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Major NJ GOP strategist didn't deny 2020 election results. Many of his clients do.
By
Ian Shearn (
New Jersey Spotlight
)
Published Oct 26, 2022
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From video by the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol
By
Ian Shearn (
New Jersey Spotlight
)
Published Oct 26, 2022
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Despite unpleasant departures from his two most famous clients — first, former Gov. Chris Christie, and, more recently, former President Donald Trump — Bill Stepien, New Jersey’s most prominent GOP operative, endures.
Since Stepien’s well-publicized, self-proclaimed falling-out with Trump after the 2020 election, where he served as campaign manager, his consulting firm National Public Affairs has collected more than $3 million in political consulting fees, according to Federal Election Commission reports. The lion’s share of it has come from 17 Republican congressional candidates running in this year’s midterm elections.
Almost all of Stepien’s congressional candidates are MAGA loyalists — many of them endorsed, and some hand-picked, by Trump. And 11 of them are unapologetic election deniers, which was the very issue Stepien claims caused his break from Team Trump.
“I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional,” Stepien testified to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. “That led to me stepping away,” he added in a video clip played by the committee at a televised public hearing in June.
For the most part, the national media portrayed Stepien as a Trump aide who spoke truth to misguided power. That appears to be true, but it didn’t stop Stepien from being paid by candidates pushing the election-denying fervor that has since consumed the Republican Party.
“Stepien is your classic follow-the-money kind of guy. … His story is similar to a lot of people in this business,” said Carl Golden, a longtime Republican insider who is now senior contributing analyst with the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University. “And it certainly hasn’t hurt his bottom line.” (Golden is a regular opinion writer at NJ Spotlight News.)
Lucrative list of clients
Stepien, who declined requests for an interview, has a client list that includes New Jersey’s own Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), along with five other members of Congress who on Jan. 6, 2021 voted to reject President Joe Biden’s victory: Reps. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), Jason T. Smith (R-MO), Mary E. Miller (R-IL) and Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).
Stepien’s most lucrative client — with $744,000 in consulting fees — is Wyoming’s Republican House candidate Harriet Hageman, who trounced incumbent Liz Cheney in this year’s GOP primary. Cheney, the current vice chair on the House Select Committee, was publicly ostracized by Trump and stripped of her party leadership position after she supported Trump’s second impeachment last year.
During the campaign, Hageman was elusive on where she stood on the validity of the 2020 presidential election until August when she was well ahead in the polls.
“Absolutely the election was rigged. It was rigged to make sure that President Trump could not get re-elected,” Hageman said at a political rally in August. “What happened in 2020 is a travesty.”
Stepien’s most challenging campaign is in the hotly contested battleground race for U.S. Senate in Alaska. The stakes of that contest are high, with the Senate currently deadlocked 50-50. Stepien’s client, election-denying Republican Kelly Tshibaka, is challenging fellow Republican Lisa Murkowski, the longtime incumbent who has become a Trump target. (Alaska’s new election system advances the top four vote-getters to the general election, regardless of party.)
Trump, who vowed revenge against Murkowski — and other Republican lawmakers who supported his second impeachment — has endorsed Tshibaka. Murkowski called on Trump to resign after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. She was also the only Republican to oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Election denier Ronny Jackson
Another Stepien client is high-profile election denier Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX), Trump’s former White House physician, who has paid Stepien $87,000 in the current election cycle. Last year, the inspector general of the Department of Defense issued a report documenting Jackson’s inappropriate interactions with subordinates and improper use of alcohol while on duty.
Jeff Van Drew’s campaign paid Stepien’s firm $155,000 for consulting during this year’s primary, which Van Drew won with 87% of the vote. The New Jersey Republican State Committee paid Stepien an additional $8,000 in May for the Van Drew campaign. In 2019, Stepien was the key figure in convincing Van Drew to defect from the Democrats after he voted against Trump’s first impeachment.
In addition to his midterm work, Stepien has remained on Trump’s political team. “Bill is one of the most hardcore supporters of President Trump,” Jason Miller, another senior adviser on the 2020 campaign, told The Washington Post in June. He has remained in Trump’s inner circle and is in constant communication with Trump, he added.
