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How an election conspiracy theorist has Trump’s ear on voting laws and midterms | US voting rights | The Guardian

mich adv

...Michigan voting machines

Smith will argue that Trump, outside his official presidential duties, tried to persuade political allies in Michigan to sway the election in his favor.

Nevada

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A Donald Trump campaign operative urged a colleague to “make them riot” in Detroit as supporters gathered outside an absentee ballot counting center the day after the 2020 election, according to a newly unsealed court filing.

This story also appeared in Bridge Michigan

“Do it!!!,” the unnamed campaign employee allegedly said in discussions about the TCF Center, where Trump’s unfounded claims of widespread fraud fueled an unsuccessful effort to block ballot counting in the heavily Democratic city.

The conversation was among a handful of new Michigan-related details publicly released Wednesday as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s ongoing case against Trump, the former president who is accused of felonies for attempting to overturn his loss.

Smith described the campaign employee as a co-conspirator who had brushed off warnings that potential “unrest” in Detroit could escalate to resemble a violent effort to stop vote counting in Florida’s 2000 presidential election.

The unnamed campaign operative “sought to create chaos” in Detroit as the campaign prepared litigation to try and stop the county in court, Smith wrote.

Related:

Later in mid-December, Trump allegedly asked then-Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a widely discredited report from Antrim County that suggested voting tabulators there had been compromised.

McDaniel, a Michigan resident, called the report inaccurate. And after discussing it with then-state House Speaker Lee Chatfield, she told Trump the report was “fucking nuts,” according to the court filing.

In the 165-page document unsealed Wednesday, Smith outlined what he called “private crimes” by Trump as he argued against a request for presidential immunity in the case. Trump faces multiple felony counts, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by attempting to overturn the election.

Trump, who is running for president a third time, has called the indictment part of a “witch hunt” to deny him a return to the White House.

Earlier this week, Trump’s attorneys urged additional redactions from Smith’s court filing before it was made public, arguing the special counsel was trying to influence the upcoming election by releasing new details of the investigation.

Smith’s office “wants their politically motivated manifesto to be public … in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States,” his attorneys wrote.

The new filing comes after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined presidents have absolute immunity for official acts, requiring Smith to reframe the indictment around the new restrictions.

Like the original indictment filed last year, Michigan figures heavily in the new document. The state, and Detroit, are mentioned a combined 60 times in the 165-page document.

The filing chronicles how Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani allegedly “attempted to pressure the Michigan legislature to overturn the valid election results” by passing a joint resolution calling the election results into doubt.

Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, both Republicans, maintained throughout the post-election turmoil that they had not been provided any evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election. They told Trump the same, according to court filings.

Then-candidate Joe Biden won Michigan by a margin of about 154,000 votes, or 2.7%.

The Antrim County Report emerged after attorney Matt DePerno convinced a judge in early December 2020 to let him bring in an outside firm and examine Dominion voting machines after an initial reporting error.

DePerno had sued over a close vote on an unrelated ordinance. He has pleaded not guilty to separate felony charges over his alleged attempts to obtain and access voting machines throughout the state.

The Antrim report was discredited not long after its publication, but not before Trump seized on it as conclusive evidence the election was rigged against him, even as multiple senior advisers and staff attempted to persuade him otherwise.

Trump handed then-Attorney General Bill Barr the Antrim County report on the day he resigned, according to transcripts of Barr’s interviews during a congressional investigation into Jan. 6, 2021.

“‘This is absolute proof the Dominion machines were rigged,’” Barr said Trump told him. “‘The report means that I’m going to have a second term.’”

But Barr told investigators he thought the reporter was “very amateurish” and arrived at “nonsense” conclusions.

Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 loss effectively ended on Jan. 6, 2021, when Vice President Mike Pence refused to block congressional certification of the election despite riots at the U.S. Capitol.

In a Tuesday debate, Trump’s new running mate, JD Vance, declined to say whether Trump lost four years ago or whether he would certify an election if put in the same position as Pence.

Vance defended his position Wednesday during a campaign event in Michigan.

“I’m focused on the election 33 days from now, because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to common sense economic policies,” Vance said in Auburn Hills.

“And by the way, to all of you listening out there, I believe that we are going to have the safest and most secure election in 2024 that we’ve had, because the RNC is fighting for election integrity in a way that it frankly wasn’t four years ago.”

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MMA 1 24

A January 3 Washington Post article by Sarah Ellison explores the influence of far-right MAGA site Gateway Pundit and its founder, Jim Hoft, whose false claims Media Matters has documented for years.

Ellison expertly examines Hoft's influence in spreading pernicious voter fraud claims, which others in right-wing media build upon. She even quotes Steve Bannon saying that Hoft and Gateway Pundit provide an “infrastructure” for pro-Trump voices to riff on:

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure”[PERMISSION?] upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

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In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “a fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

The entire piece is worth reading, specifically to learn how Gateway Pundit has amplified false and misleading claims about voter fraud in Michigan.

