Political activist Catherine Englebrecht is founder of True the Vote, an organization that claims it wants to stop voter fraud.
Englebrecht also claimed it needed money to investigate voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election.
This required raising tens of millions of dollars.
To identify voter fraud is costly.
To identify voter fraud when there is none is far more costly.
Trump’s most significant contribution to the U.S. economy might be the creation of a cottage industry of businesses trying to find instances of voter fraud to support the former president’s bogus claims of voter fraud.
Fred Eshelman, founder of Eshelman Ventures LLC, who contributed $2.5 million to True the Vote, sued the organization because it did not find voter fraud. He said he “regularly and repeatedly” contacted the organization for updates but “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises,” according to his lawsuit.
The New York Times reported that many of Engelbrecht’s former allies and associates have severed their relationship with her.
Rick Wilson, a Republican operative who became a Trump critic, did public relations work for Engelbrecht in 2014 but then quit shortly thereafter.
He said she had declined to reveal data to back her voting fraud claims.
“She never had the juice in terms of evidence,” Wilson said.
Cleta Mitchell, Engelbrecht’s former attorney who has worked for Trump, and John Fund, a conservative journalist, told GOP donors in August 2020 that that they dropped their support for Engelbrecht.
Mitchell and Fund said they supported Englebrecht’s early work into voter fraud but that they since had serious questions about her work.
“Catherine started out and was terrific,” Mitchell said. “But she got off on other things. I don’t really know what she’s doing now.”
“I would not give her a penny,” Fund said.
On June 5, 2022, Englebrecht’s longtime business partner Gregg Phillips announced that he had begun a nonprofit organization under the name “The Freedom Project.” He began raising $25 million to help build a mobile hospital in Ukraine in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“Our recent project, The Freedom Hospital, in Ukraine helps old folks, women and kids near the fight receive healthcare,” Phillips posted on the conservative social media site Truth Social.
The Dallas Morning News and ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism, reported that Phillips and Engelbrecht now say they did not raise much money for the project and no mobile hospital was constructed.
https://www.propublica.org/article/ukraine-freedom-hospital-true-the-vote-phillips-engelbrecht
And there’s more.
In October 2022, a federal judge ordered that Engelbrecht and her True the Vote partner Gregg Phillips be jailed for contempt of court for refusing to identify the person who allegedly provided them information about Konnech, an election software company.
The judge’s order is part of a defamation suit filed by Konnech against True the Vote, which accused Konnech of giving the government of China access to the company’s server that included personal information about almost 2 million U.S. election workers.
The judge overseeing the defamation suit ordered Engelbrecht and Phillips to reveal the name of a person who helped True the Vote access Konnech’s computer systems. When Englebrecht and Phillips failed to obey the order, they were put in jail.
