waldron, phil col

// ninja anyone can call themselves a cybersec expert?

heavily involved in AZ fraudit --> fake electors

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an 10 23

How Trump conspiracy lawyer Sidney Powell got chomped by her own ‘kraken’

Jordan Green

andRaw Story

October 22, 2023

MAGA attorney Sidney Powell rocketed to notoriety in 2020 amid her brash claims about election fraud and lawsuits based on esoteric technical jargon purported to support fantastical narratives about foreign interference.

She promised to “release the kraken” in a bid to keep then-President Donald Trump in power.

But Powell’s plea deal on Thursday marks a significant win for prosecutors in the Georgia criminal racketeering case against Trump and his allies — including Powell — for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Her agreement stemming from her involvement in a secret effort to access and copy election files in Coffee County, Ga., increases pressure on her co-defendants, up to and including Trump his former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who competed with her for access to electronic voting machines at the center of their alleged conspiracy.

Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with the performance of election duties, according to the Washington Post. As part of her deal, she is required to pay a $6,000 fine and $2,700 in restitution to the state of Georgia, turn over documents and testify truthfully against her co-defendants.

While Powell, along with the other 18 co-defendants in the case, was accused of participating in a larger conspiracy that includes a fake electors scheme, attempting to corrupt the U.S. Justice Department and harassment of two Georgia election workers, the specific accusations against Powell were limited to one relatively obscure episode.

In it, Trump’s allies dispatched a team to collect sensitive election data from Dominion Voting Systems machines in an elections office in rural Coffee County only one day after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Fulton County prosecutors alleged that Powell “corruptly conspired” with others, including a former local Republican official who signed on as a Trump elector, a Georgia bail bondsman, and the elections director in Coffee County, of unlawfully accessing “secure voting equipment and voter data,” including “ballot images, voting equipment software and personal voter information.”

The case against Powell was chiefly built around the claim, to which she has now conceded in her guilty plea.

Powell’s plea reflects a tacit acknowledgement that she contracted and paid SullivanStrickler, an Atlanta-based computer forensics company, to access and copy data from the Coffee County elections office. Her plea marks an about-face from a two-fold defense strategy in which her lawyer argued in a series of court filings last month that no crime had been committed and that if one had been, his client was not involved.

“Members of this conspiracy — of this enterprise — go to Coffee County — and they take things that aren’t theirs,” John Floyd, an expert on Georgia racketeering lawyer who is assisting Fulton County prosecutors, told Judge Scott McAfee during a hearing earlier this month. “They copy ballots. They copy data. They copy other information, and they copy software that belongs to Dominion.”

Floyd rejected an initial argument by Powell’s lawyer that the breach was lawful just because Misty Hampton, the former elections director, extended an invitation to Trump’s allies. Beyond arguing that Powell and her co-defendants defrauded the state by breaching the election equipment, he told McAfee that they also took Dominion Voting Systems’ private property.

Powell is the second defendant to plead guilty in the case, following Scott Hall, a bail bondsman, who pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, and has agreed to testify against his co-defendants, including Powell.

With her guilty plea on Thursday, the “kraken” Powell promised to release has now come back around to envelop her.

How Powell reached this point is a story steeped in data, drama and betrayals on a most Trump-y team of rivals.

Deflecting blame on to allies and rivals

Powell’s defense, before she pleaded guilty, provides a window into the overlapping efforts by her co-defendants, most notably former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to access the voting machines in order to gather data that could be used to fuel dubious claims of election fraud and ultimately overturn the election.

Emails, phone texts and testimony unearthed in legal discovery for the case, as well as through the investigation by the now-disbanded U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, paint a most complicated picture of allegiance and antagonism among Trump’s closest MAGA loyalists.

They show that while Powell and Giuliani had become bitter rivals by the time of the Coffee County breach, they shared an interest in accessing voting machines, and their respective teams worked with an overlapping pool of lawyers, political operatives and technicians to achieve that objective.

Many of these individuals have not been charged to date, although texts, emails and testimony show they were involved in coordinating data collection and analysis. The materials also show that officials in the Trump White House were apprised of their efforts.

[Rudy Giuliani points to a map as he speaks to the press about various lawsuits related to the 2020 election, inside the Republican National Committee headquarters on Nov. 19, 2020, in Washington, DC. Also pictured, at center, is attorney Sidney Powell. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Evidence against Powell chiefly comprised a contract signed with SullivanStrickler on Dec. 6, 2020, to collect and analyze election data from Dominion voting machines — not in Coffee County, but in Antrim County, Mich., where Trump allies were then scrutinizing election-night irregularities. The Coffee County breach, which took place a month later, was performed under the same agreement, the government alleges.

Phone texts that Powell herself submitted as evidence to the Fulton County, Ga. court, if anything, bolstered the prosecutors’ case against her. They show the chief operating officer of SullivanStrickler instructing an employee two days after the visit to the Coffee County elections office that “we are not uploading/giving access to anyone until we are paid.”

Later, he added, “Let’s keep communications quiet for now. I am now negotiating directly with Sidney.”

The company’s director of data risk and mitigation testified in a separate civil case last year that Powell was the customer and paid the bills for the data collection in Coffee County.

But Powell’s lawyer, Brian Rafferty, seized on the fact that metadata from the contract shows that a man named Jim Penrose was the author of his client’s electronic signature.

“It shows right here in the middle of this document that Jim Penrose signed this,” Rafferty told the court earlier this month. “And if you look at the contract, it’s not even a signature; it’s somebody typed her name. So, when it says, ‘Sidney Powell,’ somebody typed it. And the person who typed it is James Penrose.”

ALSO READ: Trump insiders blindsided by Sidney Powell plea deal

Penrose is a cybersecurity consultant and former National Security Agency official who worked closely with Powell in the period following the 2020 election. Powell acknowledged in her testimony to the House Select January 6 Committee last year that Penrose was part of a group of Trump allies that joined her at Tomotley, defamation lawyer Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, beginning in mid-November 2020 to strategize how to overturn the election.

Penrose could not be reached for comment for this story.

In a court filing, Rafferty also deflected blame onto Giuliani’s legal team. He noted that a different attorney, Preston Haliburton, submitted an open records request to the Coffee County Board of Elections & Registrations. Haliburton is a professional boxer-turned-personal injury lawyer in Atlanta. At the time, he identified himself as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Texts from the encrypted Signal messaging app obtained in discovery show that an invitation letter from Coffee County Election Director Misty Hampton, in response to Haliburton’s request, then made its way to Katherine Friess, a member of the Giuliani legal team. Rafferty noted that yet another lawyer — Charles Bundren — was included in separate Signal chat to discuss the Coffee County election data that took place on the day of the breach.

‘Lives in both worlds’

Testimony by Powell and Giuliani to the House Select January Committee suggests their efforts to access the Dominion voting machines, leading to the Coffee County trip, were significantly more intertwined than either might want to admit.

Giuliani and his co-counsel Jenna Ellis — also a defendant in the Georgia racketeering case — had conspicuously distanced themselves from Powell with a public statement indicating she was working on her own and not representing the Trump campaign on Nov. 22, 2020.

But just two weeks later, Powell’s team was executing a contract with SullivanStrickler to collect and analyze the election data from Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Mich., while Friess, with the Giuliani legal team, flew to the rural community to meet with Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy.

Another significant player close to both Powell and Giuliani — a retired Army colonel named Phil Waldron — was also involved in the effort to access the voting machines in Antrim County, according to Giuliani.

Giuliani told the House Select January 6 Committee that “Katherine Friess was in Antrim County with Phil Waldron when that was being done.” Powell also testified to the committee that she believed that Waldron inspected the voting machines in Antrim County.

A retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological influence operations, Waldron now owns a distillery in Texas. Although he has not been charged, his name would come up repeatedly in relation to the various efforts to access voting machines following the 2020 election.

ALSO READ: 'Devastating for Trump': Legal analysts expect others to follow Sidney Powell to plea deal

The committee subpoenaed Waldron after obtaining a 38-page PowerPoint presentation that he circulated among members of Congress, and that committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called “an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election.” Waldron sued to block the committee, claiming that the information sought by Congress was part of a confidential and proprietary work product under a contract he signed with unnamed attorneys to investigate the 2020 election.

Giuliani testified to the committee that he considered Waldron to be part of his team. Powell also worked with Waldron and told the committee she valued his expertise.

“I know he was looking at logistics for, like, for example, if we could get access to the machines,” Powell testified. “He knew — or my understanding was he knew — people that would know how to analyze them — you know, reputable, unimpeachable, military, nonpartisan, bipartisan, whatever you want to call it, but professionals who would know how to look at whatever it was and make sense of it.”

Waldron is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the Fulton County indictment. As one of the overt acts cited in the alleged conspiracy, Powell sent an email to SullivanStrickler Chief Operating Officer Paul Maggio on Dec. 21, 2020, instructing him that she, along with “Individual 6” and others, “were to immediately ‘receive a copy of all data’ obtained by SullivanStrickler LLC from Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Michigan.” Numerous media outlets have identified “Individual 6” as Waldron.

Waldron could not be reached by phone or email for comment for this story.

Jim Penrose has described Waldron as the “crossover” between the Powell and Giuliani teams.

“Phil Waldron is the one who lives in both worlds,” Penrose told an Arizona woman named Staci Burk during a phone call on Christmas day in 2020. “Most of the remainder of the team operates independently of one another.”

At the time, the Powell team was cultivating Burk as a potential witness.

Burk is now suing Powell and five other defendants for civil conspiracy, violation of civil rights, false imprisonment and assault, alleging that Powell’s associates attempted to pressure her into signing an affidavit that could be used to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to seize voting machines. Burk’s suit also alleges that the defendants frightened her into allowing a private security group to take up residence in her home. Members of the security group ultimately stole Burk’s cell phone and took it to the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a hub for high-level Trump allies on Jan. 6.

