by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 9, 2022) — [Please see Parts 1 and 2 of this series. Here, we continue our analysis of the “Declaration” former government subcontractor Dennis Montgomery provided to Mike Lindell and his attorney, Kurt Olsen, parts of which Olsen read on the second day of Lindell’s “Moment of Truth Summit” held on August 20 and 21, 2022.
On Sunday evening, August 21, Lindell and Olsen attempted to dispel any doubts arising as to the reliability of the “PCAPS” data Montgomery reportedly captured in real time from the 2020 election allegedly showing targeting by a Chinese “cyberwarfare attack.”
Describing Montgomery as a brilliant computer technician and courageous whistleblower, both men claimed the Declaration not only proves Montgomery’s bona fides, but also reveals the reason the PCAPS, which Lindell called “the keys to everything” (23:16), have not yet been made public.
At his “Cyber Symposium” approximately one year earlier, Lindell promised to release the PCAPS but on the second day reversed course, claiming his “red team” warned that a “poison pill” was about to be injected into the data by someone apparently opposed to its release.
As we reported in Part 2, Lindell began that Sunday night segment by describing his first interaction on January 9, 2021 with The American Report‘s Mary Fanning, who along with co-author Alan Jones has published scores of articles featuring Montgomery’s claims, often interwoven with current news events and sporting attention-grabbing headlines.
On January 9, 2021, Lindell said, in a telephone call facilitated by WVW host Brannon Howse, Fanning described Montgomery’s having captured the election data and cyber attack as it allegedly unfolded the night of November 3, 2020. Finding Fanning overwhelmingly convincing, Lindell said, he agreed to an introduction to Montgomery. From there, Lindell claimed an immediate “divine connection” when Montgomery told him about his 2014 stroke.
After reiterating the “poison pill” explanation and defending Montgomery and Fanning from detractors, Lindell turned over the session to Olsen, who he said would lay out in greater detail the restriction on publishing the data as well as a proposal for seeing that restriction lifted.
A recap of the Summit hosted by Howse claims that “bombshell information about government whistleblower Dennis Montgomery” was released during the event. The Post & Email contacted Fanning for a clarification of the claim but received no response.
With more than seven years of covering Montgomery’s claims, beginning with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) in 2013, The Post & Email has identified a number of discrepancies between Montgomery’s newest Declaration and previous statements, many of which are contained in court records and other official documents.
In Part 2, we began our analysis with #13 in the Declaration. Interestingly, the document alternates between the first and third person.]
In item #16 of the “Declaration,” Montgomery claimed when his home and storage units were raided in 2006 by the FBI and allegedly other federal agencies, they were seeking “all evidence of FBI/CIA/NSA involvement in operating surveillance programs, foreign and domestic in Nevada that target foreign and domestic individuals, businesses, and elections.”
In previous statements, however, including a “Whistleblower” timeline which became part of the court record in a civil case against then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, Montgomery never claimed he had invented anything relating to “elections,” nor did he mention it in his 2013 interviews with Arpaio or members of his staff relating to his claims of government surveillance of county residents and American citizens at large.
Background: Montgomery, eTreppid and the Raid
At some point between January 10 and January 18, 2006, Montgomery abruptly left eTreppid, the company he and Nevada businessman Warren Trepp founded in 1998 (originally named “Intrepid”) to develop compression and pattern-recognition software, initially for the gaming industry. Following the 9/11 attacks, the company entered into contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, garnering millions of dollars in revenue and catapulting eTreppid into the top 20 defense contractors in the country.
Montgomery’s unexpected departure led to bitter litigation between Montgomery and Trepp over the ownership of the source code incorporated into eTreppid’s technology. Soon thereafter, Montgomery filed suit against Trepp and eTreppid in U.S. District Court in Nevada, and Trepp sued Montgomery in state court; both cases, which grew to involve other parties, were settled more than two years later.
Because of Trepp’s concerns that Montgomery took “trade secrets and classified information” with him upon his exit, the Air Force opened an investigation which was soon assumed by the FBI and led to a search, or “raid,” of Montgomery’s home and storage facilities on March 1 and 3, 2006 (p. 2).
The search warrants and other documentation were designated “SEALED” but are publicly available here and include FBI “302s,” or interview summaries, between the FBI and eTreppid employees who worked closely with Montgomery.
