by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 7, 2022) – [Author’s Note: In Part 1, The Post & Email provided a brief overview of claims made over the last 20 months by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, The American Report’s Mary Fanning and Alan Jones, and former government subcontractor Dennis Montgomery that China perpetrated a “cyberwarfare attack” on the 2020 U.S. election, altering the results in the presidential race from Donald J. Trump to Joe Biden.
Since early last year, Lindell has expended multiple millions of dollars in travel, legal actions, video productions and conferences featuring speakers advancing the “China” narrative and other theories to explain Trump’s reported loss.
At his “The Moment of Truth Summit” on August 20 and 21, Lindell hosted a myriad of public and private figures to share their views on the 2020 election and election integrity in general. A notable segment on the first day included citizens from all 50 states and the District of Columbia who made a commitment to improve election integrity and security in their jurisdictions. Many, like Lindell, believe that electronic voting equipment is compromised and should be abolished with a reversion to hand-counted paper ballots.
As we reported in Part 1, on August 22 broadcaster Brannon Howse recapped “The Moment of Truth” with telephone interviews with Fanning and Lindell, who asserted they have made considerable progress since “January 9, (2021),” the date Howse introduced Fanning to Lindell. That contact led to Fanning’s introduction of Montgomery to Lindell, with Lindell eagerly embracing Montgomery and Fanning’s claim that a Chinese cyber attack altered the election outcome.
Less than a week later, Lindell would take some of the “evidence” to the White House in the hope of gaining an audience with Trump or his advisers to share it.
Lindell now asserts that Montgomery is “one of the smartest men that ever walked this planet.”
Having publicly accused several voting-machine manufacturers of creating products they know to be susceptible to tampering, Lindell is currently a defendant in three lawsuits which he acknowledged at the Summit (49:30). The first is from Dominion Voting Systems, Inc. claiming defamation; the second was filed by Smartmatic on a similar basis; and the third was filed by former Dominion executive Eric Coomer. Countersuits Lindell filed against Smartmatic and Dominion were dismissed in May, although at the time Lindell vowed to appeal.
Despite his stated resolve to publicly release Montgomery’s alleged election data during his “Cyber Symposium” held last year in Sioux Falls, Lindell announced on the second day of that event that the threat of a “poison pill” (10:49) being imminently inserted into the data precluded him from fulfilling that pledge.
At “The Moment of Truth,” Lindell declared he now “owns most of” the evidence Montgomery provided on the 2020 election. Further, he said, he and his attorney, Kurt Olsen, devised a plan to file a Motion to Intervene in a 15-year-old case, long settled, which Montgomery filed against his former business partner, Warren Trepp, stemming from Montgomery’s work and sudden departure from the company they formed, eTreppid, in 2006.
Launched in 1998, eTreppid had been the recipient of millions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Defense as a result of its development of video compression technology. To protect the government’s interests, then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte requested a protective order and State Secrets Privilege be imposed on parties in the litigation relative to the work they performed at eTreppid for governmental agencies (50:25), a request the federal judge granted in 2007.
If his and Olsen’s Motion to Intervene proved successful, Lindell said, the court would lift the State Secrets Privilege and protective order, thereby allowing the release of Montgomery’s election evidence, and, at the same time, benefit Lindell because “the machines are gonna be gone; the lawsuits are gonna be gone; we’re gonna get our country back!” (50:50)
Lindell followed that exclamation by pressing a button on the laptop computer in front of him which he said filed the Motion to Intervene. The audience responded with applause and a standing ovation. ]
What Did Lindell “Validate,” and How?
In speaking with Montgomery after his January 9 conversation with Fanning, Lindell told his audience on August 21, there was “a divine connection” when Montgomery told him about his 2014 stroke. “He lived through something that was so horrific…and God told him, ‘You’re gonna stay alive for a time such as this, and you will meet someone,’ and that was me,” Lindell described the exchange.
Afterward, Lindell said, he spent 6-7 months “validating” Montgomery’s data, after which he held the “Cyber Symposium” to which he invited the media, “cyber” professionals, elected and non-elected officials and legislators to observe the historic unveiling of the PCAPS.
In Lindell’s recent soliloquy in which he strove to bolster Montgomery’s bona fides and credibility (concluding in the following segment), Lindell claimed that at the Cyber Symposium, “We were dropping PCAPS” until he was informed by his “red team” of the impending threat to the data, although several cyber professionals who attended and participated in a private viewing of the limited information Lindell released disagreed that PCAPS were even presented.
“But now I’m going to tell you why we couldn’t put those PCAPS out there,” he said, introducing his attorney, Kurt Olsen, and two cyber professionals who took their seats on-stage. “Kurt’s going to go through why couldn’t I pop those PCAPS, 32 terrabytes of your 2020 election,” Lindell said.
Olsen began his presentation with, “The big question is, ‘Who is Dennis Montgomery?’ He then aired a June 6, 2017 interview between Sean Hannity and then-Circa News journalists Sara Carter and John Solomon, who reported Montgomery’s lawsuit against the FBI filed earlier that year. Both referred to a face-to-face interview Carter conducted with Montgomery in which he claimed to have amassed 600 million government documents during his government service showing illegal surveillance of American citizens.
