One of Trump's favorite election conspiracists pocketed millions while looking for fraud

[LetMyPeopleVote]

True the Vote started in my neck of the woods and I had to deal with their poll watchers a number of time. Lately, this group and its founder has been scamming people

Link to tweet

https://www.rawstory.com/catherine-engelbrecht-true-the-vote/

The former president has hailed True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht from his campaign rallies and invited her to Mar-A-Lago, and the former PTA mom-turned-Tea Party activist's efforts to turn up fraud have been the subject of the feature film, "2000 Mules," by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, but a new investigation by Reveal turned up evidence of self-dealing by her nonprofit organization.

“This certainly looks really bad,” said Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch, who reviewed the findings.

Reveal's investigation showed True the Vote gave questionable loans to Engelbrecht and awarded contracts to companies run by her and partner Gregg Phillipps, who serves on the organization's board, and within days of receiving a $2.5 million donation to stop the certification of the 2020 election gave much of that money to a company owned by the couple and the law firm owned by conservative heavyweight James Bopp Jr. -- the organization's general counsel.,,,,

However, experts questioned whether the group, whose only recent employee is Engelbrecht, established a proper structure and policies to protect against self-dealing, and its small board of directors has multiple conflicts of interest.

Juanita Jean used to live near the founder of True the Vote. https://juanitajean.com/true-the-vote/

This will not be the first time, or even the third or eighth time, you have read about Cathy Engelbrecht here at the beauty salon. She’s been on our radar for ten years when she was speaking in church basements and VFW halls in the Houston area, pushing the idea that it’s too damn easy to vote. She would get the attendees name and addresses, mostly very old people, and send them requests for money. She didn’t like my questions and quickly named me “that woman” and told people I was a reporter as she rolled her eyes.

She had difficulty giving me any examples of the horror of illegal voting that she claimed was killing America. I could give her a couple of examples that happened right in her neighborhood, but they were both Republicans. She quickly informed me that she wasn’t talking about just two people, she was talking about hundreds, thousands. She just didn’t know any of them.

And then the third example hit. The Republican man she was personally supporting for county commissioner voted in two states for three elections and I had his signature to prove it. I wrote about it in the newspaper and he was defeated soundly.

I once described her as an attractive woman with a dollar sign on her forehead. She always had her hand out. She was far more concerned with raising money than illegal voting.

And now the Washington Post says she’s being sued for taking $2 million from a donor and producing the same thing I saw her produce – diddle squat.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. If you do read it don’t get excited and skip over the part where she’s mattress thrashing with a member of her board of directors. Look, I don’t want to slut shame another woman, but she rolled her eyes at me and that gives me a free shot. I’m taking it.

This will be fun to watch

[FakeNoose]

1. We need to start calling these people "American oligarchs"

... because that's what they are.

[Wounded Bear]

2. K & R...nt

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. She helped create the Big Lie. Records suggest she turned it into a big grift.

True the vote is a scam. The lady who formed this entity is a tea party idiot who found a way to scam her fellow conservatives

Link to tweet

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/14/true-the-vote-big-lie-election-fraud/?utm_campaign=trib-social&utm_content=1655241639&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

A former PTA mom-turned-Tea Party activist, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has played a pivotal role in helping drive the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to a central pillar in the Republican Party’s ideology. Casting herself as a God-fearing, small-town Texan, she’s spread the voter-fraud gospel by commanding airtime on cable television, space on the pages of Breitbart News and even theater seats, as a new feature film dramatizing her organization’s exploits, “2000 Mules,” plays in cinemas across the country.....

And while the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been dismissed out of hand by courts and debunked by audits, even those led by Republicans, the story of True the Vote highlights how exploiting the Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise, growing from a cottage industry to a thriving economy.

The records show:

True the Vote regularly reported loans to Engelbrecht, including more than $113,000 in 2019, according to a tax filing. Texas law bans nonprofits from loaning money to directors; Engelbrecht is both a director and an employee.

Companies connected to Engelbrecht and Phillips collected nearly $890,000 from True the Vote from 2014 to 2020. The largest payment — at least $750,000 — went to a new company created by Phillips, OPSEC Group LLC, to do voter analysis in 2020. It’s unclear whether OPSEC has any other clients; it has no website and no digital footprint that Reveal could trace beyond its incorporation records. The contract, which one expert called “eye-popping” for its largess, did not appear to be disclosed in the 2020 tax return the organization provided to Reveal.

True the Vote provided Bopp’s law firm a retainer of at least $500,000 to lead a legal charge against the results of the 2020 election, but he filed only four of the seven lawsuits promised to a $2.5 million donor, all of which were voluntarily dismissed less than a week after being filed. The donor later called the amount billed by Bopp’s firm “unconscionable” and “impossible.”

The organization’s tax returns are riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended. Experts who reviewed the filings said it makes it difficult to understand how True the Vote is truly spending its donations.

In one instance, True the Vote produced two different versions of the same document. A copy of the 2019 tax return Engelbrecht provided to Reveal does not match the version on the IRS website.

[lees1975]

4. There is some real offhand humor in the fact that

they collected all of this money to look for fraud, but didn't those who were handing out the cash realize they weren't finding anything, but they kept writing checks.