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primary 8 22 big lie 5
SEE AM PJT WITH FLYNN BOTH RUSSIA BUTINA
SEE HUGO CHAVEZ GHOST 2 26
CLETA?
see flynn 3 AND FOUR
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Election denial movement sets stage for chaos on Election Day and its aftermath
So-called election integrity activists are calling for Trump to declare martial law, mandate hand-counting of ballots, seize voting machines, and refuse to certify elections at a whim
Written by John Knefel & Sophie Lawton
Published 10/20/26 2:17 PM EDT
Updated 10/20/26 4:58 PM EDT
The election denial movement has spent months trying and largely failing to subvert the midterms, and now some of its major figures are articulating their plans to attempt to disrupt the vote on Election Day and sow chaos in the weeks and months that follow.
Their proposals include calling for President Donald Trump to declare martial law, sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the military to polling places, forcing officials to count ballots by hand, demanding the federal government seize voting machines, and working to stop the certification of some elections.
The main figures pushing at least one or more of the above measures include former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, her lawyer Peter Ticktin, and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, among other election denial and right-wing media figures.
These developments follow months of activity from right-wing media operatives who have pushed for the implementation of various anti-voting rights measures, many of which have been thwarted, have stalled, or never came to fruition. A MAGA media effort to convince Trump to declare a national emergency seems to be dead in the water.
Even as many of these pre-Election Day efforts have faltered, new conspiracy theories continue to emerge. Mitchell, who aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has claimed without evidence that left-wing organizations are illegally harvesting ballots from nursing homes, for example.
But as the election draws near, some figures have set their sights on the day itself and what comes after.
Pushing for chaos on Election Day
Noncitizen voting is a vanishingly rare occurrence
Right-wing media figures in the election denial movement are pushing to make Election Day confusing and chaotic on the pretext of preventing noncitizen voting — a vanishingly rare occurrence.
Forcing hand-counts
Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, and her lawyer Peter Ticktin, a personal friend of Trump’s, have been pressing Trump to attempt to force officials to hand-count ballots, sometimes instead of machines and sometimes in addition to them.
In July, Peters released a “100-Day Risk Mitigation Election Plan” that would require officials to “apply the ‘Bank-Teller Method’: independently hand-count every ballot for federal contests before certification and reconcile that count with the tabulator result.”
Then in August, Peters claimed the administration already had the “authority” to “issue immediate cybersecurity guidance and assistance to transition all counties to hand mark paper ballots,” and that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had the duty to interfere in how states use voting machines.
Peters has also allegedly met with Trump on at least two occasions since her release from prison on election-related charges — once on June 30 and again on October 5.
Ticktin, meanwhile, has taken a slightly different approach recently, acknowledging that eliminating machines at this point is not feasible. On September 29, Ticktin said, “We could still have an order that requires — not hand-counting and get rid of the machines, because there’s no time for that — but let the machines do the count, but before the count — but then let us commandeer and get the ballots. If we have the ballots, we can count them ourselves.” He added that “it would be done after the election, but before certification."
Video
Citation
From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
Ed Martin is another proponent of this unnecessary and counterproductive measure. On Bannon’s War Room episode on October 6, Martin claimed that any election officials who want to “switch out your state and stop using the Chinese compromised machines, you can do it, and you can just ask [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne] Mullin for the money and he can help you pay for more people, pay for hand-marked paper ballots and counters and everything else.” He also noted that “Tina Peters met with Trump” recently.
Cleta Mitchell has long been on crusade to limit the use of voting machines, and, like Peters, has demanded that Lutnick interfere in state election processes based on an incorrect interpretation of an obscure federal regulation. Mitchell said that Lutnick should order “mandatory, pre-certification manual confirmation hand counts of ballots in 5% of the precincts and central count for each jurisdiction in the country.”
Stationing ICE and other federal officers or the military at polling places
Calls for ICE or other federal officers at polling places aren’t new — Steve Bannon has been making the demand since at least August 2025 and has continued to do so throughout the midterm election cycle — but they have become more widespread. As recently as August, Bannon said: “I think ICE agents belong at polling places."
Mike Davis, a frequent guest of Bannon’s, said on September 1: “I would have ICE agents and other federal law enforcement at every polling place across America. And that should only scare away noncitizens.”
YouTube streamer Tim Pool said in July that “at the bare minimum, we expect something like we will have federal law enforcement agency at polling locations in states that do not cooperate” with the Department of Homeland Security.
Jerome Corsi, former employee of Alex Jones, took an even more extreme line in calling for Trump to send the military to polling sites under the guise of a national emergency. “Donald Trump can take control of the elections,” Corsi said on September 12. “He can have the military or National Guard go in and make sure the elections are done legitimately.” Corsi claims to have been involved in drafting a proposed “national emergency” order.
Several other right-wing pundits have endorsed the idea of having ICE at polling places over the course of the year as well, including The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Fox News’ Jesse Watters.
The right-wing media figures plotting to sow doubt and contest results after the midterms
Declaring martial law and involving the military in recounts
Ticktin is the most vocal election denial activist to suggest that Trump invoke martial law after the midterms.
On September 19, Ticktin said during an appearance on Real America’s Voice, “Either we’re going to fix this thing before this election or we’re probably going to see martial law after this election.”
Then during an appearance on The Alex Jones Show on September 29, Ticktin said that if the election is “stolen from us because of their machines,” then Trump will “have to declare martial law.”
“I didn’t say declare martial law for the elections,” he added, “I’m saying in the event that the elections are stolen, what other options are there?”
Video
Citation
From the September 29, 2026, edition of Alex Jones Live's The Alex Jones Show
A few other prominent figures in the election denial movement have also called for Trump to declare martial law. These voices include MAGA “prophet” Julie Green and Douglas Frank, one of Ticktin’s fellow travellers.
On September 15, Green claimed that an impending declaration of martial law would lead to the mass arrests of politicians, judges, and lawyers. “It’s not just an election. There has to be a political reset,” Green said, “During the martial law it will not just be politicians tried for treason. So will judges, AGs, lawyer, prosecutors, who are against this nation."
On August 22, Frank said of Trump, “I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he declares martial law and we have the National Guard come out and we have to redo the election.”
MAGA fantasies about involving the military after the election extend beyond these calls for martial law as well. Where Corsi wanted the military to take over election systems, others in the movement have called on the military to intervene in the counting or recounting of votes.
Seizing machines or ballots
Beyond suggesting the president declare martial law, Ticktin has concocted a plan for the government to seize ballots or election machines in order to “count them ourselves” and prevent supposed fraud. Ticktin predicted on Alex Jones’ show that Trump would “seize the machines” in order to protect himself from prosecution by the Democrats if they win the House and Senate.
QAnon influencer and election denier Juan O. Savin said in an interview streamed on Rumble that any election machines with foreign components could “be seized as evidence and investigated and canceled.” Savin pushed for Trump to delay the election, but argued, “If you need the public to turn their brains on and become engaged, don't pause it then. Let it run the distance and then go seize those machines” after the election is over.
Right-wing media figures have previously supported the seizing of election materials, such as when the FBI raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and when Sheriff Chad Bianco seized 650,000 ballots in Riverside County, California. Real America's Voice host Wayne Allyn Root said of Bianco’s efforts, “I guarantee you he was going to find that all or most of them are filled with fraud and filled with illegal aliens,” and called the court’s order to return the ballots “a disgrace."
Trump himself has reportedly said that he “regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election,” according to The New York Times.
Pushing for Trump to delay the election
Juan O. Savin is not the only figure who has suggested Trump delay the elections in order to investigate voting machines or other election infrastructure. In an interview with David Nino Rodriguez on Rumble, former Overstock.com CEO turned election conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne called on Trump to “delay things."
Byrne's plan includes Trump putting former U.S. Agency for International Development employee Tim Meisburger in charge of elections countrywide and making it a one-day affair in which “you have to show an ID” and “there's no technology used.” He further suggested Trump “delays them and then puts this guy in charge of the election. And he could do a national security order, do something like that, and we could have an election like they run it in Burma.”
Video
Citation
From an October 15, 2026, stream by David Nino Rodriguez uploaded to Insights 21 channel on Rumble
Demanding Trump or other officials not certify elections
In an early October interview, Juan O. Savin claimed Trump has indicated “that we're going to fight hard to not allow them to certify the election after the election for reasons that we raise between now and Election Day,” citing voting machines with foreign-made parts as the “reason."
Video
Citation
From an October 6, 2026, stream on YouTube by Michael Jaco
Later in the interview Savin referenced Byrne's conspiracy theories on election machines (Byrne suggested Trump seize the machines following the 2020 election) and asked, “How can you certify a vote that was done with uncertifiable — uncertified machines?” Savin then reiterated, “So what's Trump going to do? He can't certify the election. He lets it go forward, and let's have the food fight after the fact."
What comes next when “the core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election.”
The election denial movement has not accomplished many of the key goals it’s set for itself. The SAVE America Act has no apparent path to become law. Trump has yet to issue a national emergency declaration or an executive order to take control of state election systems. The administration’s many efforts to uncover supposedly widespread noncitizen voting haven’t produced any tangible evidence of its existence.
These are real losses, but Trump and his media allies remain dedicated to subverting elections in the United States. As Bannon recently said to CBS News, “The core belief of the MAGA movement is we won the 2020 election." That load-bearing lie continues to animate Trump’s movement, and there is no reason to believe that it will be any different on Election Day or in the days after.
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South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says he is appointing Darline Graham Nordone to finish the term of her late brother, former Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in office Saturday at age 71.
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From spy agencies to FEMA, the president appears to be mounting a “whole of government” effort to sway races that will decide control of Congress.
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Sean Duffy isn’t the only Republican complaining about DEI, but he seems to have an expansive definition of the idea.
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- Edvard Pettersson @ Courthouse News Service: Hunter Biden wins $1.7 million in punitive damages against Patrick Byrne
A federal judge said the former Overstock.com CEO knew his claims that Hunter Biden had sought an $800 million bribe from Iran were fabricated.
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bishop Leon Benjamin had an ominous warning for his flock.
“We are at war and the war is very real,” Benjamin said during the meeting that his organization dubbed a “training.”
To Benjamin, a self-described “prophet to the nations,” the enemies include both political figures and more mystical forces. He told his audience that their “primary enemy is the shadowy government that is manipulating you” through “hybrid” warfare and influence operations. Benjamin suggested this dark plot was also being aided by “witchcraft, sorcery, word curses,” and “voodoo.”
“That’s some serious witchcraft. That’s some serious covert … operations right under your nose — in your face,” Benjamin said. “This is some witchcraft stuff where people can say things to you, curse you with their words or do certain things to get you to start to be confused.”
Benjamin’s disturbing sermon was conducted under the auspices of a group he is involved in called the “Coalition of Leaders United.” Audio of the event, which was apparently posted about a year ago, was featured on the group’s site. The talk was filled with grim assessments of the state of the country and intense conspiracy theories. Benjamin suggested former President Donald Trump was the answer to all of these dark scenarios. He also repeatedly pointed to another man in Trump’s circle, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, whose book “The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare” was the subject of the training session.
“We must destroy the enemies, the networks of globalist power brokers who wish to destroy the individual identities of nation states to establish a new normal — a.k.a. New World Order. General Flynn says all of this is for the what? The Great Reset,” Benjamin declared, later adding, “Everything is planned by design for this Great Reset. They have this idea of utopia, which is communism.”
Flynn wasn’t just an inspiration for Benjamin. According to Federal Election Commission records, the pastor’s “Coalition of Leaders United” received at least $75,000 via four donations made between April and August of this year. The cash came from a political action committee spearheaded by Flynn. That group, “Fight Like A Flynn,” was largely backed by a company linked to entrepreneur Patrick Byrne.
Both Flynn and Byrne previously worked together to promote false claims that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was fraudulent. The pair also tried to convince the former president — including during an infamous December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office — to have federal troops intervene in the result. TPM reviewed FEC records for “Fight Like A Flynn,” which show that — with the help of a seven-figure sum that has come from a business managed by Byrne and a longtime partner — Flynn is once again working to influence the current presidential election by backing a network that includes far-right organizations, candidates, groups with ties to Trump and the Republican National Committee, and at least one sitting member of Congress. Flynn and Byrne did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
This money trail is a clear example of how some of the most extreme election deniers have remained active and coordinated ahead of this year’s race. It also illustrates how there are extensive links between the most conspiratorial and fringe elements of the MAGA movement and more seemingly mainstream elements of the GOP.
Along with Benjamin’s effort to recruit fighters for a war against the “New World Order,” the groups backed by Flynn include QAnon activists and multiple figures who participated in the Jan. 6 protests against Trump’s last defeat. “Fight Like A Flynn” has also given money to ventures tied to local GOP candidates, a firm that has worked on Trump’s legal team, a group focused on voter registration that is a favorite of Trump’s daughter-in-law-turned-RNC Chairwoman Lara Trump, and the campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Benjamin alluded to the breadth and ambition of the groups in Flynn’s orbit as he concluded the “training” call with a pro-Trump prayer. While the audio posted on his site did not detail the other participants on the call, Benjamin implied the group included faith leaders and some of the many Trump supporters who have become involved with politics at the hyperlocal level.
“I want to pray a supernatural blessing upon each and every one of you all. Some of you all I know are running for office. Some of you all are running for your city, local leadership. Some of you all have jobs, your businesses, ministries. I want to pray this blessing over you,” Benjamin said, adding, “Bless these networks like never before. Unite them oh God with the right people, the right place, the right time, with the right resources. … Let it begin now oh God. And we pray for President Donald Trump. We pray for his team. We pray, oh God, no matter what it looks like.”
Benjamin is a direct example of the Trump faithful who have run for office. He mounted unsuccessful congressional bids in Virginia in 2020, 2022, and a special election last year. During that second race, reporters noted Benjamin posted Facebook photos on Jan. 7, 2021 indicating he attended Trump’s fiery speech in Washington D.C. the day before. During those remarks, the former president railed against his loss and urged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol as his defeat was being certified inside. Pro-Trump crowds began to storm the building during his speech. Benjamin’s social media shots from the protest include pictures that apparently show him with Byrne and Flynn’s son, Michael Jr.
FEC records show “Fight Like A Flynn” was organized on June 25, 2023. Since then, records show it has taken in $1,261,940.76 and disbursed $1,078,575.95. Between September and December 2023, the group received three separate donations totaling $1 million from a corporation called “Haverford Valley L.L.C.” based in a UPS Store in Potomac, Maryland. The contributions represent over 79 percent of “Fight Like A Flynn’s” funding. Haverford Valley L.C., a firm which is based in Utah and which Byrne long co-managed with his associate John Pettway, used the same Maryland address. In an email to TPM, Pettway said he has stopped working with the company.
“I no longer work for the Haverford Group,” Pettway wrote.
“Fight Like A Flynn” is headquartered at a Post Office in Palm Beach, Florida, about four miles from Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. The group’s treasurer, Robert Kiger, is a fixture in the tony beach town’s political scene. Kiger is a local businessman who had what reporter Zach Everson described as “extraordinary access” to the presidential motorcade and Air Force One during Trump’s administration. He also founded a pro-Trump PAC, has worked on multiple GOP campaigns, and self-published a memoir titled “From Poverty To Polo To Politics – A Life Leading To Trump.” In an interview with TPM on Monday evening, Kiger said the committee was “not affiliated” with anything militant or extreme, and referred all requests for comment to Flynn.
“I’d suggest you take it up with the office over at General Flynn, because I’m not really at liberty to comment as the treasurer,” Kiger said before hanging up.
Mike Flynn Jr. (left), Leon Benjamin, Patrick Byrne (right), and others in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: Facebook/Leon Benjamin)
Flynn has been a prominent part of Trumpworld for years, although his official stint in the White House was brief and consumed by scandal. As an Army Lieutenant General, Flynn was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until 2014, when he was reportedly forced out in a leadership shakeup. Two years later, Flynn was a prominent supporter of Trump’s first presidential campaign. After Trump took office in January 2017, he made Flynn his first White House national security adviser.
Flynn resigned from that post after just over three weeks when it was revealed he lied to former Vice President Mike Pence and others about his communications with the Kremlin’s ambassador to the U.S. Flynn subsequently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian diplomat, however, after Flynn hired the conservative attorney Sidney Powell, he withdrew his guilty plea. The Justice Department under Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr then tried to drop the case, but the move was challenged by a federal judge. Trump ultimately pardoned Flynn in the final days of his administration.
After leaving the Trump administration and during his legal drama, Flynn increasingly dabbled in far-right politics and promoted slogans affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. As his legal bills mounted, Flynn and his family were involved in a series of businesses that mixed fringe politics, merch sales, events, and his own defense fundraising. His attorney, Powell was involved in some of these efforts. Using his expertise in unconventional warfare, Flynn consistently promoted the idea of an ongoing conflict as he sought to build a force of “digital soldiers” for himself and Trump.
The crosspartisan reform group Issue One previously examined a non-profit linked to Flynn which directed money to a constellation of right wing groups while also paying multiple members of Flynn’s family. Along with its political contributions, “Fight Like a Flynn” has also paid over $37,000 to “Resilient Patriot LLC,” a Florida corporation that Flynn is the manager of.
Byrne has had, perhaps, an even more unique path to presidential politics and election activism than Flynn. He launched the online retailer Overstock.com in 1999. While at the helm of the company, Byrne created his own website, “Deep Capture.” On that page, Byrne detailed his “theory” that Wall Street was “dominated by a group of players who first pushed the laws to their limits” including unethical short selling practices that Byrne blamed for harming his business.
Byrne eventually began dabbling in crypto and, while speaking on the topic at a conservative conference in 2015, he met a young Russian woman named Maria Butina. The pair had a romantic relationship. In 2019, after Butina was arrested and charged with being a Kremlin spy, Byrne went public with his connection to her and began to claim he was embroiled in a sprawling and complex series of investigations where he was working as some kind of deep cover asset for multiple government agencies. Amid the drama, Byrne resigned from Overstock as his claims unspooled through a bizarre press release and intensely emotional cable news interviews.
Flynn and Byrne ultimately teamed up as they both promoted false claims that Trump’s 2020 loss was fraudulent and offered wild proposals to reverse the election. On December 17 2020, Flynn appeared on the conservative cable channel Newsmax where he suggested Trump could seize voting machines, or perhaps take even more drastic measures.
“It’s not unprecedented — I mean, these people out there talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done,” Flynn said.
The next day, Flynn and Byrne ended up meeting with Trump inside the Oval Office and White House residence. They were accompanied by Powell who, after her work with Flynn, masterminded the infamous “Kraken” lawsuits that she claimed would overturn Trump’s defeat, but that flamed out and resulted in a series of charges and sanctions against her. Axios, among the first to report on the meeting in depth, dubbed the sitdown “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” and said the group sought to convince Trump he should “take extreme measures to keep fighting” his election defeat. Byrne told the story of the meeting in a rambling series of posts on his website where he said they aimed to get Trump to, among other things, “direct a federal force” to go to six counties they deemed “problematic” to recount paper ballots or potentially even conduct a do-over of the election.
“We suggested US Marshall Service + National Guard,” Byrne wrote of the proposal.
This checkered conspiracy-filled history and effort to involve the military in the last election has not stopped at least one current member of Congress from accepting funding from Flynn in the current campaign. According to FEC filings, the “Fight Like A Flynn” PAC gave $2,500 to Ted Cruz’s Senate campaign on Oct. 21. The committee also gave $50,000 to back ads opposing Cruz’s Democratic Party opponent in the race, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX). Cruz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the support from Flynn’s PAC.
Other Republican candidates have benefited from Flynn’s largesse. “Fight Like A Flynn” made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Dan Franzese, a Trump loyalist mounting a longshot congressional bid in Florida. Silent Majority Foundation, a group affiliated with Pete Serrano, who is running to be attorney general in Washington State, received $15,000 from “Fight Like A Flynn” on Feb. 15. Franzese and Serrano did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to making donations, “Fight Like A Flynn” has also paid some vendors, including Binnall Law Group. FEC filings show the firm received $16,656.59 from Flynn’s group in eleven payments made between July 2023 and August of this year. The payments were identified as “LEGAL FEES,” “LEGA FEES,” and “LEGA FEESL.” Jesse Binnall, who is the firm’s name partner, is a member of the Republican National Legal Association and has worked on Trump’s legal team. Binnall did not respond to an email from TPM on Monday. Reached via phone on Tuesday morning, which was Election Day, he declined to comment.
