What’s Kraken?
A couple of nights ago on Lou Dobbs’s show, President Trump's (and General Michael Flynn’s) lawyer Sidney Powell suggested there was massive fraud in the presidential election vote tabulations. She said she was about to “release the Kraken.” Lin Wood, the other most prominent Trump election counsel, suggested much the same explosion of evidence establishing the presidential vote tabulations were manipulated.
There was a bizarre switch on election eve. As vote counting suddenly and oddly was halted in several key states, the tallies, which had shown that a substantial victory was in the offing for the President, suddenly -- and statistically impossibly -- ran up huge numbers for Biden and away from Trump. This certainly creates an impression that the shift was the result of theft.
Other indications besides the statements of these lawyers (the analyses by statisticians, the hundreds of sworn affidavits by poll watchers) who certainly would not risk their reputations on baseless charges of such significance, suggest that the counting was seriously flawed and likely tampered with.
By whom and how the evidence of it was obtained remains unclear, but as this is likely to be a continuing issue, I’d like to share what I have been able to find through the work of numerous online commenters and researchers .
While you may not agree that President Trump is a strategic genius who sees things far into the future and prepares for all contingencies, it cannot be doubted that two years ago he anticipated foreign interference with our election process and issued in an Executive Order a means to investigate and punish any person, group or country which engaged in such international election fraud.
It’s a lengthy order and I’ll try to note some of the most significant portions of it. It tasks the DNI with preparing a report of the investigative results of such interference no later than 45 days after an election, but specifies:
d) Nothing in this order shall prevent the head of any agency or any other appropriate official from tendering to the President, at any time through an appropriate channel, any analysis, information, assessment, or evaluation of foreign interference in a United States election.
(e) If information indicating that foreign interference in a State, tribal, or local election within the United States has occurred is identified, it may be included, as appropriate, in the assessment mandated by section 1(a) of this order or in the report mandated by section 1(b) of this order, or submitted to the President in an independent report. [Emphasis added]
Sec. 2. (a) All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any foreign person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of Homeland Security:
(i) to have directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in a United States election;
(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any activity described in subsection (a) (i) of this section or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property or interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
Sec. 7. (a) Any transaction that evades or avoids, has the purpose of evading or avoiding, causes a violation of, or attempts to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
(b) Any conspiracy formed to violate any of the prohibitions set forth in this order is prohibited.
(c) the term “United States person” means any United States citizen, permanent resident alien, entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States (including foreign branches), or any person (including a foreign person) in the United States;
(d) the term “election infrastructure” means information and communications technology and systems used by or on behalf of the Federal Government or a State or local government in managing the election process, including voter registration databases, voting machines, voting tabulation equipment, and equipment for the secure transmission of election results;
(e) the term “United States election” means any election for Federal office held on, or after, the date of this order;
(f) the term “foreign interference,” with respect to an election, includes any covert, fraudulent, deceptive, or unlawful actions or attempted actions of a foreign government, or of any person acting as an agent of or on behalf of a foreign government, undertaken with the purpose or effect of influencing, undermining confidence in, or altering the result or reported result of, the election, or undermining public confidence in election processes or institutions
Did this Executive Order set in place a means to investigate computer manipulation overseas to affect our election and did such an investigation reveal that this occurred and significantly affected the election in several key states? If so, the reported results must be amended substantially to discard the false count, or other measures taken to prevent certifying fraudulent results dependent on the manipulated reported final tallies. That is the issue I think Powell and Wood are hinting at.
To be sure, there is a great deal of evidence of regular old-timey ballot stuffing and standard election fraud, but computer and internet generated mischief has the potential to far exceed that and seems to Trump's lawyers in fact to have done so.
Georgia
Georgia has an interesting recent history on the use of equipment purchased by the governor from a company called Dominion. Last year concerns were raised by and suits were brought by activists -- from Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and the conservative FreedomWorks to Democratic groups such as Stacey Abrams’ organization Fair Fight -- who demanded paper ballots and sought an order for a paper backup for electronic poll books. Judge Amy Totenberg (who has a history of documenting election fraud, having served when younger as a field investigator for the UMWA reformers in colle
cting evidence of fraud) was greatly concerned about the unreliability of the Knowlink PollPads bought from Dominion Voting Systems for more than $100 million, and ordered a paper pollbooks be kept in every polling place in Georgia. By a 2 to 1 margin the 11th Circuit temporarily halted her order this October. Judge Totenberg declined to order a switch to hand-marked ballots bypassing Dominion’s equipment altogether because she indicated a change so close to the election “cannot but cause voter confusion and some real measure of electoral disruption.
Dominion’s lobbyist, who pitched the $100 million dollar purchase of these machines, was Georgia Governor Brian Kemp’s former chief of staff. Georgia’s secretary of State Brad Raffensberger took campaign cash from the wife of a CEO of Dominion’s partner.
