A fitting metaphor
Mayor Giuliani, however, never became my lawyer, and I will not be so constrained in my accounts, as my ultimate purpose (my only real purpose), is to deliver to the public as honest a rendering as I may construct of the events between November 3 and January 6. It seems like a historically worthy thing to do.
For my part, though they thought of me as an entrepreneur, I introduced myself to them as the proprietor of this website, Deepcapture.com. I pointed out that back in 2008 it had won numerous awards for its business investigative journalism, and had also been voted the best journalism regarding corruption within the United States. I may have done other things in life but in addition, I'm a journalist, and I have the rights any journalist has. This means I can investigate what I want to investigate, I don't have to reveal how I learn things, and if I feel like sharing some of my findings with lawyers like Sidney and Rudy, it is no different than the dozens of other times this website has investigated things and shared its findings with lawyers, or even with law enforcement.
© Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty ImagesSidney Powell speaking during a press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington on Nov. 19, 2020.
Sidney was in touch with people from the earliest days of the creation of these systems, and soon she showed me that her information covered a portion of the narrative about which we had some knowledge but not much (mostly concerning the origin of the machines and their reason for certain design flaws). On the other hand, as we ran through what my side of the table had already teased out of the data in the days since the election, she showed she understood what we were saying, and we quickly tied things into what she already knew. It was a highly-productive first conversation, and she ended it by telling me that I needed to go to the other side of the office, find Rudy Giuliani, and immediately tell him everything I had just shared with her.
© Fox NewsRudy Giuliani on Fox and Friends
I should explain what I expected to find. I expected to find a command post staffed by lawyers and quants. The quants would be doing the statistical work, driving answers that would feed lawyers being notified of the research into such irregularities as I have walked through previously, and would be availing themselves of whatever remedies the law surely provided. I figured there would be a war-board, with the states in question having boxed out all relevant data, progress, and to-do's. There would be an information loop, obviously, such that the campaign headquarters in each state would be on a daily conference call to receive updates on progress. Thinking that may be a fair bit for one 76-year-old gentleman to manage, I imagined Rudy might have some strong COO, perhaps a lawyer, or perhaps an executive, who might be keeping assignments on track.
What I found is this:
The place was 20% empty, and another 30% were packing out their desks.
One conference room held a large number of lawyers around a table. At least 3 of them were good. These lawyers were the mules of the operation. They were each assigned one or more states. Yet there were things going on at the state level or below, bubbling up organically, and local lawyers jumping in filing actions. I came to learn that between Rudy's legal team and the campaign staff there was 0 communication, even though they jointly occupied 2/3 of an office story. And between the campaign staff and the activities of those local groups and their lawyers, there was also 0 communication. I did not know if that was for a legal reason or just the way they operated. In time, I came to realize it was the latter.
The Mediocrity - I am not going to be mean about it. For example, I am not going to reveal the gender or other details about this person (other than to say, imagine a person who is a lawyer and who had once made a career at one of the better-known government agencies). But given how the Mediocrity went out-of-way to be horrible to work with, and because of how stunningly destructive Mediocrity's behavior was, I am simply to refer to the person as, "Mediocrity".
The Commish - Think of Mike, from Breaking Bad. The quintessential cop. Tough, correct, and courteous, but stays poker-faced and dead-eyed at all times. Sits in meetings with his hand casually covering his mouth, saying nothing. When asked something, might open his mouth, and if he does he invariably has something highly intelligent to say. Making one wonder, "Why does he work so hard to keep his opinion to himself?"
Mike, from Breaking Bad.
I do remember something from the Q&A that day that impressed me. A question on abortion came from the staunchly pro-life crowd. Rudy answered the questioner's thrust, "No, I'll never support a law that criminalizes abortion for the woman. Laws on abortion have always been directed at the activities of the doctors, not the mothers. I'll never put a woman in jail for having an abortion. If that is what you folks are looking for, I'm not your man." He lost 2/3 of the audience in that moment, but gained the respect of 1/3, among them, myself, if only out of respect for such rare directness from a politician.
* * * * * *
So 12 years later, on a Friday afternoon at about 3 PM, I walked into the office space that was being shared by the Trump campaign and by the law firm that was forming up around Rudy Giuliani to investigate, address, and challenge, the election irregularities which were surfacing from the 2020 election.
It was nothing like the outfit that I expected to find (explained above), with data-gathering feeding decision-making feeding information loops to keep a large and geographically distributed workforce operating successfully. Law firms are notoriously poorly-managed businesses, in any case, they truly are, but the law firm-campaign space that had taken shape within that office was a particular shit-show. People wandered vaguely from meeting to meeting. The meetings I saw were run like bull sessions, with no agenda, no format, and no apparent sense of urgency.
