ASOG allied security & op gp
<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>see ramsland</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/hillbilly-spoof-big-lie-kentucky/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/hillbilly-spoof-big-lie-kentucky/</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">raw story</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">w<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">hen election night returns came in for the Kentucky election on Nov. 5, 2019, <b>Matt Bevin, the Republican incumbent governor trailed Democratic challenger Andy Beshear by about 5,000 votes.</b></span></font></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A brash businessman who antagonized the state’s teachers, Bevin had gone into his reelection campaigns as one of the <a href="https://morningconsult.com/2019/01/10/americas-most-and-least-popular-governors-q4-2018/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">most unpopular</a> governors in the country. But with Republicans prevailing in every single remaining statewide race, his supporters couldn’t believe it was possible for Bevin to lose.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One the day after the election, Bevin refused to concede, making <a href="https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/elections/kentucky/2019/11/07/kentucky-governor-election-fact-check-matt-bevins-voter-fraud-claims/2516391001/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">baseless allegations</a> to reporters, as the <em style="">Courier Journal </em>reported, “that absentee ballots were illegally counted</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, people were turned away from the polls, voting machines malfunctioned and ballots were stored in open boxes” — claims that were systematically refuted by state and local election officials.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Saturday, with Bevin still refusing to concede, two far-right influencers jointly appeared on a podcast cross-published on their respective platforms to herald what sounded like an earth-shattering development.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We have literally been given the motherlode of leaked documents from a whistleblower that appears to be someone who might be working inside the elections,” declared Millie Weaver, an Ohio-based media provocateur who was a correspondent for the conspiracy theory hub <b>InfoWars</b> at the time</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weaver introduced Terpsehore “Tore” Maras, a pro-Trump podcaster who lived in North Dakota. Weaver said she and Maras had been on the phone the night before when she checked her email and discovered “that some whistleblower, anonymously, decided to send me hundreds of documents — <em>hundreds </em>— these documents are confirmed legitimate documents — we have official, like, ballots, Kentucky ballots, audit logs, you know, all this crazy information, bank transactions, checks, papers that have literally been taped back together that went through shredders. Somebody must have been doing a lot of work to compile all of this information. But this information looks like there’s significant amount of voter fraud going on in Kentucky.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Indeed, someone had broken into Harp Enterprises, a Lexington-based company that supplies voting machines, and had accessed checks received by the company and other internal documents. Roger Baird, the company’s owner, told Raw Story he believes either a disgruntled former employee or someone associated with a losing campaign put a janitor up to stealing the documents.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But almost nothing about what the two women said about the documents — starting with Weaver’s claim that Harp Enterprises “runs the electronic voting machines for the entire state of Kentucky” — was true</b>. Harp Enterprises, which exclusively purchases voting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic, services only some of the precincts in Kentucky’s 120 counties.<b> Voters in Jefferson County, which includes Louisville and holds the largest share of Democratic voters, vote on ES&S machines.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maras claimed that the documents included hand-written notes showing employees coaching each other on “how to manipulate the votes.” And based on a financial transaction from a company with foreign ownership, Maras concluded, “You can’t get any more smoking gun with regards to foreign-entity meddling, let’s say.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chagrined to see his private documents tweeted out and displayed on a video stream, Baird showed Weaver’s video presentation to his banker.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“He was like, ‘This is like a hillbilly spoof,’” Baird recalled. “There was just enough little droplets of real information that you might scratch your head, and say, ‘Huh, maybe there is something there.’ When they started connected me to George Soros….” As he recounted the story, Baird’s voice trailed off in incredulity and he burst into laughter.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As the joint podcast crept into its second hour, Weaver noted with approval that her boss, Alex Jones, was in the chat watching her video.</b></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“This is election fraud,” Maras said. “Kentucky was a dry run. In 2020, they’re coming for everything.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“We need to blow the lid off this now before they steal the 2020 election,” Weaver agreed.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Yeah, but look at the losers they’ve got running on the Democratic ticket,” Maras chimed in. She ticked through the list of Democratic presidential primary contenders, noting each candidate’s unappealing attributes and weaknesses, while assigning insulting nicknames to them, before concluding with Trumpian logic that none of them could win fair and square.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“So, what they’re gonna do is they’re gonna steal it,” Maras concluded.</b></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Weaver also attended a press conference at the state Capitol in Frankfurt, and spread many of the same baseless allegations to her followers in a <a href="https://www.pscp.tv/w/1OwxWdAXVZqKQ" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">livestream</a> on Periscope. Weaver could not be reached for comment for this story.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Kentucky election in 2019 was a harbinger, but in a different sense than Maras likely intended.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Many of the same players who would later turn up in Washington, DC after the 2020 election and promote a battery of conspiracy theories falsely claiming the election was stolen were also involved in investigating election fraud claims in Kentucky, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">according to at least two people involved.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-secret-source-who-helped-fuel-trumps-big-lie" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Joshua Merritt</a>, a Dallas area information technology consultant, <a href="https://twitter.com/AmericanREI5/status/1520490454701285377" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">indicated</a> in a Twitter thread last month that <b>Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO “contracted” the Texas-based company Allied Security Operating Group to work on the Kentucky election.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In response to an account with the username @AmericanRE15 who asked him to confirm that he was saying “Byrne contracted you guys to work on the Bevins [sic] fraud in f*ing 2019,” Merritt replied, “Bingo….”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He added in a separate tweet: “And then there are all the people we briefed after 2018… We investigated Bevins case, Florida, Dallas, Maryland… And others.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><small style="">Josh Merritt responds to a question on a Twitter thread by @AmericanRE15 on April 30</small><small style="">Screengrab]</small></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merritt could not be reached for this story, and he blocked this reporter on Twitter during the reporting of this story.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/trump-election-fraud-texas-businessman-ramsland-asog/" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Russell Ramsland</a>, the founder of Allied Security Operating Group</b>, began pushing election fraud claims after Democrats made gains in Texas during the 2018 mid-term elections, and would go on to push specious claims about the 2020 election on Lou Dobbs’ show on Fox Business Network, and then file a declaration alongside Maras to support federal lawsuits seeking to overturn the election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Weaver also confirmed Allied Security Operations Group’s involvement in the Kentucky election, which has not been previously reported.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I went down to Kentucky to go hand-deliver an SD drive or a USB stick to Governor Bevin himself at his office,” Weaver recounted in a December 2020 <a href="https://www.pscp.tv/w/1RDGlPDXMOgGL?t=10m17s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">livestream</a>. “And I also met with a group called ASOG. So, there’s this group called Allied Security Operations Group, and they’re heading a lot of the election fraud efforts that have been happening.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weaver said in the same livestream that she had provided the documents to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and described working with Allied Security Operations Group.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Yeah, we met with them,” she said. “We essentially went over the information. They already had seemed to have gotten it, which means they probably got it from Grassley or something.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Messages to Grassley’s office seeking clarification on whether the senator received the documents or anyone from his office passed them on to Ramsland were not returned before press time.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In November 2020, Weaver, Maras and Weaver’s partner Gavin Wince came to Washington, DC as the nucleus of a conspiracy-happy group that would come to be known as <b>“Team America.” Patrick Bergy, who was also part of the group, <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/tore-maras/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">previously told</a> Raw Story that Byrne paid </b>for their hotel rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in northern Virginia.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merritt also indicated in the April 30 Twitter thread that Byrne and Maras together connected with Allied Security Operations Group during the efforts to uncover fraud in Kentucky. In response to a question from the @AmericanRE15 account on whether he had disclosed that he worked with Maras on the Kentucky fraud claim, Merritt replied, “She was brought in with Byrne when we were working with them through ASOG.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Raw Story could not independently confirm Byrne’s involvement in the Kentucky 2019 election. Byrne and Maras have previously said in a <a href="https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/tore-says-show-32690/sun-27-mar-tore-with-patrick-byrne-on-the-daily302-vodcast-1330267662" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">podcast</a> published two months ago that they did not formally meet until November 2020.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The first time that I think of myself as meeting Tore, we were in a restaurant in Alexandria; it was a week or two after the election,” Byrne said in the podcast. “She was with some people. I was with some people. Somebody took me over to meet her people. Boom boom boom. When I shook hands with her, after looking at her or listening to her for a few seconds, I said, ‘Gee, I’ve met you somewhere, haven’t I?’ And she actually turned away, didn’t answer. I thought it was funny.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Byrne went on to share a cryptic story about how a couple of nights later Maras made an admission to him that suggested she had spied on him eight years earlier. According to Maras, she had been Byrne’s “waitress” at a restaurant in London in 2012 and he was her “target.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neither Byrne nor Maras could be reached for comment about Merritt’s assertion that they worked together on the 2019 election in Kentucky.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As <a href="https://www.rawstory.com/tore-maras/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">previously reported</a> by Raw Story and ProPublica, Byrne has described tasking a group of intelligence professionals with interviewing Maras after she submitted a declaration to support lawsuits filed by Sidney Powel that sought to overturn the 2020 election. Byrne said the team that interviewed Maras concluded that “we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Despite Byrne’s determination in December 2020 that Maras was not credible, the two continue to appear together on podcasts, where they promote election fraud conspiracy theories and praise one another.</b></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Maras and Weaver have both said they worked with</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general on examining alleged election fraud in Kentucky. In December 2020, Kline <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/us/politics/jan-6-fake-trump-electors.html?smid=em-share" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reportedly</a> promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden,</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> talking up the plan on far-right media outlets like </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">One America News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s podcast.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weaver mentioned Kline’s involvement in the Kentucky election in her December 2020 <a href="https://www.pscp.tv/w/1RDGlPDXMOgGL?t=10m17s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">livestream</a>, and Maras said she worked with Kline “in 2019 on the election fraud in Kentucky” in a <a href="https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/tore-says-show-32690/wed-09-feb-re-betrayal-many-forms-maskholes-push-n-push-off-ride-peak-stimulus-hard-lines-1241253357" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">podcast</a> earlier this year. Kline could not be reached for comment for this story.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Warning signs in Kentucky</font></strong></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I had <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/08/opinions/kentucky-election-fraud-bevin-opinion-douglas/index.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">said</a> back then and have said all along that 2019 was a mini version of what potentially could happen in 2020, and did happen,” Joshua A. Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, told Raw Story. “I said then that we need to pay attention to what happened in Kentucky for fear of that happening on a larger scale with the presidential election.”</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Douglas said he sees one critical difference in how Bevin’s baseless fraud claims played out in 2019, compared to the firehose of the spigot of falsehoods issued by President Trump that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>After the 2019 election, Douglas said, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell issued an ultimatum to Bevin to present evidence of voting problems or concede. In contrast, McConnell waited for more than a month after the 2020 election </b>as Senate majority leader before <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/15/mcconnell-gop-let-trump-down-gently-election-445690" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">congratulating</a> Joe Biden on his win.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For conspiracy theorists, Kentucky in 2019 was a ripe target.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Twenty-nineteen is an off-election year, so you could really focus on Kentucky,” said Roger Baird, the Harp Enterprises owner. “You get a lot of attention all of a sudden when you’re the only one having an election. We get more attention in an off-election year than we do in a big year like 2020.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similar to the feverish claims about election fraud in the 2020 election, Maras’ theory about the Harp Enterprises documents quickly expanded to include claims about official betrayal to explain why no one was being prosecuted.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you had asked me, I would tell you: Everyone in Kentucky government is guilty,” Maras said during the Nov. 9, 2019 podcast. “And maybe this is why the secretary of state is like, ‘Oh, just leave it alone.’ Yeah, leave it alone because everyone’s gonna be going to jail.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maras said she called the Kentucky State Police hoping that she could bring the documents to the attention of Governor Bevin. She said a detective called her back and tried to get her to explain how she obtained the documents. A spokesperson told Raw Story he couldn’t confirm that the agency received a complaint about the matter.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Kentucky Attorney General’s office, which would typically investigate allegations of election fraud or other criminal misconduct, did not respond to inquiries.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Baird told Raw Story he asked Homeland Security to try to determine how his company’s internal documents were stolen, but they never reached any conclusions.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the weeks following Bevin’s loss in Kentucky, Maras continued to refine a fanciful theory of electronic vote-swapping.