LINDELL FREE TO RELEASE DATA FROM FORMER GOVERNMENT SUBCONTRACTOR DENNIS MONTGOMERY, GOVERNMENT SAYS
by Sharon Rondeau
(Oct. 9, 2022) – A 21-page brief filed by the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday asks a Nevada federal judge to maintain a protective order and State Secrets Privilege invocation in a 2006 lawsuit which MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell had recently sought to have lifted.
The government’s filing was a response to Lindell’s August 20, 2022 Motion to Intervene in Montgomery v. eTreppid Technologies, LLC; Warren Trepp; U.S. Department of Defense in which Lindell asked the Nevada federal court to revoke the 2007 protective order for the purpose of defending himself against a defamation suit filed early last year by Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.
Following the 2020 presidential election, Lindell accused Dominion and other voting-machine manufacturers of knowingly allowing, or causing, votes cast to be altered from Donald Trump to Joseph R. Biden, Jr., and has since engaged in a campaign to eliminate electronic voting equipment nationwide.
Dominion and Smartmatic responded by filing suit against Lindell for defamation; a third lawsuit from former Dominion executive Eric Coomer was filed this past spring in Colorado.
After Lindell unsuccessfully petitioned two lower courts for a dismissal of the Dominion case, the U.S. Supreme Court last week declined to hear arguments, thereby permitting Dominion’s case to go forward.
At his “The Moment of Truth Summit” on August 21, Lindell told the audience that data supplied by one of the Montgomery v eTreppid litigants, former government subcontractor Dennis Montgomery, was the source of his claims against Dominion. During his 19-minute soliloquy, Lindell vehemently vouched for Montgomery’s credibility and the reliability of the “PCAPS” data Montgomery allegedly provided revealing purported 2020 election-tampering on a massive scale.
As The Post & Email has long reported, since 2013 or earlier, Montgomery has claimed to numerous parties to possess evidence of illegal government surveillance of U.S. citizens; however, when pressed, he has failed to produce it.
It is only recently that Montgomery has claimed to have developed technology associated with voting, to possess proof of election-tampering or that such alleged technology and information are covered by the 2007 protective order. Those claims appear in Montgomery’s 194-page “Declaration” from which Lindell’s attorney, Kurt Olsen, read aloud to Summit attendees on August 21.
The Declaration accompanied Lindell’s August 20, 2022 filing with the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, the court which presided over the Montgomery litigation.
Because of the protective order restricting Montgomery from publicly discussing certain aspects of his work with the U.S. government, Olsen explained and Lindell claimed in his Motion, they would seek a lifting of the order, which would, according to Lindell at the Summit, neutralize the legal actions against him.
Montgomery and eTreppid
In September 1998, Montgomery teamed with former junk-bond dealer Warren Trepp to launch Intrepid, later renamed “eTreppid,” to develop software for the gaming industry.
After the 9/11 attacks, the Defense Department became interested in eTreppid’s work in the areas of “data compression, pattern recognition, and change and anomaly detection,” eventually awarding it a no-bid, $30 million contract.
Nothing in eTreppid’s history indicates it developed “election” software or technology nor that any government agency contracted with it to do so. Montgomery had represented to the Air Force that software he allegedly invented could detect hidden terrorist communications in Al Jazeera broadcasts, a claim which remains uncorroborated to this day and earned Montgomery the moniker in a 2009 Playboy article, “The Man Who Conned the Pentagon.”
In early 2006, Montgomery sued Trepp, alleging copyright infringement over software and source code he allegedly invented while at eTreppid which was used in the company’s work with the federal government. The Defense Department and eTreppid were also defendants in the case.
Montgomery’s legal action came just weeks after he abruptly and unexpectedly departed eTreppid, apparently taking with him considerable data and other materials. According to the FBI’s interviews with some of Montgomery’s former coworkers, Montgomery took equipment, source code and other sensitive information from eTreppid’s computers which they believed to be classified.
Soon after Montgomery filed suit alleging what he took from eTreppid was his property, Trepp countersued Montgomery, alleging he confiscated classified information, source code and hardware utilized in eTreppid’s work with the government and that many of the company’s computers were found disabled directly after Montgomery departed.
After numerous contentious hearings and motions, all litigation was settled in September 2008, with Magistrate Judge Valerie P. Cooke presiding.
Learning of the litigation, then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Negroponte requested the court grant a protective order and State Secrets Privilege over information he said could cause “serious, and in some cases exceptionally grave, damage to the national security of the United States” if it were revealed during the proceedings.
On August 29, 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Philip M. Pro granted Negroponte’s requests, ordering that “The Parties shall not serve or take any discovery relating to or questioning the existence or non-existence of any actual or proposed relationship, agreement, connection, contract, transaction, communication or meeting of any kind between any entity in the intelligence community as defined by the National Security Act of 1947…” (p. 5).
After expounding on the scope of his granting of the order, Pro enumerated items exempt from the protective order (pp. 5-6), which he said included “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.
