A growing number of right-wingers who peddled debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election are profiting from promoting election denial and efforts to challenge election results, according to a new report from the left-leaning watchdog group Accountable.US.
Some of the individuals who remain at the center of the movement include people like attorney Kurt Olsen, newly elected Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman and "election integrity" activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips.
"These grifters happily peddled known conspiracies that planted the seeds for January 6th — and cashed in the first chance they got," said Derek Martin, an Accountable.US spokesperson. "It couldn't be clearer where their priorities lie. Not even an attempted insurrection would stand in the way of them making a quick buck."
Olsen, who was an unknown private attorney before the 2020 election, quickly rose to prominence after he started promoting unproven legal theories denying the results of the election that would have helped Trump remain in office.
For 18 years, he worked as a partner at Klafter, Olsen & Lesser – a small New York-based law firm he co-founded, according to the Daily Beast. But once, Olsen signed on to help Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's failed bid to overturn the 2020 election at the Supreme Court, the firm changed its name and created a new website excluding Olsen's name in the URL.
While Paxton's Supreme Court suit eventually failed, Olsen continued to gain notoriety among the bizarre community of "Stop the Steal" individuals.
Since then, Olsen has taken on the role of co-counsel in a number of cases on behalf of 2020 election deniers. In 2021, alongside celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz, Olsen represented a group of Michigan poll challengers who sued Dominion Voting Systems.
Although the case was later dismissed, Olsen has continued to build his reputation as a prominent election denier, representing other notable individuals in the movement like MyPillow CEO and Trump loyalist Mike Lindell and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
After her election loss, Lake filed a lawsuit asking the Maricopa County Superior Court to issue an order "setting aside the certified result of the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election and declaring that Kari Lake is the winner" or alternatively "vacating the certified results…[and] requiring that Maricopa County re-conduct" the election.
Lake was represented by Olsen and Bryan James Blehm. Lake's campaign paid Olsen more than $187,000 for his services after her loss while she continued repeating unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.
On December 28, 2022, Lake's campaign paid Olsen $3,314.00 in "attorney fees" and then another $183,754.29 on December 31, 2022.
Olsen also represented Lake and failed Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem in a lawsuit seeking "to prohibit the use of electronic voting machines" during the 2022 midterm election.
But he isn't the only individual who has benefitted from promoting falsehoods regarding election results.
Jake Hoffman, the Arizona state senator representing its 15th district, has also been a vocal supporter of the election denial movement and has quietly collected payments through his Arizona-based company 1TEN (Or "110") LLC.
Put Arizona First, a state political action committee supporting Lake's candidacy, paid 1TEN LLC more than $2.1 million to support her candidacy.
After Lake's defeat in the recent midterm election, Hoffman argued that Arizona should not certify the results of the 2022 gubernatorial election.
"There is no question in my mind that [the election] should be certified by [Arizona governor] Doug Ducey, and it should not be certified by Katie Hobbs," Hoffman said in an interview with Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk on Nov. 23, 2022.
Without any proof to back his claims, Hoffman alleged that "tens of thousands of voters" in Maricopa County were disenfranchised during the election – the same claim Lake's team pushed out.
1TEN LLC also received more than $2 million to support Lake's campaign for governor from the Turning Point PAC, which paid the company $256,517.91 alone for "media" and "text services" in non-federal races between July and September 2022. Turning Point continued to use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the elections.
Campaign finance reports filed with the state of Arizona also reveal that Turning Point PAC paid 1TEN LLC to specifically oppose Katie Hobbs – Lake's opponent. A day before the election Lake's Campaign paid Hoffman's company once again, this time a total of $135,611.28 for "telemarketing/auto dialers" services on Nov. 7, 2022.
After Lake lost the election, Hoffman continued to push out falsehoods regarding the midterm election and repeatedly called not to certify the Arizona gubernatorial election results.
"The attorney general has outlined a litany of alleged violations of Arizona election law at the hands of Maricopa County, and the people of this state deserve nothing less than full cooperation by county officials in the attorney general's investigation into the cause and scope of voter disenfranchisement stemming from those violations," Hoffman said in an interview with Reuters.
He also called for investigations into the election's administration when the state legislature reconvened in Jan. 2023. Hoffman continued to receive payments from the Lake campaign. On November 14, 2022, Lake's campaign paid Hoffman's company $270,897.11.
It's a moneymaker both for the lawyers that are involved and the people who work for the nonprofits, said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. At the same time, she added, it keeps people like Lake in the news.
"There's a whole crew of people who spend their time talking about how electronic voting machines are somehow corruptible, and all of this is fodder for the millions of people in the Republican Party," Beirich said. "In general, this has almost become an industry on the right. You have the lawyers who are fighting for this. You have people like the MyPillow guy and others who are still going around the country holding events, like Mike Flynn, talking about how the elections were stolen."
Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, who are both tied to a Texas-based based non-profit True the Vote, similarly benefitted financially from promoting conspiracies about the 2020 election.
Their non-profit, which has been accused of engaging in voter suppression and intimidation, worked with volunteers on election day to challenge voters as they showed up to cast their ballots.
The pair was also a part of the core team behind the 2021 film "2000 Mules," which amplified voter fraud claims that have been widely discredited.
Engelbrecht and Phillips met with Dinesh D'Souza, the conservative filmmaker who made the movie, and told him they could "detect cases of ballot box stuffing based on two terabytes of cellphone geolocation data that they had bought and matched with video surveillance footage of ballot drop boxes," The New York Times reported.
As they promoted falsehoods regarding the election being fraudulent, the pair also collected payments for their companies.
The Center For Investigative Reporting found that companies connected to Engelbrecht and Phillips collected nearly $890,000 from True The Vote from 2014 to 2020 – including $750,000, which went to Phillips' company OPSEC Group LLC to do voter analysis in 2020. This was not mentioned in TTV's 2020 990 form.
On top of this, an analysis of the organization's financial records done by The Center For Investigative Reporting revealed that TTV "enriches Engelbrecht and partner Gregg Phillips rather than actually rooting out any fraud."
Heading closer to the 2024 presidential election, efforts by election conspiracy theorists are only bound to get much worse.
"We're going to have more and more people picking up this line," Beirich said. "Because if you're running for office, and you don't ever want to accept that you could possibly lose, why not push the election denial whether you win or you lose in the actual race, right? And I think that we're going to hear a ton of this in the coming two years as we approach 2024."
