smartmatic dominion

primary 7 22

SEE TWO DISCOVERY

see defam libel= moderation

see fox

see big lie

see rightwing media

bad code guk

see voting machines

121 rudy 1.x billion$ ?! lawsuit

---

RWW

03/25/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Martha McHardy @ The Daily Beast: Humiliation in Trump’s Backyard Could Signal Worst GOP Midterms in 100 Years

If the enormous 21-point swing against Trump in his own hometown was replicated across the country, this would be the Republicans’ worst midterms in 100 years.

Tracy Simmons @ Religion News Service: For Doug Wilson's neighbors, CNN documentary a reminder Moscow is Christian nationalism's ground zero

‘I’m hopeful that this exposure will help people recognize the signs of Christian nationalism in their own spaces,’ one Moscow resident said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní José María León Cabrera, Annie Correal **and Eric Schmitt @ The New York Times: The U.S. Said It Helped Bomb a Drug Camp. It Was a Dairy Farm.

The Times visited a village where the United States and Ecuador said they destroyed an armed group’s training camp. Residents said it was actually a dairy farm.

Katherine Doyle, Courtney Kube and Dan De Luce @ NBC News: Inside Trump's daily video montage briefing on the Iran war

The montage, which typically runs for about two minutes, has raised concerns among some of the president’s allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war.

Brian Kaylor @ Public Witness: At Pentagon Worship Service, Hegseth Casts Iran Conflict as Violent Holy War Against God’s Enemies

In the first Christian worship service at the Pentagon since the start of the strikes against Iran, Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” used prayer and several Bible passages to cast the conflict as a holy war against God’s enemies. He prayed that God would pour out righteous wrath by helping “break the teeth” and kill the “wicked” enemies “who deserve no mercy” and should be “delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”

Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Ché Ahn says God told him to run for governor. California says he can't be on the ballot.

The New Apostolic Reformation leader's campaign faces collapse after failing to file required tax returns. He's now suing for ballot access.

David Edwards @ Raw Story: Mike Lindell found in contempt of court for refusing to pay voting machine company

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols held MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in civil contempt of court after he claimed an "inability to pay" voting machine company Smartmatic sanctions over frivolous claims about the 2020 presidential election.

David J. Bier @ Cato At Liberty: Government Defrauds Legal Immigrants and US Sponsors Who Paid $1 Billion in Fees

The US government is taking fees from immigrants and US sponsors for services that it has no plans to provide. The government took their money, and now it won’t even adjudicate their applications—in many cases, it refuses even to issue denials.

---

see dominion defam fox

4/17/23 hannity 0'keefe msnbc dominion discovery whole short email redacted, judge nixed, 2ndary JOK evidence "interesting"

---

AN 11 25

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice has dispatched federal investigators to question "multiple people" who have been spreading conspiracy theories that Venezuela stole the 2020 election, the Guardian reports.

According to the report, the "discredited election-rigging conspiracy theory could strengthen Trump’s military action against [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro."

"Two promoters of the conspiracy theory have repeatedly briefed the U.S. attorney for the district of Puerto Rico, W. Stephen Muldrow, and have shared witnesses and documents with officials," the report said, citing four sources.

Muldrow refused to comment.

Other conspiracy theorists in Tampa, Florida, have also been interviewed, the report said.

The Guardian said, "an investigation of this sort underscores how Trump’s justice department is becoming a major weapon in the president’s efforts to rewrite the history of his 2020 loss – while potentially strengthening the administration’s case for military action against Venezuela."

Among the lies spread about the 2020 elections was that deceased Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez somehow founded the electronic voting machine and software companies to change the election seven years after his death. Other conspiracy theories claimed that the impoverished regime of Venezuela was outright controlling electronic voting machines.

Read the full report here.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/foxs-tom-homan-and-sara-carter-are-honoring-dominion-smartmatic-and-seth-rich-conspiracy

4 23

fox News contributors Tom Homan and Sara Carter are set to appear at an event that honors far-right streamer Mel K, who has repeatedly pushed conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems, Smartmatic, and the death of Seth Rich. They are helping celebrate the conspiracy theorist despite Fox News settling litigation with Dominion and Rich’s family, and while the network is still actively involved in a defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic.

Homan, who was the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has been a Fox News contributor since 2018. Carter is a podcast host who joined Fox News in 2017.

Homan recently became the CEO of The America Project, a nonprofit organization that pushes election denialism. It was founded by conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne, who is facing a Dominion lawsuit for pushing election lies. Byrne is also heavily connected to the QAnon movement. He praised Homan in a statement on the group’s website, saying that the “Nation’s top lawman will CEO the organization whose mission is to defend our borders, protect our rights and freedoms, and secure election integrity.”

The America Project is sponsoring an April 29 gala in Florida for the nonprofit Partners For Family Values called “Celebrating Conservative Women's Voices.” Homan is the keynote speaker while Carter, former Fox News pundit and Trump administration official Monica Crowley, and right-wing commentator Gina Loudon are listed as celebrity guests. (Loudon has also promoted conspiracy theories about Dominion, including tweeting: “#Dominion #StopTheSteal.”) A flyer for the gala describes Mel K as a “celebrity podcaster” and an event “honoree.”

Mel K is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who hosts an eponymous streaming program. She has repeatedly claimed that Dominion Voting Systems rigged the 2020 election. She has also included Smartmatic, a voting systems company that is suing Fox News for defamation, in her conspiracy theories.

During a May 2021 appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Charlie Ward’s show, Mel K said that a Dominion employee stated “he would not let Trump win. Well, he meant it. And -- they’re so caught there. There's a million reasons. But the thing is, all of this is treason.”

After Ward later said that “Dominion and Smartmatic fixed it” and flipped the votes, she replied: “Yup. It’s happened all over the world.”

During another 2021 discussion, Mel K told Ward on her own show that the two companies are involved in a worldwide conspiracy to rig elections, stating: “We’re talking now Ecuador, Myanmar, Belarus, Haiti, we're talk -- even Brazil. We're talking about this whole Smartmatic/Dominion voting thing being a worldwide issue and being caught one after another after another. It was caught here first. But all of these countries are having the exact same problem.”

She also accused Dominion and Smartmatic of being part of a global conspiracy that’s “caught up” in Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that prominent individuals have trafficked children through a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. She claimed in February 2021 of this group of people, which includes Smartmatic and Dominion: “They're all caught up in, what, Israel, Pizzagate. And they're all caught up in that. They're caught up in a lot of this stuff. … The Epstein boomerang is what I call it, and it’s coming back soon. They’re all involved. It’s the same people and they’re all involved in all of it. And it's about hiding their own crimes. Because, on a side note, what's going on in Myanmar, which I believe is a sting, too, because it's the same people. Smartmatic, Dominion, the IMF put a huge amount of money in there to control the election.”

During her convoluted rant, Mel K also linked this group of people to adrenochrome -- the QAnon-connected conspiracy theory that elites harvest children’s blood.

She recently claimed that Fox News' settlement with Dominion was actually “an inside merger not a settlement” and the company that owns Dominion is “friends” with the people who control Fox.

Mel K has repeatedly promoted the conspiracy theory that Democrats murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. In 2020, Fox News privately settled with Rich’s parentsafter the network pushed reprehensible conspiracy theories — including a retracted story — about his death.

On her July 13, 2021, program, Mel K claimed that Rich “stumbled upon a lot of horrible stuff going on at the DNC,” and she later said: “All of this goes back to [Hillary Clinton campaign Chairman] John Podesta. And there was an email released in the WikiLeaks with Hillary Clinton asking John Podesta if he, if they could drone Julian Assange. So basically what happened was after they had Seth Rich murdered, that's when they created the entire Russia hoax.”

On Instagram, Mel K wrote this January that “justice in his case will unlock a Pandora’s box of crime criminals demons and sell outs. … #johnpodesta #justiceforSethRich.” She recently posted a picture of herself with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, calling him “the absolute most fearless boldest bravest voice in America.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/foxdominion-lawsuit/new-audio-shows-fox-news-anchor-maria-bartiromo-followed-trump-campaign

no lnx vid

New audio shows Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo followed Trump campaign directives to promote January 6

The Trump campaign told Bartiromo to push January 6, 2021, as the date to overturn the 2020 election. Then she did it.

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

PUBLISHED 04/14/23

New audio revealed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — which Fox allegedly failed to provide to Dominion in the discovery process — shows how Fox News and Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo took directives from the Trump campaign to promote the campaign’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election results on January 6, 2021.

The new evidence was revealed by former Fox producer Abby Grossberg as part of her separate lawsuit against the network for allegedly setting her and Bartiromo up as scapegoats for Fox’s clear pattern of spreading lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. While the paper trail released so far in the case shows that Grossberg herself promoted conspiracy theories in the pursuit of ratings, she has also brought forward additional evidence that has already produced big legal results in the Dominion case. The judge in the case reportedly sanctioned Fox on Wednesday for failing to turn over Grossberg’s audio recordings in a move that will give Dominion an opportunity to conduct further legal discovery at Fox’s expense.

On Wednesday night, MSNBC host Alex Wagner played exclusive audio excerpts from the key pieces of evidence that Grossberg had preserved and Fox had allegedly withheld from Dominion, including aphone call on November 8, 2020, in which then-Trump campaign attorney Rudy Giuliani admitted that he did not have evidence for his outlandish claims about Dominion. (Bartiromo and other Fox hosts continued to host Giuliani, anyway.)

In another phone call, from December 5, 2020, an unnamed Trump campaign official admitted that Georgia’s statewide recount of ballots was “pretty darn close to what the machine count was,” and that the secretary of state’s office found that “that there weren’t any physical issues” with the voting machines. In a key piece of audio that Wagner played Wednesday night, theTrump campaign official also gave one of the earliest signals that the campaign intended to use the January 6, 2021, joint session of Congress in an attempt to overturn the election results,and that then-Vice President Mike Pence would supposedly “have to decide” which votes to count.

In another key section from the December 5, 2020, phone call that Grossberg’s lawyer provided to Wagner, the unnamed Trump campaign official suggested that media outlets should cover this date as a supposed milestone for determining the election — indeed, this had been his entire purpose for getting on this phone call.

Video From the April 12, 2023, edition of MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight

Bartiromo immediately picked up on the Trump campaign’s instruction. On both her weekday morning Fox Business show, as well as her Sunday show on Fox News that Grossberg regularly produced, Bartiromo pushed the January 6 date many, many times, furthering the Trump campaign’s efforts to move the goal posts from its many legal and electoral defeats. These examples included instances in which Bartiromo either mentioned the date first, or she was clearly teeing up the guest to talk about the date, which Bartiromo depicted as an alleged point in time when Congress or Pence could realistically overturn the election.

On December 8, 2020, which was known as the “safe harbor” date against any legal challenges for the election results, Bartiromo hosted then-Trump campaign attorneyJenna Ellis, asking her, “So what do you see as, you know, today's date in terms of the safe harbor date? How does that complicate your challenges?” Ellis responded that “the ultimate date of significance is January 6,” which she said justified the campaign’s continued litigation. This was three days after Bartiromo’s call with the Trump campaign official. [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 12/8/20]

On the December 13 edition of her Sunday show, Bartiromo hosted Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), asking him, “I want you to walk us through what happens on January 6,” which she described as “another date, as we approach a potential transition” of the presidency. Jordan then described the efforts that congressional Republicans would make to object to the election results, in order to prevent the “potential transition” that Bartiromo had described. [Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures, 12/13/20]

Video

Citation From the December 13, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo

On December 14, the date when the Electoral College delegates voted across the country, Bartiromo hosted then-House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. “What's your take on where we are?” she asked. “Is it the end of the line now for the president's campaign to stop and overturn this election as the Electoral College will meet, or are you looking at January 6 as a pivotal date or what?” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 12/14/20]

The next day, December 15, Bartiromo read a news headline about the Electoral College results. Following a video clip of President-elect Joe Biden calling for the country “to unite, to heal,” Bartiromo said in a seeming rebuttal: “The next major step in the election process is on January 6. This is the date we are looking forward to, when Vice President Mike Pence is going to preside over the joint session of Congress while they officially tabulate the electoral votes.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 12/15/20]

Video

Citation From the December 15, 2020, edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo

On December 18, Bartiromo hosted former pro football player and future Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker and his son, right-wing social media personality Christian Walker. Bartiromo played a video clip that Christian Walker had posted in which he declared, “The electors might have cast their votes today. They're not counted until January 6, when Congress meets. … This isn’t over yet.” Bartiromo responded: “I just love that.” [Fox Business, Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, 12/18/20]

On December 20, Bartiromo hosted Herschel and Christian Walker again on her Sunday show, once again praising Christian Walker’s online video and telling him, “You were basically underlining Section 1, Article 2 in the Constitution.” After Christian declared on “January 6, the vice president will count the votes,” Bartiromo did not challenge the apparent contention that Pence could determine the election results, but instead just praised Christian further: “Yes, and that's pretty much what you said on Instagram, which was great. It went viral.” [Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures, 12/20/20]

On the January 3, 2021, edition of her Sunday show — the weekend prior to the joint session of Congress — Bartiromo hosted multiple Republican members of Congress who were planning to challenge the election results. At the conclusion of one segment, she remarked to Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL): “If you're going to object to six states, and then you’ve got a two-hour debate, we’re not going to learn the results here until — well, we're not going to learn on January 6, that’s for sure. This goes into January 7.” (The electoral votes were indeed certified after midnight, under what had become truly unprecedented circumstances.) [Fox News, Sunday Morning Futures, 1/3/21]

Video

Citation From the January 3, 2021, edition of Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo

The manner in which Grossberg has sought to substantiate the main claim in her lawsuit against Fox — that the network was allegedly setting up her and Bartiromo to take a fall in the Dominion lawsuit — is turning out to be a very strange thing indeed. Fox executives must bear ultimate responsibility for the lies the network helped to spread, but at the same time the new evidence that Grossberg has brought to bear in this case makes Bartiromo look worse and worse by revealing more of her reckless on-air behavior and coordination with the Trump campaign’s effort to subvert a national election result.