According to the 302 of Trepp’s interview, he told investigators Montgomery was “a bright individual, who is a workaholic and has been known to embellish facts to his advantage…”
Trepp claimed Montgomery left “blank” backup disks for the computer systems and that certain hardware was found missing or “damaged” (p. 5) after Montgomery’s departure. Trepp also told investigators that “Montgomery has software programming skills” but that he had discovered “that Montgomery’s skills may not be what he has purported them to be.” “Trepp cited a recent Air Force Office of Special Investigation Inquiry, which determined that Montgomery’s programming skills were not what he alleged,” the report states. “Montgomery has hired other employees to do programming and claimed that he did the work.”
In another “302,” eTreppid Director of Research and Development Sloan Venables was reported to have stated he “knew Montgomery promised products to customers that had not been completed or even assigned to programmers.”
As Olsen would later emphasize, during the Montgomery-Trepp litigation, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte claimed the State Secrets Privilege and a protective order over information eTreppid held as a result of its government work which the government wished to restrict from disclosure due to its “national security” implications.
In 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Philip M. Pro granted Negroponte’s requests. However, at the same time, Pro stated that certain items were not precluded from release, including “the computer source code, software, programs, or technical specifications relating to any technology owned or claimed by any of the Parties (‘the Technology’);” and “Any contract, relationship, agreement, connection, transaction, communication or meeting of any kind relating to the Technology, unless covered by paragraphs 2 or 3 above;”, among others (p. 3).
It was information connected to “any intelligence agency” which was not to be disclosed, Pro ruled.
Nevertheless, as Montgomery has come forward over the years with multiple allegations of government surveillance and abuse, he has always stopped short of delivering the evidence he claimed to have by falling back upon Negroponte’s invocation of the State Secrets Privilege and protective order in the 15+-year-old case.
As for #17 in Montgomery’s Declaration, U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Cooke did, in fact, rule that the FBI raid violated Montgomery’s Fourth Amendment rights when it conducted the raid, excoriating the FBI for allegedly misleading her in its search warrant application.
She later referred Montgomery to the U.S. Justice Department for “perjury” and imposed harsh sanctions on his attorneys for their conduct in Montgomery v. eTreppid for alleged “forum shopping.”
“In a 53-page ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Cooke found that Deborah Klar and Teri Pham engaged in ‘forum shopping’ by trying to get other courts and officials to prod Montgomery’s previous lawyer, Michael Flynn, to release documents and to get out of paying the fees Montgomery owed Flynn,” the Las Vegas Review Journal reported on April 5, 2009.
The following year, however, Judge Pro reversed Cooke’s imposition of sanctions on the attorneys.
On page 163 of the transcript from a Motion Hearing in Montgomery v eTreppid dated June 10, 2008, Cooke asked Montgomery if he were “aware that Ms. Wells (Department of Justice attorney) told the Court that she had attempted to arrange a meeting between you and government officials to review the terms of the U.S. Protective Order on two occasions…?”
Following back-and-forth discussion about attorney-client privilege impacting Montgomery’s ability to respond, Trepp’s attorney, “Mr. Peek,” stated, “Your Honor, all I know is the Court ordered him to meet with the government. And it wasn’t until the Court ordered Mr. Montgomery to meet with the government that he did so.”
“Ms. Klar,” representing Montgomery, responded, “Your Honor, that is not correct. We agreed to meet with the government before the May 21st hearing.” However, it appears the meeting never took place.
When Peek reverted to his original line of questioning about contents of a disk Montgomery said came from eTreppid and was “stored” alternately between his storage unit and his car, Peek asked Montgomery if he reviewed the disk’s contents to determine whether or not he believed there was information covered by the State Secrets Privilege. Montgomery was arguably evasive in his responses.
In the Olsen/Lindell Declaration, Montgomery himself admitted that the State Secrets Privilege precluded only “certain discovery” from disclosure (12:36).
At 12:41, Olsen narrated on his own and not from the Declaration, “Again, Dennis was raided.” Resuming reading from the document, he said, “On March 4, 2010 the DOJ and the FBI raided the law office of his attorneys, the Liner Law Firm, without a search warrant or any probable cause and seized millions of pages of attorney-client documents…”
Reading “us gov” as “US government” where the latter appears twice in the paragraph, Olsen emphasized the words, “election data” where they appeared and corrected Montgomery’s writing of “manufactures” to “manufacturers.”
