Elections Have Consequences

[abbey1227]

Nov 21, 2022 9:44:20 GMT merh said:

Nov 20, 2022 13:33:53 GMT abbey1227 said:

I'll give this country full of Marxist credit for one thing.........they sure stick together and cover each other much better than their party's opposition.

There's never nearly the same amount of leaking and gossip and outrage for what goes on behind closed doors with them.

Of course, having a complicit MSM helps with that

Didn't it say Liddy is Republican?

The Lake representatives posed a series of questions about voting problems on Election Day, nearly a week earlier. Then, toward the end of the phone call, an attorney for the RNC stressed the importance of rapid answers, according to the Maricopa attorney, Tom Liddy, a lifelong Republican who heads the county’s office for civil litigation.

Liddy recalled that the RNC attorney, whom he and others identified as Benjamin Mehr, told him that there were “a lot of irate people out there” and that the campaign “can’t control them.”

Liddy said in an interview Friday that he considered those words a threat.

On Friday night, a Twitter account associated with Lake’s campaign posted a video of a portion of the call that captures Liddy cursing and raising his voice. The Lake campaign did not respond to a request for the full video, which was taken from inside the GOP’s war room at a Scottsdale resort. County officials said they were blindsided that the conversation had been recorded and then posted publicly with the names of only one side bleeped out.

I wonder if he's related to G Gordon?  

[abbey1227]

Consequences



Home heating costs are on the rise but government assistance is running short
Home heating costs are projected to rise 28% this winter. Additional money that helped keep homes warm last winter was included in Covid packages but has run out this year.

Nov. 20, 2022, 7:42 AM CST
By Shannon Pettypiece

[merh]

Nov 23, 2022 19:38:46 GMT @politicidal said:

....sure, why not.

TEXT:

It looks like Kanye West is serious about running for president in 2024, after he revealed he's spoken to Donald Trump about it during a visit to the former president's Mar-a-Lago estate.



The rapper is making the most of his Twitter reinstatement after telling his millions of followers about his first time at the residence in Palm Springs, Florida.

Trump and West, who now goes by the name Ye, have met on a number of occasions and are admirers of each other. It is unclear when the alleged meeting took place, but the revelation comes at a time when West has lost multiple business deals, and celebrities have spoken out against him, due to a number of alleged antisemitic statements.

Late on Tuesday night, Ye tweeted about his meeting with former President Trump, and the 45-year-old included a poll that got hundreds of thousands of people voting.



Spelling out his tweet one line at a time, he wrote: "First time at Mar-a-Lago. Rain and traffic. Can't believe I kept President Trump waiting. And I had on jeans. Yikes."

Revealing they had discussed politics, West then phrased the next part as a question. "What you guys think his response was when I asked him to be my running mate in 2024?" The options were "That's very Ye" and "That's very Nay."

At the time of writing, "That's very Ye" was leading with 59 percent of the vote.



West's latest tweet is just his third after he was allowed back on Twitter on November 20, when he tweeted "Testing" and then said "Shalom" to his followers.



The news of the meeting between West and Trump caused a stir online, with thousands of people commenting and quote-tweeting to share their opinion.



"Donald Trump will pick Kanye West as his running mate, it's the most Trumpian choice," @basedspinach wrote. It wasn't clear from the tweet who would be president and who would be vice president in their hypothetical situation.

It was not clear when West visited Mar-a-Lago for the first time, though one Twitter user (@ifididit) wrote that, on Tuesday November 22, it was raining in West Palm Beach, Florida, which matches up with West's account.



In the days leading up to the tweet, and especially since he posted it, more Twitter users started using the term "Trump / Ye 2024."



As well as Ye being reinstated on Twitter, Elon Musk also welcomed back Trump, but the former president has yet to use his reactivated Twitter account. He now communicates to the public through his own social-media site Truth Social.

www.newsweek.com/kanye-west-says-visited-mar-lago-talked-2024-presidential-campaign-donald-trump-1761632

I'm sure Donnie will go for 2nd banana

[merh]

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Resume May Be Largely Fiction.
Grace Ashford and Michael Gold
Mon, December 19, 2022 at 5:00 AM PST

George Santos, whose election to Congress on Long Island in New York last month helped Republicans clinch a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, built his candidacy on the notion that he was the “full embodiment of the American dream” and was running to safeguard it for others.

His campaign biography amplified his storybook journey: He is the son of Brazilian immigrants, and the first openly gay Republican to win a House seat as a non-incumbent. By his account, he catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.

But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the resume that he sold to voters.

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Santos’ campaign biography, told The New York Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

There was also little evidence that his animal rescue group, Friends of Pets United, was, as Santos claimed, a tax-exempt organization: The Internal Revenue Service could locate no record of a registered charity with that name.

His financial disclosure forms suggest a life of some wealth. He lent his campaign more than $700,000 during the midterm election, has donated thousands of dollars to other candidates in the last two years and reported a $750,000 salary and more than $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization.

Yet the firm, which has no public website or LinkedIn page, is something of a mystery. On a campaign website, Santos once described Devolder as his “family’s firm” that managed $80 million in assets. On his congressional financial disclosure, he described it as a capital introduction consulting company, a type of boutique firm that serves as a liaison between investment funds and deep-pocketed investors. But Santos’ disclosures did not reveal any clients, an omission three election law experts said could be problematic if such clients exist.

And while Santos has described a family fortune in real estate, he has not disclosed, nor could the Times find, records of his properties.

