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Feb. 18, 2020 - QAA

01:16:19

Episode 79: The Democratic Party & Conspiracy Theories

Seth Rich, the Podesta emails, the Imran Awan scandal and Shadow INC. A generation of political operatives like Tara McGowan getting DNC boomers to pivot to digital. The result? Infrastructure like the Iowa Caucus App. We explore how actions taken by Democrats have — inadvertently or not — fueled "conspiracy theories". ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com Music by Nick Sena (www.nicksenamusic.com) /// SOURCES: QANON NEWS: https://nypost.com/2020/02/07/conspiracist-accused-in-gambino-boss-killing-goes-on-bizarre-courtroom-rant/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/02/11/man-who-blocked-hoover-dam-part-qanon-beliefs-takes-guilty-plea/4724161002/ TRAVIS https://www.govtech.com/security/DNC-Ignored-Cybersecurity-Advice-that-May-Have-Prevented-Recent-Breach.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/an-interview-with-charles-delavan-the-it-guy-whose-typo-led-to-the-podesta-email-hack.html JULIAN https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599 https://www.thedailybeast.com/dnc-chair-tom-perez-says-iowa-caucus-slip-up-should-never-happen-again https://www.thedailybeast.com/democratic-national-committee-had-oversight-over-botched-iowa-caucus-app-report https://readsludge.com/2020/01/23/hedge-fund-billionaires-power-new-democratic-super-pac/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-11-25/acronym-s-newsrooms-are-a-liberal-digital-spin-on-local-news https://theintercept.com/2020/02/04/iowa-caucus-app-shadow-acronym/ https://theintercept.com/2020/02/05/iowa-caucus-app-election-system-security-design/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21122737/iowa-democractic-caucus-voting-app-android-testfairy-screenshots-app-store https://www.cnet.com/news/the-app-that-broke-the-iowa-caucus-an-inside-look/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/02/14/us/politics/iowa-caucus-results-mistakes.html JAKE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/federal-probe-into-house-technology-worker-imran-awan-yields-intrigue-no-evidence-of-espionage/2017/09/16/100b4170-93f2-11e7-b9bc-b2f7903bab0d_story.html https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/damaging-emails-dnc-wikileaks-dump/story?id=40852448 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-strange-case-of-debbie-wasserman-schulzs-it-guy https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/13/broward-county-florida-recount-222543 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imran_Awan

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Time	Text
	What's up QAA listeners?
	The fun games have begun.
	I found a way to connect to the internet.
	I'm sorry boy.
	Welcome, listener, to the 79th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Democratic Party Fuels Conspiracy Theories episode.
	As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
	On March 13, 2016, Bill Ivey, then-chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, wrote an email to John Podesta, who was running Hillary Clinton's campaign, about the obstacles ahead in their quest to beat then-Republican nominee Donald Trump.
	Dear John, Well, we all thought the big problem for our U.S.
	democracy was Citizens United slash the Koch Brothers' big money in politics.
	Silly us.
	Turns out that money isn't all that important if you can conflate entertainment with the electoral process.
	Trump masters TV.
	TV's so-called news picks up and repeats and repeats to death his opinionated blowhard and his harebrained ideas.
	Free-floating discontent attaches to a steaming strongman and we're off and running.
	JFK Jr.
	would be delighted by all this, as his George magazine saw celebrity politics coming.
	The magazine struggled as it was ahead of its time, but now looks prescient.
	George, of course, played the development pretty lightly, basically for charm and gossip, like people.
	But what we are dealing with now is dead serious.
	How does this get handled in the general?
	Secretary Clinton is not an entertainer, and not a celebrity in the Trump-Kardashian mold.
	What could she do to offset this?
	I'm certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not.
	And as I've mentioned, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics, and in general, conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.
	Oh, fuck.
	The unawareness remains strong, but compliance is obviously fading rapidly.
	Oh my god!
	So bad!
	So bad already!
	Imagine what kind of government you're running when the guy for the Endowment of the Arts is talking like this.
	This problem demands some serious, serious thinking, and not just poll-driven, demographically inspired messaging.
	I fear we all are now trying to navigate a set of forces that cannot be simply explained or fully understood.
	So it is, and will remain interesting.
	Sent with a handshake, Bill.
	Fuck, I hate these people.
	Really?
	Why would you hate someone that talks about you like that as a member of the citizenry?
	I don't even care about that, to be honest.
	I'm mad about the sent-with-a-handshake sign-off.
	That is the most pithy, democratic, like, West Wing, we are the champions.
	We're gentlemen.
	How dare you, sir, bullshit.
	Like, sent.
	Sent.
	On the wings of a firm handshake between two men.
	Between two men who believe in democracy.
	That is pretty obnoxious.
	I mean, the total contempt for the American people, I think, is pretty more obnoxious, I think.
	So the email was made public by WikiLeaks in October ahead of the presidential election.
	So imagine a soft, paranoid brain being struck by a sentence like, we've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics, and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry.
	Fatal levels of pilling.
	I can see it working on Jake right now.
	He thinks the sign-off is as bad as the Frazzledrip video.
	So this week we're going to examine how the Democrats have repeatedly taken actions which have contributed to the birth and maintaining of conspiracy theories.
	We're not pretending to give you a comprehensive survey here of this phenomenon.
	We'll be using three cases to kind of illustrate our point.
	Now, the two first are from the 2016 election season, the death of Seth Rich and the Awan scandal.
	And the last is going to be a big story from February 2020, just this month.
	I'm sure you remember, of course, the Iowa caucus voting app and the company that created it, Shadow Incorporated.
	But before all that...
	First off, QAnon follower pleads guilty for charges relating to Hoover Dam standoff.
	Matthew P. Wright, the QAnon follower who blocked off a bridge in a futile attempt to get a secret OIG report released, has pleaded guilty to making a terrorist threat, aggravated assault, and evading a police officer.
	He faces under a decade in prison, but his sentencing hearing is scheduled for March 4th.
	After he is sentenced, Matthew Wright will have the distinction of being the first person who was in prison because of QAnon.
	March is going to be a really big month.
	We've got some good video game releases.
	Hey guys, it turns out QAnon is sending people to jail.
	It turns out some people are getting the trials.
	But unfortunately it's the people that support Q. Yes, true.
	Yeah, you won't be the last.
	I mean, we have coming up, we have the trials in the near future, like Cynthia Abzug in Colorado, Anthony Camello, New York.
	So we got a lot of QAnon trials to look forward to.
	Oh man, I can't wait.
	Hangings at Gitmo!
	God, if the hangings at Gitmo end up all being QAnon followers and it's done by, like, Hillary Clinton.
	Not quite the storm we expected.
	Jake just looked crestfallen.
	It's like I was giving him news of a family death.
	We already had our first little taste of what I would call the great disappointment, which was, I'm sure you're going to talk about this, Travis, but Andy McCabe not getting prosecuted.
	Is that in the news as well, or can we freestyle a little bit?
	We can freestyle on that.
	Okay, good.
	I saw the most sort of disappointed Serious disappointment.
	I mean, really, you know, let's read a couple tweets, actually, from some disappointed QAnon followers.
	So here's one.
	Oh, hell yeah, do it, baby.
	This disappointed person says, so much for TikTok justice coming and for Barr and Durham.
	I'm about ready to just get off here.
	Another tweet from today's Tom Sawyer says, when you have the DOJ say they will not prosecute McCabe, then it makes it harder for the normies to see what's going on.
	Not gonna lie.
	This makes it harder for me to buy into.
	And I've been following Q since 11-17.
	Maybe you should be thinking about buying out of instead of how buying into is gonna work.
	Dude, you're in the thing already.
	Get out.
	I know.
	It's like, well, I still believe it, but the normies can't believe it now.
	Another tweet from Landslide Politics says, Are you there, Q?
	It's me, Maga.
	Are you really going to let McCabe walk while Stone is facing a decade for virtually the same crime?
	Are you there, Q?
	It's me, Maga.
	McCabe wife received illegal cash for state senate run?
	I trust the plan, but getting anxious.
	Love, Brian.
	They could tolerate any level of like logical incoherence from Q or contradictory beliefs or any kind of like nonsense, but the moment like their enemies aren't suffering enough, they're like all, ugh.
	This doesn't make sense at all.
	I was told that there would be pain.
	I was told that people like McCabe would suffer, you know, ruination, humiliation.
	They want that so badly.
	And here is a dude who lied to the investigators or whatever about leaking.
	You're right.
	He got caught.
	The IG wrote it up.
	He lacked candor.
	The IG lacked candor.
	It was something about leaking to the press or some bullshit, but he admitted it.
