A pro-Trump group that promised to challenge the Nov. 3 election results and expose fraud was sued by a North Carolina money manager who donated $2.5 million to the cause but says he didn’t get his money’s worth.
Fred Eshelman, founder of Eshelman Ventures LLC, wants his money back, saying he “regularly and repeatedly” asked for updates on the project but his “requests were consistently met with vague responses, platitudes, and empty promises,” according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Houston federal court.
Houston-based True the Vote Inc. had promised a multi-pronged plan to “investigate, litigate, and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election,” according to the lawsuit.
In the weeks after the election, True the Vote filed four lawsuits, but it dropped them all last week. “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,” the group announced on its website on Nov. 17.
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True the Vote called its effort to reverse the election results Validate the Vote. The plan included filing lawsuits in seven swing states, collecting whistleblower complaints, galvanizing Republican legislative support in key states, and conducting “sophisticated data modeling and statistical analysis to identify potential illegal or fraudulent balloting,” according to Eshelman’s lawsuit.
The money manager said he agreed to support the plan and wired the group $2 million on Nov. 5 and $500,000 a week later after the group’s president told him that more money might be needed to achieve their goals, according to the suit.
When True the Vote failed to provide any reports on its progress and with certification deadlines approaching, Eshelman said it became obvious the group wouldn’t be able to execute the plan he agreed to support. So, he asked for his money back.
True the Vote had offered him $1 million if he would drop any plans for a lawsuit, he said in the complaint.
Hilarious. True the Vote oozed up from the local firmament a decade ago, and were involved in some highly questionable activities that centered around allegations of vote fraud, none of which ever came to pass. Juanita had some experience with them. I had honestly forgotten they were still a thing until I saw the stories of their aborted litigation a few days earlier. The little coda to that story is just delightful. Grifters gonna grift.