Voter fraud hustle big money for Houston group
The Big Lie hasn’t just been destructive. It’s been profitable.
For months now, the American public has been able to watch the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection debunk claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election and show how former president Donald Trump resisted all evidence to the contrary to disastrous effect.
Harassed and intimidated election workers. Armed supporters storming the Capitol because they said Trump told them to. Bloodied law enforcement attempting to fend them off.
For months now, the truth has been increasingly clear. But the truth is of little interest to many Trump loyalists who have not only stood beside the former president as a parallel FBI investigation unfolds but who have also donated to the Big Lie cause over the years, including some $115 million spread between Donald Trump’s own collection of political committees.
Recent filings this week by the Department of Justice underscore the mounting concerns around his political fundraising practices. New subpoenas from the department seek more information about his Save America PAC, according to the Associated Press.
But Trump isn’t the only one who’s found success fundraising, in part, on his claims of voter fraud.
The Houston-based True the Vote organization has also raked in millions over the years in donations. The fate of those millions and the organization’s legitimacy have likewise been the subject of increased scrutiny in recent months. The nonprofit claims it has never-before-seen — and still-not-seen — evidence of voter fraud in hand. But back in June, another type of fraud seemed more likely. A Reveal investigation found that the organization had funneled roughly $1 million to its founder Catherine Engelbrecht and two others linked to the group. The investigation reviewed pages of tax and court records as well as legal filings suggesting that far from uncovering fraud, True the Vote has been busy perpetrating its own.
Engelbrecht is a longtime figure in the conservative Texas scene. In 2010, she led the King Street Patriots into largely Black and Hispanic Houston neighborhoods to poll watch against what they called massive voter fraud. The watchers shouted down elderly disabled citizens who needed help to vote in what Texas Observer called the Battle of Harris County. In 2012, she again raised alarms about mysterious buses full of hopeful voters “who did not appear to be from this country” and pushed for tighter voter restrictions. The Big Lie is simply the latest, and perhaps a particularly lucrative, opportunity to sell her message.
The Reveal investigation found a more than $40,000 personal loan to Engelbrecht from her own organization as well as roughly $82,500 in payments for services done by two companies she also owns. All of this was before 2016 when Trump first cried “fraud” after winning the Electoral College but losing the popular vote. True the Vote promised to review the data in a fundraising campaign. Nothing came of it, but by 2020, the organization was again promising to uncover fraud, this time through millions of dollars-worth of lawsuits. A lawyer was given roughly $500,000 to pursue those lawsuits, but after filing four, they were voluntarily dismissed just days later, according to the Reveal investigation. The investigation also found that True the Vote gave $750,000 to a company founded by True the Vote’s board member, Greg Phillips, to do voter analysis in 2020. There are, the investigation noted, legal gray areas here, but some of these moves are certainly unusual if not unethical. And there hasn’t been much to show for them either.
A major donor to the cause later sued when it became clear those lawsuits weren’t going to materialize. Still their claims helped create the sensational documentary film “2000 Mules” with Dinesh D’Souza, which, once again, claimed to reveal widespread voter fraud, but there was no there there either.
Addressing the lack of evidence of voter fraud, former Attorney General Bill Barr referenced the film in his testimony aired during the second January 6 hearing saying, “I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the ‘2000 Mules’ movie.”
D’Souza’s book of the same name was abruptly recalled just before its release date for what the author said was the result of a missed error by the publisher. NPR managed to get its hands on a copy, however, and found no such obvious error. It did, however, find a lot of questionable content that even True the Vote sought to distance itself from.
“True the Vote had no participation in this book, and has no knowledge of its contents,” Brian Glicklich, a representative for the group, told NPR in an emailed statement. “This includes any allegations of activities of any specific organizations made in the book. We made no such allegations. The book reflects the views of the author, not of True the Vote, Catherine Engelbrecht, or Gregg Phillips.”
That doesn’t mean the organization has dialed things back.
True the Vote’s website is defiant: “We will not be silenced by corrupt politicians, government agencies, or media outlets.”
In August, it promised to share what was “left out of the movie” at a summit in Arizona with a cameo from Donald Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb. There, Engelbrecht tried to pivot away from the film to their next target: communists and election fraud.
Not, she said, to move on from what happened in 2020, “because we still have to understand what happened,” Engelbrecht said. “That is critical. We have to understand that. But we are 90 some days out from midterms.”
“The hustle is ever-evolving,” as Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump wrote of the Arizona event.
The hustle predates Trump and it will last beyond him, too.
As much as he is the crown prince of the movement, True the Vote’s attempts to pivot are a reminder that he is still just a figurehead and the rot threatening American democracy goes far beyond a single Florida resident. It didn’t start in 2020 and it won’t end there, either. In Texas, false allegations and concerns of voter fraud go all the way back more than a century when it provided cover for people looking to keep Black and Mexican-American people from voting.
For modern-day vote-restrictors, campaigning and media platforms make the hustle potentially even more profitable. Like conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who uses lies to enrich himself, True the Vote likewise seems to look for the well of conservative indignation — and takes it all the way to the bank.