	You know, it's a minor, minor, minor offense, but he admitted it and the IG acknowledged it and still nothing happened to him.
	Now they're pinning all their hopes on Durham, the Durham investigation.
	OK, right.
	It's like, oh, well, that was like a minor charge when they're getting like Durham is getting like charged McCabe for like treason or like some big.
	Yeah, they're going to say, yeah, they've been saying, I've been I've been checking the temperature of the community, if you will.
	And they're saying essentially that, you know, D.C.
	is fucking still, you know, a huge swamp.
	And the grand jury is all, you know, lefties that, you know, refuse to indict McCabe.
	And so but don't worry.
	Better charges that will stick are coming, and that's with the Durham investigation.
	Jake is taking the temperature.
	When he says that, I imagine him like Winnie the Pooh getting his head stuck in various QAnon people's orifices.
	He has to pop them back out.
	Aw, shit.
	With all this goopy stuff on my hand and a little piglet next to me.
	I got red pill cream all over me again.
	Truer than you know.
	What is inside a red pill?
	What is?
	It's probably cum.
	It's a tracing program, duh, that allows the Nebuchadnezzar to find where you are in the fucking Matrix, you dumbass.
	Where the fuck have you been this entire year that we've been recording, dummy?
	Whoa, oh, that felt so good to just degrade Julian like that.
	Now I see why it's so fun for you all the time.
	You know what, Jake?
	It felt a little good on this side.
	Okay, let's go on.
	Gotta move on.
	For my next story, a QAnon killer goes on bizarre courtroom rant.
	So, the QAnon killer, Anthony Comello, who's facing second-degree murder charges for killing mob boss Frank Cali, went on a bizarre rant during a hearing on February 7th, according to a report in the New York Post.
	So it all started after Kumail's lawyer asked the justice if his client could speak in court.
	Not sure why he asked this.
	No, don't do it!
	You know he's red-pilled!
	Why would you do this?
	I have no idea, but this is what he asked.
	I call my next witness, Jake Rakitansky, to the stage.
	He will surely make me look like a scientist and a scholar.
	Oh, sorry, your honor.
	He's just finishing the last bite of a Snickers bar.
	If the bailiff could hand him some sort of napkin, it appears he's gotten chocolate all over his face.
	So when Anthony Kamel spoke in court, this is what he said.
	I just want to say that there's a lot on my phone and a lot of data about drug smuggling, human trafficking all over the country.
	I have everything from Australia to Ukraine to Italy to Russia.
	So I think we could fairly say at this point that he's not some sort of plant by another family or something.
	This guy just seems terminally, really terminally, pilled.
	There's no logic at this point to just I mean, I guess this could be him making the argument that he's insane so his lawyer can continue to develop it.
	His lawyer gives him the speech?
	That's what else could be.
	If the lawyer goes, please, please, allow my client to talk about all of the fucking evidence that he has.
	All morning he's been telling me he's got this human slave trafficking shit on his phone he wants to show you, and I'm just thinking this is a great idea at this point.
	Camelo also reportedly said this to Assistant District Attorney Wanda De Oliveira.
	Good luck, Wanda.
	Operation Mockingbird.
	If she's being handled by the CIA and like runs Operation Mockingbird telling her the operation and telling her good luck when you know that she controls the entire game and it's rigged against you, I love that.
	That's some David Goliath shit.
	What a hero.
	He's just spitting out Q-drops now.
	Let's not forget this man is a literal punisher.
	People put that skull up on their fucking trucks.
	This guy went- This guy went out and did it.
	Hand-murdered a fucking mob boss in his driveway.
	Yep.
	Ah man, gross on the rest of the community.
	So, don't commit murder please.
	My next story, uh, QAnon followers threaten to ruin their lives if Trump denounces QAnon.
	So this past week, the hashtag, if POTUS denounces Q, ...started trending in the QAnon community.
	And the tweets from it mostly consisted of QAnon people talking about the horrible things that they would do if Trump were to say that QAnon is a fraud.
	Here are a couple of examples.
	April says, Hashtag, if POTUS denounces Q, I will tattoo Feel the Burn
	across my forehead.
	The Nice Guys tweets, Hashtag, if POTUS denounces Q, I'll donate everything I
	have to the Clinton Foundation.
	I'll literally support the pedos if this goes wrong.
	I was working up a funny way to say just that.
	I was like, so, okay.
	I will start a pedophile network.
	So all these tweets inspired a friend of the show, Joe M, aka Storm is Upon Us, to taunt me with this tweet.
	Hey Travis Few.
	Look at all the cultists making outrageous life-ruining commitments.
	Hashtag if BOTUS denounces Q. You should pressure your friends in the MSM to get it done and ask the Q. Imagine how much fun you could have ridiculing us all.
	Go on.
	Do it.
	He has a great point.
	I keep telling them, like, like, get me a White House press pass.
	I will fucking ask the question, goddammit.
	You get me, uh, in the White House press pool, I'll fucking ask them.
	The funny thing about this is, there's this weird attitude, it's like, oh, if Post announces Q, you know, we would ruin our lives, we'd give away all of our money and make a socially, you know, uh, life-ruining tattoos.
	Wouldn't you love that?
	You would like that, wouldn't you?
	No, I would not like that.
	I would.
	No, I don't want them to ruin their lives.
	I would love to see a kind of big Trump supporter with Feel the Burn tattooed on his forehead.
	I don't want that.
	How is that not funny?
	That's so funny.
	There's this weird... Okay, maybe for you.
	Maybe they're thinking about you.
	I personally don't want them to do anything self-destructive.
	One more thing I want to mention before I move on.
	It's like I apparently found out that friend of the show and QAnon blogger, NeonRevolt, has discovered the true identity of Travis Few.
	That rules.
	I was waiting for it.
	Credit where credit is due.
	Yeah, well, it was.
	I was like, I spent a lot of time actually like taunting QAnon people to dox me because
	as soon as I sort of like, I published my face, I knew it was going to happen.
	I wanted to like blow their load about what information they had on me as soon as possible.
	They just Google mapped your house and they were like, uh.
	Uh... Yeah, right.
	He looks kind of shitty.
	Yeah, right.
	He's not that... He's just a guy.
	In fact, apparently, Neon has, according to his recent Gab post, he's actually built a little oppo file on me.
	But since I'm exactly the boring dude I say I am in my real life, it mostly consists of me looking goofy at work events.
	Yes, I love the photos he's on.
	Yeah, he's got like, oh, look, he looks kind of like a dork at this work thing.
	Then he found you had a child, and as a Christian man, he said, Yes, they're right.
	Neon decided not to dox me and actually told some other people not to dox me, and this is the reason he explained in his Gab post.
	Because he has a young kid.
	Last thing we need is the Deep State leveraging some MK asset to attack his own and pose as a radical QAnon follower lashing out against a journalist.
	So Neon knows that if he doxxed me, he seems to believe, Neon believes.
	Some fucking psycho will show up.
	Exactly, that increases my exposure of a QAnon person attacking me.
	No, no, no, no.
	Lashing out, lashing out.
	No, no, no, no.
	An MK asset.
	The Deep State will see that Neon has doxxed you or another QAnon person has doxxed you since you're one of theirs.
	Right.
	They will take an MK asset, they will send it to your house, they will gladly sacrifice
	you and your family for the narrative of a crazy, wild QAnon believer.
	July 2016. Seth Rich.
	Now, Seth Rich was the 27-year-old DNC staffer who was murdered on July 10th, 2016.
	His murder, like dozens of murders from the DC area that year, remains unsolved.
	Police suspect that the murder was the product of a botched robbery.
	However, In the wake of Wikileaks releasing DNC emails that were hacked by Russian entities, conspiracy theorists developed a different idea.
	Namely, that the emails were not hacked, but were in fact leaked by Seth Rich, who wanted to blow the whistle on corruption inside the DNC.
	And Rich was subsequently murdered for this transgression.
	There is, of course, no real evidence of this, and at the moment, Seth Rich's parents are suing Fox News over a retracted report that fueled conspiracy theories about his death.
	For a comprehensive look at the origins of the Seth Rich conspiracy theories and the grifters who promoted it, I highly recommend the Yahoo News podcast, Conspiracy Land.
	So, the conspiracy theorists are obviously themselves at fault for the baseless conspiracy theories about Seth Rich.
	But at the same time, I can't help but notice that if the DNC had made some different choices, they could have prevented the hack.
	And that may have prevented both the Seth Rich conspiracy theories and also Pizzagate.
	Because remember, Pizzagate was based on bizarre readings of the hacked Podesta emails.
	Let's start with the fact that the DNC was warned that their computer systems were vulnerable, but subsequently did nothing.
