by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 22, 2022) — As The Post & Email reported Wednesday, on August 20, 2022, attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell filed a Motion to Intervene with the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in a 2006 lawsuit in which the U.S. government, in the person of then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte, invoked a Protective Order and the State Secrets Privilege over information it considered vital to “national security.”
To his live audience at “The Moment of Truth Summit” on August 21, Lindell indicated he was filing the Motion from his laptop which, if granted and its premise upheld, would nullify litigation against him.
Lindell held the Summit, which brought together hundreds of people from around the country concerned about voting integrity, with the purpose of convincing the public that voting machines are vulnerable to malfeasance and should be abolished. At its conclusion, Lindell proffered that “data” he acquired from former government subcontractor Dennis Montgomery allegedly showing tampering in the November 3, 2020 presidential election would not only exonerate him in regard to legal action he is facing, but also demonstrates how the election was commandeered from a Trump victory to one for Joe Biden.
Montgomery was the plaintiff in the suit in which Negroponte claimed the Protective Order and State Secrets Privilege, which were granted by Judge Philip Pro in August 2007 with the clarification that information associated with “any intelligence agency” was the sole material to be protected from disclosure during the litigation.
As The Post & Email reported on September 7 in regard to Lindell’s address to his Summit audience on August 21:
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)
In the Motion, which is date-stamped by the court “08/20/22,” Lindell’s attorneys wrote that their client is seeking to defend against “a defamation claim.” There are currently three active suits making that accusation: one from Smartmatic; a second from Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.; and a third from former Dominion official Eric Coomer.
The litigation in which Lindell seeks to intervene, Montgomery, et al v. eTreppid, et al, arose in 2006 after Montgomery sued his business partner, Warren Trepp, following Montgomery’s abrupt departure from eTreppid Technologies, LLC, the company they formed in September 1998. Submitted with Lindell’s Motion to Intervene was a 194-page “Declaration” authored by Montgomery, excerpts from which were read aloud by Lindell attorney Kurt Olsen in between Lindell’s soliloquies at the Summit.
As noted previously, Montgomery later claimed he worked for eTreppid as an independent contractor, but court documents, including the operating agreement (OA) signed when the company was launched, state Montgomery was a partner, a claim he himself also made, as well as a member of the company’s “Management Committee.”
Page 55 of Montgomery’s Declaration, which is part of a lengthy November 28, 2006 order issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie P. Cooke granting Montgomery an unsealing of the warrants executed on his property by the FBI in early March of that year in its search for allegedly “classified” information, states that while at eTreppid, Montgomery “assigned patented technology” to eTreppid between 2000 and 2001 “relating to data compression, pattern recognition, and change and anomaly detection.”
There is no mention of “election”-related software, source code or technology, and references to eTreppid in the public domain make no such claim of the now-defunct company’s capabilities.
Page 17 of Montgomery’s Declaration is the first page of a February 18, 2004 “BusinessWire” press release in which eTreppid Technologies, LLC announced a “five-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with the United States Government to supply software compression, Automatic Target Recognition (ATR), and biometric products.”
The closing statement of the press release reads, “eTreppid Technologies, LLC is a privately held innovative company specializing in compression and data processing technology.”
Montgomery has only recently alleged that part of his work at eTreppid involved the development of “elections” technology in addition to software sold to the Defense Department intended to identify and prevent terrorist attacks in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Because the Protective Order remains in place, Montgomery claims in item #41 of his Declaration, he cannot release the technology behind his alleged election “data.”
At the Summit, Lindell claimed he now “owns” “most of” the data Montgomery allegedly gathered from the 2020 election, and Montgomery stated in item #39 that he “agreed to convey certain assets that I acquired and developed for eTreppid and Blxware to Mike Lindell Management.”
While Cooke in her November 2006 order ruled that the FBI showed a “callous disregard” for Montgomery’s Fourth Amendment rights by executing the search warrant without first providing her with all of the relevant information concerning the litigation, she would later refer Montgomery to the Justice Department for “perjury,” an allegation not pursued since Montgomery and Trepp settled their differences.
In late 2009, journalist Aram Roston published a detailed article titled, “The Man Who Conned the Pentagon,” referencing Montgomery’s unproven claims that software he produced while eTreppid was under contract with the DOD could decode terrorist messages embedded in Al-Jazeera broadcasts.
