Melinda Gates reportedly began exploring options for divorce from Bill Gates almost two years ago, around the time the world’s fourth-richest man was revealed to have met many times with Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropist and sex offender who killed himself in jail in 2019.
The Microsoft founder and his wife, two of the world’s most powerful and influential philanthropists, announced their divorce last week. They have not said why.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal cited “people familiar with the matter” and a former employee of the Gates Foundation who said Bill Gates’s dealings with Epstein were “one source of concern” for his wife.
In October 2019, the New York Times reported that Epstein cultivated the acquaintance of rich and powerful men including the former president Bill Clinton.
But it said few “compared in prestige and power to the [then] world’s second-richest person, a brilliant and intensely private luminary: Bill Gates. And unlike many others, Mr Gates started the relationship after Mr Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.”
In 2008, Epstein reached a deal with authorities and was sentenced to 13 months confinement for soliciting prostitution from underage girls. The conditions of the deal were a source of controversy 11 years later, when Epstein was charged with sex trafficking. Found dead in a New York jail, he was deemed to have killed himself.
Earlier this week, the Daily Beast reported that Melinda Gates warned her husband about associating with Epstein in 2013. The Wall Street Journal cited a former employee of the Gates Foundation who said relationships between the two men and other Gates employees continued after that warning.
The Journal said court documents showed that Melinda Gates spoke with legal advisers a number of times around publication of the New York Times story in 2019.
A spokesman for Bill Gates told the Journal he stood by a statement about Epstein given to the paper that year: “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.”
Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce on Twitter last week.
“After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” they said. “We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.”
The couple, who were married in 1994, have reportedly agreed to divide their assets. According to Forbes, Bill Gates is worth about $124bn. The couple have said they will give most of their money away.
Last week, Forbes said the fortune was being divided. Its headline: “Melinda French Gates Now A Billionaire After Stock Transfer From Bill Gates.”
Citing court documents, the Journal said that about two years before she filed for divorce, Melinda Gates said her marriage had been “irretrievably broken” for some time.
The paper said her legal team included Robert Stephan Cohen, a New York divorce lawyer who has represented Michael Bloomberg and Ivana Trump.
“The suspect, a boyfriend of one of the female victims, drove to the residence, walked inside and began shooting people at the party before taking his own life,” the Colorado Springs Police Department said.
Common viruses such as influenza have virtually disappeared this year, partly because of coronavirus restrictions like face masks. And a sharp decline in flu infections during this year’s season has led to only one registered pediatric death, compared with dozens in past years, official data shows.
In recent days, pressure rose further as protest protests grew over the looming expulsion of several Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. For Palestinians and their advocates, the case has become a stand-in for the wider campaign to force out Palestinians from parts of East Jerusalem and for their past displacement in the occupied territories and within Israel.
Tensions escalated again Friday night, as the police fired rubber-tipped bullets and stun grenades and Palestinians threw stones following prayers at the Aqsa compound. Video showed some grenades landing inside the mosque.
Militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel overnight Sunday, after sending incendiary balloons into Israeli farmland for the past several days. Israel has returned fire, barred fishermen from the territory from accessing the sea and shut a key crossing between Gaza and Israel — but avoided a major escalation.
A huge piece of space junk made an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night. The remnants of a Chinese rocket re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean north of Maldives, according to the 18th Space Control Squadron.
According to the U.S. Space Force, the remnants re-entered the atmosphere at 10:15 p.m. ET over the Arabian Peninsula. It was unknown if the debris impacted land or water.
China’s space agency said the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. ET, but also pinpointed the landing area just north of the Maldives. The Chinese space agency said most of the rocket was destroyed during re-entry.
After the incident, NASA slammed China for “failing to meet responsible standards” for the re-entry of space debris.
“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Saturday night. “It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”
The remnants were left over from China’s first module for its new Tianhe space station. The 23-ton Chinese rocket Long March-5B recently launched the first module for the country’s new space station into orbit. After the core separated from the rest of the rocket, it should have followed a predetermined flight path into the ocean.
But scientists had little idea where it would land as it orbited the planet unpredictably every 90 minutes at about 17,000 miles per hour. Its fast speed made its landing place nearly impossible to predict, but it had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere Saturday or Sunday.
A Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China’s space station, Tianhe, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on April 29, 2021, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Ahead of re-entry, scientists and officials were unable to give a clear prediction for re-entry. The rocket had the potential to land in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China or Australia — heightening anxiety around the world that it could cause damage to property or injure people.
After re-entry, the U.S. Space Command’s Space Track Project attempted to calm those fears, tweeting, “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B reentry can relax. The rocket is down.”
“Why the Chinese rocket is coming down uncontrolled is not at all clear,” said CBS News’ William Harwood. “U.S. rockets (and most others) routinely fire their engines to target re-entries over the southern Pacific to ensure debris can’t land on populated areas.”
The China National Space Administration has faced issues with re-entry in the past. In 2018, Tiangong 1, China’s defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In May of last year, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.
The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. When 200,000 pounds of spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris hit the ground, but there were no injuries.
Similarly, when Skylab re-entered in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported.
William Harwood contributed to this report.
Possible re-entry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track.
“My fellow New Yorkers, if there’s one thing I want to say to you it is this: Nothing works in our city without public safety, and for public safety, we need the police,” Mr. Yang said. “My message to the N.Y.P.D. is this: New York needs you. Your city needs you.”
“The truth is that New York City cannot afford to defund the police,” he added.
Times Square represents the commercial and tourist heart of Manhattan, itself the financial capital of New York City and the nation. The shooting comes as the city is revving up its marketing engine, with the goal of reviving New York City’s tourist trade.
In the year before the pandemic, 66.6 million tourists came to town, giving rise to 400,000 tourism-related jobs and an estimated economic impact of $70 billion. Last year, only 22 million tourists came to New York City, and officials estimate it will take years for the industry to recover.
The police say more than 460 people have been shot this year in New York City as of May 2, compared with 259 last year and 239 in 2019 at the same point. Mr. de Blasio routinely attributes the rise in shootings to the societal upheaval wrought by the pandemic, which has created mass unemployment, and also blames a slowdown in the court system. Dermot F. Shea, Mr. de Blasio’s police commissioner, tends to blame recent statewide criminal justice reforms, which he says have made it harder to keep those charged with criminal offenses in jail.
Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Yang took the opportunity to highlight their policing agendas, which include reimagining plainclothes anti-violence units. Mr. de Blasio disbanded his plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had been involved in many police shootings, last year. Both also touted their commitment to criminal justice reform.
Mr. Yang said he would ensure his plainclothes unit was populated by better-trained officers with clean records. Mr. Adams has said he would hire officers for the unit with the skills and temperament for the job.
Other moderate candidates, like the former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia and the former Citigroup executive Raymond J. McGuire, chimed in with similar themes — that public safety and strong policing need not come at the expense of criminal justice reform.
A huge piece of space junk made an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night. The remnants of a Chinese rocket re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean north of Maldives, according to the 18th Space Control Squadron.
According to the U.S. Space Force, the remnants re-entered the atmosphere at 10:15 p.m. ET over the Arabian Peninsula. It was unknown if the debris impacted land or water.
China’s space agency said the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. ET, but also pinpointed the landing area just north of the Maldives. The Chinese space agency said most of the rocket was destroyed during re-entry.
After the incident, NASA slammed China for “failing to meet responsible standards” for the re-entry of space debris.
“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Saturday night. “It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”
The remnants were left over from China’s first module for its new Tianhe space station. The 23-ton Chinese rocket Long March-5B recently launched the first module for the country’s new space station into orbit. After the core separated from the rest of the rocket, it should have followed a predetermined flight path into the ocean.
But scientists had little idea where it would land as it orbited the planet unpredictably every 90 minutes at about 17,000 miles per hour. Its fast speed made its landing place nearly impossible to predict, but it had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere Saturday or Sunday.
A Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China’s space station, Tianhe, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on April 29, 2021, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Ahead of re-entry, scientists and officials were unable to give a clear prediction for re-entry. The rocket had the potential to land in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China or Australia — heightening anxiety around the world that it could cause damage to property or injure people.
