Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intelligence

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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 12:02 am

Coming in From the Cold, Going Out to the Bush Campaign
by Bill Peterson and Washington Post Staff Writer; Staff writer Ronald White contributed to this report.
March 1, 1980

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No one is sure who tacked up the red, white and blue "George Bush for President" poster beside the entrance to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., recently.

Workman quickly tore it down on the mistaken assumption that the poster was on CIA property. "We're studiously staying neutral in presidential politics," said press spokesman Dale Peterson.

But the poster was an important symbolic gesture, a commentary on the 1980 presidential race and the changing attitudes about the CIA.

Simply put, no presidential campaign in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- has attracted as much support from the intelligence community as the campaign of former CIA director Bush.

One top foreign policy and defense adviser is Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA and director of intelligence and research at the State Department. Another defense adviser is Lt. Gen. Sam V. Wilson, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Lt. Gen. Howard A. Aaron, a former deputy director of DIA, is on Bush's national steering committee. Henry Knoche, Bush's right-hand man at the CIA and later acting director of the agency, is quietly campaigning for Bush in the West. And Robert Gambino recently left his job as CIA director of security to work full-time for Bush.

At least 20 other former intelligence officers are working in various volunteer capacities with the Bush campaign. Bruce Rounds, director of operations for Bush in New Hampshire, is a former CIA officer. So is Tennessee finance chairman Jon Thomas. Virginia coordinator Jack Coackley is a past executive director of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. And at least three retired CIA officers work on Bush's research staff.

"It's sure as hell not a CIA coup or anything like that," said Coakley, formerly with DIA. "But I can tell you there is a very high level of support for George Bush among current and former CIA employes."


A few years ago when the CIA was under almost daily attack for its abuses and excesses, no candidate would have dared accept such support. But today Bush openly welcomes it, and at almost every stop he receives his loudest applause when he calls for a stronger CIA.

Bush's political advisers originally were wary of their candidate's CIA ties. In a world where secret police forces routinely overthrow governments, they obviously didn't want him to become labeled "the CIA candidate."

Some of the ex-employes themselves worried about a backlash. "I could see the headlines: Bush Sprinkles Campaign With Former Spooks," said one former covert operator.

But Bush's old CIA associates argued that the public mood on the CIA was shifting. Foreign policy adviser Cline, now director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University, had been delivering pro-CIA lectures on college campuses and elsewhere since 1973 when he left the government in disgust "over what they were doing to the intelligence agencies."

For years he was heckled at almost every stop. "I don't get any heckling now. In fact, I'm quite popular," he says. "I found there was a tremendous constituency for the CIA in the sticks when everyone in Washington was still urinating all over it."


Bush bought Cline's argument. "He felt he did a good job at the CIA, and the support of the retired officers was a reflection of that," says press secretary Peter Teeley. "Quite frankly, Bush was upset with our concerns. He thought it was unfair."

The Iran and Afghanistan crisis have heightened interest still further in recent months, says Cline, a 20-year CIA veteran. "I've been beating this bush since 1974 and it's just dawning on people that we need stronger intelligence gathering.

"It's panned out almost too good to be true," he adds. "The country is waking up just in time for George's candidacy."

There certainly isn't anything improper about involvement of former intelligence officers in a political campaign. All of those working for Bush appear to be retired or ex-intelligence officers. And the "old boy" intelligence network doesn't dominate the Bush campaign any more than other networks of former associates Bush developed in his days at Yale University, the Republican National Committee, of which he was chairman, the State Department (Bush was U.N. ambassador and envoy to China), Congress or in the oil business.

But there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network. When the Association of Former Intelligence Officers held its annual banquet last October, former executive director Coakley counted 180 of the 240 persons present wearing George Bush buttons. And he recalls David Phillips, the association founder, declaring: "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem and that problem is George Bush."

Coakley and other former intelligence officers see the support for Bush as a perfectly natural phenomenon. "This is the first time any significant number of us have ever gotten involved in a presidential race. I don't think it's because he's one of us. After all, he was only at the CIA one year."

"But he was there when everything was going downhill. People there perceived him as someone who did a very good job under difficult circumstances," he continues. "Maybe more important, he's the only candidate any of us can remember who has made the agency an issue. He's the guy who raised the intelligence community to a national campaign issue."

Coakley estimates there are about 25 former intelligence officers actively involved in the Bush effort, most on a part-time, volunteer basis. As the Virginia campaign coordinator, he is one of the highest placed former intelligence officers in the Bush campaign.

Cline, Wilson, Aaron and Gen. Richard Stillwell, once the CIA's chief of covert operations for the Far East, are considered top-level advisers on foreign policy and defense matters. Cline's role is probably the most important here. He has helped organize groups of experts for Bush to meet with, talks frequently with the candidate, and recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush's director of policy development and research.


Up to this point, the advisers have worked on a very informal basis, says Cline. "When the right time comes, I'd like to organize something like one of my old CIA staffs."

Only two of the former intelligence officers are on the Bush payroll. Former CIA security director Gambino functions as a traveling bodyguard for Bush, who has refused the Secret Service protection offered presidential candidates. The other paid worker is Harry Webster, who worked in clandestine operations during 25 years with the CIA, now a Bush field coordinator in northern Florida.

More typical is Evan Parker, a CIA retiree, who has worked three days a week in Bush's research department since last fall. Few of the ex-intelligence officers knew Bush personally before the campaign; most say their CIA background never comes up in their work.

Jon Thomas, Bush's Tennessee finance chairman, is an exception. He was working in the CIA's clandestine operations division in Madrid when Bush was CIA director, and he uses his experience as an endorsement of Bush's capacity to be a good president.

"When Bush became director, the agency had been dragged across the coals in all directions for several years. There was disastrously low morale, and our efficiency had fallen way off. You just couldn't get anything done.

"Bush turned it around in about 90 days. He was very human and very effective, just what the agency needed at that point," he says. "I firmly believe we wouldn't be in the trouble we're in today in Iran and Afghanistan if George Bush had stayed at the CIA."
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 12:07 am

Cambridge Prof with CIA, MI6 Ties Met with Trump Adviser During Campaign, Beyond
by Chuck Ross
The Daily Caller
3:10 PM 05/17/2018

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Days after Carter Page’s high-profile trip to Moscow in July 2016, the Trump campaign adviser had his first encounter with Stefan Halper, a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.

The conversation seemed innocent enough, Page tells The Daily Caller News Foundation. He recalls nothing of substance being discussed other than Halper’s passing mention that he knew then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. But the interaction was one of many that the pair would have over the next 14 months, through a period of time when Page was under the watchful eye of the U.S. government.


Their relationship included a number of in-person meetings, including at Halper’s farm in Virginia.

Page’s encounters with Halper were quite different from those that another Trump campaign adviser had during the campaign with the 73-year-old academic. As TheDCNF reported exclusively in March, Halper and George Papadopoulos met several times over a period of a few days in Sept. 2016. Several days earlier, Halper contacted and met with a third Trump campaign official. That official, who has requested anonymity, told TheDCNF that Halper expressed interest in helping the campaign.

Unlike with Page, Halper’s relationship with Papadopoulos was ostensibly more of a business arrangement than a fledgling friendship.

Halper, a veteran of the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, unsolicitedly contacted Papadopoulos on Sept. 2 with an offer to fly the Trump associate to London for several nights to discuss a policy paper about energy issues in Turkey, Cyprus and Israel. Papadopoulos, who has worked on energy issues at various think tanks, accepted the offer and flew to London.

Papadopoulos and Halper met several times during that stay, having dinner one night at the Travellers Club, an Old London gentleman’s club frequented by international diplomats. They were accompanied by Halper’s assistant, a Turkish woman named Azra Turk. Sources familiar with Papadopoulos’s claims about his trip say Turk flirted with him during their encounters and later on in email exchanges.

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Stefan Halper (Youtube screen capture)

Papadopoulos wrote the paper and delivered it in early October. He was paid $3,000 for the work. Days before making that payment, Halper had finalized a contract with the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s think tank. Federal records show that Halper has been paid $928,800 since 2012 for work on four policy projects for the Pentagon. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: A London Meeting Before The Election Aroused George Papadopoulos’s Suspicions)

***

Halper’s contacts with Page and Papadopoulos are significant because they are two of four Trump associates who were targets of an FBI counterintelligence investigation nicknamed “Crossfire Hurricane.” Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn were the other two.

The investigation melded exactly one year ago on Thursday with the probe being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Page has said he is not a target of that investigation, while Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with another professor, Joseph Mifsud.

The New York Times published an extensive report on Wednesday detailing the origin of “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was formally opened on July 31, 2016.

The probe was opened based on a tip from Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K. Downer said that in May 2016, Papadopoulos told him during a conversation in London about Russians having Clinton emails.


That information was passed to other Australian government officials before making its way to U.S. officials. FBI agents flew to London a day after “Crossfire Hurricane” started in order to interview Downer.

It is still not known what Downer says about his interaction with Papadopoulos, which TheDCNF is told occurred around May 10, 2016.

About two weeks before that, Papadopoulos met in London with Mifsud. Papadopoulos has told the special counsel that during their conversations, Mifsud claimed to have learned that the Russian government had Clinton emails.

Emails were also brought up during Papadopoulos’s meetings with Halper, though not by the Trump associate, according to sources familiar with his version of events. The sources say that during conversation, Halper randomly brought up Russians and emails. Papadopoulos has told people close to him that he grew suspicious of Halper because of the remark.


The Times’ Wednesday report included a major bombshell: Current and former government officials told the newspaper that “at least one government informant met several times with Mr. Page and Mr. Papadopoulos.” (RELATED: Report: Government Informant Spied On Two Trump Campaign Aides)

That detail matches up with a May 8 report from The Washington Post that an American citizen who has been a longtime FBI and CIA source has provided information about the Trump campaign that is now in the hands of the special counsel’s office.

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George Papadopoulos (LinkedIn)

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has asked the Department of Justice for documents related to the source, but the agency has claimed that providing the information would put the source’s life at risk. Revealing information about the source would also jeopardize relationships with foreign intelligence services, the DOJ has argued. (RELATED: Secret Source Who Aided Mueller Probe Is Deemed Off Limits To Congress)

Whether Halper is that source has been a subject of some speculation over the past week, with Halper’s name being floated by TV and radio pundits as well as Internet sleuths. Congressional investigators have refused to confirm or deny whether he is. The FBI declined comment when asked about The Times’ reporting about the informant. But current and former government officials have told TheDCNF that he is a person of significant importance to the investigation, though they have not said whether he is a source for the FBI or CIA.

Whoever the source turns out to be, the fact that the FBI had an informant spying on the Trump campaign is likely to generate bitter partisan debate. Democrats will likely defend the maneuver on the grants that Trump aides’ activities warranted surveillance. Republicans have already started to point out that the use of informants undercuts Democrats’ denials that the government surveilled members of the Trump campaign.

***

Page’s relationship with Halper tracks closely with the period when the Trump adviser was under heavy scrutiny from the federal government.

By the time he joined the campaign in March 2016, Page was already known to the FBI, though not because of any criminal activity. FBI agents interviewed him in 2013 as part of an investigation into a Russian spy ring operating in New York. Page said he met with one of the Russians and provided him with academic papers he had written.

The FBI put Page back on its radar at around the time he joined the Trump campaign. In late-spring 2016, top government officials, including then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and then-FBI Director James Comey, discussed whether to alert the Trump campaign to Page’s past interactions with the Russian spy ring. But government officials decided against providing the information.

Page’s visit to Moscow, where he spoke at the New Economic School on July 8, 2016, is said to have piqued the FBI’s interest even further. Page and Halper spoke on the sidelines of an election-themed symposium held at Cambridge days later. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 and a close colleague of Halper’s, spoke at the event.

Page was invited to the event in June by a University of Cambridge doctoral candidate.

Page would enter the media spotlight in September 2016 after Yahoo! News reported that the FBI was investigating whether he met with two Kremlin insiders during that Moscow trip.

It would later be revealed that the Yahoo! article was based on unverified information from Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier regarding the Trump campaign. Steele’s report, which was funded by Democrats, also claimed Page worked with Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on the collusion conspiracy.


Page and Manafort have vehemently denied the allegations, with both men saying they don’t know each other.

The FBI and DOJ would cite the dossier and the Yahoo! article in an application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Page. The spy warrant was granted on Oct. 21, 2016, weeks after Page left the Trump team. The warrant would be renewed three times, in January, April and June. It expired in Sept. 2017, at around the time that Page and Halper fell out of contact. Page did not describe his final contacts with Halper. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: In Private, Papadopoulos Denies Collusion)

***

Halper has links to the CIA stretching back decades. His late father-in-law was Ray Cline, a CIA legend who served as director of the agency’s bureau of intelligence and research. Halper also worked with a team of former CIA officers on George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 presidential primary bid.

Halper was reportedly in charge of a team of former CIA analysts who kept tabs on the Jimmy Carter campaign.

At Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists “UK and US government agencies” among its clients.

In Dec. 2016, both Halper and Dearlove threatened to resign from the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar because of what Halper said was “unacceptable Russian influence on the group.”

Halper has not responded to numerous requests for comment. A man answered a phone call placed to Halper’s number in March but denied that he was the professor. Azra Turk, the woman who accompanied Halper during his meetings with Papadopoulos, recently shut down her phone service.

Correction: This article initially referred to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation as “Hurricane Crossfire.” It is named “Crossfire Hurricane.”
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 12:18 am

F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims
by Adam Goldman, Mark Mazzetti and Matthew Rosenberg
New York Times
May 18, 2018

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President Trump accused the F.B.I., without evidence, of planting a mole inside his campaign to undermine his presidential run. But the F.B.I. in fact dispatched a confidential informant to meet with Trump campaign advisers as it began its investigation into possible links between his campaign and Russia.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Trump accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the “phony Russia hoax.”

In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign.
The informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to Russia.

The role of the informant is at the heart of the newest battle between top law enforcement officials and Mr. Trump’s congressional allies over the F.B.I.’s most politically charged investigations in decades. The lawmakers, who say they are concerned that federal investigators are abusing their authority, have demanded documents from the Justice Department about the informant.

Law enforcement officials have refused, saying that handing over the documents would imperil both the source’s anonymity and safety. The New York Times has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety.

Democrats say the Republicans’ real aim is to undermine the special counsel investigation. Senior law enforcement officials have also privately expressed concern that the Republicans are digging into F.B.I. files for information they can weaponize against the Russia inquiry.

Over the past two days, Mr. Trump has used speculative news reports about the informant, mostly from conservative media, to repeatedly assail the Russia investigation.

“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday. “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”

No evidence has emerged that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal.

But agents were leery of disrupting the presidential campaign again after the F.B.I. had announced in a high-profile news conference that it had closed the case involving Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, according to current and former law enforcement officials.

After opening the Russia inquiry about a month later, they took steps, those officials said, to ensure that details of the inquiry were more closely held than even in a typical national security investigation, including the use of the informant to suss out information from the unsuspecting targets. Sending F.B.I. agents to interview them could have created additional risk that the investigation’s existence would seep into view in the final weeks of a heated presidential race.

F.B.I. officials concluded they had the legal authority to open the investigation after receiving information that Mr. Papadopoulos was told that Moscow had compromising information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” months before WikiLeaks released stolen messages from Democratic officials. As part of the operation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, the F.B.I. also began investigating Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his future national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

Details about the informant’s relationship with the F.B.I. remain scant. It is not clear how long the relationship existed and whether the F.B.I. paid the source or assigned the person to other cases.

Informants take great risks when working for intelligence services, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, testified before Congress on Wednesday. Their identities must not be exposed, he said, hinting at congressional efforts to obtain the name of the source. “The day that we can’t protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe.”

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acknowledged on Friday that neither the president nor his legal team knew with certainty that the F.B.I. had implanted a spy in the Trump campaign, as he and the president had alleged.

“I don’t know for sure, nor does the president, if there really was one,” Mr. Giuliani said on CNN. “For a long time, we’ve been told there was some kind of infiltration.”

The informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years, according to one person familiar with the source’s work.

F.B.I. agents were seeking more details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails, and one month after their Russia investigation began, Mr. Papadopoulos received a curious message. The academic inquired about his interest in writing a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a subject of Mr. Papadopoulos’s expertise.

The informant offered a $3,000 honorarium for the paper and a paid trip to London, where the two could meet and discuss the research project.

“I understand that this is rather sudden but thought that given your expertise it might be of interest to you,” the informant wrote in a message to Mr. Papadopoulos, sent on Sept. 2, 2016.

Mr. Papadopoulos accepted the offer and arrived in London two weeks later, where he met for several days with the academic and one of his assistants, a young woman.

Over drinks and dinner one evening at a high-end London hotel, the F.B.I. informant raised the subject of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails that had spilled into public view earlier that summer, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The source noted how helpful they had been to the Trump campaign, and asked Mr. Papadopoulos whether he knew anything about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Papadopoulos replied that he had no insight into the Russian campaign — despite being told months earlier that the Russians had dirt on Mrs. Clinton in the form of thousands of her emails. His response clearly annoyed the informant, who tried to press Mr. Papadopoulos about what he might know about the Russian effort, according to the person.

The assistant also raised the subject of Russia and the Clinton emails during a separate conversation over drinks with Mr. Papadopoulos, and again he denied he knew anything about Russian attempts to disrupt the election.

After the trip to London, Mr. Papadopoulos wrote the 1,500-word research paper and was paid for his work. He did not hear again from the informant.


Mr. Page, a Navy veteran, served briefly as an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign until September 2016. He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016 and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr. Page said their interactions were benign.

The two last exchanged emails in September 2017, about a month before a secret warrant to surveil Mr. Page expired after being repeatedly renewed by a federal judge. Mr. Trump’s congressional allies have also assailed the surveillance, accusing law enforcement officials, with little evidence, of abusing their authority and spying on the Trump campaign.

The informant also had contacts with Mr. Flynn, the retired Army general who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. The two met in February 2014, when Mr. Flynn was running the Defense Intelligence Agency and attended the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, an academic forum for former spies and researchers that meets a few times a year.

According to people familiar with Mr. Flynn’s visit to the intelligence seminar, the source was alarmed by the general’s apparent closeness with a Russian woman who was also in attendance. The concern was strong enough that it prompted another person to pass on a warning to the American authorities that Mr. Flynn could be compromised by Russian intelligence, according to two people familiar with the matter.


Two years later, in late 2016, the seminar itself was embroiled in a scandal about Russian spying. A number of its organizers resigned over what they said was a Kremlin-backed attempt to take control of the group.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Fandos, Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Benner and Eileen Sullivan.
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sat Jul 14, 2018 1:00 am

Intelligence experts accuse Cambridge forum of Kremlin links: Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, resigns from Cambridge Intelligence Seminar
by Sam Jones, Defence and Security Editor
Financial Times
December 16, 2016

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Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-chief of MI6, has cut his ties with the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar © FT montage/Photographs: Alamy, Getty

A group of intelligence experts, including a former head of MI6, has cut ties with fellow academics at Cambridge university, in a varsity spy scare harking back to the heyday of Soviet espionage at the heart of the British establishment.

Sir Richard Dearlove, the ex-chief of the Secret Intelligence Service and former master of Pembroke college, Stefan Halper, a senior foreign policy adviser at the White House to presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and Peter Martland, a leading espionage historian, have resigned as conveners of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar — an academic forum for former practitioners and current researchers of western spycraft — because of concerns over what they fear could be a Kremlin-backed operation to compromise the group.

Mr Halper said he had stepped down due to “unacceptable Russian influence on the group”.


The seminar, established by Christopher Andrew, the official historian of MI5 and former chairman of the history faculty at the university, is one of the most respected networks in its field.

Recent attendees at its discussions, held every Friday at Corpus Christi college, have included Mike Flynn, president-elect Donald Trump’s choice as US national security adviser, and Sir Simon Fraser, the recently retired permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office.