Stepien has been collecting a $10,000 monthly consulting fee, $230,000 in total, from two of Trump’s political action committees since he quit in January 2021. More than half of that comes from the Save America PAC, which Trump established six days after the election. That fund became the repository for more than $100 million in donations solicited to litigate the 2020 election results.
Immediately after the 2020 election, the Trump campaign announced an “Election Defense Fund” and aggressively solicited donations for election-related court cases in several battleground states. In the month following the election, more than $200 million poured into several fundraising committees, including Save America.
“These tremendous fundraising numbers show President Trump remains the leader and source of energy for the Republican Party, and that his supporters are dedicated to fighting for the rightful, legal outcome of the 2020 general election,” Stepien said in a statement at the time.
That was weeks after Stepien and other senior Trump advisers had told the president on Nov. 7 it was over. There was no fraud; he had lost.
Two days later, Trump created the Save America PAC, to which most of the “defense fund” donations were diverted. By the end of the year, Save America would haul in $30 million, almost all of it from the Trump Make America Great Again PAC.
Save America and the MAGA PAC are the two sources of payments to Stepien and many other Trump operatives. The two PACs have also paid Stepien’s lawyer Kevin Marino, who represented him regarding his Jan. 6 subpoena.
Jan. 6 select committee
The Save America PAC has caught the attention of the Jan. 6 Select Committee.
“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said during the public hearing in which Stepien’s video testimony was played. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off.”
During the June 13 hearing, committee counsel Amanda Wicks filled in some of the blanks, revealing new information:
“The Save America PAC made millions of dollars of contributions to pro-Trump organizations, including $1 million to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation, $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, a conservative organization which employs several former Trump administration officials, $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection and over $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the company that ran President Trump’s Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse.”
It is not clear how involved Stepien was with the Save America PAC and the post-election fundraising activities, but as late as January 2021 he was at the very least a vocal cheerleader, advocating for “the rightful, legal outcome of the 2020 general election.”
Save America and other Trump PACs have since become part of the Department of Justice’s criminal probe into the events of Jan. 6. And they want to talk to Stepien about it. He was among 40 people subpoenaed by the department in what The New York Times called “a substantial escalation of the investigation into (Trump’s) efforts to subvert the 2020 election,” people familiar with the inquiry said, according to the Times.
Federal agents also seized phones last week from two people — Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helps coordinate Mr. Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020, the Times reported, quoting anonymous sources.
Neither Stepien nor his lawyer Kevin Marino responded to an email requesting comment about this report, as well as a request for an interview.
It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations. It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, 'Yeah, that wasn’t true.'
Bill Stepien in testimony to the Jan. 6 Committe
Stepien’s testimony
The video excerpts of Stepien’s testimony were played for a single purpose: to demonstrate that Stepien and others had clearly informed the president that there was no evidence of any serious election fraud. With each hearing, the committee was laying out a case against Trump. This hearing’s takeaway was that Trump was clearly informed by top aides the election conspiracy theories were ungrounded.
“It’s an easier job to be telling the president about, you know, wild allegations,” Stepien said in new video clip of his testimony aired Oct. 13 by the select committee. “It’s a harder job to be telling him on the back end that, ‘Yeah, that wasn’t true.’”
But the letter accompanying Stepien’s Nov. 8, 2021 subpoena from the committee reveals a different line of inquiry.
“As manager of the Trump 2020 re-election campaign, you oversaw all aspects of the campaign,” wrote Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the committee chairman. “You then supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ’Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fundraising.”
What was the basis of such an accusation?
It came from a “Select Committee interview of witness with personal knowledge,” the letter explained in a footnote. Whatever exchanges between the committee and Stepien occurred in the closed-door deposition have yet to been made public.
“Additionally,” Thompson continued, “the campaign reportedly urged state and party officials to affect the outcome of the November 2020 election by, among other things, asking states to delay or deny certification of electoral votes and by sending multiple slates of electoral votes to the United States Congress.”
