Mark Zuckerberg is best known for creating and leading Facebook, a company that’s made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. He has an estimated net worth of $80 billion and poured hundreds of million of his wealth into the 2020 election.
Here’s the thing: You probably had no idea at the time Zuckerberg was influencing the outcome of the most contentious presidential election in our lifetime. That’s because we didn’t learn the true extent of Zuckerberg’s financial contributions until the voting already took place.
We now know what he did and how we can prevent it from happening again, thanks to Citizens United Productions’ new documentary film of 40 minutes.
Citizens United President David Bossie hosts and narrates the film, “Rigged: The Zuckerberg-Funded Plot to Defeat Donald Trump.” He joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” with director Jason Killian Meath. Listen to the whole show or read a lightly edited transcript.
Rob Bluey: David, let’s start with you. How did Mark Zuckerberg defeat Donald Trump?
David Bossie Such a great question. What most people don’t know, and I would think that most people listening to this right now don’t know, is that Mark Zuckerberg spent $400 million in the 2020 election cycle, and he spent it specifically in just the last several months of the campaign through nonprofits.
He sent his money through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is he and his wife’s operation. They sent the money directly to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, two extreme left-wing organizations.
CTCL, the Center for Tech and Civic Life received $327 million. Their budget for 2019 was $1 million. Their 2020 budget was $328million. It’s just an incredible flow of money that came in there.
These grants were made to local and state election officials. They used that money to create votes for Joe Biden by using drop boxes, mail-in and absentee voting programs.
I submit that if Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t spend the $400 million in the last three or four months of the campaign, Joe Biden does not win.
Bluey: What inspired you to make this movie? We’ve heard President Trump talk about the stolen election. We’ve had other people talk about a rigged election. It must have been a huge task to sort through all the documents and information that so many people in legacy media would ignore.
Bossie:They have, just like the Hunter Biden laptop story. They suppress these stories. They don’t want to tell the stories. They don’t cover the stories. These are important issues. The biased corporate media that we live in and with today, they decide what the American people know and what they don’t know.
Much like half of America that voted and supported Donald Trump, I was frustrated, and I felt like there needed to be an answer to this thirst out there in America, this passion that has made election integrity, which is kind of a boring subject and most people don’t care about it.
It’s not in the top five or top 10 issues in America when you look at the polling data. It is now at the top in polls, especially for Republican primary voters. They don’t want to vote for somebody who is not going to take a position to answer and solve the problems of what happened in the past.
We decided to tackle this question together, given our long-standing relationship and the question. Only by making it, did we get to the core of the story.
This is my third film with Jason Meath. His ability to put this together, his ability to see the narrative and that forest through the trees because it’s so detail-oriented. But you have to keep it interesting and high level while at the same time giving them the granular detail that’s necessary for people to understand and feel like they took away something. It’s a real art form, and it’s really hard to do. Jason Meath, my writing partner, did an incredible job.
Bluey: Jason, how are you able to uncover the information that’s featured in the film?
Jason Killian Meath I always know that when I’m going into one of these projects, it’s going to be meticulously researched and sourced, and we are not going to leave anything to chance and going to be very thorough. This is definitely the case.
Dave called me, I would say just before Thanksgiving last year. He also told me about the Mark Zuckerberg money. I had to Google it because I had maybe heard a little bit about, but the mainstream press really just doesn’t cover this.
It was something I began to research. We started talking, as we were planning the pre-production of the film, more facts were coming out about this because there’re numerous investigations and various folks in various election integrity outfits that were looking at this. Scott Walter’s Capital Research Center was looking at various aspects of the Zuckerberg-funded money that went into the election.
I began to understand, much in the same time that I was making the film and what was really happening in 2020. The more I learned, the more I was shocked and realized that there was a story that needed to be told.
There’s been talk about this. There was a book called “Rigged” as well that detailed some of this and it was very good. We were able to follow the tax filings that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative as well as CTCL put out. This also helped us to determine where the money was going.
Bluey: It’s a captivating film. It’s really beneficial for a lot of our Daily Signal listeners and our audience who asks us all of the time for this evidence, and now you’ve given them a real blockbuster film to do that. At your Mar-a-Lago premiere, President Trump was present. He also stars in this film. What information did you share with the film?
Bossie:People can go to rigged2020.comYou can stream it from any device, anywhere in the world, at any time. I encourage you to do this. You can even go there to view the trailer. You can also read and watch the trailer.