Circa is now defunct and the video of the interview with Montgomery not readily available.
Carter reported Montgomery showed receipts for the materials he gave the FBI under an immunity agreement in 2015, a development The Post & Email has written about at length. However, as Fanning and Lindell correctly noted toward the conclusion of their August 22 conversation with Howse, Carter and Solomon provided no follow-up to their initial report despite their stated intention to do so.
At 9:02 in the segment, Olsen began reading selected paragraphs from a sworn “Declaration” he said he received from Montgomery outlining his skills, experience and development of software while he worked for eTreppid and later, the Montana-based Blxware; both companies are now defunct. Montgomery also stated he worked as a government contractor at Ft. Washington, MD.
Item #13 of the Declaration states:
Beginning in 2005, I became aware that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) had started using the eTreppid technology that I had developed for locating terrorists abroad to conduct surveillance of citizens of the United States, including members of the Supreme Court of the United States and thousands of other federal and state jurists, members of Congress, state officeholders, numerous public figures and religious leaders in the U.S., and other Americans.
That claim is eerily similar to another Montgomery made in late 2013 to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) which initiated a yearlong investigation in which Montgomery was paid $10,000 monthly to serve as a confidential informant.
Montgomery’s overture to the MCSO with the claim he possessed evidence of government breaches of the bank accounts of tens of thousands of Maricopa County residents followed, by approximately four months, the revelations of former government subcontractor Edward Snowden of government programs collecting a plethora of personal data on U.S. citizens without a warrant. From a hotel room in Hong Kong in June 2013, Snowden divulged to The Guardian, accompanied by significant documentation, that the National Security Agency (NSA) was operating a “massive surveillance machine” which he believed was destructive to “privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world.”
In addition to the Maricopa County residents, Montgomery claimed to then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that he held evidence of illegal surveillance of American citizens to include Arpaio himself, numerous federal judges, Donald Trump, broadcaster Alex Jones, and millions of others from around the country.
A super-computer referred to as “The Hammer,” Montgomery claimed, was the tool the government used to conduct the surveillance and data-mining of innocent Americans. Unlike his later claim to Fanning and Jones of having constructed “The Hammer,” at the time Montgomery told MCSO investigators the computer was “already purchased” by the government when he arrived at Ft. Washington on behalf of Blxware, as Montgomery’s Declaration states in item #20.
As The Post & Email has reported, rather than confirming Montgomery’s claim that he placed “top-secret” data on 47 hard drives provided to Arpaio, three former NSA officials — Thomas Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe and William Binney — analyzed the drives and found nothing on the drives to be of a “classified” nature or even of government origin.
Further, in a scathing report to Arpaio, two of the three wrote that the data demonstrated “evidence of an outright and fraudulent con perpetrated on the government for personal gain and cover.”
The analysts’ findings were cited by U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow in a 2016 opinion stemming from a long-running civil-rights complaint against Arpaio (p. 64).
While during the trial there arose an allegation that Snow had exhibited bias against Arpaio in a private setting, Snow did not recuse himself. His ruling condemning the Sheriff’s Office for defying his orders as to the apprehension of illegal aliens in Maricopa County ultimately produced a criminal referral of Arpaio, conviction without a jury and the first pardon issued by then-President Trump.
“There were many reasons Sheriff Arpaio would not have wanted the hard drives and their fraudulent nature disclosed,” Snow wrote in the opinion (citations omitted). “First, Mr. Montgomery committed a fraud on the MCSO. Having paid large sums of money to Montgomery for his investigations, the MCSO was a victim of that fraud. Disclosure could therefore bring embarrassment to Sheriff Arpaio and the MCSO. Second, Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Montgomery shared the same attorney and had shared this attorney since at least November 2014. Third, Sheriff Arpaio testified that the MCSO continued to engage Mr. Montgomery as a confidential source up through and including the time of the hearing, despite Arpaio’s repudiation of the substance of Montgomery’s reports, and despite the overwhelming evidence of Montgomery’s fraud. These are all powerful motivations to avoid disclosure of the fraudulent hard drives.”
Montgomery’s claims about “The Hammer” were resuscitated by Fanning and Jones in their initial article on the subject dated March 17, 2017 bearing the sensational title, “Whistleblower Tapes: Trump Wiretapped ‘A Zillion Times’ By ‘The Hammer,’ Brennan’s and Clapper’s Secret Computer System.”
“The Whistleblower Tapes” were recorded during interviews of Montgomery and his associate, Tim Blixseth, with the MCSO in the fall of 2013 and in the course of Arpaio’s civil-rights trial leaked by a plaintiff’s attorney to a friendly media outlet, The Phoenix New Times.
The Times’s publication of the recordings in late 2015 belies Fanning and Jones’s claim of exclusivity as well as their assertion that it was Snow who released them. Making much of their effort to “transcribe” the tapes yet performing no vetting of their content, Fanning and Jones reported Blixseth and Montgomery’s assertions to be accurate, with The American Report serving as a springboard for an ever-evolving narrative which continues to this day.