Published 12:29 IST, November 29th 2020
Trump supporter who donated $2.5 million to fight 'election fraud' demands money back
Outgoing US President Donald Trump supporter, who had donated $2.5 million to expose and even prosecute claims of the election fraud, wants his money back.
A supporter of outgoing US President Donald Trump, who had donated $2.5 million to expose and even prosecute claims of the election fraud, wants his money back after “disappointing results”. As per the Bloomberg report, a businessman from North Carolina, Fredric Eshelman has said that he had donated the huge sum of money to ‘True the Vote’ which is a pro-Trump “election ethics” group based in Texas that had vowed to file lawsuits in the seven swing states to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election.”
However, reportedly according to the lawsuit filed by Eshelman in Houston, the Texas group dropped its legal actions and ceased its ‘Validate the Vote 2020’ campaign. Moreover, True the Vote even stopped returning calls of the North Carolina businessman when he had demanded an explanation. The founder of Eshelman Ventures llc, which is a venture capital company reportedly said that he asked for updates “regularly and repeatedly” but according to his lawsuit, his requests “were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises”.
However, the defeat of True the Vote’s campaign is indicating US President Donald Trump’s fate as his team lost at least 38 court actions since the November 3 presidential elections that declared Democrat Joe Biden as the winner. Most recently, Trump’s team lost a legal battle in Pennsylvania where the federal court panel even blasted the US President’s team for filing the case without any merit.
True the Vote responded to dismissing the lawsuits
While Trump has continued to make unsubstantial claims about election fraud and question the democratic process without conceding to the President-elect Biden, True the Vote responded to dismissing the lawsuits in battleground states. Even though the Texas group did not respond to media outlets requesting for comment, a statement was spotted on its website attributed to the group’s founder and president, Catherine Engelbrecht that sought to blame external forces for its failure.
The statement said, “Yesterday, we made the difficult decision to dismiss our current lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. While we stand by the voters’ testimony that was brought forth, barriers to advancing our arguments, coupled with constraints on time, made it necessary for us to pursue a different path. But our fight for election integrity continues. The litigation component of our work is only a fraction of what we are doing to pursue real solutions to vulnerabilities in our election system.”
Updated 12:28 IST, November 29th 2020