On Parler, Lin Wood posted:
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp & Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger should be investigated by the GA Bureau of Investigation. Maybe they should resign.
We The People deserve honest public officials.
Georgia’s purchase was also questioned by Oregon’s Democratic senator Ron Wyden:
...in a speech at an election security conference in Washington DC, said that the voting machine lobby “literally thinks they are just above the law, they are accountable to nobody, [and] they have been able to hotwire the political system in certain parts of the country like we’ve seen in Georgia”.
Wyden was referring to the fact that Brian Kemp, who is now Georgia’s governor after overseeing his own election while secretary of state, appointed an ES&S lobbyist as his deputy chief of staff. Meanwhile, the state is in the process of purchasing more than $150m in new voting machines.
“My view is that the maintenance of our constitutional rights should not depend on the sketchy ethics of these well-connected corporations that stonewall Congress, lie to public officials and have repeatedly gouged taxpayers.
Dominion reportedly has Venezuelan and Cuban investment and utilizes parts from China. Its software is widely used across the U.S.
Another Trump lawyer tweeted of Dominion:
@RudyGiuliani
Did you know a foreign company,DOMINION,was counting our vote in Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.
But it was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing.
Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?
It will all come out.
Here’s Lord Malloch-Brown, head of Smartmatic, addressing the Atlantic Council about the wonders of technological aids to voting. Dominion denies any connection to Smartmatic:
Dominion has no company ownership relationships with any member of the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, or the Clinton Global Initiative, Smartmatic, Scytl, or any ties to Venezuela. Dominion works with all political parties; our customer base and our government outreach practices reflect this nonpartisan approach.
Georgia is not the only state in which the reliability of Dominion was questioned by representatives across the political spectrum.
In Maryland, Congressman Jeremy Raskin threw down a red flag on the company.
“Raskin’s bill could affect at least two of the largest election companies. Dominion Voting Systems, which is the second-largest voting machine vendor in the US, is based in both the US and Canada. Scytl, which provides election night reporting and other online election management tools, is based in Spain.”
Well, Scytl used to be based in Spain, with offices in Frankfurt and Barcelona, but it went bankrupt and this October was purchased by an Irish company, Paragon.
Scytl and Bytes
Linn Wood Wood tweeted:
@LLinWood
Biden & his criminal cronies are not going to sleep well tonight. Well, Biden might because he probably forgot the name Scytl.
His co-conspirators know name well. They also know the name Paragon, company which purchased Scytl in 10/20.
Every will be revealed.
#FightBack
Scytl provides electronic voting systems which have a bad record of vulnerability to electronic manipulation. Before declaring bankruptcy, it botched elections in 2018 in New South Wales, in Ecuador in 2014, in 2011 in Norway, and in 2015 in Switzerland before bankruptcy and a sale to Paragon last month.
Does Trump Have the Goods His Lawyers Hint At?
Representative Louie Gohmert stated in a video on Friday that the U.S. Army had possibly seized Sctyl’s servers in Frankfurt. He said that he had information that Scytl had possession of “extremely compelling information" proving the votes had been manipulated after the data was sent from the voting machines to be tallied.
It’s hard to imagine Germany allowing U.S. troops to seize property in Frankfurt. (Of course, a covert operation is not unheard of.)
In any event Scytl has categorically denied the Gohmert report. Most particularly they deny having offices in Frankfurt, or that the U.S. Army seized anything from Barcelona, Frankfurt, or anywhere else.
Would seizing the Scytl computers be the only way to establish vote tally manipulation?
I don’t think so. For one thing, Dominion stores its data on Amazon cloud, and federal law enforcement could get access to it. The Utah Data Center which, among other things, stores data relating to cybersecurity, can and does process, “all forms of communication, including the complete documents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches.”
It could have picked up odd happenings between the overseas offices of the big electronic election services. All the ways the data could be accessed is, frankly, a topic beyond my ken.
In the meantime, personnel shuffles indicate the President was unhappy with the performance of some of the officeholders. He ordered DHS head Chad Wolf to fire his cyber chief, Chris Krebs, something Wolf has refused to do. The President has the unilateral right to dismiss Krebs without Wolf’s assistance.
At the Department of Defense, General Michael Flynn’s aide Ezra Cohen-Watnick has been made acting undersecretary of intelligence. Previously he was the U.S. strategic policy coordinator for all intelligence programs, “including, among other things, covert action, human intelligence, electronic surveillance.”
Are Trump’s lawyers onto something big or not? We’ll have to see. In April of last year, Democratic congressman Raskin, while challenging private voting systems companies, said, “To say that they don’t have any evidence of any wrongdoing is not to say that nothing untoward happened,” Raskin said. “It’s simply to say that we don’t have the evidence of it.”
I wonder if he’d say that today?
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