With the 2024 election on the horizon, it's worth remembering that the earliest, most viral false claims to arise may well be sourced – directly or indirectly – to Gateway Pundit.

REF WAPO

WAPO NO LNX

Democracy in America

Election 2024

Democracy in America

A right-wing tale of Michigan election fraud had it all – except proof

Gateway Pundit, a favorite news source of former president Donald Trump’s, has pushed false claims of a stolen election even as others have pulled back in the face of consequences

By Sarah Ellison

January 3, 2024

The story had all the elements of a blockbuster crime saga: burner phones, semiautomatic weapons, silencers and bags of prepaid cash cards. “NOW WE HAVE PROOF!” blared the headline on the right-wing website Gateway Pundit. “Massive 2020 Voter Fraud Uncovered in Michigan.”

The story referenced “thousands of fraudulent ballots” caught by Muskegon City Clerk Ann Meisch. Grateful readers deluged her office with hundreds of calls, hailing her as a hero.

But Meisch knew it wasn’t true.

According to police reports, the Michigan attorney general’s office and an interview with Meisch, an employee of a voter registration drive company had submitted to the Muskegon city clerk thousands of voter registration applications weeks before the 2020 election, some with faked signatures and faulty addresses.

Meisch’s staff spent hundreds of hours weeding out the bad applications. The guns the police found were legally registered to a landlord who had nothing to do with the registration drive. The prepaid phones and cash cards were given to temporary employees to contact new voter prospects.

“There were no fraudulent ballots,” Meisch said in an interview, “not a single one that anyone in my office was aware of.”

But for Gateway Pundit, which is run out of its founder’s home and whose small staff produces stories that help set the agenda for Donald Trump’s most ardent followers, the August story provided weeks of headlines that radiated across right-wing media and were repeatedly amplified by pro-Trump influencers. That’s despite the fact that it was published nearly three years after the election — and after Meisch’s staff had thwarted any fraud.

The outlet’s emphasis on long-debunked fraud claims helps explain why election denial has proved so durable, despite the many efforts to halt the spread of disinformation and impose consequences on those who persist in it.

Trump himself faces multiple criminal counts for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election on the disproven grounds that it had been rigged against him. The Trump lawyers who pushed false voter fraud claims have, in some cases, been hit with criminal charges, as well as censure and disbarment proceedings. In mid-December, a federal jury ordered former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two election workers who sued him for defamation. Trump’s largest media ally, Fox News, agreed last year to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation suit.

Some right-wing outlets, such as Fox’s smaller cable-news rival Newsmax, have pulled back from election-related conspiracy theories in the face of lawsuits and threats of legal consequences.

But through it all, Gateway Pundit has continued trumpeting disproven election fraud stories, even as it faces defamation suits over its coverage of the 2020 election. It has also taken its own legal action against fact-checkers, disinformation researchers and story subjects, while pressing in court to make it harder for social media companies to crack down on misinformation.

The outlet’s reporting was a favorite of Trump’s as he clung to the presidency more than three years ago, aides said, and it has become a key amplifier of his continued fraud claims as he campaigns to return to the White House. Gateway Pundit traffic peaked in November 2020 at nearly 7 million page views, and the site still averages more than a million visits each month, according to Comscore, which measures the readership of media sites.

Less than a year from the 2024 election, the latest polls show that some two-thirds of Republicans falsely believe that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. Gateway Pundit’s influence helps explain why, experts in disinformation say. Though the site employs only a handful of regular writers, it has played an outsize role in popularizing false claims.

“Gateway Pundit is a known source of disinformation that quickly trades up the chain,” said Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University studying online disinformation and media manipulation. “Because when they report a piece of information, it gives others license to do so.”why?

The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, who started blogging as a hobby in 2004, is among “the best at creating a right-wing echo system,” right-wing podcast host and former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon said in an interview. Hoft did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this report.

Bannon said Hoft is often one of the first to pick up a social media post or a local news story that other right-wing personalities then repeat and aggregate. He “isn’t afraid to take a leading edge where you don’t have all the facts but they are coming together,” Bannon explained. Once Gateway Pundit puts one of its signature all-caps headlines on a story, that provides what Bannon calls an “infrastructure” upon which his own podcast and other right-wing outlets and influencers can build.

That infrastructure was useful to pro-Trump One America News, a small cable network that pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. A former OAN producer attested that he and his colleagues were directed to consult Gateway Pundit when they arrived at work to inform the day’s programming, according to depositions and documents from a defamation lawsuit filed against the Trump campaign and others, including Gateway Pundit, by a former Dominion Voting Systems executive who was falsely accused by Trump allies of helping to swing the 2020 election.

“Check Gateway Pundit, Epoch Times and The Blaze right when you get in. … These are very helpful to find good OAN content,” read one Jan. 14, 2021, email to producers from the channel’s news director. OAN settled in the case under undisclosed terms in September.

