The conservative activist cited by Donald Trump as an authority on voter fraud owes the US government more than $100,000 in unpaid taxes, was once accused of lying about his qualifications, and has faced several allegations of ethical impropriety.
Gregg Phillips’s unfounded claim that three million people vote illegally in the US was championed in a tweet by Trump on Friday morning, as the new administration prepares to launch what he says will be a major inquiry into the integrity of American elections. The president tweeted:
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!
January 27, 2017
Phillips, 56, became popular among Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential campaign for his strident statements on Twitter and his development of an “election fraud reporting app” that allows people to use their cellphones to report alleged wrongdoing.
He claims to have been building a database of all voter registrations in the US with location details since 2009, but has declined to make his findings public.
While he has posted online about excessive government spending, Phillips owes the federal government $100,961 in unpaid income taxes with his wife, according to a lien filed by the IRS in Manatee County, Florida, in 2014. An official at the county clerk’s office said the outstanding sum had not been paid. In a text message on Friday, Phillips said: “I am in a disagreement with the IRS over income taxes. The amount owed is less than $50,000.”
Phillips also had a colorful and lesser-known career in Mississippi and Texas state politics over the past few decades, in which he was accused of exploiting positions that he held in the administrations of both states for financial gain.
The former stockbroker and Republican fundraiser described those years differently in a tweet posted last November. “I’ve torn down govt in two states, eliminated 20k jobs, & saved $5 billion,” he said. “Requires enormous stones.”
After Phillips served as chief fundraiser on his successful 1991 election campaign, Kirk Fordice, theRepublican governor of Mississippi, nominated him to be executive director of the state’s department of human services.
Aged just 33, Phillips was confirmed despite an investigation into his background by state legislators finding several red flags. While Phillips reportedly said on his job application that he majored in “finance” for his degree, records from the University of Alabama showed that in fact he majored in transportation, according to multiple press reports from the time. On Friday, Phillips said: “My degree is a bachelor of science in commerce and business administration.”
Phillips also said that he was registered to vote in Madison County, Mississippi, but he did not appear in voter rolls, according to the reports. He did not file a statement of economic interests by the deadline required in state ethics law. Having been critical of “deadbeat fathers”, Phillips was himself accused of failing to pay child support. The allegation, made by his ex-wife’s new husband in an interview with a newspaper columnist, was denied by Phillips. A Republican state senator reportedly pressured investigators to drop this issue.
State investigators then wrote another scathing report on Phillips after he resigned from the job in 1995. Phillips had immediately taken an $84,000-a-year job with a corporation to which his department had previously awarded a state workforce training contract worth $878,000.
The legislature’s watchdog committee said: “His actions relative to the contractual arrangement create the appearance of impropriety and could constitute a violation of state ethics laws.” No action was taken against Phillips. On Friday he said: “I was fully cleared by the MS [Mississippi] ethics commission of any wrongdoing.”
Amid reports that Phillips was in line to be appointed head of the human services department in his home state of Alabama, the Birmingham News in October 1995 urged Governor Fob James to look elsewhere. “He can find better than Phillips,” the newspaper said in an editorial. Noting that auditors had discovered mismanagement in his Mississippi department, the article said Phillips held “shaky qualifications and a suspect track record”. He was passed over for the position.
In 2003, Phillips took a job as the second-in-command in Texas’s own human services department, where he was put in charge of a drastic privatization of many services. An investigation by the Houston Chronicle in 2005 alleged that Phillips had been involved in awarding tens of millions of dollars worth of state contracts to companies with which he was personally linked.
In only the most striking example, the newspaper found that two clients of Enterject, a lobbying, services and training company that Phillips co-founded, were given $167m in state contracts. Phillips told the newspaper he had “severed all ties” to his company when he went to work for the state. Yet the reporters found that, in fact, he remained “actively involved” with Enterject and that his wife was the company’s chief financial officer.
The Chronicle also found that Enterject was given a $670,270 contract for processing immigrant paperwork from the Texas Workforce Commission. The commission’s executive director, Larry Temple, had been Phillips’s deputy in Mississippi. Phillips again denied any wrongdoing.
After he left the Texas state administration, Phillips’s new company AutoGov won a no-bid contract worth at least $207,000 in public funds to work on fixing the error-plagued computerized welfare system that Phillips had implemented. The Dallas Morning News described the problematic setup as “the state’s biggest privatization fiasco”.
In his response on Friday, Phillips did not answer questions about his time in Texas.
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