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Print article Like many Donald Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight. The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first-ever conversation, Eshelman was sold. “I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.
The story behind the donation provides new insights into the frenetic days after the election, when baseless claims led donors to give hundreds of millions of dollars to reverse President Joe Biden's victory.
Eshelman ultimately gave True the Vote a total of $2.5 million for its 2020 election efforts. True the Vote launched a massive undertaking in November to recruit whistleblowers, lobby legislatures, analyze data, and file lawsuits in seven battleground states. The project’s budget estimate of $7.3 million, as given in a project overview, was roughly 17 times True the Vote’s total 2018 revenue, the most recent year for which the group’s finances are publicly available. As part of the initiative, called “Validate the Vote,” True the Vote even budgeted $700,000 for a battle in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the end, True the Vote filed suit in just four states and voluntarily dismissed those four suits just days later, before any hearings had taken place. The group has offered various explanations for the dismissals. In one email to supporters, the group referenced “an excruciating series of events that will one day be known, but now is not the time to air.” James Bopp, T