After re-entry, the U.S. Space Command’s Space Track Project attempted to calm those fears, tweeting, “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B reentry can relax. The rocket is down.”
“Why the Chinese rocket is coming down uncontrolled is not at all clear,” said CBS News’ William Harwood. “U.S. rockets (and most others) routinely fire their engines to target re-entries over the southern Pacific to ensure debris can’t land on populated areas.”
The China National Space Administration has faced issues with re-entry in the past. In 2018, Tiangong 1, China’s defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In May of last year, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.
The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. When 200,000 pounds of spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris hit the ground, but there were no injuries.
Similarly, when Skylab re-entered in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported.
William Harwood contributed to this report.
Possible re-entry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track.
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The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) did not disclose internal polling that revealed dismal numbers for former President Donald Trump in key swing districts during the House GOP retreat in April, according to two sources who spoke with The Washington Post.
During a presentation at the Florida retreat, NRCC staffers reportedly withheld the information even when pressed by a member of Congress regarding Trump’s support.
The polling data showed Trump’s favorability ratings underwater, with his unfavorable ratings 15 points higher than his favorable numbers, according to The Post.
In the districts that were polled, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had better numbers than Trump, The Post noted.
House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is facing the possibility of being removed from her leadership role for her criticism of Trump’s influence over the party, was reportedly “alarmed” by the lack of transparency in revealing the former president’s polling data.
Cheney was taken aback, in part, because Trump’s lackluster poll numbers were also withheld from ranking committee chairs during a March retreat.
The NRCC reportedly denied that they sought to keep the polling information away from members, but Cheney saw it as another way that the GOP was seeking to ignore the truth about Trump’s possible drag on the party.
A gunman killed six members of an extended family Sunday inside a birthday party at a mobile home in Colorado Springs before turning the gun on himself, police said, in what appears to be the fourth deadliest mass shooting in state history, tied for the deadliest mass murder in the city’s history.
The killings happened just after midnight Sunday at the Canterbury Mobile Home Park on Preakness Way off Powers Boulevard, near the airport on the city’s east side. Officers, racing to a reported shooting, arrived at a trailer to find six dead adults and a man with serious injuries, who later died at a hospital, Colorado Springs police said in a Sunday news release.
The suspect, the boyfriend of a female victim, drove to the trailer where a birthday party was being held with friends, family and children. Inside, he began shooting party attendees before taking his own life, police said, adding that the children present “are now with relatives.”
The incident was Colorado’s worst mass shooting since a gunman killed 10 people at a Boulder supermarket March 22. The killings appear to be the deadliest gun-slaying in Colorado Springs history and to tie for the deadliest mass murder in Colorado Springs history, said Colorado Springs Police Department historian Dwight Haverkorn.
The party celebrated the birthdays of Nubia Marquez, 28, and her brother, Melvin Perez, who would have turned 31 this week, as well as their mother, Joana Cruz, who would have turned 54 this week, a family member said on Sunday.
“My mom had always liked celebrating them together,” said Nubia Marquez, who had attended the party with her husband, Freddy Marquez.
Had the couple not left around 10 p.m., their fates might have been different. When they left Joana Cruz’s home around 10 p.m., “everybody was calm,” Freddy Marquez said. “Everybody was good.”
Also killed were Nubia Marquez’s other brother, Jose Guttierez, 21; Melvin Perez’s wife, Mayra Perez, 32; and Mayra’s sister Sandra Ibarra and brother Jose Ibarra, the couple said.
Freddy Marquez identified the suspected shooter as Sandra Ibarra’s boyfriend and described him as “quiet” and “serious,” and said that he always carried a gun. He had met the alleged gunman only once and said “there was nothing out of the ordinary” about him. The couple knew the man only by the the nickname “Junior.”
Freddy Marquez described his mother-in-law, Joana Cruz, as “loving” and “hard working.”
“She was always laughing,” he said of the mother of four.
Her sons were “just like their mom,” he added. “They were all great people.”
A woman who lives nearby in the mobile home park said she awoke to the sound of what she believes were gunshots and eventually heard crying outside. Two young children were put in the back of a patrol car.
“And on Mothers Day,” said the woman, who did not wish to be named.
In a Sunday statement Colorado Gov. Jared Polis called the mass murder a “terrible act of violence,” occurring as “many of us are spending the day celebrating the women in our lives who have made us the people we are today.”
“Families torn apart, and at a birthday party, no less,” he said.
Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers called the shooting a “senseless act of violence” and asked for the public’s patience as the police department investigates.
“Today we find ourselves mourning the loss of lives and praying solemnly for those who were injured and those who lost family members,” Suthers said in a Sunday statement. “We think, too, of the emergency personnel who responded to a horrific scene and we keep them in our prayers today.”
#Breaking: 7 killed at birthday party at #ColoradoSprings mobile home park. Police say shooter, a boyfriend of one of the victims, is among dead.
Colorado Springs Police Chief Vince Niski said officers and investigators who responded “are all left incredibly shaken.”
“This is something you hope never happens in your own community, in the place that you call home,” he said.
“My vow to this community and to the families who have lost someone today is that this department will do everything we can to find you the answers you deserve and be here for you with an unwavering support.”
The department’s Violent Crimes led the investigation, police said. As of Sunday night a motive was unclear.
Those with information about the killings who haven’t spoken with detectives were asked to call the Colorado Springs Police Department at (719) 444-7000, or the Crime Stoppers Tip Line at (719) 634-STOP (7867) or 1-800-222-8477, if they wish to remain anonymous.
The Sunday scene was deadlier than mass killings Colorado Springs has mourned in recent years. In 2015, a man shot three people to death at random before dying in a shootout with police in Colorado Springs on Halloween. Less than a month later, a man killed three people, including a police officer, and injured eight others in a shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in the city.
In 2007 a man opened fire on the Youth With a Mission Center in Arvada, killing two and injuring two before escaping. Later that day he made a similar attack on New Life Church in Colorado Springs, killing two and wounding three before shooting himself.
Until Sunday, Colorado Springs’ deadliest gun slaying appears to have occurred May 17, 1986, when five people were gunned down execution-style during two business robberies, according to Haverkorn. The alleged killer killed himself when confronted by police the next day.
Sunday’s events appear to tie with a Sept. 20, 1911, mass murder of six neighbors from two houses — all killed with axes — for the deadliest mass murder in Colorado Springs history. The murderer was never identified.
Statewide, Colorado’s deadliest shooting remains the Columbine High School massacre of 1995, in which two armed teens went on a shooting spree, killing 12 students and one teacher, and wounding more than 20 others. The gunmen then killed themselves.
The state’s second deadliest shooting occurred at an Aurora movie theater in 2012, when an armed gunman opened fire at a midnight showing of “Batman: The Dark Knight Rises,” killing 12 and wounding 70.
The March 22 attack at a south Boulder King Soopers remains with state’s third deadliest mass shooting, with 10 dead, including a police officer. The suspect awaits trial.
Friday’s birthday party massacre becomes the state’s fourth deadliest mass shooting, with six dead, in addition to the alleged gunman, whom police say killed himself.
Colorado was tied for fourth in the nation with Washington for state with the greatest number of mass shootings in the U.S. between 1982 and April 2021, according to Statista.com. California came in first, with 21; Florida second, with 12; and Texas third, with 11.
Colorado is fairly middle of the road when it comes to firearm mortality by state. In 2019 it ranked 19th in the nation, with 14.2 firearm-related deaths per 100,000, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2018 the state ranked 33rd in the nation for firearm homicides per 100,000 individuals, with 2.31, slightly above half of the national average of 4.12, according to a 2021 repot from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, citing data from the global burden of diseases study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.
At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.
Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.
Russell J. Ramsland Jr. delivered presentations on electronic voting in this airplane hangar in Addison, Tex., where the company Allied Security Operations Group has offices. (Aaron C. Davis/The Washington Post)
Ramsland, a failed congressional candidate with a Harvard MBA, pitched a claim that seemed rooted in evidence: Voting-machine audit logs — lines of codes and time stamps that document the machines’ activities — contained indications of vote manipulation. In the retrofitted hangar that served as his company’s offices at the edge of a municipal airstrip outside Dallas, Ramsland attempted to persuade failed Republican candidates to challenge their election results and force the release of additional data that might prove manipulation.