Learn more about our amazing cast, including Ken Blackwell, Ken Cuccinelli, Cleta Mitchell, Congresswoman Claudia Tenney and Congressman Jody Haice. The film features Newt Gingrich, Kellyanne Conway, as well as President Trump. Michael Gableman is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice and special counsel who was appointed by the state legislature to conduct his investigation. It’s a star-studded ensemble. It was really powerful to hear the stories and interview with them.
The documentation of it was then required. We gained access to this information not through any other way other than the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s own IRS 990 forms, which were just filed this January, so it’s only been three or four months since we’ve had really access to the detail of it.
It showed grants to Kenosha in the amount of $860,000, $1.1 Million to Madison and Green Bay respectively, $1.7 Million to Racine, $3.4M to Milwaukee, and $1.7M to Racine. Those three strongholds are Democrat strongholds throughout the state. It was about 85% of the money, of Zuckerberg’s money that in the state went to Biden-controlled districts.
The Zuckerberg supporters claim that the majority of grants were granted to Trump-leaning states. I don’t care about that. This may be true. This may not be true. But $5,000 and $10,000 grants don’t change an election. We found 162 grants totaling $272 million. 92% of those funds went to Biden district. That’s putting your thumb on the scale of an election.
Bluey: Jason. When did the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative make these donations? And how was it spent?
Meath:When filing your tax return, you must declare for what purpose you spent the money. It’s part of the law. You’ve got to say where’s this money going. And it’s very clear, we have it in the film, on their tax filing it said it is to conduct safe elections during the COVID-19.
What is a safe election? You would assume that gloves and PPE would be enough to protect you against COVID. That is not what the money was used for, and perhaps a small percentage. We may have heard figures as high as 3% or 6%. It went to COVID protection and PPE.
The vast majority, the hundreds and millions of dollars, of the money went to get-out the vote operations.
Bluey: Who are other key players in this scheme, particularly those with a long history in Democrat Politics?
Bossie: That’s a great question. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is just a repository of their cash—really so that they can give it out. We also discuss other places they give to, all left-wing: The Obama Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. Many, many of the who’s who of the left wing, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative donates to.
David Plouffe is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s chief strategist. David Plouffe was Barack Obama’s campaign manager. Another person involved is Joel Benenson, who was the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Of course, David Plouffe is an author of a book, “A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump.”
These are dedicated partisans that Mark Zuckerberg hires to give them the money they need to achieve their strategic goals. One of them went to, as I mentioned, the Center for Tech and Civic Life. They received a large portion of the money, $327 million out of $400 million.
The two leaders of that group, Tiana Epps-Johnson, an Obama fellow at the Obama Foundation, and Donny Bridges, both had previously worked at the New Organizing Institute, which is a hardcore … Mark Levin calls it a communist organization. The New Organizing Institute, the Washington Post called the Democrat Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry. These people truly understand data. They are experts in digital operations. They know how to win.
Mark Zuckerberg claims that this was done through a nonpartisan organization called 501(c). These are the people running it. That’s like you setting up a foundation and putting me in charge of it and saying it’s nonpartisan. Nobody’s going to think that Dave Bossie woke up tomorrow and is not going to be the conservative activist that he’s been his entire life. It is hard to believe.
Bluey: Now you will be focusing on three states in this film, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. What happened there? And why are these three important?
Meath: We decided on those three states because when you look at the vote tallies of the 2020 election, those three battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin—comprised 42,000 votes in those three states. Joe Biden is president because of the 42,000 votes he received in those three states. We mainly focused on those states.
I will say that they did not distribute the money to states that were considered very safe, such as New York, California, or Massachusetts. Nearly every state was given money. I believe that they wanted to insure their state. They wanted to make sure Joe Biden got the popular vote total. If you can recall, when he won, everyone was talking about how no previous president had received such a high number of votes.
And I always was left scratching my head thinking, first of all, there’s a pandemic, and we were told that nobody was going to be able to vote and people were going to be afraid to vote. Second, Joe Biden never ran for office. He basically hid in his basement most of the time, and when he did go out, there was maybe 10 or 15 people standing in circles—in socially distanced circles—to look at him and he couldn’t even fill up those.
So that always left me scratching my head, like how in the world did this many people … how are they so enthusiastic to go out and vote for this man?
They had $400 million in donations to help them get people to mail in votes and get people to drop off ballots. This helped them to churn out the votes wherever they could. They didn’t just win in the battlegrounds states, although those were vital for the electoral win. They also influenced those popular numbers.