Stepien’s partner
The source of that allegation came from a story by Barton Gellman in The Atlantic on Sept. 23, 2020. It was presciently entitled “The Election That Could Break America: If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?”
In that piece, Gellman wrote: “According to sources at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.”
Asked to comment, a Trump campaign press secretary said, “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election.”
Gellman also mentioned Justin Clark, who is Stepien’s partner at National Public Affairs and was Stepien’s deputy campaign manager for Trump in 2020. Gellman recounted what Clark thought was a private 2019 event in Wisconsin where Clark was speaking to a group of Republican lawyers about Election Day operations strategy. But someone in the room had a tape recorder.
“It’s always been Republicans suppressing votes,” Clark said. “So let’s start playing offense a little bit. … It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
Clark cited a huge advantage for Trump’s Election Day operations: “First and foremost is the consent decree’s gone,” he said, referring to a four-decades-old federal court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The order was the result of the New Jersey 1981 gubernatorial election, where the Republican National Committee tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers, some of them armed, as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force.”
But in 2020 the order had been lifted, and Republicans were amassing an army of 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deemed suspicious-looking. Now, Clark said, Republicans were free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.”
And that, he said, was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal.”
[Stepien] always seems to be around the fire, but never gets burned by it.
Carl Golden, contributing analyst with the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University
‘Now you see him, now you don’t’
In addition to his partnership with Stepien, Clark worked on former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s 2016 presidential campaign. He is also one of the founders of a GOP law firm called Elections LLC. It has received more than $3 million in fees from Trump committees, including the Save America and MAGA PACs, FEC records show. It has also provided legal work for several congressional campaigns, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), a far-right conspiracy theorist who embraces QAnon principles and white supremacy. It has also provided services for four of Stepien’s clients.
Stepien has his fans and detractors, but most of them agree he is a skilled political analyst, exceedingly loyal to his clients while demanding of and often imperious toward his subordinates. He also possesses an innate ability to navigate the perilous trenches of political warfare. In the New Jersey State House, “his nickname in the office was ‘Smoke’ — now you see him, now you don’t,” WNYC journalist/author Matt Katz wrote in his book about Christie, “American Governor.”
Stepien, a Garden State native and Rutgers graduate, started his political career as a driver for former Republican Rep. Bob Franks. He worked in a number of obscure local elections in New Jersey, and made a name for himself after running two successful campaigns for Christie, who in 2013 was planning to run for president and was poised to make him the state GOP chairman.
But Stepien’s world came crashing down in 2014 with Bridgegate, a political dirty-tricks scandal orchestrated by Christie aides during his gubernatorial reelection campaign to punish an uncooperative mayor.
When a state legislative committee probing Bridgegate subpoenaed Stepien to testify, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. When it became clear Stepien had prior knowledge of the Bridgegate operation, Christie cut all ties with him. His exile didn’t last long.
A brief exile
Within a few months, Stepien was getting consulting work for GOPAC, a national Republican advocacy organization with ties to Ocean County’s powerful GOP Chairman George Gilmore, as well as a political consulting firm that had done work for Christie.
Former state Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Bergen), a Christie foe who co-chaired the legislative panel investigating the Bridgegate scandal, concluded that Stepien never really left Christie’s orbit.
“What other conclusion could you draw?” Weinberg said at the time. “Obviously, they found another way to keep him in the Republican inner circle.”
In a recent interview with NJ Spotlight News, former state Assemblymember John Wisniewski, who with Weinberg co-chaired the legislative investigation into Bridgegate, puts it this way: “Mr. Stepien is the Zelig of American politics. His ‘stepping away’ from Trump is about as real as his firing by Chris Christie. Both were theater to conceal his continued support of and from both malefactors.”
“He always seems to be around the fire, but never gets burned by it,” Golden said. “When the big bomb drops, I want to be sitting next to him.”
This article originally appeared on NJSpotlightnews.org and was provided to Gothamist. Find election guides and more election coverage at NJSpotlightnews.org.
Tagged
new jersey
Politics
Ian Shearn
Ian T. Shearn, a former editor and reporter for The Star-Ledger, is a freelance writer for NJ Spotlight News in Hillsborough, New Jersey.
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