Are Montgomery’s Continuing Claims Nothing More than Fuel for Conspiracy Theories?

by Sharon Rondeau

(May 24, 2021) — On May 17, 2021, The American Report issued an article based on claims made on the website blxware.org, belonging to former government subcontractor and self-described “whistleblower” Dennis Montgomery, claiming that Montgomery allegedly informed the FBI in 2015 of “critical infrastructure cyber vulnerabilities” which have manifested themselves in recent news events.

Those occurrences include the hacking of the Colonial Pipeline, the government-reported SolarWinds breach, and Montgomery’s claim from October 31, 2020 that “The Hammer,” a purported government super-computer and software named “Scorecard,” were deployed to alter the results of the November 3, 2020 presidential election from victory for incumbent Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden.

“We provided information to the FBI and DOD on Colonial’s Pipeline network vulnerabilities 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015,” Blxware.org states. Montgomery now alleges, “We provided proof to the FBI, DOD, and Homeland Security in documents and demonstrations in Washington DC how easy it would to hack Colonial Pipeline and hold them hostage. Exactly what happened recently!” This newly-minted revelation comes only after events have transpired and are being reported in the news, thereby bringing great pause in relying on the credibility of the claims.

In a fashion similar to a “spreadsheet” showing where foreign countries, led by China, allegedly “hacked” the 2020 election to switch votes from Trump to Biden, in its latest article The American Report’s Mary Fanning and Alan Jones display a table allegedly showing the locations of breaches in the Colonial Pipeline as reported by “the whistleblower” who remains unidentified but is unmistakably Montgomery.

Through The American Report, Montgomery has claimed that during two 2015 interviews with the FBI, he delivered information and evidence forewarning of domestic and overseas election interference; the aforementioned “critical infrastructure cyber vulnerabilities”; alleged connections between Joe Biden and his son Hunter with China; “domestic surveillance,” including that of Donald Trump and “159 judges” as part of a greater “approximately forty million Americans” and private industries; and that Barack Obama “could, and did, access THE HAMMER, ‘at will.’”

While documentation exists to substantiate that Montgomery provided information to the FBI some years ago, no verifiable evidence of what he allegedly divulged has appeared.  In a closed-door hearing with members of the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees in October 2018 as they probed the origins of the “Trump-Russia collusion” narrative, former FBI General Counsel James Baker confirmed that Montgomery had provided what he claimed was evidence of illegal government surveillance of American citizens, but Baker said he did not know the outcome of any investigation which might have been launched, nor did he state whether or not the information was found to be credible.

As The Post & Email has reported, Montgomery has made numerous claims dating back to 2013, when he interviewed with then-Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph Arpaio and members of his organization claiming widespread government surveillance of Maricopa County citizens.  Those claims came several months after former NSA and CIA contractor Edward Snowden revealed a stunning level of warrantless data-collection by the federal government on American citizens generally.

Believing an investigation was warranted, Arpaio hired Montgomery as a confidential informant at a salary of $10,000 a month to produce the evidence he claimed to have about the government’s alleged surveillance of Maricopa County citizens, tasking investigator Michael Zullo with overseeing Montgomery’s progress. 

However, Montgomery’s eventual production of “Top Secret” information on 47 hard drives, a common theme in The American Report’s articles over the years, revealed no such evidence on any of the 47 hard drives, according to two former high-ranking NSA analysts, J. Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake, commissioned by Arpaio and Zullo to provide an objective analysis of the drives’ contents.

In a scathing report addressed to Arpaio dated November 14, 2014, Wiebe and Drake wrote that the drives contained “evidence of an outright and fraudulent con perpetrated on the government for personal gain and cover” by Montgomery and no evidence of government data-collection.

Regarding Montgomery’s penchant for claiming foreknowledge of unfolding events after they emerge, Zullo told this publication, “That’s exactly the tactic he used on us.”

“This is Walter Mitty Montgomery you are dealing with.” Zullo said.  “Every time something comes out in the news, lo and behold, Montgomery has information on it.  It was the MO that he used in our investigation. I find it very difficult to reconcile his creating the ‘Hammer’ nonsense because I produced investigational recordings of Montgomery telling investigators in 2013 that he in fact had nothing to do with the creation of this unverified computer known as ‘The Hammer.’  On top of that, for seven years now Montgomery has claimed The Hammer is so super-secret that nobody can detect its covert activities, but now he claims he can track its activity. This flies in the face of his claims in 2014 that The Hammer could conduct clandestine activities and not be traced.