Bluey: The majority of the money went towards Democrat-heavy regions. Did any of the nearly 400,000,000 go to election offices or areas more likely to support Donald Trump?
Meath:They will claim that more grants were given to Trump districts than to Biden. This may be true. But the problem is, when you look at the grants, if you applied for a grant, I don’t care who you were. They’d give you $5,000, maybe $10,000, but they didn’t give $42 million, $20 million dollars, $15 million dollars to Trump districts. They were giving them to Joe Biden-heavy regions. That’s where the serious money went.
You can’t flip an election on $5,000, but you can flip an election putting $25 million into a jurisdiction or $40 million into a Democrat-rich county. That’s where you start flipping the election.
Bluey, Thank you for connecting the dots for us. We’ve heard how the left used COVID-19 to change voting laws, some illegally in states like Pennsylvania, but this reaches a whole new level what you’ve just described. Why didn’t we see this coming in 2020, and what are some of the ways that we can prevent it from happening in the future?
Bossie:These are excellent questions. It is important that you have highlighted the importance of what you just said. All this was done under the cover of COVID-19, which is supposed to ensure that everyone has a safe election. The film talks about it. NPR even says that a very small percentage went to COVID safety glasses and Plexiglass.
All the money went to GOTV to help Joe Biden win this thing. I was involved in the campaign. Look, I was the deputy camp manager. It was Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon and I that ran it in 2016. Although there were different people involved in 2020, we were still able to help. But I didn’t get involved in the GOTV effort or the Election Day operations effort in 2020.
We didn’t see around the corners that guys who run presidential campaigns need to see around. Your job is to look around corners. It’s very difficult to do. The RNC must do its part. They need a machine.
By the way, in this midterm election right now that we’re in, there is no overriding national campaign to help run it. It’s the RNC, maybe a bit more. [National Republican]Senatorial Committee, [National Republican]The Congressional Committee, but not really. It’s got to be the RNC who, without a doubt, owns and operates what is going to happen as far as the Election Day activities and the legal side of things.
Meaning, are we going to go into court before Election Day, not after it’s over, not after we’ve had a problem but before? Are we going to do it over the summer and into autumn to ensure that we fight every fight that can be won?
Marc Elias is their leader. Marc Elias is their guy. He and his team go from one state to another, going county by county, all across the country trying to figure out where they can win and where they can do the most damage to the Republican Party. We must do the same.
We need a dedicated group of people who will go to battle every day. Lawyers and political operatives who are going to scour the country to find these weaknesses, to find the places where we’re being adversely affected and go fight those in court before Election Day, not after.
Bluey, I have a question for you in light the recent events. Could Zuckerberg, or another billionaire, step in to do this again in 2022 or 2024 during the midterms?
Meath: Think about it. They did this to a president. They were able change the results or at least helped to defeat a sitting president. If they can do that, well, now they’re emboldened and they can do anything they want and nothing is stopping any other tech billionaire from coming in and throwing money into a race at the current rate.
17 states are currently trying to pass laws banning the use of this kind of private money. The problem is that in many of these Democrat swing states, the Democrat governors veto the bills. So there’s nothing to say that in those places, in those areas, that this would not happen again.
I would also like to mention that even though they were critical of Joe Biden winning the election, states like Pennsylvania and other states were unable to ignore their laws for 2020. Many of these states saw the money coming in. Many of these offices saw this money coming in and decided not to follow the laws. Instead, they threw out drop boxes on street corners and distributed mail-in ballots everywhere they could.
Five mail-in ballots were received in my home. I don’t understand why I should need five mail-in ballots. This was happening all over the country. So there’s nothing to really stop them unless more states, more crucial states pass election integrity laws.
Bluey: What is your message to state legislators debating this issue in their states? Or considering doing something in the future to prohibit private funding of elections?
Meath: A film like this can certainly help try to get us on message and to try to see the gravity of what’s going on in our elections. The more information we can get out to people, the better. We interviewed Rep. Janel Brandtjen, who’s in the Wisconsin Legislature. And she’s in the film along with Michael Gableman, who was appointed to conduct an investigation of what happened in Wisconsin. And it is very telling when you talk to them, what they’re up against.
Even Republican lawmakers are afraid to discuss election integrity. This is because, if you recall, right after President Trump questioned election results, other conservatives questioned them, the media and the Democrats freaked to the point that they wanted all to be cancelled.