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2019 and 2020, according to the <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/trump-election-fraud-texas-businessman-ramsland-asog/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Washington Post</a>,</b> Ramsland and Merritt from Allied Security Operations Group appeared on a<b> podcast called “Economic War Room</b>” and claimed that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location and manipulate it. During his media appearances, Ramsland also circulated baseless claims about<b> Scytl, a Spain-based company that provides election-night reporting services,</b> asserting that “they’re housing all of our vote, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” the <em>Post </em>reported.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Maras appears to have been exposed to the same baseless claims about Scytl in November 2020, roughly the same period when Merritt and Weaver indicated Allied Security Operations Group was looking at the Kentucky election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a podcast two weeks after the 2019 election, Maras spent an hour offering a breezy discourse on how various election technology companies supposedly carry out electronic vote manipulation, asserting that “the Hart-Intercivic software” was “working together” with Scytl.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“So, this phase is shuffling ballots, mixing them,” Maras said, adopting the professorial air of an adept instructor breaking down a complex formula for undergrad students. “Picture a bag of Scrabble tiles, and you’re mixing them. That’s basically what they do to all your votes. And during this mixing phase is where you can swap a vote for some other vote.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a previous podcast, on Nov. 10, Maras had acknowledged that “elections aren’t my thing,” and admitted she knew little about how voting machines work. Now, on Nov. 19, Maras was saying that it had taken her a week to figure out what a highly compensated cybersecurity contractor in northern Virginia who was paid to safeguard US elections would have known for at least 10 years.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>What Maras missed — and what election deniers in 2020 missed and continue to miss as they go around the country sewing doubt about the election system — is that vote data that is reported on election night is separate from the votes that are tallied up and certified by local and state elections officials.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Kentucky, two poll workers — one Republican and one Democrat — hand-deliver a tape displaying a printout of the aggregate vote and a media card in a sealed bag to the county election office. A duplicate of the tape is displayed at the polling place as a record of the precinct tally. At the county office, the media card is inserted into a machine that tallies the votes from across the county. Like the voting machines, the machine that tallies the votes is not connected to the internet. To ensure that the votes remain secure, an election worker uses a clean thumb drive to pull the data off the tally machine and then walks it over to a networked computer to upload it to the election-night reporting site.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Our job is to make sure nothing touches the computer that does the tally,” Baird said.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Common sense tells you that if you hook up your voting machines to the internet, you’re plumb dumb,” he added.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">References to Scytl and foreign servers purportedly housing votes would prove to be a ubiquitous feature in declarations sworn by Maras and Merritt for the lawsuits filed in November and December 2020, along with video documentaries and livestreams by Weaver during the same period. Maras’ 37-page declaration, executed on Nov. 29, 2020, alone contains 23 references to Scytl.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ensconced in Washington, Weaver addressed her followers on Periscope around the same time, outlining her qualifications to be part of an elite team churning up dubious evidence to aid in the effort to overturn the election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I want to give you guys a little bit of background as to why I know what I know and I’m in the situation where right here where I’m even being invited to some of the groups that are heading these efforts, where you see people like Phill Kline, and you see people like Sidney Powell and these other people out here heading these movements,” Weaver said. “Why would they care what little Millie has to say?... So, I’ve been making these videos for over a year now, talking about the plan that the Democrats and really the establishment has had to throw Trump out of office, to get rid of him.”</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">pro publica</font></div><div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...[quite long]</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version <b>never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There was no proof at that specific moment,” the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought “could lead to” election fraud. “But there was no, like, ‘There was election fraud,’” he said, “at least at that time in my mind.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold. The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Antrim_720623_7.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">clerical error</a> had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden. After the clerk’s office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error. Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn’t been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself</b>. Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim:</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business. Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a <a href="https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/record-eagle.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/7/8d/78d95322-374b-11eb-8fec-3fdfe95b2a93/5fcc0d5d6e7fd.pdf.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">court order</a> to allow the machines to be formally accessed. On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county’s election management server.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report. Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud. <b>Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version. It had “REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2” and Ramsland’s name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation. “The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” it claimed. “This leads to voter or election fraud.” Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hayes’ and Sanders’ names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new “information must have been written by” Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It wasn’t just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland’s version was flawed. An <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Antrim_720623_7.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">analysis</a> commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an “extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statement</b>s,” including that “the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to” and were instead “benign” lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome. A bipartisan <a href="https://misenategopcdn.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/99/doccuments/20210623/SMPO_2020ElectionReport_2.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">investigation</a> led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are “a complete waste of time to consider.” (Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about revising the report. But he did <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/trump-election-fraud-texas-businessman-ramsland-asog/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">tell</a> The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security’s 29 “core observations.”)</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, “MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realDonaldTrump must appoint a special counsel now.” <b>Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a statement, Giuliani said: “This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts.” (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Byrne described the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” posting it on his blog under the claim: “You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trump tweeted: “WOW. This report shows massive fraud.</b> Election changing result!” Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump’s personal secretary sent an <a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">email</a> to the deputy attorney general with the subject line “From POTUS.” The Antrim report was attached to the email. An additional document included talking points (“This is a Cover-up of voting crimes”) and conclusions (“these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County”). That email launched Trump’s attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 <a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Interim%20Staff%20Report%20FINAL.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">report</a> by Senate Democrats. In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” enough for him to win the state, in a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-brad-raffensperger-phone-call-transcript/index.html?msclkid=708f31a3b5e011ec8fb68cac140aedc0" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">recorded phone call</a> on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times</b>.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and <a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/rudy-giuliani-speech-transcript-at-trumps-washington-d-c-rally-wants-trial-by-combat" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">suggested</a> that halting the certification of Biden’s victory was justified because of “these crooked Dominion machines.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Trump’s speech</a> emphasized the “highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades,<b> Republican <a href="https://projects.propublica.org/represent/members/G000565-paul-gosar" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Rep. Paul Gosar</a> of Arizona was on the House floor <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?507672-102/house-debate-arizona-electoral-challenge-part-2" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">objecting</a> to the certification of his state’s electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory by Congress. He cited as evidence “the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.</b>” About a minute later, Gosar’s speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, “No Machines Dominion STEALS.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This transformation happened after Dominion’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims. The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard. The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election. It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell. Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can’t be disproven</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can’t. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> The people promoting the theory claim he can’t reveal the evidence because he’s under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/FVLBIt4Cnxpm/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">online interview</a> that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, “Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Montgomery <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">has been accused of fraud</a> by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations. In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts</b>. (It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer. In 2018, a <a href="https://casetext.com/case/montgomery-v-comey?q=montgomery%20v.%20comey&sort=relevance&p=1&type=case" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">federal judge</a> in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” (Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen. According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn’t publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day “cyber symposium” he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota</b>. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent. Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online <a href="https://frankspeech.com/content/mike-lindells-cyber-symposium-2021#::text=Cyber%20Symposium%20Live%20Stream%20will%20begin%20at%209,be%20held%20with%20a%205%20million%20dollar%20challenge%21" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">offer</a> of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that “this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.” The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described “white hat” hacker — all of whom had been associated with </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Allied Security </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">at one time or another. (They called themselves the “Red Team” but coordinated on a group chat named “Purple Unicorns.”) </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/19/technology/qanon-messages-authors.html" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">two independent forensic linguistic analyses</a> as “Q,” the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">(Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.) Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn’t what was promised</b>. “I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF,” Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team. “So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn’t include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof,” another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn’t delivered on his guarantees. “If this software does exist, and the developer” — Montgomery — “is working with us, it shouldn’t take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data” that would prove his assertions.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged. Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn’t credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person.</b> Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and “we’ve seen plausibility” and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell’s claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus: None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised,</b> according to accounts from five of them. In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The data “was some gobbledygook,” said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump. Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen. Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times <a href="https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/11/mike-lindells-lead-cyber-expert-says-they-cant-pro/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">quoted him</a> saying that “we were handed a turd.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have “credible information on a threat in the data streams,” implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to <a href="https://www.salon.com/2021/09/10/mike-lindell-held-secret-meeting-with-trump-on-reinstatement-day/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Salon</a>.</b> At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium “really amazing,” and he has continued to praise Lindell’s efforts on his behalf. Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, “The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “and many others did a cyber attack on our election!”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Some of the responses were dismissive. “Stupid article,” wrote Michael T. Flynn’s spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. “No one we care about will read it.”</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Others contested the article’s findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, “So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. “I was a member of said coalition,” wrote Seth Keshel.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“‘Coalition’ may not be the right word,” wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on “election integrity” efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn.</b> “We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with ‘coalition.’” Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth.</b> “I’ve not wavered on this,” Keshel emailed ProPublica. “I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this.” The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: “I don’t believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can’t say either way.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition’s ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election. He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim. “I think that it’s picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff,” he said. He defended the coalition, saying, “I think they got the gestalt of it correct.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Don’t pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked. (These errors included Allied Security’s central contention that Dominion machines were “purposefully designed” to create “systemic fraud” through a process known as “adjudication.” The machines in question did not have the “adjudication” software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.) Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines’ security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them. (The <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/documents/sos/Antrim_720623_7.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Michigan secretary of state expert</a> found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that “the timing appears to be a coincidence,” though it said that having a limited amount of memory “is contrary to best practice.”)