Gregg Phillips Fema
SEE QANON
SEE TRUE THE VOTE
200 MULES
CONSPIR TELEPORT WACKO FIRED 6 26
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- David Gilbert @ Wired: Waffle House Teleporter Gregg Phillips Is Still on the Trump Administration’s Payroll
In June, a FEMA official infamous for claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House was reportedly ousted. He’s still employed by the government, though—and meeting with a Trump fixer.
Gregg Phillips, an election denier who once claimed he teleported to a Waffle House, says he is still working in the Trump administration, after he was reportedly removed from his influential role overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency response efforts in June.
While it remains unclear what Phillips has been working on in the administration since stepping away as head of the Office of Response and Recovery, on Sunday he wrote on Truth Social, “I have been in the admin since last year. I’ll be leaving soon to rejoin the fight.”
One day later, he was pictured at a Department of Justice building alongside Ed Martin, the former US pardon attorney who President Donald Trump last week announced would be departing the administration to “fight legal battles for the upcoming midterm election.”
WIRED's Walking Tour of President Trump’s Renovated Washington, DC
“Enjoyed the visit with our friend Ed Martin today in DC,” Phillips wrote on Truth Social. “Haters are gonna hate this.”
Martin and the Department of Justice did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment about Phillips’ role in the administration. Phillips declined to comment.
A FEMA spokesperson directed WIRED to a statement it issued in June saying Phillips was “taking leave for personal reasons.” When asked if Phillips was still employed by the agency and still on leave, the agency didn’t respond.
Phillips is on administrative leave, according to the White House, which also confirmed that Martin is still working in the administration until September 4. Federal employees on administrative leave are entitled to full pay and benefits.
Phillips has long promoted baseless allegations of widespread voter fraud, claiming in 2016 that more than 3 million noncitizens voted in the presidential election, robbing Trump of winning the popular vote. Days after taking office in 2017, Trump promoted Phillips’ false claims. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Phillips gained further notoriety when the group he was involved with, True the Vote, provided the data that underpinned the debunked film 2000 Mules, which falsely alleged that a network of individuals was paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes.
A 2022 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that True the Vote has raised millions of dollars from donors by repeatedly promising to uncover evidence of election fraud but has failed to do so. Much of that money, CIR reported, went to companies controlled by Phillips and in loans to True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht.
Phillips was appointed last December to head up FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery despite having no past experience working in emergency response. In June, following his departure, the agency thanked Phillips for his “service, dedication, and leadership,” adding that “he has played a pivotal role in stabilizing the Office of Response and Recovery and advancing key reforms to strengthen our mission delivery.”
Three sources at FEMA, who were granted anonymity due to fears of recrimination by the administration, tell WIRED that Phillips has not been seen at FEMA’s headquarters since June.
When Phillips posted on Truth Social this week about his decision to “rejoin the fight” he was once again discussing “illegals on the voter rolls” and the work he and Engelbrecht had done almost a decade ago to address the perceived issue—which is so rare that even a third-party analysis of a database maintained by the right-wing Heritage Foundation shows it contains fewer than 100 examples. When asked if Phillips’ comment meant he would be working with True the Vote again, Engelbrecht said, “I’m sure Gregg will be involved in a number of projects in the future, and we at TTV think very highly of him, but in an effort to set the record straight, he is not part of the True the Vote team. He previously assisted TTV as a contractor on research projects from 2020–2023.”
When asked about Phillips’ role as a board member of True the Vote, as revealed by the CIR report, Engelbrecht did not respond.
WIRED recently revealed that ahead of the midterms, True the Vote will release another documentary, entitled Trapped, which again makes allegations about widespread and systemic voter fraud.
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- Gabe Cohen and Andrew Kaczynski @ CNN: FEMA official who claimed he teleported to Waffle House ousted from agency, sources say
A top FEMA official who had drawn scrutiny for bizarre past remarks — including claiming he teleported to a Waffle House — has been pushed out of the agency, four sources tell CNN.
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AN 5 26
Lauren Boebert: Space aliens are 'fallen angels' - Alternet.org
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WHO WAS TELEPORTED TO WAFFLE HOUSE
MSN
FEMA chief doubles down on wild claim he teleported to Waffle House - MSN
A top FEMA official is doubling down on claims he was teleported over 50 miles to a Waffle House, slamming "haters" who don't believe him.
GUK
Top US Fema official claims to have teleported to a Waffle House before
Mar 20, 2026A far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House. Gregg Phillips, who in December ...
NEW REP
President Donald Trump has finally weighed in on that FEMA official who claims he teleported to a Waffle House—and it’s a doozy.
Gregg Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has repeatedly doubled down on claims that he was instantaneously transported 50 miles to one of the popular chain restaurant’s locations.
In a brief interview with CNN’s KFile, Trump was directly asked about Phillips’s wild journey.
“What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” Trump said.
After being assured that Phillips was very much not kidding, Trump replied: “I don’t know anything about him teleporting.… It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”
Trump’s apparent disbelief underscores just how little the president knows—or cares—about anyone who works for him. Phillips has made a slew of outrageous claims in the past. He previously claimed to have spoken with God and with Satan, and claimed that he was “already dead” but was kept around to do God’s work. Phillips has said that many of these instances occurred while he was undergoing self-directed treatment for metastatic bone cancer, using ivermectin and fenbendazole.
After a 2025 incident where he said he collapsed at a Lowes and came to in a McDonald’s parking lot, with 15,000 steps logged in his health app and a Big Mac in his lap, he insisted: “The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all—it fell with me.”
“This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing,” he said.
But one of his rather outrageous claims may have been exactly what kept him in Trump’s circles. Phillips is a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him.
Since Phillips’s outlandish claims first began to circulate in March, FEMA’s No. 3 official has been relegated to the sidelines of his own agency—enraging Phillips, multiple insiders at FEMA told CNN.
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NYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/climate/gregg-phillips-fema.html
NO LNX
A Proponent of Election Conspiracy Theories Will Take a Top Role at FEMA
Gregg Phillips, who spread unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud in the 2016 election, will join the agency’s leadership, the Trump administration confirmed.
An unidentified person, Catherine Engelbrecht in a black top, and Gregg Phillips in a dark jacket and long beard.
Gregg Phillips, right, onstage in 2022 with Catherine Engelbrecht, with whom he has led True the Vote, a conservative nonprofit group.Credit...Bridget Bennett/Reuters
By Scott Dance
Reporting from Washington
Dec. 10, 2025
A leading proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories is set to oversee federal disaster response as the Trump administration prepares to drastically reshape the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to a person familiar with the decision.
The appointee, Gregg Phillips, will take over the agency’s Office of Response and Recovery as of Monday, according to the person. The office is the largest of FEMA’s divisions and central to its mission of helping disaster-struck communities, and its leader makes recommendations on whether federal disaster declarations and aid are warranted.
PolitiFact, a nonprofit fact-checking group run by the Poynter Institute, has traced unsubstantiated assertions that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election to Mr. Phillips. Those claims were later amplified by President Trump.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, confirmed that Mr. Phillips would be taking a senior leadership position at the disaster response agency and stressed his “experience in emergency and humanitarian response, state government operations and large scale program reform.” Mr. Phillips has worked in state human services agencies in Texas and Mississippi but his LinkedIn profile makes no mention of professional experience in emergency management.
Mr. Phillips joins FEMA as the Trump administration is considering significant changes to the agency’s role in helping communities respond to and recover from disasters. A task force of mostly Republican emergency managers and government officials, which Mr. Trump assembled this year after suggesting that FEMA be eliminated, is scheduled to announce its recommendations for the future of the agency at a public meeting on Thursday.
While that group is expected to suggest FEMA continue to exist, discussions at a series of public meetings since May suggest that the panel could propose changes that mean the agency responds to fewer disasters across the country and instead shifts more of its disaster relief and recovery work onto states, local governments and the philanthropic sector.
The Handbasket first reported the appointment of Mr. Phillips. He did not respond to a LinkedIn message from The New York Times seeking comment and FEMA officials did not respond to a request to interview Mr. Phillips.
The decision places at the helm of federal emergency response a man accused of multiple ethical lapses before becoming a leading voice among supporters of President Trump spreading unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud.
In Mississippi, Mr. Phillips faced scrutiny in 1995 when he left a role leading the state human services department for a job at a company he had hired as a state contractor, a move a state watchdog agency said “could constitute a violation of state ethics laws.” The Clarion-Ledger reported that Mr. Phillips said he had not benefited from the state contract.
A decade later, a Houston Chronicle investigation alleged that Mr. Phillips and other Texas health officials had financially benefited from the privatization of a state human services program.
On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Phillips said his work had “led some of the most ambitious and successful transformations in modern U.S. history — saving billions of dollars while improving performance and outcomes.”
He has more recently been involved with a group called True the Vote, which has elevated unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud across the country. He was held in contempt of court and jailed in Texas in 2022 after he refused to identify an anonymous source in a defamation case filed against True the Vote, which Mr. Phillips was helping to lead. The case arose from the group’s accusations that a technology company had mishandled poll worker data.
True the Vote helped produce a documentary called “2,000 Mules” that has since been widely debunked. It claimed to reveal a voter fraud scheme that stole the 2020 election for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Questions about the documentary prompted Georgia officials to subpoena the group, and in February The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that True the Vote had said in court filings that it did not know the identity of an anonymous source who shared information about a voter fraud scheme, nor did it have documents to provide evidence of voter fraud.
Mr. Phillips said on his podcast the next day that the Journal-Constitution’s reporting was false.
In recent months, Mr. Phillips has shifted his focus to FEMA, saying in a LinkedIn post that he has worked in disaster zones and emergency for four decades. He has stressed his Christian faith as a motivating factor in his disaster work.
“I’ve seen the best of America’s contractors walk away in disgust over the inept FEMA contract managers,” he wrote in one LinkedIn post. “Specifically, they have failed to deliver a comprehensive and detailed plan for working with the faith community.”
In another post, he shared a photo of a young boy alongside a story about finding him in rubble and the hashtag #Haiti2010, an apparent reference to a catastrophic earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010. He described holding the boy as he fell asleep, only to be told later that the boy died.
“People ask me why I do it,” he wrote. “My little friend.”
Scott Dance is a Times reporter who covers how climate change and extreme weather are transforming society.
:{:{A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 11, 2025, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Election Conspiracy Theory Proponent Will Take Top Role at FEMA.}:
See more on: Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Politics, Donald Trump
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DUCK 3 26
CNN
A top FEMA official has history of violent rhetoric and said he once ...
2 days agoA CNN KFile review of Phillips' social media and podcast appearances found that he repeatedly used violent rhetoric, shared conspiracy theories and, in one case, claimed he'd experienced ...
The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › 2026 › mar › 20 › fema-gregg-phillips-waffle-house
Top US Fema official claims to have teleported to a Waffle House before
2 days agoA far-right conspiracy theorist turned high-ranking official at the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) claims to have once teleported to a Waffle House. Gregg Phillips, who in December ...
Yahoo
https://www.yahoo.com › news › articles › far-fema-official-charge-disaster-184717080.html
Far-Right FEMA Official in Charge of Disaster Response Once ... - Yahoo
2 days agoGregg Phillips, who was appointed during the brutal winter storms to run FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, is a right-wing activist who has peddled conspiracy theories and promoted violence
MSN
FEMA chief's teleport claim stirs controversy
2 days agoFEMA's head of disaster response, Gregg Phillips, has drawn attention after claiming he once teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House, alongside a history of violent rhetoric and conspiracy theories.
Mediaite
Trump's Gregg Phillips Says He Can Teleport — Seriously
2 days agoFEMA's Gregg Phillips has a history of violent rhetoric and claims of teleporting at a Waffle House that is now out in the open, thanks to a new report.
Hindustan Times
Who is Greg Phillips? 5 things to know on FEMA official behind Waffle ...
TodayGreg Phillips sparked controversy after claiming he "teleported" 50 miles to a Waffle House IN Georgia, drawing attention to the 65-year-old official.
Rolling Stone
FEMA Official Gregg Phillips Claims He Teleported to Waffle House
2 days agoFEMA disaster response official Gregg Phillips claims he has experienced episodes of teleportation, including once to a Waffle House in Georgia.
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2025 › 12 › 10 › climate › gregg-phillips-fema.html
Gregg Phillips, a Proponent of Election Conspiracy Theories, to Join ...
Dec 10, 2025Gregg Phillips, who spread unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud in the 2016 election, will join the agency's leadership, the Trump administration confirmed.
Political Wire
FEMA Official Claims He Was Teleported to Waffle House
2 days agoCNN: "As millions of Americans braced for a series of brutal storms this winter, the senior official in charge of the federal government's disaster response had been on the job only a few weeks — and had previously claimed on podcasts that he once teleported to a Waffle House." "Gregg Phillips, appointed in December to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, rose to prominence ...
Daily Beast
Trump's Disaster Response Chief Believes He Was Teleported to a Waffle ...
2 days agoPhillips, a longtime conservative activist who repeatedly shared conspiracy theories on social media before being appointed to a top FEMA position, described an incident in which he said he ...
AP JAN 2017
By
Phillips
VIDEO: Trump SLAMS ‘Pathetic’ Colorado Gov Polis Over Tina Peters Case | ‘Governor Jails Our Hero’VIDEO: Trump SLAMS ‘Pathetic’ Colorado Gov Polis Over Tina Peters Case | ‘Governor Jails Our Hero’
In this undated file photo, Gregg Phillips is seen in Austin, Texas. Phillips, who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud, was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned. (Erich Schlegel/The Dallas Morning News via AP, File)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.
Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show.
In a post earlier this month, Phillips described "an amazing effort" by volunteers tied to True the Vote, an organization whose board he sits on, who he said found "thousands of duplicate records and registrations of dead people."
Trump has made an issue of people who are registered to vote in more than one state, using it as one of the bedrocks of his overall contention that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that voting by 3 to 5 million immigrants illegally in the country cost him the popular vote in November
The AP found that Phillips was registered in Alabama and Texas under the name Gregg Allen Phillips, with the identical Social Security number. Mississippi records list him under the name Gregg A. Phillips, and that record includes the final four digits of Phillips' Social Security number, his correct date of birth and a prior address matching one once attached to Gregg Allen Phillips. He has lived in all three states.
