The billionaire chairman of tech giant Oracle, Larry Ellison, was reportedly involved in a phone call that focused on the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election’s legitimate results in the days immediately following the vote.
The Washington Post first reported news of Mr Ellison’s participation on Friday. According to the Post, the call took place on 14 November 2020, less than a week after Election Day resulted in Mr Trump’s stunning defeat in previous GOP strongholds like Arizona and Georgia.
Others on the call included Jay Sekulow, an attorney for the White House, as well as Fox News’s Sean Hannity and Sen Lindsey Graham, according to the Post. The identities of the other participants raise the question of how unified the group was in their beliefs, given that Mr Graham would not go on to support attempts to object to the election’s certification in the Senate and Mr Sekulow, just ten days later, would be reported by ABC News to not be involved in the effort to overturn the election in the courts due to concerns about it lacking legal merit.
Mr Hannity, on the other hand, would continue to push conspiracies about election fraud throughout December and early January from his primetime spot on America’s most-watched cable news network.
The Independent has reached out to Oracle for comment about Mr Ellison’s involvement in the call. The company’s representatives did not provide a statement to the Post before its story was published.
The revelation that Mr Ellison was involved in the mid-November conference call apparently came in a court filing made as part of ongoing litigation against True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative voter ID organisation that has spread conspiracies about the 2020 election. The group previously provided what it saw as evidence of voter fraud to authorities in Georgia, who declined to open an investigation based on the group’s information.
The group’s founder, the Post reports, wrote to a donor after the call concluded that the participants “asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally”.
Mr Ellison has never commented publicly about the 2020 election’s legitimacy, but is known to be a supporter of Donald Trump and has previously fundraised for the one-term Republican president.
He previously supported Marco Rubio’s unsuccessful 2016 GOP primary bid; Mr Rubio also voted against all efforts to object to the 2020 election on 6 January.
