The Trump election-denier talking points all start with the claims of a con-artist -- who bills himself as a programmer and U.S. intelligence contractor. All of the nonsense he peddles has been called out by judges and others as being fraudulent and his testimony in court as perjury as he pushes wild tales of U.S. government conspiracies to hack voting machines. Even prior to the 2020, Dennis Montgomery has been fined by federal courts multiple times for pushing complete fabrications. The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-montgomery/ Central to the election-denial movement is a galaxy of conspiracy theories about vote-flipping supercomputers. The myths can be traced to Dennis Montgomery, a programmer and former U.S. intelligence contractor. Judges have called him a fraud and a perjurer – and he has a history of promoting tall tales. A REUTERS INVESTIGATION Conspiracy Chronicles The origins and evolution of the election-denial movement Part 1. The programmer Part 2. The professor Part 3. The attorney The conspiracy theory seemed to come out of nowhere: Dark forces had hacked into voting systems nationwide to rob Donald Trump of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The myth started spreading even before the votes were counted. One of the earliest versions, from an obscure right-wing website, had a hero: Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer and self-described former contractor for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The writer cited Montgomery’s claim that he had built a supercomputer called the Hammer years ago as a U.S. government surveillance tool, along with software called Scorecard that could be used to manipulate election results. Now, Montgomery alleged, someone had hijacked the technology and was using it to steal the presidency for Joe Biden. In the election’s febrile aftermath, these and other unproven claims about Hammer and Scorecard went viral and morphed into a grand global conspiracy theory about how a host of sinister characters, often tied to China, had hacked voting systems to flip votes from Trump to Biden. As the stolen-election fiction spread, so did its repercussions — frivolous lawsuits seeking to overturn the election; threats of violence against election workers; and well-funded campaigns to rid America of voting machines. Two years later, about two-thirds of Republicans say they believe Trump was cheated, Reuters polls show. Montgomery did not comment for this article. Reuters interviewed more than two dozen of his former associates and prominent election deniers to trace the evolution of the Hammer-and-Scorecard conspiracy theory. The convoluted tale emerged in a series of phone interviews of Montgomery by Mary Fanning, the right-wing writer who originally published his unsupported allegations on her website, the American Report. Fanning told Reuters that Montgomery approached her with the election-hacking claims shortly before the November 2020 vote. Fanning’s post cast Montgomery as a whistleblower exposing the secret use of his tech creations to steal votes. But former associates of Montgomery have called him a con artist, and federal judges in civil cases have accused him of fraud and cited him for perjury. The computer programmer has a history of promoting tall tales: He’s peddled allegedly phony technology or bogus evidence of conspiracy theories to the U.S. government, a right-wing Arizona sheriff and, most recently, Mike Lindell, the pillow magnate and outspoken election denier. Fanning published Montgomery’s hacked-election claims after Trump himself had predicted for months that he would be cheated. Then Trump allies seized on the theory. Among the first was pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who referenced Hammer and Scorecard on Fox News. Other right-wing figures in an emerging election-denial movement piled in, unleashing a wave of social-media posts from grassroots Trump supporters about Hammer and Scorecard. Powell and other prominent election deniers have since offered a wide array of false claims about hacked voting machines, drop boxes stuffed with illegal ballots, and election workers with suitcases full of fake Biden votes. By their telling, the perpetrators include corrupt Democrats, Venezuelan socialists, Chinese agents and traitors lurking inside major U.S. voting-equipment makers. Attorney Sidney Powell, who has promoted Donald Trump’s false stolen-election claims, talked about the Hammer-and-Scorecard conspiracy theory on Fox News shortly after his 2020 election loss. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst But the essence of Montgomery’s allegations — a vast conspiracy to hack election systems and flip votes — has endured, even among Trump supporters who have never heard of Hammer and Scorecard. The theory provided the foundation for a nebulous but versatile constellation of vote-rigging allegations to feed Trump supporters’ hunger for explanations of his stolen-election claims. Last month’s midterm elections proved a rebuke of sorts for the election-denier movement. Many strident conspiracists lost their bids for Congress and key state offices. A predicted “red wave” of Republican victories never materialized, despite high U.S. inflation and low approval ratings for Biden. And yet the results also underscored the lasting appeal of stolen-election falsehoods, especially in rural Republican districts. Various news organizations have estimated that more than 150 newly elected