The Pieces of Trump’s Election Subversion Conspiracy Come Together, From Antrim County To Arizona

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Ahead of the next chapter in the Arizona Senate’s shameful GQP sham “fraudit” this Friday afternoon in the Senate chamber comes this reporting about the predecessor GQP sham “fraudit” in Antrim County, Michigan, and howit is tied to the the Arizona Senate’s GQP sham “fraudit.” Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, and other GQP legislators, are part of this massive GQP election subversion and seditious conspiracy, and should be investigated as co-conspirators.

The Washington Post reports, Giuliani asked Michigan prosecutor to give voting machines to Trump team:

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In the weeks after the 2020 election, Rudolph W. Giuliani and other legal advisers to President Donald Trump asked a Republican prosecutor in northern Michigan to get his county’s voting machines and pass them to Trump’s team, the prosecutor told The Washington Post.

Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter said in an interview that Giuliani and several colleagues made the request during a telephone call after the county initially misreported its election results. The inaccurate tallies meant that Joe Biden appeared to have beaten Trump by 3,000 votes in a Republican stronghold, an error that soon placed Antrim at the center of false claims by Trump that the election had been stolen.

Rossiter said he declined. “I said, ‘I can’t just say: give them here.’ We don’t have that magical power to just demand things as prosecutors. You need probable cause.” Even if he had had sufficient grounds to take the machines as evidence, Rossiter said, he could not have released them to outsiders or a party with an interest in the matter.

Legal scholars said it was unusual and inappropriate for a president’s representatives to make such a request of a local prosecutor. “I never expected in my life I’d get a call like this,” Rossiter said.

Giuliani’s team called Rossiter around Nov. 20, 2020, Rossiter said, as it worked to overturn Trump’s defeat to Biden. The direct appeal to a local law enforcement official was part of a broader effort by Trump’s allies to access voting machines in an attempt to prove that the election had been stolen. That effort extended to a recently disclosed draft executive order for Trump’s signature to have National Guard troops seize machines across the nation.

A Post examination found that the call to Rossiter was also part of a behind-the-scenes intervention by Trump’s legal team in Antrim that seized on the county’s election night blunder and helped twist the mistake into supposed proof of a vast conspiracy to rig the election.A review commissioned by state officials later found that the election night error was largely the result of officials’ failure to properly update machines that scan and count paper ballots following a last-minute change to ballots in several precincts. This led to inaccurate vote tallies in the county’s initial results.

After addressing the mistakes in the days that followed, officials announced that Trump had in fact beaten Biden by more than 3,000 votes, a result that was confirmed by a hand recount of the paper ballots marked by voters. The county clerk, Sheryl Guy, later said in a report that the error was an honest mistake that she “owned, acknowledged and accepted.”

But as Trump’s advisers searched for evidence to support his false claims that the election had been stolen, they focused on Antrim. Having unsuccessfully pressed Rossiter and another county official for access to the voting machines, they supported an election lawsuit brought by local Realtor William Bailey, who won a court order granting him access to the machines from a judge who had recently donated to Trump’s campaign.

A purported “forensic report” produced for Bailey’s lawsuit, created by a team that his attorney later described in a podcast interview as “forensic scientists and data collection scientists,” claimed that data gathered from Antrim’s machines provided evidence of sweeping fraud. The machines — made by Dominion Voting Systems, which had become a focus of election conspiracy theories — were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to manipulate votes, the report said. Experts have called that conclusion false and the report critically flawed.

The 23-page report was produced by a team that included Phil Waldron, the pro-Trump retired army colonel now best known for circulating a PowerPoint presentation before Jan. 6 that said troops could seize ballots. The report was signed by Russell J. Ramsland Jr., a conservative activist who has claimed since 2018 that elections were compromised and leads the Texas-based company Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG).

The analysts who examined Antrim’s machines for ASOG were accompanied by Katherine Friess, a former Republican Senate counsel who was working with Giuliani on Trump’s legal effort, the Traverse City Record-Eagle first reported. They made two visits to municipal offices in Antrim to inspect voting machine data, arriving on private planes provided by Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock chief executive, Byrne told The Post. Byrne, who was deeply involved in efforts to prove the election was stolen, described himself as part of an independent team that gave assistance to Giuliani and others.

The ASOG report was released to the public via a Dec. 14 court order, as electoral college members met to cast their presidential votes in state capitols. Alongside the report, Bailey’s attorney submitted an affidavit to court from a former engineering professor who raised additional concerns about voting machines. The metadata of a version of the affidavit posted to the attorney’s website lists Friess as the creator of the document the previous month.