Burk obtained a default judgment against Powell in the case on Oct. 2 from a federal court clerk in Arizona, after Powell failed to respond to her complaint.

ALSO READ: Trump's prison presidency? How he could run — and win — from behind bars.

But Powell’s lawyer, Robert H. Holmes, told Raw Story that “the default was taken fraudulently” and that “Ms. Powell was never served” with a summons for the lawsuit. Based on Burk’s request, ABC Legal Services, the process serving company, opened an investigation into the delivery of the summons. According to a report, the process server reported that he left the summons outside the door of an apartment in Dallas on Sept. 2.

Burk provided a copy of the report, which was completed on Wednesday, to Raw Story.

“When the server knocked on the door to the listed unit, the resident inside looked through the peephole and asked who he was and what he wanted in a hostile manner,” the report states. “The server stated his name, and told the resident that he was looking for Sidney Powell as he had some legal documents for her. The resident said to leave the documents at the door because she was not going to open the door. The server noted that he receives that reaction often since he is an African-American male.”

The report adds that the process server “left the documents outside the door,” and then from down the hallway, “saw the woman crack the door open and grab the documents” before returning inside.

The report concludes by indicating that ABC Legal Services is offering Burk the option of having the summons re-served on Powell.

If Penrose’s later actions called into question his loyalties, during the time period when Trump allies were trying to get access to the voting machines in Coffee County he made it clear that he was on Team “Kraken.”

“I’m investigating this on behalf of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, right, the people that are gonna take this right up to the president and the Supreme Court, and work on these cases,” he told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call in 2020.

Penrose told Burk at the time that the team had already spent $75,000 to investigate claims about illegal ballots on airplanes before determining that there was nothing to substantiate them.

Obsession with voting machines takes hold

Trump and other White House officials received frequent updates on the efforts of the Giuliani and Powell teams, working in tandem, to access the voting machines in late 2020 and early 2021.

Friess, one of the lawyers on Giuliani’s team, forwarded talking points and a press release about a report produced on the Antrim County election data to Giuliani around Dec. 14. The email also went to Bernard Kerik, the team’s chief investigator; and Boris Epshteyn, another lawyer.

“Here’s — the press release is approved,” Friess wrote in the email, which was obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee. “Needs to go to the White House. President and VP just briefed. They are thrilled.”

Kerik then forwarded the email to an aide to White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, the email chain shows.

The report contained the bold claim that “the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

Trump predictably seized on the report, tweeting, “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!”

But an analysis published in March 2021 by J. Alex Halderman, co-chairman of the Michigan Election Security Advisory Commission, concluded that the report “contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions.”

ALSO READ: Inside the 11 scenarios that deny Trump the presidency — without him actually losing Election 2024

The false claims about Dominion voting machines were at the heart of a contentious, late-night meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020 in which Powell, along with retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, urged Trump to use the military to seize voting machines and re-run the election.

The meeting reportedly devolved into a screaming match between Powell’s entourage and members of the White House counsel team.

Giuliani also joined the meeting after being alerted that Powell, Flynn and Byrne were at the White House. He proposed an alternative to the military option floated by Powell’s camp.

“His point of view was that in some way the campaign, I believe, was going to be able to secure access to voting machines in Georgia through means other than seizure,” Derek Lyons, a former Trump administration official who was present at the meeting, told the committee.

Lyons added that Giuliani argued that examination of the machines in Georgia could produce “evidence that could then be leveraged to gain additional access to additional machines.”

Giuliani confirmed in his testimony that “we were trying to use the civil process to get access to the machines,” adding that he vaguely recalled “negotiating with one of the boards for access to some of the machines.”

‘Name calling and misogynistic behavior’

After the Dec. 18 meeting, Powell found herself ostracized from Trump’s inner circle at the White House, most notably Chief of Staff Mark Meadows — also a co-defendant in the Fulton County case.

“It is imperative I be included in meetings scheduled today with you, Rudy, and with the President, about the machines and any of these issues,” Powell wrote in an email to Meadows on Dec. 21, which was obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee.

Powell would later explain to congressional investigators that the urgency of meeting with Trump, Meadows and Giuliani was that she didn’t trust the Giuliani team to handle the mission appropriately.

“Rudy was off, you know, in a couple different directions trying to access the machines,” Powell said. “And I was concerned that it needed to be a process that was completely transparent and preserved so that there could be no question about it and that the people doing it have military qualifications or credentials approved by both sides, however you want to put that, but, anyway, unimpeachable credentials, and perform the examination in a recorded, transparent process. And I don’t know how Rudy and people were doing that.”

The Fulton County indictment alleges that Powell made false claims to the House Select January 6 Committee through statements in her testimony that minimized her role in the efforts to access voting machines in Michigan and Georgia.

The feud between Powell and Giuliani reached a nadir during a Dec. 21, 2020, meeting in Meadows’ office at the White House, before Meadows shunted her away from a scheduled meeting with Trump. Powell recalled that Friess and Waldron were also there, and an email obtained by the House Select January 6 Committee confirms Waldron’s attendance.

Powell described the meeting as “the epitome of devolution into name calling and misogynistic behavior from Mr. Giuliani toward me.”

She added, “I do remember Mr. Giuliani just absolutely lashing out about me being unfit to practice law, called me several names. And, I mean, he just went on and on.”

Following the meeting in Meadows’ office, Powell made her disdain for Giuliani clear in a Dec. 22 email to the two men and to Molly Michael, Trump’s assistant, that was obtained by the committee.

“Also be advised Michigan trip was not set up properly on ground with locals,” Powell complained. “Team is there with no access. It has cost us great expense and should be reimbursed by Rudy’s funding. Georgia machine access promised in meeting Friday night to happen Sunday has not come through.”

‘Y’all are welcome any time’

Late on New Year’s Eve, the Giuliani team received a welcome surprise.

“We have received your open record request, and I will be speaking with my board, and per Georgia law I do not see any problem assisting you with anything ya’ll need [in] accordance to Georgia Law,” Hampton, the Coffee County election director, wrote in a response on official letterhead. “Y’all are welcome in our office any time.”

A Georgia Bureau of Investigation summary obtained by Powell through discovery indicates that Hampton’s letter came in response to an open records request by Preston Haliburton, the Atlanta lawyer who identified himself as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Haliburton also identified himself as counsel for Cathy Latham, the Coffee County GOP chair, when he told the Georgia Senate Election Law Study Subcommittee that she was claiming whistleblower status during a Dec. 30, 2020, hearing. Latham is also a defendant in the Fulton County case, and is accused of participating in both the Coffee County breach and the fake elector scheme.

Haliburton did not return a message left by Raw Story at his office last week.

A Signal group chat obtained by Powell through discovery also suggests that the Giuliani team initiated the Coffee County project. The chat opens with a message from a woman named Jennifer Jackson on Jan. 1, 2021.

“Just handed [sic] in DC with the Mayor,” Jackson’s text reads. “Huge things starting to come together.

“Most immediately, we were just granted access -by written invitation! To the Coffee County Systens. [sic] Yay!” the message continues. “Putting details together now with Phil, Preston, Jovan etc. Want to give you a heads up for your team.”

“Phil” and “Preston” appear to refer to Phil Waldron and Preston Haliburton, while “Jovan” appears to refer to Jovan Pulitzer, a former treasure hunter to whom Trump allies turned for advice on forensic analysis of ballots.

Jackson closed her message by writing that the message “was from Katherine,” likely referring to Katherine Friess, the lawyer on the Giuliani team.

While the Giuliani team celebrated the invitation, the Signal group chat shows the SullivanStrickler employees deferring to Powell’s team, likely in recognition that under their contract, she would be footing the bill.

“Should we reach out to Penrose for potential guidance?” SullivanStrickler employee Greg Freemyer wrote.

“Let’s wait for the request,” Paul Maggio, the chief operating officer, counseled. “If they need us, they will call.”

A separate Signal group chat entitled “Coffee_County_Forensics” shows Penrose — Powell’s associate — managing the project. In the first message on Jan. 6, 2021 at 7:35 p.m. — as police regained control of the U.S. Capitol after a deadly riot, and Congress prepared to reconvene to complete the certification of Joe Biden as president — Penrose sent the initial message to the Signal group — introducing Maggio to Scott Hall, the Georgia bail bondsman who has now pleaded guilty alongside Powell to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties.

According to the Fulton County indictment, Hall conveyed his interest in the Coffee County expedition to Latham, the local GOP chair.

In the next message in the Signal thread, Penrose asked Maggio to take the lead on the project.

Another lawyer — someone who has not been publicly identified with either the Powell or Giuliani teams — was also in the Signal group.

A minute after Penrose delegated leadership to Maggio, Charles Bundren wrote, “We need cell numbers to identify who they are for the people at the elections HQ.”

Bundren is a Dallas-area lawyer who, with few exceptions, has attracted little notice in the public examination of the Jan. 6 saga. In 2014, Bundren joined fellow lawyer John Eastman — one of the defendants in the Fulton County racketeering case, who is accused of leading the effort to corruptly pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate Joe Biden electors — in filing a friend-of-the-court brief in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the University of Texas at Austin’s use of race-conscious admissions.

More recently, Bundren represented Waldron in his suit seeking to block the House Select January 6 Committee’s efforts to obtain his cell phone records. But then Bundren stepped aside as Waldron’s lawyer and joined him as a co-plaintiff to block review of his own cell phone records. In Waldron’s lawsuit seeking to block the congressional committee, he claimed that he was investigating the 2020 election under a contract with unnamed attorneys in Collin County, Tex., which is where Bundren’s law office is located.