THE LATEST

Right-wing media figures defending Uganda's anti-gay law are connected to organizations that helped inspire it

04/17/23 1:13 PM EDT

Ben Shapiro: “The great suspicion is that in Frozen 4, they'll make Elsa a lesbian ... if they do that, it is the end of Disney as a company”

04/17/23 12:09 PM EDT

Steve Bannon: “People should have read Mein Kampf – what, in the '20s – and taken it to heart”

04/17/23 12:01 PM EDT

Rep. Paul Gosar promotes pro-Hitler and Holocaust-denying site after it praised him for attacking “Jewish warmongers”

04/17/23 10:29 AM EDT

Angelo Carusone on MSNBC: As Fox is in court, "the cable companies are going to have to decide whether or not they want to give Fox News significantly more money"

04/16/23 9:08 PM EDT

Pagination

Current page1

…

IN THIS ARTICLE

Fox/Dominion Lawsuit

Fox News host Mark Levin demands judge in Dominion lawsuit “step aside”

04/14/23 11:01 AM EDT

Listen to Media Matters' Angelo Carusone explain how the Dominion lawsuit could impact Fox News’ cable contract negotiations

04/13/23 6:38 PM EDT

Judge in Dominion case admonishes Fox lawyers for allegedly withholding discovery and misleading the court about Rupert Murdoch's role

04/12/23

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/here-are-conspiracy-theories-about-dominion-and-2020-election-fox-news-maria-bartiromo

many lnx some vids twts

A recently published brief from Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News shows Fox executives repeatedly called out anchor Maria Bartiromo, implausibly still considered a straight news anchor by the network, for amplifying election fraud lies on right-wing social media platform Parler.Media Matters has identified at least 12 of these posts from the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, at least three of which appear to specifically defame Dominion.

In March 2021, Dominion filed a defamation suit against Fox News and its parent company for the false claims the network pushed after the election. Those false claims were extensive: In the two-week period after Fox News declared Joe Biden the president-elect, the network questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it almost 800 times, including by using Dominion as a scapegoat.

Dominion’s brief calling for a summary judgment in its favor, released to the public last week, reveals that the network knew it was pushing false claims about Dominion’s voting machines. As Dominion detailed in the filing, “Literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility—from the top of the organization to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves—acted with actual malice.” This includes Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo, whom the filing calls out for amplifying baseless attacks against Dominion both on her show and across social media.

The filing also reveals that Fox executive Gary Schreier and Fox Business News President Lauren Petterson lamented that Bartiromo “sometimes” amplified baseless conspiracy theories.

“On November 7, [Petterson] received an alert that there was a coordinated effort on 4chan to spread claims that Dominion voting systems were used to commit fraud… The next day, Gary Schreier warned Petterson that Bartiromo ‘has gop conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.’”

The filing also mentions that after Bartiromo announced that she would be leaving Twitter for the far-right social media platform Parler, “Petterson commented to Schreier, ‘How about get off social all together.’ Schreier responded, ‘I mean if you say crazy wrong shit on Parler is that better just because Parler won’t flag you?’”

Here are some of the posts that Bartiromo shared on Parler amplifying baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election:

Dominion’s brief references several instances in which Bartiromo spread election lies on Parler

The filing mentions that on November 5, Bartiromo “posted unfounded allegations of vote ‘dump[s]’ on social media,” prompting Fox host Brett Baier to alert Bill Sammon, the network’s then Washington bureau chief, “We have to prevent this stuff…We need to fact check.”

Maria Bartiromo Parler Post

Maria Bortiromo Parler Post claiming late night vote drop

The filing details that when Bartiromo hosted Trump lawyerSidney Powell on her show on November 8, 2020, she planned to ask about “voting irregularities” and “Bartiromo knew Powell would respond with conspiracy theories about Dominion.”The day before, Powell had sent Bartiromo an email titled “Election Fraud Info” that Powell had “received from a 'source' which the author herself describes as ‘pretty wackadoodle.’”Bartiromo reportedly described the email as “kooky” and “nonsense.” From the filing:

“Bartiromo … never reported on the existence of this email. Nor did Bartiromo tell her viewers about the source of Powell’s claims or that Trump’s own Senior Advisor and son-in-law rejected the allegations as conspiracy theories. While the claims were laughable on their face, Bartiromo gave them credibility. As Tucker Carlson texted that night, “[t]he software shit is absurd.…Half our viewers have seen the Maria clip.”

Bartiromo also promoted lies from Powell on Parler,including by sharing a November 15 clip from Sunday Morning Futures featuring Powell claiming that “the evidence is coming in so fast” she 'can't even process it all.'”

Maria Bartiromo promoting her interview with Sydney Powell on Parler

The filing also mentions that on November 12, “Schreier notified Petterson and others that Dobbs and Giuliani had ‘[s]poke about servers for the voting machines in foreign country’ on air, but that this claim had not been verified.” (Former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs' program was cancelled in February 2021, days after he was named in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic, another election software company targeted by Fox.) That same day, Schreier had been warned that, per the filing, Bartiromo was “sharing conspiracy theories about Dominion on Parler, to which he responded ‘I don’t know why she invites this.’”

Maria Bortiromo Parler Post saying she'll talk about supposed dominion rigging on her show

Maria Bortiromo Parler Post claiming Venezuela interfered in the election

Bartiromo continued to attack Dominion on November 17, sharing a Gateway Pundit article alleging “Mass Dumps” of votes “for Biden” on Parler, in addition to promoting her segment featuring election fraud claims from disgraced Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Maria Bortiromo Parler Post claiming dominion voting machines were seized in Europe

Maria Bartiromo claiming experts found massive fraud in michigans election

Maria Bartiromo posts on Parler about her interview with Rudy Giuliani

Beyond the posts referenced in Dominion’s filing, Bartiromo spread other election-related lies on Parler in the weeks surrounding the 2020 election.

For example, Bartimoro pushed the debunked claim that dead people had votedby the thousands in Michigan. She also shared content from the Gateway Pundit alleging that a “voter fraud training” was held in the state:

Maria Bartiromo posts on Parler about dead people supposedly voting in 2020

Maria Bartiromo sharing an article alleging voter fraud trainings in detroit

Bartimoro additionally implied that there was cheating during the election and might be during Georgia's U.S. Senate runoff election, and she shared content casting doubts about election integrity:...

many msg show bad trinity knew lying

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/they-knew-it-was-lie-behind-scenes-happenings-fox-while-network-pushed-false-claims-about

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-says-dominion-filings-show-keyhole-view-what-fox-inside

https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/two-days-after-2020-election-fox-news-chief-political-anchor-bret-baier

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/abc-susan-glasser-details-how-fox-executives-lied-about-their-panic-over-ratings-amidst

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/cnn-contributor-breaks-down-how-fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-shows-fox-promoted-lies-led

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/angelo-carusone-there-will-be-serious-business-consequences-fox-news-because

https://www.mediamatters.org/2020-election-lawsuits/fox-news-lied-about-dominion-and-2020-election-compete-far-right-newsmax

https://www.mediamatters.org/rupert-murdoch/rupert-murdoch-told-fox-ceo-suzanne-scott-fox-news-would-concentrate-helping-any-way

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/new-filing-shows:{-tucker-carlson-tried-get-fox-reporter-fired-correctly-fact-checking:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/angelo-carusone/msnbc-angelo-carusone-explains-how-dominions-new-filing-shows-fox-news

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/angelo-carusone-explosive-new-court-filings-prove-crystal-clarity-fox-knew-it-was-pushing

https://www.alternet.org/judges-deny-fox-news-voting/

an 12 22

The final report released by the Jan. 6 committee this week says that Donald Trump – who has spewed election fraud claims for two years now – _{was even stunned}_ by an election fraud claim from one of his former allies, Sidney Powell, the New York Times reports.

Just weeks after the 2020 election, Powell, who's also a former Trump lawyer, said on a conference call that “communist money had flowed through countries like Venezuela, Cuba and perhaps China to interfere with the election.” According to Insider, Powell _{also believed}_ technology company Dominion Voting Systems was in conspiracy with Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.

Former Trump aide Hope Hicks said in response to Powell, the former president “muted his speakerphone and laughed at Powell, telling the others in the room, ‘This does sound crazy, doesn’t it?’”

NYT noted that, however, Trump proceeded to instigate the rioters by saying he “likes the crazies.”

Last month, Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said, "Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

And the Daily Beast reports that Powell finds herself now _{on Trump’s “no-go list”}_ and he no longer takes calls from the lawyer.

Dominion Voting Systems has since _{sued Powell and Giuliani}_ for spouting “baseless voter fraud claims that hurt its business.”

The Jan. 6 committee wrote in its final report that, “Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies. He actively propagated them. Time and again President Trump was informed that his election fraud claims were not true. He chose to spread them anyway. He did so even after they were legally tested and rejected in dozens of lawsuits.”

an 12 22

When the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren handed down its unanimous decision in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964, it established a tough standard that plaintiffs have to meet in defamation lawsuits. Plaintiffs, according to the Warren Court, have to prove “actual malice.” And that is what Dominion Voting Systems is trying to prove in the defamation lawsuits it filed against Fox News, Newsmax TV, One America News (OAN) and others in response to the false claims they promoted about the 2020 presidential election.

After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes, many far-right MAGA Republicans at Fox News, Newsmax and OAN promoted the false claim that Dominion’s voting equipment was used to help Democrats steal the election — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. Fox News, in response to Dominion’s defamation lawsuit, has maintained that its hosts weren’t saying the claims about Dominion were true, and that they were just asking questions.

Dominion, meanwhile, is trying to show, in its $1.6 billion lawsuit, that hosts at Fox News acted with actual malice and promoted claims they knew were nonsense. And on Wednesday, December 21, attorneys for Dominion pointed to Fox News host Sean Hannity as an example of someone who knew that the Big Lie was a lie but promoted the claims of Trump attorney Sidney Powell anyway. Powell, who is also facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, falsely accused Dominion of helping Democrats steal the election from Trump. Another MAGA Republican who made that false claim and is being sued by Dominion is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Dominion has sued former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani as well.

Reporting for the New York Times on December 21, journalist Jeremy Peters explains, “On November 30, 2020, Sean Hannity hosted Sidney Powell on his prime-time Fox News program. As she had in many other interviews around that time — on Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media — Ms. Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spun wild conspiracy theories about what she said was ‘corruption all across the country, in countless districts,’ in a plot to steal reelection from the president, Donald J. Trump. At the center of this imagined plot were machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which Ms. Powell claimed ran an algorithm that switched votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Dominion machines, she insisted, were being used ‘to trash large batches of votes.’”

But when Hannity gave a deposition two years later on Wednesday, December 21, 2022 and was under oath, he admitted, “I did not believe it for one second.”

According to Peters, “The hearing was called to address several issues that need to be resolved before the case heads for a jury trial, which the judge has scheduled to begin in April. Mr. Hannity’s disclosure — along with others that emerged from court on Wednesday about what Fox News executives and hosts really believed as their network became one of the loudest megaphones for lies about the 2020 election — is among the strongest evidence yet to emerge publicly that some Fox employees knew that what they were broadcasting was false.”

Under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard established by the Warren Court 58 years ago, defamation is very difficult to prove. An honest mistake doesn’t fit the definition of defamation — the plaintiff has to show actual malice. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin filed a defamation lawsuit against the Times and lost because Palin and her attorneys couldn’t prove actual malice.

“The high legal standard of proof in defamation cases makes it difficult for a company like Dominion to prevail against a media organization like Fox News,” Peters notes. “Dominion has to persuade a jury that people at Fox were, in effect, saying one thing in private while telling their audience exactly the opposite.And that requires showing a jury convincing evidence that speaks to the state of mind of those who were making the decisions at the network. In Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, Dominion’s lawyers argued that they had obtained ample evidence to make that case.”

