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In December 2018, reports emerged that an online crowd-funding campaign was attempting to circumvent an ongoing budget standoff between the White House and Congressional Democrats. The fight was over $5 billion in annual funding demanded by President Donald Trump for his long-promised wall along the southern border of the United States. CNBC reported that A fundraiser to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border has raised nearly $5 million in three days on the online platform GoFundMe. Politico wrote: Brian Kolfage, a 37-year-old Florida resident who was severely wounded in the Iraq war, has started a GoFundMe campaign to complete Trump's signature pledge. The campaign has raised over $4 million in the three days since it started, with an overall goal of $1 billion. The fundraiser is real. By 20 December, four days after it was started, the crowd-funding campaign called We the People Will Fund the Wall had raised more than $7 million. The man behind it, Brian Kolfage, is an Air Force veteran who lost three of his limbs while deployed in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart in 2004. Kolfage is also an outspoken supporter of the current president, and he frequently shares his conservative political views on social media. He was previously an administrator of the Right Wing News Facebook page, which was one of hundreds removed from the social networking platform in October for what Facebook described as inauthentic activity. As of 20 December, Kolfage was listed as a social media and advertising strategist for the RightWing.News website, which has a track record of publishing junk news and hyper-partisan conspiracy theories, some of which we have previously debunked. Kolfage also ran a now-defunct affiliate website of Right Wing News called Freedom Daily, whose long record of producing often racially inflammatory junk news we have repeatedly documented. In February 2018, Freedom Daily was one of several such sites sued for defamation in federal court for falsely identifying a Michigan teenager as being responsible for the killing of Heather Heyer, an anti-racist counter-protester at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The description on his crowd-funding campaign page for the border wall reads: The campaign is real, but it's not clear how it might function, and whether it could make even a small contribution to the actual cost of any border-wall construction. Kolfage's claim that if the 63 million people who voted for Trump each pledge $80, we can build the wall seems highly inaccurate. It's true that 63 million people did vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and $80 from each of those would amount to roughly $5 billion. However, $5 billion is the amount that Trump had demanded to be set aside for the border wall just in the 2019 budget, before he appeared to back away from that demand in December 2018. No study or report exists that estimates the likely total cost of constructing a border wall would be $5 billion. Indeed, Trump himself has previously said he would need $25 billion to build the wall, before lowering his estimate to $15 or $20 billion. His administration has in the past requested $18 billion from Congress for just the first planned phase of construction. In 2017, a leaked internal report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security put the estimated total cost of the wall at $21.6 billion, and a study conducted by Democratic Senate staff estimated it would cost as much as $70 billion to construct and $150 million per year to maintain. In the first four days of the campaign, Kolfage raised around $7 million, which equates to $1.75 million per day. Even at that impressive rate (one that is unlikely to be sustained beyond the initial excitement and media attention surrounding the campaign), it would take 571 days to reach $1 billion. This means Kolfage's campaign would only raise 20 percent of what Trump asked for in 2019 alone, halfway through 2020. Based on Trump's most recent, reduced estimate for the total cost of the wall ($15-20 billion), it would take Kolfage's campaign between 23 and 31 years to pay for it, and that would only be possible if GoFundMe increased its current fundraising ceiling of $1 billion by between 1,400 and 1,900 percent. (We asked GoFundMe whether it was considering raising that cap, but we did not receive a response.) Furthermore, in order to reach Trump's projected total cost of $15-20 billion, the 63 million Americans who voted for him in 2016 would have to contribute between $238 and $317 each, not the $80 per head presented by Kolfage. In light of these facts, we asked Kolfage several questions, including whether he accepted that -- even if his $1 billion target was met in a timely manner -- it still would not be sufficient to cover the cost of a border wall, and what purpose, therefore, his campaign could serve. We also asked Kolfage who or what entity he had designated as the beneficiary of the fundraising, and to whose bank account the funds could be released. (The campaign page invites donors to send checks to Kolfage himself, and says that 100% of your donations will go to the Trump Wall.) We did not receive any response to our questions. The campaign page does stipulate that, If we don’t reach our goal or come significantly close we will refund every single penny. We are working on a time frame to achieve. However, the campaign does not have a termination date or explanation of what might count as significantly close to the $1 billion target. GoFundMe does have a policy and mechanism whereby a donor can demand a refund in the event of misuse by the campaign manager or the intended beneficiary of the funds; but that policy is relatively narrowly defined and might not protect donors in all circumstances.
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