Posting in the “Coffee_County_Forensics” Signal group chat in the early morning hours of Jan. 7, Hall instructed the SullivanStrickler team to text Hampton and Latham before they arrived at the election office. Hall was planning to fly down to Coffee County from Atlanta, and Latham texted Maggio the address for the Douglas Municipal Airport so he could pick up Hall, according to the indictment.

Just before 3 p.m., Maggio wrote in the chat: “Collection is going well. No real issues at this point. Looking to be here until 6-7 PM this evening.”

Then, at 7:47 p.m., Maggio reported that his team had completed the assignment and were driving back to Atlanta.

After each update, Bundren replied in the thread: “Thanks.”

Bundren has not been charged in the Fulton County case.

Double-cross?

Following the Jan. 7, 2021 visit to Coffee County, a man named Doug Logan — who would later lead the so-called “audit” of the 2020 election in Arizona — was tasked with analyzing the data. As Powell’s defense team emphasized before she pleaded guilty, texts exchanged between Logan and Penrose suggest that Charles Bundren was directly overseeing the project.

“If you can draft a report for review on Friday morning with Charles Bundren that would be best — we only have until Sat to decide if we’re going to use this report to decertify the Senate runoff election — or if we hold it for a bigger movement later,” Penrose wrote in a Jan. 20, 2021 text to Logan that was obtained by Powell through discovery.

“I’m not going to brief Sidney on these findings yet,” Penrose added. “I’d ask you to do the same, so we can maintain agility on how to use it.”

Logan would later testify under oath in a deposition for a separate lawsuit that Bundren was the lawyer “that we were doing work under.” He added that Penrose told him that Bundren “was the main attorney on this work.”

More than a year after Logan’s work on the project, congressional investigators asked Giuliani if he had received a report on the Coffee County voting machines.

“Yes, sir,” Giuliani testified. “Yeah.”

Asked who gave him the report, Giuliani replied, “I don’t want to guess at it. Probably was Phil Waldron.”

As for Powell, her guilty plea means there’s a good chance she will take the witness stand and testify against her co-defendant Giuliani, who has admitted to being a consumer of the work product that came out of the Coffee County breach.

Key players in Sidney Powell’s legal drama

Charles Bundren: Dallas area attorney. He oversaw collection and analysis of Coffee County election data, according to Doug Logan.

Katherine Friess: Lawyer on the Giuliani legal team. She was involved in the examination of the Antrim County, Mich. voting machines, which led to a bogus report claiming election fraud, and then reportedly received a letter inviting Trump allies to examine voting machines in Coffee County, Ga.

Rudy Giuliani: Trump’s former personal attorney and the former mayor of New York City. A member of Giuliani's legal team was involved in examination of the Antrim County election data, and he received a report on Coffee County election data.

Preston Haliburton: Atlanta personal injury lawyer. He submitted the open records request to the Coffee County Board of Elections & Registrations while serving as “counsel of record for the Giuliani legal team.”

Scott Hall: Georgia bail bondsman. He flew to Coffee County on a private plane to accompany contractors as they collected elected data, and has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties.

Misty Hampton: Former Coffee County election director. She invited the Trump allies to visit the election office in January 2021, and is a codefendant alongside Powell, Latham, Trump and 16 others in the Georgia RICO conspiracy case.

Cathy Latham: Former Coffee County GOP chair. She spoke with Scott Graham Hall, and appears to have helped him make arrangements to travel to Coffee County to accompany contractors as they extracted election data. She is a codefendant alongside Powell, Hampton, Trump and 16 others in the Georgia RICO conspiracy case.

Doug Logan: Owner of Cyber Ninjas firm that conducted the so-called Arizona audit. He worked as an analyst on the Coffee County election data, and submitted a report on it to Charles Bundren.

Jim Penrose: Former National Security Agency official. He allegedly signed Sidney Powell’s name on the contract with SullivanStrickler, oversaw the data collection during the team’s visit to Coffee County, and directed Doug Logan to write a report on the data for attorney Charles Bundren

Sidney Powell: Lawyer who filed “Kraken” lawsuits to try to overturn the 2020 election. Her signature is on the contract with SullivanStrickler under which the Coffee County election breach was carried out.

Donald Trump: Former president accused of leading a criminal racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Trump is the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination.

Phil Waldron: Retired Army colonel with a background in psychological influence operations. He reportedly traveled to Antrim County, Mich., to inspect voting machines and was reportedly briefed on the plan to breach the Coffee County election system.

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Former President Donald Trump made a “secret” $1 million donation to the election audit conducted in Arizona following his false claims that the election was stolen from him, the Guardian reports.

The audit was requested by Arizona GOP senators, and doubted by many of their colleagues due to the “wild conspiracy theories” it mirrored. An assertion “that bamboo fibers found in ballot sheets proved they had been printed in Asia” even caused some local GOP members to deem the probe a “grift disguised as an audit.”

But nevertheless, the audit persisted.

Although eventually proven baseless and unsuccessful, The Guardian reports that “one of the largest benefactors” behind this attempt to counter the 2020 election results remained a secret for nearly two years.

But watchdog group “Documented” was able to track funding for the failed assessment and eventually landed on Trump’s super PAC, Save America.

First, the group discovered that _{Cyber Ninjas}_, the Florida company that conducted the audit, was provided $5.7 million by far-right groups, and then given an additional $1 million from former Trump advisor and attorney Cleta Mitchell.

Still, questions around the origin of the $1 million remained unanswered.

TheNew York Timesreports that in September of 2021, “unnamed ‘officials,’” as well as Arizona GOP senators who requested the election audit, adamantly denied Trump’s contribution.

However, with its research on many corporate, tax and campaign finance filings, as well as emails and text messages between Trump allies that were obtained by nonpartisan accountability group American Oversight, "Documented" managed to counter those claims.

The Guardian broke down the process of how the watchdog group traced the donation back to Trump.

Like many incidents surrounding Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020, tracing back Trump’s contribution to the audit starts with the Jan. 6 committee.

The committee’s final report mentioned that Trump super PAC, Save America, donated $1 million to the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) — led by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows — but did not disclose the origin or the reason for the money.

Further research revealed that Trump’s contribution possibly began around June 2021, as accountability group American Oversighttracked text messages between retired Army officer and “arch election denier”Phil Waldronand Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the Florida-based company that conducted the audit.

Waldron texted Logan, “Kurt is going to talk to 45 today, about $.”

According to the Guardian, “Kurt” likely referred toKurt Olden, an “election denying lawyer.” He continued, “Mike L talking to Corey L,” referring to CEO of MyPillow and devoted Trump supporter Mike Lindell and Trump campaign manager Corey Lewondowski.

A couple of weeks later, Waldron asked Logan if he had received a $1 million payment from Lewondowski. He texted, “Supposedly Kurt talked to Trump and they got 1 mil for you,” but he noted he “couldn’t verify who sent and received.”

According to The Guardian, the Federal Election Commission reported that less than two weeks later, on July 26, 2021, Save America transferred the $1 million to CPI. Two days later, a new group, American Voting Rights Foundation (AVRF) “registered as a corporation in Delaware.”

CPI donated $1 million to AVRF — the group’s first and only donation — in 2021, and although the date of donation is unknown, the clear relationship between the groups, the “timing and amounts” of the transfers, as well as the revealed text messages between Trump allies all leads to one culprit: Trump.

Furthermore, on the day AVRF registered as a corporation, Trump attorney Mitchell emailed Cyber Ninjas CEo Loganand put him in touch with the audit spokesperson, Randy Pullen as well as AVRF treasurer Tom Datwyler.

The Arizona Republic recently confirmed that Trump was notified of the process the whole time

GOP vice-chair of Maricopa County board of supervisors Bill Gates told The Guardian he is “disappointed, but not surprised” by the revelation.

“At the very least, it is highly hypocritical for the Arizona state senate to have allowed the audit to be funded in this fashion,” Gates said.

Ultimately, even after the great lengths Trump and his cohort of election deniers went to assist in the audit, the goal to overturn Arizona's election was never met. The Guardian reports that in 2020, President Joe Biden won Maricopa County, the most populated in Arizona and where the audit took place, by 45,109 votes.

Regarding the morality of the audit, Gates added that Arizona law states, “electoral candidates are not allowed to fund vote recounts which have to be financed with taxpayer dollars.” And although the audit was “technically not a recount,” it’s clear the intent was the same.

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After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was among the many MAGA Republicans who aggressively promoted the Big Lie — claiming that the election had been stolen from Trump and aggressively looking for possible ways to keep Trump in the White House. One of the fellow Trump supporters Meadows worked with during that period, according to CNN reporter Zachary Cohen, was Republican operative Phil Waldron.

“As allies of then-President Donald Trump made a final push to overturn the election in late-December 2020, one of the key operatives behind the effort briefed then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about his attempts to gain access to voting systems in key battleground states, starting with Arizona and Georgia, according to text messages obtained by CNN,” Cohen reports in an article published by CNN’s website on September 26. “Phil Waldron, an early proponent of various election-related conspiracy theories, texted Meadows on December 23 that an Arizona judge had dismissed a lawsuit filed by friendly GOP lawmakers there. The suit demanded state election officials hand over voting machines and other election equipment, as part of the hunt for evidence to support Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.”

Cohen continues, “In relaying the news to Meadows, Waldron said the decision would allow opponents to engage in ‘delay tactics’ preventing Waldron and his associates from immediately accessing machines.Waldron also characterized Arizona as ‘our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,’ referring to similar efforts in other states like Georgia. ‘Pathetic,’ Meadows responded.”

According to Cohen, those previously unreported text messages “shed new light on how Waldron’s reach extended into the highest levels of the White House and the extent to which Meadows was kept abreast of plans for accessing voting machines — a topic sources tell CNN, and court documents suggest, is of particular interest to state and federal prosecutors probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.”

