Vietnam and effectively sabotaging his presidential campaign.
During the war, Kerry was among the 3,500 sailors who were assigned to swift boats, navy riverine craft. For his service, Kerry won medals including the Silver Star. A series of TV ads and a book by a group known as “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” claimed that Kerry did not deserve the Naval honor. The campaign proved to be a classic smear campaign, even leading to the use of the pejorative term “Swiftboating,” meaning “an untrue or unfair political attack or smear campaign.”
Kerry later became involved in protests against the Vietnam war, before entering politics and becoming a Massachusetts senator. He was secretary of state under President Barack Obama and is currently President Joe Biden’s climate envoy.
In 2004, LaCivita was instrumental in creating “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” which morphed into “Swift Vets and POWs for Truth.” The organization claimed to be non-political but was financed by major Republican donors. In 2004, the New York Times examined the Swift Boat claims and concluded that Kerry “has stretched the truth here and there, but earned his decorations.”
The Times also determined that “the Swift Boat Veterans, contradicted by official records and virtually everyone who witnessed the incidents, are engaging in one of the ugliest smears in modern U.S. politics.”
Regarding the medal dispute, a Los Angeles Times editorial stated, “These charges against John Kerry are false…Kerry is backed by almost all those who witnessed the events in question, as well as by documentation.”
Another notch on LaCivita’s list of innuendo and smear came with his involvement in the 2008 presidential campaign when he exaggerated Obama’s links with Bill Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois and former member of the 1960s revolutionary group, the Weather Underground.
Investigations by CNN, The New York Times and other news organizations concluded that Obama did not have a close relationship with Ayers. Obama condemned Ayers’ past and said that he did not have a close association with him.
Obama and Ayers’ were both on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, and their terms overlapped for three years from 1999 to 2002. The Woods Fund of Chicago is a private independent foundation whose goal is to increase opportunities for less-advantaged people and communities in the Chicago metropolitan area.
Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, another former Weather Underground activist, hosted a gathering at their home in 1995, where Alice Palmer introduced Obama as her chosen successor in the Illinois State Senate.
LaCivita was instrumental in twisting The Obama–Ayers connection into a major campaignv for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
After the controversy, Ayers was defended by officials and others in Chicago. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley issued a statement in support of Bill Ayers and the Chicago Tribune editorialized in Ayers’ support.
William C. Ibershof, the lead federal prosecutor of the Weather Underground case, wrote to The New York Times on October 9, 2008, “I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child. Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.”
LaCivita wears multiple hats. He is the senior strategist for Make America Great Again Inc. (MAGA Inc.), a Super PAC backed by trump that was formed in 2022 and that can raise unlimited amounts of money. LaCivita has worked with MAGA Inc. though his personal consulting company, FP1. MAGA Inc. which has not yet disclosed its donors, has spent about $8.5 million on ads this month to support Republican Senate candidates in Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to federal records.
During the 2020 campaign, LaCivita led Preserve America PAC, a group that was almost entirely funded by entities connected to the late Las Vegas casino tycoon and trump supporter, Sheldon Adelson and which spent about $100 million over the final months of the campaign to help elect trump.
LaCivita, 57, was wounded as a Marine in an artillery unit during the 1990 Gulf War. After his discharge from the military, he has worked in the campaigns of former Republican senators George Allen of Virginia and Bob Corker of Tennessee, and Linda McMahon, the small business administrator under trump. He has had senior roles for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and was a consultant for the Congressional Leadership Fund, the outside group that supports Republican House candidates.
While at the NRSC, LaCivita was the direct supervisor of James Tobin, who previously worked with LaCivita for the Republican consulting firm, DCI Group. In 2005, Tobin was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison for his role in the 2002 New Hampshire phone jamming and election tampering scandal for his activities during that campaign. Democrats, who sought testimony from LaCivita for a civil suit tied to the same incident, settled the civil suit out of court. Tobin’s conviction was overturned on appeal.
During the 2016 presidential race, LaCivita was a senior adviser to the presidential campaign of Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.. After Paul suspended his campaign, LaCivita worked for the Republican National Committee, helping to organize opposition to a floor effort at the Republican convention to deny trump the nomination.
LaCivita is a partner in FP1 Strategies, a national public-affairs and campaign firm founded in 2012. The company website said it has helped elect 31 Republican U.S. Senators, eight Republican governors, 56 Republican members of Congress and four Republican attorneys general. The company was recently sold to Omnicom, the fourth largest advertising agency in the world.
Since 2004, LaCivita has been president of the firm Advancing Strategies LLC. The company was incorporated in 2023 and in the first quarter of this year, the trump campaign paid the company $122,000 for services.
Suzie Wiles is the daughter of famed sportscaster and professional football player, Pat Summerall. She was a key player in trump’s unexpected pivotal win Florida in 2016 by 1.2 percentage points; in 2020, the margin increased to 3.3 points. In September 2018, trump sent Wiles to save then Rep. Ron DeSantis, whose quest for governor was foundering. Again, Wiles pulled off a victory, leading to DeSantis’s ascension to governor.