Within about 45 minutes I was ushered to a room where I was to have 30 minutes with Rudy. Physically he was more of a grandfather than I had remembered, a bit less robust, a bit more hunched, and a bit more irascible. I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math Ph.D. Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories regarding porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. As I spoke he occasionally grunted stoically, and it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. After about 10 minutes Rudy started checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat together. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.
Eventually, I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, and gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for one's 76-year-old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts, and typing responses.... Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office.... Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to determine, someone rushed in with some unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.
Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up their desks into bankers' boxes. I was perplexed and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall when I heard Rudy's familiar voice saying, "...don't understand a goddamn thing this guy's saying..." drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.
Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.. A one-pager.
Another piped up, And bulletpoints. The Mayor likes bulletpoints!
Another added, but with graphs and data.
But no more than one page! Repeated the first.
At the risk of sounding snobbish, I was insulted by Mediocrity and these 20-something staffers giving me writing advice, and such asinine advice at that. I told them I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I requested one favor: any other requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my colleagues, and that way we would have structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.
Then I left and drove back to DC. Within a few hours, I learned that there were three different open requests from three different people on Rudy's team to various of my colleagues. One of Rudy's people was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type... And the shit-show began.
I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three smart, competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in-and-out). And there was a supermodel pretty 21-year-old acting as a senior assistant (at first I thought, "That's not a good look on you, Rudy", but it turned out she was extremely competent and professional, perhaps the most of anyone there). Yet the atmosphere was one of despair, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.
From occasional contacts with several of those staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had happened just before I arrived that first day. Rudy had declared, "You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!" and had insisted that it was not going to be part of their legal strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: "This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14 Amendment."
So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a blow-up between Rudy and Sidney Powell, ending with Rudy shouting at Sidney and sending her away in front of an office of dozens of people. And declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his mule-lawyers to work on procedural filings.
Later, a member of Rudy's team told me that initially, Rudy had not even wanted to do that much. He had wanted to make three more-or-less token challenges in three states, then call it a day. Sidney's insistence that he was missing the Big Picture had caused Rudy ultimately to relent and allow a more aggressive posture to be taken. But still, nothing was to be about election fraud and the possibility of a mass rigging of the election. Rudy could tolerate hearing about a couple of hundred dead people in Philadelphia voting, but he did not want to hear about anything more sophisticated than that.
That Friday afternoon, November 6, the first time I arrived there just days after the election, I had, in fact, stumbled in on Sidney just as she was recovering from that exchange. And Sidney had sent me to talk to Rudy because she needed someone else to explain what she was herself just realizing: a new form of election fraud had emerged that was not about hundreds of dead people voting in some city but was about the possibility of several hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into each of several certain locations. Rudy had just not been processing any of it from her, and probably did no better from me, and that was why he kept trying to talk with me about how Joe Frazier (1944- 2011) was still voting in Philadelphia.
Over that weekend, Sidney sent a brilliant female junior attorney over to sit with me and a few of the dolphin-speakers (a name I use for the cyber-heads who enjoy geeking-out to each other in technical acronyms). That junior lawyer had anticipated staying 30 minutes, but after an hour and a half she went into the next room and called Sidney. I overheard her tell Sidney that we had the goods, or at least a well-developed understanding of what had gone on in various states, and even specific counties.
From that point forward our relationship with Sidney was perfect. As we researched and discovered things, we brought them to her and her staff, and they would listen closely, patiently, and ask intelligent questions. And they began incorporating the material into their pleadings.
That being the case, I will say no more about how Sidney and I worked.
* * * * * *
Mark Twain once ended a long letter to a friend by writing, "If I'd had more time I would have written you a shorter letter." In those two days after meeting the Mayor in his offices, I had time, and by Sunday afternoon I was putting the finishing touches on the most simplified one-page account that I could possibly create. My aim was to pare the story down until this time the Mayor could not lose the forest for the trees, and the Mayor would grasp the entire narrative in one succinct one-page bullet point read. At that point, once he understood the Big Picture, we could begin diving in on each of the sub-claims: data would be gathered, affidavits taken, and so on. But to begin with, Rudy needed to read and absorb a one-page briefing (in fact it was about 80% of a page), into which I had distilled the research of about a half-dozen different people who had been working down a half-dozen different alleys. It was as pure a distillate as could be achieved if I say so myself. I included a second page of one graph, concerning one state, backing up a claim made in that one-page narrative: once Rudy grasped that, I figured, once we agreed where we were, I would then supplement with additional graphs for each of the other relevant states. Affidavits that were being gathered would be adduced to document each of the other points made. And so on and so forth. But this time we were going to crawl, walk, run.