At the time of November's presidential election, Phillips' status was "inactive" in Mississippi and suspended in Texas. Officials in both states told the AP that Phillips could have voted, however, by producing identification and updating his address at the polls.
Citing concerns about voters registered in several states, the president last week called for a major investigation into his claim of voter fraud, despite his campaign lawyer's conclusion that the 2016 election was "not tainted."
"When you look at the people that are registered, dead, illegal and two states, and some cases maybe three states, we have a lot to look into," Trump said in an ABC interview.
Reached by telephone Monday, Phillips said he was unaware of his multiple registrations but asked, "Why would I know or care?"
"Doesn't that just demonstrate how broken the system is?" he asked. "That is not fraud -- that is a broken system. We need a national ID that travels with people."
Phillips has been in the national spotlight since Nov. 11, when he tweeted without evidence that his completed analysis of voter registrations concluded the "number of non-citizen votes exceeded 3 million."
Thousands of people liked and retweeted the claim, which led to a viral article three days later on InfoWars.com, a site known to traffic in conspiracy theories.
Phillips also has previously tweeted about the dangers of "inactive voters" being able to vote in U.S. elections. "There is already law that compels states to remove inactive voters. Many don't," Phillips tweeted Nov. 29.
According to media reports, five Trump family members or top administration officials also were registered to vote in two states during the 2016 election -- chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon; Press Secretary Sean Spicer; Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin; Tiffany Trump, the president's youngest daughter; and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a senior White House adviser.
The Houston-based True the Vote has challenged the validity of voter rolls in numerous states. On Friday, Phillips tweeted that the conservative group "will lead the analysis" of widespread voter fraud, and suggested in a CNN interview that it might release the underlying data in a few months.
Shortly after Phillips appeared on CNN on Friday, Trump tweeted: "Look forward to seeing the final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!"
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12 25 talk 1 libtard bitch w/o specs
:{:{Gregg Allen Phillips (born October 13, 1960) is an American conspiracy theorist and head of the Office of Response and Recovery in the Federal Emergency Management Agency.[1] He was formerly head of the Mississippi Department of Human Services, Deputy Commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, and the author of a tweet cited by U.S. President Donald Trump that falsely alleges, without evidence,[2] that between three and five million non-citizens voted in the 2016 elections.[3][4][5] }:
Phillips executive produced and appeared in Dinesh D’Souza's debunked[6] political film 2000 Mules and pushed a conspiracy theory about election fraud.[7][8][9] He was partnering on a project with a Texas-based, partisan-conservative organization named True the Vote which falsely alleges widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though "on the record there has been still no evidence or proof provided that there was any sort of fraud".[10]}:
Career
:{In the 1990s, Phillips campaigned for Republican gubernatorial nominee Kirk Fordice.[3] A year after his election, Governor Fordice in 1993 nominated Phillips to head the Mississippi Department of Human Services. The Mississippi State Senate approved his nomination despite a discrepancy in Phillips' resume uncovered by the Mississippi Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review. In 1994, he privatized the collection of child support in two Mississippi counties by signing a contract with a private company based in Virginia.[11]
Phillips left the Department of Human Services in 1995, "under fire from the Legislature for his management of the state welfare programs."[12] A week after leaving Department of Human Services, Phillips was hired by Synesis Corporation, a division of Centec Learning, which had an $878,000 contract to lease mobile learning labs to the University of Mississippi at Oxford as part of LEAP, a literacy program that Phillips favored when he headed the Department of Human Services.[11]}:
Phillips was Deputy Commissioner for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission from March 2003 to September 3, 2004.[13][14]
Phillips then ran the health care analytics firm AutoGov.[13] Phillips is described as a "vocal conservative who founded a health-care-data company."[15]
Phillips was appointed to run the Office of Response and Recovery in the Federal Emergency Management Agency starting December 15, 2025. It is the second highest officer in the agency. His appointment came at a time when the 2nd Donald Trump administration was reorganizing the agency and its mission. Phillips had no documented professional history of working in disaster relief, but he had been recently touting his personal experience on social media.[1][16]
Phillips has been employed by both the Alabama and Mississippi Republican parties. He is listed as a resident of the capital city of Austin, Texas. An investigation by the Associated Press showed that Phillips was registered to vote in three states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Phillips responded, "Doesn't that just demonstrate how broken the system is? That is not fraud — that is a broken system. We need a national ID that travels with people."[17]
Allegations of grift, ethical misconduct, philandering, nepotism and cronyism
Government roles
Phillips has faced allegations of ethical misconduct and cronyism, including abusing his previous positions in government in both Mississippi and Texas for personal financial gain.[18][19] Phillips was found to "award millions in government contracts" to his own personal businesses or associates involved, and then were "quietly shuttered years later".[18] In a follow-up 1995 report by the Mississippi legislature, they concluded that "Mr. Phillips’s actions create the appearance of impropriety, facilitating an erosion of the public trust… [that] could constitute a violation of state ethics laws."[18]
In 2003, Texas House of Representatives Arlene Wohlgemuth championed the reorganization of the state's 12 health and human services agencies into five with the passage of House Bill 2292. She recommended that Phillips spearhead the reorganization of the Health and Human Services Commission.[20][21] She would later push to rush the process, wanting it before September 2004, which drew suspicion and questions as to the urgency.[22]
Unbeknownst to the public, Wohlgemuth legislative director Erica Phillips began dating fellow Republican Texas House Representative Jack Stick. “I think her boss pretty much told her go out with me," Stick would tell the Austin American-Statesman. “In fact, I think she had to tell Erica a few times because it sure took a while.”[21] Jack Stick later married Erica Phillips, who changed her name to Erica Stick, on October 16, 2004.[23][24]
Jack Stick would serve in the state House between 2003 and 2005 and serve as a municipal judge, and later would work as legal counsel from March 2006 to December 2007 for AutoGov - one of Gregg Phillips' many companies that obtained lucrative contracts for government healthcare work which subcontracted under another one of his companies named GHT Development.[21] In March 2007, Stick's matchmaker and the former Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth had become a lobbyist, at which point she brought the House Appropriations Committee a proposal which she acknowledged would probably steer a technology contract to GHT Development, which Gregg Phillips owned.[25][20]
Erica Phillips would also enter the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in 2005, get promoted to chief of staff in 2012 with an annual salary of $160,000. She ultimately had to resign from her role under then Executive Commissioner Kyle Janek on February 15, 2015, amidst criminal investigations and scandals related to her husband Jack Stick steering a no-bid $110 million state contract to a local company in which he had significant conflicts of financial interest as a legislator.[20][26][27]
According to Kevin Lyons, spokesperson for the Texas Comptroller, Phillips is unable to do business in the state of Texas. "He's one of our revolving door kind of hustlers," said Andrew Wheat, the research director of Texans for Public Justice.[18]
Phillips and his wife Helen owed the U.S. government more than $100,961 in unpaid taxes according to a lien filed by the IRS in Manatee County, Florida, as of 2014. Phillips responded to The Guardian via text: “I am in a disagreement with the IRS over income taxes. The amount owed is less than $50,000.”[28][29]
Enterject, Inc.
Under Gregg Phillips, Larry Temple became the deputy director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services. Phillips later founded Enterject, Inc. in 2000 in Atlanta, Georgia.[30] Enterject used the Internet to track tax credits for employers and offer Web-based welfare-to-work training, government contract-procurement lobbying, tax-credit tracking and Internet-based job training for health and child care workers. It even provided an Automated Tax Credit Hotline.[31] Meanwhile, Temple became the welfare reform director for the Texas Workforce Commission in 1997 and then agency executive director in September 2003.[32][33][34]
In 2004, the Houston Chronicle “reported allegations that Temple steered a $670,270 state contract to a company founded by a friend, Gregg Phillips, the No. 2 official at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.”[35]
Temple then hired Phillips’ sister in law Mary Katherine “Kaki” Roesch Leyens for a $55,000-a-year job in the Texas Workforce Commission after she divorced Vicksburg, Mississippi Mayor Laurence Leyens. Ann Fuelberg, who was a subcontractor on a Texas Workforce Commission project overseen by Enterject, would quit Enterject when she was named executive director of the Employees Retirement System of Texas.[36]
Phillips was earning $180,000 annually as the CEO of Enterject, Inc. Phillips claimed that he severed all ties when he was at the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, having turned it over to the Operations Officer Paige Harkins, herself the daughter of real estate developer Gary Harkins, a friend of Temple and whom Temple called an old "family friend."[33][32] The Houston Chronicle found this to be false based on phone records and documents, as he was forming contracts for Enterject, Inc. while Health and Human Services Commission receiving $167 M in contracts.[37][34] Though Temple denied that he or his son worked for Enterject, the company won two contracts from the Texas Workforce Commission: $2.7 million in job-training grants and a $670,000 contract managing immigrants' labor certifications.[33]
When the conflict of interest was uncovered by The Houston Chronicle, Phillips claimed that he had no plans to return to Enterject,[38] and that he had cut all ties.[32] However, the Georgia Secretary of State's Office listed Phillips' wife, Helen, as the company's chief financial officer.[32] Phillips claimed that his wife was just a part-time bookkeeper for the company.[39] Additionally, GHT Development Inc. owned the internet registration for Enterject, Inc. which itself was owned by Phillips and for which he was its CEO. ^[37]
GHT Development, Inc.
GHT was an umbrella corporation, which oversaw another one of Gregg's Austin based companies AutoGov, which was “a predictive data analytics company focused on health care.” AutoGov was paid more than $400,000 over the course of two years through GHT for work with the Texas Youth Commission by 2007.[20]
In March 2007, former Representative Arlene Wohlgemuth turned lobbyist, brought the House Appropriations Committee a proposal, which she acknowledged that the amendment's wording would probably steer a technology contract to GHT Development.[25]
AutoGov Inc.
Jack Stick, former Chief Counsel for Texas Health and Human Services Commission, was general counsel from 2006 to 2007 with AutoGov.[20] By 2009, AutoGov was doing work for the Health and Human Services Commission, but as a subcontractor hired by Maximus, Inc.[20] Albert Hawkins, the former Commissioner of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, approved the subcontract shortly before leaving office.[40] The Texas Health and Human Services Commission hired AutoGov without soliciting bids from other companies, and Phillips headed AutoGov Inc. in 2010 purportedly to help Texas' food stamp program eliminate errors in the applicant screening process.[41] AutoGov was paid $297,000 by Maximus until the contract was terminated in July 2010.[41] The company had made $600,000 for various work with state agencies. The commission paid AutoGov more than $100,000 following an October 2010 settlement signed by then-Executive Commissioner Thomas Suehs.[20]
CoverMe Services Inc.
