Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook, Inc. is under heavy fire from former President Donald Trump, regarding most notably, $350 million donated by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan to help local election offices in various jurisdictions.
“Zuckerberg broke the law, spending millions of dollars — don’t you think he broke the law? — millions of dollars to get out the vote in highly Democrat areas,” Trump said to the crowd attending the recent North Carolina Republican Party Convention on Saturday, reported Business Insider.
“This election will go down as the crime of the century,” Trump said. “And our country is being destroyed by people who perhaps have no right to destroy it.
The Zuckerbergs’ purportedly funneled money through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a small Chicago-based nonprofit that quickly amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in donations during the last election cycle to help local election offices through “election grants.”
The Center for Tech and Civic Life gave grants to more than 2,500 jurisdictions this year to help departments pay for election administration. The money arrived as historically underfunded election department budgets were sapped from unforeseen purchases during the primaries and were forced to spend money on election workers, postage and printing for the increasing number of voters who wanted to vote by mail, reported NPR.
The full extent of the grants is not known. The Center for Tech and Civic Life declined repeated interview requests from APM Reports to discuss the funding and how it was used. In late October, the group listed the jurisdictions that received funding on its website- but did not disclose dollar amounts or funding priorities for each jurisdiction.
But through a series of interviews, public records requests, and a review of public meetings, APM Reports pieced together the details of grant awards in the five swing states that decided the election.
APM Reports obtained more than 30 applications and grant agreements between local election offices and the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
The documents show requests mainly focused on the logistics of the election: increased pay for poll workers, expanded early voting sites and extra equipment to process millions of mailed ballots more quickly, reported NPR.
Trump also slammed Big Tech for deplatforming him, accusing Silicon Valley executives of ruining the country. He also said he wasn’t interested in waiting two years to be allowed back on Facebook.
“They may allow me back in two years. We got to stop that, we can’t let it happen — so unfair,” he said. “They’re shutting down an entire group of people. Not just me. They’re shutting down the voice of a tremendously powerful — in my opinion, a much more powerful and a much larger group.”
Trump added that President Joe Biden had been destroying the country “before our very own eyes.” He then criticized the country’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, denouncing him as “not a great doctor.”
“We will break up the Big Tech monopoly,” he said on Saturday. “We will reject left-wing cancel culture.”
The speech was carried live on C-Span, which tagged it as a “Campaign 2024” event. Despite losing the 2020 election, Trump has a firm grip on the GOP. He told associates he planned to run again in 2024, if he’s healthy, Politico reported last month.
Source: Newmax