“We had to find the right candidate,” said Laura Pressley, a former Ramsland ally whose own claim that audit logs showed fraud had been rejected in court two years earlier. “We had to find one who knew they won.”
Ramsland
Huffines
He made the pitch to Don Huffines, a state senator in Texas. Huffines declined.
Sessions
He tried to persuade U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.). Sessions declined.
No candidate agreed to bring a challenge, and the idea of widespread vote manipulation remained on the political fringe — until 2020, when Ramsland’s assertions were seized upon by influential allies of Trump. The president himself accelerated the spread of those claims into the GOP mainstream as he latched onto an array of baseless ideas to explain his loss in November.
The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies. This is the previously unreported origin story of a core set of those claims, ideas that were advanced not by renowned experts or by insiders who had knowledge of flawed voting systems but by Ramsland and fellow conservative activists as they pushed a fledgling company, Allied Security Operations Group, into a quixotic attempt to find evidence of widespread fraud where none existed.
To assemble a picture of the company’s role, The Washington Post obtained emails and company documents and interviewed 12people with direct knowledge of ASOG’s efforts, as well as former federal officials and aides from the Trump White House. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters or out of fear of retribution. Three individuals who were present in the hangar for those 2018 meetings spoke about the gatherings publicly for the first time.
By late 2019, ASOG’s examination had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show.
ASOG’s examination by last summer had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by The Post. Ramsland had sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries, Pressley said.
This comes from ASOG’s confidential “executive summary” of a report on how to “eliminate system-wide election fraud threat” that was given to government officials in summer 2020. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
After the Nov. 3 election, to an extent not widely recognized, Ramsland and others associated with ASOG played key roles in spreading the claims of fraud, The Post found. They were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the “kraken” lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell — who The Post learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG — and aired publicly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.
During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.
Ramsland
Among those voices were the people in Ramsland’s network.
Gohmert
Powell
Giuliani
In the aftermath of the election, Trump was surrounded by those repeating claims Ramsland had made …
Trump
… and in seeking to overturn the election, Trump himself embraced some of those ideas.
The idea that the election was stolen took root and remains persuasive to millions of Americans. Although Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security called the election the “most secure in American history,” polls have consistently shown that about one-third of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe that Trump lost because of fraud. An internal poll by the National Republican Senatorial Committee in March found that among Republicans who believed the election was stolen, nearly half said hacked machines were partly to blame and an additional 8 percent said they were the main source of fraud.
The fraud claims have undermined faith in the electoral process, been cited as a motivation for legislation to curtail access to polls in dozens of states and spurred the companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic to file billion-dollar lawsuits. Ultimately, the conspiracy-mongering helped inspire the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
In an email exchange with The Post, Ramsland, 68, confirmed that ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but said that he had never spoken to Trump himself and that the company was “one of many voices” that expressed concerns about election-system vulnerabilities. He noted that election security has been a long-standing concern across the political spectrum and said that many others had “reached similar conclusions regarding irregularities in the election system.”
Through an attorney, Powell confirmed that she had met Pressley but did not respond to questions about where or about her work with Ramsland. Giuliani and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment. Gohmert declined to comment on his interactions with Ramsland.
Lawyer Sidney Powell, joined by Rudolph W. Giuliani, left, speaks at a news conference at Republican National Committee headquarters on Nov. 19. (Sarah Silbiger for The Washington Post)
Through a spokesman, Trump declined an interview request.
Pressley, 58, said she and Ramsland had a falling out in part over his use of her analysis of election data and her suspicions that his motives were financial or partisan. She said she believes he has not provided evidence for his claims about the 2020 election and fears those claims could undercut legitimate questions about the integrity of U.S. voting. “I’m heartbroken by it,” Pressley said recently, speaking in detail about ASOG for the first time, during a three-hour interview near Austin.
In emails to The Post, Ramsland called Pressley “unreliable” and said ASOG ceased doing business with her “because of her lack of technical experience and complete inability to understand electronic investigative work.” He said Pressley had a limited view of the work performed by ASOG, adding that “our cyber team had already gone far beyond the simple audit log data and analysis she had initially brought to ASOG.”
Many people and organizations claimed after the election to have evidence casting doubt on Biden’s victory. But Ramsland and ASOG’s role was unique, said Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who led a team tracking the integrity of the 2020 election for DHS.
Repeatedly and at key moments, Masterson said, ASOG was the source of morsels of inaccurate information that shaped public perception. Some of the ideas it pushed had circulated previously, he said, but they were supercharged by the influence and connections of Ramsland and the people around him — and by the air of authority the company provided.
“It wasn’t just that the president would tweet about their stuff. It was all these little nuggets and grist that they provided or that were cited to them in testimony or in the ‘kraken’ cases. It provided the appearance of substance and fact to something that had no substance or fact,” said Masterson, who has not previously discussed ASOG publicly. “It was like: ‘Look, these are professionals. … They have former military experience. And look at what they found.’ They gave those who wanted to push and believe in the lie something to hold on to.”
Convinced there was fraud
The nation’s embrace of electronic voting grew out of the debacle of 2000, when hanging chads and other hard-to-interpret paper ballots muddled the outcome of the presidential race, souring many Americans on the analog technology the country had used for decades.
Two years later, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, dedicating billions of dollars to modernize U.S. elections. It encouraged jurisdictions across the country to replace their old voting machines with new digital systems.
The result was a massive investment in paperless touch-screen voting machines, also known as direct-recording electronic voting machines or DREs, which states came to view as simpler, cheaper and more accessible to people with disabilities.
“There were some electronic voting machines before that, but this was the thing that opened the floodgates to them,” said Matt Blaze, a professor of law and computer science at Georgetown University who researches election technology and security.
Blaze and other experts warned that DREs introduced new security risks: Without a reliable paper trail, there was no way to check whether the machines had accurately recorded voters’ intentions.
As concern about this vulnerability mounted, a growing number of states and localities began requiring voting machines to leave a paper trail. Today, most voters mark paper ballots by hand, and they are then scanned and tabulated by a machine. Some use touch-screen machines that produce a printed copy of the voter’s selections. A few still vote on paperless machines.
There has never been a documented case of a U.S. election being stolen through hacking, according to Blaze and other experts.
Still, concerns about the security of electronic voting continue to simmer, including among experts. It does not help, they say, that some machines contain modems to simplify the reporting of results and that those machines have sometimes been left connected to the Internet for extended periods.
It was DREs, and the built-in inability to verify their results, that helped persuade Pressley that her race for a seat on Austin’s nonpartisan city council in 2014 had been stolen.
As a candidate, Pressley told voters she had grown up outside Dallas, the daughter of a cattle auctioneer. She said she arrived in Austin two decades earlier as a poor single mother and succeeded against the odds. She earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, worked for 17 years in the semiconductor industry and owned a company that sold bottled rainwater.
The campaign foundered amid revelations she had previously appeared on Infowars, the right-wing website operated by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and on another occasion had said she believed data showed that military-grade explosives were planted inside the twin towers on 9/11. That comment prompted the Austin American-Statesman to retract its endorsement of her. (Pressley told The Post she had “no opinion” on whether planes brought down the World Trade Center.)
The race was not close: Her opponent, a community organizer, defeated her by a margin of almost 30 points.
Pressley could not believe it.
“I knew in my heart that I had won,” she recently told a gathering of law enforcement officers outside Houston, one of hundreds of speeches she has given about the case, “and I became convinced there was fraud.”
Laura Pressley in February 2015, explaining why she was contesting her loss in an Austin City Council runoff election. (Jana Birchum)
A recount confirmed her loss. But nearly all the ballots had been cast on DREs, and Pressley remained skeptical.
She took the case to court.
