@realDonaldTrump: MUST SEE: Fox News reporter Jack Riley blows the lid off of Maryland election machine manipulation. Similar to what happened to us in Florida! Coincidence???
Despite the apparent interest by the president, Gail Copeland remained frustrated. At the inaugural ball at the Washington, DC, Convention center on January 20, 2021, she ran into Austin Peters, the colleague from the Republican Lawyers Association who had taken her information to the attorney general two months earlier.
“It hasn’t fallen through the cracks,” he shouted into her ear over the deafening music. “The AG has appointed the U.S. Attorney for Central Florida to conduct an investigation into voter machine manipulation in the 2020 election. He will be calling you and your guy and the Maryland tech as witnesses.”
It was another two months before she received the invitation to testify, and not until May 2021 that she and the U.S. Attorney, Cameron Davis, agreed to a date with the Grand Jury. She gave them everything Gordon had told her, including the name of Eric Figueroa from Dominant Technologies.
Davis sent a request to the NSA to run a trace on Figueroa. They were able to locate the emails he had sent to the chief IT manager for the Florida state bureau of elections, as well as those he exchanged with the IT manager for Montgomery County, Maryland. In their vast digital archive, which scooped up internet traffic from around the world for potential decrypt, Davis found a copy of the phony FTP site where Figueroa had uploaded patch files for the 51 Florida counties using Dominant Technologies voting machines, each of them using a different vote-shifting algorithm. But Figueroa himself had vanished as if he had never existed. Dominant Technologies could find no trace of him. No payroll. No office. No official email. No nothing. He was a ghost. And yet, he had total access to the Dominant Technologies computers and the network of VPNs they used to communicate with state and county elections directors. The NSA also found in the archive similar FTP sites for Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and Arizona, each containing a set of patches dated just days before the election. But when the NSA techs opened up the code, the files erased themselves.
In his initial confidential report to the attorney general, Davis noted that Figueroa’s electronic footprint appeared to begin in Dayton, Ohio, the DT corporate headquarters. But when he turned over the data to the FBI elections division and their cyber team, they concluded that Figueroa had used IP spoofing software and that he really had been operating from somewhere on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Nobody questioned the FBI analysis, and nobody did a further trace of the IP address to discover that it pinged from Russia to Finland to Italy, then Australia, and finally to the basement of a townhouse at 9th and Pennsylvania Avenue, SE.
Davis was planning to interview Richard Foreman Hall, the controlling shareholder and a managing director of Dominant Technologies at the time of the election, even though he had resigned his director’s seat and disposed of his stock in the third week of November 2020. By the time they got around to standing up a team to interview him in Silicon Valley, they learned that Mr. Hall had committed suicide by driving his red Lamborghini Centenario Roadster, one of just a handful imported into the United States, off the Pacific Coast Highway near Big Sur.
No one on Davis’s team ever seriously suggested that they interview Governor Tomlinson or Senator Bellinger, who were serving out the remainder of their terms, or prominent DNC talking head T. Claudius Granger, the man with no first name.
The day after Navid’s apparently accidental death, his colleagues in the cellar “war room” at 920 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, smashed hard drives and USB sticks and left Washington, DC, for their former homes. The war room itself was rented out to a print shop.
In September 2021, President Trump invited Gordon Utz and his fiancée, Annie Bryant, to a private ceremony in the Oval Office and awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the citation, he noted that Gordon “had made extraordinary contributions to the security of our nation’s election systems.” Later that afternoon, he tweeted:
@realDonaldTrump: Honored to have awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a true unsung hero, Gordon Utz. After four years in this office, there are still agents of the Deep State out there…
2/ whose sole purpose is to start wars, steal elections, enrich themselves, and smear anyone who tries to stop them. Thank you, Gordon, for your courage!
Ken Adams, aka the Crocodile, went to Majority Leader Gus Antly shortly after the election and told him simply, “I know what happened in Maryland 8. And it’s going to cost you.” After a brief parley, they agreed on the price, and when the new Congress was sworn into office, Adams was appointed staff director of the powerful Ways and Means Committee under the Democrat chairman.
As for Nelson Aguilar, at the time this book went to print, his recount petition was still making its way through the courts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Election Heist is an entertainment, a term I have borrowed from British writer Graham Greene. He used it to distinguish between his “serious” novels, and those intended as, well, pure entertainment.
But to entertain does not mean dealing with trifles or the banal. My subject in this book is power, and the things people will do to acquire it and retain it. This is arguably the most serious subject any writer can approach.
A great deal of research is available on the flaws of our electronic voting machines. The interested reader can start by viewing this survey of seven ways our election systems can be hacked that was published just after the 2016 election: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/7-ways-electronic-voting-systems-can-be-attacked/d/d-id/1327172. Another favorite of mine is Bev Harris’s 2002 investigative classic, Black Box Voting, which can be downloaded here: http://blackboxvoting.org/black-box-voting-book/.
I consulted a number of cybersecurity experts as I was devising the scenario for this book, and want to single out for their input Tom Malatesta, Jarred Nicholls, Francis Kane, and Mike Hugenberg. Others who still work for alphabet soup agencies (and must therefore remain anonymous) discussed my scenario and reminded me that anything controlled by software can be hacked, a critical concept when considering the tabulators many districts use to count paper ballots.
A number of election officials in Maryland and Florida were generous with their time as I examined potential flaws in our voting systems. They, too, have requested anonymity. But you know who you are. Tim May and Frank Mitchell, co-hosts of the inimitable Mid-Maryland Live afternoon drive talk show on WFMD, deserve a shout-out for their cameo, as do Carol and Fred Wilson of Elk Run Vineyard.
Finally, the entire team at Post Hill Press has done a terrific job in producing, editing, and promoting this book. A special thanks to publisher Anthony Ziccardi, who has believed in me through thick and thin; to managing editor Madeline Sturgeon, for keeping the trains running during the Coronavirus mass hysteria; to publicist Meredith Didier, for getting the word out; and to remarkable copyeditors Monique Happy and Kiera Hufford, who not only smoothed out my rough edges but caught many errors and inconsistencies, all with good humor and grace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a nationally recognized investigative reporter, novelist, and war correspondent who was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 2006. He is the New York Times bestselling author of ten books on national security issues, as well as three novels and the critical biography, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. His work is regularly featured on FoxNews opinion, FrontPage Magazine, Breitbart, the New York Post, and elsewhere. In 2012, he was the Republican nominee for congress in Maryland’s 8th district.
“Presenting the Nobel Peace Prize to Kenneth Timmerman and John Bolton will strengthen those in the world…who are today trying to find ways and means of putting a stop to the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”—Nominating letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee from former Swedish deputy prime
minister Per Ahlmark
To schedule appearances, please email Ken directly: [email protected]
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