In 2018, Phillips renamed AutoGov, Inc. to CoverMe Services Inc. with himself as CEO and Catherine Engelbrecht as CFO.[42][43][44] CoverMe claimed that “in the span of a five-minute interview, hospitals can provide patients with real-time eligibility and enrollment support, creating better outcomes for both the patient and provider.”[45] It made $1.7 million charging services to University of Mississippi Medical Center for work through 2023[46]
True the Vote
An investigation by The Center for Investigative Reporting found that Phillips and the Texas-based nonprofit organization True the Vote engaged in questionable transactions that involving more than $1 million sent to its founders, and a longtime romantic affair between the founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Phillips.[47][19]
On August 17, 2012, True the Vote sent $5,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee, which is illegal because a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit may not contribute to any political party or candidates.[48]
In 2014, True the Vote paid $25,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future for a “donor list rental.”[49][50] Phillips was the director of American Solutions for Winning the Future.[49][51][52]
In 2015, True the Vote gave $30,000 to a company called Define Idea Inc. for “IT support services.”[49][53] Phillips was also a director of Define Idea Inc.[49][54]
True the Vote gave a retainer of half a million dollars to James Bopp’s law firm to lead the prosecution of cases related to 2020 election fraud claims, however, Bopp only filed four of seven lawsuits committed to Fred Eshelman in exchange for his $2.5 million donation. Then, less than a week after filing, they voluntarily dismissed the suits claiming that they were saving the client money; Bopp kept the money and True the Vote kept the remaining $2 million.[55]
Of the $2 million left over from Eshelman's donation, $750,000 went to OPSEC Group LLC, a new company created by Phillips and based out of Alabama, purportedly to do voter analysis.[47][56] The contract with OPSEC did not appear to be disclosed in the 2020 tax return True The Vote provided to Reveal.[47][57] Specifically, on November 9, 2020, OPSEC Group submitted a bill for $350,000 to True the Vote for “Validate the Vote”, and again billed another $700,000 on December 7 for a project called Eyes on Georgia, according to court records.[47]
"The Freedom Hospital" in Ukraine
On June 5, 2022, Gregg Phillips had announced on Truth Social that he had begun a nonprofit under the name "The Freedom Project" and began soliciting donations to raise $25 million for a mobile hospital in Ukraine in response to the Russo-Ukrainian War. He claimed to have already raised half the amount needed due to an in-kind donation from manufacturer MED-1 Partners, but MED-1's CEO Tim Masud denied making a pledge or offer of any such donation.[58] Additionally, "The Freedom Hospital" posted a video on its YouTube account with a caption saying that its team was reporting from Ukraine.[59] The Freedom Hospital had no role in producing the video, and Christopher Loverro, a Los Angeles-based actor and veteran, who made the video in front of a recently bombed Ukrainian preschool, said he never had any connection to The Freedom Hospital and had not given anyone permission to use his work. Loverro said he reported the video to YouTube and commented on the post, warning: "This is a scam. Do not donate to this organization." The hospitals in Ukraine never materialized, and Phillips abandoned the project earlier in April 2022, months before making the fundraising posts on TruthSocial, according to his attorney.[60] True the Vote was listed as the fiscal sponsor on the website, which has since been deleted.[58][60][61]
Unsubstantiated and false voter fraud claims
:{:{In 2013, Phillips' firm partnered with the partisan-conservative, Texas-based organization True the Vote to, according to Phillips, update and analyze voter registration data in the U.S. to supposedly identify indicators of each person voting such as: citizenship or non-citizenship, identity, and felony status.[62][15] He has falsely asserted that his organization has evidence that between three and five million votes were illegal in the 2016 presidential election.[63][64][65] Phillips made his voter fraud claims before voter history data was available in most jurisdictions.[65] }:
Later the group changed its stance and blamed a lack of funding as the cause when Catherine Engelbrecht stated in a video message "As it stands, we do not have the funding to do what we want to do. We’ve gathered 2016 voter rolls, we’ve gathered information from thousands of [Freedom of Information Act requests], but we’re limited by the lack of resources [...] Next steps up are for us to sort of pull back on the national audit, and focus on targeted investigations.” In March 2017, Phillips told The Texas Tribune the final results were still forthcoming but the audit was no longer going to happen.[66] He also claimed that the 2020 election was rigged to steal the election from Trump, but has not provided any such evidence other than fabricated evidence in the form of Russian maps manipulated to look like American maps tracking non-existing vote mules.[67]}:
2000 Mules (2022)
Main article: 2000 Mules
In May 2022, Dinesh D'Souza released 2000 Mules, a debunked[6] political film which falsely alleged that Democrat-aligned individuals were paid to illegally collect and deposit ballots into drop boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election, based on unsubstantiated allegations by True the Vote involving cellphone data.[68][69]
Philip Bump of The Washington Post wrote about the faulty "reliability of [Phillip's] analysis of data collected from cellphones", saying "there's good reason to think that Phillips's analyses don't include precise measurements of proximity to ballot drop boxes".[68]
According to Houston Public Media and NPR, Phillips made a "false claim" that alleged research helped "solved a murder of a young little girl in Atlanta", with True The Vote acknowledging it had reached out to law enforcement "more than two months later", and had "played no role in those arrests or indictments".[70][71]
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger examined one instance of voter fraud falsely alleged by Phillips, whereby a man delivered multiple ballots to a dropbox. Raffensperger stated that his office found no wrongdoing: "We investigated, and the five ballots that he turned in were all for himself and his family members."[70]
Eight Arizona Republican officials held a meeting with about 200 others to hear a presentation from Phillips weeks after the release of 2000 Mules. Phillips characterized the press as "journalistic terrorists"[68] for demonstrating the film's lack of proof. Asked if he had turned over evidence to law enforcement, Phillips said he had given data to the Arizona attorney general's office and the FBI a year earlier, though the offices said they never received it.[72]
Jennifer Wright, chief attorney at Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich's election integrity unit, worked for Gregg Phillips at True the Vote before going to work for Brnovich.[73] Phillips alleged his group investigated the ballot harvesting in San Luis, Arizona, resulting in the arrest of former school board member and former San Luis Mayor Guillermina Fuentes.[74] Records show the investigation was done in August 2020 and the indictment occurred in December 2020.[75][76] Phillips also claimed that these two indicted suspects pled guilty after having watched the film 2000 Mules. Alma Juarez pled guilty on January 18, 2022[77] and Guillermina Fuentes pled guilty on April 11, 2022,[78] whereas the film had a wide release on May 25, and limited screenings May 2 and 4, 2022, making this impossible.[79]
Konnech, Inc. (2022)
In late 2022, Phillips falsely alleged in a social media and podcast campaign that his associates had discovered evidence that Konnech, a poll worker management software company, had stored data on a Chinese computer server and allowed the Chinese government to access it. Phillips said the discovery had been made by two associates who hacked Konnech's servers. Konnech filed a federal defamation suit against True the Vote in September, also alleging True the Vote acquired information on millions of poll workers from the alleged hack.
During an October court hearing, the involvement of a third Phillips associate was disclosed, but Catherine Engelbrecht and Phillips declined federal judge Kenneth Hoyt's demand to identify the man, asserting he was an FBI informant and in danger from drug cartels. Phillips and Engelbrecht also testified to being confidential informants for the FBI while under oath.[80] Hoyt told them if they didn't identify the man within two days, and present the poll worker data they allegedly obtained, they would be held in contempt of court and jailed; they were jailed for contempt on October 31, 2022.[81][82] Engelbrecht and Phillips appealed their incarceration to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel of which ordered them released on November 8.[83]
Phillips made a complaint about Konnech's data handling to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, which then used his information for beginning a prosecution of Konnech's CEO in October 2022. All charges were dropped by the DA a few weeks later, citing that the evidence presented had been potentially biased. Konnech's CEO sued the country, and settled for a $5 million settlement.[84][85]
References...
OMG
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/true-the-vote-election-fraud/}:
no lnx many
How True the Vote Fabricates Claims of Election Fraud, for Fun and Profit
Gregg Phillips, a former Texas official who claims that “2,000 mules” stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, has raised millions of dollars to chase nonexistent fraudulent votes.
By Mimi Swartz
August 22, 2022
Gregg Phillips True the Vote
Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips.]
If your movie preferences lean toward the likes of Top Gun: Maverick, or if your politics fall anywhere to the left of Liz Cheney, you might have missed the theatrical release of a documentary titled 2000 Mules. But if you tuned in to the January 6 hearings, you might have caught a reference to the film by former attorney general William Barr, who, doubling as a movie critic, dismissed it as “singularly unimpressive” and “indefensible.”
Directed by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules purports to prove that Democrats engaged in widespread voter fraud during the 2020 election and stole the presidency from Donald Trump—who, coincidentally or not, pardoned D’Souza in 2018 after his felony conviction for making illegal campaign contributions. Trump, who hosted a screening of 2000 Mules at Mar-a-Lago, called it the “greatest and most impactful documentary of our time.”
As with so many things hyped by the former president, the film became a viral sensation, complete with its own eponymous hashtag. It is among the highest-grossing documentaries of the year so far, having earned nearly $1.5 million at the box office since its May release. (Documentaries don’t tend to attract Marvel franchise–size audiences.) Streaming revenues—D’Souza’s website sells the film for $19.99 a pop—totaled $10 million in just the first two weeks of release, according to Salem Media Group, the conservative Christian company that financed the film.
Whatever haul it’s actually made, 2000 Mules and its claims have clearly achieved a broad reach. A Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely U.S. voters conducted in the first week in June found that 41 percent had heard of the film and 15 percent had seen it. (Of the 146 likely voters who had watched the film, 77 percent said it strengthened their “conviction that there was systematic and widespread election fraud in the 2020 election.”) One of the movie’s admiring viewers was Texas Secretary of State John Scott, a Greg Abbott appointee who briefly represented Trump in a challenge to Pennsylvania’s 2000 election tally. “It’s really amazing,” the state election chief told an audience of Jewish conservatives in Dallas in mid-July. “You get an enormous amount of information.”
This success has come despite the movie’s claims being repeatedly debunked. The Associated Press, NPR, the New York Times, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post, among others, have pointed out that the film’s central assertion—that cellphone tracking data reveals multiple trips by Democrat-funded flunkies (a.k.a. “mules”) to stuff drop boxes with phony ballots in battleground states—is just so much hooey. The film contains video footage of people putting multiple ballots into drop boxes (which is not, as the film would have it, illegal). But as NPR notes, the videos never show the same individuals taking votes to multiple drop boxes, or returning to the same boxes to stuff them with additional ballots.
Some of the alleged ballot-harvesters get tagged as though they’ve been spied on by undercover cops—including “dog guy,” who was filmed with his pup. Another fellow is deemed suspicious for taking a picture of his bike propped against a drop box after voting. “If you’re just casting your own ballot,” one of the film’s talking heads asks darkly, “what reason in the world would you have to come back and take a picture of the box?” Millions of Instagram users could provide the answer.
The absurdities don’t stop there. A map that purports to depict cellphone usage in Atlanta—one of the main alleged centers of mulish activity—actually shows a slice of Moscow, according to the Washington Post. The film boasts that the “geolocation” technology not only backs up Trump’s assertions of systematic election theft but had such pinpoint accuracy that it also helped solve the murder of an eight-year-old girl in Georgia. Law enforcement officials told NPR that there was no truth to the story; the murder had been solved two months before the brains behind 2000 Mules said they turned over their evidence to authorities.
You might think such disproven claims would discredit the filmmakers. But for many conspiracy theorists, the depictions of shadowy, hoodie-wearing figures approaching ballot drop boxes, interspersed with images of dark rooms lit by computer screens displaying incomprehensible maps and diagrams, is proof aplenty.
The star of the show, along with D’Souza and the hoodied mules, is Gregg Phillips, a Republican who has served as a state official in Mississippi and Texas. He is credited with developing the technology used to “prove” the mules’ nefarious deeds. According to the film, Phillips has “a deep background in election intelligence; he’s worked projects over the world; he has a massive thirty years’ experience.” His costar is Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of the Houston-based nonprofit True the Vote, whose stated mission is to “restore America’s confidence in our electoral process.”
Phillips has served as a board member and a highly paid “researcher” for True the Vote. He and Engelbrecht are listed as executive producers of 2000 Mules. And both have shown, time and again, how a lot of money can be made by purporting to show—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that voter fraud is an organized threat to our democracy. As Texas-based reporter Cassandra Jaramillo writes in a recent exposé for the investigative website Reveal, “True the Vote highlights how exploiting the Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips make a cinematic pair. She is blond, always impeccably made up, and earnest in the way of a former Texas beauty queen turned marketing executive. The tall, pale-eyed Phillips, who began his political career, and his hunt for voter fraud, in Alabama in the eighties, is as steady and sincere as an undertaker, with the kind of elaborate, well-tended facial hair that evokes a Civil War general. You could think of them as the Barbie and Ken of voter fraud, or maybe the Bonnie and Clyde.
Engelbrecht, a former small-business owner and Parent Teacher Organization board member in southeast Texas, began chasing alleged voter fraud in 2009 after finding herself “sickened” by the election of President Barack Obama. She’s been a leading advocate for restrictive voter ID laws and purges of voter rolls, and has organized controversial poll-watching efforts focused on Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Houston.
Elected officials including the late Congressman Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas have raised questions about the tactics of Engelbrecht’s organizations. King Street Patriots, the anti-voter-fraud group that Engelbrecht founded prior to True the Vote, in 2009, was registered as a charitable 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Democratic officials and voting rights groups such as Fair Fight, founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic legislator and current candidate for governor of Georgia, have charged that True the Vote uses “suppressive tactics” and supports only Republican candidates, in violation of nonprofit rules. Journalists for the Washington Post and the Center for Investigative Reporting have documented questionable financial dealings—including the transfer of large sums of money going to Engelbrecht’s and Phillips’s for-profit businesses. In every case, the two have denied wrongdoing.
(Texas Monthly made multiple requests to interview Engelbrecht and Phillips, then sent a detailed list of questions to them and James Bopp, a lawyer who has represented True the Vote. Brian Glicklich, True the Vote’s communications consultant, said Engelbrecht and Phillips would not respond to questions or meet with a reporter.)
Phillips became nationally notorious immediately after the 2016 election, when he tweeted on November 11—soon after Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton—that he had “Completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million.” At the time, Phillips was marketing an app he’d created, called VoteStand, which allowed users to send photos or videos of suspected improper voting or electioneering to a central database.
Not surprisingly, President-elect Trump jumped on Phillips’s claim, tweeting: “Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal.” (Coincidentally or not, that is approximately the margin by which Clinton won the popular vote.) Despite promises to produce evidence of his claims, Phillips never did so. Reputable election officials from both parties, in states across the country, said no such fraud took place. But Phillips’s “finding” became the basis for Trump to repeatedly assert what he started saying in November of that year: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
The Associated Press, among others, started poking into Phillips’s history in the wake of his splashy claim. In 2017, AP reported that the self-proclaimed foe of voter fraud was registered in 2016 to vote in three states: Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. Queried on that subject, Phillips’s response was, “Why would I know or care? Doesn’t that just demonstrate how broken the system is?”
Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties have heard claims of widespread voter fraud, with not one finding any compelling evidence to support them. Yet Phillips and Engelbrecht, along with Trump, have brought to mind Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ observation that “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” When the lie is amplified by partisan outlets such as Fox News and by influencers on social media, that makes it easier for the conspiracy mongers to advance their political goals—and for some to make money along the way.
Christian Menefee, a Democrat who serves as county attorney for Harris County, where Houston is located, told me that “the lies and exaggerations about voter fraud . . . are used by conspiracy theorists to file meritless lawsuits, and by elected officials to push partisan audits that end up finding nothing. It leads legislators to pass restrictive voting laws, causes people to question election processes that have been safely used for decades, and makes election workers fear they’ll find themselves in court if they make a minor mistake. These are real impacts, changing how our elections are run and making it harder for eligible voters to cast ballots.”
Andrew Wheat, the research director of the corruption-exposing nonprofit group Texans for Public Justice, put it a little differently. “Sometimes you get the feeling that we as a human race have lost the ability to do a simple Google search, because these hustlers keep doing the same things over and over.”
When Gregg Phillips entered political life in his home state of Alabama, he was a clean-shaven, baby-faced fund-raiser for the state’s Republican party. As he later told the Atlantic, “Our first voter project I did when I worked for the GOP in Alabama back in the 1980s. I’ve been involved off and on since then, and I’ve always said we need to ensure integrity in our systems.”
At a legislative hearing in Arizona in late May, Phillips recounted an experience back home that he said turned him into a crusader against voter fraud. In 1994, a race for chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama between the Democratic incumbent, Ernest “Sonny” Hornsby, and a Republican challenger, Perry O. Hooper Sr., came down to fewer than 300 votes out of 1.1 million cast. Hooper, whose campaign was run by GOP campaign guru Karl Rove, won after a recount. But while the outcome was in question, Hooper’s campaign made vociferous charges of voter fraud, which were never proved. Phillips said he advised the campaign in its investigation. “I worked in Alabama since I was a kid and you know, 15,000 votes showing up in Selma, Alabama”—a city that is overwhelmingly Black—“was not a super big surprise to anyone,” Phillips told his Arizona audience.