Peters adds, “One lawyer for Dominion said that ‘not a single Fox witness’ so far had produced anything supporting the various false claims about the company that were uttered repeatedly on the network. And in some cases, other high-profile hosts and senior executives echoed Mr. Hannity’s doubts about what Mr. Trump and his allies like Ms. Powell were saying, according to theDominion lawyer, Stephen Shackelford. This included Meade Cooper, who oversees prime-time programming for Fox News, and the prime-time star Tucker Carlson, Mr. Shackelford said.”

Citing Cooper and Carlson as examples, Shackleford told the court, “Many of the highest-ranking Fox people have admitted under oath that they never believed the Dominion lies.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/fox-news-ceo-deposed-dominion/

https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/supreme-court-refuses-to-dismiss-dominions-1-3-billion-defamation-suit-against-mike-lindell/

9 22

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/oans-summer-election-conspiracy-theories

The 2020 presidential election was 693 days ago, and One America News Network is still a major hub for both denying the reality of 2020 and projecting conspiracy theories onto future elections.

Since June, OAN’s election fraud coverage has continued to hinge on hosts’ and guests’ repeated denials of the fairness of the 2020 election. It has included everything from claims that the ballot counts were tampered with to continued promotion of Dinesh D'Souza's ridiculous 2000 Mules documentary. And despite an ongoing $1.6 billion defamation suit, OAN has even proclaimed that “we were right” about Dominion Voting Systems.

With the stolen election as bedrock, OAN is looking grimly toward the future, with paranoid warnings that the Democrats will now use TikTok, postal unions, and their October surprise — “the next COVID election variant” — to cheat in the midterms and beyond. All this as the supposedly “Stalinesque” FBI runs interference for President Joe Biden’s political goals with actions like seizing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s cell phone.

OAN’s stolen election cinematic universe remains as rich with misinformation as ever, and they're hoping their viewers get involved. As Steve Bannon put it during an appearance on the network, “It’s all about … whether this audience, whether this audience turns out and brings people with it, and becomes poll workers, election judges, election officials, and also force multipliers to get everybody to the polls...

https://www.alternet.org/2022/09/mike-lindell-dominion-false-narrative/

defam ct loss

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-knew-it-was-pushing-lies-about-dominion

no lnx

Fox News knew it was pushing lies about Dominion

Fox largely chose to ignore its own reporting as it focused on spreading the “Big Lie” and wild conspiracy theories about voting machines

WRITTEN BY GIDEON TAAFFE & ZACHARY PLEAT

PUBLISHED 09/02/22

Reports from Fox News in mid-November 2020 make it clear that the network knew it was peddling falsehoods about Dominion voting machines, yet many of its personalities continued to overwhelmingly spew conspiracy theories on prime-time cable television.

Dominion is suing Fox for defamation after the right-wing cable channel extensively pushed false claims about the 2020 election and Dominion’s voting machines. In the two-week period after Fox News declared Joe Biden the president-elect, the network questioned the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it almost 800 times, including by using Dominion as a scapegoat. Fox became an outlet that aired Trump campaign lies about Dominion voting machines getting hacked without any evidence. The channel’s coverage of the election mimicked the baseless claims of Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.

For Dominion to prove that Fox acted with “actual malice,” the company must show that Fox knew the allegations made about Dominion were false, or that Fox acted in reckless disregard for the truth. In addition to pursuing how culpable the Murdochs were in this regard, Dominion lawyers are deposing Fox prime-time hosts and appear to have text messages that show employees knew Fox was peddling lies, according to Washington Post reporting.

While these lines of inquiry may be already sufficient to meet the “actual malice” standard, brief moments in Fox’s own programming also show the network was contemporaneously aware the Dominion allegations were lies, even if these few examples were drowned out. The Washington Post noted that Dominion may currently be trying to ascern “whether Fox personalities who challenged election fraud claims on air faced any repercussions.”

Some articles and newsletters on FoxNews.com from November 2020 included statements from Dominion rejecting the baseless conspiracy theories or Fox staffers mocking the conspiracy theories. On the channel’s programming, some Fox personalities made the effort to debunk what their own colleagues were pushing and encouraged the Fox audience to accept the election. This included directly fact-checking lies about Dominion, labeling such claims as disinformation, and explaining that no evidence for these conspiracy theories had been presented. Unfortunately, vastly outnumbered by Fox lies about the election, these moments were brief and few:

Fox correspondent Eric Shawn debunked Trump lies about Dominion, citing cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security to call it an example of “disinformation.” [Fox News, Special Report, 11/12/20]

Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy debunked guest Jonathan Turley’s claim that Dominion voting software “had glitches.” Doocy said: “With that Dominion software: Five counties in Michigan and Georgia had problems. And the Dominion software was used in two of the counties. And in every instance, largely, it was human error – a problem, but the software did not affect the vote counts.” [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 11/13/20]

Days later, Doocy and Turley acknowledged that there was no evidence for the Dominion conspiracy theories. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 11/16/20]

Shawn offered to “clarify the election facts as we know them right now,” debunking several baseless claims of voter fraud on-air, reading off the response from Dominion to one particular claim about the company. Shawn also noted that the conspiracy theories are “designed to undermine your faith in American democracy.” [Fox News, America’s News HQ, 11/15/20]

Fox correspondent Rick Leventhal said Rudy Giuliani “offered no evidence” for his claims that Dominion is “a radical left company with ties to Venezuela, outright accusing it of fixing the 2020 results.” [Fox News, Fox News at Night, 11/16/20]

Fox News anchor Dana Perino and contributor Karl Rove recognized on-air that the accusations were all potential grounds for lawsuits by Dominion against Giuliani and Powell. [Fox News, The Daily Briefing, 11/19/20]

Shawn interviewed Dominion representative Michael Steel for nine minutes to debunk specific right-wing allegations against the company. [Fox News, America’s News HQ, 11/22/20]

Just two days before the Jan. 6 insurrection, Doocy repeatedly pointed out that Trump’s supporters have shown no evidence to support Dominion conspiracy theories. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/4/21]

THE LATEST

On MSNBC's American Voices, Angelo Carusone explains how right-wing media “started using the language of QAnon” following Biden's speech

09/04/22 8:24 PM EDT

On MSNBC's The Cross Connection, Angelo Carusone explains how mainstream cable networks are embracing a “shift towards authoritarianism”

09/03/22 11:48 AM EDT

Fox News host Greg Gutfeld: “I am pro-disinformation”

09/02/22 6:00 PM EDT

Greg Gutfeld says Biden’s speech warning of extremism is an attempt “to goad you into an emotional state for violence”

09/02/22 5:36 PM EDT

Fox News knew it was pushing lies about Dominion

09/02/22 5:35 PM EDT

IN THIS ARTICLE

Fox News

Fox-News-MMFA-Tag.png

Voter Fraud and Suppression

Voter Suppression

Dominion's lawsuit against Fox could have severe consequences

07/05/22 11:21

Fox News’ Mark Levin and Sarah Palin suggest Dominion computers are being used as part of a “fraud and abuse” scheme in Alaska

05/04/22

Uncovered documents from defamation case show that Fox News legal strategy is full election denial

05/02/22

mma 8 22 no vid

two additional right-wing activists who have been implicated in a wide-ranging scheme to breach election data appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast from late 2020 to mid-2021 to discuss their efforts to overturn the results of the election. The resurfaced video provides a contemporary account of what the two men were saying in their own words during the period now under scrutiny.

The two right-wing figures are former Michigan state senator and election fraud conspiracy theorist Patrick Colbeck and Matthew DePerno, a conservative Michigan lawyer and Trump-endorsed Republican nominee for state attorney general. Both have been active in efforts in Michigan to overturn the results of the election, often describing their work in real time on Bannon’s podcast. A new investigation from The Washington Post partially reveals each of their roles in accessing sensitive electoral data.

DePerno is a frequent guest on War Room – a supposed authority on purported security flaws in Dominion voting systems and other discredited election denialism. Following former President Donald Trump’s loss, DePerno hired a forensics firm called SullivanStrickler to obtain election data from Dominion Voting Systems as part of a lawsuit he had brought seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to the Post. After a judge granted DePerno limited access to the machines in December 2020, he and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell instructed SullivanStrickler to carry out a forensic examination of Dominion’s voting systems, which was successful in gaining access to the data.

Colbeck appears to have downloaded some of data that SullivanStrickler collected as part of the DePerno investigation. An account tied to Colbeck “downloaded six files from the same folder on Jan. 5, 2021, according to the records, including files labeled ‘election management server’ and ‘ThumbDrives,’” according to the Post. The Post also reported that DePerno couldn’t remember if he’d given access to the files to Colbeck and the other election denialists who accessed the data.

Colbeck and DePerno – who is now facing criminal investigation for conspiracy to tamper with voting machines across three counties in Michigan – are two of several election denial activists who have appeared on War Room and subsequently been implicated in the data breach scheme. Brian Kennedy, a senior fellow at a Trump-aligned think tank, also appeared on War Room in late 2020 to discuss his involvement in the failed recount campaign following Trump’s loss, as previously reported by Media Matters. Kennedy was named in an earlier Post investigation as having been in communication with the forensics firm that obtained the data for DePerno. The latest Post story says former War Room guest and right-wing commentator Joe Oltmann also accessed the data.

Matthew DePerno on War Room

On May 5, 2021, DePerno appeared on Bannon’s show to talk about his ongoing lawsuit in Antrim Countyand what he claimed were Dominion security flaws. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.) In that interview, he referenced Dominion’s “election management system,” a phrase very similar to the name of one of the files Colbeck allegedly downloaded.

[vid]

We’re the only case in the country that’s been able to look at actual forensic images,” DePerno said. “December 6, 2020, we went into Antrim County and actually collected forensic images of their election management system.” DePerno then claimed that through this work, his team had been able to “just manipulate any database we want.”

Earlier in the interview, he’d claimed that his access to Dominion systems had given his team the capacity, in general, to change the outcome of any election on a hypothetical ballot.

“Looking at this data, looking at the forensic images and conducting our own tests with ballots and the Dominion system, we put out a video this week that shows that we can flip votes in any race, in any election, up ballot, down ballot, from the president's race, all the way down to any school board race,” DePerno said. “We can select certain races to keep clean. We can select certain races to flip votes in from one candidate to another.”

In June, DePerno again referenced Dominion’s election management system on War Room.

“We’ve proved now that there was direct access to the Antrim County election management system,” DePerno said. “We show that on November 5, we can see it in the forensic images, that an anonymous user logged onto the EMS remotely with escalated privileges and made changes to the database when they were trying to retabulate the election.”

Colbeck’s interest in the “election management server” file may have been tied to DePerno’s repeated claims about what access to that system allowed a user to do.

There is no evidence that any votes tabulated by Dominion were changed in the 2020 election. Still, cybersecurity researchers have warned that distributing the kind of data that DePerno and Colbeck had access to could potentially be used in the future to exploit security flaws and engage in precisely the type of activities that Trump supporters are falsely alleging happened in 2020.

Patrick Colbeck on War Room

Colbeck made several appearances on Bannon’s show immediately after Trump’s loss to discuss his efforts to challenge the Michigan election results.

On November 19, 2020, Colbeck described himself as a “bit of a tech geek,” and explained that he wanted to get involved in the recount effort so he could investigate the system’s software.

“I went in there wanting to understand the stuff that people weren't physically seeing or on the ballot,” Colbeck said. “So I wanted to understand the electronic chain of command between vote tallies and and the communications of vote tallies.”

Later the same day, Colbeck again appeared on War Room and falsely claimed that vote counts were not reliable because tabulators had been connected to the internet.

“Then you get to the basics of a vote tally, which is not – there's no chain of custody around that, particularly around paper chain of custody and electronic chain of custody,” Colbeck said. “When you've got the tabulator, it's connected to the internet, there is zero chain of custody around the vote tally.”

“So is it any wonder why we had strange vote flipping happening in the middle of the night?” he added.

[vid]

the following week, Colbeck returned to War Room to again claim, incorrectly, that “the tabulator computers and the adjudicator computers and the local data center … were all networked to each other” and connected to “a cable that connected to the internet.”

“And you could see the proof that they were all connected to the internet,” Colbeck continued. “If you go look in the bottom right hand corner of all your Windows 10-based PCs and you see the little window on the bottom, there is a little icon that if you roll the mouse over there, it says, connected to the internet. But all the Detroit elected officials that I contacted that night refused – they said specifically that it was not connected to the internet. And from my background, I know differently.”

In fact, an audit and report from Michigan Republicans in 2021 found that although some of the machines had been connected to a local area network (LAN), there is no evidence that the tabulators were connected to any outside networks or that any purported internet connection had been exploited to alter any votes. The LAN connection, “which would create the same icon on a computer screen indicating a network connection as is shown by an internet accessible network,” may have accounted for Colbeck’s confusion.