“It’s a busy day. I’m not going to be able to talk to you about that today,” Binnall said.
When pressed, Binnall claimed to be unaware of groups the committee has funded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but good luck to you,” he said before hanging up.
Some of the organizations that have been backed by Flynn’s PAC blend more fringe activism with high-level Republican politics. FEC records show the group “Moms For America,” which is dedicated to building “a national movement of moms to promote the principles of Liberty [and] restore the Republic,” received $160,000 from “Fight Like A Flynn” in three payments made between November 2023 and August of this year. On Facebook, Kiger, the committee’s treasurer, posted a picture on March 2 showing he and Flynn handing over a large ceremonial $100,000 check to the group at one of its events. “Moms For America” participated in “Stop The Steal” demonstrations against Trump’s 2020 loss. The group, which did not respond to a request for comment, hosted a town hall with Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) last month.
Michael Flynn and Robert Kiger presenting a check to “Moms For America.” (Photo: Facebook)
“Fight Like A Flynn” also made two contributions this year for a total of $95,000 to Early Vote Action PAC, a group founded by the activist Scott Presler, which is dedicated to registering Republican voters in key swing states. Presler was billed as a speaker at the “Wild Protest,” which was one of the main demonstrations against Trump’s loss outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
He also has promoted a series of conspiracy theories, including QAnon. In mid March, RNC Chairwoman Lara Trump, who is also the former president’s daughter in law, claimed she wanted to hire Presler to work with the party. The announcement received pushback due to Presler’s more fringe activism and the RNC subsequently announced he would not be employed by the party. That flap did not entirely deter Lara Trump from associating with Presler. On March 26, a week after the report that he would not work for the RNC, Lara Trump posted a picture to her personal Facebook page where she posed with Presler inside the party headquarters.
“Exciting things to come!” Lara Trump wrote.
She posted another picture posing with Presler on Facebook in June with a caption describing them as a “team.” Presler did not respond to a request for comment about the funding he received from Flynn or the other groups involved with the committee.
“Fight Like A Flynn” also gave at least $75,000 this year to “Catholics For Catholics,” a staunchly pro-Trump religious organization. Flynn is a senior adviser to that group and it has promoted the movie tour he led this year, which featured conspiracy theories and screenings at which Trump was encouraged to target political enemies after an election victory.
In May, Flynn’s committee also gave $50,000 to “Spartan Sword,” a group focused on suicide among veterans that is led by Boone Cutler, who is the co-author and publisher of Flynn’s “Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare.” Cutler did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the organizations funded by Flynn’s pack sit firmly on the fringe. In February, the group gave $50,000 to “Operation Free Nation,” a South Carolina group led by activist Chad Caton. On Facebook, the group’s page declares, “Welcome to the resistance Patriots. Operation Free Nation is about DOING not talking.” Caton attended the protests against Trump’s loss in D.C. on Jan. 6 but has vehemently denied any wrongdoing. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In February, “Fight Like A Flynn” gave $15,000 to “Advocates For Citizens’ Rights,” a California organization affiliated with Leigh Dundas, a prominent anti-vaccination activist. On her Instagram, Dundas has promoted QAnon content. She also appeared in a photo Benjamin, the pastor who led the “training” on Flynn’s “warfare” book, posted where he posed with “Stop The Steal” activist Ali Alexander during the demonstrations against Trump’s loss in D.C. Dundas did not respond to a request for comment.
For his part, Benjamin, in an interview with TPM on Monday evening, rejected the notion Flynn or his book are extreme or militant. He suggested any talk of “war” was merely verbal and religious.
“I believe that where we are right now, spiritual warfare has been, at its height, a war of words,” Benjamin said.
When we pointed out that Flynn and his allies seemed to, at points, call for the involvement of actual armed forces in the election, Benjamin turned the tables. Before saying he had to leave and hanging up the phone, Benjamin left us with a question.
“Are you for America or are you against America?” he asked. “Which one are you for?”
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'Stale and unsubstantiated': Trump’s recusal motion denied in scathing rebuke
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MAGA attorney Stefanie Lambert has been representing former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne in a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. But on Tuesday, August 13, according to CNN, Federal Judge Moxila Upadhyaya removed Lambert from the case — citing her "truly egregious misconduct."
Lambert and Byrne are among the far-right MAGA Republicans who falsely accused Dominion Voting Systems of helping now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.
Dominion also filed defamation lawsuits against Fox News, Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN), MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and attorney Sidney Powell. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million when a settlement was reached in April 2023.
READ MORE: Analysis grapples with GOP fallout if Trump 'loses badly
Upadhyaya was downright scathing in his criticism of Lambert in his August 13 decision, saying that she "flagrantly and repeatedly disregarded court orders" by publicly disclosing "thousands, if not millions" of internal documents from Dominion.
The judge wrote, "Lambert's actions were intentional and clearly meant to inflict the harm that has resulted…. This Court cannot allow such intentional, dangerous, and relentless misconduct to continue…. Byrne and Lambert's acts have not only fueled theories of widescale election fraud and crime … they have resulted in real harm and threats to Dominion employees."
CNN's Marshall Cohen describes Lambert and Byrne as "part of a coterie of Trump supporters who tried to overturn the 2020 results and are still peddling debunked claims that Dominion software manipulated the outcome."
"Separate from the Dominion litigation," Cohen notes, "Lambert is facing criminal charges in Michigan over her alleged role in a conspiracy to seize voting machines in 2020 in hopes of proving her voter fraud theories. She pleaded not guilty…. The decision to disqualify Lambert from the Dominion case comes months after she leaked internal Dominion e-mails to a right-wing Michigan sheriff who has used his office to investigate baseless theories about the 2020 election."
READ MORE:'Falling on deaf ears': Damning supercut shows Trump at odds with allies on how to beat Harris
Cohen adds, "The sheriff, Dar Leaf, subsequently posted many of the documents online — doxing Dominion staffers by publicly disclosing their names, email addresses, and cell phone numbers.
READ MORE:'Nervous Senate Republican' tries boosting reelection campaign with over $1M of his own money
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AHA DOH CONSPIR AS SMEAR ~ TARGET = DIRTY TRICK BUT REQ ALT FACT EARTH 2 MURDOCH FUCKERY
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When special counsel Jack Smith announced 37 federal criminal charges against former President Donald Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case in June, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) warned that he would be "the subject of relentless attacks" and could expect "death threats."
Schiff definitely called it.
Smith has been inundated with death threats not only because of that case, but also, in response to his election interference case against the former president. Trump and his loyalists have repeatedly used words like "deranged" to attack Smith, who has become a major target of MAGA conspiracy theorists.
In an article published by Mother Jones on December 13, journalists David Corn and Dan Friedman describe an anti-Smith conspiracy theory that is showing up on far-right websites.
"A new conspiracy theory rising on the right is being deployed to help Donald Trump," Corn and Freidman explain. "It claims that Jack Smith, the special counsel who is prosecuting Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and for his alleged swiping of classified documents, was part of a multimillion- dollar extortion scheme when he was the chief prosecutor investigating and prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo. In the past two weeks, this unsubstantiated narrative has started popping up on fringe right-wing sites and social media posts."
The reporters continue, "Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and QAnonish MAGA champion, has promoted this tale…. This campaign against Smith is based on documents circulated by John Moynihan, a onetime DEA employee who says he handled money laundering investigations for the agency."
According to Corn and Freidman, MAGA Republican and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne "has claimed credit for helping to launch Moynihan's allegations against Smith."
READ MORE:Fani Willis speaks out about racist death threats and 'bold-faced lie' following Trump indictment
The journalists note, "Byrne tweeted a link to a story on the Moynihan charges that appeared on Gateway Pundit, a fringe-right site, and he declared, 'I DID THAT. Well, the extraordinary federal John Moynihan and I.' He added laughing emojis. A website he created called Deep Capture was among the first to post the Moynihan complaint."
---
mma 10 22
CLETA
...This instance of a CPI- and GOP-linked Fairfax County group sending material from QAnon influencersto the county board of elections further demonstrates the connections between the QAnon and election denial movements. Media Matters has previously documented True the Vote’s collaboration with QAnon figures, major election denial funder Patrick Byrne’s significant connections to the QAnon community, and a QAnon influencer’s involvement with a coalition recruiting and aiming to elect election-denialist secretary of state candidates. And according to Nevada Republican secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, the leader of that coalition, he had been “working very close” with Mitchell and CPI.
frontline ap
...
Financing Election Denial
Flynn has expanded his influence further through well-financed groups that advocate, among other things, changes to the way elections are run, based on the false premise that there is widespread voting fraud.
Flynn and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com, last year launched The America Project, with Flynn’s brother Joseph as president. The group said it planned to spend $50 million in the 2021 budget year, according to a filing with North Carolina charity regulators. But Joseph Flynn and Byrne separately told AP that it had spent tens of millions less, though each gave different totals.
While Flynn himself is not listed among its officers, he is the face of the group, and it’s described as “General Flynn and Patrick Byrne’s America Project.” Byrne says Flynn is his closest adviser, telling the AP and FRONTLINE that Flynn is his “Yoda” and “rabbi.”
In April 2021, Flynn was named chairman of America’s Future, one of the country’s oldest conservative nonprofit groups. The organization was founded in 1946 and was previously led by ultra-conservative stalwarts, including Phyllis Schlafly and retired Maj. Gen. John Singlaub. Since Flynn took over, the group hired his sister, Mary O’Neill, as executive director and appointed Joseph Flynn to its board of directors. The group had about $3 million in assets at the end of 2020, its most recent IRS filings show. Flynn told the AP and FRONTLINE in February that he had raised an estimated $1.7 million for America’s Future since becoming chairman.
The two groups worked in close coordination last year,together donating more than $4.2 million for a widely criticized and misinformation-driven review of the 2020 presidential election results commissioned by Arizona Republicans.
The America Project has given about $5 million to “grassroots organizations” around the country, Joseph Flynn said in a July appearance on an online show.
Many of the groups they support back what they call “election integrity,” a term often used by election deniers to justify making it more difficult to vote based on the falsehood that American elections are corrupt.
Campaign finance records show The America Project has given more than $150,000 to Conservatives for Election Integrity, a group that has supported several secretary of state candidates who have worked to undermine trust in 2020 election results.
The America Project gave $100,000 to a Colorado group, Citizens for Election Integrity, which used it for ads and text messages attacking a Republican candidate for secretary of state who ran against Flynn’s endorsed candidate. In Michigan, The America Project gave $100,000 in May to Secure MI Vote, which has reportedly pushed to roll back voter access.
In Georgia, they just announced they’re backing an effort to challenge voter registrations for tens of thousands of people.
Joseph Flynn said during a speech in May that The America Project also funded and advised many of what he termed “audits” of elections around the country, including in Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, though he did not give specifics.
In February, Flynn stood in a burger joint in Orlando, Florida, to announce The America Project’s most public initiative, “Operation Eagles Wings,” the goal of which is to mobilize and train poll watchers and precinct captains, and to drive get-out-the-vote efforts.
“I think every single person in this country, every American citizen, now has to pay attention to politics. You know, when people go, ‘I don’t get involved. I don’t do that political stuff. That’s for the politicians.’ Well, that’s exactly why we are here. OK?” Flynn told the AP and FRONTLINE during a contentious interview. “So, it’s something else that you won’t write or speak about or it’ll be edited out.”
As part of Operation Eagles Wings, The America Project has created affiliate groups in at least nine states. Its Florida affiliate said in a Facebook post last month it’s seeking “America First Poll Watchers” and will train organizations for free. State affiliates in Illinois and Virginia advertised trainings in July and August on grassroots social activism, poll watching and how to get out the vote. The promotions also promise to teach attendees to “expose weaknesses,” “monitor and evaluate absentee voting” and conduct “investigative canvassing.” ...
an raw 8 22
Patrick Bergy, a former Department of Defense contract information assurance security officer who was embedded with a group of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists in Washington, DC following the 2020 election, is publicly questioning an account by his one-time benefactor, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO.
Last week, Byrne filed a sworn declaration in the federal case for the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in south Florida. While the purpose of Byrne’s affidavit remains unclear, it included an intriguing tidbit of information relevant to :{a widely reported :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{**Dec. 18, 2020 meeting**:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:in which Byrne, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell visited Trump in the Oval Office. During the contentious meeting, which devolved into a shouting match with White House lawyers, Byrne, Flynn and Powell reportedly urged Trump to use the Department of Homeland Security or the National Guard to seize voting machines. At the end of the meeting, Trump reportedly appointed Powell to the position of special counsel.
In his declaration, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida on Aug. 18, Byrne wrote that Rudy Giuliani, who was serving as Trump’s personal attorney in the final days of the administration, disclosed to him during a lunch meeting in January 2022 that after Byrne, Flynn and Powell left the White House around 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 19, Giuliani lingered with Trump for a couple of minutes. According to Byrne’s declaration, Giuliani told him that after the others had left, “the president verbally reversed his decision and instructions” to appoint Powell special counsel, “and that is why those earlier decisions were never implemented.”
Bergy suggests in his affidavit, which was filed on Thursday, that he doubts Byrne's account about Giuliani's disclosure from the January 2022 lunch meeting. In his affidavit, Bergy describes observing Byrne leaving a meeting with Giuliani at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC around Jan. 11, 2021. Others in attendance at the meeting, according to Bergy, were Garrett Ziegler, a White House aide; conspiracy theorist Millie Weaver and her common-law husband Gavin Wince, and Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who pushed dubious claims of voter fraud to lawmakers.
“As I walked in Patrick Byrne was just leaving and was acting visibly upset following the meeting with Rudy and Garrett,” Bergy wrote. The affidavit concludes with Bergy writing that Byrne’s claim that he only learned about Trump's decision to rescind Powell’s appointment in January 2022 “defies logic based on how upset Patrick Byrne was when I saw him leaving the Willard meeting that day.”
Asked about Bergy’s account, Byrne said in an email to Raw Story that he saw Giuliani on the night of Jan. 6 and left Washington, DC on Jan. 8. He said Ziegler was not present when he encountered Giuliani. Bergy, in turn, told Raw Story he stands by his claim that he saw Byrne leaving a meeting with Giuliani and Ziegler, but that it could have taken place on Jan. 7 or 8.
Bergy describes himself in his affidavit as a “guest of Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and others” at Trump International Hotel, the Westin Arlington Gateway and Willard Hotel from mid-November 2020 through Jan. 17, 2021. During part of that time, he said he was also “a guest under an unsigned or dated Non-Disclosure Agreement with Rudy Giuliani, which I do not recognize.”
As previously reported by Raw Story, Bergy said he was invited to come to Washington, DC by Weaver and Wince, and joined a team housed by Byrne in the various hotels that also included conspiracy theorist Tore Maras; former military contractor Scott Bennett and Stephen Pigeon, an attorney for Washington state gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp. Bergy described thegroup’s purpose in his affidavit as “working to find evidence of election fraud, with the main focus being told to me put on the foreign influence that would allow them to use the Insurrection Act and call in National Guard.”
Bergy told Raw Story that he doubts that Giuliani actually witnessed Trump rescind his appointment of Sidney Powell after Powell, Byrne and Flynn left the White House in the early-morning hours following the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting. He said he doesn’t recall any mention of Trump revoking Powell’s authority among the network of people in Washington attempting to overturn the election after Dec. 18.
“If you want me to believe that story, sorry Charlie,” Bergy told Raw Story. “The timing on it and everything else going on, it’s just no way. Until someone shows me evidence otherwise, I would steer towards that not being the case. Even if he did tell Rudy, if you had a two-minute conversation with Rudy and no one else was around, how am I supposed to believe that?
“I can’t sit here and say Rudy lied, but I can say I don’t believe it,” Bergy added.
Neither Giuliani nor his attorneys could be reached for comment on this story.
Bergy told Raw Story that he believes the claim made by Byrne has the effect of protecting Trump.
As someone who has worked for the government on information security, Bergy said, the knowledge that the president had verbally rescinded an appointment that included a top-secret security clearance would have raised concern.
“It would have required that a full investigation for potential leaks or potential damage from that be investigated,” he said.
raw
https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/three-men-linked-russian-spies/
one of America's top counterintelligence experts revealed his thoughts on Saturday on the three men linked to sanctioned Russian spies who were present for a key White House meeting plotting Donald Trump's coup attempt.
"Four days after the electors met across the country and made Joe Biden the president-elect, Donald Trump was still trying to find a way to hang on to the presidency," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said in Tuesday's public hearing of the Jan. 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"On Friday, December 18th, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit in the White House that would quickly become the stuff of legend," Raskin explained. "The meeting has been called unhinged, not normal and the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency. The outside lawyers who'd been involved in dozens of failed lawsuits had lots of theories supporting the big lie, but no evidence to support it."
At the meeting, the idea of using the U.S. military to seize voting machines.
"In the wee hours of December 19th, dissatisfied with his options, Donald Trump decided to call for a large and wild crowd on Wednesday, January 6th, the day when Congress would meet to certify the electoral votes," Raskin explained. "Never before in American history had a president called for a crowd to come contest the counting of electoral votes by Congress or engaged in any effort designed to influence, delay, or obstruct the joint session of Congress in doing its work required by our Constitution and the Electoral Count Act. As we'll see, Donald Trump's 1:42 AM tweet electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government."
In a thread posted to Twitter, former FBI Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok noticed a pattern among some of the participants. Strzok had also headed the FBI's counterespionage section.
Strzok said the meeting had 'staggering counterintelligence issues' presented the three of those in attendance.
"Mike Flynn, who was paid by an organ of Russian state media to travel to Moscow to attend a dinner where he was seated next to Putin. Flynn later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador about election interference," he noted.
"Patrick Byrne, one of several men once in an intimate relationship with convicted Russian agent Marina Butina.Byrne gave money to Butina after her return to Russia, where she ran for the Duma,hounded Navalny, and supported the invasion of Ukraine," Strzok continued. "Rudy Giuliani, who repeatedly met with and took info from sanctioned Russian agents like Andrii Derkach, despite USIC warnings to the White House in 2019 that Trump’s personal lawyer 'was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence.'"
"So in this tiny meeting in the Oval Office where options to upend US democracy were advanced to the President of the United States, there were not one, not two, but three people directly linked to sanctioned and convicted agents of the Russian government," Strzok noted. "While I doubt Russia planned it, their efforts to gain access to Trump’s inner sanctum succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. And it demonstrates just how successful seemingly amateurish intelligence activity can be."
He included a Russian Foreign Ministry photo from inside the Oval Office of Trump meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The meeting occurred in May of 2017, one day after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey for investigating Russia's successful efforts to help Trump win the 2016 election.
"President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State," The Washington Postreported a few days later. "A Russian photographer took photos of part of the session that were released by the Russian state-owned Tass news agency. No U.S. news organization was allowed to attend any part of the meeting."
Here is the thread Strzok posted to Twitter:...[twt]
an ah 7 22
Co-founded by multimillionaire conspiracy theorist Patrick M. Byrne — the former Overstock.com CEO who aggressively promoted the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump — the America Project is a far-right MAGA group that describes its mission as “election integrity.” But critics of Byrne andAmerica Project advisers like Roger Stone and Michael Flynnhave been stressing that their real goal is voter suppression and voter intimidation. And Byrne is obviously willing to spent a lot of his money to suppress votes: Byrne, according to The Guardian, says he has donated almost $3 million to the America Project’s Operation Eagles Wings drive. guk
The Guardian’s Peter Stone reports that the America Project “has begun a self-styled ‘election integrity’ driveto train activists in election canvassing and poll-watching, sparking fears from voting rights watchdogs about voter intimidation.” According to Peter Stone, the American Project’s Operation Eagles Wings drive is focusing on “eight states,” including Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump lost, plus Texas and Florida, which he won.”
Byrne is among the MAGA Republicans who has been the target of a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems. In late 2020, Byrne promoted the false claim and bogus conspiracy theory that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to steal votes from Trump and give them to now-President Joe Biden.
The events that followed the 2020 presidential election were unprecedented in U.S. history. Trump was first U.S. president to lose an election by over 7 million votes, falsely claim that he didn’t, and try to overthrow the democratic election results — and he did all that with the help of Byrne, veteran GOP operative Roger Stone, former National Security Adviser Flynn and others who have promoted the Big Lie. Flynn is so nakedly authoritarian that after Trump lost the election, he urged him to declare martial law in order to stay in the White House.