Santos’ 8-point victory, in a district in northern Long Island and northeast Queens that previously favored Democrats, was considered a mild upset. He had lost decisively in the same district in 2020 to Tom Suozzi, then the Democratic incumbent, and had seemed to be too wedded to former President Donald Trump and his stances to flip his fortunes.

His appearance earlier this month at a gala in Manhattan attended by white nationalists and right-wing conspiracy theorists underscored his ties to Trump’s right-wing base.

At the same time, new revelations uncovered by the Times — including the omission of key information on Santos’ personal financial disclosures, and criminal charges for check fraud in Brazil — have the potential to create ethical and possibly legal challenges once he takes office.

Santos did not respond to repeated requests from the Times that he furnish either documents or a resume with dates that would help to substantiate the claims he made on the campaign trail. He also declined to be interviewed, and neither his lawyer nor Big Dog Strategies, a Republican-oriented political consulting group that handles crisis management, responded to a detailed list of questions.

The lawyer, Joe Murray, said in a short statement that it was “no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at The New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations.”

A Criminal Case in Brazil

Santos has said he was born in Queens to parents who emigrated from Brazil and was raised in the borough. His father, he has said, is Catholic and has roots in Angola. His mother, Fatima Devolder, was descended from migrants who fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine and World War II strife in Belgium. Santos has described himself as a nonobservant Jew but has also said he is Catholic.

Records show that Santos’ mother, who died in 2016, lived for a time in the Brazilian city of Niterói, a Rio suburb where she was employed as a nurse. After Santos obtained a high school equivalency diploma, he apparently also spent some time there.

In 2008, when Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records uncovered by the Times. Police and court records show that Santos used the checkbook to make fraudulent purchases, including a pair of shoes. Two years later, Santos confessed to the crime and was later charged.


The court and local prosecutor in Brazil confirmed the case remains unresolved. Santos did not respond to an official summons, and a court representative could not find him at his given address, records show.

That period in Brazil overlapped with when Santos said he was attending Baruch College, where he has said he was awarded a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance. But Baruch College said it was unable to find records of Santos — using multiple variations of his first, middle and last names — having graduated in 2010, as he has claimed.

A biography of Santos on the website of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the House Republicans’ campaign arm, also includes a stint at New York University. The claim is not repeated elsewhere, and an NYU spokesperson found no attendance records matching his name and birth date.

After he said he graduated from college, Santos began working at Citigroup, eventually becoming “an associate asset manager” in the company’s real estate division, according to a version of his biography that was on his campaign site as recently as April.


A spokesperson for Citigroup, Danielle Romero-Apsilos, said the company could not confirm Santos’ employment. She also said she was unfamiliar with Santos’ self-described job title and noted that Citi had sold off its asset management operations in 2005.

A previous campaign biography of Santos indicates that he left Citi to work at a Turkey-based hospitality technology company, MetGlobal, and other profiles mention a brief role at Goldman Sachs. MetGlobal executives could not be reached for comment. Abbey Collins, a spokesperson at Goldman Sachs, said she could not locate any record of Santos’ having worked at the company.

Attempts to find co-workers who could confirm his employment were unsuccessful, in part because Santos has not provided specific dates for his time at these companies.

He has also asserted that his professional life had intersected with tragedy: He said in an interview on WNYC that his company, which he did not identify, “lost four employees” at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando in June 2016. But a Times review of news coverage and obituaries found that none of the 49 victims appear to have worked at the various firms named in his biography.


Reversal of Fortunes

As he was purportedly climbing the corporate ranks, Santos claimed to have founded Friends of Pets United, which he ran for five years beginning in 2013. As a candidate, he cited the group as proof of a history of philanthropic work.

Although remnants of the group and its efforts could be found on Facebook, the IRS was not able to find any record showing that the group held the tax-exempt status that Santos claimed. Neither the New York nor New Jersey attorney general’s offices could find records of Friends of Pets United having been registered as a charity.

Friends of Pets United held at least one fundraiser with a New Jersey animal rescue group in 2017; the invitation promised drinks, donated raffle items and a live band. Santos charged $50 for entry, according to an online fundraising page that promoted the event. But the event’s beneficiary, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, said she never received any of the funds, with Santos only offering repeated excuses for not forwarding the money.


During that same period, Santos was also facing apparent financial difficulties. In November 2015, a landlord in the Whitestone neighborhood of Queens filed an eviction suit in housing court accusing Santos of owing $2,250 in unpaid rent.

The landlord, Maria Tulumba, said in an interview that Santos had been a “nice guy” and a “respectful” tenant. But she said he had financial problems that led to the eviction case, declining to elaborate further. The judge ruled in favor of Tulumba.

In May 2017, Santos faced another eviction case, from a rent-stabilized apartment in the Sunnyside neighborhood of Queens. Santos’ landlord accused him of owing more than $10,000 in rent stretching over five months and said in court records that one of his tenant’s checks had bounced. A warrant of eviction was issued, and Santos was fined $12,208 in a civil judgment.

By early 2021, Santos was becoming vocal on housing issues but not from a tenant perspective. During New York’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium, Santos said on Twitter that he was a landlord affected by the freeze.


“Will we landlords ever be able to take back possession of our property?” he wrote.

Santos said he and his family had not been paid rent on their 13 properties in nearly a year, adding that he had offered rental assistance to some tenants, but found that some were “flat out taking advantage of the situation.”

But Santos has not listed properties in New York on required financial disclosure forms for either of his campaigns; the only real estate that he mentioned was an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. Property records databases in New York City and Nassau County did not show any documents or deeds associated with him, immediate family members or the Devolder Organization.