Among other evidence, Pressley cited an audit log that contained nine instances when a machine made by the company Hart InterCivic recorded an event as “Invalid/Corrupt.” She argued that those and other alleged irregularities meant the true outcome of the election was impossible to determine.
A state judge threw out the case before trial and fined her and her attorney for bringing a frivolous lawsuit. Pressley appealed, and in 2016 a three-judge panel upheld the lower-court ruling.
“Pressley produced no evidence that the ‘Invalid/Corrupt’ error messages resulted in any legal votes not being counted, resulted in any illegal votes being counted, or otherwise materially affected the outcome of the election,” the Texas Court of Appeals panel found, adding that Pressley’s own expert witness testified it was “not known” what the nine error messages meant.
“This type of expert testimony is based on uncertainty and mere speculation and is therefore unreliable and irrelevant,” the panel said.
Pressleywould go on to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court, which said it was too late to take up her underlying fraud allegations but found that they were not frivolous and droppedthe fines. Her expert witness had testified that corrupted memory sticks that contain ballot data “could” damage the credibility of vote counting,the court wrote. To avoid fines, it wrote, “Pressley needs only to have some factual basis for her claim … not evidence that is ultimately admissible.”
Hart InterCivic told The Post that the error messages did not impact the tally and that “the election results were accurately recorded and reported.” The company said the error messages indicate a failed connection between memory sticks and the devices that read them — a hiccup resolved by simply reconnecting and trying again.
By 2018, Pressley had become an outspoken critic of electronic voting systems that lack a paper trail. She founded True Texas Elections and recruited poll-watchers in more than a dozen counties to look for evidence of fraud in the state’s Marchprimary that year. Afterward, she filed a complaint with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) alleging that Democratic votes might have been undercounted.
Laura Pressley’s presentation on election fraud, which she delivered alongside Ramsland in late 2018, included clips from voting machine audit logs. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
On election night in November 2018, the volunteer poll-watchers obtained audit logs generated by the central tabulation machines in Dallas County as they tallied votes, some of which had been cast on DREs manufactured by the largest voting-machine company in the nation, Election Systems and Software, or ES&S. Such logs record an array of activity and can be difficult to interpret for anyone unfamiliar with the software involved.
In a statement, ES&S said that its voting equipment has been through thousands of hours of independent testing and that its accuracy has been verified through audits and other examinations.
But as Pressley pored over the logs, she fixated on specific words. “Downloaded,” “cleared,” “replaced,” the audit logs said, over and over.
Soon, she came to suspect that those audit logs, too,were a window into surreptitious vote-switching.
‘When someone says, “I know a guy” …’
Allied Special Operations Group, as the firm was first named, was initially envisioned as a one-stop shop for government and corporate clients seeking cybersecurity, physical protection and sophisticated open-source intelligence services, Ramsland and former employees told The Post.
The company was formed in June 2017 by Adam T. Kraft, a former senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Kraft was the company’s chief executive, and it was based out of his house in a subdivision north of Fort Worth. Kraft declined to comment for this report.
An early promotional video described ASOG as “a group of highly trained professionals who have seen it all,” and it stressed the intelligence backgrounds of some team members. “When someone says, ‘I know a guy,’ he’s talking about ASOG,” said the narrator, who said that ASOG personnel had taken part in the types of missions “that many of us only see in the movies.”
Months after Kraft filed papers to establish the company, he was joined by a trio of other men, state records show.
Alvan “Locke” Neely, a retired Secret Service agent who first served in the Ford administration, became ASOG’s chief operations officer.
J. Keet Lewis was named ASOG’s vice president of strategy. Lewis served on the executive committee of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a Washington-based organization that for decades has been a networking hub for powerful conservative activists and donors.
According to his biography in Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Lewis consulted on international energy projects and had helped develop the Skimmer Basket Buddy, a patented maintenance tool for swimming pools. He did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Ramsland, who was also then a member of the CNP, joined as ASOG’s chief financial officer. The son and grandson of West Texas oilmen lived with his wife in the Preston Hollow section of Dallas, home to former president George W. Bush and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.
Ramsland had charted an unusual career path, including investment banking, consulting on a proposed cattle ranch in the South Pacific and working with NASA on a venture aimed at growing crystals in space. He also owned oil and gas interests in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico, records show.
According to business filings in Florida, Lewis and Ramsland later served together on the board of Photonx, a company that according to its website uses variable wavelengths of light “to treat specific pathogenic and chronic diseases.” (Ramsland told The Post that in its current form Photonx’s device “expressly doesn’t purport to treat disease.”)
Photonx now has office space inside the Addison hangar, according to a mailbox outside and a sign visible to visitors at the front door.
Ramsland was a “numbers and models” man, said Gene Street, who partnered with him in the 1990s on the London restaurant that Ramsland’s résumé, obtained by The Post, says was “Europe’s highest-grossing Tex-Mex restaurant.”
“If you ever needed to know where a single penny went, he was the guy that could tell you,” Street said.
Ramsland had donated to the campaigns of numerous Republicans, including Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), campaign finance filings show. He had also run for office himself, challenging Rep. Pete Sessions in the 2016 Republican primary as a part of the tea party, the fiscally conservative movement that had formed in opposition to President Barack Obama’s agenda. A campaign ad showed Ramsland wearing a cowboy hat and shooting a rifle at cardboard boxes labeled “open borders” and “Obamacare.” Ramsland lost by nearly 38 points.
Weeks before he joined ASOG, Ramsland spoke to a conservative association, delivering remarks rife with outlandish claims, according to video reviewed by The Post. Ramsland called the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, a “deep-state operation,” and he traced the origin of the “deep state” to a World War II-era collaboration involving Prescott Bush, the father of former president George H.W. Bush; the Muslim Brotherhood; and liberal financier George Soros — who was born in 1930 and was not yet an adult.
ASOG’s early work included hunting for intelligence about a group of Chinese nationals for an exiled Chinese billionaire, an associate of former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, and providing VIP protection details in the United States and abroad, a specialty Neely brought from the Secret Service.
In the fall of 2018, influential Texas Republican fundraiser JoAnn Fleming urged Ramsland and Pressley to join forces, Pressley told The Post. Ramsland soon shifted ASOG’s attention to election security. Fleming did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Neely said he left his position with the company when resources moved toward election security.
“My focus was and has always been protection and investigations,” he said in a brief interview outside his home in suburban Dallas. “They were going a totally different direction, and it was just not — they were pouring all their resources into that, and it was just not my gig.”
The relationship between Ramsland and Kraft also grew strained, according to three people who worked for or with the company at the time. Kraft eventually departed under pressure, the people said.
‘It had to get to Trump’
In November 2018, Texas Republicans were reeling from a battering at the polls. Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke had lost only narrowly to Cruz, and strong Democratic turnout had cost Sessions his longtime seat representing a swath of Dallas and its fast-growing suburbs as the party picked up seats in both chambers of the state legislature. Some Republicans were looking for explanations beyond the apparent purpling of Dallas.
Soon, Pressley was in the hangar, briefing Ramsland on her election-fraud theories. “Russ got really excited. They all did,” Pressley said. “I think they saw this as their next big thing.”
ASOG and Pressley began looking for a losing candidate who would challenge the election outcome and force Dallas County and ES&S to lift the hood on their technology to show whether votes had been manipulated, according to Pressley and to emails and other documents provided by her attorney.
They alighted on state Sen. Don Huffines (R), a wealthy real estate developer whose bid for a second term in the Texas legislature had just ended in defeat, handing his district to a Democrat for the first time in almost four decades.
Within weeks of the election,Pressley said, Huffines was in the hangar with James E. “Trey” Trainor III, who had been nominated by Trump to serve on the Federal Election Commission but was not yet Senate-confirmed. Trainor was advising Huffines at the time.
An email from Pressley to Ramsland. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Pressley presented her analysis of the audit logs and their mysterious “replaced” and “cleared” messages, she said. Ramsland told Huffines he was “horrified” by signs of fraud, she said. Challenging the result and forcing officials to turn over voting-machine data could prove the vote was manipulated, they argued.
Pressley said she and Ramsland waited impatiently for Huffines to decide. In early December, he told them he would not challenge his loss.