	In September of 2015, the firm Good Harbor Security Risk Management conducted an assessment of DNC security, and according to a federal filing, the DNC paid $60,000 for this assessment.
	Nice!
	The review found problems ranging from an out-of-date firewall to a lack of advanced malware detection technology on individual computers.
	The firm recommended taking special precautions to protect any financial information related to donors and internal communications, including emails.
	And with this valuable information that they paid $60,000 for, the DNC did nothing.
	Took no action on that.
	Man, they're so fucking stupid.
	God, they just raise so much money every year.
	Every year they have to get on their knees again and suck rich people's dicks, and then they do this with the money.
	What's the point?
	You don't have to keep getting on your knees.
	Just get rid of all these expenses, which is essentially 95% of the spending, and you don't need to beg anymore.
	Stop begging and stop doing this, specifically.
	Now, obviously there's no guarantee that the hack would have been prevented if they took all the recommendations, but it would have decreased the odds of the hack happening, or at the very least decreased its severity.
	We can't prove that installing a door on this house could have prevented this robbery, but you know... Now, the decision not to act on the cybersecurity advice was strange because the DNC was initially hacked, also in September of 2015.
	At least one computer system had been compromised by hackers known as the Dukes, which is a cyber espionage team linked to the Russian government.
	So the DNC's just getting serial hacked by the Russians.
	Yeah, just wide open door.
	It's just feeling like a trail of just absolute, yeah.
	It gets worse.
	So the DNC was actually alerted to this intrusion by a phone call from FBI Special Agent Adrian Hawkins.
	Here's what happened next, according to a New York Times report.
	Yared Tamim, the tech support contractor at the DNC who fielded the call, was no expert in cyber attacks.
	His first moves were to check Google for, quote, the Dukes, and conduct a cursory search of the DNC computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyber intrusion.
	By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks, in part because he wasn't certain the caller was a real FBI agent and not an imposter, quote, I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call Mr. Tameen wrote in an internal memo.
	You're the Democratic Party, you fucking idiot!
	I know!
	There's lots of ways to verify that you're actually talking to an FBI agent.
	You could contact the FBI themselves and have them verify.
	You could ask for an email from an FBI.gov email address.
	Aren't you friends with all of these people?
	You're the DNC!
	Don't you get contacted to, like, important people?
	No, because the DNC is actually just a mech made up of weird private interests shifting in and out of place.
	In fact, after that initial call, it would take seven months before the DNC finally installed some monitoring tools to detect unauthorized access into their emails.
	And it was with those tools they had finally realized that they were compromised.
	The hacking technique that the Russians use is called spear phishing.
	So this involves sending people emails that seem like they're harmless, but are really a way to trick people into giving up their password.
	The email that John Podesta received was from a fake account reset that looked like it was from Google.
	And it just said, free hot dogs now at 7-Eleven!
	With the Podesta hack, it actually might have been avoided if it wasn't for one small typo.
	So according to that same New York Times report, when the phishing email first arrived, Podesta referred the email to a few aide.
	An aide named Charles Delavan replied with this.
	This is a legitimate email.
	John needs to change his password immediately.
	Oh god.
	But the response made a simple mistake.
	Delavan had intended to write, this is not a legitimate email and simply mistyped.
	Awkward.
	On that recommendation that it was a legitimate email, the spear phishing email was opened and the account was compromised resulting in the publication of Podesta's archive.
	Oh my god!
	Oh my god!
	What?
	One word.
	Not.
	The Podesta hat.
	There would be no Pizzagate.
	There would be no Russiagate either!
	There would be nothing!
	There might not even be a Trump presidency!
	This dipshit forgetting to write not made him ruined!
	What's his name?
	Charles Delvett.
	Charles Delavan!
	Oh, I'm gonna get Charles Delavan tattooed across my fucking forehead.
	Oh, Charlie!
	Charlie!
	And what was he?
	What was he?
	Just like an intern?
	Like how old is he?
	I want to know everything about this guy who started the fucking war.
	It just works in IET for various Democratic Party entities.
	I'll just reiterate, obviously it's the DNC who are ultimately the victims of these illegal hacks, but I just want you to imagine what the political landscape would be like if the DNC took their network security seriously instead of allowing for this.
	So the Seth Rich conspiracy theories, at the very least, would have less legs, because without that hacked emails angle, the whole Seth Rich thing being murdered doesn't have much steam, you know?
	And then the Pizzagate, which is based on the belief that all these bizarre food references and the Podesta emails were actually secret codes, Probably wouldn't have happened, which means no Pizzagate shooter at Comet Ping Pong.
	And since Pizzagate is a predecessor of QAnon, it's entirely possible that QAnon wouldn't have happened, or at least not got as popular as it has.
	And without the DNC hacked emails, Trump wouldn't have asked Ukrainian President Zelensky about CrowdStrike, which was the cybersecurity firm that the DNC hired to figure out who had hacked them.
	So he might also not be present.
	If he was present, he might have not been impeached or impeached for something different.
	It just the whole our entire political life would be different if they just they took that call from the FBI agent and then took it seriously and then locked down their shit.
	But I think you can track it back also to the convention because in Fahrenheit 11.9 Michael Moore makes a good case that some of the stuff that happened at the convention started kind of this belief that Bernie Sanders was being screwed by the DNC and that they were rigging it against him.
	Then that belief Fed into the idea that then he leaked the emails. Yeah, and
	it's like so really you can trace it back to DNC actions Intra party as well. That's true
	Which is which is all these are all decisions they made that they could have not made
	I guess is the argument here at every step of the way the people who have been on TV and on Twitter
	complaining about how the world has gone to shed and that we're under
	Dictatorship and all the people and all the bots and all the stuff that's given us all anxiety for the last like
	three years and some change all stems from actions that these same people did or did
	not do.
	It's like, it's not, it's not hard to track too.
	It's, it's incompetent decisions like choosing not to install security
	when you've been advised to, but it's also a secrecy.
	It's also deciding that secrecy is going to be the best way to do a
	variety of different things.
	And we'll talk about the app later, but in general, if you are secretive
	about your operations and the result of them is something like what
	happened to Bernie Sanders.
	That's not going to be a positive thing in terms of giving birth to conspiracy theories.
	Secrecy gives birth to conspiracy theories.
	Yep.
	March 2016.
	Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Broward County, and the Democrats' IT guy problem.
	Debbie Wasserman Schultz was born in September of 1966 in Queens, New York.
	Her father, Larry Wasserman, was a certified public accountant, and she spent much of her youth growing up in Long Island.
	After attending college at the University of Florida, where she also received her master's in political science, Debbie got her first taste of real politics while she worked as an aide to Congressman Peter Deutsch at the start of his career.
	She would eventually take over Deutsch's seat in the Florida House of Representatives and bring with her a lot of opinions about the Middle East and a strong loyalty to Israel.
	Quote, I support promoting peace and stability through aid to the Palestinians as long as
	there is a true commitment to a cessation of violence against Israel, financial transparency,
	and continued support of the dialogue of peace with Israel.
	No surprise here that a centrist Democrat like Debbie completely discounts hostile actions
	taken by the Israeli government against the Palestinians, but that is par for the course.
	By all accounts, Debbie's resume was fairly impressive.
	Even without an Ivy League education, she became the youngest woman to ever be elected to the state representatives, at just 26, and was heralded as a rising star of the Democrat Party.
	Her politics, for the most part, are a mixed bag.
	She was an early supporter of LGBTQ rights, which is good, but instead of passing meaningful legislation that protected at-risk kids from being bullied or worse, she instead focused her efforts into launching the Virginia Graham Baker Pool and Spa Safety Act, A law named after Graham Baker, who died in an accident in June 2002, when the suction from a spa drain entrapped her under the water.
	Oh my god, yeah, this is the leading cause of death in, um, in bathhouses.
	You get sucked into the... Really?
	No.
	This is Looney Tunes shit!
	What the fuck?! !
	Wasserman Schultz made it her purpose to protect people, mostly children, from pools and spas, which I guess because it's Florida?
	She also supported bailing out the banks and a ton of other boring, barely left-of-center Democratic policies completely in line with the Obama-Clinton apparatus.
	So what happened?
	How did this bright, determined, up-and-coming politician become drenched in scandal?
	So much so that President Obama himself had to call her and ask her to resign for being the head of the DNC.
	And what is it about her district, Broward County, that lends itself to tragedy after tragedy, fueling wild internet conspiracies?
	Could Debbie Wasserman Schultz really be at the heart of multiple Deep State operations?
	Or is she just incredibly unlucky and careless?
	Join me as we go down the rabbit hole on Deep State Debbie and the IT Guy from Hell.