“This is under oath, by the way,” Olsen commented after reading the contents of the slide.
The Post & Email could find no evidence to support Montgomery’s claim of an FBI raid on the “Liner” law office, a reference to “Liner Yankelevitz Sunshine Regenstreif LLP,” later changed to “Liner Grode Stein Yankelevitz Sunshine Regenstreif & Taylor LLP,” or Liner Grode for short.
In performing its due diligence, on Friday afternoon The Post & Email contacted “Liner Law” at the number on its website and, when an employee answered the phone, was greeted with, “DLA Piper.” Confused, we asked if we had the correct party, to which he responded that DLA Piper acquired Liner Grode approximately four years ago. At our request, he connected us to the firm’s media representative, with whom we left a voice message and contact information. As of press time, we have not received a response.
Did Montgomery Ever Develop “Elections” Software?
In an October 30, 2006 response to the government’s request for the protective order, Montgomery submitted a “Declaration” listing his alleged intellectual property against the backdrop of the March 2006 raid. Beginning with the late 1970s through “the present” (p. 3 of 23 using top numbering), Montgomery told the court, “The software programs and the source codes owned, possessed and used exclusively by me on behalf of the foregoing Government agencies all derive from my exclusive copyrights generally relating to ‘anomaly detection’ and ‘pattern recognition,’ and more specifically relating to the source codes used in my ‘ODB,’ and derivatives thereof…”
At no point in the Declaration does he claim to have worked on anything remotely related to “elections.”
For an unknown reason, the document was not stamped “Filed” until August 3, 2007.
On a one-page biographical website, the entirety of which The Post & Email has printed for reference, Montgomery enumerates a myriad of alleged accomplishments, patent filings and work in the “AI” and medical fields. However, he does not say he invented or “licensed” any products encompassing elections, nor do any of his patent applications involve elections software or hardware.
“Independent Contractor” or “Management?”
In his lawsuit against Trepp, Montgomery claimed he “was an independent contractor throughout my time at eTreppid.”
However, the court record of the raid of Montgomery’s property filed March 10, 2006 contains a “statement of facts” declaring Montgomery “a co-owner of eTreppid.”
In his interview with the FBI, Trepp stated Montgomery was a “fifty percent owner” of the company, although that percentage was reduced to 30, Trepp said, after Montgomery liquidated the difference for “2.25 million.”
The September 28, 1998 operating agreement between Montgomery and Trepp, referenced in the 302 and reflected in the court record, states Montgomery to have been a part owner of eTreppid Technologies as well as a member of the “management committee.” An April 18, 2008 order in Montgomery v. Etreppid Technologies, LLC issued by Cooke reads, in relevant part:
In addition to case law, the court also conducted an extensive review of eTreppid’s 1998, 1999 and 2001 Operating Agreements (“OA”) (#429, Exhibits A-C). The OA reveals that eTreppid elected to be classified as a partnership for federal tax purposes. Id., Exhibits A-B, sec. 10.6.1; Exhibit C, sec. 9.6.1. However, as to the management of eTreppid, the OA states that eTreppid is managed by, and all company powers are vested in, a management committee. Id., Exhibits A-C, sec. 6.1 and 6.2. The management committee has “the general powers and duties of the management typically vested in the board of directors and the office of the chief executive officer of a corporation.” Id. The LLC’s manager conducts the day-to-day operations at the direction and under the oversight of the management committee. Id., sec. 6.1. The manager has “the general powers and duties of management typically vested in the office of a chief operating officer of a corporation.” Id., sec. 6.3. In January 1999, the manager was also given the title of “President” of eTreppid. Id., Exhibits B-C, sec. 6.3. The OA contains specific limitations on the powers of the management committee and the manager, requiring member action for certain important duties. Id., Exhibits A-C, sec. 6.4.
eTreppid’s original Operating Agreement is dated September 28, 1998 (#429, Exhibit A). The Operating Agreement was amended and restated on January 1, 1999 (#429, Exhibit B), and again on November 1, 2001 (#429, Exhibit C). The court here sets out only provisions relevant to the issues at hand.