“Gateway Pundit’s articles were chopped-up sentences that were drawn from whatever crazy thing a Twitter user was saying about election denial,” the former producer, Marty Golingan, said in an interview, “and they would spin it with maximum outrage and reactionary emotion.”

In the weeks before he left office in 2021, Trump brandished printouts of Gateway Pundit articles questioning the results of the election, say former aides who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House conversations.

“When he was looking for evidence, Gateway Pundit was one reliable place he knew he could go for validation, and maybe even some new ideas,” said one former aide.

The site has been influential in promoting false election fraud theories even though some of the most influential figures on the right say they don’t trust it. One prominent conservative radio host, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending political allies, said in an interview that the site’s stories are “bull----.”

Gateway Pundit represents a “fringe segment of so-called conservative media that’s driven by conspiratorial clickbait to drive revenues to stay afloat,” the host said.

A former Trump administration official who denies that Joe Biden rightfully won the 2020 election nevertheless told The Post in an interview that if you cite Gateway Pundit in an argument, “it means you’ve lost. You can’t use it to make an argument. You can only use it to hear what you want to hear.”

Gateway’s origins

:{In the nearly two decades since its founding, Hoft’s website has spread debunked conspiracy theories on a wide range of topics — for instance, casting doubt on President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and suggesting that student survivors of the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school shooting were part of an anti-Trump plot.

More recently, Gateway Pundit has helped spread misinformation about the attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, who was bludgeoned in the couple’s San Francisco home last year by an intruder intent on kidnapping his wife. It has also falsely claimed that U.S. aid money for Ukraine is being laundered and going into the pockets of Democrats.}:

But the site’s most notable focus in recent years has been promoting disproven narratives about election fraud.

Hoft created Gateway Pundit in 2004, inspired by the role that bloggers played in debunking a “60 Minutes” segment on George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard, according to former associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations. Bloggers had been the first to point out that “60 Minutes” had unwittingly relied on falsified records in telling its story; CBS ultimately retracted the piece.

Hoft, 60, rarely grants interviews. But years ago, the Iowa native described in a message posted online ahead of a high school reunion how he started the site.

“So much has happened since I left Fort Dodge,” Hoft began his note to his former classmates at a Catholic school, explaining that “something exciting happened in late 2004. I started writing a little political blog” that, after a few years, “gained thousands of readers every day.”

The work started getting him invited on “paid trips to different conservative events around the world,” Hoft wrote, including a 2007 visit to Israel sponsored by a conservative political group. There he met Andrew Breitbart, who at the time was an editor at the Drudge Report. The two became friends and developed an appreciation for the power of the internet to take a small ember of a story and turn it into a conflagration.

“Jim is a direct descendant of Andrew Breitbart,” Bannon said, referencing the founder of the right-wing media site Breitbart News. “Remember, they’re both about citizen journalism, and Jim knows how to harness the energy of regular citizens.”

Trump’s candidacy was a boon for Hoft and for Gateway Pundit, which, according to a study conducted by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, became one of the most popular sites on the right in 2015-2016. Among those sites, the study found, “Gateway Pundit is in a class of its own, known for ‘publishing falsehoods and spreading hoaxes.’”

In 2020, Gateway Pundit became a key part of what researchers at the University of Washington and Stanford University among others deemed a “disinformation campaign” produced by “hyperpartisan media and political operatives” working “alongside ordinary people to produce and amplify misleading claims.”

Instead of operating from the top down, this kind of campaign seizes on the social media posts of “concerned citizens” and turns them into shareable pieces of content that can spread to different outlets and to powerful influencers, the researchers found.

In one illustrative example given in the study, Gateway Pundit helped circulate a photo posted on Twitter by a writer for conservative outlet the Blaze in September 2020. The photo purported to show 1,000 mail-in ballots found in a dumpster in Sonoma County, Calif.

“Big if true,” read the caption. Five hours later, Gateway Pundit weighed in with this headline: “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up.”

The county responded in a Facebook post: “This is not true.” Instead, the county said, the photo depicted old ballot envelopes from the November 2018 election that had been discarded in accordance with California law.

Gateway Pundit updated its story after the post: “The County of Sonoma put out a statement saying the ballots were from 2018. The county says the ballots were already opened. You can judge for yourself.”

In May, Hoft, alongside a co-director of a coronavirus vaccine skeptics group, sued the researchers, alleging that the entities colluded to “censor” speech by sharing their research with social media platforms as part of an attempted crackdown on misinformation. A representative for Stanford said the case, which is in its early stages, is “completely without merit.” A representative for the University of Washington declined to speak about ongoing litigation.

Election workers under threat

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Gateway Pundit enjoyed a social-media-fueled traffic spike similar to the one it had during the 2016 election. A German Marshall Fund analysis found that “verified account shares of its content” on Twitter increased ninefold from the first quarter of 2018 through the fourth quarter of 2020, reaching 7.2 million shares, more than for The Washington Post, NBC News or NPR. Nine of its 10 most-shared articles “included disinformation about voter fraud,” the analysis found.

