A gigantic gaping suck-hole has opened in Trump's Land of Lies

Stand clear. If you fall into the origin story of his "stolen election" conspiracies, you may never return.

The Kraken! The Kraken!

A good portion of what I’ve done ever since I began covering Donald Trump back when I wrote my first stories about him in 2016 has been to provide some semblance of a guide through the thick underbrush of his campaign, then the Russia story, then the various scams and scam-artists that populated his so-called “government,” then the morass of the Ukraine lies, and finally the hurricane of fictions he unleashed about the 2020 election following his loss to Joe Biden last November.  I have carried out my task fearlessly, with as much of a sense of order and reason as I have been able to muster throughout these dark hours in our nation’s history.

But now we have reached a precipice over which even I was afraid to look. I speak, with some trepidation, of yesterday’s mega-story in the Washington Post entitled, “The making of a myth.”  It’s a tale that looks back three years to the source of what turned into, over the last six or seven months, the unfocused insanity of Sidney Powell and her “Kraken” lawsuits, the ravings of the seriously unbalanced Louis Gohmert, and the rantings of the Incredible Melting Man, Rudy Giuliani, beginning at his hastily-assembled November 7 press conference outside the garage doors of something called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia neighborhood located next door to a sex shop and across the alley from a crematorium.  That was the press conference, you’ll recall, during which the networks called the election for Joe Biden, causing most of the electronic media in attendance to start packing up their gear and getting ready to travel some 32 miles to Wilmington, Delaware to begin covering the President-elect of the United States, precipitating six months of Republican falsehoods, fantasies, and fakery.

That there could even be an origin story to this kind of nonsense is incredible enough, but that the Trump election-fraud lies had their roots in an airplane hanger in Addison, Texas, only adds to the bottomless amazingness of the whole thing.  It seems a heretofore little-noticed character by the name of Russell J. Ramsland Jr. gathered together a gaggle of conservative activists, mega-donors, and Texas lawmakers and disgruntled election-losers so that he could present to them the reason why Texas Republicans had suffered the losses they did in the 2018 midterm elections.  You see, Republicans are not used to losing elections in the state of Texas, so if they did, there had to be some reason for it.  Voila!  Ramsland had the answer for them.  The election, or at least those portions of it they had lost, including a house seat held by Republican Pete Sessions, had been stolen from them.

Ramsland had assembled something called the Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), a so-called team of intelligence experts including one “White Hat hacker” who appeared before the group in disguise and refused to give his name.  ASOG was described to the Washington Post as “a group of trained professionals who have seen it all.  “‘When someone says, ‘I know a guy,’ he’s talking about ASOG,’” declared a promotional video about the company, one of whose officers was a man by the name of J. Keet Lewis, described as the Vice President of Strategy, among whose many accomplishments, according to an SEC filing, was “consulting on international energy projects” and helping to  “develop the Skimmer Basket Buddy, a patented maintenance tool for swimming pools.” 

You get the picture.  Amazingly, this is only a single snapshot in a story absolutely packed with such morsels of fascinating information about the people involved in the origin of the whole Trump election-stealing myth.  Ramsland, who ended up owning and running ASOG, “served on the board of Photonx, a company that according to its website uses
“variable wavelengths of light to treat specific pathogenic and chronic diseases,” which should sound familiar to students of Trumpian claims and lies.  Photonx currently has space inside the Addison airplane hanger where the original meeting of election-theft conspiratorialists took place.

ASOG had evidence, they said, that what the Washington Post identified as “voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation.”  Naturally, these “lines of code” were to be found within voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems and the Smartmatic company in software that had somehow come – it was never explained how or why – from Venezuela.  

So here we go.  Various other characters appear and reappear throughout the Post story, including one Laura Pressley, whose loss in a 2014 election for a seat on the Austin City Council sparked this whole business with Smartmatic and Dominion and the rest of it, and “Jekyll,” whom the Post identifies as the so-called “White Hat hacker,” but who turned out to be a former Army mechanic, who was also quoted by Sidney Powell in her “Kraken” lawsuits as a “military intelligence expert” using the pseudonym “Spider.” 

Ramsland and “Spider” came up with this assertion that hackers and rogue operators could somehow send voting data to a remote location – a “server in Frankfurt, Germany” turned out to be the key location for some unexplained reason – and then change it, or “re-inject” the data, as they described it, using “some sort of bot” that would change the election results without anyone noticing.

All of this was glommed onto by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and Louis Gohmert and eventually Donald Trump and promoted into a grand conspiracy that inflated vote counts for Joe Biden in Michigan and Arizona and Georgia and all over the place by moving fake votes in numbers like “140,000” from the “server in Frankfurt, Germany,” for some reason, and “re-injected” into voting machines as votes for Biden.  Ramsland told the Washington Post that “any 8th grader with a reasonable background in white hat cyber investigation tools” could trace stolen votes to the server in Frankfurt, Germany.

None of which ever happened, none of which was ever proven, despite dozens and dozens of lawsuits filed in one jurisdiction after another, but by the week after the election, all of these conspiracy theories had found their way to an eager recipient in the Oval Office.  By November 15, Trump tweeted a video of Ramsland telling an interviewer that votes from 29 states were sent to “a server in Frankfurt, Germany.”  And he was off and running.  Later that month, Ramsland claimed in an affidavit in one of Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits that multiple precincts in Michigan had recorded 350 percent more votes than there were voters in the precincts.  Later, it turned out the precincts where they alleged the over-votes were in Minnesota, not Michigan.  They promptly changed their charge, saying it was now Minnesota that had the excess votes, which also turned out to be false. 

Another affidavit by Ramsland claimed that votes in Detroit were 139 percent of the total number of voters in that heavily Democratic city, indicating that massive election fraud had taken place if the claim was true.  It turned out that the official results of the 2020 election in Detroit revealed that only 258,000 voters cast ballots, out of a total number of 506,000 registered voters, a 51 percent total turnout.

At his rally on the Ellipse on January 6, Donald Trump was parroting all of this stuff that had its genesis in an airplane hanger in Texas three years previously.  “In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden,” Trump yelled to the crowd.  “In Detroit, turnout was 139 percent of registered voters. Think of that.”

They did.  A few minutes later, the crowd on the Ellipse followed Trump’s exhortations to march to the Capitol.  The rest, as they say, is the history that the Republican Party is presently attempting to erase by, among other things, expunging from its midst Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has called out Trump’s election lies and accused him of fomenting the insurrection that took place immediately after he lied about the entirely false Detroit election figures that came straight from the man from Addison, Texas.