Tech Bigwig Was on Call on How to Contest Trump's Loss

Larry Ellison recently popped up on Forbes' "10 Richest People in the World" list, but that's not why he's making headlines this week. The Washington Post is reporting on a "previously unknown dimension" of the efforts to contest former President Trump's loss in the 2020 election—one that included a phone call just days after the election with the Oracle co-founder and a host of other big names. Per court documents and a source who was on the Nov. 14, 2020, call, Ellison was joined by Fox News host Sean Hannity, GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump attorney Jay Sekulow, and James Bopp Jr., a lawyer for the Texas-based True the Vote nonprofit, which has long pushed unproven claims of widespread voter fraud and filed multiple lawsuits over it.

"[Bopp] 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," True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht wrote to a donor that evening after the call, per new filings from litigation against the nonprofit, brought by the Fair Fight anti-voter-suppression group founded by Stacey Abrams. A participant on the call tells the Post that Ellison may have been sought for his take on voting machine claims made by onetime Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

Yahoo Finance notes that Ellison—a big-name GOP donor who's still Oracle's chairman of the board after stepping down as CEO in 2014—has hosted fundraisers for Trump in the past, though "he has seemingly never expressed doubts about the 2020 election results publicly." Ellison has also backed Democrats in the past, per the Desert Sun. The Post notes the phone call 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." Oracle hasn't yet responded to the Post for comment. More here on what the other participants in the call have to say about it. (Earlier this month, the Oracle titan pledged $1 billion to support Elon Musk's takeover plan of Twitter.)