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Peter Martland and Stefan Halper quit the CIS along with Sir Richard Dearlove. Christopher Andrew co-chaired the rival CSI before his resignation in the spring, which was unrelated to Veruscript

Sir Richard and his colleagues suspect that Veruscript — a newly established digital publishing house that has provided funding to set up a new journal of intelligence and to cover some of the seminar’s costs — may be acting as a front for the Russian intelligence services.

They fear that Russia may be seeking to use the seminar as an impeccably-credentialed platform to covertly steer debate and opinion on high-level sensitive defence and security topics, two people familiar with their thinking said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Financial Times has been unable to independently substantiate their claims — and no concrete evidence has been provided to back them.


The three stepped down as conveners before the start of the Michaelmas term. Sir Richard confirmed his resignation as convener but declined to comment further. Mr Martland did not respond to a request for comment.

Their concerns come against a backdrop of growing paranoia about Russian subversion in the west. With relations between London and Moscow at their lowest ebb since the height of the cold war, Britain’s spy agencies are working overtime to try and counter Russian covert action in the UK.

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The seminars are held every Friday at Corpus Christi college © Dreamstime

Spurred by the mounting concern over Russian meddling in the US presidential election, western spooks are rushing to try and get a fuller picture of the Kremlin’s strategy for manipulating information to influence opinion.

A senior Whitehall security official said that while the authorities could not comment on specific investigations into covert Russian meddling, they were nevertheless aware that suspicions such as those flagged at Cambridge were “the kind of thing that we are aware of being of concern”.

Reliable evidence of Russia’s information war to back up such assertions has been in short supply, however. Indeed, the dispute at Cambridge revives uncomfortable memories of cold war fearmongering — and has sharply divided dons at the intelligence seminar.

While the febrile intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge in the 1930s — charged with radical new socialist thinking and invigorated by a fractious international environment — was an ideal recruiting ground for young, charismatic Soviet agents such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, whose work was the acme of cold war intelligence gathering, the modern academic milieu is a less obvious target for Russian espionage.

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Cambridge undergraduates vote under the watchful eye of a policeman in 1935 © Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

Prof Andrew, whose books on the KGB are among the most exhaustive on the history of Russian information warfare as well as the infamous Cambridge spy ring of the 1930s, said the suggestion of a Russian covert operation to compromise the seminar was “absurd”.

The seminar is “entirely unclassified” Prof Andrew pointed out, adding that the new Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism was not formally affiliated to the gathering.

Some of the academics the FT spoke to suggested that the dispute over the seminar might be tinged by an element of competition: Sir Richard and his colleagues who have departed from the seminar run a separate organisation — the Cambridge Security Initiative — which pursues a similar, though more commercially-oriented, agenda.

The CSI, which also holds regular briefings and discussions, counts Sir Iain Lobban and Sir David Omand, both former heads of the electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, as members of its advisory board.

Prof Andrew was co-chair of CSI alongside Sir Richard but resigned in the spring. He said his resignation was unrelated to any matters regarding Veruscript. All of the individuals the FT spoke to emphasised that they hoped the two organisations would have an amicable future relationship.

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Four members of the 'Cambridge Five', graduates of Trinity College, who passed information from British Intelligence to the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s. Clockwise from top left, Anthony Blunt, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess

Neil Kent, the lead convener of the seminar and editor-in-chief of the new journal also stepped back from the CSI. Mr Kent, a linguist and expert in Russian culture, said it was “inconceivable” that the Russian government was in any way involved.

“Cambridge is a wonderful place of conspiracy theories but the idea that there is a Machiavellian plot here is ridiculous,” he said. “The idea any of us would be involved in anything that smacks of Russian influence . . . it’s real Reds under the bed stuff — the whole thing is ludicrous.”


Mr Kent is responsible for building the links between the seminar and the organisation at the centre of the controversy, Veruscript. It was established by a friend of Mr Kent’s from Cambridge, Gleb Cheglakov, a Russian physicist.

According to Mr Kent, the new journal will cost roughly £50,000 a year to run and, although start-up funding is being supplied by Veruscript, ultimately it will draw on other sources of finance, to ensure its independence.

Mr Kent said he did not know where Veruscript’s money came from.

Corporate records show Veruscript is run by a company called AGC Partners, based in London.

Mr Cheglakov told the FT that the company was set up by himself and his wife using their own money. The company, which boasts a slick website and employs about a dozen people, claims it will shake up the academic publishing business by paying for peer reviews of its articles by approved academics.

AGC Partner’s corporate records show it was established in 2012. Mr Cheglakov said he was its cofounder although it is legally fully owned by Nazik Ibraimova, his Kygryz wife. Ms Ibraimova could not be reached for comment. The FT attempted to reach the company a number of times by phone and email.

Corporate records show Ms Ibraimova initially funded the company with a series of £50,000 loans made in six-monthly increments. In the past year, the company has significantly expanded. Its accounts show a loss of £410,000 in 2015, the last year for which figures have been filed.

“As we are in start-up mode, all journals are currently operating at a loss with Veruscript picking up the costs,” Mr Cheglakov said in a statement. The business is looking to significantly expand, he added. “[We] will publish journals from across the research spectrum: sciences, humanities and social sciences . . . We are a truly community-based publisher. [The] Journal of Intelligence and Terrorism Studies is our first journal to launch but we are also in the process of launching journals in areas as diverse as Functional Nanomaterials, Quantum Matter and Energy Storage.”

Mr Cheglakov did not specifically address the question of any connection between the company and the Russian government.


He stressed that all of the journals backed by Veruscript would be completely editorially independent of the organisation. “We aim to be a force of good within the publishing industry,” he said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Mon May 18, 2020 8:35 am

Robert Mueller Did Not Merely Reject the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theories. He Obliterated Them.
by Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept
April 18 2019, 2:01 p.m.

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WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials. It was a problem, he said, that had come out of nowhere and could not have been foreseen.

Even after Mr. Trump took his first concrete action at the end of January — limiting travel from China — public health often had to compete with economic and political considerations in internal debates, slowing the path toward belated decisions to seek more money from Congress, obtain necessary supplies, address shortfalls in testing and ultimately move to keep much of the nation at home.

Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

-- He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus: An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response, by Eric Lipton, David E. Sanger, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, Mark Mazzetti and Julian E. Barnes


THE TWO-PRONGED CONSPIRACY THEORY that has dominated U.S. political discourse for almost three years – that (1) Trump, his family and his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, and (2) Trump is beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin — was not merely rejected today by the final report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It was obliterated: in an undeniable and definitive manner.

The key fact is this: Mueller – contrary to weeks of false media claims – did not merely issue a narrow, cramped, legalistic finding that there was insufficient evidence to indict Trump associates for conspiring with Russia and then proving their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That would have been devastating enough to those who spent the last two years or more misleading people to believe that conspiracy convictions of Trump’s closest aides and family members were inevitable. But his mandate was much broader than that: to state what did or did not happen.

That’s precisely what he did: Mueller, in addition to concluding that evidence was insufficient to charge any American with crimes relating to Russian election interference, also stated emphatically in numerous instances that there was no evidence – not merely that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a criminal conviction – that key prongs of this three-year-old conspiracy theory actually happened. As Mueller himself put it: “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence or conflicts in the evidence about a particular fact or event.”

With regard to Facebook ads and Twitter posts from the Russia-based Internet Research Agency, for example, Mueller could not have been more blunt: “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation” (emphasis added). Note that this exoneration includes not only Trump campaign officials but all Americans:

Some IRA employees, posing as U.S. persons and without revealing their Russian association, communicated electronically with individuals associated with the Trump Campaign and with other political activists to seek to coordinate political activities, including the staging of political rallies.5 The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA's interference operation.


To get a further sense for how definitive the Report’s rejection is of the key elements of the alleged conspiracy theory, consider Mueller’s discussion of efforts by George Papadopoulos, Joseph Misfud and and “two Russian nationals” whereby they tried “to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and Russian officials” to talk about how the two sides could work together to disseminate information about Hillary Clinton. As Mueller puts it: “No meeting took place.”

Several of the media’s most breathless and hyped “bombshells” were dismissed completely by Mueller. Regarding various Trump officials’ 2016 meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, Mueller said they were “brief, public and nonsubstantive.” Concerning the much-hyped change to GOP platform regarding Ukraine, Mueller wrote that the “evidence does not establish that one campaign official’s efforts to dilute a portion of the Republican platform was undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia,” and further noted that such a change was consistent with Trump’s publicly stated foreign policy view (one shared by Obama) to avoid provoking gratuitous conflict with the Kremlin over arming Ukrainians. Mueller also characterized a widely hyped “meeting” between then-Senator Jeff Sessions and Kislyak as one that did not “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.”

Regarding one of the most-cited pieces of evidence by Trump/Russia conspiracists – that Russia tried once Trump was nominated to shape his foreign policy posture toward Russia – Mueller concluded that there is simply no evidence to support it:

7. Post-Convention Contacts with Kislyak

Ambassador Kislyak continued his efforts to interact with Campaign officials with responsibility for the foreign-policy portfolio -- among them Sessions and Gordon -- in the weeks after the Convention. The Office did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government.


In other crucial areas, Mueller did not go so far as to say that his investigation “did not identify evidence” but nonetheless concluded that his 22-month investigation “did not establish” that the key claims of the conspiracy theory were true. Regarding alleged involvement by Trump officials or family members in the Russian hacks, for instance, Mueller explained: “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.


As for the overarching maximalist conspiracy – that Trump and/or members of his family and campaign were controlled by or working for the Russian government – Mueller concluded that this belief simply lacked the evidence necessary to prosecute anyone for it:

The investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal within the meaning of FARA or, in terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the government of Russia, or any official thereof. In particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian government -- or at its direction, control, or request, during the relevant time period.1282


And Mueller’s examination of all the so-called “links” between Trump campaign officials and Russia that the U.S. media has spent almost three years depicting as “bombshell” evidence of criminality met the same fate: the evidence could not, and did not, establish that any such links constituted “coordination” or “conspiracy” between Trump and Russia:

IV. RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT LINKS TO AND CONTACTS WITH THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN

The Office identified multiple contacts -- "links," in the words of the Appointment Order -- between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government. The Office investigated whether those contacts constituted a third avenue of attempted Russian interference with or influence on the 2016 presidential election. In particular, the investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future. Based on the available information, the investigation did not establish such coordination.


Perhaps most amazingly, even low-level, ancillary, hangers-on to the Trump campaign that even many Russiagate skeptics thought might end up being charged as Russian agents were not.

All the way back in March, 2017, in reporting that even anti-Trump intelligence officials were warning Democrats that there was no solid evidence of a Trump/Russia conspiracy, I predicted that the appointment of a Special Counsel (which I vehemently favored) would likely end up finding evidence of financial impropriety by Paul Manafort unrelated to the 2016 election, as well as a possible indictment of someone like Carter Page for acting in concert with the Russian government:

It's certain possible to envision an indictment of a low-level operative like Carter Page, or the prosecution of someone like Paul Manafort on matters unrelated to hacking, but the silver bullet that Democrats have been led to expect will sink Trump appears further away than ever.

But given the way these Russia conspiracies have drowned out other critical issues being virtually ignored under the Trump presidency, it’s vital that everything be done now to make clear what is based in evidence and what is based in partisan delusions. And most of what the Democratic base has been fed for the last six months by their unhinged stable of media, online, and party leaders has decisively fallen into the latter category, as even their own officials are now desperately trying to warn.

-- The Intercept, March 16, 2017


But so vacant is the Mueller investigation when it comes to supporting any of the prevailing conspiracy theories that it did not find even a single American whom it could indict or charge with illegally working for Russia, secretly acting as a Russian agent, or conspiring with the Russians over the election – not even Carter Page. That means that even long-time Russiagate skeptics such as myself over-estimated the level of criminality and conspiracy evidence that Robert Mueller would find:

3. Carter Page

Carter Page worked for the Trump Campaign from January 2016 to September 2016. He was formally and publicly announced as a foreign policy advisor by the candidate in March 2016.516 Page had lived and worked in Russia, and he had been approached by Russian intelligence officers several years before he volunteered for the Trump Campaign. During his time with the Campaign, Page advocated pro-Russia foreign policy positions and traveled to Moscow in his personal capacity. Russian intelligence officials had formed relationships with Page in 2008 and 2013 and Russian officials may have focused on Page in 2016 because of his affiliation with the Campaign. However, the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.


In sum, Democrats and their supporters had the exact prosecutor they all agreed was the embodiment of competence and integrity in Robert Mueller. He assembled a team of prosecutors and investigators that countless media accounts heralded as the most aggressive and adept in the nation. They had subpoena power, the vast surveillance apparatus of the U.S. government at their disposal, a demonstrated willingness to imprison anyone who lied to them, and unlimited time and resources to dig up everything they could.

The result of all of that was that not a single American – whether with the Trump campaign or otherwise – was charged or indicted on the core question of whether there was any conspiracy or coordination with Russia over the election. No Americans were charged or even accused of being controlled by or working at the behest of the Russian government. None of the key White House aides at the center of the controversy who testified for hours and hours – including Donald Trump, Jr. or Jared Kushner – were charged with any crimes of any kind, not even perjury, obstruction of justice or lying to Congress.

These facts are fatal to the conspiracy theorists who have drowned U.S. discourse for almost three years with a dangerous and distracting fixation on a fictitious espionage thriller involved unhinged claims of sexual and financial blackmail, nefarious infiltration of the U.S. Government by familiar foreign villains, and election cheating that empowered an illegitimate President. They got the exact prosecutor and investigation that they wanted, yet he could not establish that any of this happened and, in many cases, established that it did not.

THE ANTI-CLIMACTIC ENDING of the Mueller investigation is particularly stunning given how broad Mueller’s investigative scope ended up being, extending far beyond the 2016 election into years worth of Trump’s alleged financial dealings with Russia (and, obviously, Manafort’s with Ukraine and Russia). There can simply be no credible claim that Mueller was, in any meaningful way, impeded by scope, resources or topic limitation from finding anything for which he searched.

Despite efforts today by long-time conspiracist theorists to drastically move goalposts so as to claim vindication, the historical record could not be clearer that Mueller’s central mandate was to determine whether crimes were committed by Trump officials in connection with alleged Russian interference in the election. The first paragraph of the New York Times article from May, 2017, announcing Mueller’s appointment, leaves no doubt about that:

The Justice Department appointed Robert S. Mueller III, a former F.B.I. director, as special counsel on Wednesday to oversee the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, dramatically raising the legal and political stakes in an affair that has threatened to engulf Mr. Trump’s four-month-old presidency.


As recently as one month ago, former CIA Director and current NBC News analyst John Brennan was confidently predicting that Mueller could not possibly close his investigation without first indicting a slew of Americans for criminally conspiring with Russia over the election, and specifically predicted that Trump’s family members would be included among those so charged:

Terry Moran

@TerryMoran
John Brennan has a lot to answer for—going before the American public for months, cloaked with CIA authority and openly suggesting he’s got secret info, and repeatedly turning in performances like this.

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Obviously, none of that happened. Nor were any of the original accusations that launched this three-year-long mania — from an accusatory August, 2016 online commercial from the Clinton campaign — corroborated by the Mueller Report:

Indeed, so many of the most touted media “bombshells” claiming to establish Trump/Russia crimes have been proven false by this report. Despite an extensive discussion of Paul Manafort’s activities, nothing in the Report even hints, let alone states, that he ever visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, let alone visited him three times, including during the 2016 election. How the Guardian could justify still not retracting that false story is mystifying.

Faring even worse is the Buzzfeed bombshell from January claiming that “President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow” and that “Cohen also told the special counsel that after the election, the president personally instructed him to lie — by claiming that negotiations ended months earlier than they actually did — in order to obscure Trump’s involvement.” Mueller himself responded to the story by insisting it was false, and his Report directly contradicts it, as it makes clear that Cohen told Mueller the exact opposite:


But Cohen said that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow project would be or was false, and the President did not direct him to provide false testimony. Cohen also said he did not tell the President about the specifics of his planned testimony. During the time when his statement to Congress was being drafted and circulated to members of the JDA, Cohen did not speak directly to the President about the statement, but rather communicated with the President's personal counsel -- as corroborated by phone records showing extensive communications between Cohen and the President's personal counsel before Cohen submitted his statement and when he testified before Congress.


Equally debunked is CNN’s major blockbuster by Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen from last July that “Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, claims that then-candidate Trump knew in advance about the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower.” The Mueller Report says the exact opposite: that Cohen had no knowledge of Trump’s advanced knowledge.

And the less said about the Steele Dossier, pee-pee tapes, secret meetings in Prague, and indescribably unhinged claims like this one, the better:




But beyond the gutting of these core conspiracy claims is that Mueller’s investigation probed areas far beyond the initial scope of Trump/Russia election-conspiring, and came up empty. Among other things, Mueller specifically examined Trump’s financial dealings with Russia to determine whether that constituted incriminating evidence of corrupt links:

Because Trump’s status as a public figure at the time was attributable in large part to his prior business and entertainment dealings, this Office investigated whether a business contact with Russia-linked individuals and entities during the campaign period—the Trump Tower Moscow project, see Volume I, Section IV.A.1, infra—led to or involved coordination.


Indeed, Mueller’s examination of Trump’s financial dealings with Russia long pre-dates the start of the Trump campaign, going back several years before the election:

Between at least 2013 and 2016, the Trump Organization explored a similar licensing deal in Russia involving the construction of a Trump-branded property in Moscow. The project, commonly referred to as a "Trump Tower Moscow" or "Trump Moscow" project, anticipated a combination of commercial, hotel, and residential properties all within the same building. Between 2013 and June 2016, several employees of the Trump Organization, including then-president of the organization Donald J. Trump, pursued a Moscow deal with several Russian counterparties. From the fall of 2015 until the middle of 2016, Michael Cohen spearheaded the Trump Organization's pursuit of a Trump Tower Moscow project, including by reporting on the project's status to candidate Trump and other executives in the Trump Organization.290


Mueller additionally made clear that he received authorization to investigate numerous Americans for ties to Russia despite their not being formally associated with the Trump campaign, including Michael Cohen and Roger Stone. And regarding Cohen, Mueller specifically was authorized to investigate any attempts by Cohen to “receive funds from Russia-backed entities.” None of this deep diving to other individuals or years of alleged financial dealings with Russian resulted in any finding that Trump or any of his associates were controlled by, or corruptly involved with, the Russian government.

Then there is the issue of Manafort’s relationship with the Ukrainians, and specifically his providing of polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, an episode which Trump/Putin conspiracist Marcy Wheeler, along with many others, particularly hyped over and over. To begin with, Mueller said his office “did not identify evidence of a connection” between that act and “Russian interference in the election,” nor did he “establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-inteference efforts”:

Because of questions about Manafort's credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik, the Office could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling data and Russia's interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting. The investigation did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian government on its election-interference efforts.


Also endlessly hyped by Wheeler and other conspiracists were the post-election contacts between Trump and Russia: as though it’s unusual that a major power would seek to build new, constructive relationships with a newly elected administration. Indeed, Wheeler went so far as to cite these post-election contacts to turn her own source into the FBI on the ground that it constituted smoking gun evidence, an act for which she was praised by the Washington Post (nothing Wheeler claimed about the evidence “related to the Mueller investigation” that she claimed to possess appears to be in the Mueller Report). Here again, the Mueller Report could not substantiate any of these claims:

B. Post-Election and Transition-Period Contacts

Trump was elected President on November 8, 2016. Beginning immediately after the election, individuals connected to the Russian government started contacting officials on the Trump Campaign and Transition Team through multiple channels -- sometimes through Russian Ambassador Kislyak and at other times through individuals who sought reliable contacts through U.S. persons not formally tied to the Campaign or Transition Team. The most senior levels of the Russian government encouraged these efforts. The investigation did not establish that these efforts reflected or constituted coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia in its election-interference activities.


