Jennifer Cohn: "…unscrupulous Republican “fixers,” including Roger Stone, deflected by falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. In the years since, these same fixers have emerged again and again to deceive voters with faulty narratives that have helped empower right wing extremists, including the Religious Right. …Bush (2000) opposed any manual recount at all. His legal team included three future Supreme Court justices: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett...A consortium of eight news agencies .. found that a manual recount of all machine-rejected ballots throughout the state ...would have produced a narrow Gore victory…. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3 billion to replace punch card machines with new voting machines. HAVA allowed the new machines to be entirely paperless, making manual recounts impossible…..In 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans might use paperless voting machines to steal elections...Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer were the only Senators who opposed HAVA…."
COMMENT: This trip down memory lane reviews the painful history of election fraud since 2000 Bush v Gore. A disreputable cast of characters managed two presidential campaigns in which the candidate with less votes became president. They are more powerful than ever, including three Supreme Court justices. This is a long read but good background, and a strong warning as to where things will go in 2022 and 2024 unless someone gets the courage to stop it. Allegra Dengler
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https://jennycohn1.medium.com/the-2000-u-s-presidential-election-was-a-harbinger-of-things-to-come-fecb1de53fa8
The 2000 U.S. presidential election was a harbinger of things to come.
Jennifer Cohn
Dec 24, 2021·23 min read
It featured a voting machine glitch, a bogus voter purge, narrative warfare, Karl Rove, and a manufactured “riot” orchestrated by Roger Stone.
Credit: CNN https://youtu.be/QpHa8B0KvUk
By Jennifer Cohn
December 23, 2021
The 2000 presidential election was a “watershed moment” for U.S. elections and “harbinger of things to come,” as Jonathan Simon, a seasoned election-security advocate and author, remarked when I interviewed him last year. The election, he explained, was marred by “counting issues with [voting machine] memory cards,” a thwarted manual recount, and “ massive purging of voters who were absolutely entitled to vote.” All of these issues favored the GOP, but unscrupulous Republican “fixers,” including Roger Stone, deflected by falsely accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election. In the years since, these same fixers have emerged again and again to deceive voters with faulty narratives that have helped empower right wing extremists, including the Religious Right.
During the 2000 general election, then Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat and environmentalist, ran against former Texas Governor George W. Bush, an oilman and self-proclaimed evangelical Christian. Bush had won the Republican presidential nomination after an unusually brutal primary against Arizona Senator John McCain, a decorated war hero. During the primary, as reported in the Atlantic, fliers, emails, and push polls had falsely claimed that McCain was the father of an “illegitimate” African-American child (a defamatory reference to his adopted daughter from Bangladesh) and that he was mentally unstable due to his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain’s staffers and daughter accused Bush’s campaign manager, Karl Rove, of orchestrating the smears.
Rove denied having done so, but this was the sort of tactic for which he was already infamous. In 1994, a Republican judicial candidate from Alabama named Harold See had hired Rove to run his campaign against an incumbent Democratic judge named Mark Kennedy. A former Rove staffer later acknowledged that Rove’s team had spread a false rumor that Kennedy was a gay pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer told journalist Joshua Green of the Atlantic. “The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out — he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.”
Bush’s selection of Rove to run his 2000 presidential campaign was telling. The apparent plan was to win at all costs. The apparent mentality was that the ends would justify the means. Bush affectionately called Rove “turd blossom,” meaning a flower that grows from manure.
Bush’s brother, Jeb, was conveniently positioned as the governor of Florida, which everyone expected to be the decisive battleground state. The state’s top election official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, opposed abortion rights and was an honorary co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign, which constituted a glaring conflict of interest.
Problems erupted even before the first vote was cast. In the runup to the election, Harris used a faulty (overbroad) felon list to erroneously purge up to 12,023 voters from the state’s voter rolls. The list had been created at the request of the Florida Department of State by DTS Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint in Atlanta. ChoicePoint’s president was a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for office in Utah during the 2000 election. According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, more than half of the voters on the Florida felon list were black.
It had been inspired by Hans Von Spakovsky, a Republican and former Georgia election official, who had written an article in 1997 calling for an aggressive campaign to purge felons from the voter rolls. (Von Spakovsky would later serve on Trump’s so-called election-integrity commission, which was established in 2017.)