In 1991, Phillips moved on to work in Mississippi as a fund-raiser for Kirk Fordice, who became the first Republican to be elected governor of the state since Reconstruction. Fordice, in turn, tapped Phillips to head the Mississippi Department of Human Services in 1993. But when the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (or PEER), made up of legislators appointed by the lieutenant governor and house Speaker, conducted a background check on Phillips, it found discrepancies in his résumé. Phillips, who was then 33, claimed he’d majored in finance at the University of Alabama, but the committee’s records search showed he had majored in transportation. And though Phillips said he was a registered voter in Mississippi at the time, the committee found that his name did not appear on the rolls. Phillips also failed to file a required financial report to the state ethics commission. And he was, according to reports citing his former wife’s new husband, a deadbeat dad who’d failed to pay child support. (Phillips denied that accusation.)
Nevertheless, the state Senate approved his nomination. Within two years, Phillips left for more lucrative work with a contractor who had benefited from an $878,000 deal with his department. Phillips’s new salary: $84,000 a year. (In today’s dollars, that’s around $164,000.) A subsequent investigation by the same PEER committee concluded that “Mr. Phillips’ actions create the appearance of impropriety, facilitating an erosion of the public trust.” The committee also asserted that Phillips’s moves “relative to the contractual arrangement create the appearance of impropriety and could constitute a violation of state ethics laws.” Phillips denied any wrongdoing.
Phillips’s next public position was as the executive director of the Mississippi GOP, which was hellbent on combatting alleged voter fraud in Black communities (in a state that is 38 percent Black). A lawsuit from Black leaders in one such area resulted in a restraining order against the state GOP’s voter-intimidation tactics, and representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice stationed themselves at polling locations during Mississippi’s 1995 elections to make sure voters of color were not turned away. The state GOP provided no evidence of the fraud that it had alleged.
Phillips hadn’t yet become a national figure, but his pattern was set: a life of toggling between ever-more-lucrative public and private-sector jobs. Phillips has mostly shown impeccable timing in his entrances and exits, experiencing only one glitch: he was up for a job as head of human resources for the state of Alabama in 1995, but a negative editorial in the Birmingham News dashed his chances, citing Phillips’s “shaky qualifications and a suspect track record.”
For some Texas Republicans, though, Phillips’s track record seemed to inspire little more than a shoulder shrug. In 2003, Phillips was hired as executive deputy commissioner of the state Health and Human Services Commission under Governor Rick Perry. (When a Houston Chronicle reporter later looked into how Phillips had come to be hired, no officials could recall. There were no letters of recommendation in his file.)
Another reported conflict of interest followed. When Phillips oversaw a billion-dollar plan to streamline and privatize Health and Human Services, two clients of a company called Enterject, a “management consulting services” firm that Phillips had founded, won $167 million in state contracts. Phillips claimed to have severed all ties with Enterject while serving in state government, but his then-wife was the company’s chief financial officer. In addition, the Chronicle reported, “a company called GHT Development Inc. owned the Internet registration for the Enterject Web site. GHT listed Gregg Phillips as its chief executive.”
When Phillips resigned from the Texas HHSC, he said it was because of a lingering health issue and that he wanted to spend more time with his family. But as it had in Mississippi, controversy followed him. According to a subsequent Dallas Morning News investigation, the company Phillips hired to replace state workers—to the tune of $899 million for five years—produced chaos, including jammed call centers and clients who were separated wrongfully from their benefits. “Most infamously,” the News reported, “applicants for a time were given a wrong fax number for sending pay stubs and other private documents. It belonged to a Seattle warehouse that had no part of the deal.”
Five years later, in 2010, the state hired an Austin-based company called AutoGov to help fix the continuing problems in Health and Human Services, at a cost to taxpayers of $207,500. State officials thought the company’s software expertise might simplify some of the confusion Phillips had left behind. Phillips, it turned out, had founded AutoGov and served as its chairman and CEO. The News reported that there was nothing illegal about bringing Phillips back into the fold given the years he had been away from state government, but noted that “critics of the deal say it’s troubling that a former employee is getting paid to try to fix problems spawned by an idea he helped hatch.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips have shown, time and again, how a lot of money can be made by purporting to show that voter fraud is an organized threat to our democracy.
Nobody can deny that Phillips is relentlessly entrepreneurial. In 2012, he garnered attention nationally with his VoteStand app. “People will have somewhere to turn if they see voter fraud or something that is not quite right in their eyes,” Phillips explained to Politico. “We think this will help us leave a positive legacy this election cycle, rather than just putting up a bunch of ads.” The app, available for iPhone through Apple’s app store, purportedly sent all reports to a “team of experts that are interested in and investigating this issue,” Phillips said, though he declined to offer more specifics about how the app worked and who had paid for its development. (He also declined to answer Texas Monthly’s question about who the “experts” were.)
It turned out that funding for VoteStand came from a super PAC, Winning Our Future, for which Phillips served as managing director. The PAC, which received $15 million from right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, backed former Republican U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s unsuccessful presidential run in 2012.
Phillips appears to have connected with Catherine Engelbrecht around 2014, when she was continuing to gain national notoriety for fighting imaginary voter fraud. Phillips had his mysterious technology, and Engelbrecht had a platform to market their investigations nationwide.That year, Phillips followed up on VoteStand with a nonprofit he founded called theVoters Trust, which offered a $1 million bounty to anyone who could prove that IRS leaders or members of the Obama administration were targeting right-wing or tea party groups. (It’s unclear who collected the cash, if anyone did.)
Even before that time, Englebrecht’s efforts, like Phillips’s, had begun to attract scrutiny. In 2011, the Texas Observer reported on multiple controversies emanating from her King Street Patriots, including one that involved a video featuring a doctored image of a Black woman holding a sign declaring, “I only got to vote once!” In a harbinger of things to come, Engelbrecht’s group had taken “evidence” of invalid voter applications to Harris County’s Republican voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, who subsequently claimed in August 2010 to have found more than five thousand such invalid applications.
The questionable research from King Street Patriots was challenged by Houston Votes, a progressive group that was registering voters. Englebrecht had publicly claimed that Houston Votes was being controlled by the New Black Panthers, a “radical, racist, criminal hate group.” The group’s leader filed a defamation suit, but the damage had been done: before the allegations were made, Houston Votes had been registering one thousand minority voters a day; afterward, its daily tally dropped to two hundred. That November, at the request of Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, federal monitors from the Department of Justice came to Houston to protect voters against intimidation by King Street poll watchers on Election Day.
More trouble followed. The Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit alleging that King Street Patriots made “unlawful expenditures in coordination with the Republican Party and/or one or more of its candidates.” The suit further alleged that King Street was a “sham domestic nonprofit corporation that instead acts as an unregistered and illegal political committee.” Though King Street denied the allegations, a state court judge ruled in favor of the Democrats. Appeals dragged on for several years, however, by which time King Street had morphed into a different group, True the Vote. The case was ultimately dismissed by agreement of both parties, and, according to Chad Dunn, the attorney who represented the Democrats, “It looks like Catherine went into the vote-suppression business full-time.”
None of the controversies stopped Engelbrecht from becoming a tea party star, hosting events where she charmed Republican county clerks, state legislators, and members of Congress in Texas and beyond. Despite the clear partisan flavor of these events, Engelbrecht continued to claim that True the Vote was nonpartisan. Engelbrecht was becoming a Fox News darling, and True the Vote said it was organizing poll-watching volunteers in 35 states, while pushing for voter roll purges and drawing accusations of voter intimidation.
It’s easy to see why Engelbrecht and Phillips joined forces. They had a lot in common, including a loathing for President Obama, a love of the spotlight, and a penchant for turning a personal profit from their crusades against alleged voter fraud. Their companies have shared a mailing address, and in 2016 Engelbrecht was named the chief financial officer of one of Phillips’s companies. Engelbrecht and Phillips have been coy about a reported romantic link, though both listed the same address in the small Central Texas town of Cat Spring, about sixty miles west of Houston, for several years. “You know, Gregg and I have actually talked about this and how we would answer this question,” Engelbrecht told the New York Times in May, “and the best answer that I think either of us are going to give is, it is totally unrelated and unimportant.”
Regardless, they’ve made quite a team. By 2016, True the Vote’s national influence was growing, with a substantial network of volunteers, event co-sponsorships with the Koch brothers’ tea party advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, and data collected by Phillips, who by then was touting a proprietary algorithm for his research. (That includes the research that he claimed—without ever showing any evidence—proved that more than three million noncitizens voted in 2016.) In the two years prior to 2016, one of Phillips’s companies was paid $30,000 by True the Vote, while he was a board member of the organization.
Allegations of widespread voter fraud were repeated by Donald Trump and right-wing media so often that they became gospel, first on the far right and eventually among a majority of Republicans. Phillips was always eager to congratulate himself for his work. “I’ve torn down govt in two states, eliminated 20K jobs and saved $5 billion,” he boasted in a 2016 tweet. “Requires enormous stones.”
When legitimate media outlets came calling, Phillips was more circumspect about his never-proved claim of more than three million illegal votes. “I’m not gonna be goaded into going faster than I want to,” he told the Atlantic in January 2017, when pressed about releasing his data. “I’m not a government official.” Besides, he said, “Our interest is not in uncovering anything that might somehow change any past election, because once those votes are certified, they’re certified and that’s over. The work that we’re doing could create a foundation for looking at elections moving forward.” The same month, The Guardian reported that the man who had built a career excising government waste owed about $100,000 in back taxes. Phillips said he owed less than $50,000, and that he was “in a disagreement with the IRS.”
A lesser man might have retreated with his spoils to, say, a villa in the Caymans. Not Phillips. Joe Biden’s victory in 2020—along with Trump’s incessant claim that the election had been stolen—inspired a deeply conservative North Carolina donor by the name of Fred Eshelman to wire $2 million shortly after Election Day to True the Vote, whose leaders were saying they needed to raise $7.3 million to stop the certification of the election and get to the bottom of the grand conspiracy that robbed Trump of his presidency. A former pharmaceutical executive and financier who gave $100 million to the University of North Carolina, Eshelman could afford to make the biggest donation True the Vote had ever received.
On November 9, not long after Eshelman’s payment arrived, Phillips’s latest venture, OPSEC, billed True the Vote $350,000. The following day, True the Vote gave a $500,000 retainer to Bopp, a right-wing lawyer best known for winning the Citizens United case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down limits on corporate campaign contributions. While True the Vote had promised that OPSEC would “aggregate and analyze data to identify patterns of election subversion,”Bopp’s role was to try to persuade judges to give the organization access to voter rolls in closely contested states so it could show proof of fraud. Eshelman was told that Bopp would file lawsuits in seven states. He filed four, and then voluntarily withdrew each of them within a week.
Eschelman pitched in another $500,000 after a consultant told him True the Vote needed “additional short-term money for Bopp.” But Bopp, Engelbrecht, and Phillips had promised much and delivered little. “We were just not getting any data or proof,” a lobbyist for Eshelman later told the Washington Post. “We were looking at this and saying to ourselves, ‘This just is not adding up.’”
Disgusted, Eshelman filed suit, demanding a refund. The lawsuit, first filed in federal court, was withdrawn and then refiled in Texas, where a judge threw out the case, ruling that Eshelman did not have standing to sue in the state. The proper authority to investigate the case, the judge said, was the Texas attorney general’s office. Republican attorney general Ken Paxton—who’s been a guest on Engelbrecht’s podcast, has taken no action.
Or rather, the Attorney General’s office has chosen a different kind of action. On May 13th, before the official May 20th release date of 2000 Mules, Jonathan White, the Division Chief of the AG’s Election Integrity Division, sent out an email to his team, stating that Deputy AG Josh Reno had invited everyone on it to a screening of D’Souza’s “voter fraud documentary” the next evening. The event was free to all comers, along with a plus-one.General Paxton had a block of reservations, White continued, and would be present. “I think they would love to have a good showing from our office…” the head of AG’s Election Integrity Division wrote. The office hosted another screening on June 6, complete with a BBQ lunch.
Meanwhile, according to Reveal’s reporting, court records showed that Phillips’s voter analysis company, OPSEC Group LLC, continued to bill True the Vote after Eschelman broke ties, receiving another $400,000 for a project called Eyes on Georgia.
True the Vote’s tax returns, linked to in the Reveal exposé, have been “riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended,” Jaramillo wrote. Her extensive investigation found that along with the handsome sums paid to Phillips’s various companies for their data analysis, True the Vote has made questionable loans to Engelbrecht, who received $113,396 in 2019 alone.
Phillips is currently CEO and Engelbrecht is “chief experience officer” of a company called CoverMe Services Inc.—formerly known as AutoGov—which says it uses software to “bridge the financial and social service gaps faced by both hospitals and their patients.” CoverMe claims that “in the span of a five-minute interview, hospitals can provide patients with real-time eligibility and enrollment support, creating better outcomes for both the patient and provider.” The State of Mississippi has paid the company close to $1.7 million for its services.
But that doesn’t mean Phillips has given up on voter fraud investigations—especially after the attention garnered by 2000 Mules. The film has the ultimate power-endorser in Trump, who brought up Phillips’s claims again in a twelve-page missive refuting the claims of the January 6 committee. “The data is astonishing!” Trump said in his publicly released statement. “Rather than 2000 mules, the number jumps to 54,000 mules.”
Both Engelbrecht and Phillips are now certified stars on the conspiracy circuit—with their credibility boosted by state and federal lawmakers eager to use their “findings” to make the case for overturning elections. In Wisconsin, the duo addressed the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections in March. In Michigan, seventeen Republican House members asked the state’s attorney general to investigate the claims made in 2000 Mules. Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona, has called for congressional hearings about the film’s allegations. On July 27, in a sign of how much weight Phillips’s name now carries in far-right circles, Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake tweeted prior to her primary victory, “I am honored to have the endorsement of True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips!”