</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren’t central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud. </b>He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin. The report’s primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in “election bribery” by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic. The special counsel raised the possibility that the report’s findings were serious enough that Biden’s victory in the state could be decertified. (A federal judge in October 2020 <a href="https://www.wpr.org/sites/default/files/20314444046.pdf" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">rejected</a> the argument that the nonprofit’s work was illegal, and courts have <a href="https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/mar/15/michael-gableman/courts-have-repeatedly-upheld-grants-gableman-says/" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">repeatedly come to the same conclusion</a>.)</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims. In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called “2000 Mules” by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden. “Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower,” Byrne wrote, “all point to about one million votes being stuffed” in Georgia.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren’t corrupted.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. “I’ve got my cards. You got your cards,” he said. “I’ll go all in.”</font></p></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-military/">https://www<b>.reuters.</b>com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-military/</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">after Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers challenged the vote’s legitimacy and pushed baseless conspiracy claims. Military ethicists say their actions threaten to weaken the public’s faith in democracy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By ARAM ROSTON, BRAD HEATH, JOHN SHIFFMAN and PETER EISLER in DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas Filed Dec. 15, 2021</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy.</b> They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I think we’re doing a huge service,” Waldron told Reuters in an interview.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In these efforts, Flynn, Waldron and their colleagues publicly touted their military-intelligence training, arguing that their expertise on the battlefield provided them special insight into alleged election fraud at home in America.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Roger Herbert, recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The military men’s false assertions are dangerous, said Roger Herbert, a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request about the role military figures have played in his quest to overturn the election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, is now facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated Reserve rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters. In an election forum last month in New Hampshire, Raiklin touted his military experience – Special Forces commander, <b>deployments battling the Taliban and the MS-13 gang </b>– to say he has the intelligence wherewithal to find fraud. “So I have a little bit of experience looking at threats, right?” he said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Raiklin declined to be interviewed.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Waldron says he and the Flynn circle are not using military techniques on Americans. He maintains the actions they are undertaking for Trump don’t undercut American democracy because he’s convinced they are ferreting out voter fraud.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The veterans’ false claims shifted over time. They have pinned Trump’s loss on actions by the Chinese government and voting technology companies, alleged misconduct by U.S. state and local election officials and said hackers had used the internet to change votes after they were cast. They have blamed old-school ballot stuffing, perhaps involving dead voters or Venezuelan interests.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The military-intelligence officers’ battle is part of a larger Republican movement that has led disgruntled Trump voters to endorse threats of violence as a means to regaining power. As Reuters has documented, Trump supporters are waging a campaign of intimidation against election workers around the country. In a review of more than 800 emails, calls and online posts made by backers of the ex-president, Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials and featured in public campaigns attacking the vote’s integrity.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A false claim pushed by Flynn and his cohorts that voting machines were hacked to steal votes from Trump is a common theme in many angry messages. The machines “are rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” said an email accusing election officials in Yavapai County, Arizona, of complicity. Invoking General Flynn by name, the writer added, “every lie will be revealed, every traitor will be punished.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Efforts by Flynn to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory have been the subject of extensive reporting by a number of U.S. media outlets. The Reuters examination of Flynn and his colleagues provides new details about the origins of the former intelligence officials’ collaboration and the extent to which they worked together in a bid to undo the 2020 election.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The reporting, based on interviews with participants, military ethicists and others, plus an examination of Reuters’ database of threats against election officials, reveals how Flynn drafted Waldron and others to actively contest the 2020 vote. Flynn and his small circle were distinctive because their military credentials provided a patina of respectability to even the most far-fetched claims.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Among the military veterans to play a role in “Stop the Steal” were:</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor in 2017, who was involved in pushing the most dramatic of conspiracy claims. He urged the president to deploy the military to overturn the election in December 2020, then went on a public speaking campaign sowing doubts about the vote and urging states to conduct their own reviews.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Waldron, who insists Trump won</b>. He gained attention last week when the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riot revealed it was in possession of a PowerPoint presentation he’d shown to U.S. lawmakers outlining methods for overturning the election. Earlier, he lobbied state officials and spoke on rightwing media about his stolen-election theories. Waldron said Flynn drafted him to go public, saying, “No one else can do it. It needs to be done, so go ahead and do it!</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence and who claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent.</b> After the election, Keshel told Reuters he contacted Flynn on LinkedIn and they began collaborating. Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim, saying the report came from a “highly respected Army intelligence captain.”</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Keshel told Reuters he stands by that assessment but never called for violence. “Personally, I believe the election was compromised,” he said, adding, “I can’t control anybody else.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator. Raiklin has said he worked with Flynn. Keshel said he reached out to the general to share his concerns, and the two worked together in the weeks after the election. Waldron said Flynn pushed him to go public with his research.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">‘CORRUPTION CURTAIN:’ </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Keshel’s work helped fuel calls by Trump followers in many states for audits of the election results. His analysis, which provided no documented evidence of fraud, was discredited by political scientists, statistical experts and Republican and Democratic election officials. In a post on Telegram, Keshel himself described his study as <b>“lenient.”</b></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">His work nonetheless spurred a torrent of emails to election official</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">s in areas where his analysis suggested fraud. In Pasco County, Florida, a Republican county Trump won, officials were deluged with emails demanding an audit after Keshel’s report. Keshel’s analysis “is literally devoid of statistical validity,” said Brian Corley, the Republican county supervisor of elections. “People just took it as fact.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment on the Flynn circle’s activities.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College, said a key issue is whether Flynn’s associates are publicly citing their military training to lend legitimacy to a partisan political cause.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed,” said Shanks Kaurin. She said she was speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of her government employer.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Waldron disputes such criticism. “I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack from foreign and domestic enemies,” he said. “They want to undermine the republic through the election process.</b>”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Earlier this month, a Reuters reporter met with Waldron at One Shot Distillery and Brewing, which he runs on Texas Hill Country’s “Whiskey Trail.” Silver-labeled bottles of rum, vodka and whiskey were on display as <b>Waldron descended the stairs wearing a gray One Shot Distillery t-shirt, with a Glock-19 in a holster fastened to his belt.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">Waldron, with an affable bearing and a beard dappled with gray, retired as an Army Reserve colonel in 2016. He said he’s fighting powerful forces in a quest for the truth.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 102);">“You talk about PSYOPS,” he said. “The election (voting machine) companies and the media have done the biggest PSYOP on the American people.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In a series of interviews this year, Waldron vowed he was on the cusp of breakthrough proof the election was stolen. “We are decrypting the satellite packets right now,” he said in January. In October, he cited a “37 terabyte” tranche of data he believed could unmask fraud.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A new mission</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Four days after the election, as ballot counts continued in a handful of swing states, the U.S. media projected Biden had won, establishing an insurmountable lead.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trump refused to concede. That day, November 7, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, held a press conference in Philadelphia in which he claimed the result had been swayed by suspect mail-in ballots and votes cast in the names of dead people.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>The next day, Waldron said he was on the phone with Representative Louie Gohmert</b>, a Republican from Texas. Waldron, who ran a cyber security company after leaving the military, said he had been researching vote hacking since August; Biden’s victory accelerated his efforts. Waldron said he told Gohmert he had tracked internet traffic routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany. Votes could be rerouted, too, he told Gohmert. Election officials say this assertion is false, and no evidence for it exists.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Gohmert immediately called Trump, Waldron said. A spokesman for Gohmert declined to comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
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</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Two days later, Waldron said, he was on a plane to Washington. “It started getting sporty about then,” he said, with his theories gaining traction.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>First he met with Sidney Powell</b>, the lawyer for his old commander, Flynn. Waldron said he met Powell in a hotel conference room that functioned as her headquarters, briefing her in the early morning hours. A lawyer who worked with Powell, Howard Kleinhendler, confirms Waldron was part of the group. Powell declined to comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Then Waldron huddled with Giuliani.</b> “We were supposed to have a 10 minute briefing but it went 45 minutes,” Waldron said. When Giuliani said he wanted to discuss voter fraud, Waldron said he pressed upon the former mayor that the fraud was on a larger, and global, scale. “We kept going over it and going over it. He finally came aboard,” he said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Giuliani did not respond to interview requests. He confirmed in a legal deposition that Waldron shared fraud allegations with him.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Colonel in the military, <b>great war record,</b>” Giuliani testified. “I’ve had substantial dealings with him and he’s very, very thorough and very experienced in this kind of work.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By the second week of November, Waldron said he began working closely with Flynn.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After a stellar military career, Flynn was appointed chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama, but was fired in 2014, in part because the two clashed over the general’s hardline views on countering Islamic extremism. Flynn became a key 2016 Trump campaign advisor and was installed by the new president as national security advisor. He resigned weeks later after it was disclosed that he had held secret talks with Russia’s ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about those talks. Trump would eventually pardon him.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In the days after Biden won the 2020 election, Flynn had set up camp at the sprawling South Carolina estate of lawyer L. Lin Wood, another supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Wood told Reuters that Flynn and Powell arrived shortly after the election. So did Keshel, then working as a technology salesman. Flynn and Keshel stayed through Thanksgiving, where Flynn carved the turkey.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The group, operating from a sitting room on Wood’s estate, created something of a clearinghouse for election fraud claims. “They all appeared to be working together,” Wood said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In an interview, Keshel said he spent his time “scanning the numbers and <b>helping write affidavits</b>” for lawsuits Powell was preparing. “There wasn’t a lot of sleep going on there,” Keshel said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Powell’s lawsuits helped fuel some of the hostility encountered by local officials. Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state debunked Powell’s allegations of election fraud, citing audits and recounts affirming the state’s tallies. In response, one angry emailer accused them of resisting further investigation “because of the Sidney Powell lawsuits and vengeance and no other reason. … We know China interfered with this election by remote and shipped mail in ballots.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A clandestine operative goes public</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Three weeks after the election, Giuliani and his associates pushed a new strategy: attempting to persuade conservative state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and declare Trump the winner of their states’ Electoral College votes. The Constitution, Trump’s team argued, granted this power.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">With Pennsylvania a focus, Flynn dispatched Waldron to a state Senate hearing held by Republican lawmakers there.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>For decades, Waldron had operated behind the scenes. So, he told Reuters, in November 2020 he initially resisted going public with his findings. But he said Flynn and Giuliani pressed him to testify about stolen votes. “Rudy’s team had asked me three times.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On November 25, wearing a blue jacket, blue shirt, striped tie and blue COVID mask, Waldron appeared in person at the Pennsylvania Senate hearing to air his fraud claims. He cited his military credentials. “I’m a retired Army colonel, 30 years,” he said. Then he claimed all the voting machine technology in the United States could be hacked.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Phil Waldron, 30-year military veteran</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“Our experts and other academics,</b>” Waldron continued, “believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent.” Only a “detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">At the end of the hearing, President Trump joined in on the speaker phone. “I’ve been watching the hearing on OAN,” the far-right television news channel, Trump said. “I’m in the Oval Office right now, and it’s very interesting to see what’s going on.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Waldron said he visited the White House later that day with Giuliani and others. “That was great!” he said Trump told them.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The White House focus turned to pushing Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to replace Biden electors with those for Trump. “That whole strategy started from that Pennsylvania hearing,” Waldron said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">That same day, Trump pardoned Flynn in the Russia inquiry case.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In the end, no state legislatures swapped out their electors. Now Flynn helped pitch a new plan to Trump.