	For this section I'll be drawing heavily from Michael Grunewald's article from Politico titled,
	How Broward County Became the Florida of Florida.
	All right.
	I highly recommend you check out the article as it has many more details I'm unable to include here.
	When you hear the words Broward County, most people think nothing of it.
	But when this researcher hears those exact same words, his clicking finger starts to tingle.
	So many amazing conspiracies have unfolded in this otherwise sleepy little Florida town, that when I list them all right now in a row, it will appeal even the most stoic skeptic.
	Broward County is home to such scandals as, it's built on a Native American burial ground, That's true.
	That's the whole country, dude!
	You murdered them all!
	Like, where were you gonna put the bodies?
	Before white people came from Europe to push them out, the Tequesta people lived on what is now Broward County.
	They were known to be incredible hunters and fishers, but were very loose on their burial rituals.
	And so, yeah, people find bones and skeletons a lot, like, in their backyards in Broward County, which is...
	Troubling for the police force because they don't know if it's like a fresh murder or just like bones of the people that they trampled.
	It was home to the tragic 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting which claimed the lives of 17 teenagers.
	You'll remember Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel was dragged for his department's completely botched response to the shooting.
	It has been under scrutiny in multiple elections, with large amounts of ballots having been lost or destroyed, or seriously concerning instances of undervoting.
	Broward County is the home of political fixer and convicted felon Roger Stone.
	It got its name from an infamously corrupt turn-of-the-century governor named Napoleon Bonaparte Broward.
	What?
	Wait, his parents called him Napoleon Bonaparte?
	Yeah.
	Oh my god.
	There was a school board member who was found out to be stashing all the bribes that she had been getting in a restaurant doggy bag.
	There was a state representative who would have sex with his clients and then bill them for the time they spent together.
	Which is incredible.
	There was the Trump supporter who sent fake pipe bombs to major Democratic leaders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
	You guys remember that?
	I do.
	Seems so long ago.
	It's a good thing he was too incompetent to make anything functional.
	And then there was this city council meeting where the mayor accused a council member of earning her living bleaching sphincters.
	Wednesday's City Commission meeting in Hallandale Beach getting heated after taking a turn for the tawdry.
	You said I do it.
	You said I bleach my hands.
	That's what you said.
	Mayor Keith Lunden making this comment Monday during a meeting on the city's $140 million budget.
	Or see where my earned income came from last year.
	I know where your earned income came from.
	I'm sure you do.
	Was it getting my sphincter bleached?
	Is that what I earned my income for?
	Oh, okay.
	Now that would be you and your family business.
	Amazing!
	Get involved in local politics, ladies and gents, and non-binary friends.
	And the mayor is incredible.
	I mean, he looks like a WWF wrestler.
	He's got a long, greasy, black ponytail, like broad shoulders, like too tan.
	Oh, it kicks ass.
	Championship.
	We need national politics like this.
	Yeah!
	Now, Broward County is run completely by Democrats.
	There's virtually zero competition ever, and so the Dems have essentially realized that they don't have to try in the least, because no other party will challenge them on the ticket.
	Oh, this is good.
	You know how, like, stagnant water is always, like, a healthy and good thing?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It develops, like, a nice... A lot of life.
	There's a lot of life that comes there.
	Healthy.
	Flying.
	So this apparently has led to incredibly frustrating situations for anyone trying to work alongside county leadership to get anything done.
	In the Politico article, the writer interviews the Florida prosecutor who is tacked with investigating a number of Florida counties suspected of running some sort of political scam.
	David Ehrenberg, the top prosecutor in Palm Beach County, recalls when he tried to compile financial disclosures from Ryden candidates in 12 counties that he suspected were part of a political scam, 11 of the election departments either had the information on their websites or gave it to him right away.
	Broward's department bounced him around voicemail hell for a week, then told him he had to pick up the two-page document in person and pay a $0.25 processing fee.
	Ehrenberg eventually persuaded a county bureaucrat to email the forms, but the incident gave him new insight into the department's reputation for incompetence.
	Quote, it was the worst experience I've had with any office around the state, he says.
	I mean, this is the 21st century.
	Let's just say they're inefficient.
	So I think this paints... I love how the Democrats consistently everyone
	generously calls them complete and utter incompetence.
	That is like the most nice and generous thing you can say about the Democrats.
	Incredible. So I think that this paints for our listeners just exactly the type
	of environment we're dealing with here. Boomer liberals with totally unchallenged
	power just absorbing the hot swampy moisture until the end of time.
	Yeah, dude. This is...
	Yeah, dude.
	This is moss, this is mycelia, this is all the things that grow in the dark, this is all the animals that don't have any skin pigment, this is deep cave shit, dude.
	Deep state vibes, man.
	They've got little lamps hanging off the top of their heads.
	That's just setting the scene.
	I have two whole other sections.
	Yeah.
	Q-Drops.
	But what does this have to do with QAnon, Jake?
	Isn't it just possible that it's unsurprising that America's sock is filled with feet?
	Sure.
	But one of those pairs of feet belongs to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has been referred to in no less than five separate QDrops.
	First, early on in a December 22, 2017 post that contains a lot of key QAnon tropes like the servers, the DNC, CrowdStrike, and it's way too long for me to read on the show, but she was brought up again on a February 6, 2018 drop that reads as follows.
	Public interest, keep high.
	You won, FBI informant.
	Awan, DWS.
	Pecky Intel, MB.
	Tarmac meeting.
	SCLL deal.
	Leads to AS-187.
	Q.
	So, of course, Q is referring to Uranium One, as well as the tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch, where he, according to Q, told Lynch of a plan to murder Chief Justice Anton Scalia and give his seat to Loretta Lynch, should she refrain from prosecuting then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
	And where's Scalia now, boys?
	Dead.
	Additionally, in the middle of the drop, Q makes his first reference to Imran Awan, an IT worker for both Debbie as well as over 20 other prominent Democrat politicians, who we'll get to shortly.
	There was also this Q drop from July 28th, 2019.
	The swamp runs deep.
	DNC servers hold many answers.
	Scaramucci model.
	Yeah, Scaramucci model in QAnon is based on, obviously, Scaramucci who served as Director of Communications for the White House for like 10 days.
	Right.
	And then so there's this, well, no, that was deliberate.
	There's this model where they bring in people for like two weeks and then he does exactly what they need to do for the job.
	Then they get out.
	QAnon had to add a couple of chapters in like the CIA operations handbook of like getting fired immediately.
	Different techniques for infiltration and subterfuge.
	So now, realistically, the only answers the server held was that the DNC tried to hamstring Bernie Sanders at every chance they got, and many emails from Debbie Wasserman Schultz bad-mouthing the Sanders campaign while strategizing with the Clinton campaign about how best to cripple him in the primary.
	Wasserman Schultz hated that Bernie did not want to be associated with the Democrats, but had chosen to run on their ticket.
	She thought Bernie didn't understand what it meant to be a Democrat, but unfortunately for Q, in this drop, the kill boxes around both Awan and DWS only materialize in the form of a firing and some probation.
	In the case of Wasserman Schultz, she was reluctant to step down, not seeing anything wrong with rigging the DNC primary in favor of Clinton, but a call from the big guy, Barack Obama, finally persuaded her to step down.
	Fortunately for her, Debbie was immediately hired by the Clinton campaign, proving once again that all politicians pay a heavy price for their incompetence.
	Nice.
	The case of Imran Awan, however, is a little bit more complicated.
	For this section, I relied heavily on Sean Boberg's reporting for the Washington Post.
	Imran Awan is basically our age.
	He was born in Pakistan in 1980, and when he was 14, he won a green card lottery and came to the United States in 1997, a great time for music.
	Awan worked fast food jobs while he attended community college, before eventually transferring to Johns Hopkins University, where he received a degree in information technology.
	In 2004, he became a U.S.
	citizen.
	That same year, he began working IT for Robert Wexler, a Democrat House representative from Florida's 19th District.
	Soon, he began to pick up work for other prominent Democrats in the House.
	So apparently, he must have been a pretty good IT guy.
	I mean, that's usually how it works, you know?
	If you're fairly good at what you do and you're around rich, lazy people, they'll usually recommend you to other rich, lazy people.
	Yep.
	So now he's got this fairly lucrative gig going on and he brings his wife and his two brothers and one of their friends over to support him in his IT endeavors.
	It's unknown if they were formally trained or if Imran trained them on the job.
	But before long, each of them were working for a handful of Democrat politicians in Congress.
	Now according to an article in the Washington Examiner, Abid Awan, Imran's first brother he brought over, the second would come later, owned a used car dealership in Virginia named Cars
	International A or CIA.
