Trump supporter who donated $ 2.5 million to fight voter fraud wants money | American political financing



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A Donald Trump supporter who donated $ 2.5 million to help expose and prosecute presidential fraud allegations wants his money back after what he calls “disappointing results.”

Fredric Eshelman, a businessman from North Carolina, said he gave the money to True the Vote, a pro-Trump “election ethics” group in Texas that had promised to take legal action against it. seven states swing as part of its campaign to “investigate, advocate, and denounce suspicions of illegal ballot and fraud in the 2020 general election.”

But according to a lawsuit filed by Eshelman this week in Houston, first reported by Bloomberg, True the Vote dropped its lawsuits and ended its Validate the Vote 2020 campaign, then refused to return its appeals when it demanded an explanation.

The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, a venture capital firm, said he “regularly and repeatedly” asks for updates, lawsuit says, but his “requests have always been met with vague responses , platitudes and empty promises ”.

The lack of success of True the Vote’s efforts to challenge the result appears to mirror that of the president himself, whose team has lost 38 lawsuits since the November 3 election, most recently in Pennsylvania where a court committee Federal Appeal criticized Trump’s legal team for filing a baseless case.

It is true that the vote did not immediately return an email from the guardian asking for comment. True the Vote did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment, but posted a statement on its website, attributed to the group’s founder and chairman, Catherine Engelbrecht, seeking to blame outside forces for the failure of its efforts.

“While we stand by the voter testimony that was presented, the obstacles to advancing our arguments, coupled with time constraints, have forced us to follow a different path,” the group said, announcing that it had withdrawn legal filings in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. All four states were won by Joe Biden, the Democratic President-elect.

“Our mission is much larger than a single election. It’s about fixing the system for all future elections, ”he continued.

Like the Trump campaign’s own legal filings, which are based on scarce evidence, the True the Vote statement did not detail any of the evidence it claimed should support the election fraud allegations.

Eshelman, the former chief executive of a pharmaceutical company, claims in his lawsuit that the nonprofit offered to reimburse him $ 1 million if he abandoned his plan to sue the group. He is asking for the return of the $ 2.5 million that he says he transferred on Engelbrecht’s instructions in installments of $ 2 million and $ 500,000 on November 5 and 13.

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