The centerpiece of the Trump/Russia conspiracy – the Trump Tower meeting – was such a dud that Jared Kushner, halfway through the meeting, texted Manafort to declare the meeting “a waste of time,” and then instructed his assistant to call him so that he could concoct a reason to leave. Not only could Mueller not find any criminality in this meeting relating to election conspiring, but he could not even use election law to claim it was an illegal gift of something of value from a foreigner, because, among other things, the information offered was of so little value that it could not even pass the $2,000 threshold required to charge someone for a misdemeanor, let alone the $25,000 required to make it a felony.

Neither the Trump Tower meeting itself nor its participants – for so long held up as proof of the Trump/Russia conspiracy – could serve as the basis for any finding of criminality. Indeed, the key Trumpworld participants who testified about what happened at that meeting and its aftermath (Trump Jr. and Kushner) were not even accused by Mueller of lying about any of it.

NONE OF THIS IS TO SAY that the Mueller Report exonerates Trump of wrongdoing. Mueller makes clear, for instance, that the Trump campaign not only knew that Russia was interested in helping it win the election but was happy to have that help. There’s clearly nothing criminal about that. One can debate whether it’s unethical for a presidential campaign to have dirt about its opponent released by a foreign government, though anyone who wants to argue that has to reconcile that with the fact that the DNC had a contractor working with the Ukrainian government to help Hillary Clinton win by feeding them dirt on Trump and Manafort, as well as a paid operative named Christopher Steele (remember him?) working with Russian officials to get dirt on Trump.

POLITICO
PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION
Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire
Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton.
By Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern
01/11/2017 05:05 AM EST


As is true of all investigations, Mueller’s team could not access all relevant information. Some was rendered inaccessible through encryption. Other information was deleted, perhaps with corrupt motives. And some witnesses lied or otherwise tried to obstruct the investigation. As a result, it’s of course possible that incriminating evidence existed that Mueller – armed with subpoena power, unlimited resources, 22 months of investigative work, and a huge team of top-flight prosecutors, FBI agents, intelligence analysts and forensic accountants – did not find.

But anything is possible. It’s inherently possible that anyone is guilty of any crime but that the evidence just cannot be found to prove it. One cannot prove a negative. But the only way to rationally assess what happened is by looking at the evidence that is available, and that’s what Mueller did. And there’s simply no persuasive way – after heralding Mueller and his team as the top-notch investigators that they are and building up expectations about what this would produce – for any honest person to deny that the end of the Mueller investigation was a huge failure from the perspective of those who pushed these conspiracies.

Mueller certainly provides substantial evidence that Russians attempted to meddle in various ways in the U.S. election, including by hacking the DNC and Podesta and through Facebook posts and tweets. There is, however, no real evidence that Putin himself ordered this, as was claimed since mid-2016. But that Russia had done such things has been unsurprising from the start, given how common it is for the U.S. and Russia to meddle in everyone’s affairs, including one another’s, but the scope and size of it continues to be minute in the context of overall election spending:

To reach larger U.S. audiences, the IRA purchased advertisements from Facebook that promoted the IRA groups on the newsfeeds of U.S. audience members. According to Facebook, the IRA purchased over 3,500 advertisements, and the expenditures totaled approximately $100,000.


The section of Mueller’s report on whether Trump criminally attempted to obstruct the investigation is full of evidence and episodes that show Trump being dishonest, misleading, and willing to invoke potentially corrupt tactics to put an end to it. But ultimately, the most extreme of those tactics were not invoked (at times because Trump’s aides refused), and the actions in which Trump engaged were simply not enough for Mueller to conclude that he was guilty of criminal obstruction.

As Mueller himself concluded, a reasonable debate can be conducted on whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation with corrupt intent. But even on the case of obstruction, the central point looms large over all of it: there was no underlying crime established for Trump to cover-up.

All criminal investigations require a determination of a person’s intent, what they are thinking and what their goal is. When the question is whether a President sought to kill an Executive Branch investigation – as Trump clearly wanted to do here – the determinative issue is whether he did so because he genuinely believed the investigation to be an unfair persecution and scam, or whether he did it to corruptly conceal evidence of criminality.

That Mueller could not and did not establish any underlying crimes strongly suggests that Trump acted with the former rather than the latter motive, making it virtually impossible to find that he criminally obstructed the investigation.

THE NATURE OF OUR POLITICAL DISCOURSE is that nobody ever needs to admit error because it is easy to confine oneself to strictly partisan precincts where people are far more interested in hearing what advances their agenda or affirms their beliefs than they are hearing the truth. For that reason, I doubt that anyone who spent the last three years pushing utterly concocted conspiracy theories will own up to it, let alone confront any accountability or consequences for it.

But certain facts will never go away no matter how much denial they embrace. The sweeping Mueller investigation ended with zero indictments of zero Americans for conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election. Both Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner – the key participants in the Trump Tower meeting – testified for hours and hours yet were never charged for perjury, lying or obstruction, even though Mueller proved how easily he would indict anyone who lied as part of the investigation. And this massive investigation simply did not establish any of the conspiracy theories that huge parts of the Democratic Party, the intelligence community and the U.S. media spent years encouraging the public to believe.


Those responsible for this can refuse to acknowledge wrongdoing. They can even claim vindication if they want and will likely be cheered for doing so.

But the contempt in which the media and political class is held by so much of the U.S. population – undoubtedly a leading factor that led to Trump’s election in the first place – will only continue to grow as a result, and deservedly so. People know they were scammed, that their politics was drowned for years by a hoax. And none of that will go away no matter how insulated media and political elites in Washington, northern Virginia, Brooklyn, and large West Coast cities keep themselves, and thus hear only in-group affirmation while blocking out all of that well-earned scorn.

Correction: A paragraph was originally included that misread a tweet from earlier today by the New York Times’ Kenneth Vogel, in which he asserted that the Mueller Report confirmed, not negated, the New York Times’ original, now-retracted report about Paul Manafort. In that tweet, Vogel was suggesting that the NYT’s retraction was wrong (as Marcy Wheeler argued), not that the original story was wrong. That paragraph, which also critiqued Wheeler’s analysis of the New York Times’ retraction, was in error and was deleted almost immediately after publication of this article.
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sat Dec 05, 2020 9:12 am

Part 1 of 4

TRUMP'S PREMEDITATED 2020 ELECTION COUP: REVENGE FOR RUSSIAGATE RAPEUTATION.
Transcript of Donald Trump Speech on Election Fraud Claims (46-Minute Speech)
by President Donald Trump
December 2, 2020



The mail-in voting scam is the latest part of their four year effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election, and it’s been like living in hell. Our opponents have proven many times, again and again, that they will say and do anything to get back into power. The corrupt forces who are registering dead voters and stuffing ballot boxes are the same people who have perpetrated one phony and fraudulent hoax after another. You’ve been watching it now for four years. These entrenched interests oppose our movement, because we put America first. They don’t put America first, and we’re returning power to you the American people. They don’t want America first, they only want power for themselves. They want to make money. That’s why they don’t want me as your president. I’ve been investigated from soon after I announced I was running for president. When I immediately went to number one in the Republican primary polls, the investigations never stopped. They went on for four years, and I won them all, I beat them all. Russia, Russia, Russia, the impeachment hoax, and so much more. Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years, issued over 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, issued 230 orders for communications records, and conducted 500 witness interviews, all looking to take me down. There was no collusion in the end, none whatsoever. Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign, colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement...And all it’s been is a big investigation in Washington and New York and any place else that can investigate, because that’s what they want to do. They want to take not me, but us down. Then we can never let them do that...

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win ... [These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”

-- TRUMP'S PREMEDITATED 2020 ELECTION COUP: REVENGE FOR RUSSIAGATE. (46-Minute Speech), by President Donald Trump




President Donald Trump: (00:00)
Thank you. This may be the most important speech I’ve ever made. I want to provide an update on our ongoing efforts to expose the tremendous voter fraud and irregularities which took place during the ridiculously long November 3rd elections. We used to have what was called "election day." Now we have election days, weeks, and months, and lots of bad things happened during this ridiculous period of time, especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege, the right to vote. As President, I have no higher duty than to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege.

President Donald Trump: (00:54)
For months leading up to the Presidential election we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots, and to verify the results. My opponent was told to stay away from the election, don’t campaign. “We don’t need you. We’ve got it. This election is done.” In fact, they were acting like they already knew what the outcome was going to be. They had it covered, and perhaps they did, very sadly for our country. It was all very, very strange. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted.

President Donald Trump: (01:44)
The constitutional process must be allowed to continue. We’re going to defend the honesty of the vote by ensuring that every legal ballot is counted and that no illegal ballot is counted. This is not just about honoring the votes of 74 million Americans who voted for me, it’s about ensuring that Americans can have faith in this election, and in all future elections.

President Donald Trump: (02:12)
Today I will detail some of the shocking irregularities, abuses and fraud that had been revealed in recent weeks, but before laying out just a small portion of the evidence we have uncovered -- and we have so much evidence -- I want to explain the corrupt mail-in balloting scheme that Democrats systematically put into place that allowed voting to be altered, especially in swing states, which they had to win. They just didn’t know that it was going to be that tough, because we were leading in every swing state by so much, far greater than they ever thought possible. While it has long been understood that the Democrat political machine engages in voter fraud, from Detroit, to Philadelphia, to Milwaukee, Atlanta -- so many other places. What changed this year was the Democrat party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients with virtually no safeguards of any kind. This allowed fraud and abuse to occur in a scale never seen before. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election on the 3rd of November.

President Donald Trump: (03:45)
Very rarely were legislatures involved, and constitutionally they had to be involved. But very, very rarely. And you’ll see that as we continue to file our suits. It’s constitutionally, absolutely incorrect what took place, even from a legal standpoint. Many states, such as Nevada and California, sent millions of live ballots to every person on their voter rolls, whether those individuals had requested ballots or not. Whether they were dead or alive, they got ballots. Other states, such as Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, instituted universal absentee balloting right in the middle of an election year, sending absentee ballot request forms to all voters on all rolls. It didn’t matter who they were. This colossal expansion of mail-in voting opened the flood gates to massive fraud. It’s a widely known fact that the voting rolls are packed with people who are not lawfully eligible to vote, including those who are deceased, have moved out of their state, and even our non-citizens of our country.

President Donald Trump: (05:05)
Beyond this, the records are riddled with errors, wrong addresses, duplicate entries, and many other issues. This is not disputed. It has never been disputed. Dozens of counties in the key swing states have more registered voters on the rolls than they have voting age citizens, including 67 counties in Michigan. All of this is evidence.

[T]he Ramsland affidavit appeared to confuse townships in Minnesota for Michigan.

Ramsland highlighted a number of "statistical anomalies and red flags" he claimed proved "that election results have been manipulated within the Dominion/Premier system in Michigan."

He specifically highlighted several precincts in Michigan where the number of votes cast appeared to exceed the number of registered voters in the county.

Many of the municipalities cited in the Michigan (MI) document, such as Albertville, Houston, Monticello, Runeberg, Lake Lillian, Brownsville, Wolf Lake, Height of Land, Detroit Lakes, Frazee, and Kandiyohi, are located in Minnesota (MN).


-- Trump lawsuit confuses Michigan and Minnesota locations in affidavit claiming voter fraud, by Savannah Behrmann, USA TODAY, 11/20/20


In Wisconsin, the state’s Board of Elections could not confirm the residency of more than 100,000 people, but repeatedly refused to remove those names from its voter rolls before the election. They knew why, nobody else did. I knew why. They were illegal voters. It is a travesty that in the year 2020, we do not have any means of verifying the eligibility of those who cast ballots in an election and such an important election it is, or determining who they are, whether they live in the state or whether they’re even American citizens. We have no idea.

A Florida lawyer is being investigated for trying to illegally register to vote in the Georgia runoff election and encouraging others to do the same, according to a local report.

Bill Price, of Panama City, allegedly filled out paperwork to vote in Paulding County, GA using his brother’s address there — and swore in an affidavit that he was a Peach State resident, election officials told WSB-TV.

“We clearly know that he is not [eligible to vote in Georgia],” Deidre Holden, Paulding County’s election supervisor, told the station.

The matter came to light after video emerged showing Price telling members of Florida’s Bay County Republican Party to temporarily change their addresses to Georgia in order to vote for the GOP Senate candidates there on Jan 5.

“We absolutely have to hold the Senate and we have to start fighting back, and we have to do whatever it takes,” Price said in the since-deleted Facebook Live video obtained by the outlet.

“And if that means changing your address for the next two months, so be it,” he said, before stating: “I’m doing that. I’m moving to Georgia and I’m gonna fight and I want you all to fight with me.”

According to the report, Price then read out his brother’s address in Hiram as the group wrote it down — and, when one woman asked, “We can truly register at that address?” he responded: “Sure.”

“It’s only for a couple months,” Price reportedly said. “We’ll have buses leaving right out here, going to Atlanta the day before Jan. 5 and I might need you guys to help me move back to Florida on Jan. 6.”


Moving to Georgia temporarily just to vote is a crime in the state, publishable by up to 10 years in jail or a fine of up $100,000.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Thursday confirmed to the outlet that the video of Price is being investigated.

“Make no mistake, individuals who attempt to undermine the integrity of Georgia’s elections will be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Raffensperger said in a statement.

Holden, the Paulding election supervisor, who is a Republican, told the station that investigators flagged Price’s registration attempt and shared the footage with her.

She said a meeting is slated for next week in order to stop Price’s alleged effort.

“What kind of message is this sending out to our children and our grandchildren and our neighbors that if you don’t win an election, that you can just go out and steal one?” Holden asked. “And that’s absolutely unacceptable here in the state of Georgia.”

Price, meanwhile, denied that he had attempted to register in Georgia and maintained that he was just kidding in the video in an email to the outlet.

“Thanks for reaching out. I did not change my voter registration…,” he told the station.

In a phone call with Fox News, Price admitted that he had filled out the registration online — but claimed he did it to expose Democrats he alleged were trying to vote illegally.

“I wanted to see how easy it was to do it,” he told the outlet. “I’m not actually moving to Georgia. I was joking.”

-- Florida man under investigation for registering to vote in Georgia, by Tamar Lapin, December 3, 2020


President Donald Trump: (06:21)
We have and in all swing states major infractions, or outright fraud, which is far more in numbers or votes than we need to overturn the results of a state. In other words, in Wisconsin, as an example, where we were way up on election night, they ultimately had us miraculously losing by 20,000 votes. I can show you right here that Wisconsin we’re leading by a lot, and then at 3:42 in the morning there was this, it was a massive dump of votes, mostly Biden, almost all Biden. To this day everyone’s trying to figure out, “Where did it come from?” But I went from leading by a lot, to losing by a little, and that’s right here. That’s at 3:42 in the morning. That’s Wisconsin. A terrible thing, terrible, terrible thing.

Image

President Donald Trump: (07:33)
But we will have far more, many times more than the 20,000 votes needed to overturn the state. If we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can’t be president. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. We’re talking about numbers like nobody has ever seen before. Just as an example, in certain states, we’ll be down by, let’s say, 7,000 votes, but we’ll find later on 20,000, 50,000, 100,00, 200,000 discrepancies or fraudulent votes, and that includes votes that went through when they were not allowed to be seen by Republican poll watchers, because the poll watchers were locked out of the building.

The Detroit Free Press reported that challengers from both sides were locked out because the limit on challengers had already been exceeded. Earlier in the day, 268 Democratic challengers, 227 Republican challengers and 75 nonpartisan challengers were on the floor. The Free Press reported roughly 400 challengers were “freely roaming the room.”

“We were well over the 134 maximum," said the city of Detroit’s lead attorney Lawrence Garcia. "In the haste of doing business, nobody noticed that until it was over 200 for each party, and at that point, we said, we better stop admitting people until some people leave, and we’re under the 134 number.”


-- Videos showing crowd locked out of Detroit TCF Center with windows obstructed are missing context, by Devon Link and Ashley Nerbovig, USA TODAY, 11/20/20


Or people that innocently came to vote on November 3rd, who were all excited about their vote. They were happy. They were proud to be citizens of the United States of America. And they went up and they said, “I’d like to vote.” They were told that they can’t vote. “I’m sorry,” they were told, “I’m sorry. You’ve already voted by mail-in ballot. Congratulations. We received a ballot, so you can no longer vote.”

President Donald Trump: (09:03)
They didn’t know what to do. They had no one to complain to. Most just left and said, “That’s strange.” But many people complained, and complained vehemently. And in a lot of cases, they filled out a provisional ballot, which was almost never used, but in virtually every case was a vote for Trump. In other words, they went in to vote and they were told that they voted, and they didn’t vote. They left and they felt horror and they lost respect for our system. This happened tens of thousands of times all over the country. That’s how desperate the Democrats were. They would fill out ballots of people not even knowing if these people were going to show up. When they did show up, they said, “Sorry, you’ve already voted.”

President Donald Trump: (10:07)
On top of everything else, we have a company that’s very suspect. It’s name is Dominion. With the turn of a dial, or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this? We have to go to paper. Maybe it takes longer. But the only secure system is paper. Not these systems that nobody understands, including in many cases, the people that run them. Although, unfortunately, I think they understand them far too well.

Image

[Scott Pelley] So back in 2017 as you’re looking ahead to the election in 2018 and then ultimately the election in 2020, you have a to-do list, and the to-do list includes what?

Image

[Christopher Krebs] Paper ballots. Paper ballots give you the ability to audit, to go back and check the tape and make sure you got the count right. And that’s really one of the keys to success for a secure 2020 election. 95% of the ballots cast in the 2020 election had a paper record associated with it. Compared with 2016, about 82%.

[Scott Pelley] And with a paper record, you can go back and verify what the machine is saying by physically counting the paper.

[Christopher Krebs] That gives you the ability to prove that there was no malicious algorithm or hacked software that adjusted the tally of the vote. And just look at what happened in Georgia. Georgia has machines that tabulate the vote. They then held a hand recount, and the outcome was consistent with the machine vote.

[Scott Pelley] And that tells you what?

[Christopher Krebs] That tells you that there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count outside. And so that pretty thoroughly, in my opinion, debunks some of these sensational claims out there that I’ve called “nonsense” and “a hoax,” that there was some hacking of these election vendors and their software in their systems across the country. It’s just “nonsense.”


-- Securing the Election, produced by Rachael Morehouse, 60 Minutes, 11/29/20


President Donald Trump: (10:46)
In one Michigan County, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what we caught. How many didn’t we catch? Are there hundreds of other examples throughout the country? Are there thousands? We just got lucky and they called it a glitch, but we found numerous glitches that evening.

The claim: Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for Donald Trump, switched votes to Joe Biden

Multiple conservative news sources have claimed this week that vote counting software from Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for President Donald Trump or switched votes to President-elect Joe Biden.

OAN’s Lilia Fifield made the claim on air earlier this week, per a clip on Mediaite.

"Election systems across the country are found to have deleted millions of votes cast for President Trump," she said. "According to an unaudited analysis of data obtained from Edison Research, states using Dominion Voting Systems may have switched as many as 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden, and the author also finds another 2.7 million Trump votes appear to have been deleted by Dominion including almost one million truckloads in Pennsylvania alone."

Similar claims appeared on Gateway Pundit, though it credits the findings to the website thedonald.win, whose author also cites Edison Research.

Trump himself then magnified the claim.

“Report: Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide. Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden. 941,000 Trump votes deleted. States using Dominion Voting Systems switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden," he wrote on Twitter.

His son Donald Trump Jr. also implied that Dominion Voting Systems had improperly tallied votes for Biden in a post on Instagram.

"What's the difference between a Dominion voting machine and Hunter Biden? Nothing. They both give 10% to the 'big guy,'" the post read.