Cohen describes Waldron as a “retired” U.S. Army colonel with ties to former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

According to Cohen, Waldron has “emerged as a key figure in the broader scheme to overturn the election and was the architect of several extreme proposals for doing so” — including “a PowerPoint presentation.”

“Waldron also helped draft language for an executive order directing the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines on behalf of the White House,” Cohen reports. “Trump never signed the order, siding with White House lawyers who insisted the idea was legally perilous. But there is evidence that his closest allies, including Meadows, continued to entertain similar pitches from Waldron in the lead-up to January 6, (2021) as they sought to validate conspiracy theories about foreign election interference.”

an raw 8 22

Patrick Bergy, a former Department of Defense contract information assurance security officer who was embedded with a group of pro-Trump conspiracy theorists in Washington, DC following the 2020 election, is publicly questioning an account by his one-time benefactor, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO.

Last week, Byrne filed a sworn declaration in the federal case for the search warrant executed at former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in south Florida. While the purpose of Byrne’s affidavit remains unclear, it included an intriguing tidbit of information relevant to a widely reported :{Dec. 18, 2020 meeting:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: in which Byrne, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell visited Trump in the Oval Office. During the contentious meeting, which devolved into a shouting match with White House lawyers, Byrne, Flynn and Powell reportedly urged Trump to use the Department of Homeland Security or the National Guard to seize voting machines. At the end of the meeting, Trump reportedly appointed Powell to the position of special counsel.

In his declaration, filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida on Aug. 18, Byrne wrote that Rudy Giuliani, who was serving as Trump’s personal attorney in the final days of the administration, disclosed to him during a lunch meeting in January 2022 that after Byrne, Flynn and Powell left the White House around 12:15 a.m. on Dec. 19, Giuliani lingered with Trump for a couple of minutes. According to Byrne’s declaration, Giuliani told him that after the others had left, “the president verbally reversed his decision and instructions” to appoint Powell special counsel, “and that is why those earlier decisions were never implemented.”

Bergy suggests in his affidavit, which was filed on Thursday, that he doubts Byrne's account about Giuliani's disclosure from the January 2022 lunch meeting. In his affidavit, Bergy describes observing Byrne leaving a meeting with Giuliani at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC around Jan. 11, 2021. Others in attendance at the meeting, according to Bergy, were Garrett Ziegler, a White House aide; conspiracy theorist Millie Weaver and her common-law husband Gavin Wince, and Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who pushed dubious claims of voter fraud to lawmakers.

“As I walked in Patrick Byrne was just leaving and was acting visibly upset following the meeting with Rudy and Garrett,” Bergy wrote. The affidavit concludes with Bergy writing that Byrne’s claim that he only learned about Trump's decision to rescind Powell’s appointment in January 2022 “defies logic based on how upset Patrick Byrne was when I saw him leaving the Willard meeting that day.”

Asked about Bergy’s account, Byrne said in an email to Raw Story that he saw Giuliani on the night of Jan. 6 and left Washington, DC on Jan. 8. He said Ziegler was not present when he encountered Giuliani. Bergy, in turn, told Raw Story he stands by his claim that he saw Byrne leaving a meeting with Giuliani and Ziegler, but that it could have taken place on Jan. 7 or 8.

Bergy describes himself in his affidavit as a “guest of Patrick Byrne, Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and others” at Trump International Hotel, the Westin Arlington Gateway and Willard Hotel from mid-November 2020 through Jan. 17, 2021. During part of that time, he said he was also “a guest under an unsigned or dated Non-Disclosure Agreement with Rudy Giuliani, which I do not recognize.”

As previously reported by Raw Story, Bergy said he was invited to come to Washington, DC by Weaver and Wince, and joined a team housed by Byrne in the various hotels that also included conspiracy theorist Tore Maras; former military contractor Scott Bennett and Stephen Pigeon, an attorney for Washington state gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp. Bergy described thegroup’s purpose in his affidavit as “working to find evidence of election fraud, with the main focus being told to me put on the foreign influence that would allow them to use the Insurrection Act and call in National Guard.”

Bergy told Raw Story that he doubts that Giuliani actually witnessed Trump rescind his appointment of Sidney Powell after Powell, Byrne and Flynn left the White House in the early-morning hours following the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting. He said he doesn’t recall any mention of Trump revoking Powell’s authority among the network of people in Washington attempting to overturn the election after Dec. 18.

“If you want me to believe that story, sorry Charlie,” Bergy told Raw Story. “The timing on it and everything else going on, it’s just no way. Until someone shows me evidence otherwise, I would steer towards that not being the case. Even if he did tell Rudy, if you had a two-minute conversation with Rudy and no one else was around, how am I supposed to believe that?

“I can’t sit here and say Rudy lied, but I can say I don’t believe it,” Bergy added.

Neither Giuliani nor his attorneys could be reached for comment on this story.

Bergy told Raw Story that he believes the claim made by Byrne has the effect of protecting Trump.

As someone who has worked for the government on information security, Bergy said, the knowledge that the president had verbally rescinded an appointment that included a top-secret security clearance would have raised concern.

“It would have required that a full investigation for potential leaks or potential damage from that be investigated,” he said.

i forgot ziegler:

an 6 22 raw story

Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.

Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.

Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.

Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.

Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.

In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”

“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”

Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.

For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”

Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.

Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.

In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.

“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”

Waldron declined to comment for this story.

Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.

“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”

While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.

“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.

One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.

In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”

“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”

Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”

Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.

Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”

Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.

“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”

Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”

Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”

Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”

During the frantic period between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, a young White House aide named Garrett Ziegler served as a conduit of information from a network of teams led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to President Trump, as the operatives generated unfounded and specious claims in an attempt to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election.

Ziegler has spoken openly about using his pass to let attorney Sidney Powell and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn into the White House for a Dec. 18, 2020 meeting with President Trump andcontributing to a report authored by his boss, trade advisor Peter Navarro, that was used to undermine confidence in the election. But Raw Story has confirmed that Ziegler played a much more significant role than has been previously understood. Working directly with a team that reported to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, Ziegler helped create a seamless information chain that was mobilized in the effort to overturn the election.

As previously reported, Ziegler let Powell and Flynn into the White House for an impromptu meeting with Trump, in which the trio reportedly urged the president to invoke the National Emergencies Act so that he could use the National Guard to seize ballots and appoint Powell as a special counsel to investigate the election. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, has said that he contacted Ziegler to arrange the meeting. The visit caught Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone by surprise, according to Ziegler, and Ziegler’s visitor access privileges were subsequently revoked.

The following day, Trump tweeted a link to the report authored by Navarro produced in collaboration with Ziegler, while calling his supporters to come to Washington, DC on Jan. 6 for a “wild rally.”

Ziegler also said he attempted to arrange a separate meeting between Powell and Trump, Raw Story has found.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one night to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler asserted in a YouTube interview after he had left the White House. Powell was blocked from meeting with the president, he said, contending that Trump’s more cautious staff prevented the president from taking bolder action.

Ziegler disclosed on his Telegram channel last month that he received an invitation to speak with the staff and members of the January 6th Committee. The House cited Navarro, Ziegler’s former boss, for criminal contempt for defying subpoenas from the select committee and referred him to the US Department of Justice for prosecution on April 6.

While gathering information and drafting the Navarro report, Ziegler worked with a research team that reported to Giuliani, according to Giuliani associate Michael Trimarco. A Long Island businessman with a background in finance and tech, Trimarco told far-right conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel in a recent video that he had been helping Giuliani analyze the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, and then hastily switched over to researching alleged election fraud after the election.

The Westin hotel inArlington, Va. served as the initial hub for the teams collecting affidavits to support the legal challenges, Raw Story has found. Those teams promoted a fount of specious claims that would fuel the violent effort to prevent Congress from certifying the election. Byrne said in a video posted earlier this year that Trimarco “rented some rooms” for Powell “and a few other people” at the Westin. The video was removed from Byrne’s channel on the alternative video streaming platform Rumble, but a copy was republished by the news site One News Page, crediting Rumble as the original source.

“All of this would have fallen apart on that side of the river had it not been for [Trimarco] showing up and not just with a credit card, but trying to provide some adult supervision,” Byrne said. “He’s a real champion, and the MAGA crowd should know that when push came to shove, this fellow came up out of nowhere and was very valuable in helping corral all these forces and keep things from just spinning apart in the early days.”

In mid-November 2020, Powell, Flynn and Byrne decamped from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation in South Carolina at the invitation of defamation attorney Lin Wood in mid-November. The team led by Powell and Flynn at Tomotley received widespread coverage. Less attention has been focused on a second team that stayed behind. Ziegler was a frequent presence at the Westin, which he dubbed the “cyber-patriots,” Trimarco said.

The team at the Westin “did have access to Garrett at the White House, they did get tours, and they did work with Garrett extensively,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “I know he did — and he was working diligently with these folks to get as much information as quickly as we could into the right hands.”

Ziegler worked with Giuliani team to get information to Trump

Following in the footsteps of his older cousin Ron Ziegler, onetime press secretary for President Richard Nixon, Garrett Ziegler landed an internship at the White House as a college student in 2017.He joined the staff of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under Navarro two years later. Prior to the election, Ziegler said he worked on reports touting “the Trump economic record” in sectors like mining and manufacturing in swing states.Beginning around Nov. 15 — roughly the same time Powell moved her team from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation — Ziegler said he and three other aides started helping Navarro compile reports casting doubt on the outcome of the election.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told David Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor who has amassed a large following on Telegram among election deniers and anti-vaccine adherents. “He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

In his account of his time working on the Giuliani election team at the Westin, Trimarco told Vandersteel he was impressed by Ziegler’s energy and found him to be mature beyond his years.