One of Gateway Pundit’s highest-profile stories of 2020 was published after a volunteer Trump campaign attorney presented a misleading video during a post-election hearing in Georgia. The video purported to show that Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, her daughter, had tampered with ballots.

That day, Gateway Pundit published the first of 58 articles on the two women that would appear over the next year and a half, despite the fact that Georgia election officials had quickly debunked claims that the pair had engaged in election fraud. Gateway Pundit’s stories cast Freeman and Moss as “crooked” operatives who counted “illegal ballots from a suitcase stashed under a table!”

In 2021, the women sued Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft and Hoft’s twin brother, Joe, who is a frequent contributor to the site. Gateway Pundit and Jim and Joe Hoft filed a counterclaim, alleging that the case against them is designed to drive Gateway Pundit out of business. The counterclaim was dismissed in 2023.

The lawsuit by Freeman and Moss, which is awaiting trial, alleges that the falsehoods about them “have not only devastated their personal and professional reputations but instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats that has forced them to change their phone numbers, delete their online accounts, and fear for their physical safety.”

In their response, the Hofts said articles in Gateway Pundit about Freeman and Moss were “either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.”

A federal jury recently ordered that Giuliani pay the two women $148 million for his own false claims that they helped steal the election from Trump. His lawyer, Joseph D. Sibley IV, told jurors that Gateway Pundit had been “patient zero” for the false claims.

Not a smoking gun

Meisch, the Muskegon city clerk, fears she may come under the same kind of attack when people learn that she doesn’t believe she uncovered massive voter fraud in her city.

“I’m just worried people will turn on me,” she said.

Gateway Pundit’s Aug. 8 story about Muskegon, a formerly booming foundry town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan that Trump narrowly lost in 2016 and 2020, outlined a purported voter fraud conspiracy. The report was built on a police investigation that had been reported on three years earlier by local news outlets. The police had found no evidence of a broader effort to subvert the election, but referred the case to the FBI because the voter registration company at the center of the case was based out of state. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Gateway Pundit published a copy of the 2020 police report, which contained new details about the investigation, including that police had found guns in the storefront that the voter registration company had rented. Almost immediately after publication, other right-wing outlets picked up and amplified the piece. The same day the story was published, Bannon hosted Hoft on his daily podcast to discuss it. Over the next two days, then-Fox News host Lou Dobbs, conservative podcaster Joe Oltmann and Right Side Broadcasting, a pro-Trump streaming service, cited the story.

Dobbs called it a guide to “how the Marxist Dems stole Michigan.” Oltmann said the gun silencers, also known as suppressors, were evidence “of organized crime.” Bannon said the story showed that “demon” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, was a “liar.”

For the next 10 days, Gateway Pundit averaged a story a day on the topic, eventually publishing at least 40 pieces. During that period, an array of right-wing podcasters all discussed the story on their shows, including former Fox personality Dan Bongino, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Jack Posobiec, a far-right blogger.

Twelve days after the initial story was published, the Michigan attorney general’s office issued a statement responding to the report, citing its “false claims of election law violations.”

“Despite Gateway Pundit’s continuing claims to the contrary, the 2020 election has been thoroughly litigated and audited and has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt that it was fair and accurate,” the statement read.

The voter-registration company employee who had handed in the faked registration applications to the clerk’s office had not filled them out herself; she was responsible for collecting the registration forms from many employees and submitting them in batches, according to Nessel’s office. Voters registration in Michigan are nonpartisan.

The state attorney general’s office said that while it had not ruled out that a crime may have been committed in Muskegon, numerous state agencies had investigated and none had uncovered evidence of successful fraudulent registrations because they had all been “intercepted and not filed into the state’s voter database.”

“This is once again, not a smoking gun for their long-debunked theories,” the statement read.

But Gateway Pundit was unbowed. The same day, the site published another piece on Muskegon and Hoft appeared on Bannon’s podcast again, calling Nessel’s statement “confirmation” of the Gateway Pundit story.

On Sept. 5, Trump posted about the story on Truth Social, without comment, and was reposted 3,300 times.

In late August, the Michigan Republican Party held a news conference in Lansing, the state capital, that party Chairwoman Kristina Karamo billed as an opportunity to “address the recent reports of election corruption uncovered in Michigan.”

“The constant questions surrounding our election system is an absolute threat to our republic,” Karamo said. “No one is going to continue to convince us that these are all just a bunch of anomalies.”

Gateway Pundit “slanted the story to make it seem that the attempt to interfere with the election was successful,” Karen Buie, the Muskegon County clerk, said in an interview. “There was an attempt. You can’t negate that. But it failed because we have systems in place.”

Meisch, the city clerk, said in an interview that she is bracing for even more mistrust of the system that she has worked for over 30 years to protect. Already, she said, paranoia among voters has been growing as baseless conspiracy theories spread about voting machines and drop boxes.