OANN, The Gateway Pundit, the White House, and Trump Jr. have not responded to requests for comment from USA TODAY.

Government, experts agree: There were no deleted or changed votes, including by Dominion

A national coalition announced Thursday that there is no evidence that any voting software deleted or changed votes in last week's election, per USA TODAY.

In fact, the security group — which includes the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Association of State Election Directors — described the election as "the most secure in American history."

"There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised," the coalition concluded.

It added that all states with close results have paper records of each vote that allow for a recount, if necessary.

"This is an added benefit for security and resilience," the coalition wrote. "This process allows for the identification and correction of any mistakes or errors."

CISA Director Chris Krebs also retweeted a message from election law expert David Becker that condemned "wild and baseless claims about voting machines," according to CBS News.


David Becker @beckerdavidj
Please don't retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they're made by the president. These fantasies have been debunked many times, including by @DHSgov @CISAgov on this excellent site/resource, Rumor Control.
cisa.gov/rumorcontrol
2:35 PM, Nov 12, 2020


Edward Perez, an election-technology expert at the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that studies voting infrastructure, told the New York Times that claims about Dominion voting machines are "misinformation at best and, in many cases, they’re outright disinformation."

“I’m not aware of any evidence of specific things or defects in Dominion software that would lead one to believe that votes had been recorded or counted incorrectly," Perez said.


Dominion itself 'categorically denies' claims

Dominion Voting Systems released a statement this week to deny the claims that its machines had deleted or changed votes.

"Dominion Voting Systems categorically denies false assertions about vote switching issues with our voting systems," the statement reads. "Vote deletion/switching assertions are completely false."


The statement also addresses some specific details of allegations from Trump and Gateway Pundit.

Dominion calls the claim from Trump that its machines deleted 941,000 votes for him in Pennsylvania alone "impossible."

That's because Dominion only serves 14 counties in the state, which produced a total of 1.3 million votes — 52%, or 676,000, of which went to Trump. That only leaves 624,000 other votes, fewer than what Trump claims were switched.


Edison Research created 'no such report' about switched votes

The statement from Dominion Voting Systems also noted that Edison Research — a firm that OANN and Gateway Pundit cited in their stories — has refuted claims that it produced any data to support allegations of vote switching.

Larry Rosin, the president of Edison Research, told The Dispatch Fact Check, that it never produced any data to that effect.

"Edison Research created no such report and we are not aware of any voter fraud," he said.

Isolated incidents in Michigan, Georgia not indicative of wider issues with Dominion

A few — though not all — of the counties in Michigan and Georgia that experienced minor issues on Election Day used voting systems made by Dominion.

But the errors were not glitches with the machine, and there's no indication that the software affected the vote counts.

In Michigan, inaccuracies in two counties were due to human errors, not software issues, per a statement from the Michigan Department of State. Just one county used software from Dominion.

"As with other isolated user errors that have occurred in the reporting of unofficial results both in this and previous elections, this is not the result of any intentional misconduct by an election official or because of software or equipment malfunctioning or failing to work properly," the statement read.

And in one Georgia county, an apparent problem with Dominion software delayed officials’ reporting of the vote tallies but did not affect the actual vote count, per the New York Times.

Our rating: False

Based on our research, the claim that Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for Donald Trump or switched votes to Joe Biden is FALSE. A national election security coalition announced on Thursday that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised." Other experts and Dominion itself also condemned the claims.

Our fact-check sources:

• USA TODAY, Nov. 12, Election security officials: 'No evidence voting systems compromised'
• CBS News, Nov. 13, Trump spreads baseless claim about Dominion Voting Systems after losing election
• New York Times, Nov. 11, No, Dominion voting machines did not delete Trump votes.
• Dominion Voting Systems, Nov. 13, SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: FACTS & RUMORS
• The Dispatch Fact Check, Nov. 12, Did Edison Research Find That Dominion Deleted Trump Votes or Switched Votes to Biden?
• Michigan Department of State, Nov. 7, Isolated User Error in Antrim County Does Not Affect Election Results, Has no Impact on Other Counties or States

-- Fact check: Dominion voting machines didn't delete votes from Trump, switch them to Biden, by Camille Caldera, USA Today, 11/14/20


96% of the company’s political donations went to Democrats, not surprisingly. Frankly, when you look at who’s running the company, who’s in charge, who owns it -- which we don’t know -- where are the votes counted, which we think are counted in foreign countries, not in the United States, Dominion is a disaster. Election authorities in Texas have repeatedly blocked the deployment of Dominion systems due to concerns about security vulnerabilities and the potential for errors and outright fraud. Every district that uses Dominion systems must be carefully monitored and carefully investigated, but not only for the future.

[Scott Pelley] Let me ask for your reaction to some of the vote fraud that the President and his team have been alleging. “Votes tabulated in foreign countries.”

[Christopher Krebs] So, [expostulates] all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. I don’t, I don’t understand this claim; all votes in the United States of America are counted in the United States of America. Period.


-- Securing the Election, produced by Rachael Morehouse, 60 Minutes, 11/29/20
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sun Dec 06, 2020 5:12 am

Part 2 of 4

President Donald Trump: (12:01)
Right now, we’re worried about the present, and what went on with an election that we won without question. Under my lead, the Republicans won almost every state house in the United States, which they weren’t expected to do. We went up to 16 seats in the house. The numbers are still being tabulated, because there are nine seats that nobody really knows. They don’t know. Two weeks later, it’s still under consideration, because it’s a mess. Republicans were supposed to lose many seats, and instead they won those seats in the house, and a very important election that’s coming up will determine whether, or not we hold the Senate.

President Donald Trump: (12:59)
David Perdue and Kelly Leffler are two tremendous people. Unfortunately, in Georgia, they’re using the same horrible Dominion system, and it’s already been out that -- think of it, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots have been requested. You check it out who’s requesting those ballots. The difference is, it’s one state, and we will have our eyes on it like nobody’s ever watched anything before, because we have to win those two Senate seats. The tremendous success we had in the House of Representatives, and the tremendous success we’ve had so far in the Senate, unexpected success all over the country, and right here in Washington.

President Donald Trump: (13:55)
It is statistically impossible that the person, me, that led the charge, lost. The greatest pollsters, the real pollsters, not the ones that had us down 17 points in Wisconsin when we actually won, or the ones that had us down four or five points in Florida, and we won by many points, or had us even, and down in Texas, and we won by a lot, not those pollsters, but real pollsters. Pollsters that are fair and honest said, “We can’t understand a thing like this. It’s never happened before. You led the country to victory, and you were the only one that was lost. It’s not possible.”

President Donald Trump: (14:43)
The speaker of the house of a certain state said, “Sir, I expected to lose my seat, and instead, because of you, and because of that incredible charge, and all of those rallies, we had a tremendous victory, and everybody knows it. You are much more popular than me, sir, except I got many more votes than you did, and it’s impossible that that happened. There is something wrong.” I’ll tell you what’s wrong, voter fraud. Here’s an example. This is Michigan. At 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror.

This is a list of Republicans and conservatives who opposed the re-election of incumbent Donald Trump, the 2020 Republican Party nominee for President of the United States. Among them are former Republicans who left the party in 2016 or later due to their opposition to Trump, those who held office as a Republican, Republicans who endorsed a different candidate, and Republican presidential primary election candidates that announced opposition to Trump as the presumptive nominee. Over 70 former senior Republican national security officials and 60 additional senior officials have also signed onto a statement declaring, "We are profoundly concerned about our nation's security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term."

A group of former senior U.S. government officials and conservatives—including from the Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43, and Trump administrations have formed The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR) to, "focus on a return to principles-based governing in the post-Trump era."

A third group of Republicans, Republican Voters Against Trump was launched in May 2020 has collected over 500 testimonials opposing Donald Trump.


Former Executive Branch officials

Cabinet-level officials


• Peter Allgeier, U.S. Trade Representative (2005, 2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• William Cohen, U.S Secretary of Defense (1997–2001), Chair of the Senate Aging Committee (1995–97), Chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee (1981–83), U.S. Senator from Maine (1979–97), U.S. Representative from ME-02 (1973–79) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stuart M. Gerson, U.S. Attorney General (1993), Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division (1989–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Carlos Gutierrez, U.S. Secretary of Commerce (2005–09)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chuck Hagel, U.S. Secretary of Defense (2013–15), Chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (2009–13), U.S. Senator from Nebraska (1997–2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Hayden Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) (1999–2005), Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (2005–06), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006–09), 4 star general (April 22, 2005)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• Carla Hills, U.S. Trade Representative (1989–93), U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1975–77) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Peter Keisler, U.S. Attorney General (2007), Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division (2003–07), Acting Associate Attorney General (2002–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ray LaHood, U.S. Secretary of Transportation (2009–13), U.S. Representative from IL-18 (1995–2009)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• James Mattis, Secretary of Defense (2017–19)
• Bob McDonald, U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs (2014–17)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Negroponte, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (2007–09), Director of National Intelligence (2005–07), U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (2004–05), U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2001–04), U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines (1993–96), U.S. Ambassador to Mexico (1989–93), Deputy National Security Advisor (1987–89), Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs (1985–87), U.S. Ambassador to Honduras (1981–85) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mary Peters, U.S. Secretary of Transportation (2006–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Colin Powell, U.S. Secretary of State (2001–05), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–93), National Security Advisor (1987–89) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• William Reilly, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (1989–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Tom Ridge, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (2003–05), Governor of Pennsylvania (1995–2001), U.S. Representative from PA-21 (1983–95) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Thomas A. Shannon Jr., U.S. Secretary of State (2017) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF (2005–10), U.S. Secretary of Agriculture (2001–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• William H. Webster, Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (2005–20), Director of Central Intelligence (1987–91), Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (1978–87), Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (1973–78), Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri (1970–73), U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (1960–61) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Christine Todd Whitman, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (2001–03), Governor of New Jersey (1994–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Robert Zoellick, U.S. Trade Representative (2001–2005) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Defense Department officials

• Chuck Boyd, 4 star General United States Air Force (1959–95) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Torie Clark, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Donley, U.S. Secretary of the Air Force (2008–13) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Raymond DuBois, Acting Under Secretary of the Army (2005–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• William McRaven, Admiral, Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (2011–14)) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Sean O'Keefe, Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (2001–04), U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1992–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard V. Spencer, U.S. Secretary of the Navy (2017–19) (endorsed Michael Bloomberg)
• William Howard Taft IV, U.S. Ambassador to NATO (1989–92), U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense (1984–89) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Vickers, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (2011–15) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Matthew Waxman, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs (2004–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dov Zakheim, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) (2001–04) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Homeland Security Department officials

• Kenneth Adelman Fmr Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (1983–87) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Parney Albright, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael D. Brown, Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• James Loy, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (2003–05), Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (2002–03), Commandant of the Coast Guard (1998–2002) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Mitnick, General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security (2018–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Elizabeth Neumann, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security (2016–20) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Miles Taylor, Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security (2017–19), author known as "Anonymous" (endorsed Joe Biden)

Intelligence Community officials

• Jon D. Glassman National Security Advisor to the Vice President, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan (1983–86), United States Ambassador to Paraguay (1991–94)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (2007–11) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Justice Department officials

• A. Brian Albritton, Middle District of Florida (2008–10)
• Donald B. Ayer, U.S. Deputy Attorney General (1989–90), U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of California (1981–86)
• Daniel Bogden, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada (2009–17, 2001–06)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• Greg Brower, U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada (2008–09), member of Nevada Senate (2011–16) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Wayne Budd, District of Massachusetts (1989–92) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Paul Charlton, U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona (2001–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• James Comey, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (2013–17), U.S. Deputy Attorney General (2003–05) (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charles Fried, U.S. Solicitor General (1985–89) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jonathan L. Goldstein, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey (1974–77) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Thomas Heffelfinger, U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota (1991–93), (2001–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David C. Iglesias, U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico (2001–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Marcos Jimenez, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida (2002–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Kelley, U.S. Attorney for the California Southern District of New York (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington (2001–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jan Paul Miller, U.S. Attorney for the Central District of Illinois (2002–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Matthew Orwig, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas (2001–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Paul Perez, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida (2002–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stanley Twardy, U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut (1985–91) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ken Wainstein, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (2004–06) (endorsed Joe Biden)[35]
• William H. Webster, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (1960–61) (endorsed Joe Biden)

State Department officials

• Richard Armitage, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (2001–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Robert Blackwill, U.S. Ambassador to India (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs (2006–2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charles R. Bowers, U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia (1991–1994) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Peter Bridges, U.S. Ambassador to Somalia (1984–1986) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard Burt, U.S. Ambassador to Germany (1985–89) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jack Chow, former Special Representative of the U.S. Secretary of State on Global HIV/AIDS (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Eliot A. Cohen, Counselor of the Department of State (2007–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs (1981–89) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Sada Cumber, Special Envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (2008–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Eric S. Edelman, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2005–09), U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (2003–05), U.S. Ambassador to Finland (1998–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Julie Finley, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (2005–2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Carl W. Ford Jr., Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (2001–2003) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• James Glassman, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2008–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy in Europe and Eurasia (2004–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Gordon Gray III, U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia (2009–12) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard Kauzlarich Fmr Dep Asst Secretary of State (1984–86) United States Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina (August 1, 1997 – August 20, 1999)(endorsed Joe Biden)
• James Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs (2001–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Kramer, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (2008–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stephen Krasner, Director of Policy Planning (2005–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Frank Lavin, U.S. Ambassador to Singapore (2001–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Winston Lord, U.S. Ambassador to China (1984–1989) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Brett McGurk, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (2015–18)
• Alberto J. Mora, general counsel to the U.S. Information Agency (1989–1993) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Douglas H. Paal, former member of the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Kori Schake, Deputy Director of Policy Planning (2007–08) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Gregory Schulte, U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005–2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mark C. Storella, U.S. Ambassador to Zambia (2010–2013) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Shirin R. Tahir-Kheli, Alternate United States Representative to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs (1990–1993) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Robert Tuttle, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom (2005–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Wolf, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (1989–1992), Ambassador to Malaysia (1992–1995) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Philip Zelikow, Counselor of the Department of State (2005–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Treasury Department officials

• Jimmy Gurulé, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rosario Marin, Treasurer of the United States (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)

White House officials

• Steve Abbot, Deputy Homeland Security Advisor (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Bruce Bartlett, author, historian, domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan (former Republican, now Independent; previously endorsed Elizabeth Warren, then Joe Biden)
• Kenneth Bernard, Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense and Assistant Surgeon General (2002–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Bolton, National Security Advisor (2018–19), U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2005–06)
• Victor Cha, Director for Asian Affairs of the National Security Council (2004–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Gary Edson, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs (2001–04) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard Falkenrath, Deputy Homeland Security Advisor (2003–04) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Aaron Friedberg, Director of Policy Planning and National Security Affairs to the Vice President (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stephen Harmelin, White House Aide (1964-1965) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Bill Kristol, Chief of Staff to the Vice President (1989–93), founder of The Weekly Standard, editor of The Bulwark (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Omarosa Manigault Newman, Communications Director of the Office of Public Liaison (2017–18), reality television star (Independent since 2019, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Peggy Noonan, Special Assistant to the President (1984–86), columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
• Anthony Scaramucci, White House Communications Director (2017) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stephen Slick, Senior Director for Intelligence Programs and Reform of the National Security Council (2005–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Shirin Tahir-Kheli, Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations of the National Security Council (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Olivia Troye, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor to Vice President Pence (2018–) and aide to the White House Coronavirus Task Force (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ken Wainstein, Homeland Security Advisor (2008–09) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Other executive officials

• Linton Brooks, Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration and Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security (2003–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Josh Venable, U.S. Department of Education Chief of Staff for Betsy Devos (2016–18) chief of staff for the Michigan Republican Party (endorsed Joe Biden)

U.S. Senators

Current


• Mitt Romney, U.S. Senator from Utah (2019–present), 2012 nominee for President, Chair of the Republican Governors Association (2005–06), Governor of Massachusetts (2003–07)[57][58]

Former

• David Durenberger, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee (1985–87), U.S. Senator from Minnesota (1978–95) (Independent since 2005, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jeff Flake, U.S. Senator from Arizona (2013–19), U.S. Representative from AZ-06 (2003–13) and AZ-01 (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Gordon Humphrey, U.S. Senator from New Hampshire (1979–90) (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Larry Pressler, U.S. Senator from South Dakota, U.S. Representative from SD-01 (endorsed Joe Biden, Independent since 2013)
• John Warner, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee (2003–07), Chair of the Senate Rules Committee (1995–99), U.S. Senator from Virginia (1979–2009), U.S. Secretary of the Navy (1972–74) (endorsed Joe Biden)

U.S. Representatives

Current


• Justin Amash, U.S. Representative from MI-03 (2011–present) (Libertarian since 2020, endorsed Jo Jorgensen)
• Denver Riggleman, U.S. Representative from VA-05 (2019–present)
• Francis Rooney, U.S. Representative from FL-19 (2017–present)

Former

• Steve Bartlett, Mayor of Dallas, TX (1991–95), U.S. Representative from TX-03 (1983–91) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rod Chandler, 1992 nominee for Senate, U.S. Representative from WA-06 (1983–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Bill Clinger, Chair of the House Oversight Committee (1995–97), U.S. Representative from PA-05 (1979–97) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Tom Coleman, U.S. Representative from MO-06 (1976–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charlie Dent, U.S. Representative from PA-15 (2005–18), Chair of the House Ethics Committee (2015–17), Co-Chair of the Tuesday Group (2007–18)[70] (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charles Djou, U.S. Representative from HI-01 (2010–11) (Independent since 2018) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chuck Douglas, U.S. Representative from NH-02 (1989–91) Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court (1977–85, 1974–76) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mickey Edwards, Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee (1989–93), U.S. Representative from OK-05 (1977–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David F. Emery, U.S. Representative from ME-01 (1975–83)
• Wayne Gilchrest, U.S. Representative from MD-01 (1991–2009) (Democrat since 2019, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jim Greenwood, U.S. Representative from PA-08 (1993–2005) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard L. Hanna, U.S. Representative from NY-22 (2013–17) and NY-24 (2011–13) (deceased)
• Amo Houghton, U.S. Representative from NY-29 (2003–05), NY-31 (1993–2003), and NY-34 (1987–93) (deceased)
• Bob Inglis, U.S. Representative from SC-04 (2005–11, 1993–99), 1998 nominee for Senate (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Jolly, U.S. Representative from FL-13 (2014–17) (Independent since 2018)
• Jim Kolbe, U.S. Representative from AZ-08 (2003–07) and AZ-05 (1985–2003) (Independent since 2018, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Steven Kuykendall, U.S. Representative from CA-36 (1999–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jim Leach, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (2009–13), Chair of the House Financial Services Committee (1995–2001), U.S. Representative from IA-02 (2003–07) and IA-01 (1977–2003) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John LeBoutillier, U.S. Representative from NY-06 (1981–83) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Frank LoBiondo, U.S. Representative from NJ-02 (1995–2019)
• Susan Molinari, Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference (1995–97), U.S. Representative from NY-13 (1993–97) and NY-14 (1990–93)[33] (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Connie Morella, U.S. Ambassador to the OCED (2003–07), U.S. Representative from MD-08 (1987–2003) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mike Parker, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works (2001–02), 1999 nominee for Governor of Mississippi, U.S. Representative from MS-04 (1989–99) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jack Quinn, U.S. Representative from NY-30 (1993–2005) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Reid Ribble, U.S. Representative from WI-08 (2011–17)
• Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Chair (2011–13) and Ranking Member (2007–11) of House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Conference (2003–07), U.S. Representative from FL-27 (1989–2019)
• Claudine Schneider, 1990 nominee for Senate, U.S. Representative from RI-02 (1981–91) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Joe Schwarz, U.S. Representative from MI-07 (2005–07) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chris Shays, U.S. Representative from CT-04 (1987–2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Peter Smith, U.S. Representative from VT-AL (1989–91), 1986 nominee for Governor of Vermont (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Alan Steelman, 1976 nominee for Senate, U.S. Representative from TX-05 (1973–77) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dave Trott, U.S. Representative from MI-11 (2015–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• James T. Walsh, U.S. Representative from NY-25 (1993–2009) and NY-27 (1989–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Joe Walsh, 2020 candidate for president, U.S. Representative from IL-08 (2011–13) (Independent since 2020, endorsed Joe Biden)
• G. William Whitehurst, U.S. Representative from VA-02 (1969–87) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dick Zimmer, 2008 and 1996 nominee for Senate, U.S. Representative from NJ-12 (1991–97) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Statewide executive officials