Sunday evening I got a phone call at 11 PM, telling me Mayor Giuliani and his entourage were dining in such-and-such a Georgetown restaurant, and would I mind bringing what I had written over to them. I got dressed and went, but when I arrived his security told me to sit in the bar and wait. I did for 45 minutes until someone came out of the Mayor's private dining room to tell me the Mayor asked that I not come back to his table (security was concerned about me, apparently), but asked me to simply send into the private dining room the paper I had written. I sent it in, then left.
Later, people in that room told me what happened when my paper arrived.
First, in the 90 minutes between 11:30 PM and 1 AM, Mayor Giuliani imbibed three triple scotches on ice. Those relating this story could not vouch for what he had drunk before 11:30.
Second, in front of everyone, Rudy took my paper and read it for perhaps 45 seconds, then put it aside saying, "I'll get to this later."
Third, the Mediocrity was at the table. The Mediocrity picked up the one-pager Rudy had set down, and holding it between fingers like it was a turd, announced with a laugh, "Can you believe Byrne worked all weekend and this is all he wrote?"
Nine hours later, Monday morning at 10 AM, Rudy Giuliani took the stage at a joint press conference held with Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellison. Rudy was meant to give a synopsis of where things stood, and then introduce Sidney Powell, who was going to discuss the possibility of mass election fraud on a scale no one was yet comprehending. That it was not about a couple hundred dead people voting here, or a few hundred illegals voting there, but about something deeper, systemic..... Unprecedented.
Instead of sticking to the plan, Rudy Giuliani got carried away, and huffed and puffed his way around the stage for 40 minutes about how many hundreds of dead people had voted here and how illegal people had voted there..... And Joe Frazier still voted! As he worked himself up like Grandpa, repeating all the same points he had been making for days, hair die ran down both sides of his face, unnoticed.
Nine hours earlier, he had had nine shots of whiskey in under 90 minutes.
* * * * * *
Another story that came to me from those times within Rudy's offices: One Pennsylvania lawyer, a female, had taken on the job of a filing in Pennsylvania. She received a message from opposing Kirkland & Ellis counsel that was so threatening, so unprofessional, that Kirkland later had to withdraw from the case. Shaken, the female Pennsylvania lawyer turned in a draft filing but withdrew her representation. Rudy had had to find a firm, overnight, that would finish the Pennsylvania filing. He finally found a lawyer in Texas with election experience who finished it and got it filed in Pennsylvania. It made no mention of election fraud and was instead focused on the procedural Equal Protection arguments. Rudy only read it on his way traveling to the Pennsylvania court where he was to defend it: upon reading it, he apparently told his companions, This is the worst piece of shit filing I've ever had to stand up in a courtroom and defend. He went into that Pennsylvania courtroom and was destroyed. Here is a partial transcript:
Matthew W. Brann, U.S. District Judge: So it's correct to say then that you're not alleging fraud in the amended complaint?* * * * * *
Rudy Giuliani: No, your honor, it does not, because we incorporate by reference in 150 all of the allegations that precede it, which include a long explanation of a fraudulent, fraudulent process, a planned fraudulent process.
Judge: I understand that. So the amended complaint, does the amended complaint plead fraud with particularity?
Rudy: No, your honor, and it doesn't plead fraud. It pleads the, it pleads the plan, the scheme that we lay out in 132 to 149 without characterizing."
SOURCE: audio clip
We got a call from Rudy's team that we needed to have a set of computer forensic specialists down in Georgia the following morning. They would be provided access to a set of voting machines they could "exploit". The licensed and certified computer forensic people in question demanded answers, such as, Where are the machines? What kinds of machines are they? Tampering and playing around with election equipment being a federal felony, under what legal authority will we be operating? Will there be law enforcement there to review and document all actions taken, for any chain-of-evidence questions that might later arise?
The response from Rudy's team was, "We've got all that covered. Get down to Georgia, stat!"
With misgivings, I caused the requisite people to fly into Georgia from various locations. They were driven to a precinct where, it turned out, someone had indeed vaguely promised that access would be given to machines.... But that person was not there that day. Or had changed his mind. The dolphin-speakers sat around then were driven to another precinct where, this time, they were told there would be someone with a court order granting them access to certain machines. No such person was there, but a group of hostile county employees was. Again they sat around waiting for Rudy's lawyers to arrange paperwork, but nothing arrived. After hours of waiting in the parking lot, in the early evening, they drove away, and as they sat at a traffic light a half-mile down the street they saw 17 police cars, lightbars flashing, go rolling by to the building they had just left. My cyber-buddies quickly and safely returned to their respective homes.