“I mean, this guy — talk about people really working 24-7,” Trimarco said. “He would come around at 11, midnight, 1, after he’s done at the White House, to get information. I saw him come by one or two times. But he was working with a few key people on our team to get the information.”

In the tangled web of relationships among the operatives working to overturn the election at the Westin, Tomotley and across the country, Trimarco was responsible for making sure crucial information reached Giuliani.

“If you wanted to get information from Sidney’s camp, at least at the very beginning, over to Rudy’s, you’d come through me,” Trimarco said. “That was the reason I was at a lot of these meetings — to get information over to Rudy, because he represented the president, for real. And we weren’t physically in the same location.”

While the “cyber-patriots” team was headquartered at the Westin, according to Trimarco, Giuliani has said he was working out of the Trump Hotel around the time of the election and then moved to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Shortly after Christmas, Giuliani said he moved to the Willard Hotel.Giuliani’s statements about his whereabouts during the period he was challenging the election on Trump’s behalf come from a deposition for a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer.

Giuliani did not respond to multiple emails and voicemails to his lawyers seeking comment..

Ziegler was working so closely with the team at the Westin that information often reached Trump before it reached him, Trimarco said.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president, and then it would circle back to Rudy.”

Ziegler told Raw Story he would respond to questions for comment, but didn’t send responses by press time.

Trimarco comes from a politically connected family in New York. His involvement in politics long predates the effort to overturn the 2020 election. During a New York state court trial to decide a complaint brought by Trimarco against his former business partners, witnesses testified that Trimarco took part in a meeting with then-Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) in 2002 to discuss a venture that would theoretically capture and store biometric data to properly identify passengers at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. Trimarco’s former partners accused him of failing to talk about their business during the meeting and instead promoting a business owned by his family.

Trimarco claimed in his March interview with Vandersteel that “the feds are coming after me” related to a matter involving Cambridge Analytica — the British consulting firm that used Facebook data to micro-target voters to the advantage of the Trump campaign in 2016. He further asserted that Giuliani was representing him in the matter. It is unclear exactly what Trimarco’s relationship to Cambridge Analytica is, but a Fast Companystory linked Cambridge Analytica to members of the Ergen family, who own Dish Network, and court records indicate that Trimarco was involved in marketing and distribution work for Dish Network in 2010.

In 2018, Trimarco sued Dish Network scion Chase Ergen, and he was represented by a New York City lawyer named Howard Kleinhendler.

Trimarco told Vandersteel that he was analyzing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop for Giuliani in October 2020. Kleinhendler allowed him to come by his law office to print out pages from the device. The effort to mine the laptop for information that could damage the Biden campaign pivoted to generating baseless election fraud theories once it became apparent Trump was going to lose.

“When everything went south after election night and Howard was on the phone with me right away — ‘How can I help? Can I work on this? I want to help the cause,’” Trimarco recalled. The next day, Trimarco said Kleinhendler showed up at the Westin ready to go to work. Kleinhendler went on to file an election suit as Sidney Powell’s co-counsel in Arizona, and currently represents Powell in defamation suits brought by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.

Despite multiple attempts, Kleinhendler could not be reached for comment.

In his interview with Vandersteel, Trimarco recalled a meeting that took place at the Westin shortly after the election that included Kleinhendler and Powell. Two other men who attended the meeting — retired Army Col. Phil Waldron and Texas businessman Russell Ramsland — explained “their theories on how the system was hacked,” Trimarco said.

Ziegler maintains that during his time in the White House he was outspoken in his advocacy for Trump to take bold action to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden.

“I was telling whoever would listen to me in the White House: ‘Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it,’” Ziegler told an interviewer, outlining a proposal similar to the one Powell, Flynn and Byrne pitched to President Trump at the White House meeting.

In late December 2020, Ziegler said he was “still holding out hope that some of the advice my boss was giving [Trump] that we needed to do something about this would actually get done,that he would quote-unquote cross the Rubicon…. But he didn’t do that.”

By then, the ceaseless drumbeat of unfounded claims that the vote had been electronically altered by foreign powers had come to be accepted as truth by Trump’s supporters. Outraged by what they considered treason by lawmakers, state officials and judges who thwarted the president’s attempt to cling to power, they took matters into their own hands. On Jan. 6, 2021, the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to delay certification of the electoral vote. The vote was ultimately certified and Biden was confirmed as the next president.

https://www.americanoversight.org/december-2020-emails-to-arizona-lawmakers-reveal-election-deniers-plans-for-scanning-and-throwing-out-invalid-ballots

1/24

d:{ocuments:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: obtained by American Oversight and :{reported on by :(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:*:{Rolling Stone:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:* reveal that inearly December 2020, election-denying activists pushed Arizona state legislators to use untested technology to scan and toss out “invalid” ballots, thus handing the state’s electoral votes to then-President Donald Trump.

The emails, sent days before members of the Electoral College were set to cast their votes for president, also included members of Trump’s legal and campaign team and appear to be a precursor to the discredited “audit” of Maricopa County ballots that the Arizona Senate would later launch. Many of the emails were sent by :{**Phil Waldron**:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear;background-color:#ff9900;"):}:, the retired Army colonel who shared a :{PowerPoint:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:outlining measures for overturning the 2020 election results with Trump allies and congressional offices in the days before the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. :{Text messages:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: previously uncovered by American Oversight indicated that Senate President Karen Fann had consulted with Waldron prior to hiring the inexperienced firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct the “audit.”

Included on Waldron’s emails to Arizona lawmakers were :{Bernard Kerik:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, an adviser to Trump’s legal team and an ally of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as well as former Trump administration official :{Emily Newman:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and Trump campaign lawyer :{Jenna Ellis:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, both of whom :{were involved:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: :{in advancing baseless voter-fraud claims:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and lawsuits seeking to overturn results.

On Dec. 8, 2020, Waldron sent an :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to state Rep. :{**Mark Finchem**:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear;background-color:#ff6600;"):}::{ :{—:(style="background-color:#ff9900;"):}::(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: a :{vocal Trump supporter:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and major proponent of false voter-fraud claims — that included a “base research doc” on Arizona voting data. Kerik and Ellis were copied on the email, along with :{Russell Ramsland:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, the co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which was behind that month’s debunked :{report:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: on election fraud in Antrim County, Mich. Lawyer and lobbyist Katherine Friess, who was :{involved in the Antrim “audit,”:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: also appears to have been added to the email.

Waldron then sent an :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: with the “Arizona data reporting” to Finchem, state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, Kerik, and Newman, outlining technology he claimed could detect fraudulent ballots.Waldron advocated obtaining images of the ballots, which his team would run through “optical scanning technology” that would “allow us to pull invalid votes out of the totals ‘By Candidate’ so that your state can certify normal elections and potentially not have to take extra legislative action.” :{Records previously:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: obtained by American Oversight show that Borrelli then forwarded the email to all Arizona Senate Republicans.[8 15 22 trms reports on 6? states where voter//server info grabbed, some illegal]

Three days later, Waldron sent another :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: to :{Finchem:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Borrelli, and state Sen. Eddie Farnsworth regarding the purported scanning technology. Waldron attached hundreds of pages of affidavits from election conspiracy theorist and treasure hunter Jovan Pulitzer, including about the ballot inspection technology he said he designed. Pulitzer, who :{claimed:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: that fraudulent ballots could be detected by the absence of certain folds in the paper and was the :{likely source of:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: the theory that fraudulent ballots containing bamboo fibers had been shipped from Asia, was copied on the email along with :{Ramsland:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: and others.

In the email, Waldron :{falsely said:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:that “scanned images are public records” in Arizona and that his team should “need no authoritative release requests” to access them. Waldron also suggested that his “local consultant and advisor” Lyle Rapacki, a :{conservative activist:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: who has claimed that :{“demonic”:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: forces led to Joe Biden’s win and who was also copied on the email, could travel to Maricopa County to load images of the scanned ballots onto a hard drive for inspection.

Less than a week after receiving this email, Farnsworth joined Fann in issuing a subpoena demanding that Maricopa County turn over all of its ballots, voting machines, and other records so that the Senate could conduct an “audit.”

Among the records obtained by American Oversight were communications between Arizona Sen.:{**Kelly Townsend**:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:and Michael Bowman, president of ALEC Action, the advocacy arm of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council. In a November 2021 :{email:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}:, Townsend asked Bowman for advice on which ALEC committee would be best to discuss “election integrity” with. Bowman responded that Townsend should talk with ALEC’s “Process Working Group,” which was meeting in San Diego the following month.

Last week, the Arizona Court of Appeals rejected the state Senate’s broad use of legislative privilege to withhold records from the “audit” from public release in American Oversight’s lawsuit. And on Thursday, Cyber Ninjas and its CEO Doug Logan are scheduled to sit for a deposition regarding the firm’s failure to turn over public records to the Senate. Read more :{here:(style="box-sizing:inherit;transition-duration:0.2s;transition-property:background-color, border-color, box-shadow, color, opacity, text-shadow, transform;transition-timing-function:linear"):}: about our ongoing investigation into efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 election in Arizona.

Part of Investigation:

WHAT IS SUBSTACK

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-had

NO LNX MANY VID?

Team Trump Had a Second Pre-Insurrection War Room

An investigation of who was in this second Insurrection Eve war room has now begun.

Seth Abramson

Jun 6

Introduction

As this publication has exclusively and exhaustively detailed, on the eve of the January 6 insurrection Team Trump convened a 23-person war council at Trump International Hotel in D.C. to plot out—as attendees have since confessed—what would happen the following day. It is now clear that a second, contemporaneous pre-insurrection war council was held at a nearby Washington hotel and that it may well have been linked, through either phone or video conferencing, to the first.

This previously unreported news could significantly swell the size of Donald Trump’s pre-insurrection planning team, even as it remains possible (indeed, a possibility that has been extensively investigated here at Proof) that any remote conferencing that occurred the night before the January 6 insurrection also included the White House.

