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It's a story as old as time itself.

A rich Republican idiot gives his money to con men (from The Seattle Times with emphasis added here and there): 

Like many Donald Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight.

The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first-ever conversation, Eshelman was sold.

“I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.

“$200,000?” one of his advisers on the call asked.

“$2 million,” Eshelman responded.

Then wants it back:

Over the next 12 days, Eshelman came to regret his donation and to doubt conspiracy theories of rampant illegal voting, according to court records and interviews.

Now, he wants his money back.

...

Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party collected $255 million in two months, saying the money would support legal challenges to an election marred by fraud. Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress also raised money off those false allegations, as did pro-Trump lawyers seeking to overturn the election results – and even some of their witnesses.

But it gets better:

Eshelman has alleged in two lawsuits – one in federal court has been withdrawn and the other is ongoing in a Texas state court – that True the Vote did not spend his $2 million gift and a subsequent $500,000 donation as it said it would.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.

And who is Catherine Engelbrecht?

True the Vote was formed in 2010 by Engelbrecht, a Texas-based tea party activist. Engelbrecht, 51, came to prominence during the Obama administration partly for accusing the Internal Revenue Service of improperly targeting True the Vote and other conservative nonprofit groups.

True the Vote has spent the past decade aggressively promoting claims of voter fraud and pushing for voter-identification laws...

I know you'll all need a moment to pause and steady yourself to get over the shock that the True the Vote scam was cooked up by a racist, Texas teabagger.  

But wait!  There's more!

Engelbrecht’s Validate the Vote plan, an exhibit in the lawsuit, budgeted $1.75 million for “data and research” work. It was to be led by a company whose name evoked the shadowy world of intelligence operations: OPSEC Group.

Records show that OPSEC had been formed less than two months earlier in Alabama by Gregg Phillips, a former True the Vote board member whose 2016 tweet was the source of the false claim that Trump would have won the popular vote that year but for millions of fraudulent votes by illegal immigrants.

Phillips, 60, and Engelbrecht are business partners in a health-care company. Eshelman alleges in a legal filing – without providing evidence – that the two are also lovers.

Eventually, the facts overwhelmed the Wingnut Reality Denial Bubble that Eshelman's money had been propping up.  One by one, lawsuits were dropped.  Secret witnesses on the verge of signing affidavits evaporated.  Mighty voter fraud algorithms starved to death for lack of actual data.  

And then...

Eshelman was furious, according to court documents and interviews.

On Nov. 17, he sent Engelbrecht an email demanding the return of his money. True the Vote offered on Nov. 23 to return $1 million to settle the matter. Eshelman filed his first lawsuit two days later, saying the group had failed to provide an accounting of how the remainder of his money had been spent.

He withdrew the federal lawsuit on Feb. 1 and filed the suit in Texas state court.

None of Eshelman’s money has been returned, court documents show...

Sorry stud, no refunds.  

Grift Store credit only.

No Half Measures