As reported in the Tampa Bay Times, the “NAACP and American Civil Liberties Union [later] sued the state … over the felon voter purge [from the 2000 election], arguing it disenfranchised black voters. A consent decree from the lawsuit settlement required the state to run its old felon lists with new standards…” The exercise “resulted in 12,023 fewer Floridians making the felon list, meaning these people could have been targeted [improperly] as felons and denied the right to vote…”
This was not the only supposed mistake that helped Bush. In Palm Beach County, a “butterfly ballot” design flaw caused many Gore voters to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan, a conservative third-party candidate. Approximately two thousand Gore voters are believed to have made this mistake due to the faulty design.
At the time, multiple news outlets reported that Palm Beach County’s election supervisor, Theresa Lepore, had designed the butterfly ballot. But an Ohio company called Triad, which sold replica ballots as souvenirs and would later derail the 2004 presidential recount with cheat sheets and remote access, has claimed that it created the butterfly ballot. According to Ohio attorney Bob Fitrakis, Triad is owned by the Rapp family from Zenia, Ohio, which he says is active within the local “right to life” movement. The family’s social media accounts bear this out.
On election night, Bush’s cousin, John Ellis, worked at the Fox News desk where he had access to confidential exit poll data and real-time voting data, a situation that foreshadowed the 2016 election, when ABC News producer Chris Vlasto shared confidential exit poll data with the Trump campaign at 5:01 p.m. on Election Night. According to the New Yorker, it was Ellis’s “responsibility to tell the networks when they could safely project the outcome in each state. He also stayed in constant touch with his cousins in Austin, relaying early vote counts as they showed up on his screens.” “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth,” Ellis would later tell The New Yorker. “Me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.”
Election night was a roller coaster. At about 8:00 p.m., the networks, including Fox News, called the election for Gore based on exit polls that predicted he would win the decisive state of Florida with 99.5% certainty.
Rove made some calls and, within about ten minutes, the networks retracted their earlier prediction and declared the race too close to call.
At about 2:15 a.m., the networks reversed their initial call by declaring that Bush had won Florida and thus the presidency. CBS’s screen flashed: ``Bush elected president.”
Gore called Bush to concede and congratulate him on his victory. His supporters wept, as cheers erupted in Austin, Texas.
But Gore soon learned that the network had mistakenly called the race for Bush based on a computer glitch involving a single precinct in Volusia county, which had erroneously subtracted 16,000 votes from Gore’s total. The mistaken call gave Bush the momentum and thus the advantage in the ensuing narrative warfare.
Election officials claimed that the “Volusia error” occurred when a corrupted memory card containing vote totals from precinct 216, which used optical scanners, was manually uploaded to the central tabulator at the county election office. But those who study election security are skeptical. As explained by journalist Kim Zetter in an article for the New York Times, a corrupted memory card “should produce an onscreen error message or cause a computer to lock up, not alter votes in one race while leaving others untouched. And what kind of faulty card deleted votes only for Gore, while adding votes to other candidates?”
https://bradblog.com/?p=12479
Moreover, as initially discovered and reported by Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris (and later by the New York Times), internal vendor memos that were leaked online referenced a second memory card, which was never located. “The problem precinct had two memory cards uploaded. The second one is the one I believe caused the problem,” one memo said. “There is always the possibility that the ‘second memory card’ or ‘second upload’ came from an un-authorized source,” it added ominously.
The vendor was Global Election Systems, whose largest shareholder and Senior VP was convicted embezzler Jeffrey Dean whose crimes involved sophisticated computer tampering. At the time, Global was receiving financial support from an ATM manufacturer in Ohio called Diebold, Inc., which was in the process of acquiring it. Diebold was expected to name Walden O’Dell, a major Bush supporter, as its new president.
The Volusia error was corrected in the early morning hours of November 8, prompting Gore to call Bush and un-concede. According to Vanity Fair, Bush responded that “the networks had already called the result and that the numbers were correct — his brother Jeb had told him.” Gore reportedly told him that, ”Your little brother is not the ultimate authority on this.”
“Due to the narrow margin of the original vote count, Florida Election Code 102 mandated a statewide machine recount, which began the day after the election. It was ostensibly completed on November 10 in the 66 Florida counties that used vote-counting machines and reduced Bush’s lead to 527 votes. According to legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, however, “18 counties… did not carry out the legally mandated machine recount,” but no one from Gore’s campaign made an issue of it.
As far as a hand recount, Gore sought to review only about 80,000 ballots that had been rejected by the machines (and thus not counted) in just four counties: Volusia, Miami Dade, Dade, and Palm Beach counties. When Republicans accused him of cherry picking counties, he proposed a statewide hand recount instead, but Bush refused.