Governors

Current


• Charlie Baker, Governor of Massachusetts (2015–present)[85] (blanked ballot)
• Larry Hogan, Chair of the National Governors Association (2019–20), Governor of Maryland (2015–present) (wrote-in Ronald Reagan)
• Phil Scott, Governor of Vermont (2017–present), Lieutenant Governor of Vermont (2011–17) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Former

• Arne Carlson, Governor of Minnesota (1991–99) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Lincoln Chafee, Governor of Rhode Island (2011–15), U.S. Senator from Rhode Island (1999–2007) (Libertarian since 2019)
• Jim Edgar, Governor of Illinois (1991–99) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Kasich, 2016 candidate for president, Governor of Ohio (2011–19), Chair of the House Budget Committee (1995–2001), U.S. Representative from OH-12 (1983–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• George Pataki, 2016 candidate for president, Governor of New York (1995–2006) (declined to endorse)
• Marc Racicot, Governor of Montana (1993–2001), Attorney General of Montana (1989–93), Chair of the Republican National Committee (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden) (Republican)
• Mark Sanford, U.S. Representative from SC-01 (2013–19, 1995–2001), Chair of the Republican Governors Association (2008–09), Governor of South Carolina (2003–11)
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor and Governor of California (2003–11)
• Rick Snyder, Governor of Michigan (2011–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jane Swift, Governor of Massachusetts (2001–03)
• Lowell Weicker, Governor of Connecticut (1991–95)
• Bill Weld, Governor of Massachusetts (1991–97), Libertarian 2016 nominee for Vice President (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Christie Todd Whitman, Governor of New Jersey (1994–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Other statewide officials

Current


• Karyn Polito, Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts (2013–present)

Former

• Jeff Amestoy, Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court (1997–2004), Attorney General of Vermont (1985–97) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Douglas Baily, Attorney General of Alaska (1989–90) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Walter Cohen, Acting Attorney General of Pennsylvania (1995) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction (1995–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Richard Hodges, Director of the Ohio Department of Health (2014–17), Ohio House Representative (1993–99) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jim Jones, Chief Justice (2015–17) and Justice (2005–17) of the Idaho Supreme Court, Attorney General of Idaho (1983–91) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Mutz, Lieutenant Governor of Indiana (1981–89), 1988 nominee for Governor of Indiana (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jeffrey B. Pine, Attorney General of Rhode Island (1993–99) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Thomas D. Rath, Attorney General of New Hampshire (1978–80) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mark Shurtleff, Attorney General of Utah (2001–13) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff, Treasurer of New Jersey (2010–15) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Gregory Smith, Attorney General of New Hampshire (1980–84) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• James C. Smith, Secretary of State of Florida (2002–03, 1987–95)Attorney General of Florida (1979–87) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Grant Woods, Attorney General of Arizona (1991–99), (Democrat since 2018) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Greg Zoeller, Attorney General of Indiana (2009–17) (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)

Former judges

Federal judges


• John Paul Stevens, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1975-2010), Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (1970-1975) (Deceased)

State judges

• Rebecca White Berch, Chief Justice (2008–14) and Justice (2002–15) of the Arizona Supreme Court (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Janine P. Geske, Justice of Wisconsin Supreme Court (1993–98) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Robert F. Orr, Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court (1994–2004)[77] (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Kevin A. Ross, Judge on the Los Angeles County Superior Court (1999–2005) (endorsed Joe Biden)

State legislators

State senators

Current


• Dawn Addiego, New Jersey State Senator from District 8 (2010–present) (Democrat since 2019, endorsed Joe Biden)
• John S. McCollister, Nebraska State Senator from District 20 (2015–present) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Former

• Greg Brower, State Senator from District 15 (2011–16), U.S. Attorney for the District of Nevada (2008–09), Inspector General of the Government Publishing Office (2004–06)
• Paula Dockery, Florida State Senator from District 15 (2002–12), Florida State Representative from District 64 (1996–2002) (Independent since 2017, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mike Fasano, State Senator (2002–12), President Pro Tempore of the Florida Senate (2008–10), House Majority Leader (2000–01), Florida State Representative from District 36 (2012–13) and District 45 (1994–2002) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Susan Gerard, Arizona State Senator from District 18 (2001–03) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dawson Hodgson, Rhode Island State Senator from District 35 (2011–15) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Russ Potts, Virginia State Senator from District 27 (1992–2008) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Kevin Raye, President of the Maine Senate (2010–12), Maine State Senator from District 29 (2004–12) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Bob Worsley, Arizona State Senator from District 25 (2013–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)

State representatives

Current


• Gary Clary, South Carolina State Representative from District 3 (2012–present) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Cheri Helt, Oregon State Representative from District 54 (2019–present)
• John Lyle, Rhode Island State Representative from District 46 (2019–present) (Independent since 2020)
• Chad Mayes, California State Assemblyman from District 42 (2014–present) (Independent since 2019)

Former

• Jim Cunneen, California State Representative from District 24 (1994–2000) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jim Dillard, Virginia State Delegate from District 41 (1983–2005), District 51 (1982–83), District 19 (1980–82) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Beth Fukumoto, Minority Leader of the Hawaii House of Representatives (2014–17), Hawaii State Representative from District 36 (2013–18), Acting Chair of the Hawaii Republican Party (2011) (Democrat since 2017)
• Deb Gullett, Arizona State Representative from District 11 (2003–05) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Doug Hart, Michigan State Representative from District 73 (1999–2005) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charles Jeter, North Carolina State Representative from District 92 (2013–16) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Becky Jordan, Arizona State Representative from District 16 (1993–66) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mickey Knight, Michigan State Representative from District 96 (1981–93) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Maturen, Michigan State Representative from District 63 (2015–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Steve May, Arizona State Representative from District 26 (1999–2003) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dennis O'Brien, Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from (2007–08), Pennsylvania State Representative District 169 (1983–2012, 1977–80) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Juan-Carlos Planas, Florida State Representative from District 114 (2002–10) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Douglas Prescott, New York State Assemblyman from District 26 (1991–97) and District 25 (1985–91, 1981–83) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Ravitz, New York State Assemblyman from District 73 (1993–2002) and District 66 (1991–92) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Charles R. Saxbe, Ohio State Representative from District 75 (1975–82) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Todd Smith, Texas State Representative from District 92 (1997–2013) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chris Vance, 2016 nominee for Senate, Chair of the Washington Republican Party (2001–06), Washington State Representative from District 31 (1991–94) (Independent since 2017, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rich Vial, Oregon State Representative (2017–19) (Independent since 2020)
• Roberta Voss, Arizona State Representative from District 19 (1997–2003) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Katherine Waddell, Virginia State Delegate from District 68 (2006–08) (Independent, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Cole Wist, Colorado State Representative (2016–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Municipal and local officials

Current


• Steve Chirico, Mayor of Naperville, Illinois (2015–present) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mark Kersey, San Diego City Council (2012–present) (Independent since 2019, endorsed Michael Bloomberg, then Joe Biden)
• Ann Kobayashi, Honolulu City Councilor from District 5 (2009–present, 2002–08), Hawaii State Senator from District 10 (1981–94) (Democrat since 1988, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Kymberly Pine, Honolulu City Councilor from District 1 (2013–present), Hawaii State Representative from District 43 (2004–12) (Democrat since 2017, endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Tubiolo, member of the Westchester County Board of Legislators (Democrat since 2020)

Former

• Phil Heimlich, member of Cincinnati City Council (1993–2001) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Joe Lhota, Chair of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (2017–18, 2012), 2013 nominee for Mayor of New York City (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rick Romley, County Attorney for Maricopa County, AZ (2010) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Former Republican Party officials

Republican National Committee


• Stephen Duprey, member of the Republican National Committee, former chair of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Trevor Francis, communications director for the Republican National Committee (2009) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Doug Heye, communications director for the Republican National Committee (2009–10) (wrote in Mitt Romney)
• Ryan Mahoney, communications director for the Republican National Committee (2017–19) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Lisa Miller, communications director for the Republican National Committee (2007) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Steele, Chair of the Republican National Committee (2009–11), 2006 nominee for Senate, Lieutenant Governor of Maryland (2003–07), Chair of the Maryland Republican Party (2000–02) (endorsed Joe Biden)

State party chairs

• Matt Borges, Chair of the Ohio Republican Party (2013–17) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Pat Brady, Chair of the Illinois Republican Party (2009–13) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ryan Call, Chair of the Colorado Republican Party (2011–15) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jennifer Horn, Chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party (2013–17), 2008 nominee for NH-02, co-founder of The Lincoln Project (endorsed Joe Biden)

Activists and public figures

Celebrities and activists


• Charles Barkley, former professional basketball player (endorsed Pete Buttigieg)
• Max Boot, author, consultant, military historian, columnist for The Washington Post (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Niki Christoff, lawyer, operative for the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Michael Cohen, attorney to Donald Trump (2006–18) (Democrat since 2018)
• George Conway, attorney, co-founder of The Lincoln Project (Independent since 2018, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mindy Finn, political consultant, strategist, and activist, Independent 2016 candidate for Vice President (Independent since 2016)
• Mary Fisher, HIV/AIDS activist (endorsed Joe Biden)
• David French, senior editor of The Dispatch, attorney, political commentator (Independent since 2018, endorsed Joe Biden)
• David Frum, columnist and speechwriter for George W. Bush
• Carey Hart, off-road truck racer (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Jill Hazelbaker, communications executive, political campaign spokesperson
• Margaret Hoover, conservative political commentator, political strategist, author (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Caitlyn Jenner, television personality and retired Olympic gold medalist decathlete
• Dwayne Johnson, actor, producer, businessman, retired professional wrestler, former American football and Canadian football player (Independent since 2017, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Robert Kagan, historian (Independent since 2016)
• Jennifer Lawrence, actress (currently Democrat, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Matt Lewis, political writer
• Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, former board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Liz Mair, political and communications consultant
• Evan McMullin, former CIA officer, Independent 2016 candidate for President (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mike Murphy, political consultant (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Tom Nichols, national security affairs scholar (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Howard Opinsky, national press secretary of the 2000 McCain presidential campaign (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Piper, theologian
• Jennifer Rubin, political commentator (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mark Salter, speechwriter of the 2008 McCain presidential campaign (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Andrea Saul, press secretary of the 2012 Romney presidential campaign (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rob Schenck, Evangelical minister (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Steve Schmidt, chief strategist for the John McCain 2008 presidential campaign, co-founder of The Lincoln Project (Independent since 2018, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Tara Setmayer, CNN Political Commentator, Contributor to ABC News and former GOP Communications Director[
• Bret Stephens, journalist, editor, and columnist (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Stuart Stevens, writer and senior political strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign (endorsed Joe Biden
• Mac Stipanovich, political activist and strategist (Democrat since 2019, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, former U.S. Air Force captain and commercial airline pilot during the water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 (former Republican, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Steven R. Timmermans, former executive director of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (2014–) (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Dane Waters, campaign strategist (endorsed Joe Biden)
• John Weaver, political consultant, chief strategist for the John Kasich 2016 presidential campaign, co-founder of The Lincoln Project (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Peter Wehner, writer for The New York Times, former speechwriter (endorsed Joe Biden)
• George Will, journalist, columnist for The Washington Post (Independent since 2016, endorsed Joe Biden)
• Rick Wilson, political strategist, media consultant, author, co-founder of The Lincoln Project (endorsed Joe Biden)

Media personalities

• Amanda Carpenter, author, political advisor, speechwriter (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mona Charen, columnist, journalist, political commentator, writer (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ann Coulter, media pundit, author, columnist, lawyer
• S. E. Cupp, political commentator and writer (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Susan Del Percio, political strategist, media analyst (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Mark Galli, American minister, author, editor
• Jonah Goldberg, conservative syndicated columnist, author, political analyst, commentator
• Seth Mandel, conservative author and editor of the Washington Examiner
• Meghan McCain, co-host of The View, daughter of John McCain (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ana Navarro, political commentator and Republican strategist (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Ramesh Ponnuru, conservative political pundit, journalist, senior editor for National Review
• Charlie Sykes, conservative talk show radio host, founder of The Bulwark (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Kevin D. Williamson, conservative political commentator, roving correspondent for National Review

Business executives and leaders

• Mike Fernandez, founder of MBF Healthcare Partners
• Carly Fiorina, 2016 candidate for president, California 2010 nominee for Senate, Chair (2000–05), President and CEO (1999–2005) of Hewlett-Packard (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Cindy McCain, businesswoman and philanthropist, widow of the late Senator John McCain (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Les Otten, CEO of the American Skiing Company, candidate for Governor of Maine in 2010 (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital Group (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Christy Walton, heiress of Walmart
• Meg Whitman, CEO of Quibi, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (2011–18), 2010 nominee for Governor of California, CEO of eBay (1998–2008) (endorsed Joe Biden)

Organizations

National organizations


• 43 Alumni for Biden (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Defending Democracy Together (endorsed Joe Biden)
• The Lincoln Project (endorsed Joe Biden)
• National Committee of Asian American Republicans (endorsed Joe Biden)
• REPAIR (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Republican Voters Against Trump (endorsed Joe Biden)
• Right Side PAC (endorsed Joe Biden)

Republican-related organizations

• Bowdoin College Republicans
• University of Vermont College Republicans

Websites

• The Bulwark

See also

• Endorsements in the 2020 Republican Party presidential primaries
• List of Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign endorsements
• List of former Trump administration officials who endorsed Joe Biden
• List of Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign endorsements
• List of Republicans who opposed the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign
• Republican reactions to Donald Trump's claims of 2020 election fraud
• Never Trump movement

-- List of Republicans who opposed the Donald Trump 2020 presidential campaign, by Wikipedia

Lincoln Project’s Steve Schmidt: American Democracy Was Deliberately Poisoned
by Amanpour and Company
12/8/20

One survey says maybe 8 million of Biden's 81 million votes came from self-described Conservatives, and maybe 3 million from Republicans. So that's not small.

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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Sun Dec 06, 2020 5:12 am

Part 3 of 4

Image
"This is normal"

President Donald Trump: (15:44)
Nobody knows anything about it. By the way, there’s your line. This is one of many. Here’s what is normal, and all of a sudden, look at that. This is normal, normal. Look even here, normal. And then boom, all of a sudden, I go from winning by a lot to losing a tight race. It’s corrupt. Detroit is corrupt. I have a lot of friends in Detroit. They know it, but Detroit is totally corrupt. Look at this, look at this. That’s at 6:31 in the morning, unexpectedly came in. In the recent recount in Georgia, which means nothing because they don’t want to check signatures, and if you’re not going to check signatures in Georgia, it doesn’t work, but we have a secretary of state and a governor who made it very difficult to check signatures.

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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Do something@BrianKempGA. You allowed your state to be scammed. We must check signatures and count signed envelopes against ballots. Then call of election. It won't be needed. We will all WIN!


President Donald Trump: (16:41)
Why? You’ll have to ask them, but without a signature match, or a check, it doesn’t matter. They found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack, all against me. This was during a recount that I didn’t even think mattered. They found many thousands of votes, and that recount didn’t matter. The one that matters is the one that’s going on now, that because of the fact it’s so close, they had to by law give another recount. But the recount has to be a recount where they check the signatures. Otherwise, they’re just checking the same dishonest thing. It won’t matter.

President Donald Trump: (17:22)
In this case, the signatures on envelopes are the only thing that is relevant. We will compare the signature on the envelope to the signatures from past elections, and we will find that many thousands of people signed these ballots illegally. The Democrats had this election rigged right from the beginning. They used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus, where it originated as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud, a fraud that the whole world is watching. And there is no one happier right now than China.

When performed by professionals in criminal cases or legal proceedings, signature verification can take hours. But election employees in many states must do the job in as little as five seconds...

But experts say mail voters are far more likely to be disenfranchised than those who vote in person.

That’s particularly true for young people, who are more likely to experiment with various handwriting styles; the elderly, whose signatures sometimes change with age; people with disabilities; and those voting by mail for the first time — a category that this year includes millions of Americans.

People tasked with verifying signatures often receive little or no instruction. According to one study, those without formal training are more likely to flag a genuine signature as a fake rather than identify false signatures as real.

“It is just ripe for error,” said Linton Mohammed, a forensic document examiner in California who has been an expert witness in lawsuits over ballot signature rules...

A forensic-level analysis isn’t the goal, many election officials said. Instead, workers check to see if signatures look similar enough to be counted, and don’t reflect the wrong name or diverge drastically from the one in the voter’s file.

“We are not real picky as long as it looks similar,” said Jennie Aines, elections director for Franklin County, Pa. She said her staff does not receive any type of instruction in signature analysis.

“There’s no training,” she said. “We are all just office workers trying to get stuff done in here.”...

Without a cure process, rejecting ballots for handwriting issues isn’t fair to voters, said Thomas Vastrick, a forensic document examiner who has taught signature verification classes for Florida election workers...

“We always err on the side of the voter,” said Robert Rodriguez, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade County Elections Department...

Signatures that don’t match do not always signal fraud.

In addition to the young and the elderly, voters whose first language is written right to left — such as Arabic or Urdu — are less likely to have a consistent signature in English, experts say.

Medication can also affect one’s handwriting, as can fine motor skills issues, disabilities and injuries.

North Dakota resident Maria Romo didn’t learn until this year that her vote in the 2018 midterm election had been rejected due to a perceived signature mismatch.

Romo said her already messy handwriting has gotten worse since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Her hands sometimes go numb and she struggles to grip a pen. Sitting down, standing up or resting her arm on a chair can change the look of her writing — all of which she would have told elections officials, she said, had they asked...

Emily Will, a forensic document examiner in North Carolina, said she’s troubled by the idea that workers may be comparing ballot signatures to just one, or even a few, samples from the voter’s file. She said she likes to have at least 20 examples of a voter’s past signature when she performs a verification, with several having been written recently.

“Think about signing a credit card receipt as opposed to your will or your mortgage papers,” she said. “Some people might consider their ballot signature very important, but some might think this is just nothing and they just scrawl it out.”

Amy Campbell of Philadelphia said she thinks she signed her ballot correctly in the June primary but election officials canceled her vote, claiming they “could not obtain” her signature.

The 26-year-old, who voted by mail due to concerns of COVID-19, said she was angry that she was not given the chance to cure her ballot.

“I thought I had done what I was supposed to do to vote and make sure I was doing my part to keep my city safe,” Campbell said. “It was frustrating that some minor clerical issue disqualified my vote.”


-- ‘Ripe for error’: Ballot signature verification is flawed — and a big factor in the election, by Maya Lau, Laura J. Nelson, L.A. Times, 10/28/20


President Donald Trump: (18:10)
Many people received two, three and four ballots. They were sent to dead people by the thousands. In fact, dead people -- and we have many examples, filled out ballots -- made applications, and then, voted, which is even worse. In other words, dead people went through a process. Some have been dead for 25 years.

To hear some people tell it -- including a handful of prominent Republicans, such as members of President Trump's family and supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell -- you might think that Democrats were using dead people to steal Michigan's Electoral College votes from Trump.

