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A tech billionaire and dark-money Democratic donor who said he wished Donald Trump was an “actual martyr” days before the assassination attempt against him is now poised to bankroll Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, a source told The Post.
Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, clarified his claims the day after Trump was shot, saying he does not condone political violence of any kind.
He has known Harris for years and is set to pump millions of dollars into her White House campaign, according to sources.
“He wants to be the new George Soros who is pulling the strings” in the Democratic Party, said a political adviser who knows Hoffman, referring to the nonagenarian philanthropist and Democratic mega-donor.
Hoffman “has a good relationship with Kamala since they were both in the [California] Bay Area and have been friendly for years,” another source told The Post.
“I wholeheartedly support Kamala Harris and her candidacy for President of the United States in our fight for democracy in November,” said Reid in a post on X Sunday, shortly after President Biden announced he would drop out of the race.
“Harris’s background and leadership growing the economy, fighting for bodily autonomy, and protecting our democracy uniquely position her to push back against Trump’s extremism,” he added.
Hoffman, 56, has donated to Democratic dark-money groups, including the Hopewell Fund, a nonprofit which is managed by Arabella Advisors, described as “a secretive dark money juggernaut” which spent more than $1 billion to propel Biden to the White House in 2020 by Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust.
Hoffman also traveled to Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean compound and made plans to stay at his Upper East Side mansion, six years after the billionaire pedophile was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in Florida in 2008.
In 2014, Hoffman paid a single visit to Little St. James — also now known as “pedophile island,” where Epstein and gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly abused underage girls, the Wall Street Journal reported.
He said he was trying to convince Epstein to make a donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“While I relied on MIT’s endorsement, ultimately I made the mistake, and I am sorry for my personal misjudgment,” Hoffman wrote in an email to the Journal last year, when asked about his association with Epstein.
Around the same time, Hoffman also brokered a deal to introduce Epstein to venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who had been a classmate at Stanford University.
“Meet one of the guys who invented derivatives, Jeffrey Epstein?” Hoffman wrote to Thiel, echoing an inaccurate claim Epstein was fond of making, the Journal reported. Hoffman wrote Epstein was “mostly fun, very interesting guy, you may find him perverse, but very smart on biology, computation, macro econ.”
Thiel, who has admitted to taking meetings with Epstein, told the Journal: “I was rather naive and I didn’t think enough about what Epstein’s agenda might have been.”
Hoffman, who did not return a request for comment Monday, has also bankrolled litigation against Trump, paying the legal costs of E. Jean Carroll in her civil defamation trial in New York which found the former president liable for sexual assault against the advice columnist last year.
Trump was ordered to pay more than $83 million in damages for defaming Carroll with comments including calling her a “whack job” and claiming he didn’t know her.
In recent years, Hoffman has been a venture capitalist who supports AI startups. He had strongly backed Biden despite the president’s disastrous, car-crash debate against Trump last month, which is widely seen as one of the main reasons he dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday.
“He and Jeff [Katzenberg] are in the same boat,” the source said, referring to the billionaire film producer, who also backed Biden despite his poor performance at the June debate against Trump.
“They are in all these discussions about how to extract themselves from Biden.”
Last week, Hoffman broke with chief political strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn, who said he plans to work with the Lincoln Project, a group of political strategists opposed to Trump.
“Hoffman wanted a clean slate,” the political adviser told The Post. Mehlhorn had originally suggested the Trump assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa., had been “staged,” but later apologized for the comment.
Hoffman made his “actual martyr” comment during an exchange with Thiel at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, according to a report.
Thiel “made him look like a fool, and people have turned on him like you wouldn’t believe,” the political adviser told The Post.
Hoffman walked back his comments in a post on X after the assassination attempt against Trump on July 13.
“Of course I meant nothing about any sort of physical harm or violence, which I categorically deplore,” Hoffman wrote on X. “I am horrified and saddened by what happened to former President Trump and wish him a speedy recovery.”