“We were all ready to go. We had someone who was going to fund the challenge and everything,” she said. “It was devastating.”
Huffines did not respond to requests seeking comment.
In an interview, Trainor confirmed the hangar meeting with Ramsland and said he advised Huffines not to bring a challenge. Under Texas law, contested state Senate races are decided by a Senate vote rather than by a judge.
“We were never going to convince senators that something nefarious had gone on, whether it did or didn’t,” Trainor said, noting that some Republicans might not have backed a challenge that risked embarrassing the GOP secretary of state.
ASOG briefed a number of people during this period, including Powell and Gohmert, according to Pressley and a former ASOG employee named Joshua Merritt. Pressley said Powell approached her after one briefing in the hangar, gave her a business card and called the audit-log analysis proof of fraud.
Ramsland and Lewis were also working to coax another losing candidate to bring a challenge: Sessions, the ousted congressman.
Lewis called a Sessions donor and left a voice message suggesting that the congressman’s race had been stolen. The donor forwarded the message to Carolyn Malenick, a volunteer for Sessions. Within days, Sessions was on a plane from Washington to Texas for a trip to the hangar, according to Malenick, who joined him there.
A calendar invitation for the Dec. 14, 2018, meeting shows that Ramsland, Lewis and Pressley were among those expected, as was Fleming, the conservative fundraiser who Pressley said had connected her and Ramsland.
An invitation to ASOG founders and allies to meet with Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) on Dec. 14, 2018, for a briefing on alleged election fraud. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Also in attendance, Malenick said, was conservative talk-show host Kevin Freeman.
Pressley said she gave a PowerPoint presentation that began with a picture of Joseph Stalin and a quote attributed to the Russian dictator: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes and how.”
Ramsland followed, accompanied by the purported white-hat hacker, who would not provide his name to the audience, Malenick said. The two presented a $4 million plan that included ASOG standing up an “operations” center to search for voting irregularities, Malenick and Pressley said.
Malenick, a longtime Republican fundraiser, told The Post she eventually came to believe Ramsland was misleading donors.
Ramsland told The Post the center was Kraft’s idea and that election investigations are costly. He said Malenick had “problems with truthfulness,” citing an FEC case from the 1990s that ended with her paying a $5,000 fine.
With a certification deadline fast approaching, Sessions, too, decided against formally challenging his election result, according to his brother and attorney, Lewis Sessions.
Privately, Pete Sessions did not drop the matter. He filed a confidential complaint with Paxton, the Texas attorney general, alleging “a variety of legally questionable conduct” in Dallas County voting. The complaint, provided to The Post by Lewis Sessions, included an affidavit from Pressley in which she claimed her poll-watchers reported they had been treated with hostility and had seen an elections worker using an Internet-connected laptop. She also enumerated audit-log messages — including “replaced” and “time stamp mismatch” — she considered suspicious.
On Jan. 31, 2019, Pressley presented her findings to Paxton in a meeting in an Austin office used by Ramsland, she said. Emails between her and Ramsland show preparations for the meeting.
But again, nothing came of the effort.
Ramsland has said in media appearances that ASOG brought information to Paxton’s office and urged further examination. It is unclear whether he was referring to the Pete Sessions complaint and Pressley’s briefing or to a separate complaint, and Ramsland did not respond to messages seeking clarification. He told The Post that he now believes Paxton’s office lacks the financial resources and the “level of technical expertise and sophistication” necessary for a meaningful investigation.
In a statement, Paxton’s office said: “We take every credible allegation of fraud seriously. In this case, after a thorough investigation by our office with the assistance of election systems experts, cybersecurity experts, and the FBI, we found the claims in this case were unverifiable, and an audit of the voting records confirmed the outcome of the election.”
Legally, the allegations of fraud in Dallas in 2018 had all but reached a dead end, Pressley said.
With Pressley in tow, Ramsland launched a fundraising blitz, traveling to the ranches and mansions of some of Texas’s wealthiest conservative funders. Ramsland told potential funders that their money would support legal challenges to ensure election integrity ahead of the 2020 election, Pressley said. “The hook was always Trump — that their guy could lose,” Pressley said.
Pressley said that early in February 2019, she accompanied Ramsland to present her audit-log analysis in Midland to Charles Richard “Dick” Saulsbury, who had made a fortune in engineering work in oil and gas. In Cisco, they met with Farris and Jo Ann Wilks, whose wealth stemmed from the sale of a family fracking business.
An email from Ramsland to Pressley on Jan. 30, 2019. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Pressley said pledges as high as $700,000 were discussed. The Post obtained correspondence in which Ramsland named Saulsbury as a potential funder and in which Pressley referred to a “Wilks investor meeting.”
Saulsbury did not respond to questions through a spokeswoman. Reached briefly by phone, Farris Wilks said he had no memory of providing money to Ramsland and then hung up.
Ramsland said neither the Wilkses nor the Saulsburys were donors. Malenick and a former ASOG employee said the company had sought to raise capital at the time by selling ownership shares. Ramsland did not respond to a follow-up question about whether the Wilkses or the Saulsburys were investors.
Pressley, a Republican who has donated to candidates from both major parties, said she began to grow suspicious that Ramsland’s motives were political or financial, or both, particularly in February 2019 when he took her research to D.C. to meet with Washington insiders but excluded her.
“I don’t think he wanted me there and hearing what he was saying,” Pressley said. “Everything he was doing … became about getting to Trump. He had this idea it had to get to Trump.”
Pressley’s company, True Texas Elections, sought a consulting contract from ASOG in February 2019, but it never materialized. As their relationship deteriorated, Pressley sent a cease-and-desist letter to ASOG late that month demanding that Ramsland stop presenting her research without authorization, according to their correspondence.
A cease-and-desist letter from Laura Pressley to Adam Kraft, then CEO of ASOG, on Feb. 23, 2019. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Ramsland denied to Pressley that he had tried to exclude her from the meetings in Washington and challenged her allegation that he had co-opted her audit-log analysis. She had shown her presentation to dozens of people without any confidentiality agreement or copyright markings, he wrote. “We frankly do not understand how a project to save Texas and our country has turned into this,” he wrote in a letter reviewed by The Post. “This isn’t just your project. This has been a team effort from the beginning.”
Ramsland spreads the word
As 2019 progressed, Ramsland decided to take his case to the public via “Economic War Room,” the online television show hosted by Freeman.
Like Ramsland and J. Keet Lewis, Freeman was a member of the Council for National Policy, according to membership directories posted online by the watchdog group Documented.
“We finally decided that if we couldn’t get the government to pay attention without public opinion and public pressure, the best guy to go to would be Kevin,” Ramsland later recalled in a panel discussion, a recording of which is posted online.
Asked whether CNP had supported Ramsland’s efforts, the group’s executive director, former congressman Bob McEwen (R-Ohio) said: “CNP is a convening organization of several organizations and individual members. And that’s what it does. It doesn’t sponsor legislation or oppose legislation. It is an opportunity for people, patriotic citizens, to gather together to share their concerns and interests in our nation’s security.”
In emails exchanged over the course of a week, Freeman said he was unavailable to answer questions about his presence at the meeting and his involvement with Ramsland.
Ramsland appeared on the show multiple times in 2019 and 2020, at least once with another ASOG employee who appeared with his face in shadow and voice disguised. The employee’s identity was kept secret on the show, with Freeman referring to him as Jekyll, a “white-hat hacker.” It was the same purported hacker who had accompanied Ramsland during meetings in the hangar with Sessions and others, according to Pressley and Malenick.
The Post has reported that Jekyll is Merritt, a former Army mechanic who studied network security administration after leaving the military. In December, The Post reported that affidavits in Powell’s lawsuits from a purported “military intelligence expert” using the pseudonym “Spider” were actually written by Merritt.
Merritt, who told The Post in December that he had briefed Powell and Gohmert, declined to comment for this report.
Together, Ramsland and Merritt painted a picture of an entirely porous voting system, wide open and hackable. Ramsland made a range of specific claims, including that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location, change it and then “re-inject” it, or they could unleash “some sort of a bot” to change the results without anyone noticing. He said there were indications that vote manipulation was already happening and said all major U.S. voting-machine companies were vulnerable.