“We haven’t yet seen the full impact of the Gateway Pundit story,” said Meisch. “We won’t see that until the next [presidential] election.”

But for Gateway Pundit, the impact is already apparent. In July, the month before the Muskegon story, the site’s traffic fell below 700,000 unique visitors for the first time in years, according to Comscore.

In August, it more than doubled, to 1.5 million.

Clara Ence Morse and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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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.

===

raw  https://www.rawstory.com/matthew-deperno-2658319741/

no lnx

Michigan AG candidate may face criminal charges before election for tampering with voting machines: report

Bob Brigham

September 21, 2022

Michigan AG candidate may face criminal charges before election for tampering with voting machines: report

The GOP nominee for attorney general in Michigan could face criminal charges stemming from his election denialism before the November election.

Kalamazoo attorney Matthew Perno is being investigated by Muskegon County Prosecutor DJ Hilson, who was appointed special prosecutor by Attorney General Dana Nessel, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Hilson issued a statement on the timing of potential charges, saying, "As prosecutor, I have an ethical obligation to ensure that all necessary evidence and information is obtained and reviewed so that a determination of criminal charges can be made. In order to meet that obligation, I have determined that additional investigative work needs to be done and I am working with investigators on those issues."

"I am acting as expeditiously as possible, but due to this ethical obligation, I cannot say at this time when any decisions would be made."

Nessel requested a special prosecutor as DePerno is her opponent following an investigation by her office and the Michigan State Police.

Also under investigation are GOP state Rep. Daire Rendon and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, among others.

"According to documents from Nessel's office, several people − including DePerno − are also accused of either illegally tampering with voting machines or being present when others "broke into the tabulators." Additional people accused of misconduct in the request for a special prosecutor include Stefanie Lambert Juntilla, Ann Howard, Ben Cotton, Jeff Lenberg, Douglas Logan and James Penrose," the newspaper reported. "Juntilla, a lawyer, has worked on debunked legal efforts brought by Trump-supporting attorney Sydney Powell and others to suggest widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Cotton, Lenberg, Logan and Penrose worked both with Powell's so-called 'Kraken' team on discredited election efforts across the country and on DePerno's Antrim County lawsuit."

DePerno has denied any wrongdoing.

Read the full report.$

9 29 22

matthew DePerno, the Republican nominee for attorney general in Michigan who has made a name for himself by pushing lies about the 2020 election — and by becoming the target of an investigation into whether he illegally tampered with voting machines — is spending the final stretch of his campaign spouting new falsehoods about supposed election crimes.

In a recent meeting with the Detroit Free Press’ editorial board, DePerno claimed that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had been “broken into” in 2020, the paper said Tuesday. He also said that his opponent in the November 2022 election, Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), had failed to look into the purported crime.

“Why don’t you write a story about Dec. 4, 2020, when I referred to Dana Nessel an actual crime of two tabulators that were actually used in the November 2020 election where the security tapes were removed, the machines were broken into,” DePerno said.

But none of that is true, the Free Press reported.

for one thing, the paper found, DePerno never submitted any kind of criminal complaint to law enforcement. More importantly, the candidate still hasn’t offered evidence, or even a detailed description, of the crime he said took place.

His allegations appear to stem from a 2020 civil lawsuit filed by his client Bill Bailey, which claimed that a vote-tallying issue on Election Day in Antrim County was evidence of possible widespread fraud in Michigan. (In fact, it was a simple, quickly resolved human error.) Unofficial early results showed then-President Donald Trump losing the rural, conservative county, but a prompt recount indicated that he had won, 61% to 37%.

As part of the legal challenge, DePerno claimed that some voting machines in Antrim Country were missing the security tape typically placed over them after elections, suggesting that they could have been compromised. But the group of inspectors DePerno was involved with hadn’t looked at the machines until weeks after the election, the Free Press reported — well after that security tape legally could have been removed.

Still, DePerno claimed that “there is evidence that someone who was not authorized removed the tape ... during the election.” He provided no such evidence, according to the Free Press.

He also told the outlet that he believed Nessel had known about allegations of tampering and done nothing to address them.

“You cannot deny that Dana Nessel was aware of the allegations,” DePerno said. “You can also not deny that Dana Nessel never took any steps to investigate these claims. Not one single witness was contacted to give a statement by [Michigan State Police].”

Both Nessel’s office and the Antrim County clerk reiterated this week that they believe the claims are baseless.

The lawsuit hasn’t gone anywhere. An appeals court panel foundin April that the “plaintiff merely raised a series of questions about the election without making any specific factual allegations as required.”

In a statement to HuffPost, DePerno’s campaign declined to comment further on the allegations or lawsuit. “We are done rehashing the Antrim County Case,”a spokesperson wrote.