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Election by military might</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">MILITARY INTEL: Click to hear audio of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin introducing himself by citing his military intelligence and legal background to a crowd gathered in Manchester, New Hampshire, last month to hear his claims that the 2020 election result should be reversed.]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>On December 17, Flynn told the rightwing cable network Newsmax that the president could use the armed forces to conduct a do-over election in several swing states he lost. Trump, he said, “could take military capabilities and place them in those states and basically re-run an election in those states.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A day later, Flynn, Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump at the White House. They urged the president to deploy the U.S. government to make digital copies of the hard drives in some voting equipment to investigate the machines and conduct recounts in at least six counties, Byrne told Reuters. Trump was receptive to the idea, said <b>Kleinhendler, the lawyer working with Powell,</b> but the government never took those steps. It is unclear why.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">At the same time, Army reserve officer Raiklin, a Flynn ally and former Green Beret, was pushing election fraud theories on social media and on rightwing websites. <b>Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer, but he doesn’t appear to practice that area of law.</b> A Reuters review found he has not argued such a case or written scholarly articles on the topic.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">SCREEN TIME: Ivan Raiklin, at right, sharing his vote fraud conspiracies last month.]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On a December 7 podcast and in tweets, Raiklin laid out a plan to reverse the vote, alleging conspiracies involving Pence, intelligence agencies, big tech, China and the postal service. He urged Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system” and used the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn. “We the people are going to force this plan on them,” he said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Raiklin’s efforts drew attention on Twitter.</b> On December 22, Raiklin tweeted a copy of a two-page open memo to Trump, detailing “Operation Pence Card.” The pitch: Pence, acting as “the Representative of the Federal Seat of Government,” would reject votes from states where Trump alleged fraud, flipping the election. The memo was retweeted 23,700 times.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“We the people are going to force this plan on them.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Army reserve officer Ivan Raiklin]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Raiklin’s conduct is now under government scrutiny. The Army Reserve’s chief spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Flake, said Raiklin’s superiors are “aware of the situation and investigating,” but that privacy rules restrict him from providing details.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Flake added: “The U.S. Army Reserve follows the Department of Defense’s long standing policy in regards to forbidding service member involvement in partisan political campaigns to avoid the perception of DOD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of any partisan political candidate, campaign, or cause.” Raiklin did not answer questions from Reuters about the inquiry.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On New Year’s Day, Keshel gave an interview carried on YouTube in which he said the election’s results were “definitely irregular” because they disrupted what he said were historical trends in U.S. elections. “I served one tour in Afghanistan … with a primary focus on understanding enemy activity,” he said. Now, he said, his focus is on unearthing the election’s “data irregularities.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">PODCASTS, TWEETS, FORUMS: Ivan Raiklin lays out his case in New Hampshire. Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, has worked with former General Michael Flynn to challenge the 2020 election. REUTERS/Brian Snyder]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Conspiracy PowerPoint</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In early January, Waldron said he flew to Washington bearing a 36-page PowerPoint presentation he said he helped prepare.</b> Its goal was to convince Congress and the White House the election was stolen and Pence should stop the certification of Biden’s win</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">. This month, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, produced a copy of that PowerPoint in response to a subpoena.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Waldron’s presentation was called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” He said he briefed legislators on Capitol Hill on January 5, explaining a document whose recommendations included, “Declare National Security Emergency” and “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Waldron’s pitch mirrored arguments being made by Trump, who at the time was publicly urging Pence to refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes from a handful of swing states and either declare Trump the winner or not declare a winner at all. Waldron proposed going further, such as deploying U.S. marshals and the military to seize ballots nationwide. “A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS” to recount all the votes, the PowerPoint said.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">HOW TO UNRAVEL AN ELECTION: <b>Pages from a PowerPoint P</b>hil Waldron presented in D.C. this year. The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has obtained a copy. REUTERS/Courtesy Phil Waldron</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states,” the PowerPoint said. “The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>On January 5, Flynn told a pro-Trump crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., “We will not stand for a lie!” The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has subpoenaed Flynn to testify about his efforts to overturn the election.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A week after the attack, <b>Waldron told Reuters he blamed Pence for the chaos</b>. Pence’s offense, he said, was to refuse to go along with the plans to block Biden’s certification. That was the riot’s primary cause, he said. “You could logically argue that he had more to do with inciting the riot than anyone else on that stage,” he said.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Secret Service had to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol complex during the riot. Videos show some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol chanting, “hang Mike Pence.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Congress’ votes in the early morning hours of January 7 to ratify Biden’s victory brought an end to nearly all of the Trump camp’s efforts in the courts to keep him in power.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>“After that, it was pencils down,” said Powell colleague Kleinhendler. “There was just nothing else to do.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Flynn circle wasn’t ready to let go.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Arizona audit</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Everett Stern, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who runs a private intelligence firm, said he was approached in April by two Republican political operatives who urged him to gather information on elected officials to help prompt a state audit of the 2020 vote</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. They also helped connect him with Raiklin, said Stern, who said the operatives told him they were acting at Flynn’s direction. Stern said he declined to take part because he viewed the approach as an “extortion” attempt and alerted the FBI, which said it had no comment.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate pushed for a “forensic audit” of the vote in the state’s largest county.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Arizona’s Senate president, Karen Fann, turned to Florida cybersecurity contracto<b>r Doug Logan to do the job. Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas,</b> had no experience running audits or elections, though Logan said he had done previous work reviewing 2020 election disputes. Logan told Reuters he wasn’t sure how his company was picked for the task; he said he didn’t submit a proposal until Fann contacted him.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Logan did have connections, though. He confirmed to Reuters he was among those who huddled with Flynn at Wood’s estate after the election. And he received an endorsement from Waldron, who called him “very reputable” in a text message to Sen. Fann before she selected him to run the audit, records released in a public records lawsuit show.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College]</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“We did things the right way,” Logan said. Through a spokesman, Fann declined to comment.</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Arizona Senate audit cost $5.7 million. It was largely financed by Flynn’s team.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Nearly $1 million came from a nonprofit called</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> America’s Future,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> which until then had been largely dormant, Internal Revenue Service filings show. Flynn now chairs its board. His brother Joe Flynn was a director. And his sister, Mary O’Neill, was executive director.</span></b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Joe Flynn declined to comment. O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Michael and Joe Flynn also briefly served as directors of Powell’s nonprofit Defending The Republic, which kicked in $550,000 for the Arizona audit.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Another $3.5 million came from <b>The America Project, whose website features a video from Flynn declaring, “Our great nation was under a new type of attack.” Joe Flynn is one of the nonprofit’s three board members, and Flynn its senior strategic advisor.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The America Project’s chief executive, former Overstock CEO Byrne, told Reuters Flynn “asked me to come down and set this up.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” Flynn “is a driving force” to continue fighting the results of the 2020 election, said the group’s operations officer, Carl Johnson. The America Project told Florida regulators it expected to raise $50 million this year, records show. Byrne said the group raised closer to $10 million, mostly from him.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The resulting Arizona audit featured reviewers with little training who scrutinized ballots using procedures that were widely criticized by election experts; Logan defended the auditing work. The review confirmed Biden won.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">This November 19, retired captain Keshel and current reserve lieutenant colonel Raiklin were featured speakers at an “election integrity” rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Citing polls saying a growing number of rightwing Americans believe the election was rigged, Raiklin and Keshel told a crowd of about 75 that their movement is succeeding.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Noting his legal and military intelligence background, <b>Raiklin laid out what he called a “deep state” conspiracy theory of a stolen election</b>. “I connected these dots,” Raiklin told the crowd.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Keshel, now a paid consultant for The America Project,</b> said Trump supporters faced a “two-front war” – auditing the 2020 election and preparing for 2024.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It sounds a little crazy,” Keshel said. “But I do believe wholeheartedly … that the future will reflect the truth of the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Both men received standing ovations.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FIGHTING WORDS: Supporters of President Donald Trump have used virulent language in spreading false fraud claims. Here, a Trump backer at an “Election Security Seminar.” REUTERS/Brian Snyder</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">REUTERS INVESTIGATES</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Additional reporting by Chris Kahn and Brian Snyder</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Election Foxhole</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By Aram Roston, Brad Heath, John Shiffman and Peter Eisler</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">beast</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">team of Donald Trump’s lawyers and associates who launched a last-ditch effort to stay in power ahead of the </span><a class="TrackingLink LinkWrapper" href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-most-damning-parts-of-the-senate-report-into-jan-6-capitol-riot" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); transition: color 0.15s ease 0s;" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">Jan. 6 Capitol riot</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"> enlisted the help of a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations,<b> </b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><b>The Washington Post</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><b> </b>reports.<b> The so-called legal “command center” at the ritzy Willard hotel in Washington, D.C. featured Rudy Giuliani, former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik, and former White House Chief of Staff Steve Bannon. John Eastman, the lawyer who authored the memo outlining how then-Vice President Mike Pence could suspend the Senate’s certification of the 2020 presidential election’s results, also made appearances at the “war room,”</b> where Team Trump pushed the lie that he had won the election and reportedly devised ways to pressure Pence into stopping certification. Among those involved in the effort, according to the </span><em style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px">Post</em><span style="" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, was </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Phil Waldron, a former Army officer with expertise in psychological operations. Waldron led a team analyzing state election data he said gave credence to Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.</span></span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During the frantic period between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, a young White House aide named Garrett Ziegler served as a conduit of information from a network of teams led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to President Trump, as the operatives generated unfounded and specious claims in an attempt to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Ziegler has spoken openly about using his pass to let attorney Sidney Powell and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn into the White House for a Dec. 18, 2020 meeting with President Trump and</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> contributing to a report authored by his boss, trade advisor Peter Navarro, that was used to undermine confidence in the election.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> But Raw Story has confirmed that</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Ziegler played a much more significant role than has been previously understood. Working directly with a team that reported to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, Ziegler helped create a seamless information chain that was mobilized in the effort to overturn the election.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As previously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/us/politics/donald-trump-election-results-fraud-voting-machines.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reporte</a>d, Ziegler let Powell and Flynn into the White House for an impromptu meeting with Trump, in which the trio <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-oval-office-meeting-sidney-powell-a8e1e466-2e42-42d0-9cf1-26eb267f8723.html?deepdive=1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reportedly</a> urged the president to invoke the National Emergencies Act so that he could use the National Guard to seize ballots and appoint Powell as a special counsel to investigate the election. Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO, has said that he contacted Ziegler to arrange the meeting. The visit caught Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone by surprise, according to Ziegler, and Ziegler’s visitor access privileges were subsequently revoked.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The following day, Trump tweeted a link to the report authored by Navarro produced in collaboration with Ziegler, while calling his supporters to come to Washington, DC on Jan. 6 for a “wild rally.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ziegler also said he attempted to arrange a separate meeting between Powell and Trump, Raw Story has found.</b></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I walked Sidney over to the residence one night to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler asserted in a YouTube interview after he had left the White House. Powell was blocked from meeting with the president, he said, contending that Trump’s more cautious staff prevented the president from taking bolder action.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziegler disclosed on his Telegram channel last month that he received an invitation to speak with the staff and members of the January 6th Committee. The House cited Navarro, Ziegler’s former boss, for criminal contempt for defying subpoenas from the select committee and referred him to the US Department of Justice for prosecution on April 6.