	What?
	At this point, honestly, I closed the web browser and I shook my head.
	The Washington Examiner isn't exactly known for their most honest reporting.
	Nevertheless, and feeling like an absolute moron, I typed the words Cars International A into my Google
	browser.
	Into my Google browser.
	Incredible.
	This is what Debbie Wasserman Schultz herself would write if she were trying to be a host on this podcast.
	Into my Google search engine.
	This is the best day of my life.
	The first thing that came up were a number of lawsuits from people who had been ripped off by the owners of Cars International A, a place which infuriatingly actually exists.
	The lawsuits do indeed name Imran's brother, Amir Awad, as one of the defendants.
	Damn it, Amid.
	Of course, of course, of course, it's meaningless.
	But like, why the fuck, every time we look into stuff like this, there's always some dumbass that names their shady car dealership CIA or some bullshit.
	Like, why can't anything be known?
	Like, why couldn't I have Googled that, saw that it didn't exist, or saw that it came from some 4chan post or something?
	No, all the fucking lawsuits are online.
	Like, you can read through the lawsuits.
	I do not know what the outcome of any of them were.
	Yes.
	I wonder if he was on, like, some Hot Topic shit, like, isn't it funny?
	CIA.
	Funny t-shirt thing.
	Anyways, before long, Imran Awan and his crew were pulling in $157,000 to $169,000 each per year doing various IT chores for 25 different Democratic governors.
	$20,000 each per year doing various IT chores for 25 different Democratic governors.
	But auditors began to notice something strange.
	Various invoices were breaking up computer parts into multiple pieces, keeping the pricing
	low enough that it didn't have to be listed on the House inventory.
	iPads, laptops, and all sorts of dope shit was being invoiced for and then ostensibly disappearing off the fucking grid.
	Investigators began to home in on five individuals, Imran Awan and his entire family.
	They mapped their logins and what they found was rather shocking.
	From the Washington Post, By mid-summer, with the approval of the House Administration Committee, the Inspector General's office was tracking the five employees' logins.
	In October, they found massive amounts of data flowing from the networks they were accessing, raising the possibility that an automated program was vacuuming up information, according to a senior House official familiar with the probe.
	Initially, investigators could not see precisely what kind of data was moving off the server due to legal protections afforded by the Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause, which shields lawmakers' deliberations from investigators' eyes.
	So, of course, this is where all the conspiracies spawned from.
	That Awan and his crew of terrorists were funneling state secrets to Pakistan, and Clinton knew about it and looked the other way.
	Of course, this all really ties into the Barack Obama is a Muslim conspiracy theory.
	In actuality, there was no classified data held on any of the servers that the Awans had access to.
	No matter, around the same time, Hillary was being investigated over her missing emails and private servers, so this just added another piece of the puzzle for Hillary truthers.
	Shortly after Trump won the election, leaders in the House, now aware that Awan and his team were under federal investigation, called for them to be barred access from all House servers.
	Everyone agreed, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz then found Awan a consulting position where he wouldn't need House access and could continue to make lots of money.
	God dammit!
	You fucking idiot!
	They are so consistent!
	Just remove the problem it seems like it would be easier.
	She said publicly that the reason was to shield Awan from mounting smears and racist claims
	coming from him at the right.
	They are so consistent.
	Incredible.
	In fact, some of her colleagues thought she, quote, dust protest too much from that same
	post article.
	Debbie Wasserman Schultz's fierce defense of the Awans at times puzzled even some in her own party.
	In May, Wasserman Schultz chided the Kappa police chief during a public hearing after officers confiscated a laptop that had been left in the Capitol building hallway.
	It belonged to her office and had been issued to Imran Awan.
	Just left a computer?
	Yeah, great IT guy.
	Okay, so he's also very competent.
	Oh my god.
	Quote, I think you're violating the rules when you conduct your business that way and should suspect there will be consequences, Wasserman Schultz told the chief.
	So if you'll remember, Travis, this fueled lots of QAnon follower chatter about the nefarious file contained on the laptop.
	And that's the real reason that Debbie wanted it back so badly.
	Yeah.
	But in the end, Wasserman Schultz's office turned over every single document file and server over to the investigators.
	They determined that much of the discrepancies were due to poorly optimized systems and practices in place long before the Awans arrived.
	Investigators identified that many other office infrastructures were set up to similar mediocrity.
	Oh, this is just part of a pattern of incompetence.
	It's a unique incident.
	Nevertheless, this began to fuel suspicion that it was in fact Imran Awan and his band of terrorists who had leaked the DNC's emails to WikiLeaks.
	Geraldo Rivera actually went on Hannity and said, and I quote, What if he was a source to WikiLeaks?
	He has all the passwords.
	He has all the information.
	This is a huge story.
	The story continues to be that boomers look at anyone young and go, they know digital.
	For them, that is just like every part of this.
	But that turned out not to be true.
	As all intelligence agencies agree, it was actually Seth Rich who leaked the emails.
	Just kidding, Travis.
	I know it was Russia.
	Yeah, there we go.
	And then, on July 24th, 2017, it all came crashing down.
	Imran Ahmad was arrested by federal police at Dulles International Airport.
	Was he an international spy after all?
	Sadly, no.
	But rather had taken out two loans on rental properties claiming he and his wife lived there and then wired nearly $300,000 to Pakistan.
	Oh my lord.
	He was subsequently charged with bank fraud.
	None of the charges had anything to do with his IT work for the Democratic Congress people.
	So it seems like he was immoral and incompetent in general, not just at work?
	Yeah.
	Nice.
	Debbie Wasserman Schultz finally fired Awan a week later.
	He was sentenced to time served plus three months of supervision.
	House investigators found no evidence that Awan or anyone in his family worked for any kind of foreign entity, terrorist organization, foreign government, anything.
	So, I gotta ask myself, what's more likely?
	That Awan was running a secret spy ring funneling Clinton-improved intel to Pakistan for impressive sums of money, and the independent auditors were unable to find any evidence of it, or were in on it themselves, somehow?
	Or, do we have a bunch of fucking lazy Democrats with absolute shit infrastructure who've built in loopholes to get themselves free laptops and iPads and shit, and they tell the IT guys to have the vendors split up the charges across two receipts so it doesn't go on house inventory?
	I've worked in offices, I know how this shit works.
	Both, of course, are equally plausible.
	And the bank fraud charge was definitely not a good look.
	It is undoubtedly criminal, but not like, you know, international spy infiltrators criminal.
	As of this writing, Imran Awan's whereabouts are unknown, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz is in her 15th year repping the state of Florida in the U.S.
	House of Representatives.
	Nice.
	Yeah.
	She's awesome.
	He's awesome.
	This is so good.
	And let's you know, I mean, so good.
	The point of the episode is to kind of also look at how this feeds conspiracy theories and I'd say defending horrifying incompetence over and over.
	That will contribute.
	That's a suspicious behavior be like what's going on here is like normally because like people in their general experience Oh, someone's incompetent.
	They fuck up.
	They get fired.
	That's normal, right?
	Yeah, and like just just day-to-day life But when you look at this this sort of like tear and like politics be like, oh well He's fucking up over and over again and they defend him.
	They give him a new job just fucking up.
	He's doing illegal things that he is being arrested for right and doing by the police.
	Right.
	By FBI.
	He was gonna like try to flee the country.
	It's so funny that they're like, oh my god, this guy's a fucking spy.
	He's in the fucking thing.
	And it's like, he's not, but he's also in the same universe, like arrested by the FBI,
	like trying to flee the country.
	It's like the Sim is just a little off tilt, you know?
	And again, here we have a case of like private interest, this young man and his brothers.
	Yeah, who is like kind of making themselves a niche inside the DNC, built of pure incompetence
	and just taking up more and more space inside that ecosystem and sucking up more and more
	money until you collapse in a just shit pile of total incompetence and deep corruption
	He worked hard, he worked fast food, he went to community college, and then transferred to Johns Hopkins, which is a great school, and sort of carved this niche out and was like, oh shit!
	These people are fucking morons.
	Like, I can bring my whole family, or I can teach them to do what I do, or even just set up automated networks to do it for us, and we can just fucking take their money.
	And guess what?
	The same exact structure, the same story, is going to be told in my segment because, again, people in their mid to late 30s are currently grifting these boomers and taking all their fucking money and creating holes in what should be infrastructure because of the private-public mesh.
	Yeah.
	It is infuriating.
	But I think one could honestly make the argument that after working so much, because Awan started working for the US government in 2004, long before Wasserman Schultz even came into the picture, she just kind of absorbed him because he was what was known as a shared staffer.
	He was there so long that, I mean, part of me wonders that he, like, sort of saw all this corruption.