[pix Former President Donald Trump endorses Republican Matthew DePerno for state attorney general at a rally on April 2 near Washington, Michigan. (Photo: Scott Olson via Getty Images)

‘They Are Domestic Terrorists’

DePerno’s claim about voting-machine tampering actually echoes pieces of an investigation into his own alleged actions: Nessel’s office has said that DePerno was one of the “prime instigators” of what it described as a potential “conspiracy to unlawfully obtain access to voting machines used in the 2020 General Election.”

At the office’s request, a special prosecutor is currently investigating DePerno and right-wing operatives who the office says tried to access and breach the machines as part of their attempt to push voter fraud myths.

DePerno and others, including far-right Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf,allegedly managed to get their hands on some machines during this effort. Leaf also sent a sheriff’s deputy and a private investigator from town to town, pressing clerks for information.

According to Nessel’s office, the group then took the machines to “hotels and/or AIRBNB’s in Oakland County” so that they could break into them and perform “tests” on the equipment.

It’s a felony in Michigan to “obtain undue possession” of voting equipment.

DePerno has previously called the state investigation a “witch hunt,” and he promises on his campaign website to “prosecute the people who corrupted the 2020 election and allowed fraud to permeate the entire election system.”

DePerno’s efforts have been a wellspring for widespread lies about the 2020 election. 

Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a key financial backer in the effort to sow doubt about the 2020 results, sent a team to look into the machines in Antrim County, and it wrote a report claiming that Dominion-brand voting machines in the area were “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

This report has been repeatedly debunked, but it was still cited in a draft executive order in 2020 asserting that Trump, who was still president at the time, had the authority to seize voting machines nationwide.

“It’s not a question. ... The whole thing’s rigged,” Byrne, now one of several people facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, said in a video this month.

Byrne then called out Nessel, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) and Jonathan Brater, the director of Michigan’s Bureau of Elections: “They are domestic terrorists. I’m saying it. Sue me.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

an 9 22 colo

...Tina Peters, Mesa County’s Clerk, was not a cultish election denier immediately before or after 2020’s presidential election. She did not make any accusations that her voting system’s computers had been secretly sabotaged when Sandra Brown, Mesa County’s back-office election manager, mistakenly double-counted 20,000 ballots in late October 2020—a procedural error during preprocessing ballots that Brown repeated in Mesa County’s municipal elections in April 2021.

But soon after April 2021’s elections, where a slate of conservatives who skipped a candidate forum all lost, the first of what became a parade of pro-Donald Trump, self-proclaimed election IT experts began telling Peters about anomalies with her county’s voting system computers. The anomalies were the same clichés about illegal voters and forged totals that had been put forth by Trump diehards in other states. Except the allegations were dressed up as statistics and technicalities. Peters, a businesswoman turned public official, was more than impressed.

As March 2022 indictments by Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein, a Republican, and a recent New Yorker profile recount, Peters used a standard update of election software in late April 2021 to make unauthorized copies of her election system’s hard drives, software, and data. The apparent goal was gathering intelligence to show that the technology—made by Dominion Voting Systems—could not be trusted to produce accurate vote counts.

Trump’s lawyers and partisan IT specialists had made copies of computer drives, software and data in December 2020 in Antrim County, Michigan, after a former state GOP leader turned state judge allowed it. The copies, of another Dominion system, were not to be shared. But they were soon leaked in Trump circles.

That effort, nonetheless, produced no evidence for any of Trump’s failed post-election lawsuits. Still, one day after January 6, 2021’s pro-Trump insurrection, some of the same data miners went to Coffee County, Georgia. There, an election official let them copy their Dominion system’s drives, software and 2020 data. Members of this loose cadre of IT experts showed up in Mesa County in late April—several weeks after back-office manager Brown again erred in using a computer as it was compiling vote subtotals in its municipal elections.

What happened next in Mesa County gets complex. It also reveals how a rare but recurring trend among a handful of local election officials—mistakes with setting up or using their system’s computers—can be exploited by partisans who claim that invisible forces are secretly stealing votes if their candidates lose.

In every cycle, there are some election officials who do not properly set up or use these computers—errors that usually are caught and corrected, but initially produce incorrect election results. This trend has been overlooked in the press coverage of the interstate plot by Trump’s IT gurus to steal election software and 2020 data.

The operational problems, however, are among the findings by the Independent Media Institute’s Voting Booth project, which has co-written a forthcoming guide about how election systems work. The co-author is Duncan Buell, a computer scientist who has studied voting systems, software, and data for more than a decade, and was an election official in Richland County, South Carolina, home to the state’s capital, Columbia. These errors recurred in each cycle that he studied.

In 2020’s general election, the programming, and operational mistakes were few and far between. Nonetheless, the errors that Trump’s IT squads seized upon—errors that were corroborated by post-election inquiries by other government bodies—helped fuel the lie that the presidential election was stolen.

Moreover, some of the election workers who made these mistakes—such as Mesa County’s Brown—and their elected superior—such as Peters—then fell under the spell of Trump’s conspiratorial IT squad—producing fodder for more false claims.