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While gathering information and drafting the Navarro report, Ziegler worked with a research team that reported to Giuliani, according to Giuliani associate Michael Trimarco. A Long Island businessman with a background in finance and tech, Trimarco <a href="https://www.brighteon.com/8d5b1400-4d69-44b1-aff7-be9536df8790" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">told</a> far-right conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel in a recent video that he had been helping Giuliani analyze the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020, and then hastily switched over to researching alleged election fraud after the election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Westin hotel in<b> Arlington, Va.</b> served as the initial hub for the teams collecting affidavits to support the legal challenges, Raw Story has found. Those teams promoted a fount of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/21/us/politics/phil-waldron-jan-6.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">specious claims</a> that would fuel the violent effort to prevent Congress from certifying the election. Byrne said in a video posted earlier this year that Trimarco “rented some rooms” for Powell “and a few other people” at the Westin. The video was removed from Byrne’s channel on the alternative video streaming platform Rumble, but a <a href="https://www.onenewspage.com/video/20220208/14304112/PATRICK-makes-Correction-Mike-Trimarco-Patriot.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">copy</a> was republished by the news site One News Page, crediting Rumble as the original source.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“All of this would have fallen apart on that side of the river had it not been for [Trimarco] showing up and not just with a credit card, but trying to provide some adult supervision,” Byrne said. “He’s a real champion, and the MAGA crowd should know that when push came to shove, this fellow came up out of nowhere and was very valuable in helping corral all these forces and keep things from just spinning apart in the early days.”</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In mid-November 2020, Powell, Flynn and Byrne decamped from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation in South Carolina at the invitation of defamation attorney</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Lin Wood</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> in mid-November.</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> The team led by Powell and Flynn at Tomotley received </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/magazine/michael-flynn-2020-election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">widespread coverage</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. Less attention has been focused on a second team that stayed behind. Ziegler was a frequent presence at the Westin, which he dubbed the “cyber-patriots,” Trimarco said.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The team at the Westin “did have access to Garrett at the White House, they did get tours, and they did work with Garrett extensively,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “I know he did — and he was working diligently with these folks to get as much information as quickly as we could into the right hands.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziegler worked with Giuliani team to get information to Trump</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Following in the footsteps of his older cousin Ron Ziegler, onetime press secretary for President Richard Nixon, Garrett Ziegler landed an internship at the White House as a college student in 2017. </b>He joined the staff of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under Navarro two years later. Prior to the election, <b>Ziegler said he worked on reports touting “the Trump economic record” in sectors like mining and manufacturing in swing states. </b>Beginning around Nov. 15 — roughly the same time Powell moved her team from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation — Ziegler said he and three other aides started helping Navarro compile reports casting doubt on the outcome of the election.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler <a href="https://rumble.com/vk6y2l-garrett-ziegler-trump-white-house-director-pulls-no-punches..html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">told</a> David Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor who has amassed a large following on Telegram among election deniers and anti-vaccine adherents. “He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his account of his time working on the Giuliani election team at the Westin, Trimarco told Vandersteel he was impressed by Ziegler’s energy and found him to be mature beyond his years.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I mean, this guy — talk about people really working 24-7,” Trimarco said. “He would come around at 11, midnight, 1, after he’s done at the White House, to get information. I saw him come by one or two times. But he was working with a few key people on our team to get the information.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the tangled web of relationships among the operatives working to overturn the election at the Westin, Tomotley and across the country, Trimarco was responsible for making sure crucial information reached Giuliani.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“If you wanted to get information from Sidney’s camp, at least at the very beginning, over to Rudy’s, you’d come through me,” Trimarco said. “That was the reason I was at a lot of these meetings — to get information over to Rudy, because he represented the president, for real. And we weren’t physically in the same location.”</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the “<b>cyber-patriots”</b> team was headquartered at the Westin, according to Trimarco, Giuliani has said he was working out of the Trump Hotel around the time of the election and then moved to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Shortly after Christmas, <b>Giuliani said he moved to the Willard Hotel. </b>Giuliani’s statements about his whereabouts during the period he was challenging the election on Trump’s behalf come from a deposition for a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Giuliani did not respond to multiple emails and voicemails to his lawyers seeking comment..</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziegler was working so closely with the team at the Westin that information often reached Trump before it reached him, Trimarco said.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president, and then it would circle back to Rudy.”</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ziegler told Raw Story he would respond to questions for comment, but didn’t send responses by press time.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trimarco comes from a politically connected family in New York. His involvement in politics long predates the effort to overturn the 2020 election. During a New York state court trial to decide a complaint brought by Trimarco against his former business partners, witnesses testified that Trimarco took part in a meeting with then-Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) in 2002 to discuss a venture that would theoretically capture and store biometric data to properly identify passengers at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. Trimarco’s former partners accused him of failing to talk about their business during the meeting and instead promoting a business owned by his family.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Trimarco claimed in his March interview with Vandersteel that “the feds are coming after me” related to a matter involving Cambridge Analytica — the British consulting firm that used Facebook data to micro-target voters to the advantage of the Trump campaign in 2016.</b> He further asserted that Giuliani was representing him in the matter. It is unclear exactly what Trimarco’s relationship to Cambridge Analytica is, but a <em>Fast Company </em><a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/40477438/cambridge-analytica-has-your-tv-in-mind-and-an-unlikely-ally" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">story</a> linked Cambridge Analytica to members of the Ergen family, who own Dish Network, and court records indicate that Trimarco was involved in marketing and distribution work for Dish Network in 2010.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2018, Trimarco sued Dish Network scion Chase Ergen, and he was represented by a New York City lawyer named Howard Kleinhendler.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trimarco told Vandersteel that he was analyzing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop for Giuliani in October 2020. Kleinhendler allowed him to come by his law office to print out pages from the device. The effort to mine the laptop for information that could damage the Biden campaign pivoted to generating baseless election fraud theories once it became apparent Trump was going to lose.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When everything went south after election night and Howard was on the phone with me right away — ‘How can I help? Can I work on this? I want to help the cause,’” Trimarco recalled. The next day, Trimarco said Kleinhendler showed up at the Westin ready to go to work. <b>Kleinhendler went on to file an election suit as Sidney Powell’s co-counsel in Arizona, and currently represents Powell in defamation suits brought by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite multiple attempts, Kleinhendler could not be reached for comment.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In his interview with Vandersteel, Trimarco recalled a meeting that took place at the Westin shortly after the election that included Kleinhendler and Powell. Two other men who attended the </span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">meeting — retired Army Col. Phil Waldron and </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);">Texas businessman Russell Ramsland</span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 102, 0);"> —</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> explained “their theories on how the system was hacked,” Trimarco said.</span></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ziegler maintains that during his time in the White House he was outspoken in his advocacy for Trump to take bold action to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“I was telling whoever would listen to me in the White House: ‘Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it,’” Ziegler told an interviewer, outlining a proposal similar to the one Powell, Flynn and Byrne pitched to President Trump at the White House meeting.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In late December 2020, Ziegler said he was “still holding out hope that some of the advice my boss was giving [Trump] that we needed to do something about this would actually get done,<b> that he would quote-unquote cross the Rubicon…. But he didn’t do that.”</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By then, the ceaseless drumbeat of unfounded claims that the vote had been electronically altered by foreign powers had come to be accepted as truth by Trump’s supporters. Outraged by what they considered treason by lawmakers, state officials and judges who thwarted the president’s attempt to cling to power, they took matters into their own hands. On Jan. 6, 2021, the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to delay certification of the electoral vote. The vote was ultimately certified and Biden was confirmed as the next president.</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Democracy Dies in Darkness</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The making of a myth</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ASOG report, released Dec. 14</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“68% error rate in Michigan Voting Machines. ... Did Michigan Secretary of State break the law? Stay tuned!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dec. 15 tweet</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis, Jon Swaine and Josh Dawsey</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">May 9, 2021</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Russell J. Ramsland Jr. delivered presentations on electronic voting in this airplane hangar in Addison, Tex., where the company Allied Security Operations Group has offices. (Aaron C. Davis/The Washington Post)]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We had to find the right candidate,” said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. “We had to find one who knew they won.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[He made the pitch to Don Huffines, a state senator in Texas. Huffines declined.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He tried to persuade U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.). Sessions declined.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>No candidate agreed to bring a challenge, and the idea of widespread vote manipulation remained on the political fringe — until 2020, when Ramsland’s assertions were seized upon by influential allies of Trump. The president himself accelerated the spread of those claims into the GOP mainstream as he latched onto an array of baseless ideas to explain his loss in November.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies. This is the previously unreported origin story of a core set of those claims, ideas that were advanced not by renowned experts or by insiders who had knowledge of flawed voting systems <b>but by Ramsland and fellow conservative activists as they pushed a fledgling company, Allied Security Operations Group,</b> into a quixotic attempt to find evidence of widespread fraud where none existed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To assemble a picture of the company’s role, The Washington Post obtained emails and company documents and interviewed 12 people with direct knowledge of ASOG’s efforts, as well as former federal officials and aides from the Trump White House. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters or out of fear of retribution. Three individuals who were present in the hangar for those 2018 meetings spoke about the gatherings publicly for the first time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By late 2019, ASOG’s examination had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>ASOG’s examination by last summer had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by The Post. Ramsland had<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries</span>, Pressley said.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This comes from ASOG's confidential “executive summary” of a report on how to “eliminate system-wide election fraud threat” that was given to government officials in summer 2020. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the Nov. 3 election, to an extent not widely recognized, Ramsland and others associated with ASOG played key roles in spreading the claims of fraud, The Post found.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> <b>They were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.)</b>, a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the “kraken” lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell</span> — who The Post learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG —<b> and aired publicly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, </b>then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among those voices were the people in Ramsland’s network.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Louie Gohmert</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gohmert</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sidney Powell</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Powell</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rudolph W. Giuliani</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Giuliani</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the aftermath of the election, Trump was surrounded by those repeating claims Ramsland had made ...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">... and in seeking to overturn the election, Trump himself embraced some of those ideas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The idea that the election was stolen took root and remains persuasive to millions of Americans. Although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called the election the “most secure in American history,” polls have consistently shown that about one-third of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe that Trump lost because of fraud.</span> An internal poll by the National Republican Senatorial Committee in March found that among Republicans who believed the election was stolen, nearly half said hacked machines were partly to blame and an additional 8 percent said they were the main source of fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fraud claims have undermined faith in the electoral process, been cited as a motivation for legislation to curtail access to polls in dozens of states and spurred the companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic to file billion-dollar lawsuits. Ultimately, the conspiracy-mongering helped inspire the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an email exchange with The Post, Ramsland, 68, confirmed that ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but said that he had never spoken to Trump himself and that the company was “one of many voices” that expressed concerns about election-system vulnerabilities. He noted that election security has been a long-standing concern across the political spectrum and said that many others had “reached similar conclusions regarding irregularities in the election system.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Through an attorney, Powell confirmed that she had met Pressley but did not respond to questions about where or about her work with Ramsland. Giuliani and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. Gohmert declined to comment on his interactions with Ramsland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Lawyer Sidney Powell, joined by Rudolph W. Giuliani, left, speaks at a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Nov. 19. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Through a spokesman, Trump declined an interview request.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley, 58, said she and Ramsland had a falling out in part over his use of her analysis of election data and her suspicions that his motives were financial or partisan. She said she believes he has not provided evidence for his claims about the 2020 election and fears those claims could undercut legitimate questions about the integrity of U.S. voting. “I’m heartbroken by it,” Pressley said recently, speaking in detail about ASOG for the first time, during a three-hour interview near Austin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In emails to The Post, Ramsland called Pressley “unreliable” and said ASOG ceased doing business with her “because of her lack of technical experience and complete inability to understand electronic investigative work.” He said Pressley had a limited view of the work performed by ASOG, adding that “our cyber team had already gone far beyond the simple audit log data and analysis she had initially brought to ASOG.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many people and organizations claimed after the election to have evidence casting doubt on Biden’s victory. But Ramsland and ASOG’s role was unique, said Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who led a team tracking the integrity of the 2020 election for DHS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Repeatedly and at key moments, Masterson said, ASOG was the source of morsels of inaccurate information that shaped public perception</b>. Some of the ideas it pushed had circulated previously, he said, but they were supercharged by the influence and connections of Ramsland and the people around him — and by the air of authority the company provided.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“It wasn’t just that the president would tweet about their stuff. It was all these little nuggets and grist that they provided or that were cited to them in testimony or in the ‘kraken’ cases. It provided the appearance of substance and fact to something that had no substance or fact,”</b> said Masterson, who has not previously discussed ASOG publicly. “<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It was like: ‘Look, these are professionals. … They have former military experience. And look at what they found.’ They gave those who wanted to push and believe in the lie something to hold on to.”</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Convinced there was fraud</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The nation’s embrace of electronic voting grew out of the debacle of 2000, when hanging chads and other hard-to-interpret paper ballots muddled the outcome of the presidential race, souring many Americans on the analog technology the country had used for decades.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two years later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, dedicating billions of dollars to modernize U.S. elections. It encouraged jurisdictions across the country to replace their old voting machines with new digital systems.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The result was a massive investment in paperless touch-screen voting machines, also known as<b> direct-recording electronic voting machines or DRE</b>s, which states came to view as simpler, cheaper and more accessible to people with disabilities.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There were some electronic voting machines before that, but this was the thing that opened the floodgates to them,” said Matt Blaze, a professor of law and computer science at Georgetown University who researches election technology and security.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Blaze and other experts warned that DREs introduced new security risks: Without a reliable paper trail, there was no way to check whether the machines had accurately recorded voters’ intentions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As concern about this vulnerability mounted, a growing number of states and localities began requiring voting machines to leave a paper trail. Today, most voters mark paper ballots by hand, and they are then scanned and tabulated by a machine. Some use touch-screen machines that produce a printed copy of the voter’s selections. A few still vote on paperless machines.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There has never been a documented case of a U.S. election being stolen through hacking, according to Blaze and other experts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Still, concerns about the security of electronic voting continue to simmer, including among experts. It does not help, they say, that some machines contain modems to simplify the reporting of results and that those machines have sometimes been left connected to the Internet for extended periods.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was DREs, and the built-in inability to verify their results, that helped persuade Pressley that her race for a seat on Austin’s nonpartisan city council in 2014 had been stolen.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a candidate, Pressley told voters she had grown up outside Dallas, the daughter of a cattle auctioneer. She said she arrived in Austin two decades earlier as a poor single mother and succeeded against the odds. She earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, worked for 17 years in the semiconductor industry and owned a company that sold bottled rainwater.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The campaign foundered amid revelations she had previously appeared on Infowars, the right-wing website operated by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and on another occasion had said she believed data showed that military-grade explosives were planted inside the twin towers on 9/11. That comment prompted the Austin American-Statesman to retract its endorsement of her. (Pressley told The Post she had “no opinion” on whether planes brought down the World Trade Center.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The race was not close: Her opponent, a community organizer, defeated her by a margin of almost 30 points.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley could not believe it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I knew in my heart that I had won,” she recently told a gathering of law enforcement officers outside Houston, one of hundreds of speeches she has given about the case, “and I became convinced there was fraud.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Laura Pressley is pictured here in 2012 when she was running for a seat on Austin’s city council. Pressley ran again in 2014 and contested her loss in that race. (Jana Birchum)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A recount confirmed her loss. But nearly all the ballots had been cast on DREs, and Pressley remained skeptical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She took the case to court.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Among other evidence, Pressley cited an audit log that contained nine instances when a machine made by the company Hart InterCivic recorded an event as “Invalid/Corrupt.” She argued that those and other alleged irregularities meant the true outcome of the election was impossible to determine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A state judge threw out the case before trial and fined her and her attorney for bringing a frivolous lawsuit. Pressley appealed, and in 2016 a three-judge panel upheld the lower-court ruling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“Pressley produced no evidence that the ‘Invalid/Corrupt’ error messages resulted in any legal votes not being counted, resulted in any illegal votes being counted, or otherwise materially affected the outcome of the election</b>,” the Texas Court of Appeals panel found, adding that Pressley’s own expert witness testified it was “not known” what the nine error messages meant.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This type of expert testimony is based on uncertainty and mere speculation and is therefore unreliable and irrelevant,” the panel said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Pressley would go on to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, which said it was too late to take up her underlying fraud allegations but found that they were not frivolous and dropped the fines</b>. Her expert witness had testified that corrupted memory sticks that contain ballot data “could” damage the credibility of vote counting, the court wrote. To avoid fines, it wrote, “Pressley needs only to have some factual basis for her claim … not evidence that is ultimately admissible.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Hart InterCivic told The Post that the error messages did not impact the tally and that “the election results were accurately recorded and reported.” The company said the error messages indicate a failed connection between memory sticks and the devices that read them — a hiccup resolved by simply reconnecting and trying again.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 2018, Pressley had become an outspoken critic of electronic voting systems that lack a paper trail. She founded True Texas Elections and recruited poll-watchers in more than a dozen counties to look for evidence of fraud in the state’s March primary that year. Afterward, she filed a complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) alleging that Democratic votes might have been undercounted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Laura Pressley's presentation on election fraud, which she delivered alongside Ramsland in late 2018, included clips from voting machine audit logs. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On election night in November 2018, the volunteer poll-watchers obtained audit logs generated by the central tabulation machines in Dallas County as they tallied votes, some of which had been cast on DREs manufactured by the largest voting-machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software, or ES&S. Such logs record an array of activity and can be difficult to interpret for anyone unfamiliar with the software involved.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a statement, ES&S said that its voting equipment has been through thousands of hours of independent testing and that its accuracy has been verified through audits and other examinations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But as Pressley pored over the logs, she fixated on specific words. “Downloaded,” “cleared,” “replaced,” the audit logs said, over and over.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Soon, she came to suspect that those audit logs, too, were a window into surreptitious vote-switching.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘When someone says, “I know a guy” …’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Allied <b>Special Operations</b> Group, as the firm was first named, was initially envisioned as a one-stop shop for government and corporate clients seeking cybersecurity, physical protection and sophisticated open-source intelligence services, Ramsland and former employees told The Post.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The company was formed in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kraft was the company’s chief executive, and it was based out of his house in a subdivision north of Fort Worth. Kraft declined to comment for this report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An early promotional video described ASOG as “a group of highly trained professionals who have seen it all,” and it stressed the intelligence backgrounds of some team members. “When someone says, ‘I know a guy,’ he’s talking about ASOG,” said the narrator, who said that ASOG personnel had taken part in the types of missions “that many of us only see in the movies.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Months after Kraft filed papers to establish the company, he was joined by a trio of other men, state records show.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alvan “Locke” Neely, a retired Secret Service agent who first served in the Ford administration, became ASOG’s chief operations officer.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">J. Keet Lewis was named ASOG’s vice president of strategy. Lewis served on the executive committee of the<b> Council for National Policy (CNP)</b>, a Washington-based organization that for decades has been a networking hub for powerful conservative activists and dono</span>rs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to his biography in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Lewis consulted on international energy projects and had helped develop the Skimmer Basket Buddy, a patented maintenance tool for swimming pools. He did not respond to messages seeking comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ramsland, who was also then a member of the CNP, </b>joined as ASOG’s chief financial officer. The son and grandson of West Texas oilmen lived with his wife in the Preston Hollow section of Dallas, home to former president George W. Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland had charted an unusual career path, including investment banking, consulting on a proposed cattle ranch in the South Pacific and working with NASA on a venture aimed at growing crystals in space. He also owned oil and gas interests in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, records show.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to business filings in Florida, Lewis and Ramsland later served together on the board of Photonx, a company that according to its website uses variable wavelengths of light “to treat specific pathogenic and chronic diseases.” (Ramsland told The Post that in its current form Photonx’s device “expressly doesn’t purport to treat disease.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photonx now has office space inside the Addison hangar, according to a mailbox outside and a sign visible to visitors at the front door.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland was a “numbers and models” man, said Gene Street, who partnered with him in the 1990s on the London restaurant that Ramsland’s résumé, obtained by The Post, says was “Europe’s highest-grossing Tex-Mex restaurant.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you ever needed to know where a single penny went, he was the guy that could tell you,” Street said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ramsland had donated to the campaigns of numerous Republicans, including Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), campaign finance filings show. He had also run for office himself, challenging Rep. Pete Sessions in the 2016 Republican primary </b>as a part of the <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">tea party,</span> the fiscally conservative movement that had formed in opposition to President Barack Obama’s agenda. A campaign ad showed Ramsland wearing a cowboy hat and shooting a rifle at cardboard boxes labeled “open borders” and “Obamacare.” Ramsland lost by nearly 38 points.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weeks before he joined ASOG, Ramsland spoke to a conservative association, delivering remarks rife with outlandish claims, according to video reviewed by The Post. Ramsland called the deadly <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">2012 attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, a “deep-state operation,” and he traced the origin of the “deep state” to a World War II-era collaboration involving <b>Prescott Bush, the father of former president George H.W. Bush; the Muslim Brotherhood; and liberal financier George Soros </b>— who was born in 1930 and was not yet an adult.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ASOG’s early work included hunting for intelligence about a group of Chinese nationals for an exiled Chinese billionaire, an associate of former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, and providing VIP protection details in the United States and abroad, a specialty Neely brought from the Secret Service.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the fall of 2018, influential Texas Republican fundraiser JoAnn Fleming urged Ramsland and Pressley to join forces, Pressley told The Post. Ramsland soon shifted ASOG’s attention to election security. Fleming did not respond to messages seeking comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Neely said he left his position with the company when resources moved toward election security.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“My focus was and has always been protection and investigations,” he said in a brief interview outside his home in suburban Dallas. “They were going a totally different direction, and it was just not — they were pouring all their resources into that, and it was just not my gig.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The relationship between Ramsland and Kraft also grew strained, according to three people who worked for or with the company at the time. Kraft eventually departed under pressure, the people said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘It had to get to Trump’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In November 2018, Texas Republicans were reeling from a battering at the polls. Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke had lost only narrowly to Cruz, and strong Democratic turnout had cost Sessions his longtime seat representing a swath of Dallas and its fast-growing suburbs as the party picked up seats in both chambers of the state legislature. Some Republicans were looking for explanations beyond the apparent purpling of Dallas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soon, Pressley was in the hangar, briefing Ramsland on her election-fraud theories. “Russ got really excited. They all did,” Pressley said. “I think they saw this as their next big thing.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ASOG and Pressley began looking for a losing candidate who would challenge the election outcome and force Dallas County and ES&S to lift the hood on their technology to show whether votes had been manipulated, according to Pressley and to emails and other documents provided by her attorney.