In the final two months of 2016, the Trump presidential campaign paid more than $1.2 million to a small Ohio telemarketer. At the time, the company, Victory Solutions, owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Internal Revenue Service and was facing a number of lawsuits from investors. The following year, it filed for bankruptcy.
Then Trump’s White House gave the company’s chief executive a job.
Shannon Burns is an advance associate for the White House, a part-time gig that involves preparing and managing various official presidential appearances. “I work for the WH on behalf of the President advancing his events and rallies around the nation,” Burns told his Facebook friends earlier this year. “Have been doing it since last year.” He’s also done a little bit of work for the Trump re-election campaign this year.
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The White House work began as Burns attempted to shed his company of millions of dollars in unpaid debts to federal and state tax authorities, investors, employees, his own lawyers, and the wife and mother of his late business partner. Victory Solutions has filed for bankruptcy protection twice, only to have the cases dismissed after Burns failed to get the required approval from his own shareholders.
In 2017, officials from the U.S. Marshals helped seize more than 1,000 of the Victory-owned phones the company was selling to political clients, who then use them to mount their own phone-banking operations. Under a court seizure order, the value of that property was supposed to go toward the repayment of some of the money that Burns’ company still owed to a political technology firm it acquired in 2014. In spite of such intense collection methods, that technology firm is still trying to recoup the funds it’s due.
Neither Burns nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment on this report.
The numerous lawsuits against Burns and his company in federal and state courts in Ohio paint a picture of a political vendor that, even after skyrocketing from relative obscurity thanks to huge payments from the Trump campaign, can’t or won’t satisfy its many financial obligations. Some former investors say Victory Solutions existed solely to enrich Burns himself at the expense of its investors and creditors.
None of that, it appears, precludes one from employment in Donald Trump’s White House.
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Burns founded Victory Solutions in 2006 with Daniel Cord, a fellow Cleveland-area Republican. The company provides technology solutions for grassroots organizing and fundraising, largely to political campaigns. Its flagship product is called Victory VoIP, a suite of calling hardware and software that it dubs “the most effective on-premise volunteer phone bank technology made exclusively for Republican candidates and conservative causes.”
The company took in a little more than $100,000 in Federal Election Commission-reported payments that year from the Ohio Republican Party. But documents later filed during Victory Solutions’ bankruptcy proceedings suggest that much of its revenue wasn’t reported in campaign-finance filings; more often, Victory was a subvendor for another consultant, making it difficult to nail down from public records who was paying the company during those early years, and how much they were shelling out.
But according to Burns, the company was thriving. At least that’s what he was telling potential investors. In a 2011 pitch obtained by PAY DIRT, Burns boasted of Victory’s “dramatic growth” from revenue of $50,000 in 2007 to a projected $8.7 million in 2012. With $750,000 in new equity investment, he wrote, that 2012 figure could go as high as $13.7 million.
The pitch listed a handful of Victory’s most notable clients in Republican politics, including former Florida Gov. Rick Scott, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Rob Portman, Sen. Rand Paul, and former Sen. Dan Coats.
Those were just a few, Burns wrote, of the more than 360 customers with whom Victory worked during the 2010 election cycle. “Momentum is building,” he wrote.
At the time, tragedy was also unfolding for Victory. In 2010, Daniel Cord, the company’s co-founder, had been diagnosed with brain cancer. He died two years later, leaving Burns, Victory’s majority owner, to manage the business on his own.
The year before Cord’s diagnosis, Victory had brought in $431,000 in revenue, according to Burns’ investor pitch. But they were apparently still strapped for cash, and turned to Cord’s mother, Edith Cord, for a $15,000 loan. In February 2009, she obliged.
The loan was due to be repaid a year later. But by November 2012, nine months after Daniel’s death, Edith hadn’t seen a cent, she later told a court in Ohio. For months, she pursued Burns in an attempt to secure repayment, to no avail. She would later allege that he was evasive, frequently dodging her calls, and offering noncommittal answers when they were able to get in touch.
Burns frequently blamed Victory’s “cash flow” problems, saying he’d make Edith Cord whole once the company’s financial situation improved. Then in mid-2015, he cut off contact.
Edith Cord finally sued Victory for the money on Oct. 27, 2016. That was two days after the Trump campaign began paying Victory. It reported writing the firm four checks on Oct. 25, totalling $390,000, for “telemarketing services.” According to Burns’ LinkedIn page, he’d been consulting for the campaign as well. By December, the campaign had paid Victory Solutions a total of $1,266,923.37, according to FEC records.