In their Motion to Intervene, Lindell’s attorneys wrote that “Lindell seeks to use testimony and evidence concerning Montgomery’s background and his work for U.S. intelligence agencies, and the information from Montgomery itself, to defend the reasonability and veracity of his allegedly defamatory statements in the D.C. Litigation” (p. 2), referring to the Dominion lawsuit.
In its reply brief filed Thursday, the Justice Department’s Civil Division, Federal Programs Branch wrote that Lindell is not a party to the protective order and therefore is not restricted from releasing any information gleaned from Montgomery.
“Lindell has determined that it is necessary to intervene in this long-dismissed litigation in Nevada as part of his defense against the defamation claims he faces in D.C. in order to obtain relief from a protective order entered in this case pursuant to the state secrets privilege,…” DOJ attorneys Brian M. Boynton and Anthony J. Coppolino wrote on page 5. “Lindell seeks this relief despite the fact that: he is not subject to the protective order entered in this case and that protective order does not apply to any litigation but the above-captioned cases in which it was entered…”
“…neither this litigation nor the United States’ motion for protective order have anything at all to do with voting, elections administration, or Dominion,” the Department of Justice continued.
At the same time, the government asked that the protective order remain in place for the same reasons it was granted in 2007 and stated that Montgomery was still held by the non-disclosure agreement he signed in relation to eTreppid’s work with the government.
On page 15, the DOJ contended that Lindell’s claims lacked “relevance” on three counts, including that the protective order did not pertain to any information pertaining to “voting, elections administration, or voting machines, whether manufactured by Dominion or any other entity.”
First, the Protective Order in this litigation was entered over 15 years ago, pursuant to an assertion of the state secrets privilege over 16 years ago. Just simply looking at a calendar shows that the Order had nothing to do with the 2020 election or alleged fraud therein. Second, neither the Protective Order nor the supporting materials submitted by the United States in seeking it had anything to do with voting, elections administration, or voting machines, whether manufactured by Dominion or any other entity.3 And third, Lindell has not explained what the two categories of information that are subject to the Protective Order have to do with the defamation litigation. The closest Lindell comes on this score are statements that Montgomery has information related to purported “illegal US government surveillance programs” using Montgomery’s technology that involved the surveillance of, among many others, voting machines manufactured by Dominion. Mot. at 3; Montgomery Decl. ¶ 38, ECF No. 1216-2. But even on its own terms, this baseless claim provides no support to Lindell. That is because Lindell has not explained what these farfetched allegations of surveillance have to do with his contentions that votes in the 2020 election were manipulated by anyone, let alone the United States Government.
Montgomery and the MCSO
In the fall of 2013, Montgomery approached the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) with the claim of having in his possession approximately 600 million pages of evidence showing that the U.S. government illegally collected data of Americans across the country and that specifically, more than 151,000 Maricopa County residents were victims of government-initiated bank breaches and possible identity fraud. After interviewing a Montgomery surrogate and Montgomery himself on a number of occasions for several hours, then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio concluded that an investigation of Montgomery’s claims was warranted.
For approximately a year Montgomery was paid $10,000 a month as a confidential informant to produce the evidence he claimed to have of the breaches. During that year, former detective and then-Maricopa County Cold Case Posse lead investigator Mike Zullo was assigned to supervise Montgomery’s work.
After several months, Zullo came to suspect that Montgomery would not produce anything of value to the MCSO. With Arpaio’s approval, Zullo sought out three former NSA officials who agreed to conduct an independent analysis of data Montgomery saved on 47 hard drives as his MCSO work product.
In a strongly-worded letter dated November 13, 2014, former NSA officials J. Kirk Wiebe and Thomas Drake wrote that Montgomery had perpetrated a “fraudulent con” and that nothing of any government origin was contained on the drives.
In 2016, a federal judge would opine that Montgomery had carried out a “fraud” (p. 64) against the MCSO while excoriating Arpaio in a long-running civil-rights case. Snow’s referral of Arpaio for consideration of criminal charges culminated in a misdemeanor conviction, with President Trump issuing the first pardon of his term to obliterate it.
Zullo has been maligned by Montgomery and those to whom Montgomery has turned for favorable reporting, including Mary Fanning and Alan Jones of The American Report; Lindell and Olsen; and of late, radio host Peter Santilli and his associates, Lance Migliaccio and George Balloutine, who are listed as Montgomery “contacts” on a new website Santilli hosts on Montgomery’s behalf, “Operation Checkmate.”
On Friday night, Santilli reported Lindell’s assertion made on a GETTR livestream that “The government lifted the gag order, that means the whole world is going to see this election data,” which is inaccurate.
It is not the role of the Justice Department to lift the protective order, but rather, the decision lies with Judge Miranda Du, to whom the case was assigned after it was noted that Cooke is retired.
Santilli’s broadcasts are now hosted by Lindell’s news and information website, Frankspeech, including the misleading report that the protective order was “lifted.”
In response to our “Operation Checkmate” article, Santilli told this writer in an email that “Your article exudes extreme bias, is riddled with typographical and grammatical errors, contains so much text that nobody will ever read it, and based on your analytics, thankfully very few people will ever see it.”
