trimarco, michael tech

=<div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/">https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/</a></div><div>
</div><div><div style="font-size: small;">i forgot ziegler:</div><div style="font-size: small;">an 6 22 raw story</div><div style="font-size: small;">Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.
Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in an interview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”Waldron declined to comment for this story.Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020, also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go to Tomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”</div><div style="font-size: small;">=</div></div><div>
</div><div>
<div>During the frantic period between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol, a young White House aide named Garrett Ziegler served as a conduit of information from a network of teams led by lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to President Trump, as the operatives generated unfounded and specious claims in an attempt to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election.Ziegler has spoken openly about using his pass to let attorney Sidney Powell and retired Lt. General Michael Flynn into the White House for a Dec. 18, 2020 meeting with President Trump and contributing to a report authored by his boss, trade advisor Peter Navarro, that was used to undermine confidence in the election. But Raw Story has confirmed that Ziegler played a much more significant role than has been previously understood. Working directly with a team that reported to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, Ziegler helped create a seamless information chain that was mobilized in the effort to overturn the election.As previously <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.The following day, Trump tweeted a link to the report authored by Navarro produced in collaboration with Ziegler, while calling his supporters to come to Washington, DC on Jan. 6 for a “wild rally.”Ziegler also said he attempted to arrange a separate meeting between Powell and Trump, Raw Story has found.“I walked Sidney over to the residence one night to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler asserted in a YouTube interview after he had left the White House. Powell was blocked from meeting with the president, he said, contending that Trump’s more cautious staff prevented the president from taking bolder action.Ziegler disclosed on his Telegram channel last month that he received an invitation to speak with the staff and members of the January 6th Committee. The House cited Navarro, Ziegler’s former boss, for criminal contempt for defying subpoenas from the select committee and referred him to the US Department of Justice for prosecution on April 6.While gathering information and drafting the Navarro report, Ziegler worked with a research team that reported to Giuliani, according to Giuliani associate Michael Trimarco. A Long Island businessman with a background in finance and tech, Trimarco <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.The Westin hotel in Arlington, Va. served as the initial hub for the teams collecting affidavits to support the legal challenges, Raw Story has found. Those teams promoted a fount of <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.“All of this would have fallen apart on that side of the river had it not been for [Trimarco] showing up and not just with a credit card, but trying to provide some adult supervision,” Byrne said. “He’s a real champion, and the MAGA crowd should know that when push came to shove, this fellow came up out of nowhere and was very valuable in helping corral all these forces and keep things from just spinning apart in the early days.”In mid-November 2020, Powell, Flynn and Byrne decamped from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation in South Carolina at the invitation of defamation attorney Lin Wood in mid-November. The team led by Powell and Flynn at Tomotley received <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>. Less attention has been focused on a second team that stayed behind. Ziegler was a frequent presence at the Westin, which he dubbed the “cyber-patriots,” Trimarco said.The team at the Westin “did have access to Garrett at the White House, they did get tours, and they did work with Garrett extensively,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “I know he did — and he was working diligently with these folks to get as much information as quickly as we could into the right hands.”Ziegler worked with Giuliani team to get information to TrumpFollowing in the footsteps of his older cousin Ron Ziegler, onetime press secretary for President Richard Nixon, Garrett Ziegler landed an internship at the White House as a college student in 2017. He joined the staff of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy under Navarro two years later. Prior to the election, Ziegler said he worked on reports touting “the Trump economic record” in sectors like mining and manufacturing in swing states. Beginning around Nov. 15 — roughly the same time Powell moved her team from the Westin to the Tomotley Plantation — Ziegler said he and three other aides started helping Navarro compile reports casting doubt on the outcome of the election.“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler <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.”In his account of his time working on the Giuliani election team at the Westin, Trimarco told Vandersteel he was impressed by Ziegler’s energy and found him to be mature beyond his years.