Bush opposed any manual recount at all. His legal team included three future Supreme Court justices: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
It was Ted Cruz, now a US Senator from Texas, who suggested that Bush retain Roberts to help oppose the recount. Cruz was also a member of Bush’s legal team.
Volusia county, which used hand marked paper ballots (pen and paper) counted on scanners, was the only county to complete the hand recount. The other three counties used punch card systems, where incompletely punched holes resulted in partially punched “hanging chads.” These faulty punch cards were rejected by the tabulating machines. Ascertaining voter intent for these ballots was a nightmare.
Whistleblowers from Sequoia Voting, which supplied some of the defective punch cards, later told Dan Rather that the company had switched paper stock just before the election and knew that this would cause problems with the chads. They speculated that the company had done this on purpose in an effort to persuade its customers to buy expensive new touchscreen systems for the next election. As far as I know, the federal government never investigated their claims.
https://www.bradblog.com/?p=4960
As election workers in Miami Dade scrambled to manually recount the punch cards, Republican operatives shouting “Stop the fraud!” and “let us in!” demanded entry into the recount room, even though official observers were already there. The demonstration turned violent. Within two hours, the canvassing board shut down the recount because the disruption had prevented them from meeting the recount deadline and created a perception that the process wasn’t fair. The riot, which was orchestrated by Republican operative Roger Stone, is now known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
As explained by director Billy Corben, Republicans claimed the riot was a ‘spontaneous act’ by ‘local Cuban American activists,” but “they were actually paid Republican DC operatives.” Here is a link to a video of the riot, which many consider a precursor of the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsvzL4RIrKM
Other participants in the Brooks Brothers riot included Joel Kaplan, who is now Facebook’s global public policy chief, and Matt Schlapp, who is the current chairman of CPAC. Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes Schlapp, worked for the Trump administration. The Schlapps are in the second photo below.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?413000-2/facebooks-role-2016-election
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/10/trump-white-house-mercedes-matt-schlapp-453024
Political advisor Roger Stone, who claims that he directed the Brooks Brothers riot from a Winnebago, has said that “‘The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba.’” Stone has also said that one of his campaign rules is, “attack, attack, attack, never defend, and admit nothing, deny everything, launch counter attack.”
https://www.c-span.org/video/?153873-1/trump-presidential-campaign
Stone had been mentored by Roy Cohn, a New York attorney and infamous political hit man with ties to the mafia who “has been described by people who knew him as ‘a snake,’ ‘a scoundrel’ and ‘a new strain of son of a bitch,’” as reported by Politico.
The Brooks Brothers riot was not Stone’s first rodeo. Stone was also one of former President Richard Nixon’s “dirty tricksters.”
In 1980, at Roy Cohn’s behest, Stone delivered an apparent bribe (“apparent” only because Stone says he never looked inside the suitcase) to put John Anderson on the New York state ballot for the Liberal party, thus siphoning votes from Jimmy Carter to help Ronald Reagan win the presidency. Stone bragged about this to a reporter years later, after the statute of limitations for bribery had passed.
Stone also owned a lobbying firm with political operatives Paul Manafort and Charlie Black.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/special-counsel-pushing-paul-manafort-information-roger-stone/story?id=58572284
In the mid-eighties, as reported in the Atlantic, pollster Warren Mitofsky traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to conduct an exit poll of a snap election that then President Marcos, a client of Black, Manafort, & Stone, had called to prove to the U.S. that he was “legitimate.” Mitofsky later told political scientist Sam Popkin that a “representative of [Black, Manafort, and Stone] had asked him, ‘What sort of margin might make a Marcos victory legitimate?’ According to Popkin, “the implication was clear… How do we rig this thing and still satisfy the Americans?”
Black, Manafort, & Stone later came to be known as part of the “Torturers’ Lobby” for their willingness to represent brutal dictators.
Years later, Stone involved himself in the 2000 U.S. presidential election out of concern that the Reform Party might siphon away enough votes from Bush to cost him the election.
To alleviate this risk, Stone persuaded his friend and former client, a flashy real-estate mogul named Donald Trump (who had also been close with Roy Cohn), to sap attention from Buchanan, the Reform Party’s top candidate, by publicly announcing that he planned to run against him for the Reform Party nomination. Trump agreed to do it, presumably for the attention, but withdrew before the primary.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47002918
Stone also sabotaged Buchanan by publicly alleging that he had fathered an illegitimate child and had made “hush payments” to the baby’s mother. The allegation apparently had a grain of truth, as Buchanan’s sister quickly “took the fall” for having delivered payments to the baby’s mother.