“Voting rights advocates have voiced sharp criticism of Operation Eagles Wings, calling it a ‘sham,’ given the roles of Stone, Flynn, Byrne and others, and warning that it could lead to voter harassment at the polls and suppress legitimate votes,” Peter Stone reports in a Guardian article published on July 7. “To lead the fledgling operation, the America Project recruited Tim Meisburger, an ex-Trump official in the U.S. Agency for International Development. Meisburger left the agency abruptly under a cloud in mid-January 2021 after a video surfaced of him falsely informing staffers that the Capitol attack was mostly peaceful except for ‘a few violent people’ and that ‘several million’ people were demonstrating peacefully for election reforms.”
The Guardian reporter adds, “Overall, the America Project has boasted that its total funding is greater than $8m, including donations from Byrne, the ex-chief executive of Overstock.”
Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the voting rights program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, is vehemently critical of the America Project and its Operation Eagles Wings drive.
Morales-Doyle told The Guardian, “Michael Flynn and Roger Stone have repeatedly proven themselves to be enemies of democracy…. While it is not clear what exactly they will ask their election reform activists to do, their claimed pursuit of ‘election integrity’ is a sham, aimed instead at undermining public faith in our elections and setting the stage for future attempts to subvert the will of the people. The conspiracy theories they espouse would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous.”
Peter Stone notes that Flynn and Roger Stone “were in the vanguard of Trump loyalists promoting falsehoods about Joe Biden’s 2020 win.”
“In mid-December 2020, for instance, Flynn suggested on the conservative network Newsmax that Trump could use the military to ‘rerun the elections’ in several key states that Trump falsely claimed were rigged — and a few days later, he attended a White House meeting with Trump, Byrne and other allies, where more wild schemes were discussed,” Peter Stone notes. “(Roger) Stone spoke at a pro-Trump rally on 5 January, and the next morning, was at the Willard Hotel, which Trump loyalists had used as a base for plotting ways to overturn the election, accompanied by several Oath Keeper bodyguards — some of whom participated in the Capitol assault and now face criminal charges.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/rudy-giuliani-bogus-evidence-antifa/
raw story
after filming the fatal shooting of Trump supporter_{ Ashli Babbitt}_, an activist disavowed by Black Lives Matter and other leftist organizations before Jan. 6 became the public face of the right-wing hoax that “antifa" was responsible for attacking the US Capitol.
The film also reveals how the 27-year-old from Provo, John Sullivan, urged rioters to "break that shit" as they pressed towards the doors to the Speaker's Lobby, as lawmakers hurried to safety on the other side.
It now appears Sullivan learned about the planned assault on the US Capitol through his access to a far-right network that included Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Individuals in this network then turned around and fed Sullivan's information to Rudy Giuliani. Trump’s personal attorney then exploited this information in a propaganda effort to deflect blame for the attack from the former president and his supporters.
Foremost among those attempting to frame "antifa" by spotlighting John Sullivan's involvement was his brother, James Sullivan. A conservative activist with links to the Proud Boys, James Sullivan wrote in a text to an unknown recipient shortly after the attack: "I'm currently working with the FBI to expose and place total blame on John and the 226 members of antifa that instigated the Capitol' riot.'”
A screenshot of this text was obtained byMillie Weaver, part of a team of pro-Trump operatives drafted to review and analyze video of the Jan. 6 attack for Giuliani. Weaver shared the screenshot with Giuliani, her partner Gavin Wince told Raw Story, and Giuliani appears to have_{ tweeted}_ it out by accident nine days after the Jan. 6 attack. However,
To date, no "members of antifa" nor other left-wing activists have been publicly identified as taking part in the breach. The only known associate of John Sullivan who went inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 is Jade Lee Sacker, a photographer working on a documentary about the two brothers.
In a conversation recorded by Thad Cisneros, a former Proud Boy from Utah, John Sullivan explained, "Because I know we were going to storm the Capitol. I'm on chats. I'm on underground chats like — I have my resources, I have my resources. That is not me, but I have people, right?"
Cisneros told Raw Story that he "had zero knowledge" of John Sullivan's plans for Jan. 6 before the attack.
This recording was published in PsyOp the Steal, a pro-Trump documentary made by Weaver, with Cisneros' voice altered to protect his identity. Cisneros recently disclosed to Raw Story that he is the person asking questions in the recording. He also told Raw Story he provided the FBI with a copy of the recording.
Cisneros confirmed that on the night after the Jan. 6 attack, he called Sullivan and spoke to him outside the Hamilton Hotel. Shortly after Cisneros and Sullivan's meeting, Sullivan was detained by the DC Metropolitan Police and FBI for questioning about his involvement in the attack on the Capitol. Later, Cisneros said, the FBI contacted him. Agents wanted to talk to him about_{ Joe Biggs}_, a national Proud Boys leader, and_{ Stewart Rhodes}_, founder of the Oath Keepers.
"They asked me questions I knew I couldn't lie about," Cisneros told Raw Story. "They asked me: 'Do you know who this person is?' Of course. This is Joe Biggs. I called Joe Biggs and told him. I'm now regarded as a security threat by the Proud Boys. I understand."
The FBI also wanted information about Rhodes and other members of the Oath Keepers, but Cisneros told Raw Story he could not provide anything relevant to Jan. 6. He acknowledged that he and Rhodes "had been on several chats together," albeit only to discuss "organizing communities."
Cisneros said he was part of a council of national Proud Boys leaders known as the "War Boys," predating the MOSD Leaders Group, a private message group set up on Dec. 20, 2020to serve as a "national rally planning committee." Biggs, Ethan Nordean (aka Rufio Panman) and former national chairman Enrique Tarriol are all in jail awaiting trial on charges of seditious conspiracy.
"Enrique represented the strategy," Cisneros said. "Rufio represented the brawn. Biggs brought the military chutzpah. I unofficially brought a sense of reason and logic. When I hear things like, 'Storm the capitol,' it sends red flags."
Federal court documents indicate that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers privately discussed plans to assault the Capitol in separate chats.
On Jan. 4, Tarrio reportedly posted to the MOSD Leaders Group stating, "I didn't see this voice note until now, you want to storm the Capitol." Tarrio's message was in response to a voice note posted the previous evening by John Charles Stewart, a member MOSD's "upper tier leadership," recommending that the Proud Boys "plan the operations based around the front entrance to the Capitol building."
Meanwhile, on Christmas day, according to federal court documents, Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs messaged in the OKFL Hangout Chat when Congress convened for a joint session to certify the electoral vote.
"We need to make those senators very uncomfortable with us being a few hundred feet away," Meggs said.
"I think Congress will screw [President Trump] over," Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes reportedly responded. "The only chance we/he has is if we scare the s*** out of them and convince them it will be torches and pitchforks time is [sic] they don't do the right thing."
In bombshell testimony before the January 6th Committee on Tuesday, former aide_{ Cassidy Hutchinson revealed that word of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers'}_ plans reached the White House in the days before the Jan. 6 attack, even as Trump himself was planning to go to the Capitol when Congress met to certify the electoral vote.
"As Mr. Giuliani and I were walking to his vehicle that evening, he looked at me and said something to the effect of, 'Cass, are you excited for the 6th? It's going to be a great day,'" Hutchinson testified. "I remember looking at him and saying, 'Rudy, could you explain what's happening on the 6th?' He responded something to the effect of, 'We're going to the Capitol. It's going to be great. The president's going to be there. He's going to look powerful. He's going to be with the [House] members, he's going to be with the senators. Talk to the chief about it. Talk to the chief about it. He knows about it.'"
When Hutchison recounted that conversation with Mark Meadows, the former chief of staff reportedly told her, "There's a lot going on, Cass. But I don't know. Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6."
"I recall hearing the word 'Oath Keeper' and hearing the word 'Proud Boys' closer to the planning of the January 6th rally when Mr. Giuliani would be around," Hutchinson later testified.
Robert Costello, Giuliani's lawyer, did not return an email and voicemail for this story.
The Sullivan Brothers
James Sullivan, whose information about his brother John made it to Giuliani shortly after the Jan. 6 attack, was actively involved in a far-right movement that gave him direct access to the Proud Boys leadership.
Joe Biggs, a national organizer for the Proud Boys, introduced James Sullivan at a rally organized by the far-right group in Portland, Ore., in late September 2020.
"I'm part of a patriot group that came up from Utah, the Proud Boys chapter," James Sulliva
at the rally. "The group that I'm part of is called Civilized Awakening I founded back when my brother, John Sullivan — he's antifa; he organized a protest where a shooting occurred in Provo — and that's when we started organizing the patriot movement in Utah.
"My brother, John Sullivan… he was a speed skater," James said later in the speech. "He started two third-party logistics companies. He was conservative. And they manipulated him when Black Lives Matter came to Utah. Now, he was at the DC capitol saying he was gonna pull the president out of office. That Black man, that was my brother. He was raised by Lt. Col. John Sullivan."
Cisneros, another Proud Boy, had also interacted with John Sullivan before Jan. 6, having spoken at a Jul. 2, 2020 rally in Provo that Sullivan organized. Pushing back against the perception that John Sullivan allowed him to speak at the rally, Cisneros recently posted a photo of himself speaking through a megaphone with Sullivan in the background on Instagram, accompanied by the text, "When I took over a #blm event in Provo, UT with #jaydenx in the background. #slutchapter #proudboy #disavowed for working with #blm. I don't take orders I give 'em."
Cisneros told Raw Story that he met the Sullivan brothers' adoptive father. He claimed his was the anonymized voice in the PsyOp the Steal documentary referencing a meeting with the father and two sons.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
On the eve of the attack on the Capitol, Rudy Giuliani and others set up what became known as a "war room" at the Willard Hotel,Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the January 6th Committee on Tuesday.
After law enforcement regained control of the Capitol and Congress reconvened with Vice President Mike Pence to complete the certification of the election on Jan. 6, Giuliani regrouped. His new task was helping to absolve Trump of responsibility for the attack, as the president faced a second impeachment trial.
Michael Trimarco, a New York businessman with a background in tech and finance, recommended Millie Weaver and Gavin Wince to Giuliani. Weaver, a former correspondent for the conspiracy theorist hub InfoWars, and her partner Wince had been staying at the Westin Arlington Gateway in rooms paid for by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrnesince mid-November. They were part of a team that included Terpsehore "Tore" Maras and Patrick Bergy.
"When they finally met Rudy was Jan. 7," Trimarco told Raw Story. "The reason was because I felt the need to organize and collate… all the videos that were coming in from crowd sources. Millie and Gavin worked together. Tore has a lot of followers. They were sending stuff in. I said, 'These people would be good to pull all the video together."
Jason Funes, who worked on the Trump campaign in 2016 and 2020 — and worked in the US Department of the Interior from 2017 to 2019 — also contributed to the effort.
"Rudy Giuliani was being briefed by me in a group of people at the Willard Hotel on Jan. 8, and afterwards," Fune
the right-wing podcast Liberty Report podcast in November 2021. "I'm an expert witness, bro. I was the one at the Capitol building on video at sunset watching all these so-called Trump supporters. Listen, if antifa puts on a Trump hate, are they a Trump supporter?"
Following the attack on the Capitol, Funes texted photos of the driver's licenses of the Sullivan brothers' adoptive parents to a New Mexico man named Shawn Bradley Witzemann. In his text to Witzemann, Funes wrote, "Found these on the sidewalk."
Witzemann told Raw Story he doesn't believe that Funes actually found the photo IDs lying on the ground. "That was bogus," Witzemann said. "That's him being a smartass."
Witzemann hosted the Proud Boys-friendly podcast, "Armenian Council for Truth in Journalism." In it, he chronicled pro-Trump events in Washington, DC, Phoenix and Atlanta as a videographer.
One of Witzemann's_{ clips}_ captures an encounter with Funes, who is seen wearing a "Team Trump" shirt, on the evening of Nov. 14, 2020 in downtown Washington, DC, where the Proud Boys and other Trump supporters clashed with left-wing counter-protesters.
Witzemann was arrested in April 2021, and currently faces misdemeanor charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and other charges related to the Jan. 6 attack.
Witzemann said he interviewed Sullivan, alongside their fellow Jan. 6 arrestee Jesus Rivera, for a podcast, but did not expend much effort looking into Sullivan's father.
"I thought it was interesting for a minute," Witzemann said. "A lot of times you get led into a dead-end. What are you going to do?"
Asked how he obtained images of the driver's licenses belonging to the Sullivan brothers' parents and why he sent the pictures to Witzemann, Funes did not respond directly. In a prepared statement provided to Raw Story, Funes said, "Rudy Giuliani had DC hotels full of cohorts that were withholding vital information from President Trump and the entire federal government regarding Jan. 6 (including the IDs). In fact, Rudy, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Roger Stone, Ali Alexander and others were culpable of spreading lies about foreign election interference to a sitting president and the entire world."
Flynn, Powell, Stone and Alexander could not be reached for comment about Funes' assertion.
Funes confirmed to Raw Story that he possesses a video interview with Cisneros that references the John Sullivan saga.
After helping Giuliani, Funes met with Kellye SoRelle, a former Texas prosecutor who eventually became the general counsel for the Oath Keepers. SoRelle was representing the president of Latinos for Trump, Bianca Gracia in a lawsuit when Gracia introduced her to Funes.
In an affidavit she shared on_{ Twitter}_ last November, SoRelle included a startling claim about the Cisneros video.
"I was contacted by a guy named Jason Funes," she wrote. "He came to visit me from Florida and brought me a video of a male by the name of xxxxx. Xxxxxx was explaining that he was in Utah and was associated with Jason and John Sullivan (Jayden X). John Sullivan is the individual who was with Ashli Babbitt when she was shot. Thad was being recorded stating that he flew to Washington, DC with Patrick Byrne and the Sullivan brothers, and that Patrick Byrne paid for the provocateurs to be at the capitol."
In an interview with Raw Story, Cisneros disputed SoRelle's claim, saying that Byrne "would have nothing to do with John." Cisneros added, "Patrick Byrne is someone I never had any involvement with. That guy had nothing to do with any of the flights that I took."
Funes also disputed SoRelle's account.
"Kellye SoRelle has taken a video out of context," he told Raw Story. "She didn't watch it in full, and is misrepresenting what Thad said, because that is not what Thad said in that video."
Raw Story has asked Funes to release the video. Funes indicated he was willing to consider the request but would need Cisneros' permission first.
Byrne told Raw Story he doesn't remember flying the Sullivan brothers or Cisneros to Washington, DC before Jan. 6, although he did not entirely rule it out as a possibility.
"Nope, never heard of the guys nor had anything to do with them and their projects,"Byrne wrote in an email. "If that turns out to be incorrect, then it is because they were among many dozens whom in November and December who I was bringing to DC mostly for debriefing. The names of very few of those people have reached me. But neither of them ring a bell. And I do not recall helping anyone in around the J6 time. Just a month earlier."
In a text to Patrick Bergy, who was part of the team assisting Giuliani at the Willard Hotel, SoRelle suggested Funes had walked back his statement.
"So, the weird part is Jason changes his story," SoRelle said in the Jun. 1 text, which Bergy provided to Raw Story. "Originally, there was the Byrne flight stuff, which others still say… including another on the flight. But now Jason denies he said it."
In a follow-up text to Bergy, SoRelle said that Bianca Gracia, the president of Latinos for Trump, "told me the same."
SoRelle and Gracia were both present during a Jan. 5, 2021_{ meeting}_ between Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes in an underground parking garage in Washington, DC. Tarrio and Rhodes are both in jail awaiting trial on charges of seditious conspiracy.
Byrne told Raw Story that he recalled agreeing to a request to fly 15 "pro-freedom Latinos from Texas" to DC for a rally in December 2020, although at that time, he said he did not know Gracia. He added that an unidentified reporter informed him that Tarrio and two to three other people on the flight were Proud Boys.
Byrne said he recently asked Gracia, with whom he is now acquainted, about the parking garage meeting.
"She told me that she knew Enrique for a long time, that he had worked for her before working for Proud Boys and before there even was a Proud Boys, as her state organizer and on her board of directors for Latinos for America," Byrne told Raw Story. (Since Jan. 6, Latinos for Trump has changed its name to Latinos for America First.)
In a Signal thread that includedByrne and Joe Flynn, the brother of retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Graciasaid she hadn't communicated with Cisneros since February 2021.
"He was a Proud Boy but got kicked out of Proud Boys 'cause he tried to make peace w Black Lives Matter people," Gracia wrote. "He also got involved with the Sullivan guy mentioned somehow. And rumor has it he was an informant. At this point, everyone is either an informant or domestic terrorist. I did not pick up Thad's call. I made him text me."
Responding to Gracia's statement, Joe Flynn wrote: "Kellye is crazy, likes to make s*** up."
SoRelle could not be reached for this story.
In the conversation recorded by Cisneros, Sullivan risibly claimed that his brother, James told him "the Italian mafia paid for everybody to fly out there."Steven Kiersh, Sullivan's lawyer, told RawStory that his client "is not under any circumstances to speak with any person other than myself about the case."
Gavin Wince, who was part of the team that assisted Giuliani's effort to collect video and analyze the Jan. 6 attack, told Raw Story that he knows who flew John and James Sullivan to DC, but won't say.
"I can't comment because that is witness tampering," Wince said. "A lot of this is executive privilege. We were working with Rudy Giuliani and the White House on this stuff.
"The information was gathered under an NDA on behalf of Rudy Giuliani for the benefit of Donald Trump," he added. "That was the only reason we were doing that… for the benefit of Donald Trump, because in our mind he's the president of the United States being framed."
Daniel Goldman, the former lead counsel for the House prosecution of Trump's first impeachment, told Raw Story that there's no such protection. Goldman's comment was provided in response to an inquiry for a previous story looking into a claim by Weaver that she could not comment because her work was covered by executive privilege and an NDA.
"There is no such thing as an NDA covered by executive privilege since executive privilege is not contractual," Goldman told Raw Story. "This person would not fall under executive privilege under any circumstance, and I can't imagine what NDA a 'journalist' signed with Trump. The fact of such an NDA would lead me to believe they are trying to cover up misconduct through a sham contract."
Robert Costello, Giuliani's attorney, has previously told Raw Story that his client did not issue any non-disclosure agreements to Weaver and her team and was unaware that any had been given. After looking into the matter, he reported that Giuliani's secretary sent the NDAs to one of Giuliani's security people, who distributed them to the team. Costello said he located Weaver's NDA and observed that it was not signed by Giuliani, adding that without two signatures, a contract has no legal force.
Informed that executive privilege wouldn't cover their work for Giuliani and that the NDAs are likely not legally binding, Wince still declined to elaborate on the Sullivan brothers' flights to DC, saying that his information came from sources who, if disclosed, would face retribution.
"The last thing we want to do is compromise that information if it's evidence," Wince said.
Wince told Raw Story that he and Weaver did not receive any compensation for their work from Giuliani.
"The only gift or benefit we received was being allowed to stay in hotel rooms that had already been pre-booked," he said. "I believe it was Patrick Byrne and Mike Trimarco that had booked whole floors." Wince added that some of their meals were paid for. He also acknowledged that Byrne covered the cost of airfare so that he and Weaver could fly to California to interview a "whistleblower" for a pro-Trump media project.
After receiving information from Weaver, Wince, Funes and others, Giuliani recorded his "Common Sense"_{ podcast}_ for Jan. 13, 2021, promising, "This episode is going to concern itself with what really happened on Jan. 6, 2021."
Giuliani presented John Sullivan as the poster child for his thesis that "antifa" was responsible for the attack on the Capitol, making a case that was only loosely based on fact.
"I guess I'll repeat the word 'antifa' so we can see the organization for which Sullivan is operating," Giuliani told his audience in a video posted on the Rumble platform that has received almost half a million views to date. "Now, just a brief background on Sullivan: Sullivan is a Black Lives Matter/antifa partisan person involved with them. Involved in riots before. If not the most prominent, the most recent was in July 2020. He was arrested for rioting in Provo, Utah, where a person was killed during that riot."
In addition to omitting the critical fact that Sullivan had been shunned by Black Lives Matter organizers, Giuliani's statement included another egregious error. The SUV driver shot during the protest in Provo_{ did not die}_ and launched a bid for Provo's mayor.
"Let's start with the fact that long before Donald Trump or anyone else gave a speech on Jan. 6, this violent protest reaction was being created by other than Donald Trump or Donald Trump partisans, but by antifa and an antifa representative and a professional at creating riots, including riots that resulted in death," Giuliani said. "John Sullivan."
Speaking to Raw Story just before the January 6th Committee hearing on Tuesday, Weaver rejected the claim that Trump and Giuliani planned the attack on the Capitol.