Since March 2021, Wiles has been CEO of Trump’s Save America PAC, which most recently had $103 million cash in its coffers.
Wiles also ran the 2010 campaign of two-term Gov. Rick Scott, and the 2012 presidential campaign of Jon Huntsman. Wiles worked in the Reagan white House and had a senior post under Labor Secretary Jack Kemp.
She also ran the Florida-based lobbying firm Ballard Partners for nearly 10 years, leaving in September 2019. Trump named Ballard principal, Brian Ballard, as his Florida finance chairman, and Ballard raised millions for his campaign. Ballard and trump have known each other for more than three decades.
The trump administration was very good for Wiles and Ballard. The firm was the most successful lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and signed up more than 60 clients after trump’s inauguration. Clients paid Ballard nearly $10 million in 2016 to help navigate the new administration. The company brought in another $3.1 million from foreign clients including Turkey and the Dominican Republic.
Wiles’ former husband is Lanny Wiles, a veteran GOP operative tied to a Russian lobbyist who attended the infamous Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016. At the meeting were three senior members of the 2016 trump campaign, including Donald trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort along with four other U.S. citizens, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Russian lobbyist and former Soviet officer, Rinat Akhmetshin. The meeting was considered to be a key piece of evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Wiles is registered as a foreign agent and a business associate is Akhmetshin, a former Soviet officer and Washington, D.C., lobbyist. The two were hired to lobby in support of Bergev Ryskaliyev, a fugitive from Kazakh, who is alleged to have stolen millions from the Central Asian country. Filings from the Foreign Agent Registration Act or FARA show that Ryskaliyev paid Wiles $135,000 to promote his case in Congress.
Wiles and Akhmetshin also were tied to Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney who told trump Jr. that she had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton obtained from the Russian government leading up to the Trump Tower meeting. A short time after the Trump Tower meeting, Wiles reportedly held a seat for Veselnitskaya at a June 2016 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on “U.S Policy Toward Putin’s Russia.”
Akhmetshin was paid $60,000 to help draft language about Ryskaliyev’s situation meant to be entered into the Congressional Record by a member of Congress. On April 2, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., submitted a statement into the Congressional Record that railed against alleged human rights abuses by the Kazakhstan government and called for the State Department to review Ryskaliyev’s case.
Hunter was in congress from 2013 to 2020. In August 2018, Hunter and his campaign manager and wife, Margaret Jankowski, were indicted on charges including conspiracy, wire fraud, and violating campaign finance laws. Jankowski pleaded guilty to corruption and named her husband as a co-conspirator in using campaign funds for personal expenses. Jankowski said that she had conspired with her husband to spend more than $200,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses.
Hunter pleaded guilty on one count of misusing campaign funds and was sentenced to 11 months in prison, scheduled to begin in January 2021. He was pardoned by trump in December 2020. Trump pardoned Jankowski the next day and neither served a day in prison. Hunter resigned from Congress on Jan. 7, 2020.
Within a year after the Trump Tower meeting, Suzie Wiles and Lanny Wiles were divorced.
FloridaPolitics.com also reported that tax records dating back as far as 1991 through 2014, Wiles, her husband, and business partner, Tony Boselli, have a history of failing to pay both personal and corporate income tax. Boselli is a former 6-foot-6, 320 pound professional football player.
The year she ran Scott’s campaign for governor, Suzie Wiles failed to pay more than $57,000 in federal taxes. In 2011, as she ran Huntsman’s bid for the White House, and later joined Mitt Romney’s campaign as an adviser, she failed to pay $46,000 in federal taxes, the website reported.
LaCivita has lately been up to his old dirty tricks with a deepfake video purporting to show an NBC reporter ridiculing and berating trump rivals prior to last month’s third Republican primary debate.
LaCivita posted the video on Nov. 8 of Garrett Haake seemingly trash-talking Trump’s rivals ahead of the Miami debate, which NBC News co-hosted with the Republican National Committee.
The video, which was still on X started off as a normal “Meet the Press”-style report. But shortly it cut to footage of the candidates, with Haake’s voice berating each of the presidential hopefuls as they appeared on screen.
“This is Ron DeSantis, an establishment RINO that wears insoles in his boots in order to look taller,” the voice says over video of the Florida governor.
“And this is Nikki Haley,” said the voice of “Haake.” “Nobody really gives a s–t about Nikki Haley.”
The video then cut to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, with the voice saying, “this guy is probably just a stagehand.”
“Who the f– invited this guy?” the voice then asked as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie appeared on the screen.
“And this guy is probably just delivering pizzas,” the roll call concluded of Vivek Ramaswamy.
The video ends with Haake’s voice saying “nobody cares about these bulls–t RINO debates. Especially when you know that Donald Trump is going to kick some ass tonight.”
NBC demanded the trump camp take down the fake report.
After sharing the video, LaCivita tweeted, “Now this is reporting!” LaCivita followed up with “To keep @NBCNews Lawyers off my ass, please note…. THIS IS A PARODY!”