These people are sooo dangerous to our democracy.
They need to be held accountable, that's the only way to make others THINK before going down this road.
Sidney Powell group raised more than $14 million spreading election falsehoods
By Emma Brown, Rosalind S. Helderman, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Josh Dawsey
Yesterday at 9:20 a.m. EST
In the months after President Donald Trump lost the November election, lawyer Sidney Powell raised large sums from donors inspired by her fight to reverse the outcome of the vote. But by April, questions about where the money was going — and how much there was — were helping to sow division between Powell and other leaders of her new nonprofit, Defending the Republic.
On April 9, many members of the staff and board resigned, documents show. Among those who departed after just days on the job was Chief Financial Officer Robert Weaver, who in a memo at the time wrote that he had “no way of knowing the true financial position” of Defending the Republic, because some of its bank accounts were off limits even to him.
Records reviewed by The Washington Post show that Defending the Republic raised more than $14 million, a sum that reveals the reach and resonance of one of the most visible efforts to fundraise using baseless claims about the 2020 election. Previously unreported records also detail acrimony between Powell and her top lieutenants over how the money — now a focus of inquiries by federal prosecutors and Congress — was being handled.
The split has left Powell, who once had Trump’s ear, isolated from other key figures in the election-denier movement. Even so, as head of Defending the Republic, she controlled $9 million as recently as this summer, according to an audited financial statement from the group. The mistrust of U.S. elections that she and her former allies stoked endures. Polls show that one-third of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe that Trump lost because of fraud.
Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who tracked 2020 election integrity for the Department of Homeland Security, said Powell’s fundraising success demonstrates one reason so many people continue to spread falsehoods about the 2020 election: It can bring in cash.
“Business is good and accountability is low, which means we’re just going to see continued use of this playbook,” Masterson said. “Well-meaning folks that have been told that the election was stolen are giving out money that they might not otherwise be able to give.”
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The group’s financial statement, publicly filed last month in Florida, shows the organization raised $14.9 million between Dec. 1, 2020, and July 31. Of that, it spent about $5.6 million, mostly on legal fees and unspecified awards and grants. It gave $550,000 to help fund the Republican-commissioned ballot review in Arizona, according to a separate accounting by the contractor that led the review.
The group’s assets at the end of that period included nearly $5.3 million in cash and $4 million in mutual funds, the audit says.
The report did not cover the period before Defending the Republic was officially established on Dec. 1. It remains unclear how much Powell, who began urging donations to her cause as early as Nov. 10, may have raised in those first weeks and whether that money was eventually transferred to Defending the Republic.
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“The job that every American who has donated to our cause expects me to do is to get the truth out in our cases and hopefully win the litigation as I did in Flynn,” Powell wrote. “I need and deserve the full team behind me on this. I MUST run the litigation. That is why I started all of this. We do not have time, money or energy to waste. Drama needs to go.”
In text messages to The Post last week, Byrne rejected Powell’s characterizations of his team and said Powell’s email outburst was a final straw for him and his employees.
Other frustrations were detailed in a resignation email Byrne sent Powell on April 9. Just about everyone was quitting, he wrote, including the executive team and himself. Michael Flynn, the client who had been her original entree into Trump’s world, was also resigning, as was his brother.
Michael Flynn did not respond to a request for comment. Joseph Flynn confirmed that he and his brother resigned in April but declined to comment further.
Byrne wrote in the April 9 email that those who left were upset that Powell was trying to control the organization and was not making good on an agreement to step back and let others lead. He hinted at concerns about the organization’s finances, writing that “a detailed accounting of every donation that has come in to any bank account must be made, and subsequent flows accounted for.”
The Post reviewed four employees’ resignation letters from that day, including the one in which Weaver urged a complete audit of the nonprofit’s finances and access to all bank accounts for any future CFO. “I strongly recommend that any new Chief Financial Officer be promptly given access to all bank accounts,” wrote Weaver, who did not respond last week to a request for comment.
A week after the falling out over the Florida nonprofit, a limited liability company established days earlier by Powell closed on a property in the historic Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., a brick house that had been an antique shop. The company, 524 Old Towne, paid $1.2 million. The sellers understood that the buyer was Powell and that she intended to establish a law office there, Politico reported and The Post confirmed.
When a reporter visited on Saturday, shades were drawn, a sign promised 24-hour video surveillance and the front steps were cordoned off with a chain and a sign that said “private residence.” A man who was tending to a wreath on the front door declined to identify himself and said no one was home.
Within days of his resignation, Byrne launched a new nonprofit with Michael Flynn, the America Project, which almost immediately began raising money to help fund the ballot review in Arizona. The group ultimately contributed $3.25 million to that effort. Byrne said he has spent nearly $12 million from his own fortune on efforts to expose what he says is a “deeply flawed” election system.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-defending-republic-donations/2021/12/06/61bdb004-53ef-11ec-8769-2f4ecdf7a2ad_story.html
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