or re-elected Republicans in the U.S. Congress have denied or questioned whether Biden won the 2020 election. “It has all the hallmarks of the classic conspiracy theory because it throws in the CIA.” - Christopher Krebs, former director of cybersecurity in the Trump administration, on the Hammer-and-Scorecard election-rigging claims As the Hammer-and-Scorecard theory first started to spread, Christopher Krebs, then the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity expert, immediately tried to knock it down, tweeting that it was “nonsense” and “a hoax.” It didn’t work. In a recent interview, Krebs said Montgomery’s “ludicrous” theory “was the first technical conspiracy theory that really broke through.” “It has all the hallmarks of the classic conspiracy theory because it throws in the CIA,” said Krebs, who is now a risk management consultant. “It was a trope that became part of the zeitgeist even without the name Hammer and Scorecard.” The man behind the myth is something of a cipher. Leading election deniers have lionized Montgomery and attributed a variety of vote-rigging allegations to him. But Montgomery himself has said little in public about the alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election from Trump. His motivations and political leanings remain mysterious. Montgomery and his attorney, Chris Kachouroff, did not answer detailed questions from Reuters for this story. Kachouroff, in a brief interview, said of his client’s election-conspiracy claims: “Dennis has too much information for this to be made up.” Yet Kachouroff acknowledged his own doubts about Montgomery’s allegations. “Does he have my complete confidence? No,” he said. “Dennis is either the single greatest con artist this country has ever produced, or he’s telling the truth.” Montgomery, 69, last year sold a trove of the purported evidence to Lindell, one of America’s most prominent Trump allies and election conspiracy theorists. Lindell, the founder and CEO of MyPillow, has spent millions of dollars on a campaign to abolish voting machines. He publicly announced his purchase of Montgomery’s data in August at a gathering in Missouri of hundreds of his followers. “I own it,” Lindell said of Montgomery’s data, touting it as irrefutable proof Trump was cheated. “The machines are going to be gone!” he yelled, to uproarious applause. “We’re going to get our country back!” He called Montgomery the “smartest man I’ve ever met.” Lindell confirmed to Reuters that he bought the data from Montgomery in 2021 but declined to say exactly when or what he paid. He said it includes internet records of intrusions into U.S. voting systems to manipulate election results. Lindell has promised to publicly release the full data set for more than a year but hasn’t delivered, citing legal and security concerns for repeated delays. He did release some data, however, in August of 2021, when he invited teams of information-technology experts to scrutinize it at a “cyber symposium.” Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and a top election conspiracy theorist, says he bought data from programmer Dennis Montgomery that will prove that a supercomputer was used to steal the 2020 election. REUTERS/Go Nakamura Lindell told Reuters the information he gave the experts for vetting was “metadata” that proved the authenticity of the full data set. Three experts who examined it told Reuters what Lindell provided was “bunk,” “bogus” and “nonsense.” In interviews, the experts described massive files that contained a hodge-podge of gibberish code — often meaningless text or numbers, or randomly generated characters, in no recognizable data format. Bob Zeidman, a computer forensics specialist, said it was “absolutely” not metadata, or any data related to an election. He wrote in a social media post after Lindell’s event that the material had “stumped” the assembled experts and made him wonder: “Was someone sabotaging Mike’s data? Or had Mike been bamboozled? Or was Mike the bamboozler?” Montgomery’s Hammer-and-Scorecard theory nevertheless remains a central preoccupation of some election deniers. Robert Beadles, a wealthy Nevada businessman who led campaigns seeking the ouster of local officials based on unproven vote-rigging claims, wrote in a Nov. 14 blog post that Montgomery’s data, if released by Lindell, could provide evidence of widespread fraud in last month’s midterm elections. “Here could be the smoking gun,” he wrote, “proof our elections are selections by red China or even our own country.” Robert Beadles, a wealthy Nevada businessman and right-wing activist, says he believes that Montgomery may have the ‘smoking gun’ to prove voting systems across the United States were hacked to steal the 2020 election. REUTERS/Linda So ‘Imaginary voodoo’ Before Trump made election fraud a national obsession on the political right, Montgomery had focused his conspiratorial claims on alleged domestic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies. Fanning, the right-wing writer, has for years reported Montgomery’s claims that he developed the Hammer two decades ago as a surveillance tool for the government to use on foreign targets. Montgomery himself has made similar allegations in court filings, without using the term “Hammer.” The computer programmer has repeatedly alleged his technology was commandeered by Democratic politicians and U.S. intelligence officials to spy on Americans. A CIA spokesperson called Montgomery’s domestic spying allegations “absurd” but