When the ASOG report was made public, Giuliani issued a news release calling it “nothing short of mind-blowing.” The evidence of fraud it presented, he claimed, was “undisputable” and reason for state lawmakers to “halt any further approval of presidential electors until all of these machines have been seized for auditing and analysis.” The news release was authored by Friess, according to the metadata of a copy  posted online that day by a TV news station in Michigan.

The report ASOG produced for DePerno’s lawsuit made its way to the highest levels of government. On the day of its public release, Trump’s assistant emailed a copy of it to Jeffrey Rosen, the deputy to Attorney General William P. Barr, with the subject line: “From POTUS,” records released by the Senate show. Also attached to the email were talking points calling the report “evidence of intentional fraud” and claiming “Michigan cannot certify for Biden.”

On that same day, Trump tweeted that Barr, who had publicly challenged Trump’s claims about election fraud, would resign.

The next day, Dec. 15, Trump called a meeting with Rosen, soon to replace Barr at the helm of the Department of Justice, and Richard Donoghue, who would become Rosen’s deputy. The president brought up ASOG’s report, Donoghue later said in a deposition with Senate investigators. “He said something to the effect of, you know, ‘Have you guys seen this report? This is unbelievable. This is a disaster.’ ” Donoghue said he and Rosen mollified Trump by explaining that a hand recount was planned and would shed light on whether the alleged problem in Antrim was real.

[T]he claims about Antrim were eventually presented as a key justification for the draft executive order for troops to seize machines. Trump cited the case of Antrim in his speech on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.

On Dec. 16, an as-yet-unidentified person drafted the executive order that would have authorized U.S. troops to seize voting machines and appointed a special counsel to oversee the effort. The draft order’s second paragraph said ASOG’s Antrim report, “prepared by experts,” helped provide “evidence of international and foreign interference” that justified drastic action. The never-issued executive order, first reported by Politico, was among documents the National Archives gave to the House Jan. 6 committee.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security officials studied the Antrim claims at Barr’s request, preparing a “white paper” that said its key claims lacked merit and briefing Barr and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the Senate records show. On Dec. 20, Barr announced there was no basis for seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel.

* * *

Rossiter said Friess called him and placed him on speakerphone, where she was joined by Giuliani, Byrne and former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik.

Told of Rossiter’s account, Byrne said the official explanation for Antrim’s election night error had not allayed local suspicions. “Six thousand votes being shifted is all the probable cause that guy needed to demand that someone independent inspect those machines,” he said.

Rossiter and James Janisse, who was the top detective in the Antrim County Sheriff’s Office until he retired last summer, told The Post that they did investigate an allegation of fraud filed by Bailey. The detective and prosecutor said they interviewed Bailey and county officials and reviewed ASOG’s report, but their inquiries concluded with no charges.

Guy, the county clerk, told The Post that Antrim was being exploited to “terrorize the country with doubt” over the electoral process. “Nobody cares about what really happened. They are simply using us for their agenda,” said Guy, a Republican.

Michigan’s Secretary of State, Jocelyn Benson (D), last month urged the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to examine whether Trump or his campaign directed the creation of the Antrim report to justify seizing voting machines.

The false allegations about Antrim have endured since the Capitol riot, helping to power an ongoing movement to rehash the 2020 election with partisan ballot reviews, most notably in Maricopa County, Ariz. The claims have also infected debates about election integrity in communities far from Michigan, records from other states show, making “Antrim” a byword for election fraud among many Republicans.

The Detroit News reported in June 2021, Michigan Senate finds no voter fraud:

A long-awaited report on the 2020 election from a GOP-controlled Michigan Senate committee recommended that Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel consider investigating individuals who pushed false claims “to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”

The suggestion was among the most striking details of the Senate Oversight Committee’s recap of a months-long examination of the presidential election. The report was released Wednesday with its main author, Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, saying he found “no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud,” contradicting months of assertions from some members of his own party, including former President Donald Trump.

“The committee finds those promoting Antrim County as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election place all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility,” the report said.

The following month, Michigan Attorney General Nessel to investigate false claims about election:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office has agreed to investigate individuals who’ve pushed false claims about the 2020 election to raise money or publicity for themselves.

The GOP-controlled state Senate Oversight Committee recommended the probe as part of its wide-ranging report on the election, which debuted in June. The Republican lawmakers behind the document, including Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, found no evidence to prove “significant acts of fraud” in the vote and suggested Nessel, a Democrat, look into those spreading false assertions.

“After reviewing the report in full, the department has accepted Sen. McBroom and the committee’s request to investigate,” said Lynsey Mukomel, Nessel’s press secretary.

