Investigative journalist for The Guardian Hugo Lowell proved again that he is at the forefront of exposing the plot within the White House to overturn the 2020 election. In a report filed yesterday, Lowell dropped a bombshell about the true origins of the false conspiracy surrounding Dominion Voting Systems, which lies at the heart of Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
In the weeks following the November 2020 election, a report entitled “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties” began circulating among aides to former President Trump. It supposedly contained “research” from a volunteer lawyer for the campaign that claimed a company called Dominion Voting Systems had made it possible for “technology glitches” with election machines which in turn allegedly “resulted in thousands of votes being added to Joe Biden’s total ballot count.” This was patently untrue and entirely without foundation, but even more bizarre was the alleged “source” of these claims. The report cited unnamed Venezuelan officials, somehow linked to deceased former leader Hugo Chávez, and claimed the company along with voting software company Smartmatic had ties to “state-run Venezuelan software and telecommunications companies.”
The report, which first appeared in a publicly available form on the conspiracy site Gateway Pundit in early December of 2020, was dubbed “explosive” at the time. It already had been sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on November 29, 2020 and was later sent by Trump’s legal team to state legislatures as part of the effort to overturn the election.
“Kraken” Trump legal team member Sidney Powell went on Fox News to repeat the claims in the report. “We are fixing to overturn the results of the election in multiple states and President Trump won by not just hundreds of thousands of votes but by millions of votes that were shifted by the software that was designed expressly for that purpose,” Powell declared in an interview. Fox anchor Bill Hemmer, who conceded that Powell had provided no details to back up her claim, nevertheless said that Powell “sounded convincing.” Powell and Fox News are now facing billion-dollar defamation cases from both Dominion and Smartmatic.
After the Dominion report became public, senior White House adviser Peter Navarro incorporated the claims into his own three-part report on election fraud. The timeline here is curious, though. Navarro’s aide Garrett Ziegler admitted in a right-wing podcast interview last July that Navarro’s office had begun working on the report a full two weeks before the November 2020 election even took place, according to Lowell’s reporting. What the early drafts of Navarro’s report contain likely will be of interest to investigators.
The supposed author of the report was a woman named Katherine Friess, who was a volunteer attorney on the post-election Trump legal team and whose name appears on the cover of the document. But Friess has maintained for over a year now that she had nothing to do with drafting the report, even though her name was embedded in the metadata of the document as well. Lowell and The Guardian were able to obtain and observe the original document, however, which shows that senior Trump aide Joanna Miller, who worked in Navarro’s office, was its original author.
One immediate question, for which there is currently no answer, is why Navarro’s team or the White House would scrub Miller’s name off of the report and put an unknown volunteer lawyer’s name on it instead. One logical reason would be to make it seem like the White House was simply following the research and claims of third parties, and not itself inventing conspiracies out of whole cloth.
A follow up question is this: Did Navarro’s team begin to gin-up conspiracies around Dominion Voting Systems before the election even occurred? If Garrett Ziegler is to be believed, some kind of election fraud report was already underway two weeks before Election Day. What did that report contain, and where were they obtaining their “research” on it?
As an aside, Garrett Ziegler was the Navarro aide who improperly waved through coup plotters Sidney Powell, ret. Gen. Michael Flynn, and Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne during an unannounced White House meeting on December 18, 2020. In that meeting, Trump was presented with a draft executive order to seize voting machines. White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who had worked behind the scenes to keep extremists away from the former president, pushed back hard on the draft order at the time, correctly saying the president had no constitutional authority to issue the order. Later, Ziegler’s White House privileges were revoked for breaching security protocols.
The true origins of the most persistent voting machine conspiracies undergirding the Big Lie have always been hazy. But the case of the scrubbed authorship of the “explosive” Dominion Voting Systems report—one that apparently points directly back at the White House—is now likely to come under added scrutiny.
For additional political analysis, check out the Status Kuo newsletter.