Among his claims was that source code initially written by the company Smartmatic formed the basis of much of the election software used in the United States. Ramsland often pointed out, as other critics had, that Smartmatic’s founders were Venezuelan.
Representatives of ES&S, Dominion and Hart InterCivic, the nation’s three largest voting-machine companies, told The Post they do not use or license Smartmatic software. They all said their companies’ software code is not in any way based on Smartmatic code, and Smartmatic said its code is not incorporated in other companies’ software.
Ramsland told The Post that “many cyber groups” have reported that different companies share software code similarities. He did not respond to questions asking that he name any cyber groups that support his claims about Smartmatic code.
A Dominion Voting Systems voting machine in Atlanta in September 2019. (John Bazemore/AP)
In his media appearances, Ramsland also resurfaced an old baseless claim about Scytl, a Spain-based election technology firm that he described as a “somewhat disturbing company” in one appearance on Freeman’s show. “They’re housing all of our votes, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion,” he said in a September appearance.
The following month, Ramsland added a twist, claiming on an online talk show hosted by conservative Debbie Georgatos that American votes were “being held on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.”
Scytl has said that it has no servers in Frankfurt and that its systems are not used to count or “house” votes in U.S. elections. Ramsland told The Post in an email that “any 8th grader with a reasonable background in white hat cyber investigation tools” could trace votes to a Scytl server in Frankfurt.
One of Scytl’s products is a platform used by some counties to publicly display unofficial vote tallies online on election night, according to the company. After polls close, as results begin trickling in, they are published online by media outlets and state and local governments. Those unofficial election-night reports depend on tallies that are transmitted by local officials to a publishing system. In some counties, that publishing system is made by Scytl.
Ramsland claimed to The Post that Dallas County’s use of such a Scytl platform showed votes were sent overseas.
But Harri Hursti, a data-security expert who has spent years highlighting vulnerabilities in electronic voting technology, said that Ramsland’s claims about vote-fixing overseas were nonsensical. Even if a hacker could manipulate the numbers that are posted online, the underlying votes would not be affected, Hursti said. Those are kept separately, sequestered from the Internet, and they are — once tallied and checked for discrepancies — the official results of any election.
ASOG paid Hursti’s company, Nordic Innovation Labs, $2,500 in November for an 18-page memo explaining the history of Dominion, its business acquisitions and the many systems and machines Dominion now supports, according to Nordic’s managing partner, Dan Webber.
Hursti said he believes ASOG ignored information he provided, in an effort to shape a sensational narrative about election fraud. Such baseless claims are now distracting time and attention from actual election-security problems, he said.
“This is counterproductive,” he said. “There is so much that needs to be fixed.”
Over this same period, in 2019 and 2020, Ramsland was attempting to win the attention of Washington insiders, an effort Gohmert was also engaged in.
Gohmert has said that a year before the election he gave Trump information from a group of “former intelligence people that were monitoring the election in Dallas County” — a description that closely resembles the way ASOG portrays itself — and that the president considered it “a real problem.” Speaking on a podcast in November, Gohmert said his own reaction to the information was, “Holy cow.”
In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus, Ramsland told MyPillow founder Mike Lindell for his movie about alleged election fraud. Ramsland said members were “horrified” at what ASOG presented.
ASOG also reached out that summer to the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was referred to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of DHS. CISA reviewed a packet of information from ASOG that included the document saying the cost of the company’s investigation had surpassed $1 million. Also included was an affidavit from Pressley and over 40 pages dedicated to her and her poll-watchers’ observations of the vote in Dallas County in 2018. The Post obtained the documents.
An excerpt from ASOG’s May 2020 “introduction briefing outline,” which the company gave to government officials. (Obtained by The Washington Post)
Ramsland said that DHS officials in Texas found ASOG’s information compelling but that CISA officials in Washington were “too busy to take a briefing” and agreed to only a short call.
In a statement, DHS confirmed that its officials had spoken with Ramsland and his associates, “reviewed the information provided and determined that it was speculative and not actionable.”
A full-court press
Hours after the final votes were cast on Nov. 3, Trump doubled down on the claims he had been making for months. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country,” Trump said. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
Over the next several weeks, Ramsland and others tied to ASOG played key roles in the full-court press to persuade Americans that the 2020 election had been rigged.
Ramsland and Lewis appeared on Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business Network, claiming there was evidence of widespread fraud. The claim that all U.S. voting machines secretly harbored Venezuelan software was repeated by Giuliani and Powell in numerous media appearances. The claim that Scytl servers in Frankfurt could be used to flip votes went viral on the right after it was repeated by Gohmert.
On Nov. 12, Gohmert said he had told Trump that data on these servers was critical to getting to the bottom of the fraud.
“I had suggested that the president might get information from Scytl,” Gohmert said on Newsmax, “and I sent him specifics that he needed to get that would show a lot of fraud.”
The next day, Gohmert told a virtual prayer group that the Scytl data would show “how many votes were switched from Republican to Democrat,” claiming that he had learned all this from “some of our former intel people.”
Scytl strongly denied the allegations. In a statement, the company said its products were not used to tally votes in U.S. elections and that it “does not even have offices in Frankfurt and does not have servers or computers in the German city.”
But Trump fanned the theory, according to archives of his deleted tweets. Late on Nov. 15, he retweeted to his millions of online followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from 29 states were routed through “a server in Frankfurt, Germany” and that Scytl “controls and reports your vote.”
President Donald Trump speaks to supporters near the White House on Jan. 6 before the mob attack at the Capitol. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Ramsland also contributed material to Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory. On Nov. 18, a nine-page affidavit from Ramsland filed to a federal court in Wood’s Georgia case made an explosive allegation: Multiple precincts in Michigan had recorded more votes for president than what he said was the estimated number of voters.
Ramsland’s claim was amplified the following day by Giuliani and Powell at a news conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee. Like Ramsland, Powell said that excess votes in some jurisdictions were as high as 350 percent.
The claim in Ramsland’s affidavit soon collapsed under scrutiny. The precincts he cited were actually in Minnesota, a mistake Ramsland blamed on “my guys” in his exchanges with The Post. Ramsland said the Minnesota numbers also showed excess votes, a claim contradicted by official results.
In an interview, Wood said he did not know Ramsland and referred The Post to the lawyer who represented him in the case, Ray S. Smith III. Smith noted that a corrected affidavit had been filed to the court and declined to comment further.
Another of Ramsland’s affidavits claimed a 139 percent voter turnout in Detroit — meaning the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters. Detroit’s official election results show that about 258,000 of its 506,000 registered voters cast ballots — a turnout of just under 51 percent. Ramsland later filed an affidavit saying his original figures were based on data that was online but that “no longer exists [f]or some unexplained reason.”
Two Ramsland affidavits filed in Arizona purported to expose more than 100,000 illegal votes in the state, again based on high turnout rates, and suggested forensic testing to determine whether batches of fake ballots had been cast for Biden. Ramsland attached the résumés of six “key team members” he said had been involved in the preparation of his material. The only one identified by name was a former ASOG computer scientist who had died a year earlier.
Ramsland and one of his associates also played starring roles in the election-integrity “hearings” that Giuliani and GOP state legislators held in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Georgia. The events were intended to persuade legislators to wrest control of the election certification process and demand further investigation.
Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm, appeared as a witness at each of those hearings. He said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.
“Your vote is not as secure as your Venmo account,” Waldron concluded in a hotel ballroom in Phoenix on Nov. 30, provoking murmurs from the audience.
“Pardon me? Say that one more time,” Giuliani said.
Waldron obliged. A video clip of the exchange was posted to Trump’s official YouTube page.
Waldron declined to comment for this report.
By December, Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former chief executive of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani, Byrne told The Post.
Byrne was bankrolling a group of what he described as cyber experts — his “bad news bears” — to investigate election fraud. “They were the ones really getting their fingernails dirty, so to speak, hacking-and-cracking,” Byrne said in an email exchange with The Post. He said Ramsland, who had come to Washington for the effort, “acted as the conduit and synthesizer for a lot of research that was being done by other parties and technologists in our network.”