"I've seen the J6 Committee making wild accusations that Trump and Giuliani had premeditated Jan. 6," Weaver said. "To me, that seems so foreign. You get a feel for things when you're in the middle of it. The feeling for me is there wasn't a chance in hell they pre-planned and orchestrated anything of the sort. Really, it seems like afterwards everyone is just trying to figure out what the heck happened. It's alien or way out there to say Trump and his people around him pre-planned an event such as J6, which only served to hurt him. In no way did he benefit. The opposing side benefited greatly from that."
An hour later, under questioning from Vice-Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Cassidy Hutchinson would describe three "camps of thought" in the White House, telling the committee that her former boss, Mark Meadows, straddled the moderate and extreme camps. Although Hutchinson didn't mention Weaver — an outsider working to assist Giuliani after the fact — by name, her position could easily be described as aligning with the third view inside the White House.
"And there was the last group, which was 'deflect and blame,'" Hutchinson testified. "Let's blame antifa. These aren't our people."
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/
i forgot ziegler:
an 6 22 raw story
Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.
Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.
Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.
Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn andformer Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrnetried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.
Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.
In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.
Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”
“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”
Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.
For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”
Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.
Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongsideFlynn and Byrne.
In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.
“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”
Waldron declined to comment for this story.
Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.
“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”
While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.
“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”
In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.
“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”
Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.
“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.
One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.
Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.
In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”
“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”
Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”
Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.
Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.
Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.
“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”
Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.
“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”
Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”
Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.
“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”
Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/maga/
raw story
Patrick Bergy rode his Harley-Davidson to Austin, Texas, and was waiting for an interview with conspiracy-theory honcho Alex Jones in mid-August of 2020 when he learned about the_{arrest}_ of Millie Weaver, who also happened to be a correspondent for Jones’ outfit InfoWars.'
The details were vague, but Weaver and her partner and producer Gavin Wince, along with her brother, had been arrested at their home in Ohio while Weaver was uploading the final cut of a documentary called ShadowGate, in which Bergy was featured as a “whistleblower” who spoke about his experience as a military contractor following his discharge from the Army in 2007. Given the urgency of the moment, Bergy looked up the address for InfoWars and walked into the studio without an appointment. Jones quickly recorded an interview for a breaking-news segment about the arrest of one of his contributors.
“I’m the pioneer of [Interactive Internet Activities], basically social media/fake news,” Bergy said,_{remarking}_ on the irony that he was sitting in the guest chair at InfoWars. “The last place that I’m going to go is an organization called ‘Information Warfare,’ right?”
Following Weaver’s arrest and while he was still in Texas, Bergy said he also spoke to a man named Robert Caron, a shadowy figure who claimed to have a background in intelligence. Bergy had met him before when Caron convened a meeting of his group Joint Task Force MAGA, or JTF MAGA — a_{self-described}_ “MAGA counterstrike supergroup of American patriots to help expose illegal government surveillance and support President Donald Trump in Making America Great Again” — at a restaurant in the Tampa, Fla. area two years earlier, according to Bergy’s recollection. Bergy turned down an offer to join JTF MAGA, concluding that it wasn’t geared to his specific interest. But he had stayed in touch with Caron.
Caron then offered Bergy a $5,000 retainer to stay in Texas and work on a project, according to Bergy. As much as Bergy could discern based on the details offered by Caron, the job entailed setting up a website to promote JTF MAGA’s content. Bergy said he declined the offer, telling Caron he needed to get to Ohio to help Weaver and Wince.
Shortly after Weaver’s arrest, according to Bergy, he was contacted by Lara Logan — a former correspondent for CBS’ "60 Minutes" who had been widely praised for her coverage of Iraq and other conflict zones in the Middle East. At the time she was working for the Fox Nation streaming service. The claim was first outlined in an affidavit that Bergy executed in early December 2020 and that he provided to attorney Sidney Powell for use in her lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential election.
Bergy did not disclose the identity of the “person that arranged the conversation,” but has since said that it was Caron. During a conference call with Weaver, Wince, Bergy, Caron, Logan and Logan’s husband, Joseph W. Burkett, Bergy wrote in his affidavit that “we were asked if we would meet them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to discuss further; I declined and so did Millie and Gavin.”
Upon its release, the ShadowGatedocumentary took hits from all sides, with_{legacy media}_ assailing it as being “filled with false claims and insinuations,” and others on the far right questioning Weaver’s credibility because she was charged with domestic violence. The charges_{reportedly}_ stemmed from an incident in April when Weaver, her brother and Wince attempted to wrest a phone away from Weaver’s mother, prompting her to flee to a neighbor’s house and called 911. Shortly after the documentary’s release, Alex Jones — never shy about making outlandish claims himself — fired Weaver from InfoWars.
But Logan came to Weaver’s defense,_{tweeting}_ on Aug. 22: “By now this is a familiar pattern — another tactic of information warfare that has proved so effective. I know many Americans are looking forward to getting the whole truth on this. It’s on all of our interests given the significance of what was done just to hold onto power.”
Logan’s endorsement carried some weight. On one hand, her credibility had sustained damage from a story about the 2012 Benghazi attack that “60 Minutes” was forced to_{retract}_ (and much later would be_{pushed out}_ of Fox Nation for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). On the other hand, unlike Jones who built a career around promoting conspiracy theories,Logan had worked at the highest levels in journalism and was widely admired for her courageous reporting in Iraq and decades of experience.
Later, Bergy said Wince told him that Logan had Burkett reach "out to them with information that exposed the arrest of Millie Weaver was orchestrated” by military contractors in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio.
Bergy noted that Burkett had previously worked as a military contractor himself_{employed}_ by the public relations firm Lincoln Group, which was hired by the Defense Department to_{plant positive stories}_ geared towards Iraqi audiences during the Iraq war. Bergy faulted Logan in his affidavit for not investigating information that she privately shared with Weaver and Wince, especially considering her track record as an investigative journalist.
“It is extremely concerning to all involved the claims made by the Logans [sic] and warrant further investigation,” Bergy wrote in his affidavit. “The arrest of a US journalist, orchestrated on a US military base, cannot be dismissed without a thorough investigation into the Logan’s [sic] claims.”
While Logan has not reported on the mysterious connection between Weaver’s arrest and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, her journalistic instincts would prove to be attuned to the behind-the-scenesefforts to overturn the election. On Jan. 5, 2021, one day before the assault on the US Capitol, Logan_{tweeted}_ out a link to a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” The document had been used in presentations by_{Phil Waldron}_, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare, as he_{briefed}_ members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5. The PowerPoint called on Trump to order the National Guard, with support from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, to conduct a recount of the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to meet to accept the presidential elections, the PowerPoint proposed three options for Vice President Mike Pence, all of which would have either delayed or prevented Joe Biden from becoming the next president.
“This is what is being briefed on the Hill today re election fraud — for those of you who want to go to the source rather than get it second-hand,” Logan wrote.
Logan and Burkett could not be reached for comment for this story.
The charges against Weaver and Wince were eventually_{dropped}_. Whether there is any truth to the explosive claim that Weaver’s arrest was secretly orchestrated from a military base remains unclear. Regardless, it reinforced Weaver’s paranoid view of a Deep State intent on silencing Trump supporters.
“From what I hear, we’re in the jurisdiction for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” Weaver told her followers during a Periscope_{livestream}_ in late 2020. “And apparently it would have been really easy to have us at this jail here and then transferred to an espionage jail. What’s going on right now is insane, guys. It’s very creepy.”
‘They were setting all these scams up’
The ShadowGate documentary had been quickly debunked by_{USA Today}_ and_{PolitiFact}_, and although it reportedly drew millions of views, it receded from public discussion as just one more QAnon-inspired conspiracy vehicle, as violence in_{Kenosha, Wis.}_ and_{Portland, Ore.}_ set the stage for the final tumultuous months of the 2020 presidential election campaign. While the documentary might have seemed obscure even for the far-right audience to which it was geared, its four principals would find roles in the network of conspiracy theorists and operatives that sprung into action to delegitimize the 2020 election and aid Donald Trump in his quest to hold onto power.
In addition to Weaver, the producer and writer of ShadowGate, Wince, credited as its director, and thedocumentary’s two featured “whistleblowers” — Bergy and pro-Trump podcaster Terpsehore “Tore” Maras — all wound up in Washington, DC in mid-November 2020.
The ShadowGatedocumentary had a particular utility in the effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, as Bergy himself would come to recognize. More than three months before attorney Sidney Powell_{told}_ radio host Glenn Beck on Nov. 20 that “our forces” confiscated servers held by an election technology company named Scytl in Germany, Weaver had narrated a similar scenario in ShadowGate.
“Scytl is one of the most notorious outsource companies for elections, with regular electronic voting machine problems, who also tabulate our election results and cloud services in Europe, aka servers outside the United States,” Weaver said. The claim was false.
Weaver could not be reached for this story.
Spurned by Alex Jones —_{who heavily promoted the Jan. 6 rally in DC and took to a bullhorn to address rioters at the Capitol that day}_ — Weaver found a new patron in Patrick Byrne. After Jan. 6, Weaver collected and analyzed video for Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, in support of his effort to cast the attack as the work of “antifa” agent provocateurs.
Bergy told Raw Story that he also later learned that Logan was responsible for arranging for Weaver and Wince to come to Washington, DC after the 2020 election. Bergy said he was asked to come to DC by Weaver and Wince, and they were already there when he arrived around Nov. 15, 2020. Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and significant financier for the election denial efforts, confirmed in a text message to Raw Story that he covered the cost of hotel rooms for Weaver, Wince, Bergy and Maras at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel in late 2020. But Byrne said he had no knowledge of Logan encouraging Weaver and Wince to come to DC and did not make any arrangements with her.
Byrne also footed the bill for a reporting trip to California by Weaver and Wince in late November 2020, according to Bergy. In a text provided by Bergy, Wince warned that alienating Byrne “could cost us our trip to CA.” Byrne did not dispute the claim that he covered the cost of the trip.
“No, I don’t have a specific recollection of this, it sounds plausible,” Byrne told Raw Story. “I’ll go farther: vaguely rings a bell. That is to say, I’m vaguely remembering that I did pay for a trip or two for them. Along with many dozens of others, incidentally.”
The catalyst for Maras to show up in DC in November 2020 is somewhat murkier. In a conversation on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras told Bergy that she had known Byrne “before everyone else.” Byrne gave a different account, telling Raw Story that he had “never met or heard of her until” he met her around Nov. 16, 2020. But Joshua Merritt, an IT consultant who provided a declaration to support Powell’s lawsuits attempting to overturn the election, has made statements in the past that predate the relationship between Byrne and Maras long before November 2020. In a reply to an April 30 Twitter thread, Merritt_{said}_ Maras had been “brought in with Byrne” to work on investigating alleged election fraud after the 2019 election in Kentucky.
In retrospect, Bergy said he has come to see that the claims put forward in ShadowGate performed a valuable service in preparing the ground for the broad election denial narrative that Trump’s supporters worked to build in November.
“That was two or three months before the election,” Bergy said. “That was right after ShadowGatewas released. What else was in ShadowGate? Scytl. They knew November 3rd was going to happen, let alone January 6th. They were setting all these scams up. It sure seems like they were putting these things in place at least three months ahead of time to be able to prepare for Trump’s loss.
“It was useful,” Bergy added. “If they didn’t plan it, they should have.”
Bergy said he learned later that Waldron, the retired Army colonel, praised ShadowGateto Weaver and Wince at a party at Trump International Hotel on Nov. 14, 2020.
“Phil Waldron approached Millie and Gavin, and said he was the biggest fan of ShadowGate,” Bergy told Raw Story. “He identified himself as Phil Waldron and said he believed everything in ShadowGatebecause he replaced the IIA chief after I left. He said he knew who I was, and he understood my background in ShadowGate.”
Waldron could not be reached for comment for this story, while Byrne denied that the content of ShadowGateplayed any role in shaping his initial impressions of Weaver, Wince, Maras and Bergy.
“No, never heard of them or that movie until mid-November 2020,” he told Raw Story. “They were on their own path when I met them, and they have continued so. None of them have ever taken any direction from me.”
‘Calling out too many people… will backfire’
Lara Logan’s behind-the-scenes role would prove to be a source of ongoing tension among the principals in the ShadowGatefilm during the period they were working out of the Westin hotel to aid the effort to overturn the election.
“Calling out too many people (Logan, Burns [sic]) will backfire,” Wince told Bergy in November 2020, according to a text obtained by Raw Story. “It could compromise things we have in the works.
“Pissing off Burns [sic] could cost us our trip to CA we have planned that are important, and pissing off Logan while mentioning Millie could piss off Millie and/or cost her ability to use that channel,” he added.
Wince could not be reached for this story.
In Bergy’s view, his duty as a whistleblower obligated him to tell the whole truth, no matter whose sensibilities might be offended.
“When you say we need to be putting this s*** out because nothing’s getting done,” he told Wince, “I didn’t link to Millie, and I’m posting my affidavit tomorrow online which literally includes Lara’s/Joe’s involvement.”
The central focus of Bergy’s 70-page affidavit was the development of “social media psychological warfare weapons and techniques'' that he had observed as a military contractor, and his position that they were being applied on domestic targets in the United States. The affidavit traced a history from a complaint filed by Bergy to the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2015, and then name-dropped a wide array of prominent figures with whom he interacted in his quest to bring the information to light, including Logan and her husband, Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, InfoWars host Alex Jones, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander and Trump confidant Roger Stone.
Bergy has said his sole objective during his time in DC was to get his information to Trump.
In August 2021, Bergy asked Byrne to explain what happened to his affidavit once he submitted it to the legal team led by Sidney Powell so that he could include his response in a book. Byrne obliged.
“Your affidavit was read and absorbed,” Byrne confirmed. “The whistleblowers were met with and debriefed. Everything they and you had to say got put into a larger picture we were forming. The information from the whistleblowers in Arizona could immediately inform what we were doing; your bigger picture information, while accepted as truthful, did not have a precise application, though it was valuable for our situational awareness.”
In contrast to Bergy’s affidavit, Powell filed a 37-page anonymized declaration submitted by his fellow ShadowGate“whistleblower”_{Terpsehore “Tore” Maras}_ in support of her lawsuits in Wisconsin and Arizona.
Maras’ declaration mentioned Scytl, the Spain-based election technology company, a total of_{23 times}_, echoing the claim made by Weaver three and a half months earlier in ShadowGate. In her declaration, Maras claimed that votes cast in the 2020 election were put through a “mixing phase” while an “algorithm redistributes votes.” Her declaration also claimed that “Scytl re-encrypts ballot data” and has the ability to access the vote through “backdoors” that could “alter the range of the algorithm deployed to satisfy the outcome sought in the case of algorithm failure.”
Maras’ claims represented a fundamental misunderstanding of Scytl’s role in US elections. The company provides election-night reporting services that offer a visual representation of votes tabulated by local election officials, but as it noted in a fact-checking_{statement}_ issued more than two weeks before Maras executed her declaration, Scytl does not tabulate votes.
“On election night, each election office tabulates the vote using their tabulation vendor’s physical machines and uploads those results to Scytl’s [election-night reporting program],” the company explained. All ENR servers being used for the US elections are physically located in the United States. Scytl does NOT tabulate, tally or count votes.” Scytl’s statement was cited by a fact-check published by_{Reuters}_, which rated as “false” a claim by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) that the US Army had seized Scytl’s servers in Germany.
Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who assisted Powell’s team in preparing the lawsuits, cautioned another election denier in a private Telegram message in August 2021 that Maras’ claims shouldn’t be taken at face value.
“Tore is not credible,”Keshel wrote. “I was on the initial teams drafting lawsuits over the states with Sidney and Flynn. Our teams researched her heavily and found many problems.” He added that “unfortunately she wound up as a key witness in one of our cases.”
Byrne told Raw Story in an email that he “had no hand” in preparing the lawsuits, “and was not aware until much later that Tore had provided the affidavit.”
But Byrne was sufficiently concerned about Maras’ credibility that he tasked a team with interviewing her a couple of weeks after the declaration was filed in federal court.
“Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know in the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side,” Byrne told Bergy in his August 2021 email. “They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subjects 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 (precisely as I warned her they would do if she did not heed a little coaching from me).”
Maras defended her qualifications in an email to Raw Story.
"If you read my affidavit, you would know that I am an amateur cryptographer," she said. "Therefore, I am very familiar with cryptography, ethics and research surrounding it. I participate in attending such conferences and seminars when I can."
Robert Caron, who had initially put Bergy, Weaver and Wince in touch with Lara Logan, was in and around DC from November 2020 through January 2021, according to Bergy.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, Maras perceived him as a threat. Speaking with Bergy on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras fumed about a host of obscure operators vying for Powell and Flynn’s attention in late 2020.
“And you have this motherf***er standing there, bidding to help you?” she said. “They’re there to destroy you. And they are seeing everything we are giving you. And they are dismantling it. Like, that other guy, f***ing, you know, Caron, right, popped out of nowhere.”
While Maras distrusted Caron, she felt differently about Lara Logan.
“You know who hooked me up to Logan?” Bergy asked. “Because I introduced Logan to Millie and Gavin. You know who hooked me up with Logan? Our friend, Robert. She’s got interesting friends. If known contractors and CIA assets are arranging your introductions to journalists that are married to military-industrial complex psy-op contractors, am I wrong in thinking possibly a lot of people that are passed along or networked through Lara are basically…?”
Maras interrupted Bergy.
“Well, you and me are going to disagree on Lara,” she said. “I like Lara…. If it came down to it, and I had to trust someone with something, I would actually trust her.”
A plan to order the National Guard to shut down Congress
Caron’s background remains murky. In one of the few publi
with him that is available, Caron was identified in a March 2018 story that aired on the far-right network One America News as “the spokesman for JTF MAGA, the collection of veteran members of the intelligence, law enforcement and military communities dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of the Deep State.” The “team” page for a_{website}_ that houses reports by JTF MAGA, including one proclaiming retired Lt. General Michael Flynn’s innocence and another that disputes claims about collusion between the Trump campaign — has at various times included photos of Caron and Veterans for America First co-founders Joshua Macias and Vlad Lemets.
When Caron arrived in DC, Wince and Bergy viewed him as a replacement for Dennis Nathan Cain, a cybersecurity expert brought in to analyze the results of the 2020 election.
Cain told Raw Story that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon recommended him to White House trade advisor_{Peter Navarro}_, who published a series of reports claiming without evidence that the election had been stolen. Cain said he worked on a three-man team that included another man named Harry Haury and a third person whom he declined to identify. Cain said he primarily worked with Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general who_{reportedly}_ promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden.
Cain filed an expert report in a civil suit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona to challenge the election results. Cain opined that based on his assessment that the election error rate in Arizona during the 2020 election failed to meet the standard set under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the election result should not have been certified.
“I was specifically looking at the certification and accreditation of the system,” Cain told Raw Story. “I had no interest in looking at any of the technical aspects from the standpoint of whether they were hacked, because you can’t do that unless you have access to the machines.”
Cain told Raw Story that he and Caron met in DC at Caron’s request, and that Caron wanted to join his team. Cain said he declined Caron’s request because he had been working without compensation in DC for two months. Cain had set up a GoFundMe page, but it only covered about half the cost of their hotel bill at the Westin. By the time Caron approached him, Cain said he considered his work to be complete. He disbanded the team, and went home after Christmas.
Cain said he came to regret his meeting with Caron.
“He went out and wrote some emails; some of the people that were associated with me didn’t like that,” Cain said. “It kind of did some damage with some people that I was working with that didn’t care for him.”
After Cain left DC, his name appeared on a document arguing, among other things, that the states were not in compliance with the Help America Vote Act and concluding bizarrely that Trump had a “mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation” of the Constitution and declare Congress “illegitimate” as a prelude to ordering the National Guard to shut down Congress.
“President Donald J. Trump, to preserve our sovereign form of government, has the mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation of our United States Constitution and declare the 117th Congress illegitimate, then access and direct the National Guard already sent by the mayor, to prevent entry into their offices and the Capitol,” the document declared.
Entitled “Invincible Argument, the document was dated Jan. 4 and featured a dozen names, beginning with Caron and also including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers general counsel Kellye SoRelle, Veterans forAmerica First co-founder Joshua Maciasand Latinos for Trump President Bianca Gracia. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers, including Rhodes, have been indicted for seditious conspiracy. Macias was_{arrested}_ on weapons charges outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where votes were being tabulated, on Nov. 5, 2020, and was present at the US Capitol on Jan. 6.