The Michigan State Police are assisting with the investigation, Mukomel said.

Politico adds addtitional details. Read the emails showing Trump allies’ connections to voting machine seizure push:

Leaked emails obtained by POLITICO reveal the connection of two outside Trump allies — Washington lawyer Katherine Friess and Texas entrepreneur Russell Ramsland — to the failed push to seize voting machines as part of a desperate bid to overturn the 2020 election.

The emails show then-President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and another former military officer workshopping the draft of a Trump executive order to seize voting machines. The emails between Flynn, retired Army Col. Phil Waldron and others provide new details about the events that preceded the assault on the Capitol last Jan. 6.

It is unclear if the Capitol riot select committee has obtained the emails. POLITICO is publishing them here, solely redacting the senders’ and recipients’ email addresses. We are also publishing two draft versions of the executive order that would have directed authorities to seize voting equipment. CBS News previously reported on the contents of the emails and published one of the drafts.

All three emails were sent to multiple people, including Friess, who appears to have lobbied for a variety of clients, including groups linked to Puerto Rico and the telecommunications industry. Friess’ visibility into the efforts to overturn the election results on Trump’s behalf has drawn comparatively little scrutiny. She did not respond to requests for comment. Ramsland, Waldron, Flynn and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani — also a central player in the election subversion effort — also did not respond to requests for comment.

Inside the emails

Waldron — who has said he worked on secret projects in Afghanistan and Iraq with Flynn — sent the first email on Dec. 16, 2020, at 5:14 p.m. to Friess, Flynn and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Waldron’s email included a draft executive order directing the Pentagon to seize voting machines.

“Per conversation,” Waldron wrote. “This is the final draft document. For discussion and coordination”

“PRE-DECISIONAL,” he added.

That document is nearly identical to a draft executive order the National Archives has shared with the Jan. 6 committee, and that POLITICO published last month. Metadata on the document says it was created by a user named Christina Bobb, and later updated by an unnamed person. A One America News anchor by that name was involved in Giuliani’s work for Trump, and previously worked in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration.

The Washington Post reported that Bobb was on at least one conference call about setting up alternate slates of electors for the Jan. 6 certification vote, and that she was at the Willard hotel “command center” that Trump’s allies used as a home base to coordinate efforts to overturn the election. The emails did not cast light on Bobb’s ties to the draft executive order beyond her name’s appearance in the metadata, and she did not respond to requests for comment.

[T]he email traffic came at a sensitive moment for Trump allies’ push to keep him in office despite his loss to President Joe Biden. Two days after the first email, dated Dec. 16, 2020, Flynn and others held an Oval Office meeting with Trump to press for drastic action to keep his baseless election challenges alive. The New York Times reported that voting machine seizures were discussed at that meeting.

Another email appears to be a forward of a message from Ramsland, a Texas businessman who — according to The Washington Post — pushed a company called Allied Security Operations Group into “a quixotic attempt” to find proof of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. State-level officials as well as Trump’s own former attorney general have said no fraud occurred that could have changed the outcome.

Ramsland’s forwarded message included three attachments: a draft of an executive order to have the Department of Homeland Security seize voting machines, a draft document that appears to be intended to justify law enforcement officers obtaining warrants to seize those machines, and Ramsland’s public key — in other words, his digital fingerprint used in encrypting ProtonMail messages.

Ramsland’s message was sent on Dec. 17 at 8:44 a.m.

Two minutes later, Waldron forwarded it to Kerik, Friess, and Giuliani.

“Final draft finding – includes DHS switch language as well as Foreign interference expansion and warrant issuance language,” Waldron wrote.

The first two pages of the DHS version of the executive order are virtually identical to those of the Pentagon document. But its final page details a plan for DHS to seize voting machines.

That draft says the Homeland Security secretary “shall seize, collect, preserve, protect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records” required under a federal statute that governs the preservation of election records.

It also says the Homeland Security secretary can “determine the interdiction” of other election materials, “including hardware, software, documentation, ballots, key cards and any other physical items to include security badges, polling official rosters, and related items.”

It adds that the DHS secretary and subordinates shall have the power to immediately seek “the issuance of any and all search warrants” they need.

And it says the DHS secretary can ask the secretary of Defense “to provide select personnel/capabilities (federalization of appropriate National Guard assets authorized)” to support “a Defense Support of Civil Authorities mission.” Those missions have previously included support to civilian agencies handling natural disasters, presidential inaugurations, and oil spills, according to the Congressional Research Service.