* * * * * *
Over the next month and a half, a number of my colleagues interacted with Rudy from time to time, afternoons and evenings, and weekends. Nearly all mentioned two things: the inordinate amount of attention he was paying to his daily podcast, and his drinking. His own staffers were bringing it up to us. Something was clear to all who were around him: almost every evening, and many early afternoons, Rudy was shit-faced. That, and his podcasts, were the only guarantees in Rudy's life.
* * * * * *
Let me move on, and instead, describe what I have only previously hinted at. In the days after the election people were getting in contact from all over the country. Often, there were networks of people in various states, self-organizing and diving in on various aspects of the rig: what people had experienced in polling stations, what they had been told, what polling observers had experienced. These people sent delegations to find me. Soon there were witnesses to various events flying in, along with the "leaders" of networks who had found me. I was deluged with offers of assistance: volunteers from all over the country, many with backgrounds in law enforcement and military, were getting in touch through the grapevine and asking to be allowed to help in any way. It felt like anyone with half a brain could see the Rig, the telling patterns. None wanted to be paid, though at the expense of DeepCapture I would fly people to see other people and put them up in hotels to get debriefed.
So in that first week after the election, I was fashioning ... exactly what I expected to find in Rudy's office. An "operation," of some kind. We had the cyber-guys already, and quants, before November 3. But by a few days after the election, we had so many witnesses and whistleblowers and people with relevant stories seeking us out, and so many were flying to DC to find me, that we had to set up operations in hotels scattered around the city. From our volunteers with a background as military officers, we found our debriefers and created a system where they were privately and professionally meeting with the whistleblowers and witnesses, listening to their stories, and crafting summaries. These were being fed up into a chain of analysts, who were jockeying those pieces together with information coming together from our cyber guys, and other sources, and building a picture of increasing granularity of what had happened on November 3-4.
Somewhere in the months before the election General (ret.) Michael Flynn and I had met telephonically. We had known of each other for many years, as there is a strange connection between us, a deceased man who had played a role in both of our lives decades past. Conversing with Mike was like meeting and speaking with another entrepreneur: we finished each other's sentences and saw what needed to be done almost without conversing. At some point, he arrived on the scene, and I told him in detail about this assemblage of talents that had come together in various ways: the cyber guys, the quants, the flow of witnesses and affiants into our circle, our structure of multiple debriefers, our information flow back up to a circle of analysts putting everything together. I had rough-hewn the whole structure expecting Mike's eventual arrival, with the understanding that when he arrived I would be handing the keys to it over to him. Mike seemed to be pleased with the steps that had been taken thus far, within a week of the election.
I received a request from him to relocate the top of that structure to a location far away from DC, far away from any city, in fact. The information flow that was springing into existence was to come up those networks from around the country, through the capillaries of the debriefers and report writers, and into a central analytic station. I thought of that as "the liver". Mere yards away, there would be an office full of lawyers acting as the legal intake for the information we were pulling up. In short, the structure I had built by instinct, he wanted to be plugged into the lawyers who would be playing the legal chess. We agreed that both Sidney and Rudy would get all output from this structure.
I moved the structure to the location he requested. There was a team of lawyers in place there. However, around them, there were a variety of people with no discernible roles and who gave me the creeps. One ex-Agency female, a large, loud woman, and not a lawyer, suddenly became quite the unbidden organizer. Another participant, a cocky English man with a military background, suddenly announced that he was the gatekeeper between this room and that. It all began giving me quite a nasty feeling. But after only two days I got word from Flynn: things having been stood up and roughed-out as we had agreed (as had seemed obvious to both of us, with barely a need to converse), Flynn called and told me he wanted to fly in and take over, and have me go back to DC to start speaking to the public. We agreed we would cross paths for 30 minutes in a certain location as we switched places
I got ready to leave. I told the cocky British man that I needed him to pass on three key messages to someone I was not going to have a chance to see before leaving. He agreed. I said each one simply, and he nodded curtly after each. When I was done I asked him if he understood. He said casually, "Yep. Got 'em all."
"OK, repeat them back to me," I told him. He stared at me, unblinking. "You say you got them, so repeat them to me." He could come up with nothing. He had not actually listened to a word. I told him to get a pen and paper and make three notes. He did so begrudgingly.
For some reason, I was supposed to take the ex-Agency woman back to DC with me. We drove to the location at which Mike Flynn was arriving. Once there, the female slipped off to the side and told someone that she had learned something that meant she had to stay behind. Flynn arrived, and we had 30 minutes on a tarmac together. We caught up, synched up. I told him that I had misgivings about a British guy who was at the camp, and about the ex-Agency woman who was hovering around me. Then I left.