Stone has said that he was recruited by James Baker, a close ally of the Bush family, to assist with the “public relations” aspect of the 2000 presidential recount. Republican operative Brad Blakeman, who claims that he, rather than Stone, was the mastermind in the Winnebago, agrees that the Bush team’s recount strategy included conveying the message that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “It had to be a three-legged stool. We had to fight in the courts, in the recount centers and in the streets — in public opinion,” Blakeman said. (italics added.) The Bush street fight included the astroturf (staged) Brooks Brothers riot.
It also included shaming the Gore/Lieberman campaign with “Sore Loserman” towels, tee shirts, signs, and bumper stickers. According to Blakeman, Gore ceded the propaganda war to Bush. In Blake’s assessment, this was a mistake: “Gore left a leg off the stool, and that’s why the stool fell,” he said.
Fall it did. On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court expanded the hand recount to include all 61 counties across the state. But on December 9, in response to a legal filing by Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court “temporarily” suspended the recount while it considered whether to shut it down for good. (Photo of the 2000 court)
Three days later, on the statutory recount deadline, the U.S. Supreme Court shut it down for good. It reasoned that officials could not complete the recount by the end of the day and that the recount violated the equal protection clause because different counties had different standards for evaluating “hanging chads.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-bush-v-gore-still-matters
Gore conceded the next day, promising to “honor the new president-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together.” He ended with, “And now, my friends, in a phrase I once addressed to others, it’s time for me to go. Thank you and good night, and God bless America.” Gore never ran for office again.
A consortium of eight news agencies later conducted an unofficial statewide recount. They found that a manual recount of all machine-rejected ballots throughout the state — both undervotes and overvotes — would have produced a narrow Gore victory. A narrower manual recount of only the undervotes would have produced a narrow Bush victory.
The consortium did not analyze what a manual recount of all ballots (as opposed to just those rejected by the machines) would have shown. Thus, we will never know if counties other than Volusia had issues with memory cards altering the vote count. Either way, the faulty voter purge and confusing butterfly ballot design almost certainly caused enough damage to throw the election to Bush. Meanwhile, it was Gore who won the popular vote.
In 2003, the Bush administration led the U.S. into war in Iraq under the false pretense that Iraq’s then president, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraqi citizens would greet American soldiers as liberators. Neither was true, but the invasion helped the U.S. exert influence over Iraqi oil fields, which may have been the Bush administration’s principal objective. The war also allowed Bush to call himself a “wartime president,” which caused both republicans and democrats to rally around him.
THE AFTERMATH
Not everyone’s attention’s was diverted from election integrity. In 2003, BlackBoxVoting author Bev Harris teamed up with an internationally renowned election-security expert named Harri Hursti to investigate how a voting machine could subtract votes, as had occurred in Volusia County in 2000.
Hursti discovered that Global/Diebold’s memory cards do more than store votes. They also include live executable code.
He and Harris conducted a mock hacking demonstration at Leon County election supervisor Ion Sancho’s election office in Florida, with Sancho’s permission. During the demonstration, Hursti sought to hack the result of the mock election by pre-loading a Global/Diebold memory card with positive votes for one candidate and an identical number of negative votes for the other.
It worked. Not only that, Sancho said that nothing on the system would have alerted him to the Hursti hack. Had it been a real election, Sancho would have certified the result.
The demonstration was featured in the 2006 Emmy Award nominated documentary Hacking Democracy. But most voters have never heard of it because the mainstream media mostly ignored it. The country was at war, and most in the media were determined to support America’s wartime president. Undermining public trust in America’s election system was off the table. The media’s unwillingness to confront the holes in the country’s election system would be a theme that continued for years.
In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which allocated $3 billion to replace punch card machines with new voting machines. HAVA allowed the new machines to be entirely paperless, making manual recounts impossible.
Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer were the only Senators who opposed HAVA.
Global, which changed its name to Diebold Election Systems in 2002 (when it was acquired by Diebold, Inc.), became America’s largest supplier of paperless voting machines.
Diebold, Inc.’s CEO, a wealthy Bush supporter, told donors in a 2003 fundraising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”
In 2004, Senator Hillary Clinton warned that Republicans might use paperless voting machines to steal elections. In July that year, she and Senator Bob Graham, also a Democrat, introduced a paper-trail bill. But Clinton and Graham could not even get a hearing on it in the GOP-led Senate. The year before, New Jersey Representative Rush Holt (D) had introduced a similar paper trail bill in the Republican-led House. The GOP had killed Holt’s bill too.
