The real story behind Brian Kolfage and 20 million private dollars for the wall

American Thinker: A couple of weeks ago, the liberal blog BuzzFeed “broke” a “story” about President Trump supposedly ordering his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress on his behalf, citing an unnamed “source” within the Robert Mueller investigation.

But the “news” was so fake that Mueller’s office publicly disavowed it almost immediately after it appeared.

And re-appeared…practically everywhere.

Other media outlets picked up the BuzzFeed “story” — creating the false impression of smoke where there was no fire.

This has become the modus operandi of what Rush Limbaugh perceptively calls the drive-by media.  Picture a Model A Ford full of Al Capone’s hit men screeching around the corner, raking their enemy’s hideout with machine gun fire.

A similar fact-free fusillade has been directed at Iraqi war veteran and triple amputee Brian Kolfage, the man who dared to try to fund The Wall — and is doing so.

The story began when Kolfage created a GoFundMe page back in mid-December of 2018 called We The People Will Build The Wall.  His concept was to get the American people to voluntarily finance what Congress seems congenitally unable to: a southern border wall, to get a handle not just on the immigration problem, but also the equally serious problems of no-good-niks and cartel drugs flooding across the border.

It’s something President Trump promised to deliver — but which the private contributions of ordinary citizens may ultimately pay for, at least partially.

Initially, Kolfage’s concept was to transfer whatever came in directly to the federal government.  He probably never imagined that within two weeks, millions of people would have donated almost $20 million to the cause.

This is a measure of the depth of grassroots support for building the wall — and, possibly, the trigger for the fake news fusillade claiming he’d been forced to refund all of it for some (sotto voce) unspecified violation of GoFundMe’s terms of service.  The obvious implication is that Kolfage had done something shady, that he was perhaps pocketing the proceeds, and that GoFundMe had stepped in to save the day.

“People donated money to a GoFundMe page to build a wall on the southern border, and now they’re getting refunds,” ululated one TV teleprompter queen.

“Now GoFundMe is refunding all that money,” said another, in his best Serious Voice.  “And he has to start again.”

Literally dozens if not scores of others were just the same.  But these stories — like BuzzFeed’s piece about Cohen — have proved to be as accurate as the Hitler Diaries.  In fact, Kolfage was not forced to return any contributor’s money.  The fact is, he had set up his page so that refunds would issue automatically in the event that the target — $1 billion — was not met by the original GoFundMe deadline.

When it wasn’t, the refunds.

Those who sent in a contribution would have it returned after 90 days — if they didn’t request a refund.

That is a very different thing from Kolfage being forced to return the money — or being ordered to do so by GoFundMe.  It’s just one of several critical parts of the story that was not reported.  Another is that the vast majority have not so requested.

Here’s the real story: 

 

h/t FORCIBLY DERANGED