The next day, back in DC, I received the word: the ex-Agency woman had made up a lie to get permission to stay, but it had all unraveled on her. It had something to do with something I had asked her to do or had asked her not to do, or some research, or something: whatever it was, it was a fabrication (barely a word had passed between us), designed to get herself turned around and reassigned to stay in that operation in the countryside. She was confronted, blubbered, and spilled the beans: she was actually working for someone else, and was supposed to stay down in that operation in the countryside, spying and reporting back. They also confronted the cocky British guy, and though I think he never broke, I am told he was definitely implicated in the minds of everyone there. Security walked both characters off of the premises. After their departure, a device of some kind was found wired in one of the key rooms on the premises.
* * * * * *
Now, this is not to say that all time was being wasted. The structure of information flow I described, the one that had self-organized (and perhaps I had rough-hewn), was taken over by a three-star General who had led a career in Military Intelligence, and he made it far better. Soon it was spitting out refined analyses that began informing and filling up the briefs Sidney Powell was writing. We made sure that everything that was provided was also provided to Rudy.
That is the background to presentations such as the ones I have been referencing. Again, for an excellent example, watch Seth Keshel, here. Seth is a former Army Captain (Intelligence) and played a key role in that structure I just described. Seth is a quirky guy, a poly-sci junky, certainly on the spectrum, and just all about the precinct math. That link goes to a 21-minute video that provides an excellent example of the kinds of work that was being done within the structure that had self-organized, been rough-hewn by me, then received great refinement from Mike Flynn. For a good understanding of the type of work that was being done, you should watch at least a portion of this.
Still, back in DC, rejoined with my cyber-colleagues, we became aware of a disconnect we could not seem to fix. The Mediocrity had evolved into our point of contact with Rudy's team, and nothing seemed to flow well. On November 26, Thanksgiving Day, we were all sitting together in a restaurant in DC, and discussing their problems. Sitting there eating our turkey dinner, they gave me quite an earful. How the Mediocrity was super-controlling about information, plans, access. How the Mediocrity seemed to think they were peons, were telling them, "Go here, go there," with no explanatory information, no sense of "Hey teammates, this is what is going on, and we are going to work on it together!" I had trouble believing the stories they were telling me. Among them were some horrible ones concerning the Mediocrity's proclivity for hitting on people of the opposite gender, and possibly the same gender, in ways that were embarrassing to all present (the Mediocrity had asked one of my colleagues to meet one evening, and when the Mediocrity's hotel door opened the Mediocrity was in underwear, waiting). But now it was boiling over, they said, because they had received an order that they were all to be in Antrim, Michigan in two days. Again, Mediocrity would answer no questions about where exactly they were going, what machines they were expecting to find, under whose authority would they be opening machines and imaging hard drives, even how long would they be there, should they arrange their own rental cars, etc. None of it was explained. The Mediocrity had just sent word to be in such-and-such a place in Michigan, stat!
Then, life being as it is, we looked up, and damned if there wasn't the Mediocrity strolling through the restaurant not far from our table. We caught each other's eye, and soon Mediocrity was coming towards us. Thinking it was a nice opportunity to pour oil on troubled waters, I received Mediocrity gracefully, intending to converse in front of my colleagues civilly, and get things back on track.
Soon, the talk turned to Michigan, and I was asked would I be able to get the right people there at the appointed hour. Thinking I might use it as a moment of management development, I gently suggested, "You know, when we get requests like these, it would be good to be better informed. My colleagues want to know things like, 'Exactly where will they be going? Are the people there going to be cooperative? What kinds of machines might we be exploiting? What legal authority is enabling them to image one of these voting machine hard drives? Are people going to be staying overnight? Will there be rental cars provided?' You know, just the basics before people get thrown on another mission like what happened in Georgia."
"Look," the Mediocrity said, standing over us at late Thanksgiving Dinner. "First, what is your corporate structure?"
We all looked at each other, male and female, 75, Weaponized Autism and others, not previously having given the matter much thought. We were just a bunch of people who had found each other and were trying to expose what looked like a world-historic election fraud together. Finally I said, "Our corporate structure is that we're the Bad News Bears. I'm team coach."
"Ok Patrick," Mediocrity continued. "Here's what's going on. I've told you where you need to be in Michigan on Saturday. Be there. Or tell us you cannot, and we'll find someone who can."