“When you break 100 readers for the week, please let me know how I can help you,” Santilli added.
On October 5, The Post & Email asked Santilli about the veracity of a comment left in response to the article, which reads:
Rudy Lee says:
When Santilli says he won two federal trials, what’s he referring to? The federal charges against him in Oregon were dismissed before trial, and Santilli in Nevada pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to impede federal officers.
To date, we have received no response.
Similarly, Migliaccio did not respond to a question as to whether he is the individual who “pleaded guilty to five felony counts of possessing Ecstasy with the intent of distributing the drug and faces five years in prison as part of the plea agreement.”
According to Lindell associate Dr. Douglas Frank, who presented his own theory as to how the 2020 election results were allegedly altered in Lindell’s production of “Absolute Proof” last year, a Colorado investigation following the 2020 election found that “secret passwords” to vote tabulation machines “leaked out,” and “that’s why Mike [Lindell] was able to acquire so many PCAP recordings.”
Questions which need to be answered:
- How can Montgomery prove the origin of the alleged PCAPS when he remains bound by the protective order?
- How can Montgomery’s advocates reconcile that the Justice Department said there was no data covered by the protective order relevant to elections or voting?
Update, October 10, 2022, 8:49 a.m. EDT: The following was received from Santilli Sunday evening:
Sharon,
As I have already indicated, your blog reaches nobody. If I were to spend any of my time answering ridiculous questions from readers in your comment threads….who are obviously misinformed by reading your article to begin with, it would take away from the work I need to do to communicate to the public I serve. Essentially, I can’t be taken off in the weeds by your relentless time-sucking nonsense. Is that what you are intending to do?
Heres a question back to you: Of the 100+ articles you have ever written, how many times have you spoken to Dennis Montgomery? As I understand it from speaking directly to him, the answer is zero.
Try contacting Dennis Montgomery and asking him some questions. The answers to most of the important questions will undoubtedly discredit almost every article you have written.
The question posed by “Rudy Lee” indicates he has no clue what my responsibilities were in forming the joint legal defense team, preparing the juror questionnaires in advance of jury selection, as well as the searchable database and 3200+ discovery exhibits which were used by the defense team in multiple trials. Why were my charges dismissed on Oregon? Why did I “plead guilty”? What does the entire defense team say about my contributions to the defense team & being able to get the case dismissed?Please stop time sucking. Your website received 29 hits yesterday. The most efficient way to inform those readers is to have them tune into my show. Please also stop insinuating that by Dennis Montgomery not producing classified documentation in violation of his security clearance, he is therefore not credible. You would know his if you actually spoke to Dennis Montgomery at some point.
I’m deeply interested in the Dennis Montgomery story. There are too many historical and statistical anomalies with the 2020 election to believe Biden won. Won’t list them here, but it is a long list. Something criminal happened and I have seen the Edison data evidence straight from the NYTimes website that shows impossible series of repeating ratios of vote tranches that occur once Biden reached a 51/40 lead over Trump which resulted in Biden HOLDING the lead till voting ended. And in the Edison data the votes are in decimals. Why? And so much more — too much to type here. What I’d like to see is Lindell put together a large panel of computer experts to do a televised authentication of the PCAP evidence. Like 20 experts. That could settle this issue once and for all. Just a note to Sharon about how I found my way to your website. Today I re-watched one of your videos about Montgomery that I had saved on my hard drive and for a moment you flashed your website on the screen. So came here to see if you were still reporting on Dennis and was happy to see you still are. Though, I noticed, in a more critical way. Nontheless, that’s how I got here.
Presumably Santilli pleaded guilty in Nevada because he was, like he told the judge, actually guilty.
I don’t know who the defense team was or what they might have said, but some of the Nevada defendants spent years in prison.
Dennis Montgomery does have a website, whereas you may email any questions directly. As I understand Mike Lindell will have his lawyers on his Show on frankspeech, the lindell report this evening, To contact Mr.Montgomery simply .com Dennis Montgomery. Whether or not, the “gag’ order has been lifted on the 2020 election data likely may be answered this evening. The arrest of the software CEO and the China (CCP) are strong indications of nevarious involvement of manipulations of the election systems. The gov’t own admissions on hackable voting machines and Smartmatics testimony before the Louisiana State Secretary of State, as of many more evidences on, as is, a daily basis with the news. If, Mr. Lindell’s evidence does ring true, hopefully so, a true and fair vote would be a blessing to the Nation. It has been reported that President Trump did sign the Insurrection Act of 1807, before leaving Office. Also, of import in support, the Geneva Conventions and the Articles of War does support military intervention against Crimes and Acts of War upon the Country. Uncertain of how such an event would play out. For certain would likely concern Military Tribunals and arrests. I would think, the Supreme Court would be involved, perhaps the World Court. Congress and the Senate would be mute because their positions would be in question. If, Mike Lindell’s investigation is true and correct were in for a miracle of God’s handiwork. as to, merely parting of the Red Sea !!!!