Holt tried again in 2008. But the GOP blocked his effort.
After Russia attacked America’s election infrastructure to help Trump defeat Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon introduced the “PAVE Act” (later adopted by House Democrats and called the “SAFE Act”), which would have required both paper ballots and rigorous manual audits for all federal elections in 2020. Again, the GOP killed the bill.
Meanwhile, Bush rewarded Rove for helping him win the 2000 presidential election by appointing him to the position of Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff. Rove, in turn, continued courting the Religious Right, a voting bloc that had made Bush’s razor thin victory possible. In 2001, Religious Right leader Paul Weyrich gushed to the New York Times that he had “been through five administrations and the effort to communicate with conservatives and to understand … and address our concerns and involve us in the process is the best of any of the Republican administrations, including Ronald Reagan.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcUYBOlqmME
Although Rove was not religious himself (he calls himself “agnostic”), he and the Religious Right shared a lust for power and determination to annihilate the Democratic Party. A 2001 training manual from Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation stated that, “We will not try to reform the existing institutions. We only intend to weaken them, and…destroy them.*** We will attack the very legitimacy of the Left. *** We will use guerrilla tactics to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant regime.”
Tellingly, Rove had trained at the Leadership Institute founded by Morton Blackwell, a longtime member of the Council for National Policy, which Weyrich had co- founded with other Religious Right leaders in the eighties. Through the Institute’s training program, Blackwell has taught legions of right wing activists that “moral outrage [whether organic or manufactured] is the most motivating force in politics.”
In 2002, an unnamed senior Bush advisor told journalist Ron Suskind that, ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Many have speculated that the unnamed advisor was Rove.
Ohio attorneys later sued Rove for allegedly orchestrating a successful operation to hack the 2004 presidential election for Bush, who had defied the exit polls in the key battleground states (especially Ohio) to defeat John Kerry. As it turned out, Ohio’s 2004 results had been secretly routed through a backup server owned by a Tennessee company called Smartech, which also had secretly hosted the Bush administration’s emails, including those belonging to Rove. The plaintiffs in the election-fraud suit hoped that Mike Connell, the Republican IT specialist who had built the backup election website for Smartech. would “come clean” and disclose information supporting their election-fraud claim. But Connell remained tight lipped during his deposition and then died in a private plane crash before trial.
Before the crash, a Republican election whistleblower and data security expert named Stephen Spoonamore had filed a sworn affidavit in the litigation, stating that he had known Connell for years and that “Connell is a devout Catholic. He has admitted to me that in his zeal to ‘save the unborn’ he may have helped others who have compromised elections.”
In 2012, white hack hackers with the collective known as Anonymous claimed to have infiltrated and stopped a Rove-led operation to steal the election for Mitt Romney. Although they never provided evidence to back up their claim, Bob Fitrakis (one of the Ohio attorneys who had sued Rove over the 2004 election) discovered through an anonymous tip that voting machine vendor ES&S had secretly installed uncertified software patches throughout much of the state before the election.
In 2001, Bush rewarded John Roberts with a nomination to the DC Circuit and, in 2005, with a nomination to the Supreme Court, where he is Chief Justice.
He rewarded Kavanaugh with a position in the administration.
“In 2002, when Kavanaugh was working in the White House Counsel’s office on judicial nominations, Manuel Miranda, a Republican Senate staffer with whom Kavanaugh worked closely, stole thousands of research and strategy documents from Democratic staffers,” according to American Progress. (Emphasis added.)
Moreover, “documents reveal that Kavanaugh had in fact seen the files which were clearly labeled ‘not [for] distribution” and even one that had the subject line ‘spying.’ Kavanaugh compounded the original duplicity by lying to senators twice about seeing the documents and then trying to mislead them when confronted with the truth at his most recent hearings.”
Bush appointed Kavanaugh to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006. In 2011, writing for a three-judge panel, Kavanaugh “gutted the portion of the [federal] law that [had] banned foreign [campaign] spending that is not ‘express advocacy,’” as reported in Mother Jones. As a result of this ruling, “some of the ads paid for by the Russians in 2016…may well [have been] legal foreign influence activity.”
Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in 2018 after a bizarre meeting with Justice Kennedy (who was known as a “Swing Justice”) that appeared to precipitate Kennedy’s abrupt resignation from the Court.
Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett to the US Supreme Court in 2020 after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
As for Von Spapovsky, whose work inspired the faulty felon purge (and who also served as a volunteer during the 2000 recount), Bush rewarded him with a position as an attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice. He was “soon promoted to be counsel to the Assistant Attorney General…” In 2017, Von Sapovsky sat on Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?431609-3/washington-journal-hans-von-spakovsky-discusses-voter-fraud-commission
So did former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the guy who entered into the secret contract with Republican operatives who routed Ohio’s 2004 election results through Smartech in Tennessee.
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/12/550518986/tension-and-protests-mark-trump-voting-commission-meeting
Blackwell has for years co-chaired the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which provides technical assistance to election officials and other forms of election-management support in countries around the world. (You can’t make this stuff up.) Blackwell’s IFES co-chair is Tad DeVine, who worked with Manafort (Roger Stone’s former partner) supporting Ukraine’s former pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych. DeVine’s work with Manafort occurred after DeVine had advised John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2004 and before he advised Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2016.
Bush rewarded Stone for his campaign “assistance” during the 2000 election by appointing him to the Department of Interior transition working group. According to the Village Voice, this “unannounced perch” allowed Stone to “market himself to [native American] tribes and developers from Louisiana to California, earning fat fees and contingent percentages of future casino revenue. Just two of the five deals examined by the Voice [were] projected to pay him at least $8 million, and perhaps as much as $13 million.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/17/nyregion/17stone.html
Stone later also “assisted” Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. It was Stone who reportedly persuaded Trump to bring Stone’s pal (and former partner) Paul Manafort into the 2016 campaign, and it was Stone who communicated with Wikileaks in the summer of 2016, before Wikileaks released emails that Russia had hacked from John Podesta (Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair), a sort of electronic version of the theft in the Nixon Watergate scandal.
Stone also accused the RNC of attempting to steal the 2016 nomination from Trump (in favor of Ted Cruz), the Democrats of attempting to steal the 2016 general election from Trump, and anyone and everyone of attempting to steal the 2020 presidential election from Trump. It was Stone who coined the phrase “Stop the Steal” in 2016.
Stone deployed the “Stop the Steal” slogan again during the Florida recount in 2018 and yet again in 2020.
https://cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/stop-steal
In 2016, Stone began using a new organization called the Proud Boys as his personal security force. The organization had been founded the same year. Members of the Proud Boys breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 after the “Stop the Steal” rally protesting Biden’s defeat of Trump. Stone is reportedly close with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. Another Proud Boys member recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. He has reportedly agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation.
On the morning of January 6, Stone was photographed flanked by members of another organization, the Oathkeepers, whose members breached the Capitol later that day using military style formations called stacks.
Stone protege Jack Posobiec promoted the #StopTheSteal hashtag extensively. He deleted those tweets after the violence on January 6, 2021, but the Southern Poverty Law Center archived them.
Posobiec was also conveniently situated in Philadelphia during the 2016 Democratic National Convention protest, which was triggered by Wikileaks’ publication of hacked DNC emails. After one Wikileaks DNC email dump, Bannon’s publicist (Alexandra Preate) infamously texted Stone “well done.” Posobiec acted as an “agent provacateur” during the protest.
You can read more about Posobiec, who has spread horrific lies and helped normalize anti-semitism, here: https://jennycohn1.medium.com/far-right-agitator-jack-posobiec-spreads-lies-and-antisemitic-hate-yes-russia-loves-him-83940393c69a
As mentioned in the article, Posobiec has 1.5 million Twitter followers.
https://twitter.com/nathanTbernard/status/1088822733457313792?s=20
Stone protege Ali Alexander, a convicted felon who joined with Stone and Posobiec in protesting the 2018 recount in Florida, has called himself a co-organizer of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally for Trump outside the Capitol.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/11/6/1993246/-Ali-Alexander-regurgitates-Stop-the-Steal-from-2018-to-disrupt-vote-counting-and-MORE-GOP-Rubbish
During a rally the night before, Alexander led Trump supporters in a chant of “Victory or death!” Alexander had previously tweeted that he was “willing to give my life for this fight.” The chair of the Arizona GOP [Kelli Ward] quote tweeted Alexander with the message, “He is. Are you?”
Alexander “was convicted of theft & credit card fraud in 2007 & 2008,” as reported in Salon. As further reported in Salon, he was a “McCain campaign staffer in 2007, when he was apparently reprimanded — ironically enough — for discussing opportunities to commit voter fraud…”
Election 2000: The Final Hours of Bush v Gore
Karl Rove Election Night 2000