Tracy Wimmer of the Michigan Department of State had previously debunked Colbeck’s false claims as well.

“No ballot tabulation machines were connected to the internet at Detroit’s counting board,” Wimmer told The Associated Press in December 2020. “The machines were networked locally to each other and the adjudication machines by ethernet cable, and so some people suggested they were online. They were not.”

Although it’s not publicly known precisely what information the account linked to Colbeck downloaded, the name of one of the other files he allegedly accessed – “ThumbDrives” – offers a possible clue. In Michigan, when voting is over, officials transfer the final tally generated by the tabulators, which Colbeck incorrectly said were connected to the internet, to the clerk’s office via flash drives. The data Colbeck received could be related to those final vote tallies or other information related to transferring the vote totals.

It’s not clear from the Post’s reporting whether Colbeck or any of the other election deniers who downloaded the Michigan data could face legal exposure. In general, breaching an election system and distributing the data is a serious crime. Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, a hero and repeat guest on War Room: Pandemic, is facing felony charges for allegedly tampering with election equipment and for obstruction following Trump’s loss.

an 8 22

MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace confessed that one of the stories she was covering was "the scariest thing I’ve heard on this program in a long time."

In a recent report by *Washington Post*reporter Aaron Davis, it was revealed that allies of former President Donald Trump copied files from Georgia's electronic voting systems and then shared them with Trump's lawyers and other election deniers.

Wallace asked if that meant that people like Sidney Powell had her hands on such data. Davis said that they've made inquiries about whether Powell is one of those who has the data, but they haven't heard back yet.

"One interesting thing that you can tell, because of the detail of this particular computer data, is that while it was being taken from Georgia and used and shared among people in Georgia, it was also being shared among, say, Doug Kogan with the Cyber Ninjas working in the Arizona case and being shared with lawyers working on the Antrim, Michigan case," David explained. "So, there was multistate sharing of this data by attorneys who were trying to maintain some kind of arm's length from the Trump campaign itself and make it appear as if these were individual efforts."

He said that it's clear that all of it was being organized by the same pro-Trump sources.

"There are contracts that show — signed by Sidney Powell, signed by Jesse Banal, attorney and outside counsel for the Trump campaign, authorizing this forensic work, and one of the almost laughable parts of the contracts that have turned up now is that the computer forensics firm said, 'We trust that all of this information and stuff is stuff that you're licensed to use,'" Davis cited.

It turns out the info they were evaluating and doing forensic work on belonged to the government.

So, "it is a national issue," Davis continued. "And to your lead-in, you're right. So much of the post-2020 time period was people trying to look back and say, 'what happened before,' and 'was there problems about how the election was taking place?' Here, we're starting years before the next presidential election with a certain segment of the population bent on proving that there are problems with this software, and now have it. And we don't know how they could untangle and use it to manipulate or sabotage future elections."

"That is the scariest thing I've heard said on this program in a long time," Wallace confessed. She then turned to former CIA officer Tracy Walder and asked, "what do you need Russian election meddlers for when you have Sidney Powell?"

Watch the video below or at this link.

an 722

no lnx guk

A judge ruling in favor of a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit moving forward signals the possibility of looming financial woes for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. According to The Guardian, Delaware Supreme Court Judge Eric David in June ruled that Dominion Voting Systems could proceed with its defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation.

The lawsuit is a legal pushback against Fox News' reporting and perpetuation of voter fraud and election misinformation following the 2020 presidential election.

Per The Guardian, David determined "that it was a reasonable inference that Murdoch and son Lachlan either knew outright that Dominion had not manipulated the election or 'recklessly disregarded the truth' when Fox disseminated lies initially launched by Donald Trump."

READ MORE: Right-wing media outlets continue to rage against Dominion’s defamation lawsuits: report

Speaking to The Guardian, a number of legal experts have offered their perspective on the case and why it suggests trouble ahead of Fox News. Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a Stetson University constitutional law professor and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, weighed in on Dominion's case as she noted that the voting technology company appears to have a substantial argument.

“Dominion has a very strong case against Fox News,” Torres-Spelliscy said to the news outlet, adding that "all of the 'conspiracy theories about Dominion’s machines were just pure bunk,'" She also noted that "Fox as a news organization should have known that and not given this aspect of [Trump’s] ‘big lie’ a megaphone.”

“I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives,” said Media Matters for America chief executive, Angelo Carusone.

However, Fox News is confident that it will survive this legal battle.

READ MORE: The 'Fox News of justice': Jon Stewart slams SCOTUS justices' flurry of controversial and conservative rulings

A Fox spokesman told also released a brief statement to the news outlet on behalf of the network. “We are confident we will prevail in this case, as the First Amendment is the foundation of our democracy and freedom of the press must be protected,” the spokesman said.

In addition to the lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion also has a $1.6 billion lawsuit against conservative news networks One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax.

an 7 22

a judge ruling in favor of a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit moving forward signals the possibility of looming financial woes for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News. According to The Guardian, Delaware Supreme Court Judge Eric David in June ruled that Dominion Voting Systems could proceed with its defamation lawsuit against Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation.

The lawsuit is a legal pushback against Fox News' reporting and perpetuation of voter fraud and election misinformation following the 2020 presidential election.

Per The Guardian, David determined "that it was a reasonable inference that Murdoch and son Lachlan either knew outright that Dominion had not manipulated the election or 'recklessly disregarded the truth' guk when Fox disseminated lies initially launched by Donald Trump."

“I think once you start to pull the discovery material, what you’re going to find is there was a lot of communication between the Trump people both internally and externally about pushing very specific lies and narratives,” said Media Matters for America chief executive, Angelo Carusone.

However, Fox News is confident that it will survive this legal battle.

In addition to the lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion also has a $1.6 billion lawsuit against conservative news networks One America News Network (OAN) and Newsmax.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

...[quite long]

GURLs

rising star in rep movement

http://www.furmangroup.com/about_exec_joanna.php

my name is Joanna Miller, I am a junior at American University studying National Security and Foreign Policy with a minor in Mandarin Chinese Language, and am currently on the Cyber Intelligence Research Team at IWP. My internship experience overall at IWP has been life-changing, and has inspired me to do things that I would have never imagined myself doing. This is all because of the fact that IWP equips its students and interns for future careers in intelligence, national security, and more by learning how to think about international relations issues in their proper context, rather than the way we imagine them to be. Also, IWP emphasizes the importance of being leaders whose primary goal is to serve others first, rather than climb the career ladder. Students and interns are taught by professors and research practitioners who have had long-term careers in the U.S. Military, Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Department of State, and more, who give students and interns hands-on experiences relevant to actual work in the fields of intelligence and national security.

On the Cyber Intelligence Research Team, I have had the privilege of working with another intern on a research project supervised by Dean Lane, the Senior Vice President of Cyber Intelligence, who is a retired U.S. Navy pilot who fought with the Special Forces in the Vietnam War, was the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of many companies, and author of #1 bestseller CIO Wisdom. Our project this semester utilized open source intelligence to analyze Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities and assess how a cyber war between China and Russia over the Central Asian oil sector could occur.

On top of the fantastic research experience I have had, the IWP community has been nothing but organized, helpful, and supportive from the very first day. As an intern, whether I was needing help setting up for an event, needed career advice, wanted to be partnered with an alumnus working in a field in which I am interested, and more, professors, staff, and students have never fallen short of ensuring I had what I needed to be the most successful. IWP truly is a hidden gem in Washington, D.C. and has given me the experience of a lifetime that I am proud to share with family and friends.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/trump-2656976697/

The report used by former President Donald Trump to push his big lie about the 2020 presidential election was reportedly written by one of his own White House staffers, new details reveal. GUK

The Guardian has reportedly reviewed the original version of the reference document. While the public version of Trump's reference is said to have been authored by Katherine Friess, who served as a volunteer member of the former president's post-election legal team, new developments have revealed the report "was, in fact, produced by the senior Trump White House policy aide Joanna Miller."

[Joanna Miller served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Trump White House covering Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and advancing President Trump’s Buy American, Hire American agenda. Prior to her time at the White House, she had served in the White House Liaison's office in the U.S. Department of State after graduating from American University in May of 2019.]

Per The Guardian, the report on Dominion Voting Systems, which was titled, “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties” claimed the election technology company "corruptly ensured there could be 'technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count.'”

According to an inside source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, "the original version of the Dominion report named Miller — who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro — as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly."

The report was supposed to be used as a tool to support Trump's efforts to have election results overturned in battleground states President Joe Biden won. However, Trump administration officials also began using the report to support other tactics they were reportedly considering to overturn the outcome of the election so the former president could remain in power.

After the report was made public, Navarro, according to the inside source, began referencing the baseless claims in his own report which he compiled with help from Miller and, Garrett Ziegler, who also worked as a policy aide for the Trump White House.

“Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of former White House advisor Navarro's report.

The latest development comes as the House Select Committee continues its investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection and the circumstances surrounding it.

guk ... Dominion report made a number of unsubstantiated allegations that claimed Dominion Voting Systems corruptly ensured there could be “technology glitches which resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count” Citing unnamed Venezuelan officials, the report also pushed the conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems used software from the election company and had ties to “state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies” After the Dominion report became public, Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report, produced with assistance from his aides at the White House, including Miller and another policy aide, Garrett Ziegler, the source said....Ziegler has also said on a rightwing podcast that he and others in Navarro’s office – seemingly referring to Trump White House aides Christopher Abbott and Hannah Robertson – started working on Navarro’s report about two weeks before the 2020 election took place. “Two weeks before the election, we were doing those reports hoping that we would pepper the swing states with those,” Ziegler said of the three-part Navarro report in an appearance last July on The Professor’s Record with David K Clements. ...The research in the Dominion report also formed the backbone of foreign election interference claims by the former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who argued Trump could, as a result, assume emergency presidential powers and suspend normal law.executive order 13848, which authorized sweeping powers in the event of foreign election interference, as well as a draft executive order that would have authorized the seizure of voting machines, the Guardian has previously reported. guk

The claims about Venezuela in the Dominion report appear to have spurred Powell to ask Trump at a 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House – coincidentally facilitated by Ziegler – that she be appointed special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Miller’s authorship of the Dominion report was not the last time the Trump White House, or individuals in the administration, prepared materials to advance the former president’s claims about a stolen election and efforts to return himself to office.

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack revealed last year it had found evidence the White House Communications Agency produced a letter for the Trump justice department official Jeffrey Clark to use to pressure states to decertify Biden’s election win.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/fox-news-dominion/

lawsuit viable?

READ:Federal judge orders pro-Trump lawyers to pay almost $187,000 for their 'abuse of the legal system'

In December 2020, Colorado-based attorneys Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker filed a class-action lawsuit making the false, totally debunked claim that the presidential election had been stolen from then-President Donald Trump— and now, a federal judge is ordering them to pay almost $187,000 to help offset the legal costs of the groups they sued in a meritless lawsuit.

Judge N. Reid Neureiter, according to Washington Post reporter Rosalind S. Helderman, was vehemently critical of Fielder and Walker, saying, "As officers of the court, these attorneys have a higher duty and calling that requires meaningful investigation before prematurely repeating in court pleadings unverified and uninvestigated defamatory rumors that strike at the heart of our democratic system and were used by others to foment a violent insurrection that threatened our system of government. They are experienced lawyers who should have known better. They need to take responsibility for their misconduct."

Fielder and Walker filed their December 2020 lawsuit on behalf of 160 million Trump voters, who they claimed had been wronged by an elaborate plan to steal the election — and those targeted in the lawsuit included Facebook (including founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan), Dominion Voting Systems and elected officials in four states. And Neureiter declared that they needed to pay a financial price for wasting the court's time with so frivolous a lawsuit. Fielder and Walker, according to Helderman, are appealing Neureiter's ruling.

Helderman notes, "Their case was dismissed in April. In August, Neureiter ruled that the attorneys had violated their ethical obligations by filing it in the first place, arguing that the duo had run afoul of legal rules that prohibit clogging the courts with frivolous motions and lodging information in court that is not true. At the time, he called their suit 'the stuff of which violent insurrections are made,' alleging they made little effort to determine the truth of their conspiratorial claims before filing them in court."

READ: ['You were gullible': Federal judge torches Trump's election lies — and a rioter who believed them]

Dominion Voting Systems has filed some lawsuits of its own — only Dominion's lawsuits have actual merit.

Following the 2020 election, pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell made the bogus claim that Dominion's voting technology was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the election from then-President Donald Trump just as it was used by supporters of the late leftist President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Major problem for Powell: Dominion responded that its voting technology was never even used in Venezuela, thus making it physically impossible for Dominion to have helped the Chavez regime in any way. Dominion has sued Powell, Fox News, pro-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and others for promoting lies and conspiracy theories against the company.