did not comment on what, if any, technology Montgomery has developed for the agency. A federal judge took a similar view in 2017, when Montgomery sued the directors of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), along with former U.S. President Barack Obama, alleging they conducted “ongoing, illegal, unconstitutional surveillance of millions of Americans.” The judge dismissed the claims, calling them “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” A representative of Obama declined to comment. A federal judge rejected Montgomery’s 2017 lawsuit alleging a conspiracy by the Obama administration to spy on Americans. Reuters could find no evidence beyond the claims attributed to Montgomery that Hammer and Scorecard even exist, much less that the technology is capable of the fantastical vote-rigging feats claimed by election deniers. Montgomery has said he originally developed his surveillance technology for the government after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to help fight terrorism. He worked with businessman Warren Trepp in a company called eTreppid Technologies that won U.S. government contracts. In 2006, the partners sued one another in federal court in Nevada, each claiming the other stole trade secrets related to the technology they sold the government. The case was settled in 2009 after the court issued a judgment against Montgomery, who subsequently filed for bankruptcy, court records show. A judge ruled in 2009 that Montgomery had perjured himself in the case, by knowingly submitting a false court filing, and sanctioned him with a $61,000 penalty. A federal judge presiding over Montgomery’s business dispute with a partner sanctioned him for perjury and levied a $61,000 penalty. Trepp did not respond to requests for comment. Federal records reviewed by Reuters show the U.S. military awarded at least $7.5 million in contracts for technology to eTreppid. The company announced in 2004 that it had $30 million worth of contracts for its technology with the U.S. government, without specifying what agencies. Reuters could not verify how much federal agencies ultimately paid Montgomery or the specifics of how they used his technology. The programmer is perhaps best known for convincing the CIA two decades ago that he had developed technology that could intercept hidden terrorist messages embedded in videos broadcast on the Al Jazeera news network. The intelligence prompted the George W. Bush administration to issue public alerts and ground flights out of fear of impending attacks, according to media reports and congressional testimony. In a 2014 book, James Risen, then a New York Times reporter, described Montgomery as “the maestro” behind what U.S. officials came to believe was “one of the most elaborate and dangerous hoaxes in American history.” Montgomery challenged Risen’s claims in a defamation lawsuit that was dismissed, with the judge noting the “plethora of evidence showing that officials and others who worked with Montgomery do believe his work to have been a hoax.” A federal judge dismissed Montgomery’s defamation suit against author James Risen over his 2014 book that said U.S. officials believed Montgomery was the “meastro” behind a hoax on intelligence agencies. Al Jazeera called Montgomery’s claims a false conspiracy theory at the time. In response to questions from Reuters, the CIA did not comment on whether it contracted with or purchased technology from Montgomery. The agency referred Reuters to testimony from former CIA director John Brennan during his 2013 Senate confirmation process. He was asked why the agency passed Montgomery’s dubious intelligence to the White House during the George W. Bush administration, causing needless public alarm. Brennan acknowledged the CIA provided the information to a threat assessment office he ran at the time, which then “included it in analytic products.” The intelligence was later deemed inaccurate, Brennan testified. A spokesperson for Brennan declined to comment. Former senior CIA official Marty Martin, who headed the CIA’s Al Qaeda hunt at the time, told Reuters that the claims about coded messages on Al Jazeera were “imaginary voodoo” and “bullshit.” The sheriff and the ‘con man’ In 2013, Montgomery profited by offering proof of conspiracy theories to right-wing Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who granted Montgomery a lucrative arrangement as a confidential informant. Arpaio, the former sheriff in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, was a controversial national political figure at the time because of his harsh immigration crackdown in the border state. He was also among the most fervent promoters of the false “birther” conspiracy theory, which claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and was therefore ineligible to be U.S. president. Montgomery convinced the sheriff to investigate whether the lawman and his constituents were being illegally spied on by the Obama administration, two former sheriff’s investigators told Reuters. Arpaio and one of the investigators told Reuters that Montgomery offered proof of the alleged spying and also promised to explain how Obama’s U.S. birth certificate was faked. Arpaio dispatched the two investigators to visit Montgomery at his Seattle home. (Much more at above url. Very lengthy article.)
When you commies have your totalitarian world, how will you defend yourselves from injustice? You are trapping yourselves in a power corrupts scenario.