The Two War Rooms

The group that convened at Trump International on January 5 included, per eyewitness accounts previously compiled by Proof, the following members of Trump’s family, legal team, campaign staff, advisory corps, donor class, circle of friends, allies in Congress, and presidential administration:

Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Adam Piper, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck, Layne Bangerter, and two additional unnamed U.S. senators, one of whom prior Proof reportssuggest was Ted Cruz (R-TX). Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander“attended” by phone.

Other possible attendees—whose status is still being investigated in light of evidence they were present—include Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Guiliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. As Proof has previously noted, and as will become vital to the account below, four individuals from the two lists above now claim (or have had it claimed by legal counsel) that they weren’t, in fact, part of any meeting involving Trump International Hotel on January 5, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Those individuals are Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and David Bossie.

Based on the evidence now available, the largest possible size of the group that met at Trump International Hotel on January 5—all members of Trump’s inner circle—is 23.

But emerging evidence—see below—now suggests a sizable team of Trump insiders concurrently gathered, on January 5, at the Willard InterContinental Washington D.C. Hotel (“the Willard”) at 1401 Pennsylvania Ave., 0.3 miles from the White House.

The group that gathered at the Willard Hotel on January 5 appears to have been nearly as large, if not larger, than the group at Trump International Hotel. Possible attendees include, of those not also reported to have been involved in the January 5 meeting at Trump International, the following: Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Robert Hyde, Russell RamslandJr., Jim Penrose, Sal Greco, Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, and Dustin Stockton. Moreover, among the Willard war room attendees concurrently said to have been involved in a meeting at Trump International Hotel we find Rudy Giuliani, Ali Alexander, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Phil Waldron, and Peter Navarro. In all, the suspected roster of Willard war room attendees numbers 16, though that number may swell after additional investigations at Proof and elsewhere.

Indeed, just two photos of the Willard war room taken by Robert Hyde on Insurrection Day alone (the one below and this one) show ten people, only three of whom—Giuliani, Eastman and Hyde—can be identified,and are thus included in the attendee list above.

{Note: The man in the white shirt in the first picture belowmay be Owen Shroyer, who works with and for Alex Jones at InfoWars. The second picture below is Shroyer on January 5, 2021. Shroyer introduced Jones at the Freedom Plaza event that day.The two were followed on stage by Ali Alexander, who oddly said that Trump “calls me ‘Sammy Davis Jr.’ every time he sees me” (emphasis supplied). Alexander introduced Roger Stone by noting that Stone, who was then staying at the Willard, had offered “counsel” to Trump’s legal team—headquartered at the Willard—and that, as of January 5, Stone’s Stop the Steal “movement” was at “war.” After Stone speaks, someone is heard repeatedly calling “Victoria! Victoria! Victoria!”, which may refer to Trump lawyer Victoria Toensing. It is unclear if Toensing stayed at the Willard also.}:

Those who have followed the January 6 investigation closely will note that the Willard Hotel war room attendee list includes a substantially larger number of dubious figures (for instance Hyde, who aided in Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Ukraine, as detailed in a chapter in my 2020 Macmillan book Proof of Corruption) as compared to the Trump International list, which may underscores why it has taken so long for this second war room to be disclosed to the public.

Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the Willard

While Roger Stone spoke briefly to the crowd at Freedom Plaza on January 5—and in his remarks incited insurrection through militant, bizarrely pseudo-religious rhetoric—and while he also spoke in front the Supreme Court building earlier on January 5, in both instances traveling via golf cart and flanked by Oath Keepers, everyone seems to agree that Stone wasn’t at Trump International on January 5; that he never showed up to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech, as his Stop the Steal co-organizers Alexander and Jones and had expected him to do; and that he never showed up for his “Wild Protest” speech at the Capitol, despite having publicly raised money for the latter appearance.

So where was Roger Stone the rest of the time on January 5 and January 6? According to Stone himself, he was at the Willard Hotel. A video from ABC News confirms that this is where Stone was staying during the insurrection, with Stone further telling the network that he “never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport” on the afternoon of January 6. Stone’s statement makes clear that it was not that he stayed in his room at the Willard, but that he remained on hotel grounds—a distinction that is critical now. Stone’s NYPD bodyguard Sal Greco stayed with him at the Willard Hotel.

As for Alex Jones—who has said the White House asked him to lead the march on the Capitol; who has said he (with Alexander) was in text communication with the Trump campaign from the Capitol as it was being attacked; and whose top lieutenant Owen Shroyer appears to be pictured above, with Rudy Giuliani, in the Willard war room—per Yahoo! News he stayed at the Willard for a Stop the Steal event in November 2020 and, per Politico, also stayed at the Willard for a December 2020 Stop the Steal event.

But now an amazing five-part exposé by a French independent journalist publishing via Montréal-based website Centpapiers further reveals—using simple and easily confirmed photographic analysis—that the January 5 interview Michael Flynn conducted with Alex Jones, reported on at length at Proof, was held at the Willard, meaning both men were at the site of Trump’s second war room on Insurrection Eve.

{Note: This same exposé offers pictures that seem to indicate top Trump adviserPeter Navarro was with Dustin Stockton at the Willard at some point during the lead-up to the insurrection, as well as providing pictures of Stockton and his wife Jennifer Lynn Lawrence in the VIP area of Trump’s Ellipse speech alongside top Trump congressional ally Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of Ali Alexander’s self-confessed co-conspirators in plotting the dire events of January 6.}

The aforementioned couple, Lawrence and Stockton, have at various points been Steve Bannon acolytes, employees, and business associates, and were known to have been at the Willard Hotel pre-insurrection. According to this report by the New York Times,

Two organizers helping the [post-election Stop the Steal] effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Trump’s border wall. In August [2020], federal prosecutors accused Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Lawrence and Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president. A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group.

…

[Jennifer Lynn] Lawrence had personal ties to Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions”, she said in an interview. She also knew [Michael] Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank.

…

By [approximately 2PM ET on January 6], with “all hell breaking loose”, as Stockton put it, he and Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”

While Lawrence and Stockton’s presence at the Willard Hotel doesn’t ensure Bannon’s, the two Bannon associates’ unusual use of golf carts in downtown Washington during the insurrection—mirroring the use of such vehicles by Stop the Steal, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers—as well as the notion that they went to the Willard to “await instructions” from an unnamed superior, group of superiors, or group of compatriots, suggests the possibility that Bannon and/or the Three Percenter leadership were at the Willard at some point during the run-up to the insurrection or on Insurrection Day.

How Proof Learned About the War Room at the Willard

On May 5, 2021, in a little-heard interview with self-described “birther” Peter Boyles, former Chapman University and University of Colorado-Boulder law professor John Eastman—known for falsely saying prior to the 2020 election that Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for Vice President due to not being a U.S. citizen—told Boyles that that in January 2021 he “was representing the President of the United States in the Supreme Court on one of the most significant legal issues to have come down the pike in half a century.” Eastman, who notes that he “spoke right before the president” at the Ellipse on January 6, further tells Boyles he can reveal private conversations he had with his “client” Donald Trump pre-insurrection because he has received “express” permission from Trump to do so.

Eastman confesses to Boyles that in the days prior to and including the attack on the Capitol, he, Giuliani, and unnamed others “had a war room at the Willard Hotel [in Washington] kind of coordinating all of the communications.…[it was in] a suite of offices.” Significant in this, of course, is not only Eastman’s description of the space as a “war room,” but his contention that Giuliani used the room in the days prior to the insurrection. Why does this matter? Because it raises new questions about another pre-insurrection war room: the one at Trump International. Was Giuliani at the Trump International war room on January 5, the Willard war room, or both? This question has larger implications than may at first appear, so we begin by unpacking what we know:

(1) Charles W. Herbster vacillated on the presence of only one person at the January 5 pre-insurrection war council at the Trump International Hotel: Rudy Giuliani.

After first writing on Facebook that he (Herbster) was “standing in the White House”, Herbster edited his post to write that he was in fact in Trump’s “private residence” in Trump International. But he also edited out Giuliani’s name, as if he’d either (a) been mistaken about Giuliani being at Trump International, or (b) suddenly felt it critical to not say that Giuliani was with him. Note that Herbster took this view of no one else at Trump International;as Proof has detailed, David Bossie and Michael Flynn both now maintain they weren’t at Trump International, and yet Herbster still hasn’t changed his contradictory statement on the matter.For a time even Tuberville contradicted Herbster and said he wasn’t at Trump International, and yet, despite Tuberville being a senator, Herbster still didn’t amend his statement on Facebook. Yet as to Giuliani Herbster did correct himself, suggesting a possibility Giuliani really was at a different location than the other individuals Herbster mentioned—but nevertheless attended the meeting Herbster described. Proof previously noted that this would be possible if the January 5 meeting at Trump International was “conferenced” with other locations.

(2) When the Associated Press asked Rudy Giuliani if he was at Trump International Hotel on January 6, Giuliani told the AP that he would have to check, via his “diary.”

Giuliani never got back to the AP, despite there being no known illegality—as yet—with respect to the event at Trump International. So why not tell the AP where he was on January 5? Doyle Beck told the AP Giuliani was at Trump International; it’s unclear why the conversation regarding his whereabouts isn’t one Giuliani is willing to have.

(3) On January 5, Flynn gave a long interview with Alex Jones at the Willard Hotel.