	Who knows that some fucking, like, dick politician wasn't like, oh, dude, by the way, you can make a shit ton of money.
	Even if you rent there, you can actually take out loans.
	I've done it.
	You know, I mean, who knows?
	It's like when you send an innocent man to jail.
	You know, he learns how to be a criminal, so.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So, here you go, buddy.
	Not that I'm defending him.
	If you have tea with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, I'm just saying you leave knowing how to do tax fraud.
	February 2020. Shadow Inc. On Monday, February 3rd, the Iowa Democratic Caucus suffered a critical failure.
	Issues with the mobile application used to count votes forced multiple precinct captains to call in their results, which in turn jammed the phone lines.
	Results were delayed, and over the next few days, the situation grew more complex and messy.
	So, first I want to walk you through all of the choices that led to the creation of the application, and I want to give you some background on the network of operatives responsible.
	The app was created by a company called Shadow Inc., which in turn was created by a company called Acronym, which was launched by digital strategist Tara McGowan in the wake of the 2016 election.
	Now, she had worked as a digital producer for Obama in 2012, and as press secretary for Democratic Senator Jack Reed.
	Her pitch to Democratic donors, we got trounced in 2016 because our quote, digital game has fallen behind.
	And this mostly just means let's blow millions of dollars on targeted digital ads, a technique they thought had won Trump the presidency.
	So basically, they were like looked at what Brad Parscale did with very little money and were like, we need to tell these boomers they need to learn from this to pivot to digital, essentially.
	By 2019, ACRONYM created PACRONYM, which was a super political action committee designed to funnel big donor money into a variety of endeavors.
	By end 2019, PACRONYM had its sights set on the Democratic primary.
	In the last quarter of 2019, the group raised over $7.7 million, and it's at this point that David Plouffe, who led Obama's presidential campaigns, joined the ACRONYM board.
	Now, I want to thank Donald Shaw, who wrote a great article for Sludge detailing the funding of PACRONYM.
	The top donor to PAC, her name is Seth Klarman.
	He's a billionaire CEO of a hedge fund with fossil fuel holdings and a former GOP megadonor.
	In 2014, he donated $300K to Karl Rove's SuperPAC.
	And he invested in beating Hillary in 2016.
	That's the top donor.
	So, I mean, he sounds like a like a like a guy, I guess, like Trump used to be, where he's just like donated to everyone just because he wanted, like, get get on the side of power.
	It's almost like all these billionaires are the same.
	Donors also include hedge fund owner Donald Sussman, who's also a billionaire, director Steven Spielberg, director of Levi Strauss and co, Mimi Haas, and partner at Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, among others.
	These people all donated upwards of 500,000, some over a million dollars to Pat Cronin.
	Of course, that's just the visible part of ACRONYM, because the company also uses a 501c4 entity to gather dark money from a pool of completely undisclosed donors.
	So the visible part is an ex-GOP guy.
	Gotcha.
	So you can imagine what's in the invisible part of this fucking horrifying shit.
	Just all Epstein money.
	So ACRONYM created PACRONYM as a spending tool during election season.
	Then they founded Shadow Incorporated.
	Shadow Incorporated, a company that went on to create an application to help count caucus votes and convinced both the Iowa and Nevada Democratic parties to use it for their 2020 Democratic caucuses.
	As the debacle unfolded, David Plouffe attempted to downplay his involvement with Shadow Incorporated despite being on their board.
	Oh my god!
	There's been some reporting about the app at the center of this, which appears to have been developed by a company called Shadow that is associated with another firm called Acronym.
	David Plouffe, I know you've worked with Acronym.
	I've seen some reporting on Huffington Post and Lee Fong and others have sort of walked through the connections.
	I just want to ask you if you've had anything to do with this app, if you know about it, if you have any insight into this.
	I didn't know about it, so I'm helping Acronym.
	I'm a volunteer on their board.
	And what is Acronym?
	So Acronym is a digital firm that works on digital advertising, puts out a newsletter every week about what's happening in the presidential race.
	My understanding is, I just texted the CEO, Acronym's an investor in Shadow.
	I guess Shadow's got its own board of directors.
	So in my relationship with Acronym, which has been going on for a few months, I have no knowledge of Shadow.
	So you weren't sitting up there the whole time being like, I actually developed Shadow?
	I didn't know if it was Microsoft or who it was.
	Not to throw them under the bus.
	It's news to me, but anyway.
	Why don't you ask me?
	We're going to find out more about this and also... So, he just said, let's look over those words, a volunteer on the board.
	A volunteer on the board!
	I'm just, I'm giving some time to this beleaguered company.
	I'm donating my value of time to this entity.
	This company that raised $7.7 million just recently.
	Okay, so that's David Plouffe being caught, by the way, just sitting on MSNBC Live.
	He just happened to be on their fucking set when this whole thing broke apart, and so the poor guy, unfortunately, was put in a slightly defensive position when he had to answer for this.
	So, Acronym also tried to distance themselves from Shadow, putting out a press release stating, quote, Acronym is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors.
	One of those independent for-profit companies is Shadow Incorporated, which also has other private investors.
	Unfortunately, just a month prior, Tara McGowan had been interviewed saying, quote, Shadow is the technology company that Acronym is the sole investor in now.
	Lee Fong ended up writing an article on McGowan stating that, quote, internal company documents, a source close to the firm's and public records show a close and intertwined relationship between Acronym and Shadow, including the fact that the company share a WeWork office space.
	We work.
	Add WeWork to the whole thing.
	Helping determine critical infrastructure to democracy.
	A scam company is running a space where another scam company... And they're doing the vote counting apps.
	Smart.
	Very, very, very, very intelligent.
	So Lee Fong also uncovered a broader network of companies affiliated with Acronym, including a for-profit media outlet called Courier Newsroom that Tara McGowan claimed would deliver targeted, quote, hometown news by rolling out multiple digital newspapers across swing states with names like Copper Courier and Dogwood.
	So here is from a November 2019 puff piece in Bloomberg.
	While the articles she publishes are based on facts, nothing alerts readers that Courier Publications aren't actually traditional hometown newspapers, but political instruments designed to get them to vote for Democrats.
	And although the articles are made to resemble ordinary news, their purpose isn't primarily to build a readership for the website, it's for the pieces to travel individually through social media, amplifying their influence with persuadable voters.
	So, I mean, I don't know how you could, like, define fake news better?
	Yeah, than concealing your intention.
	They think that basically, just by saying, while the articles she publishes are based on facts, it's fine to do all the rest of what they just said.
	So this is both Bloomberg writing a puff piece and telling on themselves in the article, and also her telling on herself.
	Yeah.
	Do they, like, make up newspapers?
	Like, the hometown hero that just, like, shows up in your email, like, one day, and you're like, oh, I guess my town sent me a paper.
	My town has a new newspaper, yes.
	You're supposed to believe that.
	But it's just, it's just, it's just Democratic propaganda.
	Because in Democrats' brains, they think that as long as there's facts in this, it's okay to mislead them about why it was created, to mislead them about what the purpose of it is, and also to hide partisan interests.
	Which, by the way, the Democrats, they don't know what's a fact or not a fact.
	Facts become very blurry around stuff when it profits them.
	So let's not pretend that the Democrats are the party of facts.
	So keep reading this quote.
	Last week, Google imposed tight restrictions on micro-targeting political ads and Facebook is weighing similar measures.
	But because Courier Newsroom is a for-profit media company, McGowan says those restrictions wouldn't apply.
	She's also telling herself saying that they're going to circumvent the rules about political ads by creating, essentially, micro-targeted fake news organizations.
	Based on facts.
	I'm sorry.
	I'm sorry.
	Based on facts.
	It's not fake.
	It's not fake, but it's fake.
	But it's concealing its intention and purpose.
	And it's like, if it's presenting as like, oh, just your local hometown paper, but it's really just propaganda, then that's deceitful.
	Absolutely.
	She is combating disinformation, let's be clear, by founding partisan newspapers and spending millions on targeted ads promoting pieces with cherry-picked facts, all of this to fight what she calls, quote, the poisoning of the system by fake news.
	So, to me, this seems incredibly short-sighted and even stupid.
	One of the Facebook ads they pumped tons of cash into was just a meme of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell accompanied by the words, end this bromance.
	So that's the quality of what they're like.
	They're meme warriors.
	They're meme warriors.
	And we're going to find out.
	But their memes suck.
	McGowan explained to the New Yorker.
	If we're going to find more voters where they are, online, on their phones, then we'll have to be more risk tolerant.
	And if you'll pardon the word, more disruptive.
	We can be purists all we want.
	We can sit on the sidelines and do things the old way all we want.