“They claim they’re ‘14 for 14’ in predicting what’s going to happen; they’re not.  Montgomery knows the FBI is never going to release anything about his interviews with them.  Neither will Arizona, where he had a free talk with the AG in 2013, unless ordered to do so by a court.  He just keeps rolling out claim after claim, all of which are absolutely unverifiable. ”

[Editor’s Note:  Earlier this year, The Post & Email submitted a FOIA request to the Arizona attorney general’s office for the transcript, photographs, audio and/or video of Montgomery’s “free talk” and was denied based on the “confidential” nature of the meeting.]

In an interview over the weekend, Zullo told us:

Fanning has tried to erroneously describe Montgomery as a White Hat Hacker, or a cybersecurity expert, attempting to give justification to his actions.

You can’t just declare yourself a “white-hat hacker” and think this simply absolves you from legal consequences.  While computer hacking in and of itself is not an illegal activity, it is absolutely out of bounds if the hacker is conducting invasion activities in a clandestine fashion absent of the computer system owner’s consent.   Unless you’re hacking into a system under the authority of an investigatory agency for the government, or a corporation hiring you to breach its own network to find vulnerabilities, you can’t hack at will and label yourself a good guy and call it legal.  So this nonsense that Montgomery is some white-hat hacker who hacked the election in the fight of good and evil is going to be very problematic for him, in my opinion. There is a very strong possibility he and anyone else is or has been violating the law. This runs along the same line as Montgomery self-declaring as a government whistleblower. The government has never recognized him as such. Neither has he been recognized or credentialed as a cybersecurity expert.

How have Fanning and Jones been verifying any this? Simply, they are not; if Montgomery says it they print it.  

The list of offices owned by Colonial Pipeline are contained in their article and are not proof of any of Montgomery’s claims. These are open-source lists that the general public would have access to. This was the type of garbage contained on the 47 hard drives he claimed was all “top secret.” It was all trash and all open-source information.  For them it is all about ‘Hammer and Scorecard’ and China stealing the election. Why? Because this is what they sold to Mike Lindell, absent any verifiable evidence these programs, Hammer and Scorecard, are even real or were used anywhere. They just believed it all on face value.   Montgomery is trying to pin it all on China, because it is a claim that will never be proven. He accused the FBI of selling it to foreign powers, another claim that will never be proven.

Fanning and Jones, along with Montgomery, were absolutely decimated in the Dominion filings brought forward in the company’s litigation against Lindell. Contained in the filings was evidence that Montgomery’s claims of foreign hacking were fraudulently manufactured. This was also the findings of independent expert analysis conducted by others when the information was released.  Manufacturing phony evidence was something else we caught Montgomery doing in the 2014 investigation.

Is it any wonder Fanning and Jones now try to hide Montgomery’s identity from the public? Montgomery has zero credibility and they know it, so much so they don’t even speak his name as they use the information he is force-feeding them.  It is their own fault; they are way deep in the Montgomery narrative and are trying to save their own reputations by hoping Montgomery’s China narrative proves out on some level.

Fanning has been put into a box. She has to keep going back to Montgomery in hopes he can somehow verify all of this, and as she is doing this he just keeps serving up new and unsubstantiated revelations to her.  Montgomery has positioned himself to be the sole expert on the topic. He always is the only one on the planet that has the answers. And he is always diverting.  This was the exact tactic Montgomery used during the Sheriff’s Office investigation: always divert attention when he can’t prove something he previously alleged and was peddling, then he will pivot and throw some new allegations into the game to refocus your attention in another direction away from what he cannot support with any real evidence. In the end there are just a lot of empty claims.  

Fanning and Jones are trapped in the Montgomery maze of deception. It is only going to get worse from here. I think Montgomery’s claims that China did it all are about to fall apart very soon, because he can’t prove it.  I think if it ever gets as far as any legal testimony involving Montgomery it will turn into an absolute circus if his legal history is a barometer of future events.  Montgomery will have to disclose where, when, how and from whom he obtained his information. This will be a never-ending ride of circular doublespeak deflection and fabricated testimony, just as it has been in the past.