It’s not clear what expectations the order’s authors had for the National Guard. CNN first reported the existence of a draft order that would have had DHS seize voting machines.

‘Half-baked nonsense’

Chris Krebs, a former top DHS official who defended the election’s integrity and was subsequently fired by Trump, told POLITICO that the draft order was a mess.

“This draft executive order is more of the same sloppy, half-baked nonsense written by someone with only a Facebook Groups-level understanding of government authorities, capabilities, and responsibilities,” he said. “That it may have made its way to the Resolute Desk is hard to comprehend, and we should all be thankful that some sane person somewhere near the Oval Office killed this thing.”

A second document attached to the Ramsland email contained a variety of outlandish allegations involving Saddam Hussein, the Saudi Binladin Group, and Pakistan’s intelligence service. POLITICO has chosen not to publish the document.

Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Kerik, provided the following statement: “Members of the legal team were exploring various options to preserve evidence to ensure that the vote count was accurate. As with any legal team, various theories are considered and ultimately not followed.”

The draft executive orders cite an Antrim County, Mich., “forensic report” as evidence of significant voter fraud, but allegations from that report have been thoroughly rebutted. Ramsland wrote that report and co-founded a company called Allied Security Operations Group, according to The Washington Examiner.

Friess, who is listed as a recipient on all three emails, sought access to Michigan voting machines in November 2020 and told election officials in Antrim County that she worked on a forensics team for ASOG, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported at the time. That paper said she flew in by chartered jet on Nov. 27, and told officials that she had dined with Trump and Giuliani the night before. Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne told The Washington Post that he paid for the travel.

Friess’ group “made calls to township people on Thanksgiving Day to set all this up, they were strong-arming local clerks to get in and see those machines,” said Antrim County Clerk Sheryl Guy, according to the paper.

The Washington Post previously detailed how Ramsland pushed conspiracy theories about voting machines for years before the 2020 election. Friess and Ramsland were both on an email first reported by Rolling Stone that Waldron sent to a Arizona state lawmaker on Dec. 8, 2020, including what he called a “research document.”

Earlier from Rolling Stone: Start the Steal: New MAGA Emails Reveal Plot to Hand Arizona to Trump:

[The] scheme to subvert the election outcome in Arizona is laid out in newly released emails obtained by Rolling Stone. Sent in early December 2020, the emails cover a critical moment when the post-election push by Trump and Republican allies to find fraud and overturn the presidential election was in full swing.

The emails show how a group of fringe election sleuths pressed state legislators on a plan to disrupt the 2020 election certification and potentially change the vote count in a battleground state that helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency. The emails also reveal that several Trump advisers, including campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis and legal adviser Bernie Kerik, were included in the discussion.

while the Trump campaign knew about this plotting, it was the obscure investigators and researchers, the emails show, who made the case directly to Arizona legislators about how to find supposed fraud and potentially use that evidence to challenge the outcome. Those outside investigators remain active in the growing movement to find fraud in the 2020 election. What’s more, one state lawmaker included on the emails, Mark Finchem, is now running for secretary of state in Arizona. If Finchem wins, he would oversee Arizona’s elections.

Most of the new emails — first obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight and provided to Rolling Stone — were written by a man named Phil Waldron. A retired Army colonel who owns a bar and distillery outside of Austin, Texas, Waldron is emblematic of the crew of self-styled investigators and researchers that have emerged in the last 18 months to spout convoluted and sometimes easily debunked theories about election fraud. Waldron, who says he worked in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service and had ties to former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, is part of a small group of military veterans who have argued that Chinese Communist Party front groups, Venezuelans, and voting-machine companies have all contributed to vote-rigging and election fraud.

Waldron would go on to write a PowerPoint presentation titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” that described a number of ways to try to stop the certification of Biden’s election victory. Waldron and his associates sent the document to multiple people, and it ultimately ended up in the inbox of White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. (A lawyer for Meadows said he didn’t act on it. Waldron did not respond to a request for comment.)

[A]ccording to the newly obtained emails, Waldron contacted multiple Arizona Republican lawmakers in early December 2020 about his strategy for identifying fraudulent votes. At the time, Republican legislators faced tremendous pressure from party activists and from President Trump to find evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election. Trump criticized Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, for rebuffing the fraud claims and certifying Biden’s victory in the state. “Why is he rushing to put a Democrat in office, especially when so many horrible things concerning voter fraud are being revealed at the hearing going on right now,” Trump tweeted in late November 2020.