	But the new political battlefield is Snapchat filters.
	Oh.
	Go on.
	Jake's face.
	Jake just bit into a lemon like it was an apple, basically.
	His tongue is bleeding.
	He does not look okay.
	The fact just fucking log jammed his brain.
	You have to keep reading this beautiful quote, man.
	It's Snapchat filters.
	It's GIFs.
	It's memes.
	If we want to win, we will engage in that battle.
	Okay, so digital soldier shit.
	Yeah, they're digital soldiers.
	Yeah.
	They're digital soldiers.
	Using memes.
	Like a shitty wannabe version.
	Yeah, yeah, he's bad.
	Adding insult to injury, multiple reporters uncovered connections between specific political campaigns and members of Acronym and Shadow, who all seemed to oppose Bernie Sanders.
	So the CEO, CTO, and CEO of Shadow Inc.
	had all worked on the Hillary campaign during the 2016 Democratic primary specifically.
	And then the subsequent presidential election.
	So when the shit hit the fan in Iowa, acronym board member David Plouffe, like I said, had just been hanging out on the MSNBC discussion table thing, criticizing Sanders.
	That's what he was actively doing when his whole thing fucking collapsed.
	And that's how Chris Hayes was able to ask him the awkward question in the first place.
	Months prior, of course, MSNBC had also hosted the daughter of billionaire hedge fund owner and top acronym investor Donald Sussman.
	As we discussed earlier, she made the claim that anybody supporting Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren was quote, showing their sexism.
	That was on MSNBC again.
	But that wasn't all.
	The founder of Acronym, Tara McGowan, was married to a senior advisor on the Pete Buttigieg campaign.
	People dug up a tweet ranging back to January 2019 in which she proclaimed in all caps, Mayor Pete is running followed by three heart eyes emojis.
	Then people found out that the Buttigieg campaign had paid over $42K to Shadow Incorporated in August of 2019.
	Of course, I'm not trying to emphasize this because other candidates had also paid Shadow, including Biden and Gillibrand, for stuff like software or software licenses is what it's listed as.
	But it looks extra bad for Pete because his campaign strategy is being run by Michael Halle, who happens to be Tara McGowan's husband.
	OK, and Tara McGowan is the one- Head of acronym.
	Is the head of acronym.
	Head of whole acronym.
	Yep.
	Who owns Shadow.
	Now, let's get into the app.
	One of the stupidest decisions made by Shadow was embracing a design principle known as, quote, security through obscurity.
	Here's from an Intercept article by Mika Lee.
	When the media learned last month that the Iowa Democratic Party planned to use a mobile
	app to report caucus results, the party refused to reveal many details about the app.
	It didn't publish the app's source code for independent security researchers to inspect,
	nor give any information about how thoroughly the app had been tested.
	Apparently, not very thoroughly.
	That's in the article, that's not us commenting.
	The party wouldn't even name the vendor that hired to develop the app, Shadow Inc.
	I wonder why they didn't want to give them that name.
	Claiming that doing so could inadvertently help potential cyber attackers.
	Elected officials couldn't get answers either.
	The office of Senator Ron Wyden asked the Democratic National Committee for details about the app three times in lead-up to the Iowa caucus, but the requests were ignored, according to the Wall Street Journal.
	Wyden is himself a Democrat, Now if you're wondering what they should have done, the National Institute of Standards recommends what they call Open Design, explaining that quote, system security should not depend on secrecy of the implementation or its components.
	provides a false sense of security, while making it harder for people to have confidence
	that the system actually works as expected.
	Now, if you're wondering what they should have done, the National Institute of Standards
	recommends what they call Open Design, explaining that, quote, system security should not depend
	on secrecy of the implementation or its components.
	So here's from that article again.
	This open design practice is commonplace in the software industry, particularly in systems
	that handle very sensitive data.
	The Signal app, for example, is widely known as one of the best designed end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.
	Unlike the Iowa Caucus reporting app, Signal's source code is freely available on the internet for anyone to inspect.
	The inner workings of Signal's encryption algorithm are publicly documented and the implementation has been peer-reviewed.
	Furthermore, the app wasn't even tested sufficiently, even if they had used the obscurity thing.
	This gave birth to a spate of articles by the New York Times, The Verge, and CNET, like a bunch of tech people got involved, all rushing to document how clumsily the app was built and how little it was vetted before being approved for use.
	Like, some people found evidence that the person who had built the app had had to look up how to implement parts of the program, like look for ready-made toolkits to insert into the code and stuff like that.
	Also remember, this was an app that was designed to do some basic counting, basic arithmetic, and some reporting functions.
	Stuff that literally can be done on paper.
	Yeah.
	It was built clumsily, and it was not vetted before being approved for use.
	And unnecessary in the first place.
	And completely unnecessary, of course.
	So, so far we've examined how dark money and billionaire donors gave birth to acronym, pacronym, and shadow.
	We've explored the connections of those involved with DNC insiders and specific campaigns.
	We've looked at the app and found it to be designed in exact defiance of security protocols.
	It's time for the last leg of our little trip here.
	The way the DNC and the IDP handled the processing and the release of the results.
	Furthermore, I'll be exploring the multiple flagrant errors contained in the released results, many of which have still not been corrected.
	So, on Monday, February 3rd, around half past 8pm, the Iowa Democratic Party Communications Director released the following statement.
	We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results.
	In addition to the text systems being used to tabulate results, we are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report.
	This is simply a reporting issue.
	The app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.
	The underlying data and paper trail is sound, and we'll simply take time to further report the results.
	From the IDP Communications Director, Mandy McClure.
	So, with about 0% of the vote in, and the whole thing looking like a clusterfuck, Pete Buttigieg basically stepped up and declared victory.
	Here's from his speech.
	First of all, I want to say Senator Sanders clearly had a great night too, and I congratulate him and his supporters.
	And for us, this is a campaign that a year ago I think a lot of people were questioning why we're even making the attempt.
	We just had this idea that we could build a different kind of politics, a belonging based on bringing people together.
	And to see how that led to that win for us in Iowa is fantastic.
	So, that was Monday night, no results still Tuesday.
	February 4th, everyone wakes up fucking pissed.
	I mean, the shadow stuff had started to kind of surface, like the... I remember it was not good online.
	This is what AP Politics tweeted at 9.36am to prepare us for a wonderful Tuesday.
	The Iowa Democratic Party says it plans to release at least 50% of the results from caucuses on Tuesday at 4pm CT.
	So, just...
	Already telling people they're going to only release kind of partial results, even though they know there's already a massive amount of controversy around it.
	Everyone waits.
	I mean, they don't.
	They go crazy.
	But around 5 p.m., the DNC and the IDP release 62% of the results.
	They show Pete Buttigieg leading in SDEs, or state delegate equivalents, while trailing Bernie Sanders in the popular vote, as well as the first and second alignment of the votes.
	Emphasis is placed on the SDs by almost all the major news outlets.
	One of them, which I won't even name, actually removed a column from their little fucking thing so that SDs was the only one remaining on the front page until you, like, moved to a second part of the page.
	I mean, just stuff like that was happening.
	That's not the point, right?
	We're more examining the DNC, but it's important to also know how the media was reacting in this case.
	Slate wrote an article entitled, How Pete Won, which, by the way, now has been changed to, How Pete Beat Joe.
	I went to recheck on the same article.
	These motherfuckers!
	Goddammit!
	Yeah, exactly.
	A soft, beautiful brain like Jake.
	Pilled.
	Fucked.
	Fucked.
	Destroyed.
	All these motherfuckers are doing it to him!
	So, okay.
	So the New York Times was predicting, through their needle, a 95% chance of Pete Buttigieg, quote, winning.
	Even though they knew about the SDs and whatever.
	DNC Chair Tom Perez then released the following statement.
	What happened last night should never happen again.
	We have staff working around the clock to assist the Iowa Democratic Party to ensure
	that all votes are counted.
	It is clear that the app in question did not function adequately.
	It will not be used in Nevada or anywhere else during the primary election process.
	The technology vendor must provide absolute transparent accounting of what went wrong.
	So he's asking for the company called Shadow to become transparent?
	I fucking love it!
	You can't write this shit, man!
	Whose wife, who's the head of, is married to the guy running Pete Buttigieg's campaign.
	We don't even need, like, we don't need yarn, we don't need pins, and we don't need a board.
	You just can print headlines and they're just sitting next to each other and it's just everything you need.
	Shadow Incorporated should become more transparent, says fucking head of the DNC idiot.
	Our immediate goal is to ensure that every vote is counted as quickly as possible.
	Accuracy is our guidepost.
