Let’s start with what we know: John Weaver, longtime John McCain campaign strategist and cofounder of the Trump-hating Lincoln Project, is a 61-year-old homosexual child predator.

We know this because he’s admitted to being the former, and because one of the 21 victims of his sexual advances who have so far come forward, Cole Trickle Miele, has credibly accused him of the latter. Miele says he was just 14 when Weaver began contacting him, and not much older when Weaver began asking him whether he was still in high school, telling him he looks “older” and “taller,” and gushing about how much he wanted to “come to Vegas and take you to dinner and drinks and spoil you!!”

Suffice it to say: This is a sickening story about a sick man.

If you want the lurid details of John Weaver’s depravity from a leftist source, Maggie Astor and Danny Hakim of The New York Times have you covered. But the Times published this story just two days ago, whereas a lone journalist named Ryan Gidursky broke the story a full three weeks ago in The American Conservative.

Why, if we didn’t know better, we’d swear the Times was trying to do damage control on behalf of a creepy Trump-hating homosexual.

Interestingly, when we visit The Lincoln Project website, we see not a hint of its cofounder. No “About” page, and certainly no statement about his awful sexual predation on boys less than a third his age. But on Sunday, perhaps knowing that their guy had been outed, the stand-up dudes at The Lincoln Project defenestrated Weaver via tweet: “John Weaver led a secret life that was built on a foundation of deception at every level. He is a predator, a liar, and an abuser. We extend our deepest sympathies to those who were targeted by his deplorable and predatory behavior. We are disgusted and outraged that someone in a position of power and trust would use it for these means.”

The Lincoln boys go on like this for another hand-wringing paragraph. They tell us how they’re “absolutely shocked and sickened by it.” (Here we can’t help but think of Captain Renault in Casablanca: I’m shocked — SHOCKED — to find that homosexual predation is going on in here.) The last sentence of their tweet, though, is quite revealing: “We are grateful beyond words that at no time was John Weaver in the physical presence of any member of The Lincoln Project.” Translation: We know that the cofounder of our Trump-hating enterprise is now irredeemably toxic, and we want you to know we’re as grossed out by his child sexual predation as you are.

As the Times article continues, “Lincoln Project leaders, in their first extended comments about Mr. Weaver, said they had not been aware of such allegations until this month, when articles in The American Conservative and Forensic News, and an open letter on Twitter from a data analyst named Garrett Herrin, accused Mr. Weaver of grooming young men online. Steve Schmidt, a co-founder of the group [and MSNBC’s Trump-hating Republican squish], said its leaders had learned last summer from social media posts that Mr. Weaver, who has a wife and two children, might be involved in relationships with men, but emphasized, ‘There was no awareness or insinuations of any type of inappropriate behavior when we became aware of the chatter at the time.’”

Isn’t it amazing how little some people profess to knowing about a guy whom they’ve known and worked with for years? Especially when that guy turns out to be a child sexual predator? And especially when warnings about his deviant behavior have been ignored for perhaps more than two decades?

Weaver apparently hopes that having come out as a homosexual will blunt the outrage. It shouldn’t.

What John Weaver did to these boys and young men is repugnant. May they recover fully, and may he and his enablers be forever shamed by it.