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">They alighted on state Sen. Don Huffines (R), a wealthy real estate developer whose bid for a second term in the Texas legislature had just ended in defeat, handing his district to a Democrat for the first time in almost four decades.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Within weeks of the election, Pressley said, Huffines was in the hangar with James E. “Trey” Trainor III, who had been nominated by Trump to serve on the Federal Election Commission but was not yet Senate-confirmed. Trainor was advising Huffines at the time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An email from Pressley to Ramsland. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley presented her analysis of the audit logs and their mysterious “replaced” and “cleared” messages, she said. Ramsland told Huffines he was “horrified” by signs of fraud, she said. Challenging the result and forcing officials to turn over voting-machine data could prove the vote was manipulated, they argued.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley said she and Ramsland waited impatiently for Huffines to decide. In early December, he told them he would not challenge his loss.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We were all ready to go. We had someone who was going to fund the challenge and everything,” she said. “It was devastating.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Huffines did not respond to requests seeking comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an interview, Trainor confirmed the hangar meeting with Ramsland and said he advised Huffines not to bring a challenge. Under Texas law, contested state Senate races are decided by a Senate vote rather than by a judge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We were never going to convince senators that something nefarious had gone on, whether it did or didn’t,” Trainor said, noting that some Republicans might not have backed a challenge that risked embarrassing the GOP secretary of state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>ASOG briefed a number of people during this period, including Powell and Gohmert,</b> according to Pressley and a former ASOG employee named Joshua Merritt. Pressley said Powell approached her after one briefing in the hangar, gave her a business card and called the audit-log analysis proof of fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland and Lewis were also working to coax another losing candidate to bring a challenge: Sessions, the ousted congressman.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Lewis called a Sessions donor and left a voice message suggesting that the congressman’s race had been stolen. The donor forwarded the message to Carolyn Malenick, a volunteer for Sessions. Within days, Sessions was on a plane from Washington to Texas for a trip to the hangar, according to Malenick, who joined him there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A calendar invitation for the Dec. 14, 2018, meeting shows that Ramsland, Lewis and Pressley were among those expected, as was Fleming, the conservative fundraiser who Pressley said had connected her and Ramsland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An invitation to ASOG founders and allies to meet with Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) on Dec. 14, 2018, for a briefing on alleged election fraud. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Also in attendance, Malenick said, was <b>conservative talk-show host Kevin Freeman.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley said she gave a PowerPoint presentation that began with a picture of Joseph Stalin and a quote attributed to the Russian dictator: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes and how.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland followed, accompanied by the purported white-hat hacker, who would not provide his name to the audience, Malenick said. The two presented a $4 million plan that included ASOG standing up an “operations” center to search for voting irregularities, Malenick and Pressley said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Malenick, a longtime Republican fundraiser</b>, told The Post she eventually came to believe Ramsland was misleading donors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland told The Post the center was Kraft’s idea and that election investigations are costly. He said Malenick had “problems with truthfulness,” citing an FEC case from the 1990s that ended with her paying a $5,000 fine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With a certification deadline fast approaching, Sessions, too, decided against formally challenging his election result, according to his brother and attorney, Lewis Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Privately, Pete Sessions did not drop the matter. He filed a confidential complaint with Paxton, the Texas attorney general, alleging “a variety of legally questionable conduct” in Dallas County voting</b>. The complaint, provided to The Post by Lewis Sessions, included an affidavit from Pressley in which she claimed her poll-watchers reported they had been treated with hostility and had seen an elections worker using an Internet-connected laptop. She also enumerated audit-log messages — including “replaced” and “time stamp mismatch” — she considered suspicious.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Jan. 31, 2019, Pressley presented her findings to Paxton in a meeting in an Austin office used by Ramsland, she said. Emails between her and Ramsland show preparations for the meeting.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But again, nothing came of the effort.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland has said in media appearances that ASOG brought information to Paxton’s office and urged further examination. It is unclear whether he was referring to the Pete Sessions complaint and Pressley’s briefing or to a separate complaint, and Ramsland did not respond to messages seeking clarification. He told The Post that he now believes Paxton’s office lacks the financial resources and the “level of technical expertise and sophistication” necessary for a meaningful investigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a statement, Paxton’s office said: “We take every credible allegation of fraud seriously. In this case, after a thorough investigation by our office with the assistance of election systems experts, cybersecurity experts, and the FBI, we found the claims in this case were unverifiable, and an audit of the voting records confirmed the outcome of the election.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Legally, the allegations of fraud in Dallas in 2018 had all but reached a dead end, Pressley said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With Pressley in tow, Ramsland launched a fundraising blitz, traveling to the ranches and mansions of some of Texas’s wealthiest conservative funders. Ramsland told potential funders that their money would support legal challenges to ensure election integrity ahead of the 2020 election, Pressley said. “The hook was always Trump — that their guy could lose,” Pressley said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Pressley said that early in February 2019, she accompanied Ramsland to present her audit-log analysis in Midland to Charles Richard “Dick” Saulsbury, who had made a fortune in engineering work in oil and gas. In Cisco, they met with<b> Farris and Jo Ann Wilks, whose wealth stemmed from the sale of a family fracking busin</b></span><b>ess.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An email from Ramsland to Pressley on Jan. 30, 2019. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Pressley said pledges as high as $700,000 were discussed. The Post obtained correspondence in which Ramsland named Saulsbury as a potential funder and in which Pressley referred to a “Wilks investor meeting.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Saulsbury did not respond to questions through a spokeswoman. Reached briefly by phone, Farris Wilks said he had no memory of providing money to Ramsland and then hung up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland said neither the Wilkses nor the Saulsburys were donors. Malenick and a former ASOG employee said the company had sought to raise capital at the time by selling ownership shares. Ramsland did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the Wilkses or the Saulsburys were investors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley, a Republican who has donated to candidates from both major parties, said she began to grow suspicious that Ramsland’s motives were political or financial, or both, particularly in February 2019 when he took her research to D.C. to meet with Washington insiders but excluded her.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I don’t think he wanted me there and hearing what he was saying,” Pressley said. “Everything he was doing … became about getting to Trump. He had this idea it had to get to Trump.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pressley’s company, True Texas Elections, sought a consulting contract from ASOG in February 2019, but it never materialized. As their relationship deteriorated, Pressley sent a cease-and-desist letter to ASOG late that month demanding that Ramsland stop presenting her research without authorization, according to their correspondence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A cease-and-desist letter from Laura Pressley to<b> Adam Kraft, then CEO of ASOG, </b>on Feb. 23, 2019. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland denied to Pressley that he had tried to exclude her from the meetings in Washington and challenged her allegation that he had co-opted her audit-log analysis. She had shown her presentation to dozens of people without any confidentiality agreement or copyright markings, he wrote. “We frankly do not understand how a project to save Texas and our country has turned into this,” he wrote in a letter reviewed by The Post. “This isn’t just your project. This has been a team effort from the beginning.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland spreads the word</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As 2019 progressed, Ramsland decided to take his case to the public via <b>“Economic War Room,” the online television show hosted by Freeman.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Like Ramsland and J. Keet Lewis, Freeman was a member of the Council for National Policy, </b>according to membership directories posted online by the watchdog group Documented.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We finally decided that if we couldn’t get the government to pay attention without public opinion and public pressure, the best guy to go to would be Kevin,” Ramsland later recalled in a panel discussion, a recording of which is posted online.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Asked whether CNP had supported Ramsland’s efforts, the group’s executive director, former congressman Bob McEwen (R-Ohio) said: “CNP is a convening organization of several organizations and individual members. And that’s what it does. It doesn’t sponsor legislation or oppose legislation. It is an opportunity for people, patriotic citizens, to gather together to share their concerns and interests in our nation’s security.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In emails exchanged over the course of a week, Freeman said he was unavailable to answer questions about his presence at the meeting and his involvement with Ramsland.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland appeared on the show multiple times in 2019 and 2020, at least once with another ASOG employee who appeared with his face in shadow and voice disguised. The employee’s identity was kept secret on the show, with Freeman referring to him as Jekyll, a “white-hat hacker.” It was the same purported hacker who had accompanied Ramsland during meetings in the hangar with Sessions and others, according to Pressley and Malenick.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Post has reported that <b>Jekyll is Merritt, a former Army mechanic who studied network security administration after leaving the military. In December, The Post reported that affidavits in Powell’s lawsuits from a purported “military intelligence expert” using the pseudonym “Spider” were actually written by Merritt.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Merritt, who told The Post in December that he had briefed Powell and Gohmert, declined to comment for this report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Together, Ramsland and Merritt painted a picture of an entirely porous voting system, wide open and hackable. Ramsland made a range of specific claims, including that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location, change it and then “re-inject” it, or they could unleash “some sort of a bot” to change the results without anyone noticing. He said there were indications that vote manipulation was already happening and said all major U.S. voting-machine companies were vulnerable.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Among his claims was that source code initially written by the company Smartmatic formed the basis of much of the election software used in the United States. Ramsland often pointed out, as other critics had, that Smartmatic’s founders were Venezuelan.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Representatives of ES&S, Dominion and Hart InterCivic, the nation’s three largest voting-machine companies, told The Post they do not use or license Smartmatic software. They all said their companies’ software code is not in any way based on Smartmatic code, and Smartmatic said its code is not incorporated in other companies’ software.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland told The Post that “many cyber groups” have reported that different companies share software code similarities. He did not respond to questions asking that he name any cyber groups that support his claims about Smartmatic code.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A Dominion Voting Systems voting machine in Atlanta in September 2019.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In his media appearances, Ramsland also resurfaced an old baseless claim about Scytl, a Spain-based election technology firm that he described as a “somewhat disturbing company” in one appearance on Freeman’s show. “They’re housing all of our votes, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” he said in a September appearance</span>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The following month, Ramsland added a twist, claiming on an online talk show hosted by conservative Debbie Georgatos that American votes were “being held on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Scytl has said that it has no servers in Frankfurt and that its systems are not used to count or “house” votes in U.S. elections. Ramsland told The Post in an email that “any 8th grader with a reasonable background in white hat cyber investigation tools” could trace votes to a Scytl server in Frankfurt.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>One of Scytl’s products is a platform used by some counties to publicly display unofficial vote tallies online on election night, according to the compan</b>y. After polls close, as results begin trickling in, they are published online by media outlets and state and local governments. Those unofficial election-night reports depend on tallies that are transmitted by local officials to a publishing system. In some counties, that publishing system is made by Scytl.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Ramsland claimed to The Post that Dallas County’s use of such a Scytl platform showed votes were sent overseas.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But Harri Hursti, a data-security expert who has spent years highlighting vulnerabilities in electronic voting technology, said that Ramsland’s claims about vote-fixing overseas were nonsensical. Even if a hacker could manipulate the numbers that are posted online, the underlying votes would not be affected, Hursti said. Those are kept separately, sequestered from the Internet, and they are — once tallied and checked for discrepancies — the official results of any election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">ASOG paid Hursti’s company, Nordic Innovation Labs, $2,500 in November for an 18-page memo explaining the history of Dominion, its business acquisitions and the many systems and machines Dominion now supports, according to Nordic’s managing partner, Dan Webber.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Hursti said he believes ASOG ignored information he provided, in an effort to shape a sensational narrative about election fraud. Such baseless claims are now distracting time and attention from actual election-security problems, he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This is counterproductive,” he said. “There is so much that needs to be fixed.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over this same period, in 2019 and 2020, Ramsland was attempting to win the attention of Washington insiders, an effort Gohmert was also engaged in.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Gohmert </b>has said that a year before the election he gave Trump information from a group of “former intelligence people that were monitoring the election in Dallas County” — a description that closely resembles the way ASOG portrays itself — and that the president considered it “a real problem.” Speaking on a podcast in November, Gohmert said his own reaction to the information was, “Holy cow.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to <b>seven members of the House Freedom Caucus, </b>Ramsland told MyPillow founder Mike Lindell for his movie about alleged election fraud. Ramsland said members were “horrified” at what ASOG presented.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ASOG also reached out that summer to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was referred to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of DHS. CISA reviewed a packet of information from ASOG that included the document saying the cost of the company’s investigation had surpassed $1 million. Also included was an affidavit from Pressley and over 40 pages dedicated to her and her poll-watchers’ observations of the vote in Dallas County in 2018. The Post obtained the documents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[An excerpt from ASOG's May 2020 “introduction briefing outline,” which the company gave to government officials. (Obtained by The Washington Post)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland said that DHS officials in Texas found ASOG’s information compelling but that CISA officials in Washington were “too busy to take a briefing” and agreed to only a short call.