In the original 1998 OA, Montgomery was designated as eTreppid’s manager. Id., Exhibit A sec. 6.1.1. However, from January 1999 on, Douglas Frye was designated as eTreppid’s manager, and Montgomery was designated as eTreppid’s chief technology officer. Id., Exhibit B, sec. 6.1.1 and 6.1.3. As of January 1999, the management committee consisted of Douglas Frye, Warren Trepp and Dennis Montgomery. Id., Exhibits B-C, sec. 6.1.4. From inception, Warren Trepp acted as the chair of the management committee. Id., Exhibits A-C, sec. 6.1.5.
The Operating Agreement indicates that eTreppid conducts business more like a corporation than a partnership. eTreppid’s organization is based on a corporate structure, with the Management Committee being compared to a corporate board of directors and a chief executive officer, and the manager being compared to a president and chief operating officer. The management committee acts by vote and makes policies and procedures, similar to a corporate board of directors. The committee then oversees eTreppid’s manager in carrying out those policies and procedures, just as a board of directors oversees corporate officers. Members, like corporate shareholders, have no personal liability. eTreppid also has a resident agent similar to a corporation, had to file articles of organization with the Nevada Secretary of State like a corporation files articles of incorporation, and has an Operating Agreement akin to corporate bylaws. The only comparison to a partnership is eTreppid’s tax treatment.
Item #30 in the Lindell/Olsen Declaration states (13:59) Montgomery “met with Federal Judge Royce Lamberth” in 2014 “with others present,” where he reports he presented “evidence” to Lamberth on “domestic surveillance programs” and “election tampering.”
However, the latter claim is disputed by the public record and Montgomery’s assignment by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office during that time to produce the evidence he claimed to have on bank-account breaches of county residents. In fact, his meeting with the judge came about solely because of his work as a confidential informant for the MCSO in 2014.
In the same paragraph, Montgomery’s reference to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker’s having “denied any knowledge of such FBI/CIA/NSA domestic surveillance programs” on which Montgomery allegedly “worked” relates to the October 2018 closed-door testimony Baker provided to the House Oversight & Government Reform and Judiciary Committees during their investigation of the reason for the FBI’s launch of a probe into allegations that members of the 2016 Trump campaign were “colluding” with the Russian government.
Fanning and Jones, for their part, have sensationalized Baker’s testimony, claiming that after Baker allegedly was given 47 hard drives from Montgomery’s then-attorney, Larry Klayman, with the assertion they contained evidence of illegal government surveillance, Baker “knew Trump had been spied upon for a long time.”
In the transcript, Baker is noted to have told then-Rep. Mark Meadows that he was aware of allegations submitted to the Bureau by Klayman on Montgomery’s behalf regarding “unlawful surveillance of other Americans, including government officials” and that he believed the FBI had initiated an investigation of the claims. Quoting from the transcript, Baker said:
…his client was an individual named Dennis Montgomery, who I believe, to the best of my recollection, he said that he had been a U.S. Government contractor and, in the course of that work, had come across evidence of unlawful surveillance by the government of Americans — and including government officials — and wanted to give that information to the Bureau, which eventually did take place.
When asked when he met with Klayman, Baker responded, “To the best of my recollection, it’s in the late summer, early fall 2016.”
In item #31, Olsen appeared to presume Montgomery “met with” two U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffers while Montgomery stated only that he “had discussions” with them.
Is it All about the Money?
Item #39 shows Montgomery stating that last year, he “agreed to convey certain assets that I acquired and developed for eTreppid and Blxware to Mike Lindell Management.”
On September 3, 2021, then-Salon.com writer Zachary Petrizzo, a particular nemesis of Lindell’s, discovered that a limited liability company Montgomery registered days before in Naples, Florida under the name “Blxware LLC” is located in a luxury home Petrizzo said he was told Lindell purchased prior to Lindell’s August 2021 cyber symposium.
The Florida Department of State confirms the business filing and its location:
According to realtor.com, the home where the business is located sold for $1.5 million on July 12, 2021, approximately one month before the Cyber Symposium took place.
In April of this year, a nearly-12-year-old case arising from Montgomery’s allegedly having written checks to casinos with insufficient funds was “settled” and the case dismissed, according to the Clark County, NV court docket and the district attorney’s spokesman in an email to this writer.