These trends—mistakes with programming or using election computers and rogue officials who abuse the public trust by making unfounded claims—offer warnings before 2022’s general election. Many 2020 election-deniers are candidates seeking state and federal office this fall. A few already have shown in their primaries that they will attack the process and technology if they fear they may lose.

Before 2020’s election, virtually all of the members of Trump’s IT squads did not know much about voting system computers or election administration safeguards. But they eagerly presented their credentials and claimed, that election computers had been hijacked, and, moreover, that no Dominion system should be trusted. Their unproven accusations became, and remain, fixtures in Trump circles.

“It wasn’t just Colorado,” said Walter Daugherity, a recently retired University of Texas lecturer in computer science and engineering, on an August 22 televised panel sponsored and hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has spent millions to promote the stolen election fiction and whose actions are under investigation by federal authorities. “Everywhere across the country that had a Dominion trusted build [software] upgrade had the same thing happen.”

Daugherity was one analyst who received Mesa County’s pilfered data. He and Jeff O’Donnell, an IT analyst whose moniker in Trump circles is “the Lone Raccoon,” co-wrote a series of reports concluding that Mesa County’s computers mysteriously allowed 20,346 presidential ballots to be counted twice. The double counting was not the fault of election officials, specifically back-office election manager Brown, they wrote, positing that an “external trigger,” “signal,” “software algorithm” or “pre-programming” had caused “unexpected voting patterns.”

Their speculation was one of many similar pronouncements in Trump circles. They accused Dominion of complicity in a scheme that would be illegal, if it were true.

“The report made claims which, if true, would indicate a crime was committed related to election fraud,” Mesa County District Attorney Rubenstein said via email on August 25. “I stand by the investigation that we conducted and am confident that there is no evidence of a crime being committed.”

Inside One Disinformation Bubble

Mesa County was among a handful of counties across America’s 8,000-plus election jurisdictions where Trump allies discovered glitches in administering the 2020 election. The glitches, which produced incorrect initial vote counts, were signs that Trump lost due to a vast conspiracy, they asserted.

That narrative, which continues today, ignores the banalest explanation of what happened in Mesa County and in jurisdictions such as Antrim County, Michigan. In both locales, county election officials erred with setting up or using their voting system’s computers, mistakes that initially were not noticed but were later caught and corrected.

The operational errors were recorded by the system’s computers, which keeps logs of every action—from ballot paper jams to vote counts. The errors were confirmed by other evidence, such as, in Mesa County, police investigators reconstructing the mistakes on the same equipment, parsing video footage from security cameras in the room where they occurred and interviewing witnesses. But conspiracy-minded Trumpers, including O’Donnell and Daugherity, went looking for incongruities in computer logs and vote count databases, which, they said, masked programming that reassigned votes from Trump to other presidential candidates.

“The findings in this report were prepared by the authors as consultants to the legal team representing Tina Peters, the Mesa County Clerk,” the executive summary of their March 19, 2022 report said. “The findings provide evidence of unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data during the 2020 General Election and 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election. Because of this evidence, which led to the vote totals for those elections being impossible to verify, the results and integrity of Mesa County’s 2020 General Election and the 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election are in question.”

Among the incongruities they cited are batches of ballots that were not sequentially numbered in a results database. That can occur, several election experts explained, when batches of ballots with sloppy ink marks (made by voters) are detected by the software and set aside until the voter’s intent is determined. That process, called adjudication, is done in Colorado in the presence of political party observers. The batches are added to the database after the voter intent issues are resolved. (It was at this step where Brown failed to correctly use the system’s computers).

The Mesa County prosecutor took the duo’s report seriously and investigated. On May 19, 2022, Rubenstein sent a 24-page letter to Mesa County Commissioners and the Grand Junction City Council summarizing the investigation and debunking the vote-padding claims in the most pedestrian way. Two initial miscounts had occurred. The first was in 2020’s general election. The second was in municipal elections in April 2021. Both were “caused by direct action of the former Back Office Election Manager Sandra Brown.”

Investigators found that Brown had stopped and then restarted the computer during the adjudication process, including replacing one computer—without resetting the system. Brown did not call the vendor for assistance, the county prosecutor’s letter said. She was confused, tried to fix things, and erred—essentially double-counting votes at this stage in the process. Election judges from political parties witnessed this, as did an overhead video camera.

“No evidence exists that would indicate that Ms. Brown had any nefarious or criminal motive in those actions, but rather appears to have been trouble-shooting problems in the flow of the adjudication process,” Rubenstein wrote.

Human error in configuring and running election computers also sparked stolen election allegations in Antrim County, Michigan. There, the initial results in the conservative northern Michigan county were incorrect because one contest had been omitted on the ballots when configuring the system’s computers. Nobody caught the error until suspicious vote totals surfaced on Election Night. (Because one race was left out, votes were assigned to the wrong candidate in a tabulation spreadsheet, essentially bumping Trump votes down one line, where they were assigned to Joe Biden.)