In my astonishment I began to respond, and to my further astonishment, the Mediocrity began speaking over me. "I'm telling you where you need your team to be. If you can't handle it-"
I used something I had not used in a couple decades, something I had seen an economist professor friend do to another professor, a Lefty, who had continuously interrupted him (as Lefties are want to do in place of having good arguments). I just started speaking, "Well it may sound like I was finished speaking but I actually wasn't and while you might think you are going to speak over me actually I am just going to continue talking like this until you shut up and I did not care if it takes all night because I know that it may have sounded like I was finished but actually I wasn't and......" and so on and so forth. Without a break. For about 15 seconds until the Mediocrity got that I was serious, and was just going to continue speaking like that until the Mediocrity shut up. Which eventually the Mediocrity did, looking somewhat astonished, having evidently gotten away with such behavior in decades of federal employment.
At which point I politely said, "Where in the fuck do you get off? We don't work for you. We are volunteers here offering to help you do things you have no clue how to do. Go find someone else anytime you want. The way you people work in this city is astonishing. If you ever try to work at a modern company like Google, or Facebook, your ass will be fired in a New York minute. You suck."
I surprised myself, because I do not normally speak that way to people, but I did that time. Perhaps it was three weeks of frustration boiling over. I told Mediocrity that conversations with Mediocrity were constant games of narcissist deflection, how amateurish Mediocrity was, how anyone walking around saying things like "Either you do this or I find someone who will!" and "Failure is not an option!" is a mediocrity who may have learned management within government but who if ever moved to the private sector would get fired by noon. When making such requests of my colleagues, any competent person would provide relevant information. Fill them in on the mission, let them brainstorm, they'll likely be able to contribute....
I saw Mediocrity was crestfallen, and realizing I had overdone it, I gently escorted Mediocrity away from the table. I tried to soothe things over a bit, and put a nice façade on things, and not leave Mediocrity embarrassed. As we parted, Mediocrity turned to me and said, "Don't worry. I'll be with the President. I'll make sure you get full credit for all of this."
Exasperated, I returned to my seat and friends. Minutes later we saw that Mediocrity had, in fact, been part of a larger party, and walking out with that party was none other than Mayor Giuliani. I quickly sidled up to him. It was about 10:30 PM, his step seemed unsteady, and I went to his elbow like one would escorting an unsteady Grandpa to his taxi. We tried speaking, but he was indistinct. Finally I told him, "Sir, this is not working out well with your colleagues. May I respectfully request a way that I might contact you directly, so we can keep things on better track?" The Mayor pulled out his cell phone and had me take his number.
In that weeks that followed I called and texted that number on at least a half-a-dozen occasions. Not once did Mayor Giuliani ever respond to me.
* * * * * *
Over these weeks I got to know a number of excellent White House staffers. Smart young men and women in their late twenties, generally. Some (but not all) were Trump enthusiasts. They filled me in on details here and there, snippets of what was happening behind the scenes among the campaign, Rudy, and the White House. One evening, once we were close enough, I let down my hair and said, "This is a shit-show. Is this .... normal?" One of the staffers (and mind you, a pro-Trump one) said, "This is it. This is the Trump White House. This is how everything has run for four years."
* * * * * *
The Bad News Bears got where they needed to be in Michigan, when they needed to be there. The Mediocrity was there, along with other lawyers and staff from Rudy's team. They went to the precinct in which they were expected, and like Georgia, it was a bust. The machines were not what we had been led to expect. No real authorities were there, or law enforcement, or warrants: just a mildly cooperative 75 year-old lady working in a public building that had acted as a voting precinct.
While the Mediocrity hung around chatting up county workers of the opposite sex, the dolphin-speakers went to work. It turned out the 75 year-old lady who ran the place had a story about how, on the day after the election, some people from "County" had shown up and instructed her to insert her card and re-run her machine using some different inputs. What she was saying did not make sense, and it was clear that they had taken advantage of an elderly woman who probably does not send her own texts. Finally she mentioned that, unbeknownst to County, she had kept both the paper audit trail of the original run, and the re-run, and had stored them in a closet. Our geeks got excited, and had her bring them out: they unrolled them on a long carpet, and in a few minutes of study, they began finding things. Alarming things.
The Bad News Bears finally got Mediocrity to break away from Coffee-Klatch With The Deputies, and pointed out what they were finding in the paper audit rolls. Finally they suggested, "You are a lawyer, right? Don't you think you should be getting some affidavits here?" Startled, "Oh yes, of course," scrambled Mediocrity, and did so, getting affidavits from the 75 year-old lady and one or two other employees who had useful information.
Those learnings and those affidavits were fed to a Michigan lawyer who was pursuing an own election fraud case in Michigan. Days later a judge read it, and found it alarming enough he gave a court order for a formal exploitation of the Antrim County voting machines. The Bad News Bears returned to Antrim County and this time, with a proper court order in their pocket, they were able to image hard drives, and returned to base camp with those images. By working in staggered shifts around the clock, over the next four days they performed a month's worth of work, first breaking the security on the imaged hard drives, then reconstructing the files, then analyzing them. That was all fed up through the system, and emerged about a week later as an eye-opening report that created a national stir, known as the Antrim County Computer Forensics Report.