But, like much of the misinformation circulated online this week by some Trump supporters, the claim falls apart under scrutiny. A CNN analysis of the claim and the purported backing for it did not find a single instance of that happening.

One of the supposed pieces of evidence was a list that circulated on Twitter Thursday evening allegedly containing names, birth dates, and zip codes for registered voters in Michigan. The origin of the list and the identity of the person who first made it public are not known.

CNN examined 50 of the more than 14,000 names on the list by taking the first 25 names on the list and then 25 more picked at random. We ran the names through Michigan's Voter Information database to see if they requested or returned a ballot. We then checked the names against publicly available records to see if they were indeed dead.

Of the 50, 37 were indeed dead and had not voted, according to the voter information database. Five people out of the 50 had voted -- and they are all still alive, according to public records accessed by CNN. The remaining eight are also alive but didn't vote.

The sample CNN reviewed is not representative, but the trend was clear -- not a single one of the names examined was of a dead person voting.

The version of the list CNN found has since been removed from the site hosting it.


-- Claims that dead people voted went viral. These are the facts, By Konstantin Toropin, Holmes Lybrand and Annie Grayer, CNN, Updated 10:47 AM ET, Sun November 8, 2020


Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone, and if that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned, and overturned immediately. Some people say that’s too far out, that’s too harsh. Well, does that mean we take a president, and we’ve just elected a president where the votes were fraudulent?

President Donald Trump: (19:01)
No, it means you have to turn over the election. And everybody knows without going much further, and they’ve seen the evidence, but they don’t want to talk about it, what a disaster this election was, a total catastrophe. But we’re going to show it, and hopefully, the courts in particular. The Supreme Court of the United States will see it, and respectfully, hopefully, they will do what’s right for our country, because our country cannot live with this kind of an election. We could say, "let’s go on to the next one," but no, we have to look also at our past. We can’t let this happen.

President Donald Trump: (19:43)
Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win. In all states, I very easily win the swing states, just like I won them at 10 o’clock in the evening, the evening of the election. We’re not looking to show you 25 faulty or fraudulent votes, which don’t mean anything, because it doesn’t overturn the state, or a fifty, or a hundred. We’re showing you hundreds of thousands far more than we need, far more than the margin, far more than the law requires. We can show many times what is necessary to win the state.

...

As President Donald Trump continues to contest the election results, one of the most common questions I get is, "Are you investigating his allegations of voter fraud?" The short answer is yes, we will always look into credible accusations of serious wrongdoing.

The issue here is that many of these allegations are unfounded, overblown or have little or unreliable evidence.

"Reporters on my team have reviewed about 10 lawsuits alleging problems with voting and counting in several states," said enterprise editor Steve Myers. "What many people may not realize is how far the lawsuits fall short of what people claim."

For example, Myers said, in Nevada the Trump campaign announced it and the state Republican Party were preparing to file a lawsuit alleging that up to 10,000 people who no longer lived in Nevada had voted there.

"When the suit was filed, it contained just one vague reference to 'over 3,000 instances of ineligible individuals casting ballots,' and it cited no evidence," he said. The head of elections in Clark County said he would look into the allegation but that out-of-state voters are common, and often include members of the military and college students. Judges declined to stop vote counting.

The lack of evidence appears to be why judges have tossed these cases so quickly – in Georgia, it took just one day.

The Trump campaign went to court the day after the election, alleging Chatham County had improperly intermingled ineligible ballots with valid ones, our journalists reported. A judge dismissed the case after the county elections head said he reviewed the 53 ballots in question and found they had been received before the deadline.

Investigative editor Matt Doig points out that voting irregularities happen every election but, as our reporting has shown, are extremely rare and don't amount to negating a national election.

"A poll worker will accidentally mark the book to show that John Smith Sr. voted instead of John Smith Jr., and the Sr. is dead," he said. "Somebody who lives in Michigan will cast an absentee ballot there, and then vote in person at the precinct near his vacation house in Arizona. Someone will cast a vote for a spouse who died between the time the ballot was mailed and the election deadline."

The conservative Heritage Foundation, which keeps records of voting fraud, found about 1,200 cases dating back to the 1980s. The Heritage database does not include any examples of a concerted effort to use absentee ballot fraud to influence a major election...


-- Backstory: We investigated claims of voter fraud in the election. Here's what we found., by Nicole Carroll, USA TODAY, 11/13/20


President Donald Trump: (20:34)
The media knows this, but they don’t want to report it. In fact, they outright refuse to even cover it, because they know the result if they do. Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged, but that’s okay. I just keep on going forward, because I’m representing 74 million people. And in fact, I’m also representing all of the people that didn’t vote for me. The mail-in voting scam is the latest part of their four year effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election, and it’s been like living in hell. Our opponents have proven many times, again and again, that they will say and do anything to get back into power.

President Donald Trump: (21:28)
The corrupt forces who are registering dead voters and stuffing ballot boxes are the same people who have perpetrated one phony and fraudulent hoax after another. You’ve been watching it now for four years. These entrenched interests oppose our movement, because we put America first. They don’t put America first, and we’re returning power to you the American people. They don’t want America first, they only want power for themselves. They want to make money. That’s why they don’t want me as your president. I’ve been investigated from soon after I announced I was running for president. When I immediately went to number one in the Republican primary polls, the investigations never stopped. They went on for four years, and I won them all, I beat them all. Russia, Russia, Russia, the impeachment hoax, and so much more. Robert Mueller spent $48 million of taxpayer money investigating me for two and a half years, issued over 2,800 subpoenas, executed nearly 500 search warrants, issued 230 orders for communications records, and conducted 500 witness interviews, all looking to take me down. There was no collusion in the end, none whatsoever. Senator Marco Rubio, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, “The committee found no evidence that then candidate Donald Trump, or his campaign, colluded with the Russian government.” And, I thank Senator Rubio for that statement.

President Donald Trump: (23:22)
Now, I hear that these same people that failed to get me in Washington have sent every piece of information to New York, so that they can try to get me there. It’s all been gone over, over and over again. For $48 million you go through tax returns, you go through everything. The New York attorney general, who recently ran for office, campaigned without knowing me, stating, “We will join with law enforcement and other attorneys general across this nation in removing this president from office.” I never met her.

President Donald Trump: (24:03)
“It’s important that everybody understands”, she said, “that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.” And all it’s been is a big investigation in Washington and New York and any place else that can investigate, because that’s what they want to do. They want to take not me, but us down. Then we can never let them do that. Everything has been looked at. A friend of mine, who’s very smart, said, “You’ve probably seen more than anybody else. You’ve probably been investigated more than anybody else. And for you to come out with a clean bill of health makes you probably the cleanest person in this country.”


President Donald Trump: (24:48)
Some people in this administration, but fortunately not all, have been beaten down and disparaged. They just disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Why aren’t they active? Why aren’t they involved? There’s so much to be involved in. The corruption is so rampant. They just couldn’t take it anymore. They were threatened by Democrats with impeachment, and horrible things were said about them. And they’re good people. Even recently, the head of the GSA was hounded and harassed as she reported, like she has never been before. What can I say? We caught Comey cold, we caught McCabe cold. We caught them all. We’re still waiting for a report from a man named Durham, who I have never spoken to, and I have never met. They can go after me before the election as much as they want, but unfortunately Mr. Durham didn’t want to go after these people, or have anything to do with going after them before the election. So who knows if he is ever going to even do a report.

On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall would damage Democrats, including Joe Biden, and help him win reelection. In Trump’s terminology, Durham’s report would reveal an “attempted overthrow” of his administration by Democratic insiders. But Justice Department guidelines restrict prosecutors from taking such actions within 60 days of an election because they might affect the outcome of the election. Both Durham and Dannehy believed that if they complied with Barr’s demands they would be violating this doctrine, according to two people familiar with their thinking.

Durham, who is the U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, and Dannehy were also troubled that Barr had purposely misrepresented their work in numerous public comments, the two people said. According to two sources familiar with the probe, there has been no evidence found, after 18 months of investigation, to support Barr’s claims that Trump was targeted by politically biased Obama officials to prevent his election. (The probe remains ongoing.)
In fact, the sources said, the Durham investigation has so far uncovered no evidence of any wrongdoing by Biden or Barack Obama, or that they were even involved with the Russia investigation. There “was no evidence … not even remotely … indicating Obama or Biden did anything wrong,” as one person put it.

Shortly after the resignation of his prized deputy and with the election looming on the horizon, Durham phoned Barr. He forcefully told the attorney general that his office would not be releasing a report or taking any other significant public actions before Election Day, according to a person with knowledge of the phone call. Dannehy’s resignation constituted an implied but unspoken threat to Barr that Durham or others on his team might resign if the attorney general attempted to force the issue, according to a person familiar with Durham’s thinking.

After hearing from Durham in September, Barr informed the president and allies that there would be no October surprise, causing Trump to lash out. “Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crimes in the history of our country — then we’re going to get little satisfaction unless I win,” he told Fox Business last month. “[These] people should be indicted, this was the greatest political crime in the history of our country. And that includes Obama and it includes Biden.”


The president had been hoping for a repeat of what happened during the 2016 election, when, with just 11 days left, then-FBI director James Comey announced the reopening of the bureau’s Hillary Clinton email investigation. Comey’s decision is widely seen to have hurt Clinton at a crucial moment and helped Trump pull off a come-from-behind victory. For more than a year and a half, Trump believed that Durham’s investigation would confirm the conspiracy theory that the “deep state” — senior officials of the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community — had worked to sabotage his presidency with false accusations that he had colluded with Russia. The Justice Department’s inspector general last year reported finding no “evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions” of the Russia investigators, and so far, the only charge brought by Durham’s office has been against an ex-FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to falsifying an email used to obtain a warrant for electronic surveillance on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

For his part, Barr was hyping what the Durham investigation would find since at least the spring and suggested it would be bad for Democrats. “There is a difference between an abuse of power and a federal crime. Not every abuse of power, no matter how outrageous, is a federal crime,” Barr told reporters in May. “As to President Obama and Vice-President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.” One person familiar with the Durham investigation called Barr’s comments a backhanded attempt to insinuate that Obama and Biden had abused their powers. Barr’s ongoing commentary regarding Durham’s investigation appears to have violated Justice Department policy that officials should “not confirm the existence or otherwise comment about ongoing investigations.”

While discussing Durham’s investigation, Barr’s rhetoric also increasingly paralleled Trump’s. In contrast to the president, Barr delivered his comments in a measured and restrained manner, while Trump’s claims have been coarse and hyperbolic. Barr has suggested that the DOJ and FBI’s investigations of the president was “one of the greatest travesties” in American history and a “bogus scandal,” whereas Trump simply called the investigations a “hoax.” Barr has said the “greatest danger to our free system” is when law enforcement and intelligence agencies try to “affect the outcome of an election.” Trump accused them of an attempted “coup” against him. Barr has said that the “completely bogus narrative” caused by the investigations “was largely fanned and hyped by a completely irresponsible press.” Trump blamed the “fake media,” period.

After hearing there would be no October surprise, Trump excoriated Barr, telling Rush Limbaugh: “I think it’s a terrible thing, and I’ll say it to his face.”


-- How Trump and Barr’s October Surprise Went Bust, by Murray Waas, Intelligencer, Nov 2, 2020


President Donald Trump: (26:11)
But if you look at the lies, and the leaks, and the illegal acts of behavior done by so many people, and their desire to hurt the president of the United States, something should happen. The hardest thing I have to do is explain why nothing is happening with all of these people that got caught spying on my campaign. It’s never happened before and it should never happen again to a president of the United States. All you have to do is watch the hearings and see for yourself. The evidence is overwhelming. The fraud that we’ve collected in recent weeks is overwhelming, having to do with our election. Everyone is saying, ”Wow, the evidence is overwhelming”, when they get to see it. But really, it’s too late to change the course of an election. It’s too late to change the outcome.

President Donald Trump: (27:11)
In fact, there is still plenty of time to certify the correct winner of the election, and that’s what we’re fighting to do. But no matter when it happens, when they see fraud, when they see false votes, and when those votes number far more than is necessary, you can’t let another person steal that election from you. All over the country, people are together in holding up signs, “Stop the steal.” To understand how we will challenge this fraud, it is important to know the problems with mail-in balloting. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and most other states allowed anyone to get an absentee ballot and cast their vote without showing any ID. The voting took place entirely on the honor system. No identification of any kind was required.

President Donald Trump: (28:11)
Most Americans would also be shocked to learn that no state in the country verifies United States citizenship as a condition for voting in federal elections. This is a national disgrace. No other advanced country conducts elections this way. Many European countries have instituted major restrictions on mail-in voting specifically, because they recognize the nearly unlimited potential for fraud. Out of 42 European nations, all but two prohibit absentee ballots entirely for people who reside inside the country, or else they require those who need absentee ballots to show a very, very powerful ID.

President Donald Trump: (28:54)
Throughout the Democrat effort to dramatically expand mail-in voting, the Democrat party leaders were also feverishly working to block measures designed to protect against fraud such as signature verification, residency verification, or voter ID. And citizenship confirmation was almost unthought of that we should ask for it. Can you believe this? These are not the actions of people who want fair elections. These are the actions of people who want to steal elections, who are willing to create fraud. The only conceivable reason why you would block common sense measures to verify legal eligibility for voting is you are trying to encourage, enable, solicit, or carry out fraud.

President Donald Trump: (29:47)
It is important for Americans to understand that these destructive changes to our election laws were not a necessary response to the pandemic. The pandemic simply gave the Democrats an excuse to do what they have been trying to do for many, many years. In fact, the very first bill that house Democrats introduced when Nancy Pelosi became speaker, was an attempt to mandate universal mail-in voting, and eliminate measures such as voter ID, which is so necessary. Dramatically eroding the integrity of our elections was the Democrats number one priority for a simple reason: they wanted to steal the 2020 presidential election. All of the Democrat efforts to expand mail-in balloting laid the groundwork for the systematic and pervasive fraud that occurred in this election.

President Donald Trump: (30:41)
In Pennsylvania, large amounts of mail-in and absentee ballots were processed illegally and in secret, in Philadelphia, in Allegheny counties, without our observers present -- they were not allowed to be present. In fact, they weren’t even allowed in the same room. They were thrown out of the building, and they looked from outside in, but they had no way of even seeing because there were no windows. And the windows that were there were boarded up. Democrats even went to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to block observers from receiving access. There is only one possible reason that the corrupt Democrat political machine would oppose transparency during the vote counting. It’s because they know they are hiding illegal activity. It’s very simple.

President Donald Trump: (31:32)
This is an egregious, inexcusable, and irreversible harm that stains the entire election. Yet this unprecedented practice of excluding our observers, our vote watchers, as some people call them, occurred in Democrat run cities, and key states all across the nation. Here are just some of the additional facts that we’ve uncovered. Many voters all across Pennsylvania received two ballots in the mail, and many others received mail-in ballots for which they never applied. So many get ballots, they didn’t even know what they were for. And again, so many received more than one ballot. In some cases, more than two ballots. And they happened to be, for the most part, Democrats.

President Donald Trump: (32:22)
In Fayette County, Pennsylvania, multiple voters received ballots that were already filled out. They didn’t know what happened.

Quick Take

A false claim circulating on social media alleges that mail-in ballots already filled out with votes for Democrats, including Joe Biden, were sent to voters in a New York City borough. A spokesperson for the New York City Board of Elections told us the ballot that triggered the allegation was the result of a voter’s error.

Full Story

The contretemps began on Oct. 29 with a tweet by Jake Novak, who describes himself on Twitter as a freelance editorial columnist for CNBC.com. Novak said residents of Queens Village, a section of Queens Borough in New York City, “are receiving pre-filled out ballots for Joe Biden and being told to just send them back to the Board of Elections. This is blatantly ILLEGAL.” Twitter tagged the claim as “disputed.”

Novak later posted a video on Twitter in which he displays a ballot that he claims arrived entirely filled-in and another in which he elaborates on what he believes took place. The latter tweet is no longer available.

Among other things, Novak said the circles in the ballot are filled in so perfectly that no human being could have done them and they could only have been done by a machine.

Novak’s original tweet was retweeted on Oct. 30 by Eric Trump, one of President Donald Trump’s sons. The president has repeatedly and falsely claimed that vote fraud is widespread because of mail-in ballots.

The false claim also found its way onto Facebook.


The New York City Board of Elections disputed Novak’s allegation in a pair of tweets on Oct. 30. In one tweet, the board challenged the notion that the ballot brandished by Novak had not been filled out by hand. In the other, the board said it had tracked down the voter who had received the mail-in ballot and the voter had in fact received a blank ballot.

In one of his videos, Novak said he had been in touch with a Queens Village resident who had received the filled-in ballot. He said the ballot had been addressed to someone who hadn’t lived at the address for eight months. Novak said his tipster didn’t want to be identified because he had voted for past Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton but this time planned to vote for Trump, rather than Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

In his original tweet, Novak said “residents” had been receiving filled-in ballots but he backed away from the plural in the video. While saying the way the ballot he had seen was filled in suggested it was “mass produced,” he said he did not know for sure that others had received filled-in ballots.

Novak said he suspected Democrats were behind the pre-marked ballot but didn’t know for sure and was continuing to investigate.

Novak, who also lists himself on Twitter as the “creator of @Varneyco on @FOXBusiness” and a former “Executive Producer of the #KudlowReport,” said he wouldn’t provide the identity of his tipster to other news outlets because he didn’t want to give away his story. (“The Kudlow Report” was a CNBC program hosted by Larry Kudlow, now director of Trump’s National Economic Council.)

We asked Novak to put us in touch with the person or persons who had received filled-in ballots and for elaboration on why he thought the ballot could not have been filled in by a person. He did not do so.

But according to the New York City Board of Elections, there is a simple explanation for what happened, and it doesn’t involve anything nefarious. We reached Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, the board’s director of communications and public affairs, and she described what had happened in a telephone interview.

In Novak’s video of the ballot, the voter ID number is clear. According to Vazquez-Diaz, election officials tracked down the voter who had requested the absentee ballot in California. The voter reported receiving a blank ballot, filling it out and depositing it at a mail box in the Golden State.

The problem arose because the voter put the ballot into the oath envelope, which is supposed to go inside an outer envelope to be mailed to election officials. But the voter instead placed the oath envelope into the mail box. The only address on the oath envelope is the voter’s, so that’s where it was returned.


Vazquez-Diaz said officials had no idea how the envelope made its way into the hands of Novak’s tipster.

But as for Novak’s tweets, she said they were “inaccurate.”

-- False Claim About ‘Pre-Filled Out Ballots’ in Queens, by Rem Rieder and Angelo Fichera, 10/31/20


In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a poll watcher overheard unregistered voters being told to return later to try to vote under a different name. Tens of thousands of voters across Pennsylvania were treated differently based on whether they were Republicans or Democrats. Voters who submitted floored ballots in some Democrat precincts were notified and asked to fix their ballots, while Republican precincts, and in particular Republican voters, were not so notified, which plainly violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. ”If you are a Democrat, we’re going to fix up your ballot, make sure it’s perfect. If you are Republican, don’t even talk about it.”

President Donald Trump: (33:16)
In Michigan, a career employee of the city of Detroit with the city workers, coaching voters to vote straight Democrat while accompanying them to watch who they were voting for, violating the law and the sanctity of the secret ballot. You can’t do that. The same workers say she was instructed not to ask for any ID, and not to attempt to validate any signatures. She was also told to illegally backdate ballots, many, many ballots, received after the deadline. This is something that is so unconstitutional, and she estimates that thousands and thousands of ballots were improperly backdated by her and many others.

The Postal Service’s inspector general informed Congress on Tuesday that a worker who had made unfounded allegations of ballot corruption inside a facility in Erie, Pa., had disavowed his claims, which Republicans had amplified to suggest there was widespread fraud in Pennsylvania’s voting.

