People who know about the payment say that a charity group with ties to former President Trump paid $100,000 in legal fees for the six so-called “fake electors” in Nevada.
Personnel Policy Operations (PPO) paid the fees to help the Trump supporters who were being charged with lying about saying the former president won the state in the 2020 presidential election. As of Friday, the case was thrown out because the Nevada attorney general’s office filed it in the wrong place.
According to Joshua Whitehouse, head of strategy at the nonprofit, there is a strong and large group of America First patriots working together to help each other and stop the unfair use of our legal system as a weapon. “One of the hubs for that network is PPO.”
“Personnel is policy,” as Ronald Reagan said, and PPO agrees with that. Its goal is to help and support “conservative, America First civil servants and their advisors.” Its goal is similar to that of Project 2025, which is a large-scale effort by the conservative Heritage Foundation to push right-wing policies and get ready for a possible second Trump term.
Project 2025 hired Troup Hemenway as a senior advisor and associate head of personnel placement last fall. He is the president of the group. He used to work for Trump in the White House in the Presidential Personnel Office, which is the same thing as the legal fundraiser group. Other people in leadership roles at PPO, like Whitehouse, worked for the past president as well.
Hemenway confirmed that PPO did give “a substantial six-figure sum to support the legal defense of the Nevada patriots,” but that the organization does not give money to defendants. Instead, it pays their fees directly.
He also said, “We will continue to help fight crime in this country because we want to make America great again.”
The money came from the group’s Courage Under Fire Legal Defense Fund. A person with ties to the group said that the fund has helped Trump supporters like John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Peter Navarro with their legal issues. The Washington Post was the first to report on the fund in May.
The Hill asked Durand James Hindle III’s lawyer, Brian Hardy, for a statement. Hindle III is one of the pro-Trump electors and helped set up the payment.
The Silver State’s alternate voters were supposed to go to court in January, but on Friday, the case was thrown out. It’s the first time that a case against a group of pro-Trump voters has been thrown out.
A spokesman for the Nevada attorney general, John Sadler, told The Hill on Friday that the office plans to appeal the decision “immediately.”
Michael McDonald, Jesse Law, Jim DeGraffenreid, Shawn Meehan, and Eileen Rice were the voters who were charged. They were all being charged with a felony, which is offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged document. If found guilty, they could have spent up to four or five years in jail.
More than 33,000 votes made Biden the winner in Nevada in 2020. He is now President. But lawyers for Trump led a plan that relied on former Vice President Mike Pence to confirm lists of pro-Trump electors in battleground states instead of the real votes cast for Biden in the Electoral College.
Pence said no on January 6, 2021, which was the official date of the election. A crowd then stormed the Capitol while the certification was happening.
In Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona, fake electors are also being charged with crimes related to the plan.
Some of Trump’s lawyers have been charged for their work, and the former president is also facing federal and state charges for his part in efforts toss the 2020 election in his favor. In both cases, he has said he is not guilty.