Oracle's Larry Ellison joined Nov. 2020 call about contesting Trump's loss
Source: Washington Post
Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant. The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud.
Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss, an effort still coming into focus more than 18 months later. It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting. Oracle representatives did not respond to emails, calls and text messages seeking comment. Ellison is the 11th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $85 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He became a major political power broker during the Trump administration, hosting the president in 2020 for a fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley and contributing millions to Republican candidates and committees, including to Graham, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. During the Trump administration, in 2020, Oracle partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to collect data from doctors treating coronavirus infections with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by the president, among other drugs. That fall, it won praise from Trump as a “great company” as it became the preferred U.S. buyer of TikTok, in a potential deal with Chinese company ByteDance that did not come to fruition.
Details of the November 2020 call and questions about Ellison’s role in it were revealed in new filings made in litigation brought against True the Vote and its representatives by Fair Fight, a political action committee associated with the voting rights organization founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “Jim was on a call this evening with Jay Sekulow, Lindsey O. Graham, Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison,” True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, wrote to a donor on the night of the call, referring to Bopp, her organization’s lawyer. “He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that’s what I’m working on now.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/20/larry-ellison-oracle-trump-election-challenges/
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