Engelbrecht and Phillips have still failed to present any credible evidence to prove the claims they made in the movie. In the Arizona legislative hearing, Phillips said criticism of their methods came from “journalistic terrorists.” (The Republican Party of Arizona picked up on his phrase, twice tweeting out: “The mainstream media is domestic terrorists.”) Asked to describe his process in greater detail, Phillips refused, calling the methods “proprietary.”
Phillips says criticism of True the Vote’s methods comes from “journalistic terrorists.”
On a right-wing podcast in late spring, he claimed that an even bigger finding would soon be revealed. At the hearing in Arizona, he doubled down: “We do indeed have a matter brewing that is ten times bigger than Mules,” he said, inspiring excited whispers in the audience. “It’ll be about six weeks before we can clear our way through it, but I assure you it is the most explosive issue that you have ever come in contact with related to elections in the United States.”
Twelve weeks later, as this story was being published, the explosive revelation had still not been delivered.But Phillips was still dropping hints to titillate the conspiracy-minded. On a podcast in late July, he claimed that what would be revealed stems from an “op” involving “the United States government, which we worked for,” until “we were betrayed by the United States government.” This month, True the Vote held asymposium inArizona called “The Pit,” where Phillips promised to roll out “devastating” findings, including “the part that was left out of the movie.” The proceedings were livestreamed on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. But in lieu of a big reveal, Engelbrecht and Phillips announced they were putting up a new website that would include surveillance video taken at drop boxes and documents from various election lawsuits—but not the geolocation data that was the basis for the film’s allegations. And that, they said, would be a wrap on 2000 Mules. “The end of Mules!” Engelbrecht exclaimed. “End scene. We’re done.”
The pair had already been moving on to their next project. In late July, Phillips appeared withEngelbrecht on a stage in Las Vegas at a gathering of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization of local police officials who claim that federal and state authorities are subordinate to local sheriffs. They were joined by sheriffs who have signed on to True the Vote’s Protect America Now initiative, designed to encourage them to investigate elections—or, as the True the Vote website puts it, to “equip local sheriffs with the tools that they need to fight potential fraud,” such as enhanced video surveillance. A national hotline, according to True the Vote, will be set up “to connect American citizens with their local sheriffs in case they see anything awry” at the polls this fall. Five Texas sheriffs (and one former sheriff) from small, rural counties have signed up.
And so it goes, despite the many investigations of Phillips and Engelbrecht, and despite True the Vote’s continued inability to prove that voter fraud exists. “True the Vote and groups like it are well-documented voter intimidation scams,” said Chris Hollins, a Democrat running for mayor of Houston who, as county clerk for Harris, was on the front lines in the 2020 election. “They’re created to amplify conspiracy theories, funded by wealthy right-wing activists, to tie the hands of election administrators and embolden partisan poll watchers.”
They are also created, as Engelbrecht and Phillips have long demonstrated, with an eye toward making money. To support their efforts to “equip” sheriffs for November’s elections, True the Vote aims to raise a cool $1 million.
Correction 8/22/2022: An earlier version of this article reported Miriam and Sheldon Adelson had given $15 billion to the super PAC Winning Our Future. They gave $15 million.
Update 8/24/2022: This article has been updated to include information about invitations to members of the Texas Attorney General’s office to watch 2,000 Mules.
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from konech
see true the vote gregg p BS
which used in antrim?
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/election-denial-movement-and-trump-have-become-increasingly-intertwined
no lnx many vids
Media Matters for America
Research/Study
The election denial movement — and Trump — have become increasingly intertwined with QAnon
QAnon now offers a broad extremist network for election denialists to promote themselves and spread conspiracy theories to receptive listeners
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published 01/26/23
Last December, while discussing supposed “election integrity” efforts, Gregg Phillips, a leader of the election denial organization True the Vote, told an attorney for former President Donald Trump that “people want to come in and help,” and “that’s what this Anon movement is about.”
And “help” it has. Five years after “Q” began a movement based on a conspiracy theory that Trump would crush his supposed enemies and a cabal of pedophiles with mass arrests, QAnon had evolved into an online anti-reality network that has shifted much of its focus to boosting other conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine misinformation and, increasingly, election denial. It is now an online distribution system that the election denial movement and other conspiracy theorists can exploit to spread their false claims and gain attention for their organizations.
QAnon was born out of far-right message boards and grew as supporters repeatedly helped spread misinformation online during years of inaction from social media platforms. The movement became so much of a threat that multiple government agencies issued internal warnings on its supporters, who have committed multiple acts of violence, including the January 6 insurrection.
During the 2022 election cycle, the QAnon community saw a closer level of association with the election denial movement — including Trump and his associates — providing a broad extremist network for denialists to easily promote themselves and spread their conspiracy theories to people primed to support them.
QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin’s election-denial candidates coalition
Leading up to the midterm elections, QAnon influencer Juan O. Savin (whose real name is Wayne Willott) and Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant recruited election denial candidates for positions where they would be in charge of election administration. Savin boasted of his involvement, claiming that every week he would “have a call to all my candidates from around the country,” including discussing fundraising.
Savin also said he had created the “largest election integrity presentation groups in the country" -- events where denialists, sometimes including coalition members, discussed supposed evidence of voter fraud -- and that he was working “behind the scenes” and hiring QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan to “host” them.
Following the midterm elections, Savin moved to another election denial effort, teaming up with a pair of brothers to promote a long-shot challenge to the 2020 election, which the Supreme Court declined to hear.
Tina Peters
Savin detailed some of his efforts with his coalition during interviews, on QAnon-supporting shows, suggesting, for instance, that he helped convince Tina Peters — the Mesa County, Colorado, clerk who was criminally charged for a security breach of election equipment — to run for Colorado secretary of state. One of Peters’ primary opponents also revealed that Savin encouraged him to drop out of the race and endorse her.
After losing the Republican primary, Peters refused to concede, eventually becoming part of another Savin-linked coalition of Republican candidates in Colorado claiming that they lost their primaries due to voter fraud. Over the following months, these failed candidates went on QAnon shows to promote and fundraise for the coalition and amplify false claims of fraud in their primaries. A member of Peters’ coalition even invoked the QAnon slogan in a July interview on election denier Joe Oltmann’s podcast: “Where we find fraud in El Paso, we find fraud in Colorado, we find fraud nationwide. This is all national security.” “Where we go one,” she said, pausing; the other coalition members joined her in finishing it. “We go all.”
Kari Lake and Mark Finchem
Other candidates in Savin’s coalition also appeared on QAnon-promoting shows during the 2022 election cycle. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake fundraised and promoted her campaign on a QAnon-supporting show right before the Republican primary, and Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem also appeared on that same QAnon show during his campaign. Finchem also had a QAnon influencer at one of his fundraisers, which featured a performance of a QAnon song. Both Finchem and Lake also appeared with other QAnon figures during their campaigns.
Election denial groups teamed up with the QAnon community
True the Vote
The long-standing organization True the Vote — whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has been called “the godmother of the election integrity movement” — grew particularly close with the QAnon community in 2022, using its members and infrastructure to spread nefarious allegations about election software company Konnech.
Following the release of its debunked election denial movie 2000 Mules, True the Vote’s Engelbrecht and co-founder Gregg Phillips both began to cultivate relationships with QAnon figures, repeatedly appearing on QAnon shows. They praised the QAnon community’s “spectacularly good” “open source intelligence,” while also recruiting multiple QAnon figures to help with their efforts, such as Phillips’ podcast and “research team.” They also promised to hand off supposed information from the “Anons” to law enforcement that they had partnered with.
We The Media TTV research team chat log
Citation (Left): QAnon figure Chad Vivas (known online as "KagDrogo") alongside True the Vote's Gregg Phillips (Right): Message from Vivas from leaked internal chat logs of members of QAnon influencer collective We The Media
At a True the Vote event in August called “The Pit” — which featured QAnon attendees — the group presented allegations that the Chinese Communist Party rigged elections through Konnech. Attendees were encouraged to further research and spread the claims, which they did, earning praise from True the Vote for their “brilliant” and “great work.” According to The New York Times, Konnech’s CEO and his family were subsequently forced to go into hiding, and other Konech employees “feared for their safety and started working remotely.”
In October — less than two months after an investigator in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office attended “The Pit,” according to Phillips — the district attorney arrested Konnech’s CEO over allegations similar to True the Vote’s claims. (Charges were dropped in November.) The arrest was fodder for right-wing media to widely spread True the Vote and QAnon supporters’ claims about Konnech, calling it evidence of election fraud, and the story led to local governments announcing they would cancel contracts with the company. A Virginia county “election integrity” task force even gave some of those QAnon influencers’ materials about Konnech to its county election board. Phillips would go on to credit “the Anon community” for having “dug in” on Konnech and creating “focal points … of interest that [Konnech’s CEO is] ultimately going to have to answer to.”
Clean Elections USA
Another figure who attended The Pit was Melody Jennings, a QAnon supporter who had created a group inspired by 2000 Mules called Clean Elections USA, which focused on having people “monitor” ballot drop boxes for supposed fraud. She connected with several QAnon influencers at the event, later appearing multiple times on a show hosted by conspiracy theorists she met there. She credited those QAnon figures with helping her group and connecting her with others. Jennings regularly asked her “team” of QAnon influencers to promote her efforts, which led to complaints of voter intimidation in Arizona and landed Clean Elections USA in court there.
New York Citizens Audit
Another person who networked with QAnon figures at The Pit was Marly Hornik, who founded the election denial organization New York Citizens Audit. Hornik met the hosts of a QAnon show at the event and then repeatedly appeared on their program. There, Hornik promoted her organization and lauded what “the Anons are doing with Konnech,” calling them the “citizen intelligence army.”
Video
Citation From the October 27, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show
Other election denial groups and activists
Election denial organizations also associated themselves with the QAnon community outside of The Pit:
Members of a Florida-based “election integrity” group called Defend Florida connected with QAnon-supporting show host Zak Paine at an event hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. The members later went on Paine’s show to promote the group and say they asked Paine if they could “come on your show” rather than appearing in mainstream outlets because of “the great work that you’ve been doing for years.”
A Florida “election integrity” activist told a QAnon influencer that he was a “big fan” of his and of Savin.
Paine also connected with a Nebraska election denial group founder at Lindell’s event.
A duo who had filed a class action lawsuit against election software company Dominion, which was a target of election denialists after the 2020 election, told Paine that “everybody loves you” and that their lawsuit would be more popular if Paine was on Twitter.
Well-known election deniers Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn grew closer to the QAnon community
Patrick Byrne and The America Project
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who is a co-founder of election denial organization The America Project, is one of the country’s central election denial funders. Prior to the January 6 insurrection, Byrne met with Trump and fueled his voter fraud grievances. Since then, he has continued election denial activities and cultivated ties to the QAnon community. During the midterm election season, Byrne’s The America Project even funded an effort to recruit veterans to monitor polling sites for supposed fraud.
Byrne has previously suggested that he relied on the “digital soldiers” in the QAnon community and that they were his allies. He went further in 2022:
He directly invoked Q’s call in 2020 for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.
He pushed an effort to harass schools popularized by a QAnon-supporting group.
He furthered his very close relationship with Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, a QAnon influencer known online as “Tore” who ran for Ohio secretary of state. He offered to aid her activities, including monetarily, and announced that he was working with her on “election integrity” efforts and lawsuits.
Byrne and Savin — both of whom have previously mentioned being connected — disclosed their further ties over the course of the year:
Savin said they worked together in 2020, said they talked “very frequently” with each other, and suggested that Byrne had “helped us out tremendously in the election integrity stuff.”
Byrne lauded Savin as “sophisticated,” “very helpful,” and said they had spent “some good times” together. He also invoked Savin by name to promote a legal case to overturn the 2020 election.
Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates
July 24, 2022
Former Overstock CEO suggests he collaborated with QAnon influencer known for trying to elect Big Lie election administration candidates
Audio
Citation From a July 24, 2022, online stream
Additionally, some of The America Project’s work and activities during the year were explicitly tied to QAnon supporters. Byrne used multiple QAnon shows to recruit people for the organization’s plan to monitor polling sites. The America Project also brought on QAnon sympathizer Lara Logan, as well as an attorney who has represented Tore, who became The America Projects’s “chief legal strategist.”
Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn, The America Project’s other co-founder and fellow Trump voter fraud adviser, also continued to develop ties with the QAnon community:
He hung out with members of a QAnon influencer collective known as We The Media, including on a Zoom call, according to one of We The Media’s members.
Flynn’s other organization, America’s Future, recruited Liz Crokin, a fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist.
Flynn, along with Lindell of MyPillow, attorney Sidney Powell, and some members of Savin’s coalition, also appeared on a relatively new QAnon channel on Election Day 2022 to push fraud claims.
Trump and his orbit grew closer to the QAnon community, explicitly embracing and lauding the movement
Donald Trump
Trump, the leader of the election denial movement, also embraced QAnon more closely during the past year, as did some of those in his orbit — including associates of his social media company Truth Social, one of his attorneys, and his son.
Trump’s associates claimed in 2021 that they were trying “to weed out any QAnon influences — both adherents and postings — getting close to him,” but the former president and now-2024 presidential candidate only stepped up his association with the QAnon community. (He had also publicly and privately praised QAnon supporters multiple times during his presidency.)
According to a Media Matters count, Trump amplified QAnon-promoting accounts nearly 400 times on Truth Social in 2022 — far outpacing the pace of his QAnon account amplifications when he used Twitter. That Truth Social activity included repeatedly amplifying explicit QAnon content.
Trump Truth Social QAnon content amplifications
:{:{}:
Citation Explicit QAnon content amplified by Donald Trump on Truth Social in 2022
Trump met withCrokin, the QAnon influencer, at Mar-a-Lago, and another QAnon influencer claimed to have met with Trump while visiting Mar-a-Lago.}:
Trump used a song associated with QAnon on his social media and at multiple rallies. During some of the rallies, people would hold up one finger in the air in response, possibly referring to the “one” in “Where we go one, we go all.” Trump would continue to use the song at rallies even after media and others flagged its background.