Neureiter declared that Fielder and Walker need to pay a financial price for their frivolous lawsuit, which he described as "an abuse of the legal system and an interference with the machinery of government."

Helderman reports, "Neureiter said the lawyers should pay just over $11,000 to cover the legal fees of the states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, both defendants in the suit, a dollar figure the duo had agreed was fair. The two lawyers had balked, however, at far higher fees requested by three other entities: Facebook, Dominion Voting Systems and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), an election reform advocacy group that has received funding from Zuckerberg and Chan. In a 21-page order (on November 22), Neureiter ordered that Fielder and Walker pay $50,000 to Facebook and $62,930 each to Dominion and CTCL, arguing that billing records submitted by the group showed the fees were reasonable given the prominence of the lawyers who worked on the case and the amount of time they spent."

dominion? saw it on facebook or somewhere?

It was all made up!' Maddow reveals bombshell Rudy Giuliani testimony about origins of Trump's big election lie

Bob Brigham Raw Story

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Tuesday examined the origins of former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" of election fraud, which she described as the "current animating force"...

an 521

ohio Supreme Court rules in favor of state election board amidDominion voting machine controversy

Meaghan Ellis May 25, 2021

The Ohio Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of the board of elections in Stark County, Ohio. According to Talking Points Memo, the vote will free up funding that was initially blocked by Republican lawmakers who opposed the purchase of new voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.

Back in December, the board previously expressed interest in spending $1.5 million on new machines as the county's were old and dilapidated. The goal was to replace the worn machines in time for the county's special election in May. Unfortunately, the goal was not met due to the conspiracy theory perpetuated by Trump supporters.

After being inundated with complaints from the former president's base, the Republican-led county commissioners folded under pressure and rejected the board's request to purchase the machines. However, the board fired back. Despite the influx of phone complaints from conspiracy theorists, the board requested that the Court force commissioners' hand to approve their purchase.

The latest ruling follows the March lawsuit filed against the county to block the purchase. Due to lawmakers' efforts to slow the purchase of the machines, Stark County was unable to acquire the machines in time for its special elections in May. Per Talking Points Memo, the lawsuit stated:

"To have the new ICX voting machines in place for the November 2, 2021, General Election, Stark County must sign a contract with Dominion by June 15, 2021, but this deadline will not be met absent an Order, Judgment, and/or Writ from this Court before then directing the County Commissioners to acquire the ICX voting machines," adding: "Although this is the last date possible, allowing additional time is highly advisable to guarantee a smooth 2021 General Election for the Stark County voters and Board of Elections personnel."

Meanwhile, former Trump campaign staffers have also filed their own lawsuit against the elections board alleging that "they broke open meetings laws while deciding to purchase the Dominion machines."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Former Trump campaign staffers file lawsuit in Ohio on the strength ... ›

Right-wing Newsmax blasted after apologizing for broadcasting ... ›

Busted? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell's re-election don ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Voting machines didn't steal the election. But they're a terrible ... ›

Ohio Supreme Court takes case over voting machines purchase ›

MyPillow Sues to Counter Dominion Voting Systems' Defamation ... ›

ninja BS spreads to pa (subcontractor trms) MI, GA? machines must be tossed/tainted

In Stark County, Ohio, a continuation of the fight over the 2020 presidential election is in full swing although the right-wing arguments are founded on a Big Lie. According to Talking Points Memo, :{former Trump campaign staffers have filed a new lawsuit focused on allegations of "misconduct by the county board of elections.:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{":(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:

The problems began back in December when the Stark County Board of Elections voted in favor of investing $1.5 million for the purchase of new voting equipment from Dominion Voting Systems. However, in March the Republican-led Stark County Board of Commissioners pushed back with a vote opposing the purchase of 1,450 machines after received an influx of complaints from Trump supporters.

"They believe the election was stolen from Trump and we should stand by Trump and the Dominion machines have been known to be hacked," Commissioner Richard Regula said to the Canton Repository. "It's been the most calls I've ever received as a county commissioner. … I had 17 voicemails in one day."

In addition to their arguments, the commissioners released a statement explaining their decision to block the county's purchase of the machines as they raised questions about the cost of voting machines.

"Whenever there exists a potential cloud (as acknowledged by the Dominion representative at the February 2, 2021 work session) or public perception or concern regarding a vendor's long-term viability, regardless of the cause or reason, the County must take a vendor's long-term viability into account," they wrote.

Now, the county board of elections has filed a lawsuit against the commissions. The lawsuit, filed in Ohio Supreme Court, is reportedly pleading for "justices to force the commissioners to cough up the money — and fast." With a special election in August and another election set for November, officials worry they may not have an adequate number of machines.

Per Talking Points Memo, the lawsuit states:

As this lawsuit presses forward, Trump is also joining the Big Lie bandwagon as far-right news outlets are attempting yet again to perpetuate the Big Lie. "The Mainstream Media and Radical Left Democrats want to stay as far away as possible from the Presidential Election Fraud, which should be one of the biggest stories of our time," Trump wrote in a statement over the weekend, following up with a warning about the nonexistent fraud on OAN this week: "It's being uncovered now."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

421

smartmatic ~ dobbs, pirro and bartir

prophylactic

an221

2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, underway on Thursday, is being covered by Right Side Broadcasting — a conservative media outlet founded in 2015. During a panel discussion that Right Side was covering, speakers promoted the debunked claim that former President Donald Trump really won the 2020 election — inspiring Right Side to cut away with an emphatic disclaimer.

Obviously hoping to shield Right Side from legal liability, a host jumped in and told viewers, "There's a lot of sensitive topics being talked about right now. We want everyone to do their own research in regards to what they're talking about in this discussion right now —anything with the election, anything like that. It's important to do your own research."

dominion defam

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/my-pillow-lawsuit/

an 221

after spending months pushing conspiracy theories about voter fraud, Lou Dobbs is reportedly out of a job.

"Fox News has canceled 'Lou Dobbs Tonight,' the program hosted by television's staunchest supporter of Donald Trump and of his assertions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, The Times has learned. Dobbs' program, which airs twice nightly at 5 and 7 p.m. Eastern on the Fox Business Network, will have its final airing Friday, according to a Fox News representative who confirmed the cancellation," the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News but he will in all likelihood not appear on the company's networks again. In addition to his Fox Business Network program, he occasionally turned up on the Fox News Channel as a commentator," the LA Times reported. "The cancellation comes a day after voting software company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company claims the hosts perpetuated lies and disinformation about Smartmatic's role in the election, damaging its business and reputation."

Read the full report.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

newsmax anchor later apologized for walking off? stop steal BS smartmatic

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/mike-lindell/

121 an

dominion plans to sue pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell for defamation — 'imminently'

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/angry-at-us-election-defeat-trump-seeks-partial-recount-in-wisconsin

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mitch-mcconnell-re-election/

no lnx

many maps tables

Busted? Why the numbers behind Mitch McConnell's re-election don't add up

Mitch McConnell slammed for repeatedly sabotaging stimulus negotiation efforts

Meaghan Ellis

DC Report December 19, 2020

On a Thursday in August in Louisville, months before the 2020 election, a parade of cars filled with Kentucky Teamster representatives and labor groups, showed their fury at Mitch McConnell's constant blocking of critical COVID aid. They drove by McConnell's office raucously honking and bearing signs saying "Mitch better have my money."

In 2017, a Public Policy Polling Survey asked Kentuckians, "Do you approve or disapprove of Senator Mitch McConnell's job performance?" Only 18% approved. He clawed his rating back up to 39% on the eve of the election.

McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, rarely holds town hall meetings with Kentucky voters—not since a heated exchange with an angry constituent went viral.

1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.

So, what exactly drove these angry Kentuckians to reelect Mitch McConnell with a 19-point advantage over opponent Amy McGrath—57.8% to 38.2%?

Even as Republicans across the country still insist that the election was rife with fraudulent Democratic votes, no one's asking how McConnell managed one of the most lopsided landslides of the Nov. 3 election. They should. An investigation of Kentucky voting results by DCReport raises significant questions about the vote tallies in McConnell's state.

McConnell racked up huge vote leads in traditionally Democratic strongholds, including counties that he had never before carried.

There were wide, unexplained discrepancies between the vote counts for presidential candidates and down-ballot candidates.

Significant anomalies exist in the state's voter records. Forty percent of the state's counties carry more voters on their rolls than voting-age citizens.

Kentucky and many other states using vote tabulation machines made by Election Systems & Software all reported down-ballot race results at significant odds with pre-election polls.

[caption id="attachment_21747" align="aligncenter" width="625"] The 2020 Kentucky U.S. Senate election results map[/caption]

DCReport focused on the results in three counties in eastern Kentucky's Appalachian Mountains, two of which Democrats usually always win, but similar patterns emerge in other counties across the state. Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly for Democrats as recently as the 2019 gubernatorial election, there were a staggering number of Democrats voting Republican in 2020.

In rural Breathitt County, for instance, there are 9,508 registered Democrats and just 1,599 registered Republicans. The county has a history of close contests, but Amy McGrath got only 1,652 votes versus 3,738 for McConnell, a 67% to 29% trouncing. McGrath's votes, if accurate, equaled only 17% of registered Democrats in Breathitt County.

Conventional political wisdom in McConnell-land holds that these days "ancestral Kentucky Democrats" vote Republican, and analysts shouldn't correlate party registration with voting patterns. But simply dismissing any anomalies based on anecdotal hearsay ignores the data and other possible explanations. McConnell won Breathitt County in 2020 with 1,308 more votes than he received in the county's much closer 2014 race, which he won by fewer than 400 votes. The 2019 governor's race was also a squeaker in Breathitt County, but Democrat Andy Beshear eked out a 69-vote victory. Beshear won the race statewide.

McConnell's results were even more out of whack in two other nearby Appalachian counties. In his six previous Senate elections, Elliott and Wolfe counties had never voted for McConnell. Even up to last year, Elliott County remained reliably Democratic in non-presidential races, voting for the party's entire Democratic slate in both the 2015 and 2019 statewide elections. Yet in 2020, McConnell won 64% of the votes in Wolfe County and 66% of the votes in Elliott County. McGrath only got 21% of registered Democrats in Wolfe and 20% in Elliott.

Next, take the premise that there would be some basic logic in the voting patterns of those who did vote Democratic. One might expect a registered Democrat, who's going to vote Democratic, would walk into the booth and cast their vote for both Joe Biden and Amy McGrath. But the data tell another story. In 119 of 120 counties, Amy McGrath got more votes than Joe Biden. In some counties, the votes were close. But in counties like Breathitt and Elliott, 1 out of 5 voters appear to have filled out their ballots with votes for both the female Democratic Amy McGrath and the Republican pussy-grabber Donald Trump.

Then there is the question of why a county like Breathitt has more registered voters than it has people of voting age? 2019 population data shows that Breathitt County had 12,630 people with approximately 23% below the voting age of 18. This means approximately 9,700 people are of voting age, yet there are 11,497 registered voters. Having 100% of the voting-age population registered would be astounding enough, but Breathitt County appears to have almost 120% more registered voters than age-eligible citizens. And looking further, it appears this is not limited to Breathitt.

In November 2017, Judicial Watch, a right-wing non-partisan foundation promoting transparency, sued Kentucky over its "Dirty Voter Rolls" and its failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists.The suit argued that 48 of the 120 Kentucky counties had more registered voters than citizens over the age of 18 and alleged that Kentucky was one of only three states with a statewide active registration rate greater than 100% of the age-eligible citizen population. Kentucky's inflated voter rolls, and lack of transparency, provide a perfect cover for malfeasant behavior regarding the election results.

Turning an 18% approval into a 58% win may seem like a "turning water into wine"-style miracle, but a "smoke & mirrors" parlor trick seems more likely. To better understand how the data could have been manipulated, look no further than Trump's own legal filings. In an incompetent post-election lawsuit, the Trump team may have intended to accuse Democrats of election fraud, but in describing a possible plot, they attributed the cheating to Trump himself.

In a Dec. 4 filing in Georgia, Trump's legal team referred to a "machine-controlled algorithm deliberately run" by a voting machine vendor, Dominion Voting Systems. They allege this algorithm "generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden and flipped them to Mr. Trump." So Trump's own legal team, instead of providing evidence of fraud by Biden's side, may have inadvertently revealed fraud benefiting Trump. In describing a deliberate, vendor installed, machine-controlled algorithm automatically taking a percentage of Biden's votes and giving them to Trump, they certainly are outlining how fraud could have been executed.

Trump's team claims Dominion was the machine vendor embedding algorithms to "flip" votes but is Trump pointing to one machine vendor to distract from another?

In Kentucky, when looking at counties where the numbers leap out on behalf of Mitch McConnell, none used Dominion machines. Most used machines from Election Systems & Software (ES&S), a Dominion competitor. If you swap ES&S for Dominion in the alleged vote-flipping scheme, you may arrive at an alternate explanation for why Amy McGrath's numbers weren't lining up and correlating with Biden's.