It is unclear what might have led to Santos’ apparent reversal in fortunes. By the time he launched his first run for the House, in November 2019, Santos was working in business development at a company called LinkBridge Investors that says it connects investors with fund managers.

Santos eventually became a vice president there, according to a company document and a May 2020 campaign disclosure form where he declared earnings of $55,000 in salary, commission and bonuses.

Over the next two years, Santos bounced between several ill-fated ventures. As he ran for Congress, he moved from LinkBridge to take on a new role as regional director of Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment company.

Harbor City, which attracted investors with YouTube videos and guarantees of double-digit returns, soon garnered attention from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which filed a lawsuit accusing the company and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Neither Santos nor other colleagues were named in the lawsuit, and Santos has publicly denied having any knowledge of the scheme.

Two weeks later, a handful of former Harbor City executives formed a political consulting group called Red Strategies USA, as reported by The Daily Beast. Corporate filings listed the Devolder Organization as a partial owner — even though the papers to register Devolder would not be filed for another week.

Red Strategies was short-lived: Federal campaign records show it did political consulting work for at least one politician — Tina Forte, a Republican who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in November — before it was dissolved in September for failing to file an annual report.

The Devolder Organization seems to have flourished as Santos ran for office. According to Santos’ disclosures, his work there earned him a salary of $750,000. By the time it too was dissolved — also for failing to file an annual report — Santos reported that it was worth more than $1 million.

Win Raises New Questions

Santos announced his intent to make a second run at Congress almost immediately after the end of his first. He figured to again be an underdog in the district, which largely favored President Joe Biden in 2020.

But things began to swing in his favor. Republicans in Nassau County performed well in local elections in 2021. Suozzi opted to not run for reelection in 2022, instead launching an unsuccessful bid for governor. And with high turnout expected in a midterm election that also featured a governor’s race, Santos’ race became more competitive — and his campaign stance became more tempered.

During his first campaign, Santos, an adherent of Trump, opposed mask mandates and abortion access, and defended law enforcement against what he called the “made-up concept” of police brutality.

But during his second campaign, older posts on Twitter were suddenly deleted, including his claims of election fraud that he said cost Trump the election in 2020. In March 2021, he resurfaced the claim, writing on Twitter in a since-deleted post, “My new campaign team has 4 former loyal Trump staffers that pushed him over the finish line TWICE, yes I said TWICE!”

Santos also briefly claimed without evidence in another since-deleted tweet that he had been a victim of fraud in his first congressional race, at one point using the hashtag #StopTheSteal, a reference to a slogan associated with Trump’s false election claims.

And while he previously boasted that he attended the Jan. 6 rally (but, he has said, not the riot) in support of Trump in Washington, he has since ducked questions about his attendance and a prior claim that he had written “a nice check for a law firm” to assist some rioters with their legal bills.

Santos’ improved circumstances are evident on the official financial disclosure form he filed in September with the House of Representatives, although the document still leaves questions about his finances.

In the disclosure, Santos said he was the Devolder Organization’s sole owner and managing member. He reported that the company, which is based in New York but was registered in Florida, paid him a $750,000 salary. He also earned dividends from Devolder totaling somewhere between $1 million and $5 million — even though Devolder’s estimated value was listed in the same range.

The Devolder Organization has no public-facing assets or other property that the Times could find. Santos’ disclosure form did not provide information about clients that would have contributed to such a haul — a seeming violation of the requirement to disclose any compensation in excess of $5,000 from a single source.

Kedric Payne, the vice president of the watchdog Campaign Legal Center, and a former deputy chief counsel for the Office of Congressional Ethics, was one of three election law experts consulted by the Times who took issue with the lack of detail.

“This report raises red flags because no clients are reported for a multimillion-dollar client services company,” Payne said, adding: “The congressman-elect should explain what’s going on.”

The Times attempted to interview Santos at the address where he is registered to vote and that was associated with a campaign donation he made in October, but a person at that address said Sunday that she was not familiar with him.

Material omissions or misrepresentations on personal financial disclosures are considered a federal crime under the False Statements Act, which carries a maximum penalty of $250,000 and five years in prison. But the bar for these cases is high, given that the statute requires violations to be “knowing and willful.”

The House of Representatives has several internal mechanisms for investigating ethics violations, issuing civil or administrative penalties when it does. Those bodies tend to act largely in egregious cases, particularly if the behavior took place before the member was inaugurated.

Campaign disclosures show that Santos lived large as a candidate, buying shirts for his staff from Brooks Brothers and charging the campaign for meals at the restaurant inside Bergdorf Goodman.

Santos also spent a considerable amount of money traveling — charging his campaign roughly $40,000 in flights to places that included California, Texas and Florida. All told, Santos spent more than $17,000 in Florida, mostly on restaurants and hotels, including at least one evening at the Breakers, a five-star hotel and resort in Palm Beach, 3 miles up the road from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence.

—

Key Findings From the Review

A New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as attempts to verify claims that George Santos made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the resume that he sold to voters before winning a seat in the House of Representatives. Here are some of the findings.

A Criminal History: When Santos was 19, he stole the checkbook of a man his mother was caring for, according to Brazilian court records. Two years later, Santos confessed to the crime and was charged. The case remains unresolved.

Eviction Cases: In November 2015, a landlord in Queens filed an eviction suit in housing court accusing Santos of owing $2,250 in unpaid rent. The judge ruled in the landlord’s favor. In May 2017, another landlord in Queens accused Santos of owing more than $10,000 in rent. A warrant of eviction was issued, and Santos was fined $12,208.