Truth Social and its leadership
Truth Social also came to embrace QAnon as part of its business model. One of the first accounts to reportedly sign up on the platform, which launched in February, was an account called “@Q” that tied itself to the conspiracy theory. Kash Patel,a former Trump administration official and member of the platform’s board of directors, and Devin Nunes, the platform’s CEO, repeatedly amplified the “@Q” account. The platform also featured QAnon ads and verified QAnon influencers. And the CEO of a shell corporation formed to merge with the company running the platform even went on a QAnon show to advocate for his own shareholders to delay the merger. The platform also helped QAnon figures and election denial activists network.
Patel also went on numerous QAnon shows on behalf of Truth Social, telling the community that “we try to incorporate” QAnon “into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences” and praised the “good” coming from it. He also signed copies of his book with the QAnon slogan, asking, “What's wrong with it?” and he said he and Trump were “blown away” by the “acumen” of some QAnon supporters.
Video
Citation From the June 16, 2022, edition of The Patriot Party News
A Trump attorney and Eric Trump
One of Trump’s attorneys, Peter Ticktin, repeatedly went on QAnon shows to push election fraud claims. On one of those shows Ticktin even asked the audience to send him “evidence in regard to January 6,” the “fake election,” and “the election fraud.” He also seemingly invoked Q’s 2020 call for supporters to deny that QAnon exists.
Trump’s son Eric Trump, who had posted a QAnon image on social media in 2020 — also went on multiple QAnon shows, and a QAnon show host Eric Trump met with claimed that Trump told him that “his Dad loves what we’re doing.”
Increasingly, where election denial goes one, QAnon goes all
Savin’s swing state coalition members failed to win election and the GOP had disappointing midterm results, but that did not deter the growing bond between the QAnon community and election denial movements. The connections reached a new level this past year, even after the midterms.
The movement continues to grow and metastasize beyond the original Q and its focus, even when Q resumed posting during the year after an 18-month absence. And with the rise of platforms like Truth Social, and Twitter increasingly reversing its QAnon crackdown under Elon Musk, the QAnon community could become even more interconnected with election denialists and other conspiracy theories. That could help grow the dangerous and antidemocratic denialist movement, making it easier to spread its misinformation faster and more broadly.
In This Article
QAnon Conspiracy Theory Voter Fraud and Suppression
Voter Suppression
Related
In 2021, people thought QAnon would go away -- instead, it continued to fuel attacks on democracy
12/31/21
In 2020, QAnon became all of our problem
12/31/20
How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement
09/15/
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...Tina Peters, Mesa County’s Clerk, was not a cultish election denier immediately before or after 2020’s presidential election. She did not make any accusations that her voting system’s computers had been secretly sabotaged when Sandra Brown, Mesa County’s back-office election manager, mistakenly double-counted 20,000 ballots in late October 2020—a procedural error during preprocessing ballots that Brown repeated in Mesa County’s municipal elections in April 2021.
But soon after April 2021’s elections, where a slate of conservatives who skipped a candidate forum all lost, the first of what became a parade of pro-Donald Trump, self-proclaimed election IT experts began telling Peters about anomalies with her county’s voting system computers. The anomalies were the same clichés about illegal voters and forged totals that had been put forth by Trump diehards in other states. Except the allegations were dressed up as statistics and technicalities. Peters, a businesswoman turned public official, was more than impressed.
As March 2022 indictments by Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein, a Republican, and a recent New Yorker profile recount, Peters used a standard update of election software in late April 2021 to make unauthorized copies of her election system’s hard drives, software, and data. The apparent goal was gathering intelligence to show that the technology—made by Dominion Voting Systems—could not be trusted to produce accurate vote counts.
Trump’s lawyers and partisan IT specialists had made copies of computer drives, software and data in December 2020 in Antrim County, Michigan, after a former state GOP leader turned state judge allowed it. The copies, of another Dominion system, were not to be shared. But they were soon leaked in Trump circles.
That effort, nonetheless, produced no evidence for any of Trump’s failed post-election lawsuits. Still, one day after January 6, 2021’s pro-Trump insurrection, some of the same data miners went to Coffee County, Georgia. There, an election official let them copy their Dominion system’s drives, software and 2020 data. Members of this loose cadre of IT experts showed up in Mesa County in late April—several weeks after back-office manager Brown again erred in using a computer as it was compiling vote subtotals in its municipal elections.
What happened next in Mesa County gets complex. It also reveals how a rare but recurring trend among a handful of local election officials—mistakes with setting up or using their system’s computers—can be exploited by partisans who claim that invisible forces are secretly stealing votes if their candidates lose.
In every cycle, there are some election officials who do not properly set up or use these computers—errors that usually are caught and corrected, but initially produce incorrect election results. This trend has been overlooked in the press coverage of the interstate plot by Trump’s IT gurus to steal election software and 2020 data.
The operational problems, however, are among the findings by the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project, which has co-written a forthcoming guide about how election systems work. The co-author is Duncan Buell, a computer scientist who has studied voting systems, software, and data for more than a decade, and was an election official in Richland County, South Carolina, home to the state’s capital, Columbia. These errors recurred in each cycle that he studied.
In 2020’s general election, the programming, and operational mistakes were few and far between. Nonetheless, the errors that Trump’s IT squads seized upon—errors that were corroborated by post-election inquiries by other government bodies—helped fuel the lie that the presidential election was stolen.
Moreover, some of the election workers who made these mistakes—such as Mesa County’s Brown—and their elected superior—such as Peters—then fell under the spell of Trump’s conspiratorial IT squad—producing fodder for more false claims.
404 no waybaCK moment-truth-summit-start-finish:
AUG 23 2022
What happened at Mike Lindell's Moment of Truth Summit in Springfield
INSERT
Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks, and other takeaways from Mike Lindell's Springfield event
Galen BacharierSpringfield News-Leader
:{Aug. 21, 2022Updated Aug. 23, 2022,
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a leading election conspiracy theorist, brought out a surprise guest on Sunday morning during his weekend-long "summit" in Springfield: U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Georgia Republican took the stage on the second day of the event, which brought attendees from across the U.S., most of them from outside Missouri, to the Springfield Expo Center. She lambasted both Democrats, saying their policies are "ruining our country," and fellow Republicans.
"The reason why I came here is I've recently gotten really tired of being told 'Marjorie, don't talk about the election,'" Greene said.
"You have poured money and time you didn't have, of course money you didn't have," she told the crowd. "You have probably lost friends, maybe you lost a job. Maybe you've lost faith at times, but you found it again and you keep fighting."
More: PowerPoints, prayer and a missing sheriff: Inside Mike Lindell's Springfield conference
Lindell's message centers on grievances with media, spreading the word
The MyPillow CEO was not on stage at all times throughout the conference, often leaving hosting duties to co-hosts affiliated with his TV station.
When Lindell was on stage, he spent most of his time criticizing media coverage about him — lambasting national newspapers like the New York Times as well as local outlets, and TV stations ranging from CNN and Fox News to Newsmax and One America Now. He ticked through a series of articles written about him — the Associated Press reporting that MyPillow had been removed from stores due to his conspiracies, and a Washington Post photographer snapping a photo of him holding notes on "martial law" while visiting the White House.
On Sunday, he trained his sights onto reporters who were present or published stories about the first day of the event, including the News-Leader, the Springfield Daily Citizen and The Daily Beast. He displayed photos of a reporter and stories on the screen, and said the News-Leader reporter "should come up to the stage and we can pray for him."
Mike Lindell: MyPillow CEO's weekend-long elections 'summit' in Missouri kicks off
He also repeatedly urged attendees to share the event, which was being livestreamed on his app FrankSpeech, with family and friends.
"The only way this weekend fails is if nobody watches," Lindell said on multiple occasions.
It's unclear exactly how many people tuned in. FrankSpeech does not display viewer counts; a stream on YouTube alternative Rumble peaked around 1,500 viewers on Sunday morning.
Lindell's own company also maintained a prominent presence throughout. At one point he gave attendees a promo code to order MyPillows online, as well as MyCoffee, his new coffee brand. Samples of MyCoffee were available alongside breakfast.
Why Springfield? How many invited?
Repeated attempts to reach organizers of the event for information about how many people were invited, or why Springfield was chosen to host the conference, were unsuccessful.
One staffer made an informal estimate of "1,000 attendees per day." On Saturday, a reporter's rough count of attendance came to about 400 people. The crowd was predominantly white and skewed older, though some brought along young children and toddlers.
A representative for the University Plaza Hotel & Convention Center, which was listed as the event's venue in initial registration information, told the News-Leader on Friday they were not allowed to provide any information about the event.
Speakers from across U.S., including candidates and elected officials, speak
Much of Saturday's programming was dedicated to "State of the State" addresses, in which speakers representing all 50 states gave presentations about theories of election fraud within their home territory.
A majority of the speakers were volunteers with activist groups who have analyzed and scrutinized 2020 election results in their state, often putting pressure on county clerks and secretaries of states and urging for "forensic audits."
Others were candidates for or current holders of public office including Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks, Kentucky state Sen. Adrienne Southworth, Washington state Rep. Brad Klippert, Arizona state House candidate Liz Harris and Massachusetts congressional candidate Caroline Colarusso.
Linda Rantz, an organizer with the "Missouri Canvassers" group that has investigated the election in Missouri, spoke on behalf of the Show-Me State (Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has said the 2020 election was secure in Missouri, and has pursued only two cases of election fraud). Rep. Ann Kelley, a Lamar Republican who has previously attended one of Lindell's events, was also present.
*Galen Bacharier covers Missouri politics & government for the News-Leader. Contact him at gbacharier@news-leader.com, (573) 219-7440 or on Twitter @galenbacharier.
ENDIT
These trends—mistakes with programming or using election computers and rogue officials who abuse the public trust by making unfounded claims—offer warnings before 2022’s general election. Many 2020 election-deniers are candidates seeking state and federal office this fall. A few already have shown in their primaries that they will attack the process and technology if they fear they may lose.
Before 2020’s election, virtually all of the members of Trump’s IT squads did not know much about voting system computers or election administration safeguards. But they eagerly presented their credentials and claimed, that election computers had been hijacked, and, moreover, that no Dominion system should be trusted. Their unproven accusations became, and remain, fixtures in Trump circles.
“It wasn’t just Colorado,” said Walter Daugherity, a recently retired University of Texas lecturer in computer science and engineering, on an August 22 televised panel sponsored and hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has spent millions to promote the stolen election fiction and whose actions are under investigation by federal authorities. “Everywhere across the country that had a Dominion trusted build [software] upgrade had the same thing happen.”
Daugherity was one analyst who received Mesa County’s pilfered data. He and Jeff O’Donnell, an IT analyst whose moniker in Trump circles is “the Lone Raccoon,” co-wrote a series of reports concluding that Mesa County’s computers mysteriously allowed 20,346 presidential ballots to be counted twice. The double counting was not the fault of election officials, specifically back-office election manager Brown, they wrote, positing that an “external trigger,” “signal,” “software algorithm” or “pre-programming” had caused “unexpected voting patterns.”
Their speculation was one of many similar pronouncements in Trump circles. They accused Dominion of complicity in a scheme that would be illegal, if it were true.
“The report made claims which, if true, would indicate a crime was committed related to election fraud,” Mesa County District Attorney Rubenstein said via email on August 25. “I stand by the investigation that we conducted and am confident that there is no evidence of a crime being committed.”
Inside One Disinformation Bubble
Mesa County was among a handful of counties across America’s 8,000-plus election jurisdictions where Trump allies discovered glitches in administering the 2020 election. The glitches, which produced incorrect initial vote counts, were signs that Trump lost due to a vast conspiracy, they asserted.
That narrative, which continues today, ignores the banalest explanation of what happened in Mesa County and in jurisdictions such as Antrim County, Michigan. In both locales, county election officials erred with setting up or using their voting system’s computers, mistakes that initially were not noticed but were later caught and corrected.
The operational errors were recorded by the system’s computers, which keeps logs of every action—from ballot paper jams to vote counts. The errors were confirmed by other evidence, such as, in Mesa County, police investigators reconstructing the mistakes on the same equipment, parsing video footage from security cameras in the room where they occurred and interviewing witnesses. But conspiracy-minded Trumpers, including O’Donnell and Daugherity, went looking for incongruities in computer logs and vote count databases, which, they said, masked programming that reassigned votes from Trump to other presidential candidates.
“The findings in this report were prepared by the authors as consultants to the legal team representing Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk,” the executive summary of their March 19, 2022 report said. “The findings provide evidence of unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data during the 2020 General Election and 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election. Because of this evidence, which led to the vote totals for those elections being impossible to verify, the results and integrity of Mesa County’s 2020 General Election and the 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election are in question.”
Among the incongruities they cited are batches of ballots that were not sequentially numbered in a results database. That can occur, several election experts explained, when batches of ballots with sloppy ink marks (made by voters) are detected by the software and set aside until the voter’s intent is determined. That process, called adjudication, is done in Colorado in the presence of political party observers. The batches are added to the database after the voter intent issues are resolved. (It was at this step where Brown failed to correctly use the system’s computers).
The Mesa County prosecutor took the duo’s report seriously and investigated. On May 19, 2022, Rubenstein sent a 24-page letter to Mesa County Commissioners and the Grand Junction City Council summarizing the investigation and debunking the vote-padding claims in the most pedestrian way. Two initial miscounts had occurred. The first was in 2020’s general election. The second was in municipal elections in April 2021. Both were “caused by direct action of the former Back Office Election Manager Sandra Brown.”
Investigators found that Brown had stopped and then restarted the computer during the adjudication process, including replacing one computer—without resetting the system. Brown did not call the vendor for assistance, the county prosecutor’s letter said. She was confused, tried to fix things, and erred—essentially double-counting votes at this stage in the process. Election judges from political parties witnessed this, as did an overhead video camera.
“No evidence exists that would indicate that Ms. Brown had any nefarious or criminal motive in those actions, but rather appears to have been trouble-shooting problems in the flow of the adjudication process,” Rubenstein wrote.
