A Democratic political veteran is joining forces with #NeverTrump Republicans as Hillary Clinton sympathizers prop up fringe small-party candidates to bring down Donald Trump’s vote share and smooth the road to the White House for Clinton.

The race now has five candidates, with Gary Johnson running as a Libertarian, Jill Stein with the Green Party, and former Goldman Sachs employee Evan McMullin for the #NeverTrump independent party. Two of these candidates stand to help Clinton, whose husband never won 50 percent of the popular vote in two national elections with Ross Perot.

Breitbart News has learned that the McMullin effort is being led by a former top Democratic staffer, while evidence surfaces that Johnson is a tool in a wider conspiracy to hurt Trump on behalf of Clinton.

The new pro-Evan McMullin super PAC “Stand Up Together” is led by political operatives Kahlil Byrd and Chris Ashby. Who is Kahlil Byrd?

Kahlil Byrd is the former communications director and senior strategist for Democrat Deval Patrick’s campaign for governor in Massachusetts in 2006 and the director of gubernatorial appointments for the Deval Patrick administration.

At that time, national Democrats were circling around Patrick, who was being advised by David Axelrod. When Axelrod left Patrick to advise Barack Obama two months after Patrick’s election to the governorship, progressive politics on the presidential level shifted in Obama’s favor.

Byrd was working for Patrick as early as Patrick’s gubernatorial announcement in 2005, when Patrick launched the Obama-sounding campaign slogan “Believe Again” while Obama was a rookie in the Senate.

Byrd is a Huffington Post blogger, a onetime “Team Member” on the Council on Foreign Relations, and a graduate of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Byrd’s Council on Foreign Relations bio notes that in addition to Democrats he has also worked for independents and Republicans. He was identified as a media adviser to Massachusetts Republican Jeff Beatty, who got 31 percent of the vote running for Senate against John Kerry in 2008. The progressive blog Blue Mass Group called Byrd’s involvement with Beatty a case of “strange bedfellows.”

Byrd went on to co-found the 2012 group Americans Elect, which sought to reform party primaries and place a “bipartisan” ticket on state ballots. But despite raising upwards of $40 million and winning some awards, Americans Elect did not actually field a candidate to challenge Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Stand Up America says that it is not working on ballot access for McMullin but rather focusing on marketing and grassroots campaign activity.

Ashby, a Republican lawyer and political operative, is joined with Byrd in this anti-Trump effort.

Byrd and Ashby did not participate in this report.

“I am running against the Washington insiders, just like I did in the Republican Primaries” Trump declared on Twitter.

Those insiders are raining fire on Trump’s insurgent candidacy with 88 days to go. Globalist media corporations are turning their networks into all-day anti-Trump marathons. The media is flogging the narrative that fringe candidates have the chance to win in the House of Representatives in a constitutional-crisis situation.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper mentioned that kind of scenario in his ridiculously pro-Clinton primetime town hall with Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and his running mate William Weld, who defended Clinton on her email scandal. Johnson tore into Trump and put up light and perfunctory opposition to Clinton, saying, “Was there anything she didn’t promise to anyone in her acceptance speech?”

Johnson’s campaign donor list includes corporate heavyweights like IBM, United Technologies, and even Republican-hated housing giant Freddie Mac.

I reported:

A top Clinton-supporting official at the “libertarian” Niskanen Center think tank (which advocates for more Syrian refugee settlement in America) spelled out the strategy in no uncertain terms: the Libertarians need to adopt a Right-sounding platform so they can take some of Trump’s support and prop up Clinton. Did you notice that the mainstream networks began touting a Clinton lead in a new “3-Way Poll.”… …These two marginal politicians are clearly enjoying the spotlight that the pro-Clinton media are finally giving them in their effort to stop Trump. (Something tells me the folks at CNN have not secretly been reading Reason magazine all these years.)

Green Party candidate Jill Stein, meanwhile, struggles to gain wide media attention as she tries to pick up the shattered remnants of Bernie Sanders’ movement and go forward to November against Clinton. The Left is going at her already, with liberal publication Slate attacking Stein on Clinton’s behalf.

Stein’s running mate Ajamu Baraka is making a case to left-wingers for the overthrow of the two-party system. Will the mainstream media give Stein and Baraka the same opportunities they’re giving Johnson, Weld, and McMullin?