The full extent of the payments from the Trump campaign political operations to rally organizers during the 2020 election and around the rally in early 2021 remains a mystery because the campaign’s top vendor was American Made Media Consultants LLC, a firm created by Trump campaign aides to act as a clearinghouse for its spending. Trump’s campaign and joint fundraising committee routed more than $771 million through the firm, hiding details of those payments – including information about the identities of some people paid by the campaign and how much money changed hands.
“We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors about what those funds would be used for,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said during the second hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capital on Monday, “Those donors deserve the truth about what those funds will be used for.”
Information on Trump’s role in the events on Jan. 6 is obfuscated but the former president’s connections to organizers of the rally before the deadly attack on the Capitol are well-documented in campaign finance filings.
America First Policies, a “dark money” group aligned with Trump that recently rebranded as America First Works, paid Event Strategies Inc. another $2.1 million in 2018 and 2019, tax records reviewed by OpenSecrets show.
Trump campaign used election fraud claims in fundraising
House select committee Senior Investigative Counsel Amanda Wick’s video presentation in the second hearing highlighted how the Trump campaign “used fundraising schemes as part of the efforts to disseminate false claims of election fraud.”
“”The evidence developed by the Select Committee highlights how the Trump campaign aggressively pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist,” Wick said in the presentation.