Other telling things were happening nationally. Some concerned federal employees had been tracking events in a Western state, and were sure they knew how vote flipping was being done there. The problem is, the relevant judge (a Democrat), when asked to allow inspection, would insist on stalling for a couple days, thus giving time for the opposition to go in and do a "smash-down" (a hacker's term for fixing the evidence after-the-fact, in anticipation of an audit, and making sure everything ticks and ties correctly). But they made a mistake in one location, and their smash-down failed. The data that turned up was so telling, so indicative of fraud, that the lawyers went back to the judge arguing it provided grounds for a far more sweeping order that would let them examine machines across the state. The judge agreed in principle, but suggested that the precinct needed to have its data verified again before he could use its discrepancies to justify such a sweeping order. The concerned federal employees put the location in question under observation, and sure enough, that night there were three cars in the precinct parking lot. They were redoing their smash-down so that this time it would work. The license plates on those cars tracked back to a left-wing union which shows up repeatedly in the background of events of recent months. But in the morning the data was fixed, and no further orders were coming out of that judge.
However, unbeknownst to all, the scientists in question had recovered enough material both to document the original, and the smash-down.
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Meanwhile, back in DC, I was hearing odd things out of Rudy-World. I was hearing that he was getting paid $20,000/week, and there were those claiming he was just mailing things in for that paycheck. However, later it was claimed that he was working for free, and the $20,000/day bill had been a billing error from an uninformed assistant.
More importantly, from others in Rudy-world I began hearing the number "$207 million". The claim was that the Republican Party had raised $207 million to "stop the steal". In one version it grew past $300 million. In one version of the staff rumor, the finger on the button for those millions was a high-level woman at the Republican National Committee. In another version, it was all jointly managed by that RNC woman and the Commish, and they were keeping an eye to the future. In almost everyone's version of the story, $100 million had been set aside for future legal defense. But whoever was in charge, they were sitting on all the money, and I can promise, I never saw one penny of it being spent in any way to "stop the steal".
So whatever Republican loyalists around the country coughed up those hundreds of millions, in donations of $10 and $20.... They were all fleeced. It was a big joke: there was a pot of hundreds of millions of dollars given by Republican rank-and-file to Republican Bigshots to help reverse-engineer and unscramble whatever had happened on November 3, and not a penny was going to any activity related to doing so. It was all being held by people at the top licking their lips.
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In Georgia, there was a faction that had been in touch with me from days after the election. This was an interesting network of people with law enforcement and quasi-law-enforcement backgrounds. Since November 4 they had been reverse-engineering the Rig there. They had put people and locations under observation, had been filming varieties of activities through telephotos. They mapped and tracked numerous parties involved, and even tracked the organizers down to a small element, a Leninist cadre, who were staying in a motel together and managing shenanigans around the state. For their own reasons this network helping me needed to stay in the shadows, yet as the weeks rolled by they were providing good information helping us reconstruct what had happened in Georgia.
The fight there became increasingly surreal. A young man got involved who was both a staffer for a Senator, and dating the daughter of the governor, then his car exploded in an accident (see "BIZARRE EXPLOSION CRASH IN GEORGIA - KILLS HARRISON DEAL" December 5, 2020). It was on a 4-lane highway, it got struck on the side by another car...then it blew up. The engine was thrown 75 yards. Videos of the accident (most of which seem to have been removed from the internet) show a car burning in a fireball: it was quite an ornery car accident.
© WSAV3A campaign staffer of Sen. Kelly Loeffler died in the collision December 4, 2020
A technologist named Jovan Pulitzer (inventor of the ubiquitous QR-code) went public regarding his technologically-oriented investigations into the Georgia election. The best short video of Jovan explaining his work is here:
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Over those weeks, Rudy managed to schedule a few hearings in a few states. His plan had evolved to getting enough evidence in front of state legislatures that they would go off automatic pilot and begin making hard decisions. Most of these hearings were unofficial, conducted out of rented hotel spaces. His star witness was the Colonel from military intelligence with whom I had been working since August, who was brought to these different states to report and synthesize the information that the Bad News Bears were surfacing. He did an able and convincing job, but we all began to wonder: What's the strategy here? Is there a strategy? Rudy's strategy (if there is one) just seems to be a long march through the courts. Taking cases to the states and appellate levels. Imagining he is going to win by running the tables through the court system. Or getting state politicians to do something brave. But that was not going to work, as the courts are ponderous anywhere, especially disinclined to get involved in election matters, and were already setting court dates out past January 20. And politicians do not do brave things. Yet Rudy just kept plodding along, with an occasional hearing, a daily podcast. It did not make any sense.