State House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, refused to bow to Trump’s demands that Arizona reverse its decision to certify Biden as the state’s victor and instead deliver the state’s 11 electoral vote to Trump. “I voted for President Trump and worked hard to reelect him,” Bowers said in a statement. “But I cannot and will not entertain a suggestion that we violate current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”

But behind the scenes, as the emails show, other Republicans were discussing plans with outside activists about to challenge the outcome.

In one email, on Dec. 8, Waldron sent some of his team’s research to Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem. A diehard Trump supporter and onetime member of the Oath Keepers militia, Finchem had amplified fraud claims during the 2020 campaign. Waldron included Trump aides Ellis and Kerik on that email. He also added what appears to be an email address for another Trump legal team volunteer who has received less scrutiny, a lawyer and one-time lobbyist named Katherine Friess.

When Trump allies pursued claims of fraud in a northern Michigan county — claims later proven to be false — Friess was one of a group of Republican lawyers who traveled to Michigan in a charter jet in late November 2020, according to reporting in the Traverse City Record Eagle. Friess reportedly bragged to local election officials that she had dined with President Trump the night before she flew to northern Michigan’s Antrim County.

Friess’ name also appeared on the cover sheet of a “report” that Trump’s legal team provided to [Mchigan] state lawmakers in early December. The report claims that Dominion Voting Systems’s software contained “glitches” that led to “thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count.” (Dominion has refuted all such claims about its hardware and software, and sued multiple lawyers and media outlets for spreading them.) Friess has claimed she had nothing to do with the report.)

Yet another person on Waldron’s Dec. 8 email was Russ Ramsland, a self-appointed election sleuth who has spread multiple election-related conspiracy theories and made fraud allegations that were later debunked.

That same day, Waldron wrote to Arizona state Sen. Sonny Borrelli, a Republican. “We have the capability to identify fraudulent ballots via optical scanning technology,” Waldron wrote. The gist of his plan, Waldron wrote, was this: “This will allow us to pull invalid votes out of the totals ‘By Candidate’ so that your state can certify normal elections and potentially not have to take extra legislative action.”

Sen. Borrelli forwarded this message to every Republican in the Arizona Senate, emails show.

Three days later, on Dec. 11, Waldron wrote to three Arizona Republican lawmakers: Borrelli, Finchem, and Sen. Eddie Farnsworth, a Republican who chaired the judiciary committee. This time, Waldron included hundreds of pages of supporting documents purporting to describe how proprietary technology could be used to detect “kinetic markers” like folds and creases on ballots or the lack thereof, which in turn could be used to identify ballots that were “fraudulent or were not cast by a voter,” according to an attached affidavit. The documents also included operating manuals for hardware produced by Dominion Voting Systems.

[A] few days after receiving Waldron’s Dec. 11 email, Sen. Farnsworth announced he planned to subpoena information about Maricopa County’s software and hardware provided by Dominion. He said too many questions had been raised about the integrity of Arizona’s election, and the investigation was a way to “try and see if we can reinsert some confidence in our election process.”

Sen. Borrelli, another recipient of Waldron’s emails, said the operating manual for Dominion’s equipment laid out how “data can be changed and votes switched around,” adding, “Nothing’s 100 percent secure. If people want to cheat they’re going to cheat.” (Farnsworth and Borrelli did not respond to requests for comment.)

The Arizona Senate would go on to order a hand-counted audit of more than 2 million ballots cast in Maricopa County in 2020. That supposed audit violated multiple best practices and procedures for handling ballots, cost millions of dollars, and reaffirmed Biden’s victory. Still, election-law experts say no matter the audit’s outcome, it also served to further undermine trust in the last election and supply a pretext for legal and legislative changes in the future.

Bill Gates, the Maricopa Board of Supervisors chairman, says he believes the sham audit demanded by Arizona Republicans was in part fueled by the discredited claims of people like Waldron. “These are the people the Arizona state senate relied on in pursuing this effort, which has now been thoroughly discredited, wasted millions of dollars, wasted time, and accomplished nothing other than sowing doubt about our electoral system,” he says. “These people were the ones pushing it. They were the ones some of our Republican state senators listened to.”

Everyone involved needs to be charged and prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspirscy to commit election fraud, and for being co-conspirators in a seditous conspiracy, which would disqualify them from serving in any public office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Our partisan hack Attorney General Mark Brnovich aka “Nunchucks” (or is it numbnuts?) is not going to do it because he is engaged in a politically motivated coverup to protect his fellow Republicans in this massive conspiracy.

The media should be asking the new U.S. Attotney for the District of Arizona, Gary M. Restaino, Joe Biden’s appointee, what he and the Deparment of Justice intend to do to investigate, charge and prosecute this massive GQP conspiracy.





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