Employment History: According to a version of Santos’ biography on his campaign website, he was an “associate asset manager” at Citigroup. A spokesperson for Citigroup said the company could not confirm Santos’ employment. The spokesperson also said she was unfamiliar with Santos’ self-described job title.

Ill-Fated Ventures: In the last two years, Santos reported a $750,000 salary and more than $1 million in dividends from his company, the Devolder Organization, which was dissolved for failing to file an annual report. As he ran for Congress, he moved to Harbor City Capital, a Florida-based investment company. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit accusing Harbor City and its founder of running a $17 million Ponzi scheme. Two weeks later, some former Harbor City executives formed Red Strategies USA, a short-lived political consulting group that was also dissolved for failing to file an annual report.

Campaign Disclosures: Santos lived large as a candidate, buying clothes for his staff from Brooks Brothers and charging the campaign for meals at the restaurant inside Bergdorf Goodman. He also charged $40,000 worth of flights. He spent more than $17,000 in Florida, mostly on restaurants and hotels, including one resort 3 miles from Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s private club and residence.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

/rep-elect-george-santos-resume-

[merh]

/timeline-of-text-messages-reveals-rep-scott-perrys-outsized-role-in-efforts-to-overturn-2020-election/

Scott Perry’s surprisingly outsized role in efforts to overturn 2020 election revealed in new text message timeline
Harrison Cann, Pennsylvania Capital-Star
December 15, 2022
Scott Perry’s surprisingly outsized role in efforts to overturn 2020 election revealed in new text message timeline

Newly released text messages outline the outsized role that U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-10th District, had in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Perry, who has been investigated by the Jan. 6 select committee for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 results, has been a focal point of the news this week as text messages between him and former President Donald Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows outlined a plot to investigate and overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The website Talking Points Memo obtained text messages that Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, which includes those shared between Perry and Meadows following the 2020 election and through the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.

These messages, alongside previously reported messages by CNN, paint a clearer picture of the baseless conspiracy theories Trump’s allies pushed and how they attempted to illegally reverse Trump’s loss. A spokesperson for Perry, who represents the 10th congressional district in the Harrisburg and York region, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Perry and Meadows exchanged at least 62 messages between the Nov. 3 election and President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Here is a timeline of texts from the central Pennsylvania congressman.

Note: sic throughout

Nov. 8, 2020
The day after President Joe Biden was projected as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Perry texted Meadows, urging him to speak with attorney Sidney Powell, whose first name he misspells. Powell, an ally of Trump, was among several conservative lawyers who sued to overturn Biden’s victory in Michigan.

Join Raw Story Investigates. Go AD-Free.
“Mark, please do not delay in speaking with him or Sydney Powell,” Perry wrote.

Nov. 9, 2020
The next day, Perry shared a message from Cleta Mitchell, another conservative attorney who worked on the Trump campaign’s failed legal attempts to challenge the election results in multiple states. Perry said Mitchell was eager to set up a 501(c)(4) nonprofit to support her efforts.

“Cleta asked if she should set up a C4 to deal with raising money and paying for the cyber portion. She offered to do it if necessary,” Perry wrote.

Nov. 10, 2020
The “cyber portion” of their election efforts was underway by Nov. 10, when Perry told Meadows he was working with individuals in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona.

Perry passed along instructions from the “cyber forensic team” to Meadows, which included calls to preserve specific voting machines, all communications with officials responsible for software updates to the voting machines and all the logs and devices used to execute the duties and updates of voting machines. These instructions came with a link to a conspiracy theory about the vote count in Pennsylvania posted by the Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper.

Perry then asked Meadows for a point of contact in Wisconsin and Arizona. Meadows responded to Perry with the name “Cip Roy,” a misspelling of U.S. Rep. Chip Roy from Texas.

“Roger, thank you. I will contact him now,” Perry replied.

Nov. 11, 2020
Perry wrote to Meadows that “things are more clear now” after speaking with the point person for the cyber effort.

“I’m going to keep working on it but if I sense my involvement is impending, I will bail out,” Perry wrote.

Nov. 12, 2020
One of several text exchanges from Nov. 12 shows Perry sharing various conspiracy theories about voting systems in the country. In the morning, Perry sent several messages to Meadows and U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio outlining a strategy to challenge the vote in Pennsylvania, which he was forwarded from a state legislator.

“People think Dominion software was hacked,” Perry wrote.

Meadows even expressed skepticism about some of the conspiracies related to Dominion. The voting machine company ultimately filed a series of defamation lawsuits against Trump allies who have pushed these theories publicly.

Perry then urged Meadows to get the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to order the National Security Agency to investigate the debunked claims that Dominion voting machines were compromised by international parties.

“From an Intel friend: DNI needs to task NSA to immediately seize and begin looking for international comms related to Dominion,” Perry wrote.

Perry also wrote to Meadows on Nov. 12 claiming that “the Brits” – referring to the British government – orchestrated a conspiracy to manipulate voting machines and that then-CIA Director Gina Haspel was helping cover it up.

“And Gina is still running around on the Hill covering for the Brits who helped quarterback this entire operation,” Perry texted. “DNI needs to be tasked to audit their overseas accounts at CIA – and their National Endowment for Democracy.”

Later in the afternoon, Meadows asked Perry if one of his contacts would be “willing to sign an affidavit,” presumably detailing claims about the election. Perry offered to help and shared another series of conspiracy theories about the vote in Pennsylvania.

“Believe me, I’m going to do everything I can including putting you on the phone with her,” Perry wrote. “Also, apparently, our dept of state shut down all its systems on Oct 2/3 and lost all its data requiring them to replace all their hard drives. Don’t know yet if it matters but the state legislature auditors are holding that for their subpoenas next week.”