Human error in configuring and running election computers also sparked stolen election allegations in Antrim County, Michigan. There, the initial results in the conservative northern Michigan county were incorrect because one contest had been omitted on the ballots when configuring the system’s computers. Nobody caught the error until suspicious vote totals surfaced on Election Night. (Because one race was left out, votes were assigned to the wrong candidate in a tabulation spreadsheet, essentially bumping Trump votes down one line, where they were assigned to Joe Biden.)
In both counties, Trump supporters said that the entire state’s election apparatus was corrupt and demanded that the state’s certified results be thrown out. Beyond such hyperbole, a key observation emerges. Trump’s self-declared election experts were not looking at, nor may not even be aware of, the array of data sets, election records and administrative protocols that catch and correct the errors that occur. In Mesa County, for example, the district attorney’s report made this point.
“These actions were verified to have been done by her [Brown] through video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images [created by ballot scanners], interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of certain scenarios using a test environment and prove that the conclusions of Report 3 [O’Donnell’s and Daugherity’s report] are incorrect claims of what may have occurred,” Rubenstein said. “At this time, no evidence suggests that these actions negatively impacted the election.”
In contrast, what the pro-Trump duo used as the basis for their inquiry—analyses built on Peters’ pilfered computer drives—is a thinner evidence base.
The pair, who were reached by email after their August 22 presentation at Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” sent a rebuttal to Rubenstein’s summary where they rejected numerous assertions and questioned the district attorney’s expertise, evidence, and methods. (Rubenstein also noted they had lied about interviewing 11 people who had been in the room when Brown messed up.)
When asked by this reporter why they did not mention the DA’s review in their presentation at Lindell’s August 2022 forum—where O’Donnell said, “There is still no evidence that this was ever or even could have been something that was done by the clerk at the time”—O’Donnell replied that the DA’s investigation was a sham and said that my questions were “insulting.”
“We did not mention the DA’s report because it is such a sloppy ‘investigation’ that it deserves no recognition other than derision,” the “Lone Raccoon” said. “It is sad to me that somebody who is a ‘national political reporter’ would blindly fall fort the propaganda put by a small-time DA instead of actually doing their own research. However, that seems to be the rule these days.”
“Doing Their Own Research”
Perhaps my e-mail was too blunt when asking the pair if they were aware of other evidence that explained Brown’s incompetence (she was fired and faces charges related to the data breach); and what was their response to the D.A. saying they lied when they said they had talked to the party observers present (who spoke to police investigators) when Brown erred?
But I had done my “own research.” When reporting on the Cyber Ninjas’ review in Arizona in 2021, I had repeatedly seen the disinformation dynamic that I saw here. Partisans with forgone conclusions started to parse election records. Lacking prior experience in studying election systems, they did not understand where what they were seeing in the electronic records related to wider contexts and protocols. That didn’t stop them from putting forth doubts about the results. And I’d also heard about the duo’s missteps from a lifelong Republican and credible election data analyst.
Benny White, a former fighter pilot and lawyer who lives in Tucson, Arizona, has been an election observer and data analyst for the Arizona Republican party for years. He became a persona non-grata in Trump circles for analyses in early 2021 that found tens of thousands of ballots cast by otherwise loyal Republicans in the greater Phoenix area had not voted to re-elect Trump. (The voting patterns were found in the final spreadsheet of every vote cast in every race.)
Reached by phone, White said that the duo called him as they were parsing Mesa County’s tabulation-related databases. White recalled that he told them where their assumptions were mistaken, and what they were not considering because they were not familiar with election administration and safeguards that find and fix errors.
“These folks have no understanding or appreciation of election administration,” he said. “They’re looking at everything from a sterile, mechanistic perspective. There are problems that can be caused because of human interface in the system design where operators can make mistakes. And for that reason, I am always an advocate of having an independent body, whether it’s a knowledgeable person or a bipartisan group of overseers, that is present at all times to watch what’s going on and ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’”
For example, White recalled that the duo claimed that the county’s voting system “had done something nefarious because these ballots [during adjudication] weren’t all tabulated in sequence.” But that circumstance occurs if the voter’s intent on a ballot is in question, White said, in which case Dominion’s software “will hold that batch [of 1,000 ballots from] being included in the aggregate results… That was another thing that it seemed to me that Daugherity failed to understand.”
“He bases a lot of his conclusions on statistics, statistical analysis,” White said of Daugherity. “There have been single instances where he would tell me something, and I would say, ‘Walter, you’re not considering this other facet of what was going on in that particular election… You have to know more before you reach these conclusions.’”
Election administration is not simple. It takes years to understand election law, varieties in state rules and procedures, the voting system technology and all of the subsets of data created and compiled that add up to winners and losers. Trump’s IT squad might be forgiven for misunderstanding and misinterpreting what they saw, if they had been more humble and fair-minded. But they weren’t.
Their mindset is to create chaos and doubt, while claiming they are seeking the truth. The clearest evidence of that mindset is how they exploited human errors by election officials by not accurately contextualizing those mistakes, but repeatedly overclaiming that an entire jurisdiction’s votes were suspect, and that the same election technology deployed nationwide must be rejected.
With scores of 2020 election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022’s general election, this deceitful pattern is likely to recur.
Author Bio: Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/how-true-vote-cultivated-relationships-qanon-influencers-target
no lnx many, vids
How True the Vote cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers to target an election software company and serve as a pipeline to law enforcement
True the Vote’s activity with QAnon influencers shows how the election denial movement is exploiting the conspiracy theory’s network
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 09/15/22
True the Vote, a conservative organization that’s known for pushing false claims of widespread voter fraud and that was behind the debunked film 2000 Mules, has actively collaborated with QAnon influencers, promising to act as a liaison between them and law enforcement and using them to target an election software company in Michigan.
True the Vote’s collaboration with QAnon influencers is a significant development when it comes to the QAnon community’s ongoing influence in the election denier movement. Media Matters has previously reported on the community’s close associations with election denial efforts; one QAnon influencer is even involved with a coalition recruiting and electing election-denialist secretary of state candidates.
A Media Matters investigation into True the Vote’s extraordinary and blatant collaboration with QAnon figures to push election misinformation — including during repeated appearances on QAnon-supporting shows and the group’s “The Pit” event that included many QAnon figures — reveals the community’s connection with the election denial movement taken to a new level. Most recently, a software company targeted by True the Vote and its QAnon collaborators has sued the group, claiming defamation and saying its founder has left his home due to death threats. True the Vote’s leaders claimed the FBI refused to look at their supposed evidence against the company, so they turned their findings over to QAnon-supporting “citizen researchers.”
True the Vote’s background and history of election denial
Then-tea party activist Catherine Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2009, following the election of then-President Barack Obama, to push for voter ID laws and purging voter rolls. (“Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander has called Engelbrecht “the godmother of the election integrity movement.”) In 2016, Engelbrecht’s business partner, Gregg Phillips, a Republican operative and former Mississippi official, claimed without evidence that that year’s presidential election featured millions of illegal votes, a claim embraced by then-President Donald Trump.
Both Engelbrecht and Phillips are also listed as executive producers for and starred in 2000 Mules, a widely debunked film claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Despite 2000 Mules’ false claims (and True the Vote’s dubious record with its finances), right-wing figures have widely embraced the film, which was screened at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in May. True the Vote has since announced partnerships with right-wing sheriffs groups.
As 2000 Mules catapulted True the Vote into fame within the right, Engelbrecht and Phillips also began to cultivate a relationship with another particular group: supporters of QAnon, a categorically false conspiracy theory that has been tied to multiple acts of violence, including the January 6 insurrection. The conspiracy theory has also spurred internal warnings of domestic terrorism from multiple government agencies.
True the Vote has cultivated relationships with QAnon influencers, appearing on QAnon-supporting shows at least 20 times in four months, and proposed getting their material to law enforcement
Around the same time that 2000 Mules was released, Phillips joined Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform, whose leadership has extensively appealed to the QAnon community. There Phillips interacted with multiple QAnon figures, including repeatedly amplifying posts explicitly promoting the conspiracy theory and calling QAnon influencers his “friends.” (Phillips has explicitly credited Truth Social for connecting him with QAnon figures.)
Phillips Q post1
Phillips’ association also extended outside of Truth Social posts. Since at least June, Phillips has repeatedly gone on theQAnon-supporting MatrixxxGrooove Show (or MG Show), which is co-hosted by QAnon supporters Jeffrey Pedersen (known online as “intheMatrixxx”) and Shannon Townsend (known online as “ShadyGrooove”). In fact, he has been on the show at least a dozen times since June.
During those appearances, Phillips has worn flannel for “Flannel Friday,” a trend that developed in the QAnon community,and lauded the QAnon community, saying it was “becoming a force” and adding, “It’s not a fringe movement. It’s not a conspiracy theory.” Phillips even promised the hosts to get Arizona Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake on the show — which he did.
Video CitationFrom the July 15, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show
Phillips has also gone on other QAnon-supporting shows — such as X22 Report, RedPill78, and those hosted by Jon Herold (known online as “Patel Patriot”) — at least 6 times since May, leading Pedersen to brag that Phillips had been “going on all the anon shows.”
Phillips seemingly revealed some of his motivation for going on QAnon-supporting shows in May, writing, “I don’t agree with all I hear but as long as the motive is freedom from tyranny, I’ll stand next to ANYONE and fight.”
Phillips has also collaborated with QAnon figures for Patriot Games, a podcast that he launched in July. A QAnon influencer has been co-running the podcast’s official Truth Social page, and J.T. Wilde, a QAnon-supporting musician, wrote a song for the podcast, which they first debuted on MatrixxxGrooove Show. Phillips said he is also working with Wilde on other projects.
Engelbrecht, too, has associated with the QAnon community. Besides going on RedPill78,she has appeared multiple times on both X22 Report (whose host is an “old friend” of Engelbrecht, according to Phillips) and MatrixxxGrooove Show. During the latter, the show featured on screen a donation link for True the Vote that suggested some kind of collaboration between the show and the group.
Engelbrecht also participated in the QAnon Flannel Friday trend on the show alongside Phillips and has lauded the show’s “awesome” hosts for doing “such a great job of building an audience of activists and of people that are not willing — not only willing to listen, but willing to engage.” She has also said, “It is coming, there is nothing that can stop what is coming” — echoing a common QAnon phrase. (Engelbrecht has also said a QAnon influencer was “helping to run” True the Vote’s Substack.)
Phillips and Engelbrecht also see QAnon figures as tools to support their agenda. Phillips in recent months said he wanted to use supposed research from QAnon figures to give to law enforcement and the sheriffs groups that partner with True the Vote. Phillips has praised the QAnon community’s research efforts — saying that its “open source intelligence” is “spectacularly good” — and said that he wants to involve its “citizen researchers.” He has also specifically floated giving their research and findings toPinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Lamb — the head of one of the sheriffs groups True the Vote is partnering with who once signed a book with the QAnon slogan (“where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” for short) — and to “any of the other sheriffs that are going to be involved.”
Many QAnon figures attended True the Vote’s The Pit event
In August, Phillips and Engelbrecht hosted an event in Arizona they called The Pit (which Herold said he helped coordinate), where they would supposedly reveal “devastating” information showing the 2020 election was stolen.
In the weeks leading up to the event, Phillips told the MatrixxxGrooove Show hosts it would be a “secret meeting” of “influencers, folks like you all, you know, Patel [Patriot] and all the guys” where they would “turn over a bunch of information to you.” Multiple QAnon influencers were photographed at the event, including Zak Paine, the host of RedPill78 and who participated in the January 6 insurrection; David Hayes (know online as “Praying Medic”), who has called for a military coup against Biden; and the host of X22 Report. Multiple members of We The Media, a QAnon influencer collective channel, were also photographed together at the event, and one of its members, Jordan Sather, said “a bunch” of them were attending.
QAnon influencers the pit photos
Media Matters identified at least a dozen QAnon figures who attended. Multiple QAnon influencers later praised the gathering, saying it allowed “us to meet, in the flesh, fellow digital soldiers who have been working tirelessly together in the trenches for years” and thanking Phillips for “bringing the anon community together” because “nobody else has done what you did for us and bringing us together.”
Political figures also attended the event, such as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Lake and Arizona Republican secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem, along with Lamb, the Pinal County, Arizona, sheriff, and Trump attorney Christina Bobb, who used to work for far-right network One America News.
True the Vote used QAnon influencers to target Michigan election software company Konnechafter allegedly being rejected by the FBI
From The Pit, Phillips and Engelbrecht used the QAnon community to target Konnech, a Michigan-based election software company, with election fraud conspiracy theories. Konnech has since sued True the Vote, Phillips, and Engelbrecht for their claims about the company, saying they hacked its servers and that their campaign resulted in death threats against its founder and forced him and his family to flee their home.
While much of The Pit was livestreamed, a portion of it was kept private. That portion focused on conspiracy theories about Konnech, where they claimed it was a “questionable company involved in this that may have been rigging elections on behalf of the CCP [Chinese Communist Party],” according to Sather, and that the FBI was “too compromised to do anything” about it.
Engelbrecht has criticized the FBI, saying True the Vote shared this information about Konnech with the FBI, but “we became the target” of the agency instead. Therefore, the aim of The Pit event was to “go public … initially in a trusted space with people who could help gather up more and more and more information so that if, God forbid, something happens to us ... that other people are equipped.” Phillps has also said that the FBI “betrayed us.”
Video CitationFrom the August 19, 2022, edition of GraceTime TV
In response to their grievances with the FBI, Phillips and Engelbrecht turned to the QAnon community to “take what we had done and turn it over to these men and women on the internet, these anons, and just let them have it.” Phillips said that because of what they claimed was their falling out with the FBI, they turned to the “most maligned community on Earth,” the “anonymous researchers, you know, that were linked to ‘Q’” (referring to the conspiracy theory’s central figure).
Video CitationFrom the August 31, 2022, edition of 1819 News The Podcast
And the QAnon community responded, saying after the event that it was now “focusing on” and “digging in to” Konnech. Figures also spread nefarious allegations about the company, such as calling it one of the “front companies here in the United States … owned by the CCP” and saying it was tied to efforts to “manipulate our elections.” They also claimed its owner had questionable connections. Sather even called Konnech “our new Dominion,” referring to the election voting software and hardware company that has been targeted with numerous false conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
Video CitationFrom a video uploaded to Rumble on August 17, 2022
Some QAnon influencers also said Phillips and Engelbrecht had emailed or planned to email them material about the company, and some even helped establish a Telegram channel dedicated to finding supposed information about Konnech.