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>In a statement, DHS confirmed that its officials had spoken with Ramsland and his associates, “reviewed the information provided and determined that it was speculative and not actionable</b>.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A full-court press</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hours after the final votes were cast on Nov. 3, Trump doubled down on the claims he had been making for months. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump said. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Over the next several weeks, Ramsland and others tied to ASOG played key roles in the full-court press to persuade Americans that the 2020 election had been rigged.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ramsland and Lewis appeared on <b>Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business Network</b>, claiming there was evidence of widespread fraud. The claim that all U.S. voting machines secretly harbored Venezuelan software was repeated by Giuliani and Powell in numerous media appearances. The claim that Scytl servers in Frankfurt could be used to flip votes went viral on the right after it was repeated by Gohmert.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On Nov. 12, Gohmert said he had told Trump that data on these servers was critical to getting to the bottom of the fraud.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>“I had suggested that the president might get information from Scytl,” Gohmert said on Newsmax, “and I sent him specifics that he needed to get that would show a lot of fraud.</b>”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The next day, Gohmert told a virtual prayer group that the Scytl data would show “how many votes were switched from Republican to Democrat,” claiming that he had learned all this from “some of our former intel people.</span>”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Scytl strongly denied the allegations. In a statement, the company said its products were not used to tally votes in U.S. elections and that it “does not even have offices in Frankfurt and does not have servers or computers in the German city.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But Trump fanned the theory, according to archives of his deleted tweets. Late on Nov. 15, he retweeted to his millions of online followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from 29 states were routed through “a server in Frankfurt, Germany” and that Scytl “controls and reports your vote</b>.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[President Donald Trump speaks to supporters near the White House on Jan. 6 before the mob attack at the Capitol. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Ramsland also contributed material to Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr</b>., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory. On Nov. 18, a nine-page affidavit from Ramsland filed to a federal court in <b>Wood’s Georgia case made an explosive allegation: </b>Multiple precincts in Michigan had recorded more votes for president than what he said was the estimated number of voters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland’s claim was amplified the following day by Giuliani and Powell at a news conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Like Ramsland, Powell said that excess votes in some jurisdictions were as high as 350 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The claim in Ramsland’s affidavit soon collapsed under scrutiny. The precincts he cited were actually in Minnesota, a mistake Ramsland blamed on “my guys” in his exchanges with The Post. Ramsland said the Minnesota numbers also showed excess votes, a claim contradicted by official results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an interview, Wood said he did not know Ramsland and referred The Post to the lawyer who represented him in the case, Ray S. Smith III. Smith noted that a corrected affidavit had been filed to the court and declined to comment further.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Another of Ramsland’s affidavits claimed a 139 percent voter turnout in Detroit — meaning the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters. Detroit’s official election results show that about 258,000 of its 506,000 registered voters cast ballots — a turnout of just under 51 percent. Ramsland later filed an affidavit saying his original figures were based on data that was online but that “no longer exists [f]or some unexplained reason.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Two Ramsland affidavits filed in Arizona purported to expose more than 100,000 illegal votes in the state, again based on high turnout rates</b>, and suggested forensic testing to determine whether batches of fake ballots had been cast for Biden. Ramsland attached the résumés of six “key team members” he said had been involved in the preparation of his material. The only one identified by name was a former ASOG computer scientist who had died a year earlier.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland and one of his associates also played starring roles in the election-integrity “hearings” that Giuliani and GOP state legislators held in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. The events were intended to persuade legislators to wrest control of the election certification process and demand further investigation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm, appeared as a witness at each of those hearings. He said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Your vote is not as secure as your Venmo account,” Waldron concluded in a hotel ballroom in Phoenix on Nov. 30, provoking murmurs from the audience.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Pardon me? Say that one more time,” Giuliani said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Waldron obliged. A video clip of the exchange was posted to Trump’s official YouTube page.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Waldron declined to comment for this report.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">By December, Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former chief executive of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani, Byrne told The Post.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Byrne was bankrolling a group of what he described as cyber experts — his “bad news bears” — to investigate election fraud. </b>“They were the ones really getting their fingernails dirty, so to speak, hacking-and-cracking,” Byrne said in an email exchange with The Post. He said Ramsland, who had come to Washington for the effort, “acted as the conduit and synthesizer for a lot of research that was being done by other parties and technologists in our network.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On Dec. 18, Trump hosted a now-infamous hours-long meeting at the White House during which Byrne, Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser,<b> sought to persuade the president to appoint Powell special counsel to investigate the election</b>, including by examining voting machines in key swing-state counties.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump ultimately did not appoint a special counsel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>During this period, some White House lawyers heard Trump make claims that made no sense or seemed “bat-shit insane,” one former senior administration official said, later learning they came from a network that The Post found included Byrne, Powell and Ramslan</b>d.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a document obtained by The Post, skeptical Trump advisers developed a list of pointed questions aimed at determining whether there was evidence for the claims, many of which by then revolved around Dominion. The evidence never surfaced, the people close to the former president said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Byrne told The Post that White House officials “refused to look” seriously at the claims and that he and his allies will ultimately be vindicated.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>ASOG gets access to machines</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of all the ways in which Ramsland pushed the stolen-election narrative, arguably the most damaging was an ASOG report on Dominion machines in Michigan’s rural Antrim County, said Masterson, the senior cybersecurity adviser who was then focusing on elections at DHS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Antrim County became ground zero for baseless claims about Dominion voting machines when, early on Nov. 4, county officials posted unofficial results showing Biden winning by some 3,000 votes — a seeming impossibility in a reliably conservative regio</span>n. Election officials quickly acknowledged the mistake and called it human error, saying a clerk’s failure to correctly update software had led to inaccurate vote totals. <b>Final results showed Trump had won by more than 3,000 votes.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trump allies seized on the mistake as evidence of rigged or at least faulty voting machines.</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed at a news conference that a “major software issue in Antrim County” could mean results were wrong in other counties using similar technology.</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> Trump tweeted a<b style=""> Breitbart article </b>that sought to tie Dominion software to the error that made Antrim “flip blue in favor of Joe Biden” and to Election Day “glitches” that delayed voting in two Georgia counties.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The following day on Fox News, Powell said that computer glitches were “where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.” She called for an audit “of all of the computer systems that ... played any role in this fraud whatsoever.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 204, 102);">Powell’s wish for an examination of voting machines was granted after local real estate agent William Bailey filed a lawsuit in Antrim County on Nov. 23, alleging that the election had been marred by “material fraud or error.” Four days later, an ASOG team working for Bailey showed up at the offices of three Antrim townships and requested Dominion voting-machine records.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>On Dec. 4, Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer, a former Republican leader in the Michigan legislature, ordered that the ASOG team be given further access to the county’s voting equipment for a forensic examination. The decision, which offered a rare opportunity for election skeptics to examine Dominion machines, was celebrated by Trump’s campaign.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“BIG WIN FOR HONEST ELECTIONS,” Giuliani said on Twitter.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump, referred to the ASOG examiners as “our team” on Fox News</b>. Ellis did not respond to requests to clarify the Trump campaign’s relationship with ASOG.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The ASOG team returned to Antrim on Dec. 6 to examine county election equipment. ASOG’s Dec. 13 report, signed by Ramsland, made sweeping allegations about a conspiracy to fix the election. It claimed that Dominion’s systems were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to generate ballot errors and then to shunt those ballots to electronic adjudication, where administrators could change votes at will, with no oversight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The judge allowed the release of a redacted version on Dec. 14, the day members of the electoral college met to make Biden’s win official. Trump tweeted about ASOG’s report several times, claiming it exposed a “massive fraud” that cost him the election and saying Elsenheimer “should get a medal” for releasing it.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">ASOG’s report claimed that audit logs for Dominion machines showed an alarming 68 percent “error rate.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>That alleged error rate — which ASOG calculated by dividing the number of perceived error messages by the total numbers of lines in the audit log — was “meaningless,” according to an analysis by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor of computer science and engineering.</b> Halderman, who as part of the lawsuit examined the Antrim results and the ASOG report at the request of the Michigan secretary of state and attorney general, wrote that audit logs record multiple lines for each ballot scanned and that many of those lines are “benign warnings or errors” that have no bearing on the accuracy of the machines’ count.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">For example, he said, ASOG appeared to count the warning “ballot has been reversed” as an error that showed votes had been tampered with. But that entry means that a voter attempted to feed his ballot into the machine and the machine balked and spit it out — just as a vending machine often balks at a wrinkled dollar bill. That happens all the time, Halderman wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Of ASOG’s claim that many ballots were sent to electronic “adjudication,” where they were manipulated, Halderman said his examination showed that Antrim County did not perform electronic adjudication of ballots at all.</b> Halderman said that ASOG had correctly identified some security weaknesses in the county’s election system, but there was no evidence that anyone had exploited those weaknesses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The report contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions,” he wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>County and state officials, as well as Dominion, also said key claims in ASOG’s report were baseless.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramsland told The Post that ASOG had just six days to do its report and that Halderman’s analysis contradicted only 12 of ASOG’s 29 “core observations.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Three days after the court released the report, a hand recount of the county’s ballots showed that the presidential election results were correct, off from the previously reported results by only 12 votes out of some 16,000 cast. Dominion’s machines had counted accurately.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The tabulators did what they were supposed to do, and they did it very accurately, and there’s absolutely no evidence that there was some reverse cyberattack that manipulated them,” said Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom, a Republican who led a state Senate investigation of fraud claims. The ASOG report, he said, was “probably more harmful to the discussion” than anything else happening in Michigan at the time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I don’t see how anybody can take Mr. Ramsland and his group seriously as genuine purveyors of fact,” he said. “It’s very clear they’re beyond mistaken and misrepresenting what actually happened, either out of carelessness or with some sort of purpose.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>At his “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, Trump made reference to Antrim County and “the troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” as an example of how he had been wronged.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden,” he said. He also repeated Ramsland’s claim that there were more votes than voters in Detroit. “In Detroit, turnout was 139 percent of registered voters,” he said. “Think of that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He called the Nov. 3 vote “the most corrupt election in the history, maybe, of the world,” and then urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. By the thousands, they complied.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alice Crites, Kayla Ruble and Scott Clement contributed to this report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CORRECTION</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An earlier version of this article included a caption that gave an incorrect date for a photo of Laura Pressley. The image does not show Pressley in 2015, when she was contesting her loss in a runoff for a seat on the Austin City Council. Rather it shows her in 2012, when she was making an earlier run for the council.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emma Brown</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emma Brown is a reporter on the investigative team who joined The Washington Post in 2009. Previously, she wrote obituaries and covered local and national education.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron C. Davis</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aaron Davis is an investigative reporter who has covered local, state and federal government, as well as the aviation industry and law enforcement. Davis shared in winning the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 2018.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jon Swaine</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jon Swaine joined The Washington Post's investigative team in 2019. He previously worked for the Guardian from 2014 to 2019 and the Daily Telegraph from 2007 to 2014.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Josh Dawsey</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Follow</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Josh Dawsey is a political enterprise and investigations reporter for The Washington Post. He joined the paper in 2017 and previously covered the White House. Before that, he covered the White House for Politico, and New York City Hall and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie for the Wall Street Journal.</font></div><div>
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