Nov. 19, 2020
One week later, on Nov. 19, Perry told Meadows he was working with “Rudy’s folks in Philly,” a reference to the legal effort being run by Trump’s personal attorney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

“Talking with Rudy’s folks in Philly, they want the PA legislative leaders invited ASAP for Sunday or Monday. They are in all day tomorrow passing the budget so that’s out. Let me know if you want to discuss it,” Perry wrote.

Nov. 20, 2020
Meadows responded the next day stating, “As long as you are coordinating. That is fine.”

Perry replied, adding that “The call will have to come from The White House.”

Nov. 21, 2020
The following day, Meadows went to Perry asking to get in touch with local lawmakers in his state.

“Can you send me the number for the speaker and the leader of PA Legislature. POTUS wants to chat with them,” Meadows wrote to Perry. “Yes sir,” Perry replied.

Perry asked Meadows another question that went without a reply, this time asking if then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Bill McSwain, a Trump appointee, would investigate the state’s election.

“What will it take for Bill Mcswain to open an investigation?” Perry asked.

Dec. 24, 2020
On Christmas Eve 2020, Perry tried to connect with Meadows.

“Mark, let me know if we can talk some strategy. Just a few minutes,” he wrote.

There was no reply in the logs.

Dec. 26, 2020
The day after Christmas, Perry texted Meadows stressing a need for urgency as Jan. 6 and Biden’s inauguration were quickly approaching.

“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down. 11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration. We gotta get going!” he wrote.

Just over a half-hour later, Perry told Meadows to install Jeffrey Clark, the assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s natural resources section, as acting attorney general.

“Mark, you should call Jeff. I just got off the phone with him and he explained to me why the principal deputy won’t work especially with the FBI. They will view it as as not having the authority to enforce what needs to be done,” Perry wrote.

“I got it. I think I understand. Let me work on the deputy position,” Meadows replied.

Dec. 27 and 28, 2020
Over the next two days, Perry texted Meadows twice, the first time asking Meadows for a return call and the second time asking if he had called Clark.

“Can you call me when you get a chance? I just want to talk to you for a few moments before I return the presidents call as requested.” Perry wrote on Dec. 27.

“Did you call Jeff Clark?” Perry asked Meadows on Dec. 28.

Dec. 30, 2020
A few days later on Dec. 30, Perry texted Meadows that “US 18-95” had been poorly explained at a meeting the previous day – an apparent reference to the U.S. statute related to acts in the United States by an agent of a foreign government.

“Mark, need to re-visit US 18-951. It was not explained well yesterday. I think can add important context,” Perry wrote.

Dec. 31, 2020
The next day, Perry texted Meadows a YouTube link that details another conspiracy theory claiming votes were changed by Italian satellites.

“Why can’t we just work with the Italian government?” Perry wrote.

According to Talking Points Memo, Meadows does not appear to have responded to that message, but emails released by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year show he did forward the same video link to then-acting U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen hours later.

Jan. 2, 2021
Perry discussed debate rules for the House floor and asked if Trump has been in contact with the Italian government. Perry suggested Trump should reach out to former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, whose name was misspelled in Perry’s text.

“Also,has POTUS been able to have a conversation with Conti? Can he move the ball today?” Perry asked.

“Please call me the instant you get off the phone with Jeff,” Perry wrote later in the evening of Jan. 2.

Department of Justice officials reportedly persuaded Trump to drop the idea of making Clark attorney general that day.

Jan. 7, 2021
The last message to Meadows, the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, asked for the two to connect.

“Mark, please call when you can,” Perry wrote.

Based on texts shared with the House select committee, Meadows exchanged messages with at least 34 Republican members of Congress in the weeks following the 2020 election. In addition to Perry, two fellow members of the state’s congressional delegation, Fred Keller and Mike Kelly, were among those included in the messages.

The FBI confiscated Perry’s phone in August as part of an investigation into the effort to have fake electors overturn the presidential election. Perry has declined to voluntarily cooperate with the select committee, calling it illegitimate.

“That this illegitimate body leaked their latest charade to the media ahead of contacting targeted Members is proof positive once again that this political witch hunt is about fabricating headlines and distracting Americans from their abysmal record of running America into the ground,” Perry said in May following the committee’s subpoena requests.

What’s next?

The future of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6 is up in the air. The committee’s investigation is ongoing, however, it was set to dissolve in the next Congress in January. With Republicans regaining the majority in the House of Representatives, it’s unlikely that the chamber will seek any further investigations on the topic.

This is the stuff you're buying into?
Thermostats changed votes?
Italians?

[merh]

HOME POLITICS
The insurrection on Capitol Hill directly descends from the legacy of the Brooks Brothers riot and Bush v. Gore
Grace Panetta Updated Jan 6, 2022, 10:00 AM
Florida protest
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush protest outside the Palm Beach County Governmental Center against further vote counting of presidential election ballots in the state of Florida. Robert Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
The January 6 insurrection on the Capitol had echoed the November 2000 Brooks Brothers riot.
The Capitol insurrection was far more violent and destructive than the Brooks Brothers riot.
Although unlike the Brooks Brothers rioters, this group failed to stop the counting of votes.

On November 22, 2000, a group of well-dressed Republican protesters descended on a government office building in Miami. They were there to protest the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board's recount in the disputed presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush. They wanted to stop what they regarded as a steal, and they were prepared to resort to violence to do it.

The Brooks Brothers riot revived a new blueprint for electoral disputes, one that openly deployed violence and intimidation to frighten officials into discarding legitimate votes. Like the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump siege on the US Capitol, it was sought to replace the rule of law with mob rule.