On the second day of his “Cyber Symposium” in August 2021, Lindell proffered a different reason for his ultimately unfulfilled promise to release the “PCAPS” (packet data) Montgomery purportedly collected as the November 3, 2020 election returns were allegedly altered. At the time Lindell said he was warned a “poison pill” would be inserted into the data, thereby corrupting it.
On page 6 of the Declaration filed with the court, Montgomery wrote about a 2013 interview he had with then-Fox News reporter Carl Cameron after claiming he possessed evidence of illegal government surveillance, a claim he has made for years yet never substantiated. Montgomery’s claims of having observed or taken part in government surveillance activity while he was a subcontractor arose approximately four months after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed specific programs the NSA was using to collect personal information on unsuspecting U.S. citizens such as PRISM.
Cameron “interviewed me in my home in Seattle and filmed my computers running domestic surveillance programs I licensed to the us gov involved in domestic surveillance programs I worked which involved domestic election monitoring and interference,” Montgomery wrote. “Carl Cameron filmed computers hacking into voting machines manufactures [sic] and
their equipment with ease.”
A second session, Montgomery claimed, involved a “film crew” which allegedly “recorded election network vulnerabilities in various Secretary of State election networks, specifically in Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and others. The filming was done by Robert Shaffer, Foxnews field producer, Seattle, WA.”
The Post & Email was able to verify that during the last decade, a “Robert Shaffer” covered the Northwest for Fox News, with his latest article appearing to have been published on May 2, 2016. Shaffer has a LinkedIn profile but has not posted there for some time. After finding evidence Shaffer relocated to New York City, The Post & Email attempted to contact him but was told by a Fox News operator that absent an extension number, she was unable to find him in a company directory.
Beginning with Exhibit #14 on page 153, Montgomery included emails he exchanged with Cameron wherein Cameron indicated his desire to examine “examples of the harvested data” while at the same time, taking care not to “disclose anyone’s private info” in his reporting.
What Montgomery did not include is the fact that after months of failing to produce the promised documentation and Montgomery’s claim that Fox News jettisoned the story, Cameron wrote to him in an email (during 2014, Montgomery used the alias “David Webb” in email communications), “FOX never froze your story Dennis, YOU DID. The day we met I told you any story hinged on the data. On tape you described the data and said he would produce it and said you were prepared to face the music for having kept the drives. I reiterated repeatedly that day that it was up to you to produce the data and you repeatedly said you understood By December it was clear you were not producing and not being honest. I reiterated the need for data and you re-promised. In January you admitted you never intended to produce what you’d promise [sic] because of the potential criminal charges. Face it, you have been lying about lots of things…”
In the email, Cameron referred to having received a phone call from Tim Blixseth, with whom he had been acquainted, from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) then led by Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, “and deputies began calling soon after.”
The email is one of several Cameron exchanged with Montgomery subpoenaed by U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow as part of litigation claiming Arpaio had violated the civil rights of Hispanics while conducting immigration patrols in the county.
As The Post & Email has reported, in approximately the same time frame Montgomery was interacting with Cameron, first using Blixseth as an intermediary and then on his own, Montgomery claimed to Arpaio to have in his possession evidence of illegal government surveillance of Maricopa County residents. After extensive interviews with Arpaio, a sworn deputy and MCSO Cold Case Posse leader Mike Zullo, Arpaio opened what became a yearlong investigation in which Montgomery was paid $10,000/month to work as a confidential informant to produce the evidence he claimed to have.
In the Declaration, Montgomery claimed the MCSO contacted him about “surveillance of Maricopa residents, businesses, and the state election networks,” a claim Zullo has refuted and which the record plainly shows is not in evidence.
Montgomery never produced the promised data, as confirmed by a report to Arpaio signed by two former NSA officials stating that the 47 hard drives Montgomery provided to Arpaio as containing his work product constituted no government-originating data but rather, “evidence of an outright and fraudulent con perpetrated on the government for personal gain and cover.”
It is the voices of Blixseth and Montgomery, along with those of Arpaio and his investigators, heard on “The Whistleblower Tapes,” which through The American Report‘s Mary Fanning and Alan Jones, Montgomery claims were made without his consent. That allegation is negated by a video taken by Zullo and Det. Brian Mackiewicz while gathering information from Montgomery at his home in Seattle during which Montgomery clearly acknowledged he was being video-recorded.
Updated, September 24, 2022, 9:15 a.m. with upload of Montgomery Declaration and quotations from BusinessWire press release.