To steal an election it may make sense to use different algorithms for each race on the ballot so results did not appear to be uniform. Knowing the McGrath-McConnell race faced more nationwide scrutiny, schemers might have had to miscount votes by different margins in the presidential and Senate races. Flipping more votes from Biden to Trump than McGrath votes to McConnell would explain her getting approximately 20% more votes than the Democratic presidential candidate.

Significantly, Trump and his post-election legal team have pointed at Dominion voting machines and implored courts to look into this automated vote-flipping premise—but only in states that he lost. So, let's test it in ES&S states like Kentucky where Trump won.

McConnell had his biggest percentage of registered Democrats voting Republican in counties using ES&S machines. But he wasn't the only senator to perform so well. Other Republican incumbents, whom polls indicated would have close races, had similar luck to their majority leader on election day.

Lindsey Graham's race in South Carolina was so tight that he infamously begged for money, yet he won with a comfortable 10% lead—tabulated on ES&S machines throughout the state. In Susan Collins's Maine, where she never had a lead in a poll after July 2, almost every ballot was fed through ES&S machines. Kentucky, South Carolina, Maine, Texas, Iowa and Florida are all states that use ES&S machines. Maybe the polls didn't actually get it wrong.

When Trump says "look over here" at Dominion voting machines, maybe we should look at ES&S machines instead. When Republicans spout unfounded claims that Democrats stole the election, maybe we should be looking at Republican vote totals instead. And when Trump calls this the most fraudulent election in our history, maybe he knows of what he speaks.

You can follow Alison Greene on Twitter @GrassrootsSpeak.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

John Oliver breaks down how Dems can bring the pain to Mitch ... ›

McConnell's re-election campaign slapped with FEC flag over ... ›

Mitch McConnell is leaving endangered Republican senators ... ›

McConnell advances another Trump judge as COVID relief bill remains unfinished: 'His top priority' - Alternet.org ›

'It isn't even really a stimulus': Economists lament paltry $600 checks to citizens - Alternet.org ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Senator Mitch McConnell reelected to 7th term in Kentucky - CBS ... ›

Republican Mitch McConnell defeats Democrat Amy McGrath in ... ›

Mitch McConnell - Wikipedia ›

Why Amy McGrath could cost Republicans the U.S. Senate, even if ... ›

Mitch McConnell wins reelection in Kentucky, defeating Democrat ... ›

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-white-house-2649585320/

no lnx twt

Trump allies floating increasingly 'anti-democratic' ideas as their ‘desperation’ grows — and officials are 'scared'

Alex Henderson December 21, 2020

President Donald Trump can't stand rejection, and his campaign has had a lot of it since the 2020 presidential election — from judge after judge dismissing his legal team's election lawsuits to the Electoral College certifying President-elect Joe Biden's victory. Following all that rejection, journalist Charlotte Klein stresses in an article published by Vanity Fair on December 20, Trump and his supporters are resorting to increasingly extreme ideas in the hope of preventing Biden from being inaugurated less than a month from now.

"Having effectively exhausted his legal options — at least 86 judges, including dozens appointed by Republicans, have shut down the president's unprecedented attempt to overturn his defeat through the courts — Donald Trump is apparently now entertaining even more anti-democratic paths to preserving his power," Klein explains. "During a White House meeting on Friday, nearly a week after the Electoral College certified Joe Biden's victory, Trump reportedly discussed invoking martial law to overturn his losing election result — a strategy one of the meeting's attendees, former national security adviser and recent pardon recipient Michael Flynn, had recently proposed on cable television."

According to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, far-right Republican attorney Sidney Powell was also present in the White House during that Friday, December 18 meeting with the president — who floated the idea of choosing her as a special counsel to oversee an investigation of voter fraud. Powell, in her lawsuits, has been alleging that Trump was the victim of widespread voter fraud during the election but has offered no proof of it.

Others who were present during that meeting included attorney Rudy Giuliani, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

Klein writes, "As others in the room pointed out Powell's failure thus far to support her fraud claims with verifiable evidence, (Powell) 'accused other Trump advisers of being quitters,' according to the Times. Another reported an idea weighed during Friday's meeting was an executive order to seize voting machines to examine them for alleged fraud, after Giuliani separately asked the Department of Homeland Security to do so earlier in the week — apparently to no avail."

Flynn isn't the only Trump supporter who has been urging Trump to declare martial law. Far-right Georgia-based attorney Lin Wood, who has been working closely with Powell on election-related lawsuits, has also made that frightening recommendation:

Haberman and Axios' Jonathan Swan have both posted tweets noting how worried some people in Trump's circle have been about the increasingly extreme ideas they are hearing:

Klein points out that "concern about the president's increasingly desperate quest to remain in power has intensified among those in Trump's circle," noting that a senior administration official, quoted anonymously, told Axios, "People who are concerned and nervous aren't the weak-kneed bureaucrats that we loathe. These are people who have endured arguably more insanity and mayhem than any administration officials in history."

someone just said drilled that only a big corp has legal resources to get justice in legal sys from another big corp?!

but smart tech is not big? maybe // to jnz on sandy hook

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/election-fraud-2649563720

no lnx vud twet

Fox News airs point-by-point fact check of wild election fraud claims during 3 of network's most pro-Trump shows

President Donald Trump being interviewed by Fox News personality Maria Bartiromo, composite image.]

Elizabeth Preza December 20, 2020

Fox News this weekend is airing a stunning point-by-point fact check to claims made on programs hosted by the network's most pro-Trump voices after voting technology company Smartmatic send a 20-page legal letter demanding "a full and complete retraction of all false and defamatory statements and reports."

The segment, which features an interview with Palo Open Source Election Technology Institute voting technology expert Eddie Perez, aired on Lou Dobb's Friday show and Jeanine Pirro's Saturday show. Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo will also show the segment.

In its Dec. 10 letter to Fox News Media, Smartmatic charged the company and its hosts with waging "a concerted disinformation campaign against Smartmatic. Fox News told its millions of viewers and readers that Smartmatic was founded by [the late Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez, that its software was designed to fix elections, and that Smartmatic conspired with others to defraud the American people and fix the 2020 U.S. election by changing, inflating, and deleting votes." The company also demanded the company "match the attention and audience targeted with the original defamatory publications."

As the Washington Post reports:

"During Friday night's fact-checking segment, the questioner asked Perez: 'Have you seen any evidence of Smartmatic sending U.S. votes to be tabulated in foreign countries?'

This appeared to be a reference to Giuliani's Nov. 12 claim on the show that with Smartmatic software, 'the votes actually go to Barcelona, Spain.' Perez responded, 'No, I'm not aware of any evidence that Smartmatic is sending U.S. votes to be tabulated in foreign countries.'"

Speaking with CNN, Perez said that while he was unaware of the nature of the interview when he spoke to Fox News about Smartmatic, it's important to clear up any confusion the network's viewers have about voting integrity in the United States.

"I felt it was important to talk to Fox News," Perez said. "Of anything potentially more important to be speaking the facts to their audience because there are a lot of consumers of Fox News that have doubts about the election."

Watch the video below:

in stunning segment, Lou Dobbs has come to Jesus moment and fact checks all the wild election conspiracy theories he’s been peddling on air. One-by-one he debunks them. Don’t expect Trump to retweet this clip. Note: Dobbs was threatened with legal action by the voting companies. twt]

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Watch: Florida attorney busted for voter fraud in Georgia — and ... ›

Trump's legal team takes to Fox News to cry election fraud — it didn't ... ›

Trump's baseless election 'fraud' allegations continue to be laughed ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Trump Discussed Naming Sidney Powell as Special Counsel on ... ›

Mitch McConnell has an 'election fraud' problem - CNNPolitics ›

Ex-Texas cop arrested for trying to prove ballot fraud conspiracy theory ›

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/fox-news/

raw story

fox News viewers lashed out at the network over the weekend after several shows aired a segment undermining President Donald Trump's claims of election fraud.

According to reports, at least one Fox Business host and as many as three Fox News hosts aired a pre-taped segment with voting systems expert Edward Perez on Smartmatic, a voting systems software company.

The interview was aired again on Sunday by Maria Bartiromo, one of President Donald Trump's top defenders on the network.

The segment was met with contempt from viewers, who refused to believe that the election fraud claims had been debunked.

"So I guess @MariaBartiromo just sold out-shameful," one viewer wrote on Twitter.

"@FoxNews needs to be ashamed for making her air this tripe," another viewer tweeted.

"Who got to @MariaBartiromo?" another commenter complained. "Why has she put this fraud Eddie Perez, clearly an apologistfor Smartmatic, on her show TWICE to read scripted denials to scripted questions-- right down to reading back the questions, a deposition trick taught by good trial attorneys?"

In a legal notice sent to Fox News last week, Smartmatic accused the network of a "disinformation campaign"

"Over the course of the campaign, Fox News published and republished dozens of false and misleading statements regarding Smartmatic," the statement said.

Watch the video and read some of the responses below. [who got to her"]

1220 an me

Pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell has touted a challenge to the 2020 election in Georgia as her "Kraken," comparing the lawsuit to the mythical beast. But this supposedly epic legal challenge has a surprisingly gigantic error. While arguing for the Eleventh Circuit, she pushed her ridiculous and unfounded claim that Dominion Voting Systems switch votes during the election.

But she seems to have gotten her words mixed up, or forgotten which candidate she was supposed to be arguing for mid-sentence. Because the lawsuit claims that the machines switched the votes from Biden and to Trump — which would indicate a fraudulent conspiracy on the president's behalf, and one that failed anyway.

The glaring claim is located within the in background arguments for the case filed by Powell and her colleague Lin Wood, as Law & Crimepointed out.

"[T]here were all imaginable varieties of voting fraud," appellants said, "including machine-controlled algorithms deliberately run by Dominion Voting Systems that generally took more than 2.5% of the votes from Mr. Biden andflipped them to Mr. Trump for a more than 5% fraudulent increase for Mr. Biden."...

an 1220

here's why Georgia officials are warning that pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell is a 'security risk'

Alex Henderson December 03, 2020

Right-wing attorney Sidney Powell's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election have been so outrageous and over-the-top that even President Donald Trump's legal team has distanced itself from her. And according to Law & Crime reporter Aaron Keller,Georgia officials believed that her proposal for inspecting voting machines in that state posed a "security risk."

Georgia is among the battleground states that President-elect Joe Biden won in the 2020 election, but Powell — like other pro-Trump attorneys — has been claiming, without credible evidence, that Trump was the real winner in the Peach State and that the election was fraudulent. In a lawsuit that she filed with Lin Wood, another far-right pro-Trump attorney, Powell wanted her team to conduct forensic inspections of Georgia's voting machines. But during a federal court hearing held on Sunday in the Northern District of Georgia, Russell David Willard — an attorney representing Georgia officials — warned that what Powell, Wood and their team were proposing was downright dangerous.

Powell, during the hearing, told Batten that she wanted to inspect voting machines in ten Georgia counties. "The important part is, it's not just the data that comes out of the machines that is crucial to the fraud case that is so rampant across the country — it is the fact that an algorithm we believe was uploaded to the Dominion machines that weighted the votes for Mr. Biden over the votes for President Trump at approximately 1.22 over .78."

But Willard told Judge Timothy C. Batten, Sr., "You cannot allow, during the midst of an election cycle, a third party to come in and get the proverbial keys to the software kingdom." According to William, "Powell's minions" could "go in and image everything, download the software, and figure out for future elections a way to hack in so that their preferred candidate can win."

"That is, in effect, what they are seeking here," Willard told Batten. "They want to image, as they just said, not only the data on the machines, but also, the entire software package and the security protocols that are set up. That is something no federal court can possibly countenance."

Keller notes that Powell told Batten the Dominion Voting Systems program used in Georgia was also used in Venezuela to help leftist Huge Chavez steal elections in that South American country. But Dominion, in response to Powell's claims, has countered that its software has never been used Venezuela.

In a press release, Dominion stated, "Dominion has no ties to the Venezuelan government, nor any other foreign government, including China and Iran. Dominion has never participated in any elections in Venezuela and has no connection or relationship with the now deceased former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Other companies have serviced elections in Venezuela, but Dominion is not one of them."

Keller also notes that Batten "ordered several machines to remain untouched (in Georgia). The judge chiseled out a decision after much back-and-forth and pleading by Wood). Future briefs and hearings were also set."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump team now says attorney who lied with Giuliani for 2 hours at ... ›

Dominion Voting Systems employees face 'death threats' and ... ›

Sidney Powell suffers another setback as Georgia GOP county chair ... ›

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

For Trump advocate Sidney Powell, a playbook steeped in ... ›

Trump Team Disavows Lawyer Sidney Powell - The New York Times ›

Trump advocate Sidney Powell cites Ron Watkins, a central QAnon ... ›

an alexh 1120

although President Donald Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results have suffered defeat after defeat in the lower federal courts, that hasn't stopped Republican attorneys like Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell from continuing to pursue election-related lawsuits and claiming, without evidence, that the president has been the victim of widespread voter fraud. Attorney Mike Dunford offers legal analysis of some of those lawsuits in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, arguing that the lawsuits aren't as "dumb" as you think — they're worse.

