True The Vote
This will not be the first time, or even the third or eighth time, you have read about Cathy Engelbrecht here at the beauty salon. She’s been on our radar for ten years when she was speaking in church basements and VFW halls in the Houston area, pushing the idea that it’s too damn easy to vote. She would get the attendees name and addresses, mostly very old people, and send them requests for money. She didn’t like my questions and quickly named me “that woman” and told people I was a reporter as she rolled her eyes.
She had difficulty giving me any examples of the horror of illegal voting that she claimed was killing America. I could give her a couple of examples that happened right in her neighborhood, but they were both Republicans. She quickly informed me that she wasn’t talking about just two people, she was talking about hundreds, thousands. She just didn’t know any of them.
And then the third example hit. The Republican man she was personally supporting for county commissioner voted in two states for three elections and I had his signature to prove it. I wrote about it in the newspaper and he was defeated soundly.
I once described her as an attractive woman with a dollar sign on her forehead. She always had her hand out. She was far more concerned with raising money than illegal voting.
And now the Washington Post says she’s being sued for taking $2 million from a donor and producing the same thing I saw her produce – diddle squat.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. If you do read it don’t get excited and skip over the part where she’s mattress thrashing with a member of her board of directors. Look, I don’t want to slut shame another woman, but she rolled her eyes at me and that gives me a free shot. I’m taking it.
Thanks to Sam in Minnesota and Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.
Nice shot, JJ!
1Ooo. That’s going to leave a mark.
2Looks like karma caught up with her. Hope karma catches up with Trumpf and his campaign for raising $100’s of millions under false pretenses.
3I hear that if you are going to fleece marks, you have to do some work to make certain any effort of THEIRS to reveal the scam is going to be awkward or embarrassing to them, and that they are either too broke or too rich to bother suing.
Sounds like she miscalculated in several ways.
4I’m glad you are having fun, JJ. Me? Between the ongoing grifting and the nascent civil war in the GOP, I’m investing in popcorn futures.
5The conservative grift machine at work.
From the Post story:
Eshelman has alleged in two lawsuits — one in federal court has been withdrawn and the other is ongoing in a Texas state court — that True the Vote did not spend his $2 million gift and a subsequent $500,000 donation as it said it would. Eshelman also alleges that True the Vote directed much of his money to people or businesses connected to the group’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht.
Meanwhile:
…Engelbrecht received a bill for a $1 million publicity campaign from Old Town Digital Agency, an online advertising firm whose founder, Dikran Yacoubian, has worked in Republican politics on and off since the 1990s.
However:
Yacoubian, too, was frustrated that True the Vote’s whistleblowers were not materializing. “I really didn’t get to do, on the promotion side, anything — because there wasn’t anything to promote,” he said in an interview.
So he managed to bill $1 million for promoting…nothing.
I don’t really object to wingnuts stealing money from each other, since it’s a lot of money that isn’t being used for really dangerous stuff, like electing conservative politicians, but I’d sure be curious to know how much this Engelbrecht person is paying herself.
6Don’t cross JJ! Well done, ma’am.
7Reminds me of the late leader of the anti-ERA faction. She never ran for public office. I hear she had a real thing for stone carved eagles so she started Eagle Forum. Her debating skills were just about nill. I saw her taken down by pro ERA women very neatly, leaving her with her mouth flapping.
8Unfortunately, maggie#8, she still managed to keep it from getting ratified.
9“…mattress thrashing…” I am on the floor!!!
10@8&9,
Oh yeah , good ol’ Phyllis_Schlafly, another ‘Queen of Mean’ that the Rethuglikans are just eat up with, such winners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Schlafly
.
11Meanwhile, the Trumpanzees and MAGAots are getting worked into frenzies about almost everything at their ‘speshul snowflake place’:
https://patriots.win/
I guess I get to be the first to write “Canvasback Cathy Engelbrecht, Houston area cham-peen mattress-wrassler…”
Carry THAT label, Mz. Engelbrecht, carry it with pride!
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