And like that brazen assault on democracy, it was orchestrated at the top levels of the GOP. The weapon-toting, MAGA hat-clad insurrectionists of 2021 directly descend from the buttoned-down, stop-the-steal rioters of 2000.

The participants of the demonstration, primarily organized by senior Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, became irate that the three-member canvassing board had gone to an upstairs room out of the public view and entered the building to vocally protest the process.


When local Democratic official Joe Geller went downstairs to get a blank sample ballot to demonstrate something to his colleagues, he was surrounded by the protesters who loudly accused him of stealing a voters' ballot and hounded him all the way back upstairs.

Both he and then-Democratic operative Luis Rosera got caught up in a scuffle and described being kicked and punched by the increasingly unwieldy crowd, The New York Times reported, with sheriffs' deputies having to intervene to quell the brouhaha and escort the canvassing board to safety.

The incident, which is now often referred to as the Brooks Brothers riot or rebellion, intimidated the board into suspending their already-scaled back recount altogether, resulting in many votes going uncounted and lost in the "what-ifs" of history.

November 22 riot
New Yorker Chuck Walker (L) dressed as Republican presidential candidate George Bush cheers in front of the Stephen Clarke government Building in Miami, Florida, 22 November, 2000, in support of the Miami-Dade canvassing board decision to stop the hand-counting of ballots for all of Miami-Dade County. Rhona Wise/AFP via Getty Images
The Capitol insurrection drew from the Brooks Brothers playbook but was far more destructive
The insurrection waged by Trump supporters on Congress' joint session to count electoral votes, while significantly more physically violent and destructive, harkens back to the echoes of that day in downtown Miami.


On February 9, 2021 the Senate began the impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump on a charge of inciting the January 6 siege on the Capitol.

At the beginning of a debate over whether the trial is constitutional, lead House Democratic impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin showed a powerful 13-minute video montage of how the day's events played out that put the day's violence in stark display.

Like the Brooks Brothers riot, it took place on a Wednesday. The crowd in Miami was largely made up of GOP operatives, including some who went on to work in the Bush administration. Similarly, those arrested in connection with the Capitol riot include many well-off, educated professionals who could afford to fly to Washington, DC, on a weekday.

Unlike the Brooks Brothers riot, the pro-Trump insurrectionists, despite their efforts, did not succeed in suspending the counting of votes and, in fact, hardened the resolve of lawmakers to finish the count in defiance of mob violence.

Both the events of 2000 and Trump's presidency also featured many of the same characters, including Republican strategist and "dirty trickster" Roger Stone, who was involved in the event. He claimed he was tapped by top Bush campaign adviser James Baker to organize and coordinate the uprising on the scene from a Winnebago — a Stone-centric version of events that Blakeman disputed to The Washington Post.

roger stone
Roger Stone makes an appearance outside his house holding his double-peace-sign on July 12, 2020 after having his 40-month prison sentence commuted. Getty Images/Johnny Lewis
After Stone had some role in the fated Brooks Brothers riot and Bush's eventual win, he then went on to achieve a goal he'd held since the 1980s: propelling Trump to the White House.

In the early 2010s, Stone and Trump were major proponents of the racist "birther" conspiracy theory, which, in gaining Trump national attention, served to delegitimize former President Barack Obama's 2008 win and insinuate that it was under false pretenses.

Leading up to the 2016 Republican National Convention, Stone pushed false theories about voter fraud and threatened to send Trump supporters to the hotel rooms of pledged Trump delegates to pressure them to stay in line.


"We're going to have protests, demonstrations. We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those delegates who are directly involved in the steal," Stone told alt-right radio host Stefan Molyneux in an April 2016 interview, Politico reported at the time.

Stone was later convicted on seven federal charges of obstruction of justice, making false statements, and witness tampering in connection with the special investigator Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump commuted Stone's 40-month sentence in July 2020 and fully pardoned him in late December, two weeks before the Capitol siege.

Capitol Siege
Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the West wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington Jose Luis Magana/AP
Decades of false claims of voter fraud boiled over in January 2021
The 2021 insurrection, in some ways, represented the eventual legacy and inverse of the January 2001 electoral vote-counting session. Gore, who conceded shortly after a 5-4 ruling against him in the US Supreme Court, presided over the vote-counting of his own bitter loss in Congress without incident or violence.

In 2020, however, no states' election results were seriously contested. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, 2020 was one of the most successful and secure elections in US history with record-high voter turnout. Numerous judges, election officials, and, eventually, Congress resoundingly rebuffed efforts from Trump and his allies to overturn the election results.


The 2020 election certainly featured many of the same trends that arose out of the Bush v. Gore dispute and have shaped all elections since, including drastically higher amounts of election litigation prior to the election, allegations of fraud, and protests over vote counting.

But while the after-effects of 2000 may have helped lead the US to the events of January 6, it plunged the country into a dystopian state with levels of violence over election results seldom seen since the late 19th century.

"The events of the last two weeks go beyond the legacy of Bush v. Gore," Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine and the author of "The Voting Wars" and "Election Meltdown," told Insider.

"Bush v. Gore taught political operatives that in a really close election the rules of the game matter and it may be possible to litigate to victory," he added. "But what Trump did was to go beyond that — he has no plausible legal claims to overturn the election but litigated about the election anyway ... although none of this worked in the end, it showed a marked deterioration in democratic norms."