"Every time you think you have a grasp of how preposterous the Trump team's election lawsuits are, another one comes out, dumber and more conspiracy-filled than the last," Dunford explains. "The Pennsylvania monstrosity that was submitted by Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and the Four Seasons Total Litigation supporting cast was terrible. It made, according to a federal appeals court ruling, 'vague and conclusory' allegations about alleged misconduct, tried to get the court to do things that would violate the U.S. Constitution, and had, in the court's words, 'no merit.' Their case was such complete nonsense that two courts and four judges decided it was too dumb to fix.

powell, in one of her lawsuits, claims that the software used by Dominion Voting Systems was used to help President-elect Joe Biden steal the election in key battleground states — and Dunford notes that one of Powell's witnesses is a QAnon conspiracy theorist.

"As specious as the legal arguments are and as incomprehensible as the copy is, the craziest thing about the case is the substance," Dunford observes. "This complaint reads like it was drafted at the afterparty for a three-day QAnon convention. And it might have been, given that one of Powell's more absurd 'witnesses' is Ronald Watkins, who, alongside his father, runs the imageboard where 'Q' drops his messages.Hmmmm. The reason Watkins is part of this case is unclear. Powell is claiming him as an expert in Dominion's voting software, but you would hope that she could find someone better — like, I don't know, someone who has worked with it maybe?"

The QAnon cult claims that that United States' federal government has been infiltrated by an international cabal of pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals and that Trump was put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to the group, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle. And QAnon also claims that R&B superstar Beyoncé is really an Italian woman named Ann Marie Lastrassi and is only pretending to be Black — and that Beyoncé is acting on orders from billionaire Democrat George Soros....

death htreats dominion

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/sidney-powell-2649062448/

press conf: rudy: votes counter in Germany and ---- smartmatic owned by biz partner of Soros, maduro and chavez Kumer? soros #1 donor blm, antifa and dems

[radiolab math ] globalist dictators, corps everyone against us except trump;

dominion maCHINE, smartmatic software, we need paper copy (which we have in GA? counting the same fraud ballots b/c sep from outer envelope) mayor daley held votes, broward cty

10 dem corrupt cities, pols went to jail for decades

big tech censors us

lawyers drop out b/c of death threats

video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz6bzv1TMl8

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/trump-lawyer-rudy-giuliani-repeats-unsubstantiated-claims-of-broad-vote-fraud

11/20/20

wASHINGTON (AFP) – With hair dye streaming down his cheeks and Donald Trump watching on television, the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani unleashed eyebrow-raising claims on Thursday (Nov 19) that George Soros, China and a dead Venezuelan dictator conspired with Democratic “crooks” to hand America’s election to Joe Biden.

In an extraordinary 90-minute press conference at the Republican National Committee in Washington, Mr Giuliani and other members of Mr Trump’s legal team left no doubt they were refusing to acknowledge President-elect Biden’s win, arguing instead that a broad “national conspiracy” to deny Mr Trump re-election was underway.

Mr Giuliani opened with a frontal attack on “corrupt” Democratic-led cities like Detroit he accused of purposely flipping thousands of votes to Mr Biden, spoke of “a plan from a centralised place to execute” voter fraud, and warned of an “iron curtain of censorship” denying the American people facts about the election.

Then it turned bizarre.

“Did you all watch ‘My Cousin Vinny’?” asked Mr Giuliani, who proceeded to deliver his best Joe Pesci impersonation, copying the actor’s mafioso persona from the hit 1992 movie.

“How many fingers do I got up?” he groaned, apparently complaining about how far away election monitors were kept from the ballot-counting in swing states like Georgia.

Patting his beading brow with a handkerchief, and with sweat mixed with hair dye dripping down from his temples, Mr Giuliani’s attacks veered towards the outlandish. “You should be more astounded by the fact that our votes are counted in Germany, and in Spain by a company owned by affiliates of Chavez and Maduro,” Mr Giuliani lectured reporters, referring to Venezuela’s notorious strongman Hugo Chavez, who has been dead for seven years, and the country’s current leftist President Nicolas Maduro.

The company in question is elections software firm Smartmatic, founded in 2000 in Florida by two men born in Venezuela.

Smartmatic’s chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is on the board of the Open Society Foundation begun by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a recurring bogeyman of Republican politicians.

The company’s chairman “is a close associate and business partner of George Soros, the biggest donor to the Democratic Party, the biggest donor to Antifa – and the biggest donor of Black Lives Matter,” Mr Giuliani said.

“My goodness. What do we have to do to get you to give our people the truth?” he said.

Accusing Mr Biden’s aides of orchestrating the alleged fraud, Mr Giuliani asserted: “They made significant mistakes, like all crooks do, and we caught them.”

‘Craziest’ press conference?

As Mr Giuliani repeated conspiracy theories and discussed the various “pathways to victory” for his boss,Mr Trump reveled in the lawyer’s message as he looked on from the White House, tweeting of “an open and shut case of voter fraud".

Important News Conference today by lawyers on a very clear and viable path to victory. Pieces are very nicely falling into place. RNC at 12:00 P.M.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2020

The president’s claims of mass cheating have been debunked by a cybersecurity agency in Mr Trump’s own administration that declared November’s election “the most secure in American history.”

That agency’s head, Chris Krebs, was fired this week by Mr Trump. Like the president he too was watching Mr Giuliani’s performance.

“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history. And possibly the craziest,” Mr Krebs said on Twitter.

mr Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, took a dig at a big city rival when he claimed that New Jersey residents crossing state lines to vote in Pennsylvania was “as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagle football game.”

He and fellow lawyers Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis and others crowded into a room at RNC headquarters, maskless in the midst of a runaway coronavirus pandemic that has killed 250,000 Americans.

They spent considerable time detailing complaints made in multiple affidavits that allege malfeasance, including from one registered Democrat in Detroit who blew the whistle on fraud she was allegedly asked to perpetrate.

The poll worker who submitted that affidavit, Jessy Jacob, “was basically trained to cheat,” Mr Giuliani said, after holding up copies of the affidavit and challenging journalists to read and report on the legal challenges.

“I don’t know, maybe you could say she’s lying? But you can’t say there’s no evidence,” he added.

auto translate?

https://en.panampost.com/jose-gregorio-martinez/2020/11/20/former-chavez-guard-to-be-trumps-witness-in-his-fraud-allegation-against-smartmatic/

former Chávez Guard to Be Trump’s Witness in his Fraud Allegation against Smartmatic

Trump attorney Sidney Powell claims to have evidence of the vulnerability of Smartmatic - used for years in Venezuela - changing votes without being detected, according to the confession of a former high-ranking Chavista military officer. Journalist Joshua Goodman said it would be Leamsy Salazar.

Spanish – The hours of uncertainty for Venezuelans to know the election results during the Chavista era became longer for Americans who had to wait days to have at least one projection this year. The sudden turn of electoral tendencies during the vote count also became common in Venezuela. The case of the 2004 recall referendum against Hugo Chávez was the first and most bitter experience. Now Venezuela and the United States have two things in common: Smartmatic and the ghost of fraud.

It was just these two irregularities that set off the alarms in the Republican Party. President Donald Trump led the results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the early morning of November 4. In all of them, the scrutiny was extended for days. In all, the trend suddenly reversed, and Democrat Joe Biden was projected as the winner. Trump’s legal team soon put together the pieces that pointed to Venezuela. Smartmatic was exposed as a company linked to the Chavista regime that has a technology that changes votes without being detected. This is what Chávez asked for, and this is how it was executed.

no lnx twt

The results requested by Chávez

This is the complaint made public on Newsmax by former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, a lawyer for President Donald Trump’s campaign. Citing an affidavit from a high-ranking ex-military officer of the Chavista regime, Powell claimed to have evidence of the vulnerability of the voting system. This technology used this year in 28 states of the American Union is the same that for almost two decades has guaranteed the permanence in power of Chavismo in Venezuela with rigged elections.

“Designed in a way that the system could change the vote of each voter without being detected. Chávez wanted the software itself to function in such a manner that if the voter were to place their thumbprint or fingerprint on a scanner, then the thumbprint would be tied to a record of the voter’s name and identity as having voted, but that voter would not be tracked to the changed vote. He made it clear that the system would have to be set up but not leave any evidence of the changed vote for the specific voter, and that there would be no evidence to show, and nothing to contradict that the name and the fingerprint or thumbprint was going with a changed vote. Smartmatic agreed to create such a system and produced the software and the hardware that accomplished the result for President [Hugo] Chavez,” said the witness.

Sidney Powell explained on Newsmax that Smartmatic’s system was created so that Hugo Chávez would not lose an election. And that’s how it was. He was in power until his death. She added that it was later exported to Argentina and other South American countries until it reached the United States. During her interview on the TV channel, she recommended reading the statement on her Twitter account.

From Chávez’s escort to Trump’s witness

Later, the Associated Press (AP) correspondent for Latin America, Joshua Goodman, revealed who this Chavista military member could be. Although he clarified that the name is reserved, he said, “it seems that the witness is Captain Leamsy Salazar.”

Lieutenant Commander Leamsy Salazar was part of the Military House, in charge of presidential custody. For nearly ten years, he was head of security and personal assistant to Hugo Chávez. Then the second in command of the regime, Diosdado Cabello, requested his services after Chávez’s death.

Salazar fled to the United States in December 2014 as a protected witness from Washington. This made him the highest-ranking active military officer who broke with Chavismo to reveal the criminal activities related to drug trafficking of the Chavista high command, reported ABC.

Data manipulation in real-time

In the affidavit, the Venezuelan witness -specifically because of the litigation in Georgia– explains how the manipulation of the vote is done from a secret ballot center in real-time, taking the case of Venezuela as an example.

“All of the tabulations of computer-controlled voting is done in a closed environment so that the voter and any observer cannot detect what is happening unless there is a malfunction or other event that causes the observer to question the process. I saw first hand that the manipulation and switching of votes can be done in real-time, in the secret ballot center that existed in Caracas, Venezuela. For me, it was something very surprising and disturbing.”

The informant confesses that Smartmatic’s performance in Venezuela allowed him to realize that “it does not matter what the voter decides or what the ballot says. It is the operator of the software and the software that decide what counts.”

The informant also refers to the electoral frauds committed in Venezuela. According to the source, after being implemented in the country, Smartmatic’s electoral system closely observed elections in which the result was manipulated and changed as in the 2006 presidential election of Hugo Chávez against Manuel Rosales and in the 2013 election of Nicolás Maduro against Henrique Capriles.

The links between Dominion and Smartmatic

On November 12th, the former mayor of New York and also the lawyer of President Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, alleged in an interview with Fox Business that Dominion Voting Systems is owned by Smartmatic.

“Smartmatic was founded in 2004. It was formed by three Venezuelans, who were very close to the dictator Hugo Chávez. It was created to arrange elections. That is the company that owns Dominion. Although Dominion is Canadian, all its software is from Smartmatic,” added Giuliani.

Dominion has denied its connection to Smartmatic. However, the former Chavista military member assures in his statement that he is aware of the partnership between both companies and explains how they are related. “I would like to point out that the software and fundamental design of the electronic electoral system of Dominion and other electoral tabulation companies are based on software that is a descendant of the Smartmatic Electoral Management System.

Highlighting that Dominion is one of the top three vote tabulation companies in the United States, he adds that this company uses the same methods and fundamentally the same software design for data storage, transfer, and calculation of voter identification and voting data.

“Dominion and Smartmatic did business. The software, hardware, and system have the same flaws. Fundamentally, it has multiple opportunities to corrupt data and masks the process in a way that the average person cannot detect any fraud or manipulation. The fact that the voting machine displays the result the voter wants and then prints a ballot that reflects it does not matter. It is the software that counts the digitized vote and reports the results. The software itself is the one that changes the information electronically to get the result that the software operator and the vote-counting system intend to generate. This is how it is done”.

The votes that traveled to Europe

President Trump’s legal team – led by Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis – held a press conference Thursday to report on the status of the fraud investigation into the November 3 presidential election.

Giuliani added to the puzzle a fact he had already advanced on Wednesday in an interview with Fox Business: the votes of the 28 states where Dominion operated were counted in Germany and Spain by Smartmatic.He also noted that high-ranking Dominion personnel support the radical leftist group Antifa,which has been involved in violence in several cities since May 25, following the death of George Floyd.

When asked about the competence of the FBI to verify the allegations, the former mayor of New York harshly questioned the actions of this body. “I don’t know where the FBI has been for the last four years. I don’t know where the FBI was when our votes were counted in a foreign country by a company controlled by friends of an enemy of the United States.”