Jerome Corsi, who heavily promoted the_{false claim}_ that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not qualified to serve as president, was also named on the document, and Corsi_{published}_ it on his website on Jan. 5, the eve of the assault on the US Capitol.
Cain said he did not authorize his name to be used on the document.
“I am familiar with my name being on there,” he told Raw Story. “It was done without my permission. I don’t have any comment to give on what the legal ramifications of the system not being compliant with HAVA might be.”
Caron’s name also appeared at the bottom of the document’s Forward, and another section was credited to Caron and SoRelle.
On the same day Corsi published the “Invincible Argument” document, Caron was quoted in a_{story}_ published by Vision Times News headlined, “Over 400 ex-intelligence officers have started investigating election fraud.” The story quoted Caron as saying, “The fraud was so massive and so blatant, despite what the mainstream media said, that we need to get this information out to the public.”
Caron could not be reached for this story, but he has told_{CNN}_ that he was approached by two FBI agents at a hotel in Toronto last December. According to CNN, Caron said the agents told him they were investigating events that led up to the violence on Jan. 6 and that he sat down to speak with them about “key people” involved in the effort to overturn the election.
Rhodes, SoRelle, Macias and Gracia were all filmed in a meeting in a_{hotel parking garage}_ with Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Tarrio has been_{charged}_ with conspiracy, along with five other Proud Boys leaders, for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
The “Invincible Argument” document” would_{form the basis}_ of another lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, this one filed not by Powell and her team, but by SoRelle, the Oath Keepers’ general counsel.
A transcript of an Oath Keepers teleconference that took place on Nov. 9, 2020, shows that the militia group was working on a legal track even as they prepared to mobilize a tactical force at the US Capitol. Asked by Rhodes to update members on the “legal fight,” SoRelle_{mentioned Giuliani}_ as heading up one of several legal teams working to overturn the election.
“And then you have the Giuliani pals, I guess, previewing the Campaign pod that’s trying to solve the mystery of the ballots,” SoRelle said. “So, I’ve been in communication. I obviously work the RNC version of it, and then I’m in — I like the Q crowd, they’re kind of fun, and then I’ve been meeting with the Campaign crowd.”
The lawsuit sputtered almost immediately when friction arose between SoRelle and her co-counsel, Paul M. Davis, over Caron’s involvement in the litigation.
In a February 2021 filing, Davis reported that he had “expressed concern to SoRelle that Bob seemed to have some sort of undue influence over the plaintiffs and was poisoning their thinking about the case strategy with suggestions of inclusion of what the whole team had previously agreed were frivolous legal claims (this has always been a case strictly about violations of election law and NOT a case about election fraud).”
Davis went on to suggest SoRelle was disclosing confidential attorney-client communications to Caron, who was not a plaintiff.
SoRelle responded, Davis reported with incredulity, that Caron had been “listening in on our comms.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/hillbilly-spoof-big-lie-kentucky/
raw story
when election night returns came in for the Kentucky election on Nov. 5, 2019, Matt Bevin, the Republican incumbent governor trailed Democratic challenger Andy Beshear by about 5,000 votes.
A brash businessman who antagonized the state’s teachers, Bevin had gone into his reelection campaigns as one of the most unpopular governors in the country. But with Republicans prevailing in every single remaining statewide race, his supporters couldn’t believe it was possible for Bevin to lose.
One the day after the election, Bevin refused to concede, making baseless allegations to reporters, as the Courier Journalreported, “that absentee ballots were illegally counted, people were turned away from the polls, voting machines malfunctioned and ballots were stored in open boxes” — claims that were systematically refuted by state and local election officials.
By Saturday, with Bevin still refusing to concede, two far-right influencers jointly appeared on a podcast cross-published on their respective platforms to herald what sounded like an earth-shattering development.
“We have literally been given the motherlode of leaked documents from a whistleblower that appears to be someone who might be working inside the elections,” declared Millie Weaver, an Ohio-based media provocateur who was a correspondent for the conspiracy theory hub InfoWars at the time.
Weaver introduced Terpsehore “Tore” Maras, a pro-Trump podcaster who lived in North Dakota. Weaver said she and Maras had been on the phone the night before when she checked her email and discovered “that some whistleblower, anonymously, decided to send me hundreds of documents — hundreds— these documents are confirmed legitimate documents — we have official, like, ballots, Kentucky ballots, audit logs, you know, all this crazy information, bank transactions, checks, papers that have literally been taped back together that went through shredders. Somebody must have been doing a lot of work to compile all of this information. But this information looks like there’s significant amount of voter fraud going on in Kentucky.”
Indeed, someone had broken into Harp Enterprises, a Lexington-based company that supplies voting machines, and had accessed checks received by the company and other internal documents. Roger Baird, the company’s owner, told Raw Story he believes either a disgruntled former employee or someone associated with a losing campaign put a janitor up to stealing the documents.
But almost nothing about what the two women said about the documents — starting with Weaver’s claim that Harp Enterprises “runs the electronic voting machines for the entire state of Kentucky” — was true. Harp Enterprises, which exclusively purchases voting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic, services only some of the precincts in Kentucky’s 120 counties.Voters in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville and holds the largest share of Democratic voters, vote on ES&S machines.
Maras claimed that the documents included hand-written notes showing employees coaching each other on “how to manipulate the votes.” And based on a financial transaction from a company with foreign ownership, Maras concluded, “You can’t get any more smoking gun with regards to foreign-entity meddling, let’s say.”
Chagrined to see his private documents tweeted out and displayed on a video stream, Baird showed Weaver’s video presentation to his banker.
“He was like, ‘This is like a hillbilly spoof,’” Baird recalled. “There was just enough little droplets of real information that you might scratch your head, and say, ‘Huh, maybe there is something there.’ When they started connected me to George Soros….” As he recounted the story, Baird’s voice trailed off in incredulity and he burst into laughter.
As the joint podcast crept into its second hour, Weaver noted with approval that her boss, Alex Jones, was in the chat watching her video.
“This is election fraud,” Maras said. “Kentucky was a dry run. In 2020, they’re coming for everything.”
“We need to blow the lid off this now before they steal the 2020 election,” Weaver agreed.
“Yeah, but look at the losers they’ve got running on the Democratic ticket,” Maras chimed in. She ticked through the list of Democratic presidential primary contenders, noting each candidate’s unappealing attributes and weaknesses, while assigning insulting nicknames to them, before concluding with Trumpian logic that none of them could win fair and square.
“So, what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna steal it,” Maras concluded.
Weaver also attended a press conference at the state Capitol in Frankfurt, and spread many of the same baseless allegations to her followers in a livestream on Periscope. Weaver could not be reached for comment for this story.
The Kentucky election in 2019 was a harbinger, but in a different sense than Maras likely intended.
Many of the same players who would later turn up in Washington, DC after the 2020 election and promote a battery of conspiracy theories falsely claiming the election was stolen were also involved in investigating election fraud claims in Kentucky, according to at least two people involved.
Joshua Merritt, a Dallas area information technology consultant, indicated in a Twitter thread last month that Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO “contracted” the Texas-based company Allied Security Operating Group to work on the Kentucky election.
In response to an account with the username @AmericanRE15 who asked him to confirm that he was saying “Byrne contracted you guys to work on the Bevins [sic] fraud in f***ing 2019,” Merritt replied, “Bingo….”
He added in a separate tweet: “And then there are all the people we briefed after 2018… We investigated Bevins case, Florida, Dallas, Maryland… And others.”
Josh Merritt responds to a question on a Twitter thread by @AmericanRE15 on April 30Screengrab]
Merritt could not be reached for this story, and he blocked this reporter on Twitter during the reporting of this story.
Russell Ramsland, the founder of Allied Security Operating Group, began pushing election fraud claims after Democrats made gains in Texas during the 2018 mid-term elections, and would go on to push specious claims about the 2020 election on Lou Dobbs’ show on Fox Business Network, and then file a declaration alongside Maras to support federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the election.
Weaver also confirmed Allied Security Operations Group’s involvement in the Kentucky election, which has not been previously reported.
“I went down to Kentucky to go hand-deliver an SD drive or a USB stick to Governor Bevin himself at his office,” Weaver recounted in a December 2020 livestream. “And I also met with a group called ASOG. So, there’s this group called Allied Security Operations Group, and they’re heading a lot of the election fraud efforts that have been happening.”
Weaver said in the same livestream that she had provided the documents to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and described working with Allied Security Operations Group.
“Yeah, we met with them,” she said. “We essentially went over the information. They already had seemed to have gotten it, which means they probably got it from Grassley or something.”
Messages to Grassley’s office seeking clarification on whether the senator received the documents or anyone from his office passed them on to Ramsland were not returned before press time.
In November 2020, Weaver, Maras and Weaver’s partner Gavin Wince came to Washington, DC as the nucleus of a conspiracy-happy group that would come to be known as “Team America.” Patrick Bergy, who was also part of the group, previously told Raw Story that Byrne paid for their hotel rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in northern Virginia.
Merritt also indicated in the April 30 Twitter thread that Byrne and Maras together connected with Allied Security Operations Group during the efforts to uncover fraud in Kentucky. In response to a question from the @AmericanRE15 account on whether he had disclosed that he worked with Maras on the Kentucky fraud claim, Merritt replied, “She was brought in with Byrne when we were working with them through ASOG.”
Raw Story could not independently confirm Byrne’s involvement in the Kentucky 2019 election. Byrne and Maras have previously said in a podcast published two months ago that they did not formally meet until November 2020.
“The first time that I think of myself as meeting Tore, we were in a restaurant in Alexandria; it was a week or two after the election,” Byrne said in the podcast. “She was with some people. I was with some people. Somebody took me over to meet her people. Boom boom boom. When I shook hands with her, after looking at her or listening to her for a few seconds, I said, ‘Gee, I’ve met you somewhere, haven’t I?’ And she actually turned away, didn’t answer. I thought it was funny.”
Byrne went on to share a cryptic story about how a couple of nights later Maras made an admission to him that suggested she had spied on him eight years earlier. According to Maras, she had been Byrne’s “waitress” at a restaurant in London in 2012 and he was her “target.”
Neither Byrne nor Maras could be reached for comment about Merritt’s assertion that they worked together on the 2019 election in Kentucky.
As previously reported by Raw Story and ProPublica, Byrne has described tasking a group of intelligence professionals with interviewing Maras after she submitted a declaration to support lawsuits filed by Sidney Powelthat sought to overturn the 2020 election. Byrne said the team that interviewed Maras concluded that “we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations.”
Despite Byrne’s determination in December 2020 that Maras was not credible, the two continue to appear together on podcasts, where they promote election fraud conspiracy theories and praise one another.
Maras and Weaver have both said they worked withPhill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general on examining alleged election fraud in Kentucky. In December 2020, Kline reportedly promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden, talking up the plan on far-right media outlets like One America News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast.
Weaver mentioned Kline’s involvement in the Kentucky election in her December 2020 livestream, and Maras said she worked with Kline “in 2019 on the election fraud in Kentucky” in a podcast earlier this year. Kline could not be reached for comment for this story.
Warning signs in Kentucky
“I had said back then and have said all along that 2019 was a mini version of what potentially could happen in 2020, and did happen,” Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, told Raw Story. “I said then that we need to pay attention to what happened in Kentucky for fear of that happening on a larger scale with the presidential election.”
Douglas said he sees one critical difference in how Bevin’s baseless fraud claims played out in 2019, compared to the firehose of the spigot of falsehoods issued by President Trump that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. After the 2019 election, Douglas said, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell issued an ultimatum to Bevin to present evidence of voting problems or concede. In contrast, McConnell waited for more than a month after the 2020 electionas Senate majority leader before congratulating Joe Biden on his win.
For conspiracy theorists, Kentucky in 2019 was a ripe target.
“Twenty-nineteen is an off-election year, so you could really focus on Kentucky,” said Roger Baird, the Harp Enterprises owner. “You get a lot of attention all of a sudden when you’re the only one having an election. We get more attention in an off-election year than we do in a big year like 2020.”
Similar to the feverish claims about election fraud in the 2020 election, Maras’ theory about the Harp Enterprises documents quickly expanded to include claims about official betrayal to explain why no one was being prosecuted.
“If you had asked me, I would tell you: Everyone in Kentucky government is guilty,” Maras said during the Nov. 9, 2019 podcast. “And maybe this is why the secretary of state is like, ‘Oh, just leave it alone.’ Yeah, leave it alone because everyone’s gonna be going to jail.”
Maras said she called the Kentucky State Police hoping that she could bring the documents to the attention of Governor Bevin. She said a detective called her back and tried to get her to explain how she obtained the documents. A spokesperson told Raw Story he couldn’t confirm that the agency received a complaint about the matter.
The Kentucky Attorney General’s office, which would typically investigate allegations of election fraud or other criminal misconduct, did not respond to inquiries.
Baird told Raw Story he asked Homeland Security to try to determine how his company’s internal documents were stolen, but they never reached any conclusions.
In the weeks following Bevin’s loss in Kentucky, Maras continued to refine a fanciful theory of electronic vote-swapping.
In 2019 and 2020, according to the Washington Post, Ramsland and Merritt from Allied Security Operations Group appeared on apodcast called “Economic War Room” and claimed that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location and manipulate it. During his media appearances, Ramsland also circulated baseless claims aboutScytl, a Spain-based company that provides election-night reporting services, asserting that “they’re housing all of our vote, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” the Postreported.
Maras appears to have been exposed to the same baseless claims about Scytl in November 2020, roughly the same period when Merritt and Weaver indicated Allied Security Operations Group was looking at the Kentucky election.
In a podcast two weeks after the 2019 election, Maras spent an hour offering a breezy discourse on how various election technology companies supposedly carry out electronic vote manipulation, asserting that “the Hart-Intercivic software” was “working together” with Scytl.
“So, this phase is shuffling ballots, mixing them,” Maras said, adopting the professorial air of an adept instructor breaking down a complex formula for undergrad students. “Picture a bag of Scrabble tiles, and you’re mixing them. That’s basically what they do to all your votes. And during this mixing phase is where you can swap a vote for some other vote.”
In a previous podcast, on Nov. 10, Maras had acknowledged that “elections aren’t my thing,” and admitted she knew little about how voting machines work. Now, on Nov. 19, Maras was saying that it had taken her a week to figure out what a highly compensated cybersecurity contractor in northern Virginia who was paid to safeguard US elections would have known for at least 10 years.
What Maras missed — and what election deniers in 2020 missed and continue to miss as they go around the country sewing doubt about the election system — is that vote data that is reported on election night is separate from the votes that are tallied up and certified by local and state elections officials.
In Kentucky, two poll workers — one Republican and one Democrat — hand-deliver a tape displaying a printout of the aggregate vote and a media card in a sealed bag to the county election office. A duplicate of the tape is displayed at the polling place as a record of the precinct tally. At the county office, the media card is inserted into a machine that tallies the votes from across the county. Like the voting machines, the machine that tallies the votes is not connected to the internet. To ensure that the votes remain secure, an election worker uses a clean thumb drive to pull the data off the tally machine and then walks it over to a networked computer to upload it to the election-night reporting site.
“Our job is to make sure nothing touches the computer that does the tally,” Baird said.
“Common sense tells you that if you hook up your voting machines to the internet, you’re plumb dumb,” he added.
References to Scytl and foreign servers purportedly housing votes would prove to be a ubiquitous feature in declarations sworn by Maras and Merritt for the lawsuits filed in November and December 2020, along with video documentaries and livestreams by Weaver during the same period. Maras’ 37-page declaration, executed on Nov. 29, 2020, alone contains 23 references to Scytl.
Ensconced in Washington, Weaver addressed her followers on Periscope around the same time, outlining her qualifications to be part of an elite team churning up dubious evidence to aid in the effort to overturn the election.
“I want to give you guys a little bit of background as to why I know what I know and I’m in the situation where right here where I’m even being invited to some of the groups that are heading these efforts, where you see people like Phill Kline, and you see people like Sidney Powell and these other people out here heading these movements,” Weaver said. “Why would they care what little Millie has to say?... So, I’ve been making these videos for over a year now, talking about the plan that the Democrats and really the establishment has had to throw Trump out of office, to get rid of him.”
https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/trump-election-lie/
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 statementcalling 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.
Woodtold 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.
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.)
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, called Burk and explained 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 My Pillow 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 Securityat 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.)
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.”
https://www**.reuters.**com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-military/
no pix lnx grfx
after Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security AdvisorMichael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers challenged the vote’s legitimacy and pushed baseless conspiracy claims. Military ethicists say their actions threaten to weaken the public’s faith in democracy.
By ARAM ROSTON, BRAD HEATH, JOHN SHIFFMAN and PETER EISLER in DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas Filed Dec. 15, 2021
During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.
Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy. They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.
“I think we’re doing a huge service,” Waldron told Reuters in an interview.
In these efforts, Flynn, Waldron and their colleagues publicly touted their military-intelligence training, arguing that their expertise on the battlefield provided them special insight into alleged election fraud at home in America.
“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded.”
Roger Herbert, recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy
The military men’s false assertions are dangerous, said Roger Herbert, a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.
“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”
Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request about the role military figures have played in his quest to overturn the election.
One Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, is now facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated Reserve rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters. In an election forum last month in New Hampshire, Raiklin touted his military experience – Special Forces commander, deployments battling the Taliban and the MS-13 gang– to say he has the intelligence wherewithal to find fraud. “So I have a little bit of experience looking at threats, right?” he said.
Raiklin declined to be interviewed.
Waldron says he and the Flynn circle are not using military techniques on Americans. He maintains the actions they are undertaking for Trump don’t undercut American democracy because he’s convinced they are ferreting out voter fraud.
The veterans’ false claims shifted over time. They have pinned Trump’s loss on actions by the Chinese government and voting technology companies, alleged misconduct by U.S. state and local election officials and said hackers had used the internet to change votes after they were cast. They have blamed old-school ballot stuffing, perhaps involving dead voters or Venezuelan interests.
Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.
The military-intelligence officers’ battle is part of a larger Republican movement that has led disgruntled Trump voters to endorse threats of violence as a means to regaining power. As Reuters has documented, Trump supporters are waging a campaign of intimidation against election workers around the country. In a review of more than 800 emails, calls and online posts made by backers of the ex-president, Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials and featured in public campaigns attacking the vote’s integrity.
A false claim pushed by Flynn and his cohorts that voting machines were hacked to steal votes from Trump is a common theme in many angry messages. The machines “are rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” said an email accusing election officials in Yavapai County, Arizona, of complicity. Invoking General Flynn by name, the writer added, “every lie will be revealed, every traitor will be punished.”
Efforts by Flynn to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory have been the subject of extensive reporting by a number of U.S. media outlets. The Reuters examination of Flynn and his colleagues provides new details about the origins of the former intelligence officials’ collaboration and the extent to which they worked together in a bid to undo the 2020 election.
The reporting, based on interviews with participants, military ethicists and others, plus an examination of Reuters’ database of threats against election officials, reveals how Flynn drafted Waldron and others to actively contest the 2020 vote. Flynn and his small circle were distinctive because their military credentials provided a patina of respectability to even the most far-fetched claims.
Among the military veterans to play a role in “Stop the Steal” were:
Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor in 2017, who was involved in pushing the most dramatic of conspiracy claims. He urged the president to deploy the military to overturn the election in December 2020, then went on a public speaking campaign sowing doubts about the vote and urging states to conduct their own reviews.
Waldron, who insists Trump won. He gained attention last week when the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riot revealed it was in possession of a PowerPoint presentation he’d shown to U.S. lawmakers outlining methods for overturning the election. Earlier, he lobbied state officials and spoke on rightwing media about his stolen-election theories. Waldron said Flynn drafted him to go public, saying, “No one else can do it. It needs to be done, so go ahead and do it!”
Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.
Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence and who claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent. After the election, Keshel told Reuters he contacted Flynn on LinkedIn and they began collaborating. Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim, saying the report came from a “highly respected Army intelligence captain.”
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Keshel told Reuters he stands by that assessment but never called for violence. “Personally, I believe the election was compromised,” he said, adding, “I can’t control anybody else.”
Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator. Raiklin has said he worked with Flynn. Keshel said he reached out to the general to share his concerns, and the two worked together in the weeks after the election. Waldron said Flynn pushed him to go public with his research.