On Dec. 18, Trump hosted a now-infamous hours-long meeting at the White House during which Byrne, Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, sought to persuade the president to appoint Powell special counsel to investigate the election, including by examining voting machines in key swing-state counties.
Trump ultimately did not appoint a special counsel.
During this period, some White House lawyers heard Trump make claims that made no sense or seemed “bat-shit insane,” one former senior administration official said, later learning they came from a network that The Post found included Byrne, Powell and Ramsland.
According to a document obtained by The Post, skeptical Trump advisers developed a list of pointed questions aimed at determining whether there was evidence for the claims, many of which by then revolved around Dominion. The evidence never surfaced, the people close to the former president said.
Byrne told The Post that White House officials “refused to look” seriously at the claims and that he and his allies will ultimately be vindicated.
ASOG gets access to machines
Of all the ways in which Ramsland pushed the stolen-election narrative, arguably the most damaging was an ASOG report on Dominion machines in Michigan’s rural Antrim County, said Masterson, the senior cybersecurity adviser who was then focusing on elections at DHS.
Antrim County became ground zero for baseless claims about Dominion voting machines when, early on Nov. 4, county officials posted unofficial results showing Biden winning by some 3,000 votes — a seeming impossibility in a reliably conservative region. Election officials quickly acknowledged the mistake and called it human error, saying a clerk’s failure to correctly update software had led to inaccurate vote totals. Final results showed Trump had won by more than 3,000 votes.
Trump allies seized on the mistake as evidence of rigged or at least faulty voting machines. RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel claimed at a news conference that a “major software issue in Antrim County” could mean results were wrong in other counties using similar technology. Trump tweeted a Breitbart article that sought to tie Dominion software to the error that made Antrim “flip blue in favor of Joe Biden” and to Election Day “glitches” that delayed voting in two Georgia counties.
The following day on Fox News, Powell said that computer glitches were “where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.” She called for an audit “of all of the computer systems that … played any role in this fraud whatsoever.”
Powell’s wish for an examination of voting machines was granted after local real estate agent William Bailey filed a lawsuit in Antrim County on Nov. 23, alleging that the election had been marred by “material fraud or error.” Four days later, an ASOG team working for Bailey showed up at the offices of three Antrim townships and requested Dominion voting-machine records.
On Dec. 4, Judge Kevin A. Elsenheimer, a former Republican leader in the Michigan legislature, ordered that the ASOG team be given further access to the county’s voting equipment for a forensic examination. The decision, which offered a rare opportunity for election skeptics to examine Dominion machines, was celebrated by Trump’s campaign.
Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump, referred to the ASOG examiners as “our team” on Fox News. Ellis did not respond to requests to clarify the Trump campaign’s relationship with ASOG.
The ASOG team returned to Antrim on Dec. 6 to examine county election equipment. ASOG’s Dec. 13 report, signed by Ramsland, made sweeping allegations about a conspiracy to fix the election. It claimed that Dominion’s systems were “intentionally and purposefully designed” to generate ballot errors and then to shunt those ballots to electronic adjudication, where administrators could change votes at will, with no oversight.
The judge allowed the release of a redacted version on Dec. 14, the day members of the electoral college met to make Biden’s win official. Trump tweeted about ASOG’s report several times, claiming it exposed a “massive fraud” that cost him the election and saying Elsenheimer “should get a medal” for releasing it.
ASOG’s report claimed that audit logs for Dominion machines showed an alarming 68 percent “error rate.”
That alleged error rate — which ASOG calculated by dividing the number of perceived error messages by the total numbers of lines in the audit log — was “meaningless,” according to an analysis by J. Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan professor of computer science and engineering. Halderman, who as part of the lawsuit examined the Antrim results and the ASOG report at the request of the Michigan secretary of state and attorney general, wrote that audit logs record multiple lines for each ballot scanned and that many of those lines are “benign warnings or errors” that have no bearing on the accuracy of the machines’ count.
For example, he said, ASOG appeared to count the warning “ballot has been reversed” as an error that showed votes had been tampered with. But that entry means that a voter attempted to feed his ballot into the machine and the machine balked and spit it out — just as a vending machine often balks at a wrinkled dollar bill. That happens all the time, Halderman wrote.
Of ASOG’s claim that many ballots were sent to electronic “adjudication,” where they were manipulated, Halderman said his examination showed that Antrim County did not perform electronic adjudication of ballots at all. Halderman said that ASOG had correctly identified some security weaknesses in the county’s election system, but there was no evidence that anyone had exploited those weaknesses.
“The report contains an extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements and conclusions,” he wrote.
County and state officials, as well as Dominion, also said key claims in ASOG’s report were baseless.
Ramsland told The Post that ASOG had just six days to do its report and that Halderman’s analysis contradicted only 12 of ASOG’s 29 “core observations.”
Three days after the court released the report, a hand recount of the county’s ballots showed that the presidential election results were correct, off from the previously reported results by only 12 votes out of some 16,000 cast. Dominion’s machines had counted accurately.
“The tabulators did what they were supposed to do, and they did it very accurately, and there’s absolutely no evidence that there was some reverse cyberattack that manipulated them,” said Michigan state Sen. Ed McBroom, a Republican who led a state Senate investigation of fraud claims. The ASOG report, he said, was “probably more harmful to the discussion” than anything else happening in Michigan at the time.
“I don’t see how anybody can take Mr. Ramsland and his group seriously as genuine purveyors of fact,” he said. “It’s very clear they’re beyond mistaken and misrepresenting what actually happened, either out of carelessness or with some sort of purpose.”
At his “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, Trump made reference to Antrim County and “the troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” as an example of how he had been wronged.
“In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden,” he said. He also repeated Ramsland’s claim that there were more votes than voters in Detroit. “In Detroit, turnout was 139 percent of registered voters,” he said. “Think of that.”
He called the Nov. 3 vote “the most corrupt election in the history, maybe, of the world,” and then urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. By the thousands, they complied.
The scene outside the Capitol in D.C. on Jan. 6 before a pro-Trump mob stormed the building. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Alice Crites, Kayla Ruble and Scott Clement contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that people may decide to wear masks during certain seasons when respiratory illnesses are more prevalent.
“I think people have gotten used to the fact that wearing masks, clearly if you look at the data it diminishes respiratory diseases, we’ve had practically a non-existent flu season this year merely because people were doing the kinds of public health things that were directed predominately against Covid-19,” Fauci said during an interview on NBC Sunday program “Meet the Press.”
“So it is conceivable that as we go on a year or two or more from now that during certain seasonal periods when you have respiratory borne viruses like the flu, people might actually elect to wear masks to diminish the likelihood that you’ll spread these respiratory borne diseases,” he added.
Fauci’s comments come less than a month after the Biden administration announced a relaxation of federal public health guidance on wearing masks outdoors.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that fully vaccinated people can exercise and attend small gatherings outside without wearing a face mask. The agency still recommends that fully vaccinated people wear a mask outdoors when in crowded areas.
“We are at the point right now where we can and start lifting these ordinances and allowing people to resume normal activity. Certainly, outdoors, we should not be putting limits on gatherings anymore and we should be encouraging people to go outside,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CBS Sunday program “Face the Nation.”
Gottlieb added that indoor public health measures should also be relaxed in states where coronavirus infections are low and vaccination rates are high.
“Covid won’t disappear, we are going to have to learn to live with it but the risks have substantially reduced as a result of vaccination and as a result of immunity that people have acquired through prior infection,” Gottlieb said.
As of Saturday, more than 45% of the U.S. population has received at least one vaccine dose, including 33.9% who have been fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois on Sunday likened the Republican Party to the Titanic as House Conference Chair Liz Cheney’s potential ouster from leadership continues to roil lawmakers.
During an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Kinzinger said that the GOP was “in the middle of this slow sink.”