Soros and left-wing globalism

The network of left-wing globalism would be behind the plan to impose the Democrat on the White House. And when it comes to globalism, all roads lead to Soros. Trump’s lawyer warned that the irregularities detected in the presidential election constitute a national security problem, where many foreign interests are involved.

He highlighted the fact that the votes were counted in Germany and Spain by a Venezuelan company, which would be linked to George Soros, the chief promoter of globalism, whom he pointed out as the key financier of the Democratic Party and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

The violent character of BLM and Antifa has been widely documented. A recent U.S. Crisis Monitor study states that between May 26 and September 12, 637 riots were reported in the United States, and 91% of them involved BLM. In the violent protests that took place in several cities after the death of George Floyd, Antifa emerged as a protagonist in the looting, destruction, and assassinations.

Smartmatic, from Chávez to Biden

Rudy Giuliani closed his speech by emphasizing that no other choice should be made with the participation of Dominion and Smartmatic. He reiterated that what happened with the presidential election was a massive attack on the integrity of the voting system.

Adding to Smartmatic’s discredit is the fact that Democrat Joe Biden, projected by the media as the winner of the election, included in his transition team Peter Neffenger, a retired U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral who currently serves as Smartmatic’s Chairman of the U.S. Board of Directors.

Smartmatic’s name has been heard in Venezuela since 2004. That year, the same year in which the company was formed, its technology was used for the first time on the occasion of the recall referendum against Hugo Chávez. The experience was a bitter one. An electronic voting system that promised speedy results ended up being slower than manual counting. At that time, the result took about 10 hours. The exit polls had guaranteed Chavez’s defeat by a 20% difference.

In 2017, after lending itself to the election of the illegitimate National Constituent Assembly (ANC) in which only Chavista candidates participated, Smartmatic admitted that the announced result was manipulated., as reported by BBC Mundo.

Between the certification and the election

During the press conference that lasted more than an hour, Sidney Powell insisted that they have evidence that a large number of Trump’s votes were simply discarded. “They were thrown away,” she said.

In Michigan, one of the states being challenged, two Republicans refused to certify the election in Wayne County, where Detroit City is located. The deadline for certification in this state is November 23, as it is in Pennsylvania. In Georgia, the deadline is this Friday, November 20.

Certification is a process before the appointment of statewide voters to the Electoral College. It is these representatives from the 50 states who actually elect the president at the December 14 vote.

long

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/2020-election/

steven r

georgia's Trump supporters are not giving up. On Saturday, scores massed outside the statehouse in Atlanta, a small sea of mostly men in red MAGA hats hoisting signs hurling accusations against Joe Biden and wearing campaign tee-shirts saying "STOP the STEAL."

It barely mattered that Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had certified Biden's unexpected nearly 13,000-vote victory one day before. Also irrelevant was Georgia's unprecedented manual hand count of presidential votes on 5 million paper ballots, which was more than any 2020 swing state has done since Election Day to verify its votes.

Instead, Trump supporters in Georgia, like many across the country, are not just embracing a growing catalog of vote-counting conspiracy theories as the president pressures state officials to reject the popular vote and select him, via Electoral College slates, for another term. Among Trump's ranks are activists who witnessed the latest vote-counting steps as credentialed GOP observers and have studied these steps via social media and online forums. These activists appear to be coalescing into a new right-facing election reform movement, much like left-leaning activists launched a progressive "election integrity" movement after the fraught presidential elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

"Oh my God, where do I begin?" exclaimed Stacey, an official Republican Party observer during Georgia's hand count last week in DeKalb County near Atlanta. Stacey, who didn't want her last names used, was a blond woman in her 40s wearing an American flag sweatshirt and a bracelet with red, white and blue rhinestones and Trump's name spelled out in baby beads. She was taking a break with a friend, another GOP observer.

The pair, like many Trump supporters watching Georgia's audit, said they were citizens who cared about democracy and honest elections. But instead of appreciating that Georgia's first-ever hand count of millions of paper ballots had found and fixed mistakes that added more than 1,000 votes to Trump's total, they were increasingly incensed by the fine print in the election process they witnessed. Their discovery that election administration was under-resourced, complex, opaque and at times, mistake-prone, only affirmed their belief that the process had conspired to defeat Trump. Election officials across Georgia might have been counting every ballot, but that exercise and the overall process lacked the tools to convince a slice of the public that was critical and cynical.

"We're not allowed to talk to anybody—so you can't even ask questions," Stacey said, when asked what concerned her, as she sat in the viewing area inside a vacant department store that DeKalb County had converted into an early voting center and then used for the hand count.

"There's a lot of things," she said. "Like here's a box [of paper ballots]. What is this box? What is it that you're doing? You can't tell. You can't see anything. They're supposed to sort them first, according to the person they voted for, and then they're supposed to count them… But I can't see, because I'm so far away, if that really is a Biden vote going for Biden in the Biden pile—or was a Trump vote, or a Jorgensen vote."

"There's so many unknowns," her friend and fellow GOP observer added. "We don't know where they're bringing them from. We don't know where they're taking them to. Who's watching? Who's watching?" She sighed. "There's a lot of question marks. We feel really powerless. We want to be here with good intentions. But we feel powerless."

There's a direct line between campaign observers such as these women and the affidavits—or sworn statements by witnesses in lawsuits—that Trump's lead lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was waving at a widely ridiculed 90-minute news conference on Thursday, November 19. Giuliani reeled off allegations of dishonest election administration and vote-counting processes in other states that Biden won—denying Trump another term. Giuliani's affidavits, often based on what people thought they saw, which was not necessarily accurate nor the full picture, were from Republican observers like Stacey and her friend.

This sprint by Trump's team to get witness statements from allies and activists on the frontlines in 2020's swing states was what Green and Libertarian Party lawyers did inOhio in 2004, when they assumed that the election had been stolen for President George W. Bush—not just won by brazen GOP voter suppression tactics. That scramble in Ohio and its aftermath sparked a left-leaning election integrity movement that endures to this day.That movement has helped push every state (including Georgia) to recently replace the all-electronic voting systems acquired a dozen years ago with more accountable paper ballot-based voting. In Georgia, the type of audit that was be done before certifying the general election's winners—which turned into the hand count that drew Trump observers—also emerged in the aftermath of Florida and Ohio.

But now, in 2020, it looks like Trump supporters are discovering election administration issues and may be changing the script that emerged after Ohio's election in 2004 and was embraced in red-run states. That playbook greatly exaggerated the threat of voter fraud—or one person repeatedly voting—to overly police the voting process. State-level responses, such as passing stricter voter ID laws, happened to impede more voters in blue than red epicenters.

Since 2020's Election Day, Trump's supporters have discovered a palette of problems focused less on individuals and more on systemic issues with how elections are run, including Trump supporters discovering how much privatized technology, paid consultants and frustratingly opaque administrative procedures undergird American elections.

For example, after Guiliani spoke, Sydney Powell, a Trump team lawyer,echoed and amplified the kinds of suspicions heard from Trump supporters on Georgia's frontlines. Powell declared that the firms that made America's voting systems were infiltrated with leftist foreigners who could sabotage results. Beyond an operatic performance that caused her to be dismissed by the weekend, that screed was an example of disinformation based on taking a small thread of truth (foreign investment among America's handful of voting system vendors) and layering fearful partisan clichés on top. Where did her claim originate? A blogger active in progressive election integrity circles since Ohio said that it had been "bastardized" from his website.

"This is stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in," Powell declared, speaking of the hidden hands and local election officials who conspired and acted to deprive Trump of a second term.

"It's completely pointless," said Stacey, the Trump observer in Dekalb County, Georgia, saying much the same thing though not on national television. "This is optics. Take a look around you. I don't care what side of the fence you're on. You can just feel the attitude. There are too many cooks in this stew. They're too many things going on. They bring in ballots to the ballot room. Where's the ballot room?"

"People are assuming that what they are counting is valid," she said, referring to the assembled paper ballots with votes for president. "Where did that come from?"

A New Cause

These sentiments and a growing distrust of election administration and voting technology are not likely to vanish. Legal scholars, such as the University of California Irvine's Rick Hasen, who curates the country's most influential election law blog, have focused on the higher altitude impacts of Trump's failing legal strategies. The president's attacks and smears, though not succeeding in court, were eroding public trust in the democratic process and could even pressure some courts and legislatures to embrace new anti-voting measures.

"The good news is that there is no real prospect that Mr. Trump can avoid a reluctant handover of power on Jan. 20," Hasen wrote for the New York Times. "The bad news is that Mr. Trump's wildly unsubstantiated claims of a vast voter fraud conspiracy and the litigation he has brought against voting rights have done — and will increasingly do — serious damage to our democracy. Our problems will deepen, in particular, because Mr. Trump's litigation strategy has led to the emergence of a voter-hostile jurisprudence in the federal courts."

At the grassroots level, hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters are discovering eye-popping features about the mechanics of America's voting systems that are fueling more doubt, speculation and outrage. One video that went viral explained that an unadvertised feature in the software used to compile a spreadsheet of all of the votes cast in a county could apply $fractional value$ to any column of vote totals. That feature, called weighted voting, was put there by the country's biggest voting system makers for use in private-sector elections, such as counting different classes of stock in shareholder elections. If someone knew how to use this application, which can multiply any vote total by a fractional value that's greater or less than one, and were not caught doing so, they could possibly alter the reported results. Trump's supporters are seizing such tidbits as revelations of how invisible strings can be pulled.

"Those who pretend to be for Election Integrity but mock the many intelligent and passionate voices calling into question the veracity of our election system simply because they are pro-Trump are themselves making a mockery of the topic," commented one activist on an email thread. "The media, and many of the pretenders in this group, were all for looking into hacking and other forms of election fraud, until...Orange Man Bad. Now, for the first time there is incredible grassroots support to make a real impact on our entire election system."

Meanwhile, broader statements from voting system manufacturers denying that their systems were vulnerable to manipulation and errors are not persuading many Trump supporters. Nor were daily assertions from top statewide election officials in Georgia that the discovery of uncounted Trump votes during the state's hand count were caused by human errors, not the underlying technology or system design.

Since last week's hand count in Georgia, where Voting Booth profiled how Trump observers kept raising claims of stolen votes without producing any evidence, this reporter has heard new details and explanations for behind the scene breakdowns that occurred during the hand count audit. (The presidential recount that begins on Tuesday will use high-speed scanners).

Why were memory cards with uncounted votes left in precinct scanners?Because the state's new machinery from Dominion Voting Systems does not alert poll workers if vote count data on thumb drives in precinct scanners has been successfully uploaded, a longtime voting consultant who was in touch with contractors hired for Georgia's audit said. That exact same problem has roiled countywide elections in Florida, he added.

Did local officials in one Georgia county panic after they could not find 600 paper ballots, but not tell state officials? Yes, this same source said, adding that they found the missing ballots not by recounting every batch of ballots by hand (the audit's protocol), but by weighing the sealed bags containing ballots —one bag was too heavy.

This design flaw (not confirming precinct vote-count data was sent) and panic moment (due to a ballot inventory error that should have been caught before the audit began) were kept hidden from the press and public during the audit. But they are part of an election administration landscape that a cadre of Trump supporters have been discovering.

As Georgia's hand count began, election integrity activist Garland Favorito, who has worked with progressives for 15 years, said that he sympathized with the Trump activists. There were "three top things" driving Trump's supporters, he explained. They did not understand how a candidate who could fill arenas lost to a candidate who had barely left home. They did not trust that millions of mailed-out ballots had not been tampered with somewhere along the line. And they felt abused by mainstream media, who they despised more than Democrats.

Trump's frontline election observers had little appreciation that Georgia's hand count, which was not without flaws, was still more transparent than anything that had been done before. They had little appreciation for the thousands of people who were spending days counting 5 million paper ballots by hand. They did not think that Trump's ongoing efforts to smear the process was at odds with their quest for truth and honest elections. They also did not like Voting Booth's profile of their efforts, they said, because they looked foolish. They did not contest its accuracy, nor realize that reporters from the New York Times, PBS and other media stood near them during the hand count and could have written the same account.

But the cadre of Trump supporters who have discovered the world of election administration are not going away. They don't like what they have seen, even if they do not fully understand what they are looking at. Meanwhile, they and the president are fueling dizzying conspiracies where Americans who don't follow the arcana of elections do not know what to believe. And election officials are not helping to clear the air. Their systems, procedures and technologies do not easily convey ground truths—how votes are cast, counted, secured and verified—apart from noise from campaigns and the backdrop of partisan rules affecting who can vote.

Deep new currents are stirring, despite what many policy experts have said was a well-run election—given the pandemic, unprecedented attacks on the post office and millions of people voting by mail for the first time. How the festering distrust among Trump's supporters evolves into a new right-facing election reform movement is not yet clear. The seeds are planted.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB