As promised, Sidney Powell has released the Kraken. The Georgia Kraken in this case.
The very detailed and documented filing was released last week. And contrary to the Trump-supporting super-lawyer’s critics, it looks like she has the goods. Exactly as the president’s lawyers produced their own detailed evidence in Pennsylvania days before, as noted by my colleague Paul Kengor’s sharp-eyed recounting right here in The American Spectator.
Let’s take a deep dive through Powell’s Georgia Kraken.
The plaintiffs are seven Georgia registered voters. The defendants in the case are Republican — yes, Republican — Gov. Brian Kemp, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and four members of the Georgia State Election Board.
The suit begins by saying this:
This civil action brings to light a massive election fraud, multiple violations of Georgia laws … and multiple Constitutional violations, as shown by fact witnesses to specific incidents, multiple expert witnesses and the sheer mathematical impossibilities found in the Georgia 2020 General Election.
Then the suit is off and running for 104 very detailed pages — very detailed.
It focuses on a problem that has also appeared in Pennsylvania — accusing the Georgia Secretary of State of overriding the statutory authority of the state legislature. Next is a section on the “unlawful early processing of absentee ballots,” the voting system companies, then on to evidence of fraud and “a pattern showing the absence of mistake.” Next is a section on the voting machines and how secrecy software throughout Georgia is crucial to the alleged fraud. Then it’s on to “Additional Specific Fraud” and the experts who use statistical analysis to prove the shifts of thousands of votes — and a look at 20,311 absentee or early voters that voted even as they were registered as having moved out of state. It lists in specificity just how the defendants violated both the U.S. Constitution, the 14th Amendment specifically, due process, and plain old federal law. It ends, after reams of detail and witness testimony, with a request for an emergency order to decertify the results.
The very first footnote says:
The same pattern of election fraud and voter fraud occurred in all the swing states with only minor variations, see export reports, regarding Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Wisconsin.
Yes indeed. In fact, when one reads Paul Kengor’s article on the Pennsylvania bombshell, it is crystal clear that the pattern of violations in Pennsylvania is indeed the same pattern outlined in the Georgia case.
Let’s begin with the exact allegation Powell has been making, that is written this way in the suit, bold print for emphasis supplied:
The fraud was executed by many means, but the most fundamentally troubling, insidious, and egregious is the systemic adaptation of old fashioned ballot stuffing. It has now been amplified and rendered virtually invisible by computer software created and run by domestic and foreign actors for that very purpose. Mathematical and statistical anomalies rising to the level of impossibilities, as shown by affidavits of multiple witnesses, documentation, and expert testimony evince this scheme across the state of Georgia.
Powell says the fraud was executed by the systemic adaptation of old-fashioned ballot stuffing. Which is to say, the ancient method used by political bosses of old to rig an election by physically “stuffing” the ballot box or in later days by having a voting machine rigged by a party official has now been updated for the 21st century by the use of corrupted voting system companies and corrupted software. Companies with ties to a foreign power — Venezuela. (And not mentioned: Yes indeed, a Philadelphia Democrat election judge was in fact indicted in May 2020 for rigging a voting machine in three different elections.)
Powell has been pilloried for saying this, in part because she blames the voting system companies. But take a look at this:
Georgia’s electoral system, including its voter registration data and voting machines, lacks adequate data security. This insecurity presents a risk of hacking and tampering that could cause voters to be removed from voter rolls or cause cast votes to be removed or altered….
More than a decade of research shows that electronic voting machines, especially those used in Georgia, are vulnerable to hacking. The Secretary of State and the State Election Board have had notice of these problems but have done precious little to fix them.
The problem? This was not said in Sidney Powell’s lawsuit, although it makes the exact same point as Powell. No, this was said in a 2018 lawsuit by two groups in Georgia — Fair Fight in Action and Care in Action. A lawsuit filed in support of — yes — Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Powell has a declaration from one Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia. Who is he?