Kinzinger, who was one of 10 House Republicans that voted to impeach former President Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 Capitol riot, said that Cheney has been steadfast in her condemnation of the former president inciting insurrectionists since that day. She has also rebuked Trump’s continued assertions that the 2020 presidential election won illegitimately by President Joe Biden.
The congressman then contrasted Cheney’s words to those of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who he said had changed his story since the day of the riot.
“Liz Cheney is saying exactly what Kevin McCarthy said the day of the insurrection,” he said. “She’s just been consistently saying it. A few weeks later, Kevin McCarthy changed to attacking other people.”
Kinzinger said that the GOP must have “an internal look and a full accounting” of what led to the riot and compared the party to the Titanic, the ill-fated British passenger liner which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean during its maiden voyage in 1912.
“Right now, it’s basically the Titanic,” he said. “We’re in the middle of this slow sink. We have a band playing on the deck telling everybody it’s fine. And meanwhile, Donald Trump’s running around trying to find women’s clothing and get on the first lifeboat.”
He added: “I think there’s a few of us that are just saying ‘guys this is not good,’ not just for the future of the party, but this is not good for the future of this country.”
Earlier this year, Kinzinger, a vocal critic of Trump, was accused of committing “treason” by several of his own family members after publicly blasting the former president for his conduct.
A huge piece of space junk made an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night. The remnants of a Chinese rocket re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean north of Maldives, according to the 18th Space Control Squadron.
According to the U.S. Space Force, the remnants re-entered the atmosphere at 10:15 p.m. ET over the Arabian Peninsula. It was unknown if the debris impacted land or water.
China’s space agency said the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. ET, but also pinpointed the landing area just north of the Maldives. The Chinese space agency said most of the rocket was destroyed during re-entry.
After the incident, NASA slammed China for “failing to meet responsible standards” for the re-entry of space debris.
“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Saturday night. “It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”
The remnants were left over from China’s first module for its new Tianhe space station. The 23-ton Chinese rocket Long March-5B recently launched the first module for the country’s new space station into orbit. After the core separated from the rest of the rocket, it should have followed a predetermined flight path into the ocean.
But scientists had little idea where it would land as it orbited the planet unpredictably every 90 minutes at about 17,000 miles per hour. Its fast speed made its landing place nearly impossible to predict, but it had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere Saturday or Sunday.
A Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China’s space station, Tianhe, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on April 29, 2021, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Ahead of re-entry, scientists and officials were unable to give a clear prediction for re-entry. The rocket had the potential to land in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China or Australia — heightening anxiety around the world that it could cause damage to property or injure people.
After re-entry, the U.S. Space Command’s Space Track Project attempted to calm those fears, tweeting, “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B reentry can relax. The rocket is down.”
“Why the Chinese rocket is coming down uncontrolled is not at all clear,” said CBS News’ William Harwood. “U.S. rockets (and most others) routinely fire their engines to target re-entries over the southern Pacific to ensure debris can’t land on populated areas.”
The China National Space Administration has faced issues with re-entry in the past. In 2018, Tiangong 1, China’s defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In May of last year, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.
The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. When 200,000 pounds of spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris hit the ground, but there were no injuries.
Similarly, when Skylab re-entered in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported.
William Harwood contributed to this report.
Possible re-entry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track.
Medina Spirit, ridden by jockey John Velazquez, leads the field during the Kentucky Derby in Louisville on May 1. On Sunday, trainer Bob Baffert revealed the Derby winner had failed a drug test.
Sarah Stier/Getty Images
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Medina Spirit, ridden by jockey John Velazquez, leads the field during the Kentucky Derby in Louisville on May 1. On Sunday, trainer Bob Baffert revealed the Derby winner had failed a drug test.
Sarah Stier/Getty Images
Medina Spirit, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby earlier this month, has failed a drug test. It is the latest of a long line of drug test failures by trainer Bob Baffert’s horses.
Baffert, who had celebrated a record seventh Derby victory, disclosed the positive test at a press conference Sunday at the Churchill Downs racetrack in Louisville, Ky. He denied any wrongdoing and indicated that the horse had never knowingly been treated with betamethasone, the steroid for which it tested positive.
“I got the biggest gut-punch in racing, for something I didn’t do,” Baffert said.
If Medina Spirit fails a second test on a second sample, also collected at the time of the race, the horse will be disqualified from the Derby and its $1.86 million in winnings forfeited. Baffert will have a chance to appeal the case, which could take months to adjudicate.
Following the news, Churchill Downs — the site of the Kentucky Derby — has banned Baffert from entering horses in any event at the racetrack.
“Failure to comply with the rules and medication protocols jeopardizes the safety of the horses and jockeys, the integrity of our sport and the reputation of the Kentucky Derby,” the Churchill Downs company said in a statement. “We will await the conclusion of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commissions’ investigation before taking further steps.”
In 2018, Justify — another horse trained by Baffert — became just the second Triple Crown winner in four decades. The most prestigious achievement in horseracing, the Triple Crown is awarded to horses that win three of the sport’s most prominent races: the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes.
According to reporting by the New York Times though, Justify had failed a drug test weeks before its first Triple Crown race — which, had it been disclosed, would have disqualified it from participating in the race.
The horse’s breeding rights were reportedly sold for $60 million.
Last month, Baffert won an appeal with the Arkansas Racing Commission which issued a 15-day suspension over two positive drug tests involving his horses in May 2020. He said the horses were inadvertently exposed to the painkiller lidocaine.
Another Baffert-trained horse, Gamine, tested positive for betamethasone in October.
If Medina Spirit is disqualified, he will be just the second horse in Kentucky Derby history to be dethroned because of a drug infraction. In 1968, Dancer’s Image was disqualified over use of phenylbutazone, a pain reliever that is now permitted for use during races.
For now, Medina Spirit is still set to race in the Preakness on Saturday as it pursues a record third Triple Crown win for Baffert.
At Sunday’s press conference announcing the positive drug test, Baffert said he was worried about the state of horseracing.
“There’s problems in racing,” he said, “but it’s not Bob Baffert.”
A huge piece of space junk made an uncontrolled re-entry back into Earth’s atmosphere Saturday night. The remnants of a Chinese rocket re-entered the atmosphere and crashed into the Indian Ocean north of Maldives, according to the 18th Space Control Squadron.
According to the U.S. Space Force, the remnants re-entered the atmosphere at 10:15 p.m. ET over the Arabian Peninsula. It was unknown if the debris impacted land or water.
China’s space agency said the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. ET, but also pinpointed the landing area just north of the Maldives. The Chinese space agency said most of the rocket was destroyed during re-entry.
After the incident, NASA slammed China for “failing to meet responsible standards” for the re-entry of space debris.
“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Saturday night. “It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”
The remnants were left over from China’s first module for its new Tianhe space station. The 23-ton Chinese rocket Long March-5B recently launched the first module for the country’s new space station into orbit. After the core separated from the rest of the rocket, it should have followed a predetermined flight path into the ocean.
But scientists had little idea where it would land as it orbited the planet unpredictably every 90 minutes at about 17,000 miles per hour. Its fast speed made its landing place nearly impossible to predict, but it had been expected to re-enter the atmosphere Saturday or Sunday.
A Long March-5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China’s space station, Tianhe, blasts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on April 29, 2021, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Ahead of re-entry, scientists and officials were unable to give a clear prediction for re-entry. The rocket had the potential to land in the U.S., Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China or Australia — heightening anxiety around the world that it could cause damage to property or injure people.
After re-entry, the U.S. Space Command’s Space Track Project attempted to calm those fears, tweeting, “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B reentry can relax. The rocket is down.”
“Why the Chinese rocket is coming down uncontrolled is not at all clear,” said CBS News’ William Harwood. “U.S. rockets (and most others) routinely fire their engines to target re-entries over the southern Pacific to ensure debris can’t land on populated areas.”
The China National Space Administration has faced issues with re-entry in the past. In 2018, Tiangong 1, China’s defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In May of last year, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.
The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. When 200,000 pounds of spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris hit the ground, but there were no injuries.
Similarly, when Skylab re-entered in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported.
William Harwood contributed to this report.
Possible re-entry locations lie anywhere along the blue and yellow ground track.
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