The LNC Didn’t Want You to Read Weir’s Minority Report on the McArdle Probe

The Libertarian National Committee formed its Special Investigatory Committee (SIC) on February 2, 2025, eight days after Angela McArdle resigned as Chair. The committee was charged with investigating conflicts of interest and business practices at the LNC. Its work centered on McArdle and Freedom Calls, LLC, a vendor tied to Austin Padgett. The LNC adopted the SIC’s report on June 9, 2025.

How that report became a lawsuit is laid out in full in LNC News’s report here. It covers the petition’s eight counts, the piecemeal votes that authorized the suit, and the written demand Region 1 Representative Austin Martin sent the board. It also noted that the SIC itself called $49,600 the maximum damages the LNC could reasonably expect to win and said a suit would likely cost more than that.

This article covers something we did not have when that piece was written. In a document that was not released with the committee’s other reports, Ben Weir, the SIC’s Secretary, told the LNC in writing that a lawsuit was “virtually guaranteed to lose in court.” The LNC sued anyway.

A dissent from inside the committee

Weir, Region 6 Alternate, served as SIC Secretary. The LNC adopted the report at a special meeting on June 9, 2025. Weir’s minority report is dated June 13, four days later.

His verdict on the investigation was: “The committee’s ‘investigative’ work was functionally prosecutorial from the outset.” He said his own objections were dismissed or sidelined. His closing line pointed to underlying motivations: “... this committee was driven with a singular purpose in mind. It wasn’t to investigate all conflicts of interest, it was to prosecute and discredit McArdle in as many ways as possible.”

The Redpath problem

Weir wrote that the push to remove McArdle and bar her from future involvement was largely led by Bill Redpath, who served as LNC Treasurer under then-Chair Steven Nekhaila. He described Redpath as a known antagonist of McArdle and said many of the SIC’s recommendations came from him.

Then he turned Redpath’s own standard around: “If they were being honest, Mr. Redpath should have recused himself for also taking money from the Kennedy Victory Fund.” The Kennedy Victory Fund now fills multiple paragraphs of the LNC’s petition. Martin names Redpath in his filings too. He says his September 2025 ethics complaint concerned Redpath’s conflicts, and that on a recorded call Redpath acknowledged those conflicts had not been disclosed. The LNC then censured Martin in March 2026 for “breaching executive session” over that recorded call about a whistleblower complaint. There is no recorded vote known which would have placed that call into executive session. Redpath later voted yes on the September 30, 2026 ballot restricting Martin’s forwarder access.

The recommendations

Weir said the SIC’s recommended lawsuit had no merit, and that spending on one would be “completely against the fiduciary duty of this body to spend funds that we don’t even have.” On motive he wrote: “These recommendations are about power, not ethics.”

Where Weir’s objections meet the petition

The October 1 petition rests on ground Weir questioned in 2025.

Of the email promoting the Rescue the Republic rally, which supports the petition’s speech-based claims, Weir wrote that “The notion that sending an email promoting the rally constitutes an ethics breach is extremely unserious.”

On Swing Vote Strategist (SVS), the entity the SIC report ties to Padgett, Weir wrote that the payments to McArdle “began after her resignation from the LNC.” He said the report “fails to prove that the relationship existed during her tenure in a way that required disclosure under LNC policy,” and that it “manufactures conflict retroactively.”

On Padgett, Weir said the committee treated his and McArdle’s refusals to participate as incriminating, which he called a due process violation. On the undisclosed ownership of Freedom Calls he wrote “Dishonest? Probably,” and then added that the committee never established it from facts or evidence: “It is all based on assumption.”

On the contract’s cost, he noted that roughly $49,600 returned $2,468.57 and that other fundraising efforts across the party had also underperformed. He then asked a question the committee never answered: “If it was so obviously problematic, why did no one object until a political opportunity emerged?”

The October 2025 email

On October 2, 2025, Weir wrote to the full LNC Board that “this body has turned into a complete circus.” He described the SIC’s process as “the equivalent of the government investigating itself.”

His email also addressed the Treasurer’s office. Weir wrote that he had raised valid concerns about Redpath “knowing that a certain faction positioned Doug Knebel for an At-Large seat with the intention of sliding him into the Treasurer’s role once a resignation occurred.” He added that he likes Knebel, calling him “a good man who would do the work well,” and that he was disappointed Redpath kept obstructing the body.

Knebel is now LNC Treasurer under Chair Evan McMahon.

Weir’s recommendations were to move for an outside investigation before any formal conclusions, fund a full audit of transactions and phone records from the period, and avoid lawsuits no matter what. He wrote that “an external review is the only way to restore integrity.” The email also addresses Martin. Weir wrote that he detests the way Martin has conducted himself in meetings, in public, and in email, but that he believes Martin “was being honest about our Party being subverted.”

What the LNC did instead

The record since then shows no motion to commission an outside investigation and no funded audit. The October 10 report documents what it shows instead: piecemeal votes culminating at the August 2 meeting, and a petition seeking up to $1,000,000 plus punitive damages.

Martin’s October 6 written demand under D.C. Code § 29-411.03 argues that the people who investigated the Freedom Calls program had already voted to fund it. Weir raised conflicted investigators sixteen months earlier. The Judicial Committee’s November 2025 opinion had also questioned the effort, saying it was dismayed at the resources spent pursuing a former Chair who had resigned in January 2025.

A second committee, the same questions

A new SIC, proposed by McMahon on September 7, is reviewing written complaints against Martin as Region 1 Representative. Its members are Amanda Griffiths, Jonathan McGee and Michelle Wigington from the LNC, and Michael Chianese and Doug Craig from outside it. Findings are due October 15. Martin blew the whistle on the LP Alliance data breach, their relationship to the IALP, and their publicly documented collaborations with foreign agents. The motion came three days after Martin’s September 4 resolution on Freemasonry disclosure and in the midst of exposing shocking misstatements and issues with the McArdle suit. Martin says the committee was planned well before that and is retaliation for his exposing misconduct within the LNC. He also says McGee has already contacted a witness about events from the prior term.

The September 30 email ballot revoked his ability to trigger the public forwarder. Griffiths voted for it while the SIC review was pending, and the restriction makes McGee the officer who screens Martin’s messages. Martin says he has since been removed from every LNC list, including the business list, LNC Public, and Entire LNC, and now sees board mail only when someone copies him. On October 10 he sent Weir’s October 2025 email to the Entire LNC, LNC Public, and forwarder addresses.

Weir asked for a neutral investigator, an audit, and no lawsuit. Twelve months after his email, the LNC has a lawsuit, a second committee examining the director who objected, and a board whose members increasingly cannot voice dissent.

LNC News covers the governance and internal affairs of the Libertarian National Committee. Submissions can be sent to LNCnews.submissions@gmail.com.