Richard Hopkins, a post office employee in Erie, “completely” recanted allegations that a supervisor was “tampering with mail-in ballots” after investigators questioned him, the inspector general’s office said, according to the Democratic leadership of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.


Not long after the Democrats’ announcement, Project Veritas — a conservative group that researchers say has engaged in a coordinated disinformation campaign to delegitimize the voting process — released a video in which Mr. Hopkins said that he had not actually recanted his statements.

Mr. Hopkins had claimed in a sworn affidavit given to President Trump’s campaign that he overheard what he believed to be a discussion about the backdating of postmarks on ballots that arrived at the postal facility after Election Day.

Ballots must have been postmarked by Election Day, Nov. 3, to count. The implication of Mr. Hopkins’s claim was that postal workers had backdated ballots that should have been disqualified.

Under Pennsylvania procedures put in place during the coronavirus pandemic, mail-in ballots that arrived at election offices after Election Day have been separated from those that arrived by Nov. 3. They have not been added to the vote tallies for any candidate, and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has won Pennsylvania without them.

Only about 130 mail-in ballots arrived after Election Day out of about 135,000 ballots cast in Erie County, according to Carl Anderson III, the chairman of the county’s board of elections. The post office’s processes “will stand as legitimate under scrutiny,” he said in a statement.

Republicans, eager to find evidence of wrongdoing to bolster Mr. Trump’s fiction that the election was stolen from him, circulated Mr. Hopkins’s affidavit and amplified it.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who has urged Mr. Trump to continue to fight the results of the election, sent Mr. Hopkins’s affidavit to reporters along with a statement that read in part: “I will not allow credible allegations of voting irregularities or misconduct to be swept under the rug.” He later acknowledged in a television interview on Sunday that the claims he circulated were unverified...


-- Postal worker withdraws claim that ballots were backdated in Pennsylvania, officials say, by Luke Broadwater, NYT, 11/10/20


President Donald Trump: (34:05)
Other witnesses in Detroit also saw our election officials counting batches of the same ballots many times, as well as illegally duplicating ballots. One observer testified to seeing boxes and boxes of ballots, all bearing the same signature. Another observer in Detroit gave sworn testimony that he saw countless invalid ballots that did not belong to properly registered voters, and then witnessed election workers in Wayne County entering fake birth dates into the system in order to illegally count them. Witnesses of signed sworn affidavits, so in other words, you go to jail if you lie, testifying that after election officials announced the last absentee votes had been received, a batch of tens of thousands of ballots arrived, many without envelopes, all voting for Democrats.

President Donald Trump: (35:02)
In Wisconsin, a record number of voters were categorized as indefinitely confined, a status reserved for severely disabled individuals, also for the elderly, that allow them to vote without showing ID. Last year approximately 70,000 people claimed this status statewide. This year the number miraculously was nearly 250,000 voters, after election officials in Milwaukee and Dane County, a couple of the most corrupt political places in our country, urged citizens to improperly register under this status. And register they did in levels that don’t exist. In Wisconsin there are approximately 70,000 absentee ballots that do not have matching ballot applications as required by law. In Georgia, nine observers have testified to seeing countless irregular ballots without the creases or typical markings. indicating that the ballots did not arrive in envelopes as required.

President Donald Trump: (36:03)
A poll watcher in Fulton County estimated that approximately 98% of the large number of unusually pristine ballots that she witnessed were for Biden. A highly unusual number. In addition, thousands of uncounted ballots were discovered in Floyd, Fayette, and Walton counties weeks after the election, and these ballots were mostly from Trump voters. They weren’t counted. They were from Trump voters.

Floyd County election officials are acknowledging that 2,500 ballots went uncounted during the 2020 general election.

The additional ballots were determined during a statewide audit of the election results. On Monday the Secretary of State's Office initially reported upwards of 2,600 ballots were discovered.

County election officials released the following statement Tuesday:


We are thankful for the opportunity to perform a hand recount as directed by the Secretary of State. The audit worked exactly as it should have. We determined that there were approximately 2500 additional ballots that had not been counted. On investigation we determined that the discrepancy was caused by a malfunctioning scanner used during early in-person voting at the Administration Building in Rome. That scanner jammed on October 24 and was rendered inoperable. A new scanner was quickly brought in to replace it.

After an unsuccessful attempt to read damaged memory cards it was determined, based upon advice of Dominion IT assistants on site and in accordance with Secretary of State guidance, to rescan all of the ballots cast prior to the scanner malfunctioning.

For reasons we do not yet fully understand, some of those ballots either were not scanned or the scanned ballots were not migrated into the ballots included in the original tally.


All ballots from the Administrative Office early voting box are now being rescanned and tallied in order to verify the audit number. In addition, the voter affidavits of all voters who voted early at the administration office were counted today in order to provide yet another method of verifying the proper total vote count for that box.

Please remember that number may not match the total audit tally exactly. For instance, there would have been votes for unqualified write-in candidates or some who simply did not vote in a particular race.

No one, least of all the Floyd County Board of Elections, is happy with this situation nor satisfied. We intend to review all processes and procedures to understand how the incident with the scanner led to this voting discrepancy. However, we want you to understand: There is no evidence of fraud. There is no evidence of intentional misconduct.

Going forward, it is our job to correct the problem, learn from it and put in redundant processes which will prevent it from happening again. Maintaining electoral integrity, making voting fair and accessible, and doing right by the citizens of Floyd County are paramount concerns for the Board of Elections.


-- Election officials clarify how 2,500 ballots went uncounted in Floyd County, by Angelina Velasquez, 11/17/20
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Part 4 of 4

President Donald Trump: (36:43)
In Detroit, everybody saw the tremendous conflict and the horrible way that the two Republican canvassers were treated so horribly because they wouldn’t vote when they saw that 71% of the precincts didn’t balance. Also, there were more votes than there were voters. Think of that. You had more votes than you had voters. That’s an easy one to figure, and it’s by the thousands.

Weeks after major news outlets called the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden, posts circulating on social media allege that more votes were cast than there are residents in Milwaukee, Wis., Detroit, Mich., Lansing, Mich. and Pittsburgh, Pa. – four blue cities in battleground states that ultimately went to Biden. Offering accurate population estimates but erroneous vote counts, the posts falsely claim extensive voting irregularities despite the Justice Department finding no evidence of widespread fraud in last month’s election...

MILWAUKEE

The posts claim that the city of Milwaukee has 590,157 residents versus 640,768 votes cast there in the 2020 general election, meaning that more than 108% of the population voted. The city is in Milwaukee County, where Biden won 69.1% of the vote (here).

Though the population count is the same as the July 2019 estimate provided here by the U.S. Census Bureau, the 640,768 vote count is not accurate.

As reported here by the City of Milwaukee’s Election Commission, 247,695 voters cast ballots in the Nov. 3 general election. With 315,483 registered voters in the city, the turnout was 78.5%.

Contrary to what the posts claim, 42% of Milwaukee residents voted in the election.


DETROIT

The posts suggest that Detroit, with 672,662 residents and 850,441 votes, had a 126% voter turnout rate. The city of Detroit is located in Wayne County, where Biden won 68.4% of the vote (here).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s July 2019 estimate, the population of Detroit is 670,031 (here). It is possible that the post’s estimate comes from Data Commons, an online open data repository, which says here that Detroit’s 2018 population was 672,662.

As for Detroit’s vote count, the 850,441 is wrong. Official election results provided here by the Detroit Department of Elections state that 257,619 out of 506,305 registered voters cast ballots, making voter turnout 50.9%.

Accordingly, 38% of Detroit’s population voted in the 2020 general election.


LANSING

The posts falsely claim that votes in Lansing exceeded the city’s population by nearly 38,000. Lansing is mostly located in Ingham County, where Biden won 65.2% of the vote (here).

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Lansing’s population to be 118,210 in July 2019 (here), on par with the posts’ 118,427 population figure that likely comes from Data Commons (here).

The vote count of 156,295, however, is nearly triple the real number.

Robin Stites, Election Supervisor at the Lansing City Clerk’s Office, told Reuters via email that voter turnout in the City of Lansing for the Nov. 3 election was 54,045 out of 88,873 registered voters, equivalent to a 60.81% voter turnout rate.

Thus 46% of Lansing’s population voted in the 2020 general election.


PITTSBURGH

Lastly, the post claims that Pittsburgh had 691,434 votes cast, which is more than double its population. The city of Pittsburgh is in Allegheny County, where Biden won 59.4% of the vote (here).

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s July 2019 estimate (here), the population of Pittsburgh is 300,286. The posts’ similar figure of 301,048 matches that of Data Commons (here).

There were 162,719 votes cast in Pittsburgh, not 691,434.

This information can be found on Allegheny County’s official election results page (here) by scrolling down to the “Reports” box on the page’s righthand column and downloading the Excel file “Detail XLS.” In the first tab, labeled “Registered Voters,” you can filter Column A to show only Pittsburgh voting districts (rows 587 through 988), and then find the sum of the cells in Column F.

Similarly, the number of registered voters can be found by filtering to Pittsburgh voting districts and finding the sum of the cells in Column A, which equals 239,845. Accordingly, Pittsburgh experienced 67.84% voter turnout.

About 54% of Pittsburgh’s total population participated in the 2020 general election.

VERDICT

False. Though the posts provide accurate population estimates for Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing and Pittsburgh, the vote counts are incorrect and several times higher than the actual numbers.

-- Fact check: Posts claiming more votes than residents in Milwaukee, Detroit, Lansing and Pittsburgh give incorrect numbers, by Reuters Staff, 12/4/20


In Arizona, in-person voters whose ballots produced error messages from tabulation machines were told to press a button that resulted in their votes not being counted. Also in Arizona, the attorney general announced that mail-in ballots had been stolen from mailboxes and hidden under a rock.

...

Eighteen mail-in ballots were found “hidden under a rock” in Arizona, according to a Nov. 3 press release from the state’s attorney general’s office. But those ballots had not yet been cast.

Katie Conner, a spokesperson for the office, told USA TODAY that the ballots were in their original envelopes and were removed from voters’ mailboxes before they had the chance to fill them out. The ballots were sealed, according to the release.

The ballots were found by a man named Brayan Ruiz, who was working in the area on Oct. 30, according to a video on the Glendale Police Department’s Facebook. Ruiz said in the video that when he found the ballots, he took a picture before returning them to Glendale Police. That picture is included in the press release and is the same image in the Instagram post.

Officer Tiffany Ngalula, a spokesperson for the Glendale Police Department, told USA TODAY that it appears all the ballots were mailed to voters on the same day and the thief went mailbox to mailbox, grabbing all available ballots over the span of a few blocks. She added that none of the voters appeared to be missing any mail other than their ballots.

The next day, Oct. 31, all 18 of the ballots were “hand-delivered” to the voters from whom they were stolen, Conner said. The video shows two special agents from the attorney general's office and a Glendale police officer delivering the ballots to residents.

“Our agents and Glendale PD officers spent a significant amount of time speaking with residents and delivering the ballots to ensure they could still vote,” she said...

-- Fact check: Post about stolen – and returned – Arizona ballots lacks context, by Ella Lee, USA TODAY, 11/11/20


Invited error is a mistake that the appellant was responsible for. "Under the invited-error doctrine, a party may not make or invite error at trial and then take advantage of the error on appeal." Goodwin v. State, 751 So. 2d 537, 544 n.8 (Fla. 1999). "If the error is 'invited,' or the [appellant] 'opens the door' to the error, the appellate court will not consider the error a basis for reverals .... Indeed, our case law is filled with procedural pitfalls that may preclude an error from being considered on appeal." Id. at 544.

-- Invited Error: An Argument for Appellees, by Robin Bresky, Attorney at Law Magazine, 1/5/17


Trump on ‘counterfeit ballots’

And if foreign countries want to, this is an easy system to break into because they’ll do counterfeit ballots. They’ll do counterfeit ballots by the millions. – Sept. 23, White House meeting with state attorneys general

And, you know, when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others, they will be able to do something here because paper ballots are very simple — whether they counterfeit them, forge them, do whatever you want. It’s a very serious problem. — Sept. 22, remarks to reporters

But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others, be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam. Check it out! – Sept. 17 tweet, in response to Wray’s testimony that day about Russian interference in the 2020 election and resulting in a Twitter warning label (“Learn how voting by mail is safe and secure”)

Unsolicited Ballots are uncontrollable, totally open to ELECTION INTERFERENCE by foreign countries, and will lead to massive chaos and confusion! – Sept. 17 tweet, resulting in a Twitter warning label

The biggest problem we have right now are the ballots. Millions of ballots going out; that’s the biggest problem. When you talk about other countries, whether it’s China, Russia, or many others that get mentioned, they’re in a much better position with these paper ballots to do something than they would ever be under the old system. And that’s our biggest problem.” — Sept. 16, White House briefing...

Trump on ‘unsolicited ballots’

Yeah, I think it’s a better name, Josh, because they said “universal ballots” and they had 15 different names. Didn’t mean — people said, “How does that have to do with being universal?” Unsolicited. Eighty million unsolicited ballots being sent all over the place. — Sept. 23, White House meeting with state attorneys general

We need nine [Supreme Court] justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam; it’s a hoax. … Because what they’re doing is a hoax, with the ballots. They’re sending out tens of millions of ballots, unsolicited — not where they’re being asked, but unsolicited. And that’s a hoax, and you’re going to need to have nine justices. – Sept. 22, speaking to reporters on South Lawn of White House

And when you see them cheating on the other side, I don’t say if, when. When you see them cheating with those ballots, all those unsolicited ballots, those millions of ballots, you see them. Anytime you do, report them to the authorities. – Sept. 21, at a rally in Swanton, Ohio

You have ballots that you go out and you can get, you could request as you know, you can request them and that’s fine. But if you’re not requesting them, when you get millions, about 80 million, they say, all over the United States, where the hell are they going? – Sept. 21, at a rally in Dayton, Ohio

They used to say universal, but nobody knows what that means. Unsolicited, meaning people didn’t solicit these ballots. People are saying, hey, what’s going on? I just got a whole batch of ballots. They have no idea who they’re sending them to. You know they’re sending them to the wrong people. – Sept. 20, “Life, Liberty & Levin” on Fox News

But, uh, so I, I think that, uh, yeah, they’re gonna do something, Dan. Something’s gonna happen, but you know what they’re doing? They’re trying to screw it all up with the ballots. So they have — I guess I’ve heard numbers from 50 to 80 million unsolicited ballots. That’s unsolicited. People aren’t asking for ’em. – Sept. 20, “The Dan Bongino Show”

When you solicit, when you go out — it’s called “absentee” or “solicit.” When you go out and you request a ballot — you want to say, “I want to vote because I can’t be in Florida or I can’t be someplace.” You request. So you’re sending something in, it’s handled professionally, they send it back — it’s a whole thing. That’s much different than “unsolicited,” when you get millions of ballots. I heard numbers like 80 million ballots. – Sept. 18, White House briefing

The big Unsolicited Ballot States should give it up NOW, before it is too late, and ask people to go to the Polling Booths and, like always before, VOTE. Otherwise, MAYHEM!!! Solicited Ballots (absentee) are OK. @foxandfriends — Sept. 17 tweet, resulting in a Twitter warning label

The worst campaign, most dishonest campaign I’ve ever seen, and the ballots, and well you see were that these unsolicited ballots. — Sept. 17, Clay Travis interview

Take a look at what’s happened over the last year with this same kind of thing, except in a very small setting with very few ballots going out, so that’s much easier; not 53 to 80 million going out. — Sept. 16, White House press briefing

The Unsolicited Mail In Ballot Scam is a major threat to our Democracy, & the Democrats know it. Almost all recent elections using this system, even though much smaller & with far fewer Ballots to count, have ended up being a disaster. Large numbers of missing Ballots & Fraud. — Sept. 12 tweet

In the country they’re going to send out 80 million unsolicited, in other words people that don’t even know what a ballot is, all of a sudden here comes the ballot. … A lot of people use the word absentee. Get an absentee ballot where you request it, it comes to you, you vote and you send it back. That’s different. But they’re just sending out — all over they’re sending out 80 million ballots. — Sept. 12, Jeanine Pirro interview on Fox News

They send 80 million ballots out. Where are they going? Who are they sending them to? Are they sending them to certain areas and not other areas? Are they sending them to Democrat areas? These are all controlled by Democrat governors, like your politically motivated governor. … They should make people — if you register, if you want a solicited ballot, that’s where you ask for it. You have to sign papers. You get it ’cause you can’t be there. That’s one thing. When they sent 80 million ballots to people, they have no idea where they’re going. – Sept. 12, at a rally in Minden, Nevada

Sending out 80 MILLION BALLOTS to people who aren’t even asking for a Ballot is unfair and a total fraud in the making. Look at what’s going on right now! — Sept. 10 tweet...

-- Trump’s Repeated False Attacks on Mail-In Ballots, by Eugene Kiely and Rem Rieder, Factcheck.org, 9/25/20


President Donald Trump: (37:37)
In Clark County, Nevada, where most of the state’s voters reside, the standards for matching a signature using the signature verification machine were intentionally lowered to allow large numbers of ballots to be counted that otherwise would never have passed muster. This machine was set at the lowest level. According to one report, in order to test the process, nine voters in Clark County cast ballots with intentionally incorrect signatures, and eight of the nine ballots were accepted and counted. They said you could sign your name as Santa Claus, and it would be accepted. Last week, the Clark County Commission threw out the results of a local election after the registrar reported finding, “discrepancies that we can’t explain.”

Clark County commissioners have certified all the results of the general election — except in the race for the commission seat representing District C, where ballot discrepancies outnumber Democrat Ross Miller’s 10-vote victory and a special election will be held.

Clark County Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria reported to the commission on Monday that there were 139 ballot discrepancies in District C, and Miller defeated Republican opponent Stavros Anthony by only 10 votes out of 153,162 cast. As a result of the discrepancies, the commission voted not to certify the District C results and instead call Gloria back to its first December meeting to present a plan for a special election....

Discrepancies in ballot counts can occur when the number of voter check-ins at a voting site does not match the number of ballots cast at that site, when voters attempt to vote twice, and because of assorted mail ballot issues.

President Donald Trump tweeted about the decision Monday afternoon, saying that “large scale voter discrepancy” showed that officials “do not have confidence” in election security. However, Joe Gloria stated at Monday’s meeting that discrepancies occur in every election.

“There’s no election that goes without discrepancies that are identified,” Gloria said. “In particular, this time, with such a large mail ballot number, that number that I’ve identified is in the thousandths of percent.”

The 936 discrepancies make up .096 percent of total ballots cast in Clark County in this year’s election.

Anthony has been vocally supportive of Trump in the past, but Anthony’s campaign manager, Lisa Mayo-DeRiso, distanced the campaign from the president’s comments on Monday evening, telling The Nevada Independent that Anthony’s campaign “has never subscribed to the conspiracy side of that” with regard to the discrepancies.

“What we’ve consistently talked about is human error,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re counting ballots or making pizzas, there’s going to be errors.”...


-- Clark County calls for re-vote in commission race decided by 10 ballots; discrepancies outnumber victory margin, by Kristyn Leonard, thenevadaindependent, 11/16/20


Also in Nevada, some voters were entered into a raffle for more than a dozen gift cards worth as much as $250 if they could prove they had voted. This took place on Indian reservations.

The Nevada Native Vote Project posted photos on Facebook on Election Day of smiling voters holding $25 gift cards after handing over their ballots.

The posts have since been deleted but not before they were archived. The removal may have had something to do with the U.S. criminal code, two distinct sections of which impose fines and prison sentences for “whoever makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote.”

Offering gift cards for ballots was not the only way the Nevada Native Vote Project enticed people to vote. In a video that still appeared on Facebook on Nov. 24, Bethany Sam, the public relations officer for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, urged people to come out and vote by offering “some extra swag that we can give out.”