One activity that began bearing fruit was our investigations into foreign involvement in the election. This will be the subject of a piece of its own.
Mike, Sidney, myself, and others developed a Solution-in-a-Can. It was really the solution we had started within in mid-November, but redone by a top-notch lawyer and a 3-star General. Under various orders signed previously by both Obama and by Trump, if an election had foreign entanglement, the President had a broad spectrum of powers. There was indisputable evidence of foreign involvement on countless fronts, but we were asking that only a narrow set of his powers be invoked: based on the information that had been turned up, the President should use his powers under the requisite Executive Orders to send US Marshalls and the National Guard into the five problematic counties, open up the paper ballot backups, and recount them on livestreamed TV. If there were no big discrepancies, Trump would concede. If there were big discrepancies, such as half-a-million vote discrepancies that we suspected might fall out, then more aggressive courses of action could be countenanced, such as re-rerunning the election in those counties or states. The recount of the five counties could be easily done in under a week, and if it justified further action, the entire resolution could still be achieved on a Constitutional timeline.
It was either that, or an election whose integrity was doubted by 47% of the electorate had to be choked down.
General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President and the whole thing would be set in motion. The teams created from the right military and National Guard Units, the precise directives to each... The most expansive version of the plan had recounting to be conducted in 17 counties around the nation, Democrat and Republican, so no one could claim that targets were cherry-picked (beyond the Problematic 6). That most expansive version of the plan envisioned paper ballot recounting, plus imaging of hard drives of these voting machines for further forensic analysis (but not "seizing" the machines: they were to be left in place, and just have their hard drives imaged). An uber-expansive version of the plan would have had the paper ballots not just recounted, but forensically audited (but we thought that was too much to ask for with the possible exception of Georgia). However, in a pinch, we could hit just the Problematic 6 counties, and even simply recount the boxes of paper ballots, and have a preliminary answer in 2-3 days, thus ending a great deal of national drama. Mike and Sidney had the legal research, the draft finding, the general's Execution Checklist that would, upon Presidential signature, make everything run like a Swiss watch.
And yet, things slid and slid. Rudy went off to organize a hearing in a hotel room and wanting one of our people there to speak.... Days spent waiting for warrants that never came.... Absolutely no sense that there was anyone with a plan, let alone executing one . We saw the Constitutional deadlines beginning to loom...
The days turned into weeks. December came, then mid-December. Yes we had matters spinning in various states, yes we had cyber-teams inspecting packet traffic and finding foreign interactions, yes we were finding that every new voter in Nevada had his or her registration transmitted to Pakistan ISI, yes we were finding vote counting machines with wireless cards in rooms with smart thermostats that had been breached from overseas, yes we were learning why voting rolls were kept live overseas..... But Mike Flynn and I had a sense that our side was chasing its tail. That the other side was just running out the clock. And Rudy's approach would surely allow that.
At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, the Mediocrity and Rudy Giuliani were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year-old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending at least his evenings sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President the cyber-crime of all time and what his options were. At first I thought it was a sick joke, but I confirmed it. The Mayor and the Mediocrity were the ultimate point-people on the mission of addressing this world-historic event.
Flynn and I felt sick. A frequent subject of mutter between us ran along the lines, "Why the fuck are we doing this?" The president's children were off, uninvolved, pep-rallying, or planning retirements. We could detect no discernible strategy out of the President's team, no marching orders, just an organization wandering around in circles and melting as it did so. A Mediocrity who was so bad, we had had to make special arrangements such that the Mediocrity did not have contact with our Bad News Bears, or they were going to flee. And the whole mess was led by a 76 year-old gentleman, a man beloved by all including myself, but who six weeks into what might be the most sophisticated cyber-theft in all of history, still could not have a coherent conversation beyond, Did you hear that 211 dead people in Philadelphia voted? Dead people?!?!? And they voted! Joe Frazier's father voted! Have you heard?!?
And then we would remember why were doing it: America's brand is "elections". It is what we do. We had a national election that appears to have been compromised in a remarkably precise yet strategic way, it shows the hand of foreign involvement, it may be part of a Chinese psyop to take over our country, and there might never be a free, non-goon election in America again. That's why we were not supposed to quit, we often reminded each other.
And that is why, a week before Christmas, General Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and I decided it was time to take a chance. By hook or by crook we were going to Jedi-Mind-Trick our way into the White House, maneuver our way to the Oval Office, and grab the President's attention ourselves. With no invitation.
Patrick Byrne is a concerned citizen who has been hunting the oligarchy and Deep State since 2004
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