Anonymous No More: The MAGA Donor that's bankrolling troop pay

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/us/politics/timothy-mellon-donation-troops.html
archive link: https://archive.ph/JCPnW

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump announced the donation on Thursday night, but he declined to name the person who provided the funds, only calling him a “patriot” and a friend. But the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the donation was private, identified him as Mr. Mellon.

Shortly after departing Washington on Friday, Mr. Trump again declined to identify Mr. Mellon while talking to reporters aboard Air Force One. He only said the individual was “a great American citizen” and a “substantial man.”

“He doesn’t want publicity,” Mr. Trump said as he headed to Malaysia. “He prefer that his name not be mentioned which is pretty unusual in the world I come from, and in the world of politics, you want your name mentioned.”

I'll bet a plug nickle that Mellon is the reason Donny released the Amelia Earhart files

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Mellon#Search_for_Amelia_Earhart

In 2012, Mellon donated over $1 million to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), a nonprofit organization, to assist its efforts to find Amelia Earhart's plane and remains. In 2013, he sued TIGHAR for racketeering, alleging that it engaged in deceit by soliciting his money to search for Earhart's plane.[19] Mellon claimed that the plane had been found in 2010, before he made his donation.[20]

In 2014, U.S. District Judge Scott W. Skavdahl granted TIGHAR's motion for summary judgment after recognizing that even Mellon's own experts were unable to confirm his allegations about the 2010 photographs that he claimed showed the plane. Skavdahl concluded:

"Defendants represented to Plaintiff they were planning another expedition in their continued quest to find the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. Upon reading about Defendants' efforts, Plaintiff contacted Defendants and expressed his interest in supporting the expedition with a monetary contribution. That's exactly what the parties then did. No false representations were made. Regardless, no rational trier of fact could find Defendants falsely represented they had not found Earhart's plane by embarking on another expedition in hopes of finding conclusive evidence to prove it. No matter how convinced or sincere Plaintiff is in his subjective belief and opinion that Amelia Earhart's airplane was or should have been discovered prior to the making of his donation, that belief and opinion is insufficient to create a genuine dispute of material fact."

Mellon appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which affirmed the district court's ruling without holding oral argument. The Tenth Circuit concluded that the lack of actionable falsity precluded Mellon's claims.