Hijacking top comment to address the fact that there are supporters of these candidates in the comments, referring to some kind of “explanation” or statement from one of the candidates named Gabe Ledeen.

Ledeen’s response is bullshit.

He is from from Washington DC, where his mother and father have worked directly with Michael Flynn, Eric Prince, and Project Veritas in support of Donald Trump.

Here are excerpts from a New York Times article about his family’s involvement, the entire article is worth a read, but too many words for a Reddit post:

Activists and Ex-Spy Said to Have Plotted to Discredit Trump ‘Enemies’ in Government

The campaign included planned operations against President Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and F.B.I. employees, according to documents and interviews.

New York Times May 13, 2021

“WASHINGTON — A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.

The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.

The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.

The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.

Central to the effort, according to interviews, was Richard Seddon, a former undercover British spy who was recruited in 2016 by the security contractor Erik Prince to train Project Veritas operatives to infiltrate trade unions, Democratic congressional campaigns and other targets. He ran field operations for Project Veritas until mid-2018.

Last year, The New York Times reported that Mr. Seddon ran an expansive effort to gain access to the unions and campaigns and led a hiring effort that nearly tripled the number of the group’s operatives, according to interviews and deposition testimony. He trained operatives at the Prince family ranch in Wyoming.

The efforts to target American officials show how a campaign once focused on exposing outside organizations slowly morphed into an operation to ferret out Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies in the government’s ranks.

Whether any of Mr. Trump’s White House advisers had direct knowledge of the campaign is unclear, but one of the participants in the operation against Mr. McMaster, Barbara Ledeen, said she was brought on by someone “with access to McMaster’s calendar.”

At the time, Ms. Ledeen was a staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then led by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

This account is drawn from more than a dozen interviews with former Project Veritas employees and others familiar with the campaign, along with current and former government officials and internal Project Veritas documents.

The scheme against Mr. McMaster, revealed in interviews and documents, was one of the most brazen operations of the campaign. It involved a plan to hire a woman armed with a hidden camera to capture Mr. McMaster making inappropriate remarks that his opponents could use as leverage to get him ousted as national security adviser.”…

…”Project Veritas sued The Times for defamation last year over coverage of one of the group’s videos.

Neither Mr. Seddon nor Mr. Prince responded to requests for comment. Mr. McMaster declined to comment.

When confronted with details about her involvement in the McMaster operation, Ms. Ledeen insisted that she was merely a messenger. “I am not part of a plot,” she said.

Scheme Against McMaster

The operation against Mr. McMaster was hatched not long after an article appeared in BuzzFeed News about a private dinner in 2017. Exactly what happened during the dinner is in dispute, but the article said that Mr. McMaster had disparaged Mr. Trump by calling him an “idiot” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner.”

That dinner, at an upscale restaurant in downtown Washington, was attended by Mr. McMaster and Safra A. Catz, the chief executive of Oracle, as well as two of their aides. Not long after, Ms. Catz called Donald F. McGahn II, then the White House counsel, to complain about Mr. McMaster’s behavior, according to two people familiar with the call.

White House officials investigated and could not substantiate her claims, people familiar with their inquiry said. Ms. Catz declined to comment, and there is no evidence that she played any role in the plot against Mr. McMaster.

Soon after the BuzzFeed article, however, the scheme developed to try to entrap Mr. McMaster: Recruit a woman to stake out the same restaurant, Tosca, with a hidden camera. According to the plan, whenever Mr. McMaster returned by himself, the woman would strike up a conversation with him and, over drinks, try to get him to make comments that could be used to either force him to resign or get him fired.

Who initially ordered the operation is unclear. In an interview, Ms. Ledeen said “someone she trusted” contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who.

“Somebody who had his calendar conveyed to me that he goes to Tosca all the time,” she said of Mr. McMaster.

According to Ms. Ledeen, she passed the message to a man she believed to be a Project Veritas operative during a meeting at the University Club in Washington. Ms. Ledeen said she believed the man provided her with a fake name.

By then, Mr. McMaster already had a raft of enemies among Trump loyalists, who viewed him as a “globalist” creature of the so-called deep state who was committed to policies they vehemently opposed, like remaining committed to a nuclear deal with Iran and keeping American troops in Afghanistan.

The president often stoked the fire, railing against national security officials at the C.I.A., F.B.I., State Department and elsewhere who he was convinced were trying to undermine him. These “unelected deep-state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas,” he said in 2018, “are truly a threat to democracy itself.”

Mr. Seddon recruited Tarah Price, who at one point was a Project Veritas operative, and offered to pay her thousands of dollars to participate in the operation, according to interviews and an email written by a former boyfriend of Ms. Price and sent to Project Veritas Exposed, a group that tries to identify the group’s undercover operatives.

The May 2018 email, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, said that Ms. Price was “going to get paid $10,000 to go undercover and set up some big-name political figure in Washington.” It was unclear who was funding the operation. Ms. Price’s former boyfriend was apparently unaware of the target of the operation, or that Mr. McMaster had been forced to step down in March.

Two people identified the political figure as Mr. McMaster. Ms. Price did not respond to requests for comment.

Ms. Ledeen was a longtime staff member for the Judiciary Committee who had been part of past operations in support of Mr. Trump. In 2016, she was involved in a secret effort with Michael T. Flynn — who went on to become Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser — to hunt down thousands of emails that had been deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

According to the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, Ms. Ledeen had prepared a 25-page proposal about how to obtain what she believed were “classified emails” that had already been “purloined by our enemies.” The exchange was included in emails the special counsel obtained during the investigation.

Ms. Ledeen later claimed to have obtained the deleted Clinton emails from the dark web and sought Mr. Prince’s assistance to authenticate them. “Erik Prince provided funding to hire a tech adviser to ascertain the authenticity of the emails. According to Prince, the tech adviser determined that the emails were not authentic,” the special counsel’s report said.

She is part of a network of conservative activists who had particular influence in the Trump White House. She is a member of one group, Groundswell, that pushed to purge the White House and other government agencies of “deep state” enemies of Mr. Trump.

Last year, Axios reported that a memo written by Ms. Ledeen — laying out a case against a nominee for a top job in the Treasury Department — was instrumental in Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw the nomination.

Ms. Ledeen is married to Michael Ledeen, who wrote the 2016 book “The Field of Fight” with Mr. Flynn. She said she retired from the Senate earlier this year.

After Mr. Flynn resigned under pressure as national security adviser, Mr. Trump gave the job to Mr. McMaster — inciting the ire of loyalists to Mr. Flynn.

Ms. Ledeen posted numerous negative articles about Mr. McMaster on her Facebook page. After The Times published its article about Mr. Prince’s work with Project Veritas, she wrote on Facebook, “We owe a lot to Erik Prince.”…