The New York Times mentioned him in this September 2020 story, describing him this way:
Those who worked with him said (Keshavarz-Nia) “was always the smartest person in the room.” In doing cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I., he had spent decades connecting top-secret dots.
Said Powell:
Expert Navid Keshavarez-Nia … concludes that hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump in the 2020 election were transferred to Vice-President Biden.
As David Catron has noted over here, Dr. Keshavarz-Nia says this in his declaration:
I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden. These alterations were the result of systemic and widespread exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS, Scytl/SOE Software and Smartmatic systems that enabled operators to achieve the desired results. In my view, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.
Hmmm. Read through the lawsuit from the 2018 Georgia race filed in support of Stacy Abrams and you learn this, bold print for emphasis supplied:
66. One troubling problem—encountered by several voters—is that voting machines switched their votes from Leader Stacey Abrams to Secretary Kemp. Allison Bish, a Gwinnett County voter, used a machine to vote for Leader Abrams. But after selecting Leader Abrams, the machine switched her vote to Secretary Kemp. Ms. Bish switched her vote back to Leader Abrams. The machine again switched her vote to Secretary Kemp. Ms. Bish switched her vote back to Leader Abrams. The machine switched her vote to Secretary Kemp for the third time. Only on Ms. Bish’s fourth attempt was she was able to cast a ballot for Leader Abrams.
67. Jocelyn Lester experienced a similar problem when she voted in Early County. Ms. Lester voted early at the Registrar’s Office in Blakely. She voted using the voting machine, and pressed the button for Leader Abrams. But the voting machine showed her selection as Secretary Kemp. Ms. Lester reports she kept pressing Leader Abrams and by the fourth time, the machine finally corrected. While Ms. Lester was ultimately able to vote for Leader Abrams, she expresses concern that other voters may have been less attentive, inadvertently voting for Secretary Kemp. As Ms. Lester said, “If I were not paying more attention, or were less persistent, it would have been easy for the machine to incorrectly cast my vote for Secretary Kemp. And I can see how a less persistent or attentive person could have the machine incorrectly cast their vote for Secretary Kemp when they were meaning to vote for Leader Abrams.”
So in 2018 Democrats insisted that voting machines switched votes from Abrams to Kemp. But in 2020 when Powell says voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden — suddenly Powell is some sort of crazed conspiracy nut?
Right.
Powell has caught all manner of flak for citing the involvement of Dominion Voting Systems Corporation, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Smartmatic Voting Systems — and alleging foreign involvement in the election.
The 2018 lawsuit states: “Georgia maintains one of the least secure elections systems in the country.”
And when it comes to those machines that Powell has complained about? To say again, in fact, it was Democrat Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney in 2006 who specifically wrote Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to express her concern about “the acquisition of Sequoia Voting Systems by Smartmatic, a foreign-owned company.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Ron Wyden, plus Democrat Congressman Mark Pocan, also raised the alarm on the potential for voter fraud by voting system companies. As noted previously in this space, the Democrats said this:
In 2018 alone, “voters in South Carolina [were] reporting machines that switched their votes after they’d inputted them, scanners [were] rejecting paper ballots in Missouri, and busted machines [were] causing long lines in Indiana,” the letter reads. In addition, researchers recently uncovered previously undisclosed vulnerabilities in “nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states.” And, just this year, after the Democratic candidate’s electronic tally showed he received 164 votes out of 55,000 cast in a Pennsylvania state judicial election in 2019, the county’s Republican chairwoman said, “nothing went right on Election Day. Everything went wrong. That’s a problem.”
Yes, it is. And clearly Georgia, as testified to by Stacey Abrams, has serious problems in producing an honest election.
The idea that voting systems are hackable by foreign powers is, contrary to what Powell’s critics are saying, hardly the imagining of a conspiracy theorist. Here is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the subject back in August 2019. The headline:
Threats to Georgia elections loom despite new paper ballot voting
Said the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mark Niesse:
Election officials will have to be on guard against malware, viruses, stolen passwords and Russian interference across tens of thousands of new voting computers. A Russian agent visited websites of two Georgia counties in 2016 but didn’t gain access to election systems, officials said.
And foreign interference wasn’t just targeted on Georgia. Here is the New York Times in July 2019:
Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States, Report Finds
The Times reported this, bold print for emphasis supplied:
WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded Thursday that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016, an effort more far-reaching than previously acknowledged and one largely undetected by the states and federal officials at the time.
But while the bipartisan report’s warning that the United States remains vulnerable in the next election is clear, its findings were so heavily redacted at the insistence of American intelligence agencies that even some key recommendations for 2020 were blacked out.
The report — the first volume of several to be released from the committee’s investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference — came 24 hours after the former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III warned that Russia was moving again to interfere “as we sit here.” …
In his testimony to two House committees on Wednesday, Mr. Mueller had sought to highlight the continued threat that Russia or other adversaries would seek to interfere in the 2020 elections. He said many more “countries are developing capability to replicate what the Russians have done.” …
While the report is not directly critical of either American intelligence agencies or the states, it described what amounted to a cascading intelligence failure, in which the scope of the Russian effort was underestimated, warnings to the states were too muted, and state officials either under-reacted or, in some cases, resisted federal efforts to offer help.
Powell quite specifically targets the Smartmatic software voting system and its alleged tie with Venezuela. The suit says:
Affiant witness (name redacted for security reasons), in his sworn testimony explains he was selected for the national security guard detail of the President of Venezuela, and that he witnessed the creation of Smartmatic for the purpose of election vote manipulation to insure Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez never lost an election and he saw it work. Id.
“The purpose of this conspiracy was to create and operate a voting system that could change the votes in elections from votes against persons running the Venezuelan government to votes in their favor in order to maintain control of the government.
And what did the New York Times — the paper warning “Russia Targeted Election Systems in All 50 States” — have to say about the relationship between Russia, Hugo Chavez, and Venezuela? It headlined this in 2019:
Why Is Russia Helping Venezuela?
The story said:
MOSCOW — On a rainy afternoon this week, a group of Russian officials and oil executives gathered for Mass in a Catholic church tucked away behind the imposing secret service headquarters in central Moscow.
They did not come to pray. Instead, they were commemorating the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, who poured billions of dollars into Russian weapons and machinery, and showing support for his embattled successor, Nicolás Maduro.
Mr. Maduro is fighting to save the political system he and Mr. Chávez have built, with Russian support, for two decades.
In other words? Per the New York Times:
All true. Over there in the Wall Street Journal Mary Anastasia O’Grady writes “The Americas,” a weekly column on events in Latin America and Canada. On Monday, O’Grady wrote this of Powell’s Georgia lawsuit:
Central to the argument against the governor and his associates is the claim that software used by Georgia was developed by Hugo Chávez — who died in 2013 — to steal elections in Venezuela.
O’Grady discusses the role of then-President Chavez in a 2004 referendum that was focused on whether Venezuelans wanted him to stay or leave the presidency. She writes:
On the day of the referendum, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2004, Venezuelans turned out in big numbers, confident that they could rid themselves of the antidemocratic strongman through the democratic process. An exit poll by the American polling company Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates found that Chávez lost his bid to stay in power by 59% to 41%.
Yet, as I reported on Aug. 20, “at three o’clock on Monday morning two members of the National Electoral Council (CNE) who are politically opposed to Chávez announced that they had been shut out of the audit process and warned the public that the established protocol had been violated. Some 50 minutes later pro-Chávez CNE member Francisco Carrasquero emerged alone to proclaim Chávez the winner.”
Let’s sum it up, shall we?
The fact that the mainstream media and Democrats are now out there saying there is no evidence of voter fraud is nothing less than an attempted cover-up of facts — hard facts — that, if true, prove Sidney Powell’s case.
The Georgia Kraken has been released. And pretending it hasn’t will not make it go away.