They wanted to call them traders. They wanted to call them traders because they were spreading disinformation. All that’s a smokescreen because this isn’t disinformation, this is the truth, and people need to be armed with the truth in order to make bold moves. And that’s what legislatures need to do: put on their battle armor, get armed with the facts, and go out there and try to correct our very broken election system.
Bluey: Jason, you and Citizens United Productions faced your own challenges to get the message out. Not only through advertising, but perhaps other big players in the media world who perhaps don’t want this message reaching voters. Can you explain some of the difficulties you’ve had in Silicon Valley and other areas?
Meath: Dave is much closer to the day by day of what’s happening in terms of PayPal restricting the movie and platforms restricting getting our advertising and our message out. Conservatives are also affected by this.
I can tell you as a filmmaker who happens to make films that don’t tow the liberal line—in other words, a conservative filmmaker—I can’t even approach some platforms. I don’t even bother. I know that nobody at Netflix is going to take anything that I’m making.
Think about it, you’re a mid-level guy buying a film that talks about election integrity and the fact that maybe Donald Trump was right in questioning the election results. Your boss will fire you. Netflix’s founder is a raging libertarian. So I get that they’re hamstrung here, but these people try to shut down conservatives all the time.
They’re going to try to stifle this movie. And that’s one reason that Citizens United was brilliant in starting their own platform, rigged2020.comAll of their films and all their content are available for viewing at. According to my understanding, this movie is being streamed in 59 countries. People all over the world are interested. And the only way that they’re going to find out the truth is by going to rigged2020.com and subscribing to watch the film because it’s very difficult to get these messages out in any other platform.
Bluey: Before I let you go, I’ve got to ask the question of what President Trump’s reaction was to the film when he was able to see it at Mar-a-Lago?
Meath: The president came up and he said to everybody in attendance, his quote was, “I really liked a lot of movies over the course of my life. ‘Citizen Kane’ was excellent. ‘Gone With the Wind’ was excellent. ‘Titanic’ was excellent, but this is the one I most look forward to seeing.”
That was the direct message from the president at premier. And when he said that it made it all worthwhile because that’s what we’re doing it for. We don’t want another 2020 to happen again.
Bossie:I watched [Trump]Watch the movie. It was fascinating. I’ve done a lot of things with the president, but I’d never watched a movie with him before in a movie theater. After it was over, he stood up and turned to me and he said, “You know this is really sad.” I didn’t know where he was going with it. He said, “This is really sad. It’s sad that this happened, and it’s sad that you had to make this movie.” He said, “You know what? It’s actually depressing. It’s so powerful to see what you have just described in this movie. It shouldn’t have happened. It did happen, and it’s depressing that that’s the reason that Joe Biden is president.”
But on the other hand, he’s happy now to have the facts and evidence. He spoke about the movie at the North Carolina rally. The trailer was also shown to them several times. It was extremely well received.
The president is a fighter. It’s why he and I get along so well. We’re both fighters, and we are never going to stop fighting for what we believe in.
Bluey: David, tell us one more time how you can get the film.
Bossie:Please visit rigged2020.com. You can stream it from any device, anywhere in the world. PayPal is also available. Apple Pay is also available.
Back in the day, VHS was all that was available. Today, it’s all digital, and you can watch it anywhere in the world. It’s an amazing thing.
I actually pulled the trailer up on my phone and mirrored it to the president’s television in his office when I showed it to him. It is amazing how technology has advanced. Younger people tend to take it for granted. You can have a film that has impact and depth. It was hard back in the day. You had to take it to a movie theater, or send it to someone on VHS. Today, digitally it’s a game-changer.
People can send this film, “Rigged,” all across the country and please do. Let people know that this film exists. Go to rigged2020.comYou can also watch it.
Bluey: You’ve made many great films over the course of your career. It is truly incredible. David, we are so grateful for all you do every day. We know how powerful video and film can be.
Bossie:It is. I am so grateful that you reminded me. Our entire library, including all of these films, is up at rigged2020.comThe entire catalog of films, all 27 are available. “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny,” with Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich, another film which is one of my favorites. “Nine Days That Changed the World,” and my film on Pope John Paul II. It is, in my view, one of the greatest films. It was a second place film at the Vatican Film Festival many decades ago. That film is just amazing. That’s one of my favorite films. This film is a must-see. You can also enjoy many other films.
Bluey: Jason & David, thank-you so much for being with us today.
Bossie:Thank you for being here.
Meath: Thanks for all you’re doing, Rob. Appreciate it.
