Lynton Crosby ‘not on Donald Trump poll team’

Sir Lynton Crosby was at Donald Trump’s New Year’s Eve party but says he isn’t part of the Republican’s re-election push.

Conservative Party election campaign consultant Lynton Crosby. Picture: Getty Images

Sir Lynton Crosby and his wife, Lady Dawn, walked the red carpet of Mar-A-Lago at President Donald Trump’s New Year’s Eve party but the Australian political strategist says he isn’t part of the Republican’s re-election push.

The Crosbys were invited to the lavish Palm Beach resort with hundreds of Republican supporters and friends of Mr Trump from his property tycoon days to welcome in 2020.

Sir Lynton’s political nous has steered British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Tory party to multiple electoral successes and his Australian protege, Isaac Levido, was the campaign director for Mr Johnson’s win last month.

Mr Levido helped to establish Sir Lynton’s company, CTF Partners, in Washington several years ago and was one of the team involved in Scott Morrison’s “miracle win’’ for the Liberal Party last May.

Sir Lynton has told The Weekend Australian he was at the Trump party in “an entirely personal’’ capacity and wasn’t ­involved in the 2020 US election. “(I am doing) nothing political in the US and nothing for either Republicans or Trump or any permutation of them,’’ he said.

It was uncertain if other Australians closely connected to Mr Trump and wife, Melania, such as the ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, and his wife, Melissa Babbage, or golfer Greg Norman, attended the soiree in the Donald J. Trump hall, decorated in the style of Louis XIV.

Mingling among the guests with their diamonds and tuxedos were Mr Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is in the centre of the impeachment scandal, and Alan Dershowitz, the one-time lawyer of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein who ­denied claims made against him, including by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, now living in Australia.