‘CORRUPTION CURTAIN:’
Keshel’s work helped fuel calls by Trump followers in many states for audits of the election results. His analysis, which provided no documented evidence of fraud, was discredited by political scientists, statistical experts and Republican and Democratic election officials. In a post on Telegram, Keshel himself described his study as “lenient.”
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His work nonetheless spurred a torrent of emails to election officials in areas where his analysis suggested fraud. In Pasco County, Florida, a Republican county Trump won, officials were deluged with emails demanding an audit after Keshel’s report. Keshel’s analysis “is literally devoid of statistical validity,” said Brian Corley, the Republican county supervisor of elections. “People just took it as fact.”
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment on the Flynn circle’s activities.
Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College, said a key issue is whether Flynn’s associates are publicly citing their military training to lend legitimacy to a partisan political cause.
“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed,” said Shanks Kaurin. She said she was speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of her government employer.
Waldron disputes such criticism. “I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack from foreign and domestic enemies,” he said. “They want to undermine the republic through the election process.”
Earlier this month, a Reuters reporter met with Waldron at One Shot Distillery and Brewing, which he runs on Texas Hill Country’s “Whiskey Trail.” Silver-labeled bottles of rum, vodka and whiskey were on display as Waldron descended the stairs wearing a gray One Shot Distillery t-shirt, with a Glock-19 in a holster fastened to his belt.
Waldron, with an affable bearing and a beard dappled with gray, retired as an Army Reserve colonel in 2016. He said he’s fighting powerful forces in a quest for the truth.
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“You talk about PSYOPS,” he said. “The election (voting machine) companies and the media have done the biggest PSYOP on the American people.”
In a series of interviews this year, Waldron vowed he was on the cusp of breakthrough proof the election was stolen. “We are decrypting the satellite packets right now,” he said in January. In October, he cited a “37 terabyte” tranche of data he believed could unmask fraud.
A new mission
Four days after the election, as ballot counts continued in a handful of swing states, the U.S. media projected Biden had won, establishing an insurmountable lead.
Trump refused to concede. That day, November 7, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, held a press conference in Philadelphia in which he claimed the result had been swayed by suspect mail-in ballots and votes cast in the names of dead people.
The next day, Waldron said he was on the phone with Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas. Waldron, who ran a cyber security company after leaving the military, said he had been researching vote hacking since August; Biden’s victory accelerated his efforts. Waldron said he told Gohmert he had tracked internet traffic routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany. Votes could be rerouted, too, he told Gohmert. Election officials say this assertion is false, and no evidence for it exists.
Gohmert immediately called Trump, Waldron said. A spokesman for Gohmert declined to comment.
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Two days later, Waldron said, he was on a plane to Washington. “It started getting sporty about then,” he said, with his theories gaining traction.
First he met with Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his old commander, Flynn. Waldron said he met Powell in a hotel conference room that functioned as her headquarters, briefing her in the early morning hours. A lawyer who worked with Powell, Howard Kleinhendler, confirms Waldron was part of the group. Powell declined to comment.
Then Waldron huddled with Giuliani. “We were supposed to have a 10 minute briefing but it went 45 minutes,” Waldron said. When Giuliani said he wanted to discuss voter fraud, Waldron said he pressed upon the former mayor that the fraud was on a larger, and global, scale. “We kept going over it and going over it. He finally came aboard,” he said.
Giuliani did not respond to interview requests. He confirmed in a legal deposition that Waldron shared fraud allegations with him.
“Colonel in the military, great war record,” Giuliani testified. “I’ve had substantial dealings with him and he’s very, very thorough and very experienced in this kind of work.”
By the second week of November, Waldron said he began working closely with Flynn.
After a stellar military career, Flynn was appointed chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama, but was fired in 2014, in part because the two clashed over the general’s hardline views on countering Islamic extremism. Flynn became a key 2016 Trump campaign advisor and was installed by the new president as national security advisor. He resigned weeks later after it was disclosed that he had held secret talks with Russia’s ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about those talks. Trump would eventually pardon him.
In the days after Biden won the 2020 election, Flynn had set up camp at the sprawling South Carolina estate of lawyer L. Lin Wood, another supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
Wood told Reuters that Flynn and Powell arrived shortly after the election. So did Keshel, then working as a technology salesman. Flynn and Keshel stayed through Thanksgiving, where Flynn carved the turkey.
The group, operating from a sitting room on Wood’s estate, created something of a clearinghouse for election fraud claims. “They all appeared to be working together,” Wood said.
In an interview, Keshel said he spent his time “scanning the numbers and helping write affidavits” for lawsuits Powell was preparing. “There wasn’t a lot of sleep going on there,” Keshel said.
Powell’s lawsuits helped fuel some of the hostility encountered by local officials. Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state debunked Powell’s allegations of election fraud, citing audits and recounts affirming the state’s tallies. In response, one angry emailer accused them of resisting further investigation “because of the Sidney Powell lawsuits and vengeance and no other reason. … We know China interfered with this election by remote and shipped mail in ballots.”
A clandestine operative goes public
Three weeks after the election, Giuliani and his associates pushed a new strategy: attempting to persuade conservative state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and declare Trump the winner of their states’ Electoral College votes. The Constitution, Trump’s team argued, granted this power.
With Pennsylvania a focus, Flynn dispatched Waldron to a state Senate hearing held by Republican lawmakers there.
For decades, Waldron had operated behind the scenes. So, he told Reuters, in November 2020 he initially resisted going public with his findings. But he said Flynn and Giuliani pressed him to testify about stolen votes. “Rudy’s team had asked me three times.”
On November 25, wearing a blue jacket, blue shirt, striped tie and blue COVID mask, Waldron appeared in person at the Pennsylvania Senate hearing to air his fraud claims. He cited his military credentials. “I’m a retired Army colonel, 30 years,” he said. Then he claimed all the voting machine technology in the United States could be hacked.
“I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack.”
Phil Waldron, 30-year military veteran
“Our experts and other academics,” Waldron continued, “believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent.” Only a “detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated.”
At the end of the hearing, President Trump joined in on the speaker phone. “I’ve been watching the hearing on OAN,” the far-right television news channel, Trump said. “I’m in the Oval Office right now, and it’s very interesting to see what’s going on.”
Waldron said he visited the White House later that day with Giuliani and others. “That was great!” he said Trump told them.
The White House focus turned to pushing Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to replace Biden electors with those for Trump. “That whole strategy started from that Pennsylvania hearing,” Waldron said.
That same day, Trump pardoned Flynn in the Russia inquiry case.
In the end, no state legislatures swapped out their electors. Now Flynn helped pitch a new plan to Trump.
Election by military might
MILITARY INTEL: Click to hear audio of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin introducing himself by citing his military intelligence and legal background to a crowd gathered in Manchester, New Hampshire, last month to hear his claims that the 2020 election result should be reversed.]
On December 17, Flynn told the rightwing cable network Newsmax that the president could use the armed forces to conduct a do-over election in several swing states he lost. Trump, he said, “could take military capabilities and place them in those states and basically re-run an election in those states.”
A day later, Flynn, Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump at the White House. They urged the president to deploy the U.S. government to make digital copies of the hard drives in some voting equipment to investigate the machines and conduct recounts in at least six counties, Byrne told Reuters. Trump was receptive to the idea, said Kleinhendler, the lawyer working with Powell, but the government never took those steps. It is unclear why.
At the same time, Army reserve officer Raiklin, a Flynn ally and former Green Beret, was pushing election fraud theories on social media and on rightwing websites. Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer, but he doesn’t appear to practice that area of law. A Reuters review found he has not argued such a case or written scholarly articles on the topic.
SCREEN TIME: Ivan Raiklin, at right, sharing his vote fraud conspiracies last month.]
On a December 7 podcast and in tweets, Raiklin laid out a plan to reverse the vote, alleging conspiracies involving Pence, intelligence agencies, big tech, China and the postal service. He urged Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system” and used the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn. “We the people are going to force this plan on them,” he said.
Raiklin’s efforts drew attention on Twitter. On December 22, Raiklin tweeted a copy of a two-page open memo to Trump, detailing “Operation Pence Card.” The pitch: Pence, acting as “the Representative of the Federal Seat of Government,” would reject votes from states where Trump alleged fraud, flipping the election. The memo was retweeted 23,700 times.
“We the people are going to force this plan on them.”
Army reserve officer Ivan Raiklin]
Raiklin’s conduct is now under government scrutiny. The Army Reserve’s chief spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Flake, said Raiklin’s superiors are “aware of the situation and investigating,” but that privacy rules restrict him from providing details.
Flake added: “The U.S. Army Reserve follows the Department of Defense’s long standing policy in regards to forbidding service member involvement in partisan political campaigns to avoid the perception of DOD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of any partisan political candidate, campaign, or cause.” Raiklin did not answer questions from Reuters about the inquiry.
On New Year’s Day, Keshel gave an interview carried on YouTube in which he said the election’s results were “definitely irregular” because they disrupted what he said were historical trends in U.S. elections. “I served one tour in Afghanistan … with a primary focus on understanding enemy activity,” he said. Now, he said, his focus is on unearthing the election’s “data irregularities.”
PODCASTS, TWEETS, FORUMS: Ivan Raiklin lays out his case in New Hampshire. Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, has worked with former General Michael Flynn to challenge the 2020 election. REUTERS/Brian Snyder]
Conspiracy PowerPoint
In early January, Waldron said he flew to Washington bearing a 36-page PowerPoint presentation he said he helped prepare. Its goal was to convince Congress and the White House the election was stolen and Pence should stop the certification of Biden’s win. This month, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, produced a copy of that PowerPoint in response to a subpoena.
Waldron’s presentation was called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” He said he briefed legislators on Capitol Hill on January 5, explaining a document whose recommendations included, “Declare National Security Emergency” and “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”
Waldron’s pitch mirrored arguments being made by Trump, who at the time was publicly urging Pence to refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes from a handful of swing states and either declare Trump the winner or not declare a winner at all. Waldron proposed going further, such as deploying U.S. marshals and the military to seize ballots nationwide. “A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS” to recount all the votes, the PowerPoint said.
HOW TO UNRAVEL AN ELECTION: Pages from a PowerPoint Phil Waldron presented in D.C. this year. The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has obtained a copy. REUTERS/Courtesy Phil Waldron
“US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states,” the PowerPoint said. “The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot.”
On January 5, Flynn told a pro-Trump crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., “We will not stand for a lie!” The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has subpoenaed Flynn to testify about his efforts to overturn the election.
A week after the attack, Waldron told Reuters he blamed Pence for the chaos. Pence’s offense, he said, was to refuse to go along with the plans to block Biden’s certification. That was the riot’s primary cause, he said. “You could logically argue that he had more to do with inciting the riot than anyone else on that stage,” he said.
The Secret Service had to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol complex during the riot. Videos show some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol chanting, “hang Mike Pence.”
A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.
Congress’ votes in the early morning hours of January 7 to ratify Biden’s victory brought an end to nearly all of the Trump camp’s efforts in the courts to keep him in power.
“After that, it was pencils down,” said Powell colleague Kleinhendler. “There was just nothing else to do.”
The Flynn circle wasn’t ready to let go.
Arizona audit
Everett Stern, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who runs a private intelligence firm, said he was approached in April by two Republican political operatives who urged him to gather information on elected officials to help prompt a state audit of the 2020 vote. They also helped connect him with Raiklin, said Stern, who said the operatives told him they were acting at Flynn’s direction. Stern said he declined to take part because he viewed the approach as an “extortion” attempt and alerted the FBI, which said it had no comment.
In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate pushed for a “forensic audit” of the vote in the state’s largest county.
Arizona’s Senate president, Karen Fann, turned to Florida cybersecurity contractor Doug Logan to do the job. Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas, had no experience running audits or elections, though Logan said he had done previous work reviewing 2020 election disputes. Logan told Reuters he wasn’t sure how his company was picked for the task; he said he didn’t submit a proposal until Fann contacted him.
Logan did have connections, though. He confirmed to Reuters he was among those who huddled with Flynn at Wood’s estate after the election. And he received an endorsement from Waldron, who called him “very reputable” in a text message to Sen. Fann before she selected him to run the audit, records released in a public records lawsuit show.
“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed.”
Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College]
“We did things the right way,” Logan said. Through a spokesman, Fann declined to comment.
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The Arizona Senate audit cost $5.7 million. It was largely financed by Flynn’s team.
Nearly $1 million came from a nonprofit called America’s Future, which until then had been largely dormant, Internal Revenue Service filings show. Flynn now chairs its board. His brother Joe Flynn was a director. And his sister, Mary O’Neill, was executive director.
Joe Flynn declined to comment. O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael and Joe Flynn also briefly served as directors of Powell’s nonprofit Defending The Republic, which kicked in $550,000 for the Arizona audit.
Another $3.5 million came from The America Project, whose website features a video from Flynn declaring, “Our great nation was under a new type of attack.” Joe Flynn is one of the nonprofit’s three board members, and Flynn its senior strategic advisor.
The America Project’s chief executive, former Overstock CEO Byrne, told Reuters Flynn “asked me to come down and set this up.” Flynn “is a driving force” to continue fighting the results of the 2020 election, said thegroup’s operations officer, Carl Johnson.The America Project told Florida regulators it expected to raise $50 million this year, records show. Byrne said the group raised closer to $10 million, mostly from him.
The resulting Arizona audit featured reviewers with little training who scrutinized ballots using procedures that were widely criticized by election experts; Logan defended the auditing work. The review confirmed Biden won.
This November 19, retired captain Keshel and current reserve lieutenant colonel Raiklin were featured speakers at an “election integrity” rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Citing polls saying a growing number of rightwing Americans believe the election was rigged, Raiklin and Keshel told a crowd of about 75 that their movement is succeeding.
Noting his legal and military intelligence background, Raiklin laid out what he called a “deep state” conspiracy theory of a stolen election. “I connected these dots,” Raiklin told the crowd.
Keshel, now a paid consultant for The America Project, said Trump supporters faced a “two-front war” – auditing the 2020 election and preparing for 2024.
“It sounds a little crazy,” Keshel said. “But I do believe wholeheartedly … that the future will reflect the truth of the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected.”
Both men received standing ovations.
FIGHTING WORDS: Supporters of President Donald Trump have used virulent language in spreading false fraud claims. Here, a Trump backer at an “Election Security Seminar.” REUTERS/Brian Snyder
REUTERS INVESTIGATES
Additional reporting by Chris Kahn and Brian Snyder
The Election Foxhole
By Aram Roston, Brad Heath, John Shiffman and Peter Eisler
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/peoples-convoy-fails-to-disrupt-washingtons-roads-meets-with-far-right-congress-members/
no lnx
rww thus trifecta 3 22
the convoy of anti-vaccine-mandate, pro-Trump, and QAnon-conspiracy activists was determined to disrupt Washington, D.C., by circling the Beltway, the 64 miles of highway that’s generally a hellscape for commuters. Organizers of the “People’s Convoy” modeled their efforts after the trucker convoy in Canada that took over downtown Ottawa and shut down the bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan, disrupting trade and business in both countries. U.S. organizers demanded an end to vaccine and mask mandates and an end to the national emergency around COVID-19 that was declared under former President Donald Trump and extended under President Joe Biden.
On Monday, the truck convoy entered the Beltway with instructions to take up two lanes of traffic. By 2 p.m., the convoy was “struggling to occupy one lane of traffic let alone two,” The Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo reported. Regular traffic separated convoy vehicles as it had on Sunday. With diesel hitting $4.75 this week, driving their gas-guzzlers slowly around the Beltway seemed like an expensive effort in futility, especially since D.C. had lifted its mask and vaccine mandate and the Biden administration and Congress had. Brase stated the convoy’s demands to “end the state of emergency, end the vaccine mandates” and to hold “our elected and unelected officials accountable for their actions that led to this,”” the AFCLF representative told Cruz and Johnson. “We have a pendulum that’s swinging from ‘woke’ to ‘the great awakening’.”
Shortly thereafter, a larger group met with Reps. Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie for a “trucker round table” on Capitol Hill. The truckers and adjacent activists complained about rising gas prices, mask and vaccine mandates, critical race theory, and government tyranny, with one trucker calling on the legislators to simply stop funding the government. When one convoy member from Michigan asked how to prevent stolen elections, Gaetz repeated debunked voter fraud claims about the state.
“Michigan, where they waited, the center in Detroit, to see how the rest of the state voted to figure out how many ballots they needed,” Gaetz said. “You want to be very suspicious of federalizing elections. If we federalize elections, then we have the swamp and the Washington, D.C., Beltway telling you how to count votes in Lansing, Michigan.”
Massie decided to focus on mail-in ballots—which Trump baselessly insists was a source of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election—warning that “they may have to find some excuse to go back to mail-in ballots.”
Greene was in agreement. “The last thing you want is the federal government to be involved in your election,” she said.
Gaetz tried to wrap up the questions, joking that if the group stayed over its allotted time in the room he reserved, they would be accused of “an insurrection.”
“We don’t want to be accused of that,” Greene said. “It’s frowned upon here.”
The meeting with far-right members of Congress and the focus on the Big Lie from a convoy demanding an end to COVID-19-related mandates might be surprising to those just tuning in. But the rhetoric exhibited on rally stages and social media throughout the convoy’s two-week trek across the country and the organizations supporting the convoy have always indicated that this was never just about public health mandates.
A new report from the nonprofit research organization Advance Democracy, Inc., details the ties that three organizations supporting the effort have to the so-called Stop the Steal movement, whose massive rallies to overturn the 2020 presidential election attracted many of the same elements featured in the People’s Convoy.
AFCLF, whose representative met with Cruz and Johnson, has faced scrutiny over its connections to dubious efforts to overturn 2020 election results in Michigan. It claims to have raised more than $1.6 million for the convoy as of Monday, but it’s unclear how that money has been used.
The People’s Convoy also partnered with Freedom Fighter Nation on strategic and logistical planning, Brase, the convoy organizer, said on a Feb. 12 livestream.
“We don’t want to end up on the news for weird money stuff, we’re making sure that accountants and attorneys are handling it personally through freedomfighternation.org. They have helped set up a lot of this infrastructure. They are working with us one on one to help guide us,” Brase said.
Freedom Fighter Nation is led by Leigh Dundas, a COVID-19 and election conspiracy theorist who was seen near the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection. The day before the attack, she told Trump supporters at a D.C. rally that they would be “well within our rights to take any alleged American who acted in a turncoat fashion and sold us out and committed treason, we would be well within our rights to take ’em out back and shoot ’em or hang ’em, because that is what we did when they tried to overthrow our government by way of assassinating Abe Lincoln, and it is not too good of an end for the guys who sold out our government on our own soil.” Dundas and Chris Marston of AFCLF say they are https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/04/peoples-convoy-donations-fraud-afclf
Before the convoy left from California to make its way across the country, it was also supported by The America Project, an organization founded by election conspiracy theorists Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne.
The organization frequently promotes election fraud claims and contributed $3.2 million to fund the 2020 election audit in Maricopa, Arizona. The group was listed as a supporter of the convoy in a Feb. 20 press release, but by Feb. 23—when the convoy began its trip and...Byrne announced The America Project was “stepping away” from the convoy, alleging that it had been “penetrated by the left.” The convoy—which an estimated 1,000 people committed time and money to join—doesn’t appear to be penetrated by the left in the least bit.
At a Sunday night convoy rally in Hagerstown, Maryland, speakers railed against tyranny, stolen elections, and the mainstream media. QAnon conspiracy theorists ...;Christian nationalists, members of the Proud Boys hate group, and likened the rally to a “county fair,” with music, food, and speeches building community and connections among factions of the fringe right-wing.
The convoy continues its Beltway circling this week. It has yet to be as successful as its Canadian counterpart in bringing gridlock to the nation’s capital, but it has served a purpose for far-right organizers, attracting Republican star power and bringing activists from different factions of the movement together under the banner of “freedom.”
Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene American Foundation for Civil Liberties and Freedom Freedom Fighter Nation People's Convoy
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trms 9/14 gableman gmail ltr kloster?
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the team of Arizona Republican state senators, legislative staff, and advisers finalizing the Cyber Ninjas' report on the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County are preparing to say that Joe Biden legitimately won the election, according to thelargest funder of the Senate's mostly privatized election review, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.
"The way some of these political RINOs [Republicans In Name Only] are doing this is they're trying to argue that the [election] report should only be allowed to go and address the original construct of the report, the original assignment of the audit, and leave out other things that have been found," Byrne told Creative Destruction Media's L. Todd Wood.