After the election, the company even set up a stand-alone landing page marketing its VoIP products with the Trump brand. The page was titled “Make Phones Great Again,” and it pledged to “supercharge your volunteers with the phone technology used by President Trump in his historic 2016 campaign.”
Even with that Trump campaign income, Burns couldn’t or wouldn’t make his creditors whole. Edith Cord won a $48,000 judgment against Victory in June 2017. But soon Victory was facing a separate lawsuit from Cord’s wife, Leigh Hellner, the trustee of his estate.
In March 2017, Hellner and Steven Soclof, another equity investor in Victory, sent Burns a letter detailing a host of allegations of financial mismanagement and impropriety. “We have gone for years without receiving any financial statements or returns on investment,” they wrote, requesting detailed information on the company’s finances—information, they noted, that Burns was required to keep on file under Ohio law and the company’s operating agreement. “We are past the point of entertaining excuses and accepting delay.”
When they didn’t get the financial information they requested, Hellner filed a lawsuit against Victory Solutions and Burns. The May 2017 lawsuit accused Burns of enriching himself at the expense of Victory’s other investors, forcing those investors to file late tax returns by withholding financial information, and said he had “made ownership in Victory Solutions LLC a liability” for its other shareholders.
By that time, the various lawsuits against Victory were racking up—both from unpaid creditors, and federal and state authorities attempting to collect unpaid taxes. Hellner’s lawsuit alleged that Burns—who she said had been determining his own compensation—was paying himself rather than his investors and creditors.
Hellner’s lawsuit was dismissed in 2017 after both she and Burns failed to appear for a default judgment hearing.
Failing to appear in court became fairly routine for Burns during the spate of lawsuits filed against his company from 2015 to 2017. In at least five of those cases, he neglected to show up for various court appearances, occasionally resulting in judgments against his company.
The many lawsuits also resulted in hefty legal bills, resulting in yet another lawsuit from his own lawyers seeking about $6,100 in unpaid invoices. By March 2018, Victory finally filed for bankruptcy.
Victory’s first bankruptcy filing showed just how deep a hole the company was in: more than $2 million in debt, with about $183,000 in assets. Its revenue picture was bleak as well. Victory had taken in nearly $3 million in 2016, thanks largely to the payments from the Trump campaign. In 2017, revenue plummeted to less than $560,000.
Victory’s biggest creditor was a doozy: It owed $411,000 to the IRS, a debt that had accumulated since 2014. It also owed more than $375,000 in back pay to Victory employees. And it listed eight legal actions involving Victory in the year before its bankruptcy filing.
One of those lawsuits had been filed by a company called Real Good Technologies in May 2015—shortly before Burns cut off contact with Edith Cord. The year before, Victory had agreed to pay $1 million to acquire RGT, which developed mass text-messaging technology and similar products for political campaigns.
But Victory defaulted on agreed-upon acquisition payments and RGT filed suit in federal court in 2015; they settled the case for $225,000 in July 2016. A few months later, Victory defaulted on the settlement agreement as well, RGT alleged in a new lawsuit. The company won a $215,000 default judgment in that case.
That was all before Victory filed for bankruptcy, and RGT has tried in the two years since to recoup the funds it won in those various legal actions—including, in one instance, obtaining an order, executed in cooperation with the U.S. Marshals, to seize Victory property, which ended up including more than 1,000 of the company’s VoIP phone systems.
Meanwhile, Victory has been sued by a former employee, multiple lenders, a staffing agency, and a contractor that worked on its offices, all alleging unpaid debts.
Normally such debts would be resolved through bankruptcy proceedings, but Victory’s attempts to do so in federal court have now been dismissed twice. In both cases, Burns failed to obtain written authorization from enough of his company’s shareholders to enter bankruptcy proceedings, as required by the company’s operating agreement.
Victory’s second bankruptcy case was dismissed on July 2, 2019. Ten days later, the Trump campaign reported paying Burns for “event consulting.”
Burns’ White House work does not appear to be particularly consequential. He’s not making policy or coordinating messaging strategy. The White House did not respond to questions about his role, but Burns describes it as “just traveling for the WH regularly to do advance consulting.”
What’s more striking is that a political activist with such a spotty financial history would land a White House gig at all.
Burns is also supporting the president in other ways. He is the executive director of the Strongsville, Ohio, Republican Party, and recently hosted a Trump re-election volunteer training event at Victory’s offices. He’s also pictured from time to time at official Trumpworld events, such as the Christmas party at the vice president’s residence this month.
“The honest citizens in this country,” Burns declared in a recent Facebook post, “are going to throw these corrupt Democrats out of office in 2020 while re-electing President Trump in a landslide.”
