The conservative Daily Caller investigated a cancer surgery fundraiser run by Roger Stone associate Jerome Corsi -- and found that it doesn’t appear to be what he claimed.
Over the summer, Corsi raised $25,000 for 33-year-old Thomas Sickler, an Alaska man he said needed the money to get experimental surgery by an Israeli oncologist named Dr. Eliat Mendelsohn.
The only problem, the Caller revealed, is that Mendelsohn does not appear to exist.
In his regular testimonials and fundraising messages on his YouTube channel, Corsi claimed Mendelsohn miraculously cured a relative's stage-4 cancer -- and after raising tens of thousands of dollars for Sickler, said the oncologist cured the younger man too.
In both open source records searches and exchanges with institutions where the oncologist supposedly works, reporter Chuck Ross wrote that the Tucker Carlson-founded Daily Caller could not find any trace of the Israeli oncologist's existence.
Furthermore, Sickler is the owner of the "Mendelsohn Consulting Group" website that Corsi linked to and the LLC of the same name. The phone number on the Mendelsohn Consulting Group website also forwards to Sickler, the Caller reported.
A Twitter account Corsi linked to the supposed oncologist, @DrMendelsohn, tweeted at both the Stone associate and Sickler, has a photo of a doctor who appears much younger than the reportedly elderly surgeon and also posts about the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory.
When the Caller contacted Corsi about the discrepancies, he insisted the Sickler fundraiser was "legitimate."
"If I was misled, or I was bamboozled on that," he said, "I honestly think Tommy Sickler was a cancer survivor."
Corsi also defended his claim that Sickler was "healed."
In an August video posted before he was subpoenaed by special counsel Robert Mueller and subsequently went on hiatus, Corsi claimed that Mendelsohn cured his wife's cousin's cancer.
"She was treated in Israel by Dr. Mendelsohn," he said on August 2, "and I think she looks better than she has in maybe two years."
When the Caller asked him about the claim, Corsi refused to comment.
"That’s all I’m going to say," he told the website. "It’s a personal matter."
Corsi denied that he took any of the funds from the Sickler campaign and challenged Mueller and his team to investigate the funds.
“If they want to accuse me of running a fraud to raise $25,000 for Tommy Sickler, they can go ahead and accuse me of that if they want to," he said.