"The political class is going to try to come in and water this down," Byrne said. "The Republican political class, the RINOs, the nobodies… They are going to try to water this down. I am sure they all have been promised federal judgeships or sacks of cash under a streetlight if they can get this killed at this late date or watered down. And I think the public of Arizona should go ballistic."
Byrne's comments were made on August 29 but have been reposted on pro-Trump media in recent days as Arizona's Republican Senate leadership is finalizing its report on the election. Trump has also revived his attacks on "RINOs" in recent days on Telegram, a social media site favored by his base.
The Arizona Senate's review team includes Doug Logan, the CEO of the Cyber Ninjas, its lead contractor—which is writing the report and has been paid $3.2 million from Byrne's organizations.
Byrne's comments underscore what observers of the Arizona Senate's review have anticipated for months—that any credible review would conclude there were no major problems with Maricopa County's conduct of the presidential elections, although, as in any election, some procedures could be improved to make the vote-counting process more transparent.
Cyber Ninjas was hired to oversee a manual recount of Maricopa County's presidential and U.S. Senate votes and to examine whether the county's ballots were authentic or possibly forged. Logan and his team had little or no prior election audit experience, and their methods were criticized as secretive and deeply flawed. Nonetheless, for months the Arizona "audit" has been a driving force perpetuating the "big lie," or the false claim that the election was rigged by Democrats and establishment actors who orchestrated a massive vote-stealing operation.
The Arizona review has generated endless conspiracy theories and became a rallying cry, if not a litmus test, for Trump-centered Republicans. It has inspired loyalists in other presidential swing states to launch similar reviews long after the 2020 election results were certified.
The stolen election claims, however, have not produced any evidence that has been accepted by any state or federal court. Instead, Trump's campaign legal team has been sanctioned by a U.S. District Court judge in Michigan for lying in court, and some of his lawyers face fines and disbarment. In Arizona, a team of retired election auditors with decades of experience has published analyses using official 2020 election records to document how nearly 60,000 ballots had a majority of votes for Republican candidates but not for Trump. Trump lost the state by nearly 11,000 votes.
Sources in Arizona have said that the state Senate review team was spooked by the possible losses of law licenses looming over Trump's attorneys, as well as stern warnings from the U.S. Department of Justice for possibly using investigative methods that could violate voter intimidation laws. As a result, they have been editing the report drafted by the Senate's lead contractor, Cyber Ninjas, and excising claims and narratives that are speculative rather than factual. This has delayed the report's release until the week of September 20, sources indicated.
The review team consists of Arizona Senate President Karen Fann; Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Warren Petersen; Senate legal counsel Greg Jernigan; contract Senate attorneys Kory Langhofer and Thomas Basile of Statecraft; Garth Kamp, the Senate's senior policy adviser; audit liaison and former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett; audit spokesman Randy Pullen; and Logan, the Cyber Ninjas CEO, according to the Arizona Republic.
Byrne's apparent frustration with the Senate stems from the decision not to include claims made in early September by Arizona Trump activist Liz Harris that there were 173,104 "lost votes" and 96,389 "ghost votes" in the Maricopa County election. That claim was quickly debunked by the county's Republican election director—and was the subject of the Justice Department's May 5 warning letter. During his interview with Creative Destruction Media, Byrne also cited sloppily marked ballots that were adjudicated—or set aside for review of the voter's intent—as another instance of when votes were allegedly changed.
Byrne's suggestion that the Arizona Senate is rejecting the conspiratorial narratives put forth by Logan—as well as Logan's subcontractors and partisan allies like Harris—could set the stage for one of the most stunning reversals in contemporary politics. Trump's endless claims of a stolen election led to an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. A rally defending those subsequently arrested and prosecuted is planned in Washington for September 18.
Meanwhile, across the country, pro-Trump Republicans have called for copycat audits in their states, and many candidates seeking office in 2022—including most of the Republicans running for governor in Arizona—have said they believe a second term was stolen from Trump.Those responses have been fueled to a large degree by Byrne's organizations and media projects, which include a book, a conspiracy-laden documentary film, and extensive fundraising efforts.
In short, Byrne is signaling, presumably based on what Logan and other allies have told him, that the Arizona Senate's review of the 2020 election will conclude that Biden beat Trump.
"The people of Arizona should make it very clear that they will not accept any political interference in this report," Byrne complained. "It's the kiss of death. If politicians get involved… The whole point was that we don't trust the politicians. We wanted some technologists to look at stuff and tell us what they find. To have them spend all these millions of dollars and all these months and this effort to do that… and then to have some weenie politicians get involved."
"I hope that it's made really clear in social media that the citizens of Arizona and this country do not want any political interference in this report from the political class in Arizona," he said. "[Within t]he Republican political class, believe it or not, there are some weak sisters. There are some RINOs… It's all corrupt."
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"In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election," Steakin explains, "a sprawling collection of Trump loyalists, fueled by a host of baseless conspiracies involving disproven claims of widespread voter fraud, failed over and over again to overturn the election results in the courts. And while the effort resulted in dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits, many of the same Trump supporters — from a former Overstock.com CEO to longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon — have reemerged as key forces boosting the Republican-backed Arizona audit of the 2020 election results. The audit, which comes after two previous audits found no evidence of fraud sufficient to invalidate President Joe Biden's victory in Arizona and Maricopa County, has not only commandeered the attention of the MAGA movement, but also, of Trump himself, who has continued to push false claims that the 2020 election was stolen."
The former Overstock CEO that Steakin refers to is Patrick Byrne, who has been aggressively fundraising from the audit and claims to have raised $2.8 million. And Byrne, Steakin notes, "claims to have donated at least $500,000 of his own money to fund the audit."
Another far-right GOP conspiracy theorist who has been promoting the Maricopa County audit farce is attorney Lin Wood, who encouraged Trump to declare martial law following the 2020 election. Wood is an ally of Cyber Ninjas founder Doug Logan, another far-right Trumpista who pushed the Big Lie following the 2020 election.
Meanwhile, Bannon — former White House chief strategist in the Trump Administration and ex-chairman of Breitbart News — has been promoting the Maricopa County audit on his "War Room" podcast, where he has claimed that the audit "is going to lead to Georgia, and it's going to lead to Michigan."
Steven Slugocki, former chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party, has slammed the audit as a farce but stressed that it is a profitable farce. Slugocki told ABC News, "There are some people that are making a lot of money on this — and unfortunately, it's coming at the cost of our elections. They don't have Donald Trump anymore to lead them on social media; they're looking for content, they're looking for ways to engage the people who believe this election was stolen, and they're raising money off of it. It's turned into even more of a circus than anybody could have imagine."
https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/oval-office-meeting/
President Donald Trump, weeks after losing the November 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and more than 70 electoral votes, discussed declaring national security emergency powers his White House attorneys told him he did not have.
That's according to a stunning report that details a December 18 meeting in the Oval Office and the White House Residence from Axios, "Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency."
The meeting included White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, on the one side, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, former Trump administration official Emily Newman, and attorney Sidney Powell, who is now being sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion voting machines.
Powell "proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion's voting machines."
At one point Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani joined by phone,and was forced to tell everyone in the "heated" meeting to calm down. Axios reports at one point the "meeting had come entirely off the rails," and says "people were yelling and cursing" inside the Oval Office.
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, "wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: 'I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation,' he said, according to Axios."
:{Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. "What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?" Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.
Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.}:
He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They're saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let's give this a shot.
The words "martial law" were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.
But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.
Both Lyons and Morgan "expressed skepticism" about Flynn and Powell's idea of "invoking national security emergency powers."
"Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell's theories, but he said, 'At least she's out there fighting.'"
Axios adds the "handful of White House lawyers and advisers" were "determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy."
Read the entire report here.
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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/maria-butina-russia-spy-fbi-860256/
... story seems too outlandish to be real. However, parts can be confirmed. At minimum, Byrne’s story raises questions about Butina’s prosecution.
Butina, now 30, was arrested last summer. A flurry of breathless reports depicted her as a real life “Red Sparrow” who traded sex for information in an effort to “infiltrate Republican circles.”
However, the government never made an espionage case, charging her with an obscure technicality: acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Special Counsel Robert Mueller declined to take her case and didn’t interview her until “briefly” at the end of his probe, suggesting federal authorities never expected to find much under this rock. Was Butina really a spy, or was this a Burn After Reading-style farce — a parade of half-smart Americans outthinking themselves?
Byrne’s story suggests the latter.
He definitely had the affair. A source unconnected to Byrne confirmed months ago that he and Butina did indeed have a series of “trysts” across a period of years, beginning in July of 2015. Robert Discoll, Butina’s lawyer, confirmed the romance to the New York Times. But to weigh the rest of his story, readers first need to be acquainted with Byrne’s unique persona.
Imagine a pro-weed-legalization Bruce Wayne, and you’re close to picturing Patrick Byrne. Tall and square-shouldered with shaggy blond hair, the CEO is a famed eccentric, given to dressing in tieless Asian suits and quoting philosophy texts while surrounded, seemingly always, by attractive women and mysterious dudes with defense backgrounds.
Byrne’s father, Jack, helped build the GEICO empire and was known as “the Babe Ruth of insurance.” Patrick emerged from a cancer scare in his twenties with new ambition and founded Overstock.com. A carpe diem mentality and heavy partying appetite led him into friendships with celebrities, including former NBA player Brian Williams, a.k.a. Bison Dele.
When Dele was killed in a triple homicide at sea off Tahiti in 2002, Byrne says he helped the FBI attempt to reel in the suspect, Dele’s brother, Miles Dabord. This was, Byrne says, the beginning of a decade-plus arrangement with law enforcement.
Byrne aroused the ire of Wall Street in the mid-2000s when he complained about naked short selling, a little understood form of securities settlement corruption.
Byrne’s flair for conspiratorial asides and far-flung literary allusions (he’ll describe fraud schemes using both Alice in Wonderlandand The Matrixas metaphors) often leads reporters to think he’s crazy.
He’s not — he’s a rich bachelor with strange hobbies — but he does speak like a man pitching or living out a movie script. The problem is, his life is somewhat like a movie, a difficult starting point for reporters.
While his hyperbolic storytelling needs to be sorted with care, Byrne’s stories tend to be directionally correct. He was denounced as a loon and conspiracy theorist in his campaign against naked short-selling; the New York Posteven put a picture of a UFO over his head. Still, many of his complaints proved correct, and the SEC ended up having to rewrite some of its rules after 2008.
This is necessary preface to the Butina tale, which Byrne says began when he met an “attractive, intelligent” young Russian woman in Las Vegas in July, 2015.
The venue was FreedomFest, a forum for libertarian/conservative thinkers. Byrne was a speaker. Also speaking at that conference? Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
As reported in The Daily Beastin February of 2017, Maria Butina asked Trump a question at the event. Then 28, she asked a question in Byrne’s speech as well and approached him afterward. She said she represented a Russian gun rights group called *Pravo Na Oruzhiye* (“Right to Bear Arms”), while also being a special assistant to the deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank, Alexander Torshin.
He says he reached out to an FBI contact after that encounter to say there might be “something funny going on” with Butina. Initially, he says, the bureau was not responsive.
Later, Butina and Byrne made an arrangement to meet in New York. “We became intimate,” he says. Byrne says Butina impressed him as a being “one in a million” in terms of her drive and ability.
Byrne says Butina spoke like someone representing business interests who, while living in the present, were also trying to prepare for a post-Putin future. He could not discern whether Butina represented an “opportunity” for backchannel dialogue with Russia, or a threat.
Soon, though, “she was talking less about philosophy, and she started talking about things that made me uncomfortable,” he says. “She was basically schmoozing around with the political class.”
At one point, he says, “She said to me, ‘I want to meet anyone in the Hillary campaign, or Cruz, Rubio, or Trump.” Byrne insists she asked about both major political parties.
Byrne, who sits on the Council on Foreign Relations, had the ability to connect her with either side, but her interest in presidential politics unnerved him.
“I told Maria, this isn’t Russia,” he says. Referring to the FBI, he says he added: “If you’re reporting to a Russian official, and not disclosing yourself, they have these Men in Black here, and they don’t give a shit who you know.”
On this front, Byrne says, Butina is “not completely blameless,” saying she should have announced herself to the government somehow. Still, Byrne says he was never able to learn anything that proved she was more than what she said she was, i.e. a grad student in over her head.
Butina ended up getting into a photo with Donald Trump, Jr. in May of 2016. Byrne says he provided times and dates of her visit to Louisville in advance to authorities, but no one cared. “They said, ‘Patrick, this is just some grad student.”
“That sounded not right,” he said. “It sounded fishy. You don’t just let something like that happen.”
Byrne began to become concerned he wasn’t seeing the whole picture. He says his concern redoubled when law enforcement came back to him in 2016.
“Trump was the presumptive nominee,” Byrne says. “Federal agents showed up back in my life, and said, ‘Boy, did we make a mistake before.’”
Byrne says he was told to re-engage a relationship with Butina. “The gloves are off,” he says he was told. “Anything you can find.” The assignment, according to Bryne: Figure out what her intentions are, who she’s seeing.
The unconfirmable nature of this part of Byrne’s tale is what makes reporting it complicated. According to multiple sources I spoke with earlier this summer, Byrne in the past indeed worked with several government bodies, including several congressional committees, on enforcement issues.
However, the extent of any more recent relationship with the FBI in particular is not clear. Bureau spokeswoman Carol Cratty said simply, “The FBI has no comment.”
Byrne’s claims would be explosive if true in the smallest part. For instance, the government asserted in Butina’s sentencing memorandum that her “actions had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”
If Byrne told authorities about Butina in July, 2015, and no real action was taken for nearly a year, that would fly in the face of the government’s assertions at sentencing about the threat she posed.
Byrne says his perception of the case was changed by two events: the congressional testimony of FBI agents Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, and the arrest of Butina on July 15. She was among other things accused of trading sex for “a position in a special interest organization.”
Byrne was chagrined by depictions of Butina as a cold-blooded temptress. At one point later in their acquaintance, he says she was reluctant to reconnect with him, because she had a boyfriend in Republican consultant Paul Erickson. “She said to me, ‘Patrick, I’m not a Russian prostitute,” he says.
Byrne was also disillusioned by the seemingly politicized behavior of Page and Strzok, and upset the complaint against Butina was filed the day before Donald Trump met Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. He felt this was politically motivated.
“That’s not right,” he says. Stressing that he’s not particularly a fan of the current administration, he adds, “The constitution does not say, ‘Unless Trump.’”
After Butina’s arrest, the judge in the case threw out the sex charge, saying “five minutes” of review revealed the accusation was based on a joke Butina made about how to repay a friend for helping renew her car insurance.
Butina’s attorney, Robert Driscoll, says the issue of whether or not Byrne was an FBI source did come up in Butina’s prosecution last year, before Byrne went public.
Driscoll suspected Byrne was one of a number of undisclosed confidential informants in her case. He was suspicious of numerous business offers Butina received. These included $20,000 by *The Outdoor Channel* to set up an interview with Vladimir Putin, and an effort by Donna Keene, wife of the former N.R.A. president, to secure 5 million barrels of Russian jet fuel.
“They ask this grad student, ‘Hey, do you know anyone who can get a ton of Russian jet fuel?” says Driscoll. “And with the interview, she basically emailed the [Russian] equivalent of whitehouse.gov to try to set it up. And failed. It was absurd.”
Driscoll wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik Kenerson last October asserting, “the government conducted more than one unsuccessful ‘dangle’ operation against Maria Butina.” He asked for reports from those operations as part of pre-trial discovery.
“Orally, the defense confronted the government about whether or not [Byrne] was a [confidential informant],” says Driscoll. “We received a blanket denial.”
When Byrne came forward this summer, Driscoll wrote a letter to John Durham, the Connecticut federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to look into the origins of Russiagate. Driscoll wrote to Durham, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility, summarizing Byrne’s story and asking each office to look into his allegations.
After Butina was sentenced to 18 months, Byrne decided to go to the press. That Butina was in solitary confinement was a factor. Before talking, Byrne consulted with longtime mentor Warren Buffett, who said in a statement:
“I’ve known Patrick and his family for more than 40 years. His father, Jack Byrne, saved GEICO in 1976 and I met his three boys when they were teenagers. Both Mark, the middle son, and Patrick, the youngest, worked for Berkshire Hathaway. Patrick helped the company without pay in solving a difficult business problem.
“Patrick is very intelligent and patriotic. He comes by Omaha periodically to see me. At the most recent visit – a few weeks ago – though I know nothing about the subject he was describing, I told him to follow his conscience.”
Byrne is a dramatic and unusual personality, but he’s also shown a decent and generous side over the years, even a naïveté. It’s gotten him in trouble. When Byrne launched his campaign against naked shorting, his expectations for a happy ending nearly did him in.
I thought the world was like The Pelican Brief,” he says now. “When Julia Roberts figures out the scheme and she types it up and puts it on the internet, all the good guys swoop in. What I learned … is no, what happens is [the power structure] reveals itself.”
Reporters are finding it easy to laugh him off. Marketwatchsuggested investors have indulged his weirdness before, but this tale is strange “even from him.”
Maybe, but Byrne has been right about enough things in the past that he deserves a hearing. The FBI should at least have to explain exactly what was its relationship with Byrne. Moreover, the public should note that the American who knew Maria Butina better than all but a few believes she was railroaded, and just gave up his career in an effort to make amends.
“She spent the last year in a box the size of a shower stall,” Byrne said. “I’m sorry, Maria, that I was part of a process that landed you in that stall.”
Overstock C.E.O. Takes Aim at 'Deep State' After Romance ...www.nytimes.com › 2019/08/15 › business › overstock-p...
Aug 15, 2019 - Patrick Byrne said in an interview that he was still “quite fond” of Maria ... and that she “should go home and be president of Russia one day.''
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne's Maria Butina Story Merits ...www.rollingstone.com › politics › politics-features › m...
Sep 4, 2019 - Founder and CEO of Overstock.com Patrick Byrne attends ... Hackers from Russia, China, Iran Are Attacking U.S. Election, Microsoft Warns ... who, while living in the present, were also trying to prepare for a post-Putin future.
Overstock CEO says he's still 'quite fond' of Russian agent ...www.sltrib.com › news › politics › 2019/08/15 › overst...
Aug 15, 2019 - ... says he's still 'quite fond' of Russian agent Maria Butina, thinks she should take Putin's job ... Al Hartmann | Tribune file photo Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne says he had a relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Claims Maria Butina ...www.thedailybeast.com › patrick-byrne-former-oversto...
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne claimed in a blog post on Tuesday ... to arrange a meeting between her beau and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne: What to Know About His Claims ...time.com › Business › Russia Investigation
Aug 23, 2019 - Patrick Byrne issued a bizarre statement through Overstock criticizing ... him to Russian officials and oligarchs, and that she asked to be put in ...
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne's Odd Fling With Maria Butinanymag.com › intelligencer › 2019/08 › overstock-ceo-pat...
Aug 27, 2019 - After resigning as Overstock's CEO, Patrick Byrne published over ... in his hotel room, the two discussed Soviet history, a post-Putin Russia, and ...
Former Overstock CEO claims Maria Butina offered to arrange ...www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-7401629 › Form...
Aug 28, 2019 - Patrick Byrne claimed that Russian agent Maria Butina offered to arrange a private meeting between him an Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne claimed he's an FBI operative: a ...www.businessinsider.com › News › Retail
Aug 24, 2019 - Overstock.com's now-former CEO and founder Patrick Byrne's reputation has a ... involved in a web of intrigue that involved a Russian spy and the FBI ... suspicious when Butina began asking about being put in contact with ...
Patrick Byrne | Trump/Russiatrump-russia.com › tag › patrick-byrne
Nov 10, 2019 - Maria Butina and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. ... to explain that they were loyal Russian people, “President Putin is our president, ...
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne resigns after saying he aided in ...www.washingtonpost.com › business › 2019/08/22 › o...
Aug 22, 2019 - Patrick Byrne resigned Thursday as CEO of Overstock.com. ... into the 2016 election and was romantically involved with a Russian agent.
Missing: putin ?| Must include: putin
PR BS
_{Overstock.com, Inc.}_ (NASDAQ:OSTK) subsidiary Medici Ventures that is focused on applying blockchain and other technologies to land and property rights management, has announced Overstock founder and CEO Patrick M. Byrne has purchased 43% of the company in a private transaction.