Both Phillips and Engelbrecht also subsequently shared content that QAnon figures created regarding Konnech on Truth Social and praised it as “brilliant” and “great work,” and even praised and recommended people follow multiple We The Media members for their supposed findings. One QAnon influencer’s blog targeting Konnech has since been shared by former national security advisor Michael Flynn and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, both QAnon-connected and election denialist figures. Both Phillips and Engelbrecht also pointed to what the “anons” supposedly found to further criticize the FBI.
Phillips and Engelbrecht have also said they are talking with law enforcement and giving them the supposed information from those QAnon figures, invoking their partnerships with sheriffs. “We’re in with attorneys general and district attorneys and sheriffs and governors and any level that will take action,” Engelbrecht said. Phillips also said they were speaking with some United States senators, a secretary of state, and state attorneys general, and Engelbrecht in September said she had been meeting “a number of” elected officials in Washington, D.C.
Video file
CitationFrom the September 8, 2022, edition of MatrixxxGrooove Show
Days before Konnech’s lawsuit was filed, Engelbrecht disclosed — on a QAnon-supporting show — that Konnech sent True the Vote a cease-and-desist order. She refused. A federal judge has since granted Konnech’s motion for a temporary restraining order against True the Vote.
The clear collaboration between True the Vote and QAnon figures to target Konnech serves as a warning on how the QAnon movement has become an online anti-reality network that helps boost other conspiracy theorists — including the election denial movement.
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- Natalia Contreras @ The Texas Tribune: Lawsuit alleges Texas’ True the Vote hacked data and targeted small election vendor with racist, defamatory campaign.
Tags: Charlie Kirk John Cardillo Mike Lindell Round-Up True the Vote
no lnx
Lawsuit alleges Texas’ True the Vote hacked data and targeted small election vendor with racist, defamatory campaign
Case cites election integrity group’s own public claims that it stole data from Michigan company that makes software for managing poll workers.
BY NATALIA CONTRERAS, VOTEBEAT AND THE TEXAS TRIBUNE SEPT. 14, 2022
Democratic primary voting in the West University area in Houston on Mar. 6, 2018.
Primary voting in Houston in 2018. A small election vendor this week filed a lawsuit against Texas-based True the Vote, accusing the organization of defamation. Credit: Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune
This coverage is made possible through Votebeat, a nonpartisan news organization covering local election administration and voting access. The article is available for reprint under the terms of Votebeat’s republishing policy.
A defamation and computer fraud lawsuit filed this week against Texas-based True the Vote asks a judge to essentially determine whether the election integrity group’s campaign against a small election vendor constitutes slanderous lies or a participation in criminal acts.
The suit was brought by Konnech Inc., a small elections logistics company based in Michigan. It alleges that True the Vote and its followers launched a stream of false and racist accusations against the company’s founder, forcing him and his family to flee their home in fear for their lives and damaging the company’s business. The suit cites True the Votes’ public claims that it hacked the company’s servers and accessed the personal information of nearly 2 million U.S. poll workers.
In a rare move, the judge granted Konnech’s request for a temporary restraining order against Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, leaders of True the Vote, a nonprofit organization known for making allegations of voter fraud without evidence to support their claims. Judge Kenneth Hoyt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas found a “substantial likelihood” that Konnech would “suffer irreparable injury” without it. The order also prohibits True the Vote from accessing, or attempting to access, Konnech’s computers or disclosing any of the company’s data and orders the group to disclose more information about the alleged breach.
Experts told Votebeat the damage done through the spread of conspiracy theories about election software companies such as Konnech by groups like True the Vote could impact the already limited tools available that help election officials hire, train and schedule election workers.
True the Vote has for years claimed that voting machines are not secure and that U.S. elections are increasingly fraudulent but has offered little evidence, and its claims have failed to stand up to basic scrutiny. Konnech’s lawsuit specifically names Engelbrecht, True the Vote’s founder, and Phillips, a board member, saying that they “have intentionally, repeatedly, and relentlessly attacked” Konnech, and its founder, Eugene Yu, with a “unique brand of racism and xenophobia.”
Engelbrecht and Phillips, for example, repeatedly called Yu a “Chinese operative” who was spearheading a “Red Chinese communist op run against the United States.”
“On August 27, 2022, True the Vote posted an article claiming that Konnech is ‘owned by the Chinese Communist Party,’ even though Konnech is owned by U.S. citizens who are not affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party, and claiming that Konnech is involved in the ‘subversion of our elections’ which is tantamount to falsely accusing Konnech of election fraud, treason, and espionage,” the complaint states.
True the Vote named its campaign targeting Konnech and Yu the “Tiger Project.”
In a text message to Votebeat on Tuesday, Engelbrecht said “True the Vote looks forward to a public conversation about Konnech’s attempts to silence examination of its activities through litigation.”
Hours after Engelbrecht was served with the lawsuit Monday, she took to social media to tell her followers about how they can prepare for an “honest election” in November.But first, she announced True the Vote had been sued and reassured the nearly 1,600 viewers who tuned into a livestream on the crowdfunding site Localsthat allegations made by Konnech Inc. are “meritless.”
“We're going to keep moving forward. Everything we have ever said about any of this is true,” Engelbrecht said during the hourlong livestream she hosted from a hotel room in Washington, D.C., where she encouraged viewers to sign up as poll watchers and to monitor drop boxes. “And it's just a function of how we find our path to release it publicly in a way that allows us to keep moving forward.”
To date, no proof of widespread voter fraud has been found and True the Vote has not released any evidence of such fraud.
The fact that a federal judge granted the temporary restraining order under the case’s circumstances is significant, said Peter Vogel, a Texas litigation attorney who specializes in cybersecurity and information technology. Federal judges rarely grant injunctions without allowing a defendant to present evidence, he said.
“So that tells me that there must be very persuasive evidence for a federal judge to grant a temporary restraining order without having the other side be present," Vogel said
Vogel also has decades of experience as a computer programmer and has examined electronic election systems for the Texas secretary of state’s office.
Another significant aspect of the order, he said, is the relatively low level of bond the judge required Konnech to post: just $100. The bond usually protects the enjoined parties from any damage.
“This tells me the judge doesn't think there's any damage to the defendant.” Vogel said.
True the Vote’s “Tiger Project” consisted of filing dozens of public record requests to Konnech’s customers, “all in an apparent effort to intimidate those customers or to otherwise raise customers’ suspicions about Konnech,'' according to the company’s complaint.
In addition, the complaint says, True the Vote, Engelbrecht, and Phillips “falsely claimed” they discovered Konnech had stored data on an unsecured server in Wuhan, China, “which Defendants hacked into and stole data from,” including personal data on 1.8 million poll workers “which they claim is a vehicle for the Chinese Communist Party to breach U.S. elections.”
The company said it uses no such server, and stores all U.S. data “exclusively on protected computers located within the United States.” In addition, it said, it does not have data on that many poll workers “or even a small fraction of that number.”
“When [True the Vote] claimed to have illegally accessed Konnech’s system, the software was being used to manage poll worker recruitment and scheduling by 17 cities and counties (no states),” Jon Goldberg, a spokesman for Konnech, said in an emailed statement to Votebeat.
Konnech’s only Texas client is Travis County, which uses the company’s PollChief tool to recruit, train and schedule poll workers.
According to the complaint, Konnech “does not select, communicate, or otherwise interface with any poll workers.” Konnech also argues that it “never handles any ballots and no ballots or other voting counts ever enter any of Konnech’s computer servers.”
Experts say the claims and conspiracy theories spread by groups like True the Vote about small companies such as Konnech, which offers a software that election officials can use to train, recruit and schedule poll workers for an election, could negatively impact election offices and ultimately voters and taxpayers.
The market for technology available to help support elections is already very small, said Tammy Patrick, election administration expert and senior adviser at Democracy Fund. There’s typically only a handful of election support software available for election administrators. Additionally, the shepherding of hundreds and sometimes thousands of election poll workers to get hired, trained and scheduled to work can be a huge task that requires a lot of time, staff and additional resources, she said.
“Software like the one this company provides, removes all of that back and forth and allows for a more streamlined, more efficient process,” Patrick said.“And so when you have a situation like this, that is infringing and slowing down, and making the hiring of poll workers less efficient in a time when it's already a huge challenge. It can be incredibly problematic.”
The right-wing nonprofit organization has spearheaded the spread of voter fraud conspiracy theories in Texas and beyond. Earlier this year, Engelbrecht teamed up with conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza to produce the documentary film “2000 Mules”. The movie aims to expose voter fraud in the 2020 election, which has been repeatedly debunked and criticized. The organization has also partnered with conservative sheriffs across the county to increase surveillance of voting and to help in investigating voter fraud allegations.
According to the lawsuit the “attacks” on Konnech began with “The Pit,” a True the Vote, invitation-only event in August, which was also live streamed, where Engelbrecht and Phillps would finally release “devastating information” that would prove the 2020 election was stolen.
“Instead, Defendants used The Pit as a platform to announce their website, and publicly launch their attack against Konnech by spreading baseless lies,” the lawsuit claims.
The “smearing campaign” against Konnech continued with True the Vote followers associating the otherwise unknown company to “everything from Mark Zuckerberg, to George Soros, the Chinese Communist Party, and even the origins of COVID-19,” the lawsuit states.
The complaint lays out True the Vote’s conspiracy theories about Konnech, which read like a cyber thriller.
Speaking on a podcast titled “Prophets and Patriots,” Phillips described meeting his “guys” at a hotel room in Dallas, where they put “towels under the doors” like “some kind of a James Bond kind of thing,” and proceeded to hack into a Konnech server, according to the complaint, which included a copy of the podcast.
Konnech’s complaint is another example of several ongoing lawsuits that allege that “individuals are knowingly and intentionally putting out misinformation as a way of making money and accumulating power,” said David A. Schulz, Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic director.
Other election tech companies, such as Dominion and Smartmatic have filed defamation, libel and slander lawsuits against groups and allies of former president Donald Trump who echoed his false claims about 2020 election fraud, including Fox News and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
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In Georgia, two election workers filed a defamation lawsuit against cable news channel One America Network over debunked claims that the election workers had brought suitcases filled with illegal ballots while working as ballot counters. The lawsuit was resolved with a settlement in May.
“This is not the first case where this spread of false information has caused people to make death threats, and that has required people to leave their homes,” Schulz said. “This misinformation not only damages reputations, but it has real effects on people's lives and companies causing grave damage, and bringing a claim for libel is one of the few tools that companies have to fight back.”
A hearing on Konnech’s case is scheduled for Sept. 26 in U.S. District Court in Houston.
Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with The Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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12 25
ggl
[### Gregg Phillips
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Gregg_Phillips](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_Phillips)
Gregg Allen Phillips (born October 13, 1960) is an American conspiracy theorist and head of the Office of Response and Recovery in the Federal Emergency ...Read more
[### Gregg Phillips: The man claiming 3m illegal votes
BBC
https://www.bbc.com › world-us-canada-38774428](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38774428)
Jan 31, 2017 — Donald Trump and his aides say that between three and five million people voted illegally in the 2016 election. One man has emerged as the originator of that ...Read more
[### A Proponent of Election Conspiracy Theories Will Take a ...
The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › climate › gregg-phillips-fema](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/climate/gregg-phillips-fema.html)
6 days ago — Gregg Phillips, who spread unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud in the 2016 election, will join the agency's leadership, the Trump ...
[### Leaders of right-wing election conspiracy group jailed after ...
CNN
https://www.cnn.com › 2022/11/01 › politics › true-the...](https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/true-the-vote-leaders-jail-contempt-of-court)
Nov 1, 2022 — Two leaders of True the Vote, a prominent right-wing group that promotes debunked voter fraud conspiracies, were jailed this week after a ...
[### Election denier tapped for FEMA leadership role
The Detroit News
https://www.detroitnews.com › nation › 2025/12/10 › e...](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2025/12/10/election-denier-tapped-fema-leadership-role/87699704007/)
6 days ago — In one LinkedIn post, Phillips said he has been “a very vocal opponent of FEMA” and believes that the agency has failed people in need.
[### What We Know About Man Who Cried Voter Fraud
Time Magazine
https://time.com › Politics › Donald Trump](https://time.com/4651634/gregg-phillips-voter-fraud-donald-trump/)
Jan 27, 2017 — Here's what we know about Gregg Phillips, the man who claimed 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election.
[### True the Vote leadership accused of using donations for ...
The Texas Tribune
https://www.texastribune.org › true-the-vote-complaint](https://www.texastribune.org/2023/06/05/true-the-vote-complaint/)
Jun 5, 2023 — Conservative activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips used the nonprofit True the Vote to enrich themselves, according to a complaint filed to the ...Read more
[### Gregg Phillips - Government Reform Expert
LinkedIn · Gregg Phillips
210+ followers](https://www.linkedin.com/in/greggaphillips)
... Texas, I spearheaded the implementation of House Bill 2292, consolidating 12 agencies into a single, streamlined Health and Human Services Commission. In ...
[### Donald Trump's voter fraud expert registered in 3 states ...
AL.com
https://www.al.com › donald_trumps_voter_fraud_expe](https://www.al.com/news/2017/01/donald_trumps_voter_fraud_expe.html)
Jan 30, 2017 — Phillips. In this undated file photo, Gregg Phillips is seen in Austin, Texas. Phillips, who President Donald Trump has promoted as an ...Read more
[### Prominent election denier joins FEMA leadership
KTSM 9 News
https://www.ktsm.com › news › prominent-election-den...](https://www.ktsm.com/news/prominent-election-denier-joins-fema-leadership/)
6 days ago — “Gregg Phillips is joining the FEMA leadership team, bringing experience in emergency and humanitarian response, state government operations ...Read more
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