The criminal division of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office released a letter Friday documenting why federal agents may want to undertake a financial review of Texas-based proclaimed election integrity watchdog True The Vote, which has made multiple statements about possessing information on election fraud in Arizona.
The letter, which is simply addressed to “whom it may concern.” was purportedly sent to the FBI and IRS, according to the AGO’s website.
“(True The Vote) has raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud and their effort would train the public to protect election integrity at the polls and to help protect all voters’ rights,” Chief Special Agent Reggie Grigsby wrote in the letter. “Given (True The Vote’s) status as a nonprofit organization, it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted.”
But concerns about True The Vote’s finances are not the only thing Grigsby addresses in the letter.
Grigsby, who oversees the AGO’s Special Investigations Section, notes True The Vote’s president Catherine Englebrecht and partner Gregg Phillips claimed at a June 1 meeting to be working with the FBI as “informants.” The letter does not mention who or what the True The Vote officials were allegedly informing about, but the informant claim was bogus, Grigsby wrote.
According to the letter, AGO officials met with representatives of the Phoenix FBI field office on June 8. The FBI acknowledged some contacts with True The Vote officials, but insisted Engelbrecht and Phillips “were not informants for the FBI,” Grigsby noted.
Various True The Vote officials have claimed for months to possess evidence of election fraud in Arizona. They also claimed to have given a hard drive to AGO investigators in June 2021 containing “all Arizona-related information gathered to that point,” according to public records.
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Cole Hughes, executive director of True The Vote, doubled down on the claim in May 2022 when he wrote to the AGO that a hard drive was also given to the FBI. But AGO special agents who attended that June 2021 meeting and several subsequent meetings with various True The Vote officials claim no such hard drive was ever turned over.
And the FBI denied receiving anything other than one recording of one interview about illegal ballot harvesting activities in the city of San Luis in Yuma County, something that had already been under investigation since August 2020.
RECORDS RELEASED:
FBI, AGO Have No Record Of Getting True The Vote’s Hard Drive Of Purported Election Fraud Data
This summer Engelbrecht and Phillips were in Arizona when they announced that a massive amount of data they had collected about the 2020 election was lost. They urged attendees to look forward to 2022 instead.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in Texas was asked by attorneys for an election software company to hold Engelbrecht and Phillips in contempt of a court order.
That case involves Phillips’ previous claims of being involved in a cyberbreach of data about more than 1 million poll workers held on the servers of Konnech Inc., a Michigan company that designs and sells high performance software for government entities.
True The Vote officials had publicly hypothesized that Konnech was working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party.
The company sued True The Vote for defamation, which is why the parties were in a Texas courtroom Oct. 6. Attorneys for Engelbrecht and Phillips disavowed any of their clients’ earlier comments about a connection with the Konnech hack or the poll worker data.
However, the two were required by the judge to disclose the name of their source of information about Konnech’s data. The judge also ordered that no one associated with True The Vote release any hacked Konnech data while the case is litigated.
True The Vote officials were also involved with the production of the 2000 Mules movie. However, when questions were raised about the veracity of “new evidence” to be featured in a follow-up 2000 Mules book the publisher recalled the book in August, just days before it was to be released.
A new release date of Oct. 25 was quickly announced, but there has been no largescale promotion of the event, now less than two weeks away.