“It’s no secret that I believe using blockchain technology to bring proper land governance to the world is a major step towards reducing global poverty,” said Dr. Byrne. “Six months ago, and again earlier this month, I informed Overstock shareholders that I would make this investment. From the time I first realized the _{world-changing potential of the blockchain}_, I have been working to develop a way to use it to provide a secure, immutable record of property to help entrepreneurs from any economic background join the global economy. Proper land governance is the crystallization of the rule of law, and the foundation of a successful, prosperous, and free society. It is also insecticide for the rent-seeking parasites who tax humanity at every level where rule of law is absent.”
Medici Land Governance was founded in 2018 to help individuals around the world connect with the global economy by using blockchain and other technologies to record rightful ownership of property. The public benefit company recently announced memoranda of understanding with both the _{World Bank}_ and _{the nation of Zambia}_ to help develop blockchain-based systems for land governance.
“Patrick Byrne’s investment signifies a strong vote of confidence in Medici Land Governance’s unprecedented mission. Bringing coherent innovation as a whole-of-government approach in land titling and land administration is a crucial determinant and main driver of economic progress,” said Medici Land Governance CEO Dr. Ali El Husseini. “This investment will provide Medici Land Governance the additional capital needed to develop systems for Zambia, the World Bank, and other potential partners so that all people can use their property assets as collateral to enter global commerce and markets.”
“Countries will not be able to achieve the targets set in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals without engaging proactively with the private sector,” said Klaus Deininger, Lead Economist, World Bank.“Critically assessing the impact of private sector initiatives, including those by visionary leaders like Patrick Byrne, helps institutions like the World Bank in three respects. It allows emerging technologies to harness innovation and explore how it could sustainably and equitably increase coverage with land titles and to assess the economic and social impact, including on women and other disadvantaged groups. It provides opportunities to appreciate what governments need to do to create a regulatory environment for the private sector to operate effectively and transparently. And it helps to test approaches to quickly harness the benefits from good land data and interoperable systems to develop fair business models and financing modalities to quickly achieve the scale needed if countries want to achieve land tenure security for all by 2030.”
Medici Land Governance is the 14th portfolio company of _{Medici Ventures}_, Overstock’s wholly-owned subsidiary founded in 2014 to develop and invest in blockchain technologies to democratize capital, eliminate middlemen, and rehumanize commerce.
About Overstock.com
_{Overstock.com, Inc}_. Common Shares (NASDAQ:OSTK) / Series A Preferred (Medici Ventures’ tZERO platform: OSTKP) / Series B Preferred (OTCQX:OSTBP) is an online retailer based in Salt Lake City, Utah that sells a broad range of products at low prices, including _{furniture}_, _{décor}_, _{rugs}_, _{bedding}_, and _{home improvement}_. In addition to home goods, Overstock.com offers a variety of products including jewelry, electronics, apparel, and more, as well as a marketplace providing customers access to hundreds of thousands of products from third-party sellers. Additional stores include Pet Adoptions and Worldstock.com dedicated to selling artisan-crafted products from around the world. Forbes ranked Overstock in its list of the Top 100 Most Trustworthy Companies in 2014. Overstock regularly posts information about the company and other related matters under Investor Relations on its website, _{http://www.overstock.com}_.
About Medici Ventures:
Launched in 2014, Medici Ventures is a wholly owned subsidiary of Overstock.com, Inc., created to leverage blockchain technology to solve real-world problems with transparent, efficient and secure solutions. Medici Ventures has a growing portfolio of groundbreaking _{blockchain-focused investments}_. The company’s majority-owned financial technology company, tZERO, executed the world’s first blockchain-based stock offering in December 2016.
O, Overstock.com, O.com, Club O, Main Street Revolution, and Worldstock are registered trademarks of Overstock.com, Inc. O.biz and Space Shift are also trademarks of Overstock.com, Inc. Other service marks, trademarks and trade names which may be referred to herein are the property of their respective owners.
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Such forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact. Additional information regarding factors that could materially affect results and the accuracy of the forward-looking statements contained herein may be found in the Company's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2018, which was filed with the SEC on May 8, 2018, and any subsequent filings with the SEC.
SOURCE: Overstock.com, Inc.
Media Contact:
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- https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/blog/land-unchained
- ...Challenging the Assumptions of Blockchain Land Titling Most of the land on the planet is not registered under a system of private titles. Globally, up to...is governed by local communities or Indigenous People through collective or customary tenure systems. Across the Global South, land registries are often incomplete, as governments only recognize a fraction of these lands under customary systems, officially demarcating them as government-owned, public land. So while three quarters of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas where land is a key asset, over a billion of these people:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: lack legal documents formalizing their ownership of the land. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, 90 percent:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: of rural land is not formally documented. This lack of formal documentation is however not seen as a problem for many, who consider land – like water – as a common good, with high social and cultural values, that must be shared and preserved for current and future generations. For blockchain technology to be used in the administration of land, claims over land ownership first would have to be determined, documented, and verified. The World Bank, one of the major proponents of the use of blockchain for land registration, claims:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: that countries without the required records need simply to “clean up” their registry in order to make blockchain work. However, this “clean up” is a much larger and more expensive undertaking than suggested by the Bank, given it requires “documenting” rights in the first instance, demarcating parcel boundaries,resolving disputes, and, establishing the necessary procedures and laws for a“modern” land administration infrastructure. As recently as 2018, only a third of all countries:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: – including just two in Sub Saharan Africa – maintained land records digitally. In many countries where legal institutions are weak or susceptible to corruption, the process of formalizing ownership claims through individual titles can do little to improve tenure security:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, allow governments to solidify their claims to “vacant” land, and make it available for “investment,” as detailed in Driving Dispossession.
Zambia, one of the most advanced countries in the application of blockchain technology for land titling is clearly on this path to privatization. At the time of independence in 1964, there was no private land in Zambia:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, with 94 percent of the country under customary tenure and the remaining six percent under state control. This started to change in the early 1990s, when the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) required the government to change land laws towards privatization:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: as a condition for the restructuring of its international debt.As a result of this and subsequent legal changes, Zambia saw a drastic reduction of customary land:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, from 94 percent to less than 60 percent today.This so-called formalization of land tenure resulted in shifting the control over land from people to the government, thereby making it available for lease to private interests. In the years after the Lands Act was passed, conversions of customary land to leasehold increased, displacement became common, and while investors reaped the benefits, local villagers suffered through “social and economic exclusion, elite capture, displacement, intra-community conflict, and the enclosure of common pool resources.”:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:
Early Lessons from Blockchain Land Titling Raise Red Flags
Despite the security that blockchain technology is supposed to provide, it assumes the information regarding ownership claims that is collected and entered is accurate. As they decide to introduce blockchain land titling programs, governments will be responsible for allocating significant resources and determining procedures to implement the technology in a way that ensures the information collected and entered is accurate and safeguarded from corruption.
The early lessons from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh’s blockchain titling program however reveal how corruption can still occur.The program:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background:url("):}:, which documented the land claims of 24,000 farmers across 22 villages, was hailed as cost-effective way of providing a tamper-proof, secure system to document land claims. While the technology itself has proven secure, farmers have raised the alarm that bribery to land registry offices continues and results in manipulated entries into the blockchain. An Andhra Pradesh government official estimated that nearly US$700 million was paid in bribes across land registrars in India:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background:url("):}: in 2017 alone. Similarly in Kenya, early efforts to implement blockchain titling have been delayed:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background:url("):}: by numerous disputes over parcels of land with multiple titles and widespread corruption:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background:url("):}: within the Ministry of Lands. Despite the theoretical ways blockchain can reduce corruption, technology alone will not overcome these entrenched governance issues as demonstrated by these early cases.
Lastly, the security offered by the technology is not absolute. While instances of blockchain security breaches are rare, they do still occur. In 2016, a high-profile Ethereum smart wallet was hacked. The target of the hack, known as DAO, had US$60 million worth of cryptocurrency assets frozen. Given the decentralized nature of the technology, no single registrar can fix the error, demonstrating that the impact of a hacked land registry:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background:url("):}: would be catastrophic....
- Ultimately, shifting land registries to blockchain requires countries to move towards systems of private land ownership, which will require registration and digitalization. All of the 25 ongoing blockchain land projects around the world are focused on providing individual titles to land while ignoring the millions of hectares managed under customary or collective tenure systems. Thus, blockchain does nothing to help countries that maintain communal land systems and who have abstained from privatizing land and instead encourages countries to move towards individual, private land ownership. The process of transferring land away from customary systems to facilitate blockchain private titles risks further marginalizing disadvantaged groups and allowing wealthy and powerful interests to access and solidify their claims to land that does not belong to them...
- Instead of protecting land rights for communities, blockchain titling programs are actually geared towards promoting private investment. While the process of transitioning land registries onto blockchain ignores customary tenure systems, it opens the door to corruption, and can lead to dispossession, it simplifies the process of acquiring land for companies and therefore “unlocks the economic potential of land” for the private sector.
This motivation was made explicitly clear in Zambia. In 2018, the Zambian government signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU):{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: with Medici Land Governance (MLG), a blockchain company and subsidiary of the US-based online retailer Overstock.com, to “develop a program for systematic land governance within the country.” MLG’s initial project:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: used blockchain to create and digitize land titles and issued 50,000 titles“to serve as proof of concept for a systematic, streamlined process to scale up the country’s land titling program.”
“There are also trillions of dollars in value in global mineral reserves that cannot be accessed by the mining firms…where land governance is not clearly established.”
Patrick Byrne, Former CEO, Overstock.com, July 15, 2019
Less than a year later, the company signed a second MOU:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, this time with the Lusaka City Council, to issue “no fewer than 250,000 certificates of title” to people living in Zambia’s capital.As expressed by its former CEO Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s interest in land titling is closely tied to the World Bank’s motto that private property rights can help unlock the economic potential of land. In communications with investors, Byrne cited:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: “trillions of dollars in value in global mineral reserves that cannot be accessed by mining firms” due to unclear land governance systems. The explicit goal is that private titles will allow mining companies to enter into agreements with landowners to exploit vast natural resources, and ensure that the wealth extracted through mining:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: is enjoyed by land rights holders and corporations. Under this scenario, Overstock.com would also benefit financially from unlocking this “dead capital,” though exactly how this will be negotiated remains unknown.
What is known in terms of revenue models is that in Zambia, the company expects to receive a cut of the tax revenues generated:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: through government land titling and the resulting increase in taxes. In addition, Byrne has commented:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: that donor countries pay healthy sums for land titling projects,suggesting that international development aid dollars could potentially support MLG’s efforts globally.
This motivation to benefit the private sector is shared by many of the blockchain startups that have been engaged in land titling projects. Seso Global plans to:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: “unlock US$100 billion trapped in Nigeria’s real estate market using blockchain technology”while in the United Arab Emirates, Tech Mahindra’s project to shift the land registry onto blockchain promises to:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: “create value which can bring benefits to citizens and multiple entities associated with municipalities (like property developers, banks).”
The day after MLG signed its first MOU in Zambia, it also penned an agreement with the World Bank:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}: to collaborate in other countries to “support the design, implementation, and evaluation of pilot programs that will create systems to ensure secure land tenure.” The Bank’s lead economist on land issues, Klaus Deininger, commented:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:: “Joining forces with MLG allows the Bank to provide client countries access to cutting edge technology, work with the countries on adapting the technology to their context, and then document the impact of the updated process. We are excited about the opportunities this collaboration offers us to generate transformative innovations and make the case for greater public and private investment in an area that is key for development.” According to Byrne:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, the Bank is now helping open doors for blockchain-based land titling “all over the world.” However, details of the partnership with Overstock.com remain confidential and have not been made public by the World Bank. The World Bank’s Access to Information Department was “unable to fulfill” the Oakland Institute’s request for information regarding the partnership and other ongoing blockchain land titling projects.
Exploiting More Natural Resources or Preserving the Commons
The Bank’s involvement in facilitating blockchain titling contradicts its commitment to safeguarding customary tenure systems that have been shown in many cases to provide tenure security and safeguard natural resources. In a 2019 paper:{:{(link is external):(style="box-sizing:inherit;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;height:1px;position:absolute !important"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;background-image:url("):}:, the World Bank itself acknowledged that “customary land has proven to be highly resilient, continuous and flexible” and that safeguarding [customary land] rights should be a “development priority.” Despite this statement, the Bank’s programs facilitating blockchain titling continue to directly undermine customary and collective forms of land governance, putting millions at risk of losing their land and livelihoods.
As demonstrated by the Zambia case, shifting land registries onto blockchain is a part of the broader move to “unlock the economic potential of land” in order to put more land and natural resources into exploitation by private interests. While implementing the technology can be attractive to corporate interests eager to access land, it can be a tool of dispossession for those whose livelihoods depend on land governed under customary tenure systems. As a number of governments consider applying blockchain to land titling, they must understand and pay heed to the true motivations and implications of this technology. Andy Currier
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tpm
no lnx
The CEO of Overstock.com wants the public to know he’s a big part of the Trump-Russia story.
According to a press bulletin issued by the publicly traded firm after Monday trading hours, CEO Patrick Byrne wants you to know two things:
Byrne has been helping the “Men in Black” — that is, federal authorities — and was involved in the “missing Chapter 1” of the Trump-Russia probe.
Warren Buffett reminded him to alert Bill Barr and the press to point 1.
This story may sound fantastical, but it’s getting attention. Fox News has picked up on elements of the story, while an attorney for alleged Russian agent-of-influence Maria Butina sent a letter to Justice Department demanding a probe into Byrne’s accusations.
Meanwhile, in the two days since the Overstock CEO issued the statement, the company’s shares have plummeted more than 36 percent, amid a general selloff in the market.
So what’s Byrne talking about?
At first, it’s hard to say. Byrne, a financier of right-wing politicians, is avoiding specifics: His market-moving Monday statement is titled “Overstock CEO comments on Deep State, Withholds Further Comment.”
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But in a statement to TPM, Byrne said he was “ethically obligated” to speak out.
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“Watching my country rip itself apart when I know the truth has been hard,” Byrne said. “It has reached the point where people are driving 600 miles to shoot 20 strangers. I decided that as a matter of conscience I had to tell the truth, let chips fall where they may.”
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His earlier remarks — and those of other bit players in the never-ending Trump-Russia saga — offer a few additional suggestions.
In the statement, Byrne writes that Fox News contributor Sara Carter has written accurately about his situation on her blog, and that he is, in part, “confirming” what Carter had written.
Carter “broke” a story about Byrne last month that got some significant pickup in the conservative media. In that story, the Overstock CEO claimed to have had a fling with Butina, during which he discovered exculpatory evidence that would help Butina’s case, and that he accuses prosecutors of withholding.
Byrne’s claims spurred Butina attorney Robert Driscoll to send an angry letter to John Durham, the former U.S. attorney empowered by Attorney General Bill Barr to lead a civil review of the origins of the FBI’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Driscoll also sent the letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is conducting a separate probe into the FBI’s handling of Russiagate.
A DOJ spokeswoman declined to comment to TPM.
But Byrne’s statements this week appear to reveal that he is under the impression that he is a main source for Durham.
One hour before Overstock issued its press release, Carter published a story declaring that Byrne had upended the political establishment by giving “emails and text messages” to the Durham investigation.
“This is going to become the greatest political scandal in U.S. history,” Byrne is quoted as saying in Carter’s story.
The same day, Byrne took to Fox to declare that — as a result of the Durham inquiry — Barr is about to purge the country’s so-called “deep state.”
“There is a deep state like a submarine lurking just beneath the waves of the periscope depth watching our shipping lanes,” Byrne said on Fox Business on Monday. “And a nuclear icebreaker called the USS Bill Barr has snuck up on them and is about to ram midship.”
Byrne’s actions may be surprising. His statements have knocked more than a third of the value off of his company, and he has so far failed to publicly provide any evidence corroborating or further fleshing out his claims.
But he has a storied history of bizarre statements. In 2005, he held an hour-long conference call blaming someone called the “Sith Lord” for financial problems at his company, and led a campaign to make short-selling illegal. Elsewhere, he has argued that the financial system faces impending doom, and that Bitcoin is the way out.
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But as a Marketwatch columnist Therese Poletti noted, this latest episode is weird even for Byrne.
In any case, Byrne let the world know what he will be doing as the value of his company continues to tank following his comments and a general downturn in the stock market.
“I plan on sitting back and watching the United States Department of Justice re-establish Rule of Law in our country,” he said in the conclusion to his Monday statement.
The CEO of Overstock.com wants the public to know he’s a big part of the Trump-Russia story.
According to a press bulletin issued by the publicly traded firm after Monday trading hours, CEO Patrick Byrne wants you to know two things:
- Byrne has been helping the “Men in Black” — that is, federal authorities — and was involved in the “missing Chapter 1” of the Trump-Russia probe.
- Warren Buffett reminded him to alert Bill Barr and the press to point 1.
This story may sound fantastical, but it’s getting attention. Fox News has picked up on elements of the story, while an attorney for alleged Russian agent-of-influence Maria Butina sent a letter to Justice Department demanding a probe into Byrne’s accusations.
Meanwhile, in the two days since the Overstock CEO issued the statement, the company’s shares have plummeted more than 36 percent, amid a general selloff in the market.
So what’s Byrne talking about?
At first, it’s hard to say. Byrne, a financier of right-wing politicians, is avoiding specifics: His market-moving Monday statement is titled “Overstock CEO comments on Deep State, Withholds Further Comment.”
But in a statement to TPM, Byrne said he was “ethically obligated” to speak out.
“Watching my country rip itself apart when I know the truth has been hard,” Byrne said. “It has reached the point where people are driving 600 miles to shoot 20 strangers. I decided that as a matter of conscience I had to tell the truth, let chips fall where they may.”
His earlier remarks — and those of other bit players in the never-ending Trump-Russia saga — offer a few additional suggestions.
In the statement, Byrne writes that Fox News contributor Sara Carter has written accurately about his situation on her blog, and that he is, in part, “confirming” what Carter had written.
Carter “broke” a story about Byrne last month that got some significant pickup in the conservative media. In that story, the Overstock CEO claimed to have had a fling with Butina, during which he discovered exculpatory evidence that would help Butina’s case, and that he accuses prosecutors of withholding.
Byrne’s claims spurred Butina attorney Robert Driscoll to send an angry letter to John Durham, the former U.S. attorney empowered by Attorney General Bill Barr to lead a civil review of the origins of the FBI’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Driscoll also sent the letter to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who is conducting a separate probe into the FBI’s handling of Russiagate.
A DOJ spokeswoman declined to comment to TPM.
But Byrne’s statements this week appear to reveal that he is under the impression that he is a main source for Durham...>But he has a storied history of bizarre statements. In 2005, he held an hour-long conference call blaming someone called the “Sith Lord” for financial problems at his company, and led a campaign to make short-selling illegal. Elsewhere, he has
that the financial system faces impending doom, and that Bitcoin is the way out.
But as a Marketwatch columnist Therese Poletti noted, this latest episode is weird even for Byrne.
In any case, Byrne let the world know what he will be doing as the value of his company continues to tank following his comments and a general downturn in the stock market.
“I plan on sitting back and watching the United States Department of Justice re-establish Rule of Law in our country,” he said in the conclusion to his Monday statement.
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ALT LAKE CITY — Overstock.com founder and former CEO Patrick Byrne continues to fuel Jonathan Johnson's campaign for governor with unprecedented amounts of cash.
Byrne dropped another $250,000 into the Republican candidate's bank account this week, bringing his total personal contributions to $400,000 so far. He also gave another $200,000 to Johnson's Promote Liberty PAC, with at least $50,000 of that going to the campaign.
Donations to Johnson, the Overstock board chairman, from other sources since the last reporting period in mid-April total about $47,000, according to financial disclosure reports.
A review of Utah financial disclosure records for the past five years shows no individual has given more to a single candidate than Byrne has to Johnson, though some organizations have donated hefty six-figure sums to candidates.
Utah does not limit the amount of money a person may donate to a political campaign.
Johnson campaign manager Dave Hansen defended Byrne's large contributions.
"Patrick and Jonathan have had a longstanding friendship and business relationship. Patrick is doing what he can to help a friend who is running for governor and who does not have access to the funds from donors that the incumbent governor has," Hansen said.
Johnson is challenging Gov. Gary Herbert for the GOP nomination. Delegates at the state Republican Party convention last month threw the majority of their support behind Johnson, and he and Herbert face each other in a June 28 primary election.
Campaign finance has become a hot topic the past couple of weeks as the two candidates have taken shots at each other's methods for funding their bids for governor.
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