Both Stone and Giuliani were staying at the Willard Hotel, and Alex Jones and his team would have had to reserve a room at the Willard for any live recording there, so this creates numerous opportunities for overlap between Jones, Stone, Flynn, and Giuliani—the last of whom was then running an on-site Trump war room. Note that, as previously reported at Proof, Michael Lindell has said he was consistently with Flynn and Giuliani in the days prior to the insurrection. If Herbster is unclear and Giuliani cagey about whether Giuliani was ever at Trump International on January 5; and Flynn maintains he wasn’t at any meeting at Trump International (despite an Instagram photo placing him in the hotel lobby that day), one possibility is that any war room meeting(s) Flynn attended on January 5 were attended from the Willard, where we now know he was with Jones on January 5. Flynn is so adamant he wasn’t at Trump International on January 5 that he had his attorney send this author a letter threatening legal action for citing news reports placing him at that location on that day; this suggests a degree of confidence that no one can place him inside the Trump Townhouse at Trump International, his presence in the hotel lobby notwithstanding.

(4)As Proof has reported, Corey Lewandowski was also cagey about his location on January 5, telling a reporter for The Atlantic that he “met” with Donald Trump on that day—but also implying that he didn’t go to the White House in order to do so.

How could Lewandowski meet with Trump without being in the same space? Again, the specter of a very simple explanation—the use of phone or video conferencing—manifests. This might also explain the confidence thatDavid Bossie, Lewandowski’s business associate, has had in maintaining he never entered Trump International on January 5, even as Herbster places him at an event Herbster attended from the hotel.

What Happened at the Willard Hotel

Eastman describes the “suite” of offices at the Willard—a term that suggests multiple rooms and work stations—as designed for “coordinating all of the [pre-insurrection] communication[s]” between members of Team Trump. Certainly, the suite could have coordinated communications via phone conferencing rather than video conferencing, but in either case it would seem that to “coordinate” communications between a large team of people at least some conferencing would have to have occurred at some point.

So if Giuliani had a “war room” at the Willard on January 5 that was specifically set up to “coordinate communications” pre-insurrection, why on earth would he need to walk over to Trump International to attend a second war room? Why not just conference the rooms? This question begs another: if Giuliani did decide to needlessly travel from one war room to another on January 5—during a period of hours that time was precious to Team Trump—why didn’t he bring Eastman with him? Indeed, an unresolved paradox is that Eastman appears to place himself with Giuliani fairly consistently during the days before the insurrection, yet no one places Eastman at Trump International Hotel.

A similar paradox involves Giuliani, Flynn, Lindell, and Powell. As Proof has reported, Lindell says he was with Giuliani, Flynn, and Powell on January 5, yet Flynn says he wasn’t at Trump International, Herbster at first wrote that Giuliani was there and then corrected himself, and no one places Powell at Trump International. Given that Powell was, like Eastman and Giuliani, a Trump legal adviser on January 5, one explanation for this would be that Flynn, Giuliani, and Powell were with Eastman at the Willard on January 5, whether or not they—or Lindell—also visited the Trump International war room.

More Bombshells From the Eastman-Boyles Interview

(1) Trump cybersecurity advisers Russell Ramsland Jr., Doug Frank, and Jim Penrose were with Eastman in theWillard Hotel war room at some point on January 5, 2021.

Specifically, Eastman told Boyles that “the [election] experts that I had met with [in November and December 2020, a group into which Eastman putsRamsland, Frank, and Penrose] were with me on January 5.” Given this statement, it’s worthwhile to say a little more about two of these men.

Jim Penrose

According to The Hill, Penrose is “a former head of the National Security Agency’s Operational Discovery Center.”

Besides having run an operational center for the NSA—which sounds oddly similar to Eastman’s depiction of the Willard Hotel war room as having been a “communications coordination” center during the insurrection—one of Jim Penrose’s specializations, reportedly, is “how misinformation campaigns [can]…influence elections.” Does this mean that Trump had a misinformation operations expert running a secret war room during the January 6 insurrection? That’s a question the FBI will now need to answer.

Russell (“Russ”) Ramsland Jr.

Russ Ramsland co-founded Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), a Dallas-area cybersecurity firm, with a number of men, among whom was Adam Kraft, a former DIA employee of Michael Flynn. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump after the 2020 election, has referred to ASOG as “our [Trump’s] team” on Fox News Channel.

The Washington Post writes that in 2018 ASOG began pitching GOP candidates on schemes to challenge their election losses by claiming election fraud. Per the Post,

By late 2019, ASOG’s examination [of elections in which Republicans had lost] had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela, and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show. ASOG’s examination [of elections] by last summer [the summer of 2020] had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by the Post. Ramsland had sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries.

There’s more of interest here than can be unpacked in one article. For instance, Stop the Steal’s Ali Alexander is believed to have contacted a DHS number to join a 90-minute conference call on December 21, 2020, the same day Trump met in the Oval Office with a delegation from the House Freedom Caucus led by Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).Of the call to DHS, Alexander wrote on Twitter that he hoped it would “change the world”, raising the question of who at DHS could have been in contact with Alexander, and whether they were also in touch with Ramsland as he worked with Trump’s legal team. {Note: While I’ve confirmed that Alexander called a “DHS” number, it remains unclear whether it’s a “Department of Homeland Security” call-in number or a D.C. “Department of Human Services” number; in the latter case, the call may have been about January 6 permitting, though it’s unclear why this would “change the world.”}:

Trump’s 2019 and 2020 efforts to steal the election—detailed in Proof of Corruption—were linked to, among others, Texas Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas, and fracking industries, an echo of the phrase used to describe Ramsland’s donors and investors. Were any of the individuals who met in Texas in 2019 with Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and Florida-based Trump donor Harry Sargeant III to discuss the 2020 election, energy issues, and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs who allegedly had dirt on Joe Biden involved in funding Ramsland’s dubious pre- and post-election “election integrity” efforts? Republican donors who made their fortunes in the oil, gas, and fracking industries were also, as Proof of Corruption details, involved in Trump’s clandestine outreach to Venezuela in 2019 and 2020—Venezuela being the nation in which the Post saysRamsland’s donors were hoping he’d look for and find political dissidents to reveal a supposed election-theft scheme originating in Caracas.[ghost of hugo chavez?]

The Post notes that Ramsland’s lies “were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert(R-TX), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the ‘kraken’ lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell—who the Post has learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG—and aired publicly by Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.” Rep. Gohmert attended the December 21 pre-insurrection meeting at the White House, intended as a follow-up to the raucous December 18 Oval Office meeting attended by Giuliani and Powell. This underscores that, at a minimum, three individuals who Ramsland had worked with to spread false claims of election fraud were in the Oval Office with Trump during the 120 hours—December 17 to December 21—it appears the initial planning for the insurrection occurred. Indeed, the Post writes the following of November and December of 2020:

During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.

The Post alleges that at least three such “anyones”—Gohmert, Powell, and Giuliani—were part of Ramsland’s “network” of collaborators. Per the Post, “ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but…[Ramsland] never spoke[ ] to Trump himself.”

Whether or not Ramsland spoke with Trump pre-insurrection, the fact that he is, per the Post, a Cruz donor as well as a Trump donor; someone whose first client was an “associate of Steve Bannon”; co-founder of ASOG with a Flynn associate; and a man who successfully lobbied top Trump congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to use his services underscores that if he was in the Willard war room on January 5 the number of Trump associates who may have been there, nearby, or in contact with the war room is considerable.

Beyond the obvious figures, others written about at Proof but with less frequency may also be in the picture with respect to the Willard war room. The Post reports that one apparent investor in Ramsland’s efforts to spread election conspiracy theories prior to the 2020 election was Charles Richard Saulsbury, the fabulously wealthy Texan whose son Bubba Saulsbury was with Mike Pence at the vice presidential mansion on the night of January 5,as exclusively reported by Proof. If a Ramsland investor was with Pence while Ramsland was at the Willard, is it possible that any phone- or video-conferenced strategy session that evening involved not just the Trump International and Willard Hotel war rooms but both the White House and vice president’s mansion? We can’t, at present, know this. But we do know that Bubba Saulsbury—who’d come to D.C. thrilled about marching to the Capitol—saw or heard something on the evening of January 5, while with Pence, that caused him to flee Washington the next morning to avoid all of the events of January 6. What had Bubba Saulsbury heard, and from whom?

{Note: Saulsbury’s Facebook photos indicate he was staying at Trump International Hotel.}

The Post reports that, during the time Ramslandmay have been receiving investments from the Saulsburys—in 2019 and beyond—everything he did “became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his plan to challenge elections Republicans had lost] had to get to Trump.” This doesn’t sound like a man who would have sat at the Willard on January 5 without making any attempt to get in touch with the president.

Indeed, the Post reports that “In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus”—possibly the same seven Freedom Caucus members who five months later would be in the Oval Office discussing an allegedly stolen election with Trump: Gosar, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Gaetz, Greene, and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). Certainly, Trump was well aware of Ramsland by mid-November of 2020, with the Post reporting that “late on November 15, Trump retweeted to his millions of followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from twenty-nine states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish election systems company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’”

But Ramsland’s connections to key insurrectionists go well beyond these, to include ex-Trump legal adviser Lin Wood and Giuliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. The Post writes that “Ramsland contributed material to [Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory”, and also that “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm…said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”

Even former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a participant in the unprecedentedly wild December 18 meeting at the White House, is tied to Ramsland.Per the Post, “By December [2020], Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former CEO of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani.”

So if Eastman was with Ramsland in the second Trump war room on Insurrection Eve, did Ramsland’s associates Ellis, Gohmert, Byrne, Bannon, Wood, Powell, Saulsbury, Sessions, Waldron, Giuliani, or Flynn join them there at any point on January 5 or 6?

(2) Eastman was in the Oval Office on January 4 in a previously unreported meeting.