	As frustrating as the last 24 hours have been, let us not lose sight of our ultimate goal to defeat Donald Trump, to take back our democracy, and to improve the lives of millions by electing Democrats up and down the ballot.
	It's like despite this massive fuck up.
	Please don't keep to keep your eyes on the real goal Electing us so people are going crazy online.
	They're looking at some of the precincts they're showing how like Polk for example had only released about 50% and then just got stuck at that for like two days and Precincts that the captains knew had already been reported were sending in photos of the stuff being delivered.
	It had been more than 48 hours and it still wasn't tabulated correctly.
	People started counting online.
	Slowly, they trickled in more and more results.
	And as that trickle came in, the difference between Buttigieg and Bernie, on the only count that had Buttigieg ahead, the SDEs narrowing and narrowing and narrowing.
	It's like they counted the last...
	30%?
	It seemed like that percent was the one that made sure that Pete didn't look like he was winning, or at least it was too tight to call or something.
	But this is where they really fucking spit in your fucking eye.
	This is where, if you're not a conspiracy theorist at this point, you become one at this point, right?
	Because people were arguing at this point, like, don't be paranoid, don't be paranoid.
	Okay, so fine.
	So then they reached 98% of the count.
	98% of the count, 98%, and Pete and Bernie had an 0.1% difference in SDEs.
	98%.
	0.1%.
	And at that point, before they reached 100, Tom Perez tweeted this.
	Enough is enough.
	In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the Delegate Selection Plan, and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a re-canvas.
	Now, of course, this sent everyone to tizzy.
	What does it mean to re-canvast?
	Does he mean recount?
	What is he calling for?
	Why did he do it right before they reached 100?
	So meanwhile, people were scanning through the data and pointing out glaring issues.
	Central to this was a journalist called Daniel Nishanian, who wrote long threads detailing results he called, quote, mathematically incoherent.
	In some cases, they don't conform to what local precincts are reporting.
	People begun uncovering a pattern of error, a large amount of which profited Pete Buttigieg and harmed Bernie Sanders.
	Eventually, the New York Times did their own analysis and published an article entitled, quote, We checked the Iowa caucus math.
	Here's what didn't add up.
	Neshanian proceeded to then document various errors remaining in the New York Times coverage.
	Just yesterday, Neshanian tweeted, quote, Let's not forget it's been 11 days and IDP has still not cared to fix any of what's in a thread to show a modicum of respect for voters, including extra delegates and likely two missing precincts still.
	Now, one of his central contentions with the New York Times coverage was the two missing precincts that they don't list at all.
	That seems to not be an issue for them.
	Wasn't there also, I saw pictures online of, they were looking at ballots and people were rounding up for Pete Buttigieg.
	That's a separate question.
	There's math involved in the caucuses that's disastrous.
	The SDs, well, this is, we're talking just like you counted the physical ballots wrong.
	The ballots that were there.
	He is only documenting You counted the physical ballots wrong.
	There's numbers not matching in the first or second alignment.
	It's just that.
	Just the math.
	Pretty interesting stuff.
	He's definitely, I'd say, worth a follow.
	So one of the big debates I've been seeing online revolves around attempting to determine whether or not this was a conspiracy.
	But I would argue that that is almost completely irrelevant.
	The mutant private-public structure working on some of the most critical projects within the DNC effectively functions as a conspiracy.
	If the majority of that structure views Sanders as a usurper, which I think it's fair to say they do, then is it so outrageous to call that very structure a form of conspiracy?
	Hillary has literally said about Bernie Sanders, quote, nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him.
	It's been reported that Obama has been mulling a public repudiation of Sanders.
	Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer do not seem to be feeling the burn.
	What happens when the entire political class believes you're a threat?
	I think the debate over the word conspiracy or conspiracy theory is essentially useless in this case.
	You're just describing power being consolidated within a structure that does not like a certain thing
	and does not want that as an outcome.
	So there's gonna be small decisions made along the way.
	But for now, let's leave aside this question completely and let's give the Democratic Party the benefit of the
	doubt even if we assume there's absolutely no conspiracy.
	The fact remains that the DNC's choices and actions, from top to bottom, seem almost designed to birth conspiracy theories where none existed previously.
	If Shadow Inc., acronym, and people like Tara McGowan have their druthers, we're going to be playing a similar disinformation game to the Trump campaign.
	But the pivot to digital has another result as well.
	Democrats are now willing to consort with neocons.
	Like, remember the email we read you at the top of the episode?
	The one sent by Bill Ivey to John Podesta stating that, We all thought the big problem for our US democracy was
	Citizens United's big money in politics.
	Unfortunately, it seems the lesson the DNC took away from their 2016 loss is that to defeat both
	Trump and the left wing of the Democratic Party, you should ally with the Koch brothers.
	On February 14th, it was announced that Nancy Pelosi would headline a DCCC fundraiser for U.S.
	Rep.
	Henry Quellar, a Democrat backed by none other than the Koch Brothers Network, in his fight to keep his seat repping the 28th Congressional District of Texas.
	Why are the Kochs involved here?
	Well, because in this case, Quaylar is being challenged in the Democratic primary by the more progressive Nancy Cisneros.
	So perhaps the DNC and the DCCC aren't so adverse to Koch-style dark money groups as they sometimes pretend to be.
	And I want to ask you here and now, guys, what better way to fuel conspiracy theories than dark money groups?
	Just have that become a bigger thing in the Democratic Party.
	Well, you know, it worked.
	Well, here's the thing.
	It worked for the Republicans.
	They don't want to do it.
	They don't want to do it.
	But you have to destroy democracy because they're doing it.
	And it's making them win.
	So sacrifice everything.
	You've got to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.
	This is in line with the idea that Bloomberg, a Republican, who is horrifyingly opposed to almost everything good that these liberals supposedly want, is now being considered by the DNC as a frontrunner, is now having rules changed so that he can be on a debate stage by the DNC.
	So you're seeing a continuation of the same policy of obfuscation, creating shadowy dark money groups, and fucking people around with the rules behind closed doors.
	And the result of that is going to be I love that rumor so much.
	Can you imagine a more hated ticket?
	I can't.
	I can't.
	and they will have no one to blame but themselves and well everything else in
	the culture but they are making this a hundred times worse.
	Yeah. There's also there's rumors that that Bloomberg's gonna pick Hillary
	Clinton to be his vice president and that they were gonna run on the same
	ticket. I love that rumor so much. Yeah. Can you imagine a more hated ticket? I
	can't. I can't. I can't believe anybody's that dumb to do that. No but I can.
	You know- I can.
	After this whole episode, actually, yeah.
	The modern world keeps surprising me, so let's fuck it.
	Let's do it.
	But it's so funny, yeah.
	I mean, it really fits into this pattern of them seeing the other- like, somebody else, like, commit a crime, get away with it, and have it be actually advantageous for them.
	And so they're like, oh, well, we should be doing that.
	I mean, we don't want to do- we really don't want to do it, but like, oh, but- It's working so well for them.
	We need memes.
	We need fake news.
	That's how you combat real fake news with controlled fake news from us about good things.
	It's the classic he-had-a-gun approach to politics, you know?
	It's like, hey, Bernie Sanders people online are very rude to me, so it's okay to form a dark money group to defeat Bernie Sanders that is secretly backed by Mylan and the pharmaceutical companies, and then say that the reason why they're going to remain anonymous behind the, this is by the way called the Beat Bernie 2020 Super PAC of completely dark money, They're saying that they're keeping them anonymous to protect them from Bernie Sanders, people who are toxic and misogynistic.
	So Dark Money Pharmaceutical are now using identity politics to defend trying to defeat Medicare for All.
	So we're just living in a fantastic world.
	Yeah, and the majority of liberals are begging them to do it.
	Please, please, sir.
	Please, please.
	Take away my Bernie Sanders and my health care.
	Please.
	Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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	Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
	It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
	And now, today's Auto-Tune.
	Here's one of Erica's caplets in clip.
	I think we could all agree that Seth Rich has been a name that we haven't heard in a while.
	Yes.
	Why is that?
	There has been an ongoing litigation slash smear campaign against anybody who asks inconvenient questions about Seth Rich.
	Fox News got sued.
	Fox News has gone completely silent on Seth Rich.
	And I think the message has gotten out to most other media outlets.
	Don't talk about this or else.
	And I think that was their strategy all along, is to shut everybody up.
	And then I'm getting tips from people on the inside that absolutely there are records there.
	So I think they've known all along and they just try to cover it up.
	So how far up do we believe this line of corruption actually goes?
	If you look at the whole Russia collusion, Ukraine, whatever, that goes straight to Obama.
	Hillary is deeply involved.
	Obama himself is involved.

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