Voter ID
In this file photo taken May 20, 2014, an election worker walks past a voter ID sign at a Little Rock, Ark., polling place. Arkansas requires those voting by mail to submit a photocopy of their photo ID with their ballot AP Photo/Danny Johnston, File
The post-Bush v. Gore era set off a new wave of voting restrictions
The January 6 insurrection was, in a way, the last chip to fall after nearly two decades of voting conspiracies steadily becoming more pervasive across the political spectrum and Republican operatives especially building on the acrimony of Bush v. Gore.

The 2020 election featured no hanging chads or butterfly ballots thanks in part to a 2002 legislation, the Help America Vote Act, that gave states money to replace their antiquated punchcard voting machines with more modern technology.

But that legislation had other consequences that continue to reverberate today. Missouri Republican Sen. Kit Bond, one of the leading architects of the bill, successfully pushed for a provision requiring first-time voters who registered by mail without providing a driver's license or social security number to show ID in order to vote in a federal election.

That requirement opened the door for states, beginning with Indiana in 2006, to require an ID to vote. It gave conservative lawmakers and activists fodder to push for voter ID laws and other voting restrictions at the state level as well as federal investigations during the Bush administration. All this under the guise of combatting the false specter of widespread voter fraud.


Both the legacy of birtherism and years of powerful interests pushing false claims that voter fraud was pervasive, particularly in urban and inner-city communities came to a breaking point on January 6. That recent history made it possible for Trump and large sections of the right-wing media ecosystem to succeed in convincing hundreds of the president's supporters that the election was so rigged that they needed to "be there" to stop it

/capitol-hill-insurrection-has-roots-in-brooks-brothers-riot-2021-1

[merh]

Politics
Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth
by Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg
April 26, 2022, 5 a.m. EDT
Internal emails and interviews with key participants reveal for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the rigged election theory touted evidence they knew to be disproven, disputed or dismissed as dubious.

www.propublica.org/article/big-lie-trump-stolen-election-inside-creation

Rioters on the front steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021
Series:The Insurrection
The Effort to Overturn the Election

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story is part of an ongoing collaborative reporting effort between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes the documentary film “Plot to Overturn the Election.” The film aired recently on PBS and can be viewed here.


By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.

After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said ​​Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”

“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”

“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.

“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”

That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.

Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela. He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed. Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.

When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, “I can show the similarity.” In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy. He claimed that the company’s software had been “purchased” by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.

Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to “a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community.” (He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.) From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.

Powell was on the hunt for just such information.

By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president’s legal team to challenge the results of the election. In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he “conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.” The day after the interview, Trump made Powell’s position official with an announcement on Twitter.

The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud. One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video “like the holy grail of evidence.” (In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen “a few minutes” of the video, in which he had “no interest beyond general curiosity.” Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)

There was just one problem. Salazar’s claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: “Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela,” “Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012” and “There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic’s Software In The 2020 Election Cycle.” Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions. Dominion later released a statement calling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: “There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple.” He added that “Salazar’s testimony is full of inaccuracies,” strongly denied that Smartmatic’s technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has “registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach.” (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salazar’s story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.

Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.

Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they’d been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.

The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition’s chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.

Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden’s victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to “conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein.” The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Salazar’s declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show “the similarity” between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that “the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system” in the United States was potentially compromised.

Wood told ProPublica, “I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell,” though his name appears as “of counsel” in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that “while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct.”

All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn’t just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition’s failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.

This is the story of how little untruths added up to the “big lie.”


When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips. This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.


Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself: There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them. ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition’s efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.

In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media. None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.

One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election. Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann’s claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.

By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story. Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond. Powell soon referred to Oltmann’s allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and “his background,” she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator’s assessment.)

Within days of the investigator’s Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.

In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created “an entirely fake online persona.” (Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain “unproven” despite the legal finding and that “false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties,” which include being a “former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.”)

Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. The individual claimed that there was “unambiguous evidence” that “foreign interference is present in the 2020 election” and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. The Washington Post later identified the declaration’s author to be Maras.

In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.


In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators’ assessment: “Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours.’” (“I tried my best to deceive” the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. “I was scared.”)

Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras’ right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election. (“She’s a friend and an ally, and I know that she’s a little goofy,” Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. “I think she has relevant knowledge.”)

Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren’t just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon. In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden’s favor.

Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon’s voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)

One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon’s analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from “a long track record of baseball statistics.” In the end, his level of expertise didn’t matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon’s claims.

Byrne used Solomon’s analysis in his book, “The Deep Rig,” to make the case that the election was fraudulent. In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree. The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon’s analysis, especially that the “vote shares” he suggested were suspicious were “not at all surprising,” and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”

A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how “fishing for a finding” can “lead an argument astray.”

Byrne kept promoting Solomon’s work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a “Renowned Mathematician.”

Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a “Mr. Solomon.”

In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election. In the first, Burk claimed that she’d spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as “election mail ballots” passing through the facility. The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.

A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a “Jane Doe” witness who would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona.” Burk told ProPublica that she was the “Jane Doe.” The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of “a plane full of ballots that came in,” and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, “We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in.” The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.

Burk’s theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk’s claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it “had been looked into and there was nothing there.” This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)

On a phone call in late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, told Burk that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories. On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them. “When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane,” Penrose told Burk. “That created the rumor.” The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose’s investigators that in trying to impress Burk “he fabricated everything.”

“I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it’s true?” Burk asked. Penrose replied: “Yes. I’m saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It’s all bullshit.”

Penrose’s team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, “We’re not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines.”

Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)

Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. “I obviously made a mistake believing lies,” Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends. “As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece.”

Burk’s stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million. The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.

