Consultants tied to President Donald Trump may have engaged in financial fraud, tricking donors who wanted to support the nation’s bipartisan 250th anniversary organizer into sending their money instead to a rival group set up by his administration, according to a report released Thursday by House Democrats.
Allegations of Financial Fraud
The report draws in part on interviews by Democratic staffers of the House Committee on Natural Resources. Those interviews suggest that donors seeking to celebrate America fell for a bait-and-switch that, if true, could have violated various criminal statutes.
Donors who were intending to contribute funds to America250, a bipartisan committee created by Congress, were instead given the banking and routing numbers for a different but similarly named group, Freedom 250, the Democratic report says.
Freedom 250’s Mission and Funding
Freedom 250 was set up under the auspices of Trump’s Republican administration to be “a vehicle for a Christian nationalist, partisan, and Trump-centered vision of American identity,” according to the report. The group has focused on staging big splashy events largely held in Washington, such as the UFC cage fight at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday, the Great American State Fair on the National Mall and the upcoming July 4 celebration featuring a Trump speech and a fireworks extravaganza the president is touting as the “show of a lifetime.”
Freedom 250 calls the report ‘partisan smear’ and denies the allegations. The group’s spokesperson, Danielle Alvarez, dismissed the Democrats’ report as “categorically false” and a “partisan smear from politicians who would rather manufacture division” than celebrate a national milestone.
The report alleges that this fits a broader pattern in which Trump hijacked the nation’s 250th birthday celebration, redirecting tens of millions of dollars in both taxpayer money and private donations to boost “the President’s ego, political ideology and pet projects.” Much of the spending was directed to companies connected to Trump’s political operation, including the event planners for the Trump rally that immediately preceded the January 6 protests at the U.S. Capitol.
Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.
