Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Winthrop Coliseum ahead of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary on February 23, 2024 in Rock Hill, South Carolina, USA.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
Several groups founded by allies of former President Donald Trump to combat alleged “voter fraud” now have little money or results to show for their efforts.
Trump’s false claims that he only lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden because of widespread voter fraud and other irregularities were the impetus for the creation of these nonprofit groups and political action committees.
But a glaring problem for these groups is the fact that federal and state officials have repeatedly refuted Trump’s claims of fraud.
Another problem that doomed some groups was their failure to receive fundraising help from Trump, the de facto leader of the Republican Party who remains the main proponent of false claims of widespread voter fraud in the United States.
New tax and campaign finance documents reviewed by CNBC show that the push for “election integrity” hasn’t paid off for several groups close to Trump.
And in some cases, the groups’ missions reported on their tax returns were opaque when they were formed.
Other records raise questions about what funds were used for at several companies.
Parscale’s election fraud network is collapsing
One notable disappearance from the field of election integrity efforts was American Greatness, a network of pro-Trump groups founded by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
Parscale announced in 2021 that he was launching a nonprofit organization, PAC and side group called the Election Integrity Alliance under the American Greatness umbrella.
He told the news site Axios at the time that American Greatness would “provide transparent data research and visualization that will provide accurate state-by-state aggregation of all required, ongoing and completed election integrity efforts.”
Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale speaks to the crowd before US President Donald Trump meets with his supporters on August 15, 2019 in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
The Election Integrity Alliance’s mission was also to end voter fraud.
Today, American greatness has largely collapsed.
It is also unclear whether any of his stated goals were ever achieved.
Parscale, who no longer leads the organization, and the two other former board members did not respond to requests for comment.
But a person familiar with the group, who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations, said that despite Parscale’s promise, it has never provided transparent data research and visualization to help with election-related matters.
The nonprofit entered 2023 with only about $195,000. A year earlier, the company raised $550,000 and spent all but about $50,000 of it, tax records show.
American Greatness changed its name to the Jefferson Rising Fund last year and was taken over by former Trump campaign aide Katrina Pierson.
Pierson, who is now running for the Texas State House, told CNBC that she has since “left the organization shortly after its founding” and “does not know who is on the board or what their current activities are.”
Republican political consultant Katrina Pierson arrives at Trump Tower on December 14, 2016 in New York City. This is the first major meeting between President-elect Trump and tech industry leaders.
Drew Angerer | Getty Images
Recent disclosure reports show that since changing its name to Jefferson Rising Fund, the nonprofit American Greatness has hired a lobbyist to address Biden’s policies impacting the oil and gas industry.
The affiliated PAC didn’t fare much better than its sister nonprofit.
The PAC entered 2024 with around $123,000 in inventory. And in all of 2023, only $176 was raised, records show.
According to the documents, the PAC spent much of the $550,000 it received from oil and gas tycoon Tim Dunn in the 2022 election cycle on various consultants.
Dunn and the Jefferson Rising Fund did not respond to a request for comment.
No money was spent supporting pro-Trump candidates, although then-PAC Chairman Jim Renacci, a former Ohio congressman, said two years ago that it was part of the group’s plans, records show.
However, the PAC’s payments to consultants last year included $80,000 to Pierson’s company PCG and another $80,000 payment to KF6 Partners, an Israel-based company.
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The power of Trump’s favor
Unlike the American Greatness PAC and the nonprofit organization, the Election Integrity Alliance was founded with a board of directors made up of well-known figures in Trump’s circle. Several of these people played key roles in Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik were listed on the website as members of the alliance’s 2021 National Board.
“The Election Integrity Alliance will unite groups and efforts across the country focused on combating voter fraud,” the group’s now-defunct website announced in 2021.
“The Election Integrity Alliance will be a central hub providing tools to create meaningful change for the American people.”
The website also included links to a “scorecard” page where the group said it would “assess the integrity of elections in key states.”
But to carry out its big plans, the Election Integrity Alliance wanted to secure an elusive prize: Trump’s personal support.
In the summer of 2021, several board members traveled to New York to meet Trump in his office in Trump Tower. They asked the former president to designate their group as the official center for Trump allies’ election integrity work, according to a source granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.
But Trump has never publicly declared the Election Integrity Alliance to lead the MAGA universe’s election integrity efforts.
Instead, a few months after the meeting at Trump Tower in November 2021, the former president took the stage at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and cheered on another Trump-aligned nonprofit, the America First Policy Institute.
That group was led by other longtime Trump insiders, including former Small Business Administration Linda McMahon, former White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow and former West Wing adviser Brooke Rollins.
Trump’s blessing to AFPI that November evening in Palm Beach elevated it above a slew of other groups founded by Trump alums, including American Greatness, and propelled it into a fundraising juggernaut.
In the year after Trump endorsed it, AFPI raised $22 million, nearly $9 million more than the previous year, according to IRS filings reviewed by CNBC.
AFPI also launched an election integrity initiative, the Center for Election Integrity, and staffed it with former Trump White House press adviser Hogan Gidley and conservative author Ken Blackwell.
It even launched its own color-coded Election Integrity Scorecard map, which looks strikingly similar to the map the Election Integrity Alliance created for its now-deleted website.
A source close to the Election Integrity Alliance said that during its short existence, the group helped organize phone calls with other Trump-aligned groups that address election issues with a conservative bent, including AFPI and the Heritage Foundation.
Cleta Mitchell Group is burning through cash
Another election integrity group is led by Trump-allied conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who worked with Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election results when she participated in a phone call with then-president and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
She later founded the Election Integrity Network, which works to influence future elections.
Last April, Mitchell spoke at a Republican donor conference where she said conservatives needed to work together to limit on-campus voting, same-day voter registration and the automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to a PowerPoint presentation that The Washington has received mail.
But the group’s tax records, provided to CNBC by Dave Armiak, a research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, show that as of early 2023, Mitchell’s group had very little money left to use toward those goals could.
The Election Integrity Network raised just over $753,000 and spent about $746,000 in 2022, giving the organization assets of up to $24,298 by 2023.
According to CPI’s tax filings from this year, nearly 70% of its funding in 2022 came from the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit group led in part by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
At the beginning of 2023, Mitchell’s group only had net assets of $6,200 that could be used without restrictions.
Mitchell declined to comment.
Another organization, founded by Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, had a dedicated election integrity section on its website.
But Vought’s group hasn’t posted anything election-related since September 2022.
Correction: Linda McMahon was administrator of the Small Business Administration. An earlier version misstated its title.
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2024-03-05 22:19:15
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