“You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there’s 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane,” said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman’s theories were false. Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia. “Our goal in the audit was to figure out what’s really true and deal with it,” Logan told ProPublica. “That’s why we did paper examination.”

No fibers were found.


Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden. It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.

However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.

“There was no proof at that specific moment,” the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought “could lead to” election fraud. “But there was no, like, ‘There was election fraud,’” he said, “at least at that time in my mind.”

Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold. The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a clerical error had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden. After the clerk’s office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.

Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error. Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn’t been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself. Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.

The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim: Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business. Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.

Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a court order to allow the machines to be formally accessed. On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county’s election management server.

Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report. Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud. Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.

When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version. It had “REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2” and Ramsland’s name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation. “The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” it claimed. “This leads to voter or election fraud.” Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.

Hayes’ and Sanders’ names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new “information must have been written by” Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

It wasn’t just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland’s version was flawed. An analysis commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an “extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements,” including that “the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to” and were instead “benign” lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome. A bipartisan investigation led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are “a complete waste of time to consider.” (Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about revising the report. But he did tell The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security’s 29 “core observations.”)

Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, “MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realdonaldtrump must appoint a special counsel now.” Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.

In a statement, Giuliani said: “This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts.” (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)

Byrne described the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” posting it on his blog under the claim: “You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence.”

Trump tweeted: “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!” Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.

Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump’s personal secretary sent an email to the deputy attorney general with the subject line “From POTUS.” The Antrim report was attached to the email. An additional document included talking points (“This is a Cover-up of voting crimes”) and conclusions (“these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County”). That email launched Trump’s attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 report by Senate Democrats. In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.

When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” enough for him to win the state, in a recorded phone call on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times.

At the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and suggested that halting the certification of Biden’s victory was justified because of “these crooked Dominion machines.”

Trump’s speech emphasized the “highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.

Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was on the House floor objecting to the certification of his state’s electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory by Congress. He cited as evidence “the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.” About a minute later, Gosar’s speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, “No Machines Dominion STEALS.”


In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.

This transformation happened after Dominion’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general. Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims. The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)

By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard. The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election. It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell. Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.

Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can’t be disproven: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can’t. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery. The people promoting the theory claim he can’t reveal the evidence because he’s under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.

Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an online interview that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, “Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election.”

Montgomery has been accused of fraud by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations. In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. (It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer. In 2018, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” (Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)

The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the MyPillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen. According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn’t publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.

Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day “cyber symposium” he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent. Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online offer of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that “this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.” The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.

In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described “white hat” hacker — all of whom had been associated with Allied Security at one time or another. (They called themselves the “Red Team” but coordinated on a group chat named “Purple Unicorns.”) Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by two independent forensic linguistic analyses as “Q,” the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.) Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.

Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn’t what was promised. “I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF,” Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team. “So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn’t include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake.”

“At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof,” another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn’t delivered on his guarantees. “If this software does exist, and the developer” — Montgomery — “is working with us, it shouldn’t take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data” that would prove his assertions.

According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.

For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged. Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn’t credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.

On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.

The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person. Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and “we’ve seen plausibility” and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.

By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell’s claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus: None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised, according to accounts from five of them. In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.

The data “was some gobbledygook,” said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump. Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen. Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times quoted him saying that “we were handed a turd.”

Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have “credible information on a threat in the data streams,” implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.

The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to Salon. At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium “really amazing,” and he has continued to praise Lindell’s efforts on his behalf. Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, “The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “and many others did a cyber attack on our election!”


In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.

Some of the responses were dismissive. “Stupid article,” wrote Michael T. Flynn’s spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. “No one we care about will read it.”

Others contested the article’s findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, “So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point.”

Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.

Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. “I was a member of said coalition,” wrote Seth Keshel.

“‘Coalition’ may not be the right word,” wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on “election integrity” efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn. “We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with ‘coalition.’” Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.

On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth. “I’ve not wavered on this,” Keshel emailed ProPublica. “I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this.” The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: “I don’t believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can’t say either way.”

Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition’s ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.

When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election. He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim. “I think that it’s picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff,” he said. He defended the coalition, saying, “I think they got the gestalt of it correct.”

Don’t pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked. (These errors included Allied Security’s central contention that Dominion machines were “purposefully designed” to create “systemic fraud” through a process known as “adjudication.” The machines in question did not have the “adjudication” software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.) Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines’ security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them. (The Michigan secretary of state expert found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that “the timing appears to be a coincidence,” though it said that having a limited amount of memory “is contrary to best practice.”)

Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren’t central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud. He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin. The report’s primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in “election bribery” by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic. The special counsel raised the possibility that the report’s findings were serious enough that Biden’s victory in the state could be decertified. (A federal judge in October 2020 rejected the argument that the nonprofit’s work was illegal, and courts have repeatedly come to the same conclusion.)

New Documentary by Frontline and ProPublica Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth
Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims. In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called “2000 Mules” by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden. “Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower,” Byrne wrote, “all point to about one million votes being stuffed” in Georgia.

There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.

Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren’t corrupted.

What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. “I’ve got my cards. You got your cards,” he said. “I’ll go all in.”

[abbey1227]

Jan 14, 2023 23:03:06 GMT merh said:

Politics
Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth
by Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Kirsten Berg
April 26, 2022, 5 a.m. EDT
Internal emails and interviews with key participants reveal for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the rigged election theory touted evidence they knew to be disproven, disputed or dismissed as dubious.

just look at all the work those 3 put into that single piece.

But nobody could possibly organize a wave of 'ballot harvesters' across the country? They even provided many of them with gloves. Dubious indeed.