According to the ex-law professor, on January 4 three people met in the Oval Office with him and Donald Trump: Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob. Per Eastman, prior to the meeting someone had advised Trump that “law review articles” written about the 2000 election indicated that “maybe the Vice President had unilateral authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.” Presumably it was not Eastman who provided such erroneous counsel to Trump, as Eastman says that during his meeting with Trump and Pence,

Pence asked Eastman if he believed vice presidents had the authority that Trump had been advised they had, and Eastman purportedly told Pence it was an “open question.” But per Eastman, he nevertheless told Pence it would be “foolish” to accept the alternate slates of electors the Trump campaign had had sent to D.C., as none had been certified by any state legislature. Eastman says he advised Pence to “delay the proceedings [in Congress]” in “response to the [GOP] state legislatures” that wanted time to “audit” their votes.

This meeting corroborates prior Proof reporting on Trump’s plan for January 6, which was not to win re-election—an impossibility—but simply to allow for so much chaos on Capitol Hill that Congress’ joint session would have to be postponed, giving GOP-led batlleground-state legislatures time to decertify their electors. As Eastman advised Pence and Trump on January 4, under such a scenario GOP-led state legislatures could try to certify new slates of Trump electors, arguably putting Pence in a novel situation the second time Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Many of the voter suppression bills the GOP is now pushing across America are “insurrectionist” in just this way; they aim to realize the vision of our democracy that Eastman shared with Trump and Pence on January 4—one in which state legislatures decide elections, not U.S. voters.

Conclusion

The Willard war room seems to have been focused on “coordinating communications” to ensure sufficient delay in the joint session of Congress that a coup of the incoming Biden administration would be possible through the creation of new slates of certified electors. While we know that the Willard war room hosted an advisory corps focused on the administrative components of this plot, the evidence also suggests that present in this second war room may have been individuals like Stone, Jones, Alexander, Flynn, Stockton, Lawrence, and Shroyer, who lacked the qualifications to have any role in any such administrative component—but would have been of great utility in orchestrating a paramilitary component to Trump’s plan to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

At the nexus of these two parts of Trump’s apparent coup plan was Giuliani, whose ties to both of the two teams that appear to have used the Willard were considerable.Notably, it was Giuliani who said at the Ellipse, “Let’s have trial by combat!”—a line equally relevant to the administrative components of such a plot or paramilitary ones.

A robust investigation of the Willard Hotel “war room” has only just begun. Its size, technological capacities, traffic, purpose, and full roster of attendees remain an open question. This article therefore serves as only the first of a series of articles about this critical development in the story of the January 6 insurrection. More is forthcoming.

https://www**.reuters.**com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-military/

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after Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers challenged the vote’s legitimacy and pushed baseless conspiracy claims. Military ethicists say their actions threaten to weaken the public’s faith in democracy.

By ARAM ROSTON, BRAD HEATH, JOHN SHIFFMAN and PETER EISLER in DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas Filed Dec. 15, 2021, noon GMT

During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.

Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.

For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy. They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.

“I think we’re doing a huge service,” Waldron told Reuters in an interview.

In these efforts, Flynn, Waldron and their colleagues publicly touted their military-intelligence training, arguing that their expertise on the battlefield provided them special insight into alleged election fraud at home in America.

“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded.”

Roger Herbert, recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy

The military men’s false assertions are dangerous, said Roger Herbert, a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”

Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request about the role military figures have played in his quest to overturn the election.

One Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, is now facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated Reserve rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters. In an election forum last month in New Hampshire, Raiklin touted his military experience – Special Forces commander, deployments battling the Taliban and the MS-13 gang– to say he has the intelligence wherewithal to find fraud. “So I have a little bit of experience looking at threats, right?” he said.

Raiklin declined to be interviewed.

Waldron says he and the Flynn circle are not using military techniques on Americans. He maintains the actions they are undertaking for Trump don’t undercut American democracy because he’s convinced they are ferreting out voter fraud.

The veterans’ false claims shifted over time. They have pinned Trump’s loss on actions by the Chinese government and voting technology companies, alleged misconduct by U.S. state and local election officials and said hackers had used the internet to change votes after they were cast. They have blamed old-school ballot stuffing, perhaps involving dead voters or Venezuelan interests.

Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.

The military-intelligence officers’ battle is part of a larger Republican movement that has led disgruntled Trump voters to endorse threats of violence as a means to regaining power. As Reuters has documented, Trump supporters are waging a campaign of intimidation against election workers around the country. In a review of more than 800 emails, calls and online posts made by backers of the ex-president, Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials and featured in public campaigns attacking the vote’s integrity.

A false claim pushed by Flynn and his cohorts that voting machines were hacked to steal votes from Trump is a common theme in many angry messages. The machines “are rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” said an email accusing election officials in Yavapai County, Arizona, of complicity. Invoking General Flynn by name, the writer added, “every lie will be revealed, every traitor will be punished.”

Efforts by Flynn to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory have been the subject of extensive reporting by a number of U.S. media outlets. The Reuters examination of Flynn and his colleagues provides new details about the origins of the former intelligence officials’ collaboration and the extent to which they worked together in a bid to undo the 2020 election.

The reporting, based on interviews with participants, military ethicists and others, plus an examination of Reuters’ database of threats against election officials, reveals how Flynn drafted Waldron and others to actively contest the 2020 vote. Flynn and his small circle were distinctive because their military credentials provided a patina of respectability to even the most far-fetched claims.

Among the military veterans to play a role in “Stop the Steal” were:

Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor in 2017, who was involved in pushing the most dramatic of conspiracy claims. He urged the president to deploy the military to overturn the election in December 2020, then went on a public speaking campaign sowing doubts about the vote and urging states to conduct their own reviews.

Waldron, who insists Trump won. He gained attention last week when the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riot revealed it was in possession of a PowerPoint presentation he’d shown to U.S. lawmakers outlining methods for overturning the election. Earlier, he lobbied state officials and spoke on rightwing media about his stolen-election theories. Waldron said Flynn drafted him to go public, saying, “No one else can do it. It needs to be done, so go ahead and do it!”

Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.

Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence and who claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent. After the election, Keshel told Reuters he contacted Flynn on LinkedIn and they began collaborating. Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim, saying the report came from a “highly respected Army intelligence captain.”

Keshel told Reuters he stands by that assessment but never called for violence. “Personally, I believe the election was compromised,” he said, adding, “I can’t control anybody else.”

Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator. Raiklin has said he worked with Flynn. Keshel said he reached out to the general to share his concerns, and the two worked together in the weeks after the election. Waldron said Flynn pushed him to go public with his research.

‘CORRUPTION CURTAIN:’

Keshel’s work helped fuel calls by Trump followers in many states for audits of the election results. His analysis, which provided no documented evidence of fraud, was discredited by political scientists, statistical experts and Republican and Democratic election officials. In a post on Telegram, Keshel himself described his study as “lenient.”

His work nonetheless spurred a torrent of emails to election officials in areas where his analysis suggested fraud. In Pasco County, Florida, a Republican county Trump won, officials were deluged with emails demanding an audit after Keshel’s report. Keshel’s analysis “is literally devoid of statistical validity,” said Brian Corley, the Republican county supervisor of elections. “People just took it as fact.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment on the Flynn circle’s activities.

Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College, said a key issue is whether Flynn’s associates are publicly citing their military training to lend legitimacy to a partisan political cause.

“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed,” said Shanks Kaurin. She said she was speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of her government employer.

Waldron disputes such criticism. “I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack from foreign and domestic enemies,” he said. “They want to undermine the republic through the election process.”

Earlier this month, a Reuters reporter met with Waldron at One Shot Distillery and Brewing, which he runs on Texas Hill Country’s “Whiskey Trail.” Silver-labeled bottles of rum, vodka and whiskey were on display as Waldron descended the stairs wearing a gray One Shot Distillery t-shirt, with a Glock-19 in a holster fastened to his belt.

Waldron, with an affable bearing and a beard dappled with gray, retired as an Army Reserve colonel in 2016. He said he’s fighting powerful forces in a quest for the truth.

“You talk about PSYOPS,” he said. “The election (voting machine) companies and the media have done the biggest PSYOP on the American people.”

In a series of interviews this year, Waldron vowed he was on the cusp of breakthrough proof the election was stolen. “We are decrypting the satellite packets right now,” he said in January. In October, he cited a “37 terabyte” tranche of data he believed could unmask fraud.

A new mission

Four days after the election, as ballot counts continued in a handful of swing states, the U.S. media projected Biden had won, establishing an insurmountable lead.

Trump refused to concede. That day, November 7, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, held a press conference in Philadelphia in which he claimed the result had been swayed by suspect mail-in ballots and votes cast in the names of dead people.

The next day, Waldron said he was on the phone with Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas. Waldron, who ran a cyber security company after leaving the military, said he had been researching vote hacking since August; Biden’s victory accelerated his efforts. Waldron said he told Gohmert he had tracked internet traffic routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany. Votes could be rerouted, too, he told Gohmert. Election officials say this assertion is false, and no evidence for it exists.

Gohmert immediately called Trump, Waldron said. A spokesman for Gohmert declined to comment.

The U.S. military men spreading Trump's baseless fraud claims

https://www.reuters.com › usa-election-military

Dec 15, 2021 — After Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers ...

Capitol riot committee subpoenas coup PowerPoint author ...

https://www.independent.co.uk › ... › US politics

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https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2021/12/11

Dec 11, 2021 — Philip Waldron, a retired U.S. Army colonel, attended an Oval Office meeting with Trump and had multiple conversations with the White House ...

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk › news › article-10305289

Dec 13, 2021 — Retired Col. Phil Waldron circulated a 38-page memo recommending a 'national security emergency' and says he met with former White House ...

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https://www.youtube.com › watch

Dec 16, 2021 — New York Times Washington correspondent Michael Schmidt, former FBI special agent Clint Watts and former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal ...

Missing: coup ‎| Must include: coup

waldron, phil col

The U.S. military men spreading Trump's baseless fraud claims

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