Olsen introduced #40 and #41 as “the concluding paragraphs” in the Declaration, reminding the audience that the document was “certified under the penalty of perjury” (16:25). Olsen then read from slide #40:
Dennis concludes in the final two paragraphs of this declaration, “In the recent 2020 election, terrabytes of data comprising internet transmissions sent during the 2020 election were collected by the same technology I developed and previously licensed by the U.S. government. The U.S. government or their agents continued to use the election technology I licensed to them previously. The U.S. government has refused to pay the license fees associated with the technology as they continued to use the technology and have paid for it in the past.”
Always “the Protective Order,” “State Secrets Privilege”
Further, Montgomery stated in #41, as read by Olsen, “Because DOJ has asserted that the eTreppid Litigation Protective Order ‘remains in place’ to ‘preclude disclosure of the categories of information and related materials described in the order,’ I believed when I owned eTreppid and Blxware, and continue to believe today, that DOJ asserts that the Protective Order applies to the FBI/CIA/NSA domestic surveillance data including Election Data, and that public disclosure of the Election Data would violate the Protective Order and the state secrets privilege.”
Montgomery does not clarify how “Election Data” he allegedly collected in 2006 or earlier relates to the 2020 election or why the Defense Department would have contracted for eTreppid’s expansion into that area.
Blxware LLC was founded by Edra Blixseth, with Montgomery named Chief Scientist. For several months he performed additional consulting work for the U.S. government which expired after several months, and in 2009 Blxware became defunct when Edra Blixseth declared personal bankruptcy following her divorce from Tim Blixseth.
A bankruptcy court document indicates that Edra (Blixseth) “controlled” Blxware. Blxware succeeded a startup company, “Opspring.”
In 2009, Trepp sued Opspring and Blxware, where Montgomery had become employed after leaving eTreppid. According to Wikipedia:
Blxware partnership
After his separation from eTreppid, Montgomery joined with Edra and Tim Blixseth to bring his alleged terrorist tracking software to other U.S. and foreign government clients. With the Blixseths and former presidential candidate Jack Kemp he helped form OpSpring LLC, later renamed Blxware. Via Blxware, Montgomery pursued selling his terror tracking software to the U.S. and Israel governments, leveraging political connections of the Blixseth partnership.[5] Blxware’s owners Edra and Tim Blixseth divorced in 2008 and Blxware became part of Edra Blixseth’s sole property. She filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which resulted in a Chapter 7 liquidation of her assets, including Blxware and its associated software and intellectual property.[6]
Today, Montgomery operates a website under the name “Blxware.org,” where he claims that “SCORECARD, MEDUSA, DRAGNET, THORSHAMMER, HANNAH, KILLSHOT, COURIER, HANGINGCHAD, SPEARIT AMONG OTHERS PROGRAMS ARE REAL COMPUTER PROGRAMS DESIGNED TO RUN ON THE HAMMER. ANYONE TELLING YOU DIFFERENT IS LYING!”
Under the heading, “2020 Election,” the website claims:
US voting machine manufactures and their employees were hacked in illegal FBI/NSA/CIA domestic surveillance programs we worked in. The proof was provided to the DOJ and FBI by a whistle blower in 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2015. The data was also provided to FBI Director James Comey’s general counsel James Baker on 08/19/2015 and 12/03/2015.
Election Systems & Software, Inc (ES&S)
Clear Ballot Group, Inc.
Dominion Voting Systems Corp
Hart InterCivic, Inc.
MicroVote General Corp.
Smartmatic USA Corporation
VotingWorks
Unisys Voting Solutions
How can these voting machines manufacturers expect their products to be safe and secure when they can’t even protect their companies from being hacked??
Notably, at no point in the portions of the Declaration Olsen displayed and read did Montgomery assert that China was the source of the alleged “internet transmissions sent during the 2020 election” or for any interference in the election.
Upon concluding his reading, Olsen turned to parts of Negroponte’s declaration filed with the federal court asking for the State Secrets Privilege to be applied “to this litigation.”
Olsen observed that Montgomery “had sworn to under oath” that “election data” was a portion of the information Negroponte wished to keep secret.
“So anybody who says Dennis Montgomery is not the real deal is either ignorant or they’re lying,” Olsen concluded the segment to applause from the audience.
In Part 4, The Post & Email will address Olsen’s bold statement.