“I mean, this guy — talk about people really working 24-7,” Trimarco said. “He would come around at 11, midnight, 1, after he’s done at the White House, to get information. I saw him come by one or two times. But he was working with a few key people on our team to get the information.”In the tangled web of relationships among the operatives working to overturn the election at the Westin, Tomotley and across the country, Trimarco was responsible for making sure crucial information reached Giuliani.“If you wanted to get information from Sidney’s camp, at least at the very beginning, over to Rudy’s, you’d come through me,” Trimarco said. “That was the reason I was at a lot of these meetings — to get information over to Rudy, because he represented the president, for real. And we weren’t physically in the same location.”While the “cyber-patriots” team was headquartered at the Westin, according to Trimarco, Giuliani has said he was working out of the Trump Hotel around the time of the election and then moved to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Shortly after Christmas, Giuliani said he moved to the Willard Hotel. Giuliani’s statements about his whereabouts during the period he was challenging the election on Trump’s behalf come from a deposition for a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer.Giuliani did not respond to multiple emails and voicemails to his lawyers seeking comment..Ziegler was working so closely with the team at the Westin that information often reached Trump before it reached him, Trimarco said.“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president, and then it would circle back to Rudy.”Ziegler told Raw Story he would respond to questions for comment, but didn’t send responses by press time.Trimarco comes from a politically connected family in New York. His involvement in politics long predates the effort to overturn the 2020 election. During a New York state court trial to decide a complaint brought by Trimarco against his former business partners, witnesses testified that Trimarco took part in a meeting with then-Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) in 2002 to discuss a venture that would theoretically capture and store biometric data to properly identify passengers at Long Island’s MacArthur Airport. Trimarco’s former partners accused him of failing to talk about their business during the meeting and instead promoting a business owned by his family.Trimarco claimed in his March interview with Vandersteel that “the feds are coming after me” related to a matter involving Cambridge Analytica — the British consulting firm that used Facebook data to micro-target voters to the advantage of the Trump campaign in 2016. He further asserted that Giuliani was representing him in the matter. It is unclear exactly what Trimarco’s relationship to Cambridge Analytica is, but a Fast Company <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.In 2018, Trimarco sued Dish Network scion Chase Ergen, and he was represented by a New York City lawyer named Howard Kleinhendler.Trimarco told Vandersteel that he was analyzing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop for Giuliani in October 2020. Kleinhendler allowed him to come by his law office to print out pages from the device. The effort to mine the laptop for information that could damage the Biden campaign pivoted to generating baseless election fraud theories once it became apparent Trump was going to lose.“When everything went south after election night and Howard was on the phone with me right away — ‘How can I help? Can I work on this? I want to help the cause,’” Trimarco recalled. The next day, Trimarco said Kleinhendler showed up at the Westin ready to go to work. Kleinhendler went on to file an election suit as Sidney Powell’s co-counsel in Arizona, and currently represents Powell in defamation suits brought by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.Despite multiple attempts, Kleinhendler could not be reached for comment.In his interview with Vandersteel, Trimarco recalled a meeting that took place at the Westin shortly after the election that included Kleinhendler and Powell. Two other men who attended the meeting — retired Army Col. Phil Waldron and Texas businessman Russell Ramsland — explained “their theories on how the system was hacked,” Trimarco said.Ziegler maintains that during his time in the White House he was outspoken in his advocacy for Trump to take bold action to prevent the transfer of power to Joe Biden.“I was telling whoever would listen to me in the White House: ‘Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it,’” Ziegler told an interviewer, outlining a proposal similar to the one Powell, Flynn and Byrne pitched to President Trump at the White House meeting.In late December 2020, Ziegler said he was “still holding out hope that some of the advice my boss was giving [Trump] that we needed to do something about this would actually get done, that he would quote-unquote cross the Rubicon…. But he didn’t do that.”By then, the ceaseless drumbeat of unfounded claims that the vote had been electronically altered by foreign powers had come to be accepted as truth by Trump’s supporters. Outraged by what they considered treason by lawmakers, state officials and judges who thwarted the president’s attempt to cling to power, they took matters into their own hands. On Jan. 6, 2021, the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to delay certification of the electoral vote. The vote was ultimately certified and Biden was confirmed as the next president.<div>
</div><div>===</div></div></div>