In both counties, Trump supporters said that the entire state’s election apparatus was corrupt and demanded that the state’s certified results be thrown out.Beyond such hyperbole, a key observation emerges. Trump’s self-declared election experts were not looking at, nor may not even be aware of, the array of data sets, election records and administrative protocols that catch and correct the errors that occur. In Mesa County, for example, the district attorney’s report made this point.

“These actions were verified to have been done by her [Brown] through video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images [created by ballot scanners], interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of certain scenarios using a test environment and prove that the conclusions of Report 3 [O’Donnell’s and Daugherity’s report] are incorrect claims of what may have occurred,” Rubenstein said. “At this time, no evidence suggests that these actions negatively impacted the election.”

In contrast, what the pro-Trump duo used as the basis for their inquiry—analyses built on Peters’ pilfered computer drives—is a thinner evidence base.

The pair, who were reached by email after their August 22 presentation at Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit,” sent a rebuttal to Rubenstein’s summary where they rejected numerous assertions and questioned the district attorney’s expertise, evidence, and methods. (Rubenstein also noted they had lied about interviewing 11 people who had been in the room when Brown messed up.)

When asked by this reporter why they did not mention the DA’s review in their presentation at Lindell’s August 2022 forum—where O’Donnell said, “There is still no evidence that this was ever or even could have been something that was done by the clerk at the time”—O’Donnell replied that the DA’s investigation was a sham and said that my questions were “insulting.”

“We did not mention the DA’s report because it is such a sloppy ‘investigation’ that it deserves no recognition other than derision,” the “Lone Raccoon” said. “It is sad to me that somebody who is a ‘national political reporter’ would blindly fall fort the propaganda put by a small-time DA instead of actually doing their own research. However, that seems to be the rule these days.”

“Doing Their Own Research”

Perhaps my e-mail was too blunt when asking the pair if they were aware of other evidence that explained Brown’s incompetence (she was fired and faces charges related to the data breach); and what was their response to the D.A. saying they lied when they said they had talked to the party observers present (who spoke to police investigators) when Brown erred?

But I had done my “own research.” When reporting on the Cyber Ninjas’ review in Arizona in 2021, I had repeatedly seen the disinformation dynamic that I saw here. Partisans with forgone conclusions started to parse election records. Lacking prior experience in studying election systems, they did not understand where what they were seeing in the electronic records related to wider contexts and protocols. That didn’t stop them from putting forth doubts about the results. And I’d also heard about the duo’s missteps from a lifelong Republican and credible election data analyst.

Benny White, a former fighter pilot and lawyer who lives in Tucson, Arizona, has been an election observer and data analyst for the Arizona Republican party for years. He became a persona non-grata in Trump circles for analyses in early 2021 that found tens of thousands of ballots cast by otherwise loyal Republicans in the greater Phoenix area had not voted to re-elect Trump. (The voting patterns were found in the final spreadsheet of every vote cast in every race.)

Reached by phone, White said that the duo called him as they were parsing Mesa County’s tabulation-related databases. White recalled that he told them where their assumptions were mistaken, and what they were not considering because they were not familiar with election administration and safeguards that find and fix errors.

“These folks have no understanding or appreciation of election administration,” he said. “They’re looking at everything from a sterile, mechanistic perspective. There are problems that can be caused because of human interface in the system design where operators can make mistakes. And for that reason, I am always an advocate of having an independent body, whether it’s a knowledgeable person or a bipartisan group of overseers, that is present at all times to watch what’s going on and ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’”

For example, White recalled that the duo claimed that the county’s voting system “had done something nefarious because these ballots [during adjudication] weren’t all tabulated in sequence.” But that circumstance occurs if the voter’s intent on a ballot is in question, White said, in which case Dominion’s software “will hold that batch [of 1,000 ballots from] being included in the aggregate results… That was another thing that it seemed to me that Daugherity failed to understand.”

“He bases a lot of his conclusions on statistics, statistical analysis,” White said of Daugherity. “There have been single instances where he would tell me something, and I would say, ‘Walter, you’re not considering this other facet of what was going on in that particular election… You have to know more before you reach these conclusions.’”

Election administration is not simple. It takes years to understand election law, varieties in state rules and procedures, the voting system technology and all of the subsets of data created and compiled that add up to winners and losers. Trump’s IT squad might be forgiven for misunderstanding and misinterpreting what they saw, if they had been more humble and fair-minded. But they weren’t.

Their mindset is to create chaos and doubt, while claiming they are seeking the truth. The clearest evidence of that mindset is how they exploited human errors by election officials by not accurately contextualizing those mistakes, but repeatedly overclaiming that an entire jurisdiction’s votes were suspect, and that the same election technology deployed nationwide must be rejected.

With scores of 2020 election-denying candidates running for state and federal office in 2022’s general election, this deceitful pattern is likely to recur.

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

mma 8 22 no vid

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

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

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

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

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

Matthew DePerno on War Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Colbeck on War Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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