“We have twenty-five $25 dollar gift cards to raffle off so that’s a lot of money in cash here. We have also four $100 gift cards to give away, so again you want to make sure to get out here and vote. And then, we have four $250 gift cards to raffle. And our grand prize is going to be a $500 Visa gift card to the person or native voters who came out early this week early voting,” Sam said, adding that voters need only send a photo of themselves at the polling place to enter....

Sam noted that the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket. She then turned the camera to Arlan Melendez, chairman of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony that describes itself as a “sovereign Indian nation” with a Tribal Council that “carries the same unique powers and duties as any city council, county commission, or legislative government across the United States.”

“I think the Biden-Harris campaign is supporting tribal sovereignty,” Melendez said before urging people to come out to vote.

There are an estimated 60,000 registered Native Indian voters in Nevada. In a video filmed on Election Day, Sam encouraged natives to vote because Nevada is a swing state.

“I also want you to know that we do have a raffle going on whether you’re early voting or you vote today during the Election Day,” Sam said, instructing people to enter the draw by sending her a screenshot of their cast ballot from a ballot-tracking website or a photo of themselves with an “I Voted” sticker.

The prizes included cash gift cards valued at $250, $100, and $25 as well as T-shirts and beaded items, Sam said. At the end of the video, Sam told viewers to visit the tribe’s voting recommendations page, which advises people to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden...

Sam and her boss, Melendez, did not respond to emailed questions. The office of the Nevada secretary of state, which is charged with supervising state and local elections, did not respond to emailed questions....

Martinez did not respond to a request for comment sent to her Facebook account.

NCAI stands for the National Congress of American Indians. NCAI counts Native Vote as one of its initiatives. According to its website, NCAI is funded in part by taxpayer dollars from the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Small Business Administration.
The NCAI’s list of supporters also includes the Open Society Foundations, which is headed by George Soros, a liberal power donor.

NCAI did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Matt Johnson, who is listed as the NCAI contact for Native Vote, did not respond to a request for comment...

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment. The Federal Elections Commission declined to comment. The Election Assistance Commission did not respond to a request for comment.


-- Illegal Money-for-Votes Raffles Conducted in Several States in 2020 Election, by Ivan Pentchoukov, epochtimes.today


Inherent Sovereign Authority: Indian tribes - as sovereign nations - historically have inherent jurisdictional power over everything occurring within their territory. Tribal courts are courts of general jurisdiction which continue to have broad criminal jurisdiction. Any analysis of tribal criminal jurisdiction should begin with this sovereign authority and determine whether there has been any way in which this broad sovereign authority had been reduced (see below).

Federal or State Concurrent Jurisdiction: Congress has granted limited jurisdictional authority to the federal courts (under the General Crimes Act and the Major Crimes Act) and to state courts (under Public Law 280). It is important, however, to note that tribal courts maintain concurrent (or joint) criminal jurisdiction.


-- General Guide to Criminal Jurisdiction in Indian Country, by Tribal Court Clearinghouse, a project of the tribal Law and Policy Institute


President Donald Trump: (38:42)
One of the most significant indications of widespread fraud is the extraordinarily low rejection rates for mail-in ballots in many key states. These are the states that I had to win. In swing state after swing state, the number of ballots rejected has been dramatically lower than what would have been expected based on prior experience. That means years and years of voting. In Georgia, just 0.2%, that’s substantially less than 1%, of mail-in ballots have been rejected. In other words, almost none have been rejected. They took everything. Nothing was rejected, practically, compared to 6.4% in 2016. There are those that think that 6.4 was a low number.

President Donald Trump: (39:36)
Think of it. Almost none were rejected. The previous election, 6.4% were rejected. We have seen similar declines in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Michigan. Ballots weren’t rejected, especially if they happen to be in Democrat areas. These irregularities are inexplicable unless there is a deliberate effort to accept ineligible ballots or fraudulent ballots.

President Donald Trump: (40:06)
In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state and the state supreme court in essence abolished signature verification requirements just weeks prior to the election, in violation of state law. You’re not allowed to do that. It has to be approved by the legislature. A judge can’t do it. A state can’t do it. An official can’t do it. The only one that can do it is the legislature.

With concerns rising in Pennsylvania that tens of thousands of mail-in ballots will be discarded in the presidential election over technicalities, officials in the presidential battleground told counties they aren’t allowed to reject a ballot solely because an election official believes a signature doesn’t match the one in the voter’s file.

The new guidance from Pennsylvania’s Department of State — that state law does not allow counties to set aside mail-in ballots based on their signature analysis — prompted the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania and the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh to drop a lawsuit in federal court Monday.

The groups had cited the lack of guidance on the subject and sought to ensure that voters have the chance to fix ballots that are flagged for a perceived signature mismatch.

“As a result of this case, Pennsylvania voters can cast their vote without fear that their ballot could be rejected solely because an election official — who isn’t trained in handwriting analysis — thinks their signatures don’t match,” said Mark Gaber, a Campaign Legal Center lawyer who represented the groups in court.

In Pennsylvania’s June 2 primary election alone, when 1.5 million voted by mail, more than 26,000 ballots were rejected, including for “signature-related errors or matters of penmanship,” the lawsuit had said.

One county election director, L. Edward Allison Jr. of Lawrence County, said that the state’s guidance is in line with his county’s practices and that he doubts it will be controversial with counties. One way of fixing it is to contact voters to come in to verify their signature, he said.

“We recognize the fact that, as people age, their signature changes, I know mine has,” Allison said in an interview. “Different medical conditions, strokes, all that kind of stuff enters into it.”

Meanwhile, with seven weeks until the Nov. 3 election, a partisan stalemate in Pennsylvania’s Capitol is holding up legislation to fix glitches and gray areas in the state’s mail-in voting law.

To a great extent, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and the Legislature’s Republican majorities are clashing over how to prevent vast numbers of ballots from being discarded because of technicalities and how to head off the specter of a presidential election result hanging in limbo on a drawn-out vote count and legal fight in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court may rule in lawsuits on some of the outstanding issues, but Wolf, at a news conference on Tuesday in York, pressed lawmakers anew to act on changes he is seeking.

Republicans have said any changes must ensure the election is secure. Democrats accuse Republicans of pursuing voter suppression tactics, including trying to outlaw drop boxes and satellite election offices that Democrat-heavy counties in southeastern Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, are planning to use.

To help count mail-in ballots quickly after polls close, Wolf wants to give counties up to three weeks before Election Day to start processing them, instead of the three days favored by Republicans.

To ensure fewer mail-in ballots are discarded, Wolf wants to require counties to count mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day, provided they are postmarked before polls close. Republicans oppose that and would rather move the deadline by which voters can request a mail-in ballot, from a week before the election to 15 days before, to leave more time for voters to return it.

Without an agreement on legislation, “we really do risk becoming Florida in 2000,” state Rep. Kevin Boyle, D-Philadelphia, said.

A 2019 state law greatly expanded access to mail-in balloting in Pennsylvania and, fueled by concerns over the pandemic, more than 3 million voters are expected to cast ballots by mail in the Nov. 3 election.

That’s more than 10 times the number who voted by mail in Pennsylvania in 2016′s election when President Donald Trump’s 44,000-vote victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania helped propel him to the White House.

So far, nearly 1.9 million people have applied for a mail-in or absentee ballot, Wolf’s top elections official, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, said Tuesday.

For now, counties are still awaiting one court decision before they can get ballots printed and send them to voters who applied for a mail-in ballot.

In that case before the state Supreme Court, Democrats are trying to keep the Green Party’s presidential candidate off the Nov. 3 ballot.


-- Pennsylvania: Mail ballots can’t be discarded over signature, by Marc Levy, 9/15/20


Mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania can't be challenged or thrown out based on whether the voter's signature on the outer envelope matches what's on their voter registration, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The high court said in its unanimous ruling that the state Election Code had no specific language directing county election officials to compare signatures when verifying a voter's eligibility, and noted that revisions to the code over the years had actually cut out a signature comparison requirement back when mail-in ballots only applied to military members serving away from their homes.

"We draw two inferences from this early history. First, the Legislature understands how to craft language requiring signature comparisons at canvassing when it chooses to do so, as it did in 1937. Second, in the 1937 code, the Legislature drew a clear distinction between assessing the sufficiency of the ballot affidavit … and a comparison of the ballot signature," Justice Debra Todd wrote for the court. "The Legislature having subsequently stripped out the signature comparison language from the code, we ought not to construe, as intervenors suggest, the remaining sufficiency determination as incorporating a signature comparison."

The court granted a request from Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar for a declaration that signature comparisons were not necessary, over arguments from intervenors, including President Donald Trump's reelection campaign, that signature comparison was a necessary part of determining if a voter was who they said they were.

A federal lawsuit from the League of Women Voters had sought to bar counties from doing signature comparisons, arguing that signatures can naturally change over time and therefore the comparisons posed a risk that legitimate votes could be thrown out based on a mismatch. That suit was dropped after Boockvar issued guidelines in September that said counties couldn't toss ballots based on signatures.

In its own federal suit, the Trump campaign wanted the court to make signature comparisons a requirement for the precanvassing process, when election officers look at voters' declarations on the outer envelope of their mail-in ballots to verify the voters' identities and eligibility to vote, before opening the outer envelope and sending the inner envelope and the ballot within it to be counted.

Boockvar asked the justices to weigh in on the state Election Code, and the federal judge tossed the campaign's lawsuit Oct. 10.


The justices said Friday that in other areas of the Election Code not pertaining to mail-in ballots, the state Legislature had clearly indicated when signatures should be compared to state records and when they could be challenged based on those signatures, including when someone signs in to vote in person, or when they submit a provisional ballot.

But the Legislature removed the signature requirement for military voters' mail-in ballots in 1945, expanded mail-in voting in 2019 by eliminating the requirement that voters swear they are unable to vote in person, and made further accommodations in 2020 for the COVID-19 pandemic and eliminated all time-of-canvassing challenges.

"Presumably, in expanding voting by mail, the Legislature sought to streamline the process for canvassing such ballots, perhaps to avoid undermining the expansion effort by eliminating the prospect that voters — including a potentially large number of new mail-in voters — would be brought before the board or the courts to answer third-party challenges," the opinion said.

"Intervenors would have us interpret the Election Code, which now does not provide for time-of-canvassing ballot challenges, and which never allowed for signature challenges, as both requiring signature comparisons at canvassing, and allowing for challenges on that basis," the justices said. "We reject this invitation."

The justices also noted that the recent changes to the law had affected what went into the "registered absentee and mail-in voters file," which the intervenors had alleged that election officials were supposed to compare to the ballot signatures. The Legislature had cut out the requirement that the file contain copies of voter registration records with the voters' earlier signatures, the opinion said.

"It seems this file, previously utilized, is now a virtually empty relic," the opinion said. "The only informational remnant in the file, if it is still being maintained, is … a voter's absentee and mail-in ballot application number to be entered in the file. Manifestly, there is no present requirement that the file contain the type of signature information necessary to perform the signature comparison intervenors contend is mandatory."


Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office helped represent the state, hailed the ruling as a win for voters.

"Voters who use a mail-in ballot have their identity verified in the initial application, often using a drivers' license number," he said in a statement. "Pennsylvania's voter identification system is safe and secure. We are protecting every eligible vote and ensuring each is counted."

Boockvar also lauded the ruling, sending a tweet that said it was a "Huge victory for free and fair elections in Pennsylvania! And on my birthday no less!"

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.

"Secretary Boockvar's work to undermine the security features embedded in our Election Code is ongoing. People voting in person are now being held to a higher standard than those who mail in their ballots," said state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, a Republican who had filed an amicus brief in the case siding with the Trump campaign, in a statement. "Never did we contemplate that Secretary Boockvar would interpret the statute in a way which would result in signatures required on the mail-in ballots being meaningless."

The Pennsylvania Department of State and Boockvar are represented by Daniel T. Donovan, Susan Davies, Michael Glick, Sara Shaw Tatum, Madelyn Morris and Kristen Bokhan of Kirkland & Ellis LLP; Daniel T. Brier, Donna A. Walsh and John B. Dempsey of Myers Brier & Kelly LLP; Timothy E. Gates and Kathleen M. Kotula of the State Department's Office of Chief Counsel; Kenneth L. Joel and M. Abbegael Giunta of the Governor's Office of General Counsel; and Josh Shapiro, Karen M. Romano, Keli M. Neary, Howard G. Hopkirk, Nicole Boland and Stephen Moniak of the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are represented by Ronald L. Hicks Jr., Jeremy A. Mercer and Russell D. Giancola of Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP and Matthew Morgan and Justin R. Clark of Elections LLC.

The case is In re: November 3, 2020 General Election, case number 149 MM 2020, before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

-- Pa. Justices Say Signatures Alone Can't Disqualify Ballots, by Matthew Santoni, Law360, 10/23/20


President Donald Trump: (40:33)
The reason for this is clear. They were not verifying signatures because they know the ballots have not been filled out by the voters in whose names they were cast. In other words, people filled them out that had nothing to do with the names on the ballot. A simple recount of the ballots under these circumstances only compounds the fraud. The only way to determine whether there was an honest vote is to conduct a full review of the envelopes in the relevant states. You will find that many of them, tens of thousands, have fraudulent signatures. A full forensic audit is required to ensure that only legal ballots from lawfully registered voters that were properly cast are included in the final count.

President Donald Trump: (41:25)
This election is about great voter fraud, fraud that has never been seen like this before. It’s about poll watchers who were not allowed to watch. So illegal. It’s about ballots that poured in, and nobody but a few knew where they came from. They were counted, and they weren’t for me. It’s about big leads on election night, tremendous leads, leads where I was being congratulated for a decisive easy victory. All of a sudden by morning, or a couple of days later, those leads rapidly evaporated. It’s about numbers of ballots that were sent that nobody knows where they came from. It’s about machinery that was defective, machinery that was stopped during certain parts of the evening, miraculously to open with more votes.

President Donald Trump: (42:24)
It was about many other things, but above all, it was about fraud. This election was rigged. Everybody knows it. I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people. That’s what we’re fighting for. We have no choice to be doing that. We already have the proof. We already have the evidence, and it’s very clear. Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say, “You’re right.” Our country needs somebody to say, “You’re right.”

President Donald Trump: (43:12)
Ultimately, I am prepared to accept any accurate election result, and I hope that Joe Biden is as well. We already have the proof. We already have tens of thousands of ballots more than we need to overturn all of these states that we’re talking about. This is an election for the highest office in the greatest country in the history of the world. Every reasonable American should be able to agree, based on what we have already documented, that we need a systematic analysis of the mail-in ballots to review the envelopes. It’s about the signature. If they’re on the envelopes, we can only review the envelopes, and that will tell us everything.

President Donald Trump: (44:01)
This is the absolute minimum we should expect. This is not just about my campaign, although it has a lot to do with who’s going to be your next president. This is about restoring faith and confidence in American elections. This is about our democracy and the sacred rights that generations of Americans have fought, bled, and died to secure. Nothing is more urgent or more important. The only ballots that should count in this election are those cast by eligible voters who are citizens of our country, residents of the states in which they voted, and who cast their ballots in a lawful manner before the legal deadline.

President Donald Trump: (44:43)
Moreover, we must never again have an election in which there is not a reliable and transparent system to verify the eligibility, identity, and residency of every single person who casts a ballot, a very, very cherished ballot. Many very smart people have congratulated me on all we’ve done: the biggest tax cuts in history, regulation cuts, the biggest in history. We rebuilt our military. We took care of our vets like never before, Space Force, and so much more. Then they went on to say, as big and as important as these events were, the single greatest achievement in your presidency will be exactly what you’re doing right now: voter integrity for our nation. It’s more important than any of the things that we discussed.

President Donald Trump: (45:40)
If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore. With the resolve and support of the American people, we will restore honesty and integrity to our elections. We will restore trust in our system of government. Thank you. God bless you. God bless America.
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Re: Our Man in London: The Scandal of the 35-Page ‘Intellige

Postby admin » Tue Dec 22, 2020 1:54 am

Trump downplays government hack after Pompeo blames it on Russia: Secretary of state is first in administration to point to Russia but Trump attacks media over reports
What we know – and still don’t – about the cyber-attack
by Martin Pengelly in New York and agencies @MartinPengelly
theguardian.com
Sat 19 Dec 2020 13.35 EST First published on Sat 19 Dec 2020 09.20 EST

Not long after Mike Pompeo became the first member of the Trump administration to blame Russia for wide-ranging hacks of US government agencies and private companies which have sent Washington scrambling to fill the breach, the president sought to play the hack down.

In response, one senior congressional Democrat accused Trump of “another scandalous betrayal of our national security”.

“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” Trump tweeted on Saturday morning. “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because [US media] is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!)”

The hack targeted widely used software made by SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based company. On Friday night, speaking to the rightwing talk radio host Mark Levin, Pompeo placed blame squarely on Russia.

“This was a very significant effort,” he said. “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

Regardless, Trump chose to tag his secretary of state and director of national intelligence John Ratcliffe in another tweet that contained another baseless claim of electoral fraud in the presidential contest he lost to Joe Biden, but which he has not conceded.

“There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election,” Trump wrote, “which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA.”

At the same time, the New York Times reported that at the White House on Friday, Trump suggested installing the attorney and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating voter fraud. Citing two anonymous sources, the Times said aides including Rudy Giuliani, who has led attempts to overturn the election result, pushed back on the idea.

Regarding the SolarWinds hack and Trump’s attempt to play down links to Russia, Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House intelligence committee and led impeachment proceedings against Trump, said: “Another day, another scandalous betrayal of our national security by this president.

“Another dishonest tweet that sounds like it could have been written in the Kremlin. Another obsequious display towards Putin.
And yet another reason that Trump can’t leave office fast enough.”

Pompeo did not immediately respond to being undercut by his boss. But in speaking to Levin, he said: “I’m sure some of it will remain classified. But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of US government systems and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well.”

The Kremlin denies involvement.

On Saturday, a security research blog by Microsoft said a second hacking group, different from the suspected Russian team, also targeted SolarWinds products.

“The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor,” the blog said.


A SolarWinds spokesman told Reuters: “It remains early days of the investigation.”

Earlier this week, as security teams attempted to limit damage from the hacks, critics pressed for Trump to speak out.

Speaking to SiriusXM radio, the Utah Republican senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney said: “What I find most astonishing is that a cyber hack of this nature is really the modern equivalent of, almost, Russian bombers reportedly flying undetected over the entire country.

“In this setting, not to have the White House aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action is really, really quite extraordinary.”


Asked about Romney’s remarks, Pompeo said: “I saw this in my time running the world’s premier espionage service at the CIA. There are many things that you’d very much love to say, ‘Boy, I’m going to call that out,’ but a wiser course of action to protect the American people is to calmly go about your business and defend freedom.”

US-Russia ties have been strained by issues ranging from conflicts in Syria and Ukraine to allegations of interference in US politics, specifically the 2016 election and in favour of Trump, which Moscow also denies. At a news conference on Thursday, Vladimir Putin said he hoped Biden would help resolve some issues in relations between Moscow and Washington.

The state department said on Saturday the US was halting work at consulates in Vladivostock and Yekaterinburg, citing safety and security issues at facilities where operations had been curtailed because of Covid-19. The decision did not affect Russian consulates in the US, the department said, but the closures will leave the embassy in Moscow as the last US diplomatic mission in Russia. It is unclear if the closures will happen before 20 January, when Biden takes office.

Speaking to Levin, Pompeo said: “We have lots of folks that want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles. Russia is certainly on that list … You see the news of the day with respect to their efforts in the cyber space. We’ve seen this for an awfully long time, using asymmetric capabilities to try and put themselves in a place where they can impose costs on the United States.

“So yes, Vladimir Putin remains a real risk to those of us who love freedom.”
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