Dick Weekley, whose star used to be among the brightest in Texas politics, is rapidly fading. Over the past year, the kingmaker has racked up a slew of defeats. Now, the seasoned political veteran may find himself crossways with one of the richest men in America, Elon Musk.
Last year, Weekley could look forward to the impeachment and removal of Attorney General Ken Paxton and continuing a winning streak for moderates in GOP primaries, all while avoiding statewide scrutiny.
None of that happened.
Ken Paxton prevailed against the Weekley and TLR-backed impeachment effort. TLR had a lousy primary season, and the group’s record of conspiring with Democrats against Texans was laid bare in the documentary Hubris.
Then, yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an expose on a major shakeup at the America PAC, a committee Musk formed with Weekley’s help in May. The article covered the gobs of money spent, an abrupt parting of ways, and, notably, a past kickback scheme involving Weekley’s go-to operative.
According to the article, Weekley and his longtime consultant, Denis Calabrese, shepherded Musk toward two vendors, In Field Strategies, a canvassing group, and Raconteur Media, a digital marketing company. According to the WSJ, TLR’s longtime pollster, Michael Baselice, was also in the mix.
Federal Election Commission filings show In Field and Raconteur were paid more than $21 million from June 12 to July 19 for their canvassing, texting, and advertising services.
What did Musk and America PAC receive in return?
According to the WSJ, In Field registered 4,000 voters, and Raconteur sent 8,500 voter registration forms. That’s an average acquisition cost-per-voter of $1,680 between the two Weekley/TLR groups.
But how did Weekley get launched into Musk’s orbit? The WSJ and reporting from two weeks ago by the New York Times share a possible answer: Joe Lonsdale.
Keeping Bad Company
A recent transplant to Texas, Lonsdale is a tech mogul famous for co-founding Palantir with Peter Thiel.
Lonsdale is close to Musk. A CNBC report from 2022 states that the billionaire texted Lonsdale while he was debating his eventual acquisition of Twitter, now X, and recent reporting from the Times says he serves as a “political confidant” to Musk.
During a 2021 podcast appearance discussing maintaining TLR’s “political infrastructure,” Weekley name-checked a California-to-Texas transplant he’d been cultivating as a potential successor: Joe Lonsdale.
Forerunning Musk’s eventual move to Texas, Lonsdale relocated 8VC, his venture capital firm, and founded the Cicero Institute with his wife in Austin. He’s been outspoken on Twitter and his blog about the ills wrought on society by the left.
Before the Paxton impeachment crashed and burned, both of Lonsdale’s firms would serve as soft landings for multiple mutinous members of the Attorney General’s staff, chief among them, Blake Brickman.
To Paxton’s defense attorney Tony Buzbee, Brickman was the central figure in the carefully orchestrated coup that aimed to depose the sitting attorney general. According to Buzbee, Brickman gave an unsworn statement to the Texas House, which Speaker Dade Phelan’s impeachment team then used as a basis for their now-discredited impeachment.
“He was the one that put it all together,” Buzbee said of Brickman. “He’s the one that put all the pieces together; he was the driving force behind all this.”
Shortly after Paxton showed him the door, Brickman was employed by 8VC, Lonsdale’s venture capital firm.
When Texas Scorecard originally reported about the Weekley-Lonsdale-Brickman connection in May, Brickman was also listed as President of the Cicero Institute, Lonsdale’s public policy outfit. While his former colleague in the AG’s office, Ryan “we took no evidence” Vasser is still listed as an employee, Brickman himself is now absent from Cicero’s employee listings.
Vasser is best known for confessing on cross-examination that he, Brickman, and the other employees who tried to topple the Attorney General “took no evidence” to the FBI.
The Cicero Institute was contacted to clarify Brickman’s status, but no reply was received before publication.
According to the New York Times reporting on the dismissal of Weekley’s recommendations to Musk’s super PAC, Blake Brickman is Lonsdale’s “top political aide.”
Like Weekley, Brickman’s father is a home developer.
Kickback Taint
In addition to reporting the rapid dissolution of professional bonds between Weekley and Musk, the WSJ article covers an ugly episode in the Houston political and philanthropic world.
In 2019, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation sued Denis Calabrese and Raconteur Media for financial wrongdoing.
Specifically, Calabrese was accused of hiring Raconteur and other vendors at inflated prices. Those vendors, in turn, would allegedly pay millions in kickbacks, which, according to the feds, Calabrese stashed in offshore accounts.
After pleading guilty to tax charges, Calabrese was sued civilly by the Arnolds, suffered a default judgment, and was ordered to pay more than $8 million in damages.
At the time, Calabrese was the president of Arnold’s foundation, but he’d been a key figure in TLR and listed on the group’s filings with the Texas Ethics Commission for years, even following the guilty plea to tax evasion and a prison stint.
That $8 million judgment, according to court records, wasn’t settled until after the Arnolds filed a Motion to Compel document production from TLR and Dick Weekley.
Old Guard
Texas and American politics are filled with an old guard rapidly being replaced. For his part, Dick Weekley knows he’s on the way out. Still, that doesn’t make it easy, and hype men like Weekley are prone to rage rather than exit the stage.
In the same 2021 podcast that Weekley name-dropped Lonsdale, he claimed there was “new talent coming in” and that he needed it.
Weekley claimed that “TLR is a very important … political infrastructure in Texas” and that he and his aging compadres “just gotta find a way to make it sustainable … by bringing in younger folks, which we’re trying to do.”
But what if that new talent is a mismatch not only for the big tech benefactors they pretend to serve but also for the populous? If that new “talent” is focused on wielding political power to overthrow elected officials, it will be ineffective and won’t last.
Case in point, in the current environment, as exhibited by Weekley, it’s more likely they fail and fail rapidly.
Ken Paxton has been a consistent and vocal critic of the left, especially the woke left in big tech. Just last week, he won a landmark decision against Google. Partnering and elevating operatives seeking to undermine these aims is counterproductive at best.
And this is where paths converge. Elon Musk has been fighting against censorship and big tech manipulation of Americans, as has Paxton. Lonsdale, for his part, seems to agree.
Dick Weekley, TLR, and Blake Brickman, political hangers-on, have been working overtime to undermine and remove Paxton from power in service of the status quo.
Meanwhile, the grassroots have become more sophisticated about the political process, especially dislodging entrenched rent-seeking overlords in Austin. Perhaps, with time, others will as well.
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