Episode 171: Inside The Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories
A whistle-blowing insider at Texas-based intel agency ASOG spills the beans on the players at the core of the election fraud conspiracy theories pushed in 2021. We spoke to former Vice President of Cyber operations for ASOG Joshua Merritt. We also chatted with Twitter user Get_Innocuous, aka Trapezoid of discovery. His research skills helped unmask one of the key players on Twitter and uncovered new information about the famous pro-coup powerpoint that made its way to the White House and Congress.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 171 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Election Fraud Conspiracy Theory Engine episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
During an upcoming Christmas family gathering, you may be forced to listen to a distant relative explain why the election was stolen from Trump by a conspiracy involving China, Venezuela, George Soros, and Dominion voting systems.
At that point, perhaps you'll want to find somebody to blame for your family's interest in the election fraud conspiracy theories that never seem to end.
You're in luck, because in today's episode, we're talking about a Texas-based intel agency called ASOG.
For the past three years, ASOG has worked to convince political candidates and the world at large that American elections are hopelessly compromised.
While they worked in the shadows for most of that, they finally hit the big time when their theories were embraced by people in Trump world and were used in Sidney Powell's Kraken lawsuits.
To guide us through the world of dedicated Election Truthers, Travis has interviewed the former Vice President of Cyber Operations for ASOG, Joshua Merritt, although you might know him by his codenames Spider or Jekyll.
We'll also be joined by Twitter user GetInnocuous, who goes by TrapezoidOfDiscovery as well.
He's been researching StopTheSteal efforts for about the past year, And his research skills have helped unmask one of the key players on Twitter and uncovered new information about the famous pro coup PowerPoint that made its way to the White House and Congress.
Before I get into the meat of our episode today, I want to acknowledge that a lot of the coverage about January 6 is starting to run into the Gorpman Bleemer problem, as I've seen some journalists call it.
So this is named after a classic article from the satire site Clickhole, which is headlined, Legal Bombshell.
Mueller flipped Trump's confidence lawyer's friend's associate, Gorfman, who could testify against Bleemer.
And it's not even lunchtime.
Great work.
Yeah, it's a very funny classic.
And, you know, that article highlighted an issue during the sort of the Mueller investigation and coverage that it seemed like, you know, there was this huge cast of characters that you had to follow in order to understand what the hell was going on.
And every new report about someone in this cast of characters was treated like some sort of bombshell.
Yeah, and we're only one year into this.
Imagine if it lasts as long as Russia Game.
I know.
Holy fuck, we've only met the beginners cast.
This is season one, baby.
Yes, these are the intro characters.
We'll probably forget about them by next year.
Like, for example, like in, like, 2017, I remember, uh, you know, Breathless reporting about Trump associate Sam Clovis.
Do you remember Sam Clovis?
Of course not.
Of course.
Why the fuck would I put any of these names in my fucking brain?
I'm going to keep Gorpman and Bleemer in my mind instead.
That's right.
I bet I deleted cherished childhood memories from my brain just so I could absorb information about who Sam Clovis was at the time.
So much wasted mental energy.
But unfortunately, the people responsible for this world that we live in are just an ensemble of damaged weirdos.
So I'll be talking about a strange cast of characters who helped convince the majority of Republicans that elections can't be trusted.
And that cast of characters includes a failed politician who wanted to LARP as a spy, a pro surfer who went full QAnon, a QAnon blogger and podcaster from North Dakota who fakes having advanced degrees, and a retired army colonel who was recruited by General Michael Flynn to push election fraud theories.
So let's just start off with the recent news that Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows handed over a bunch of documents to the January 6th committee.
One of these documents is an email he received on January 5th that included a PowerPoint presentation that basically provided guidance on how to keep Trump in office.
The PowerPoint contained talking points that were actually just fever swamp conspiracy theories.
These theories included that the Chinese systematically gained control over the election system and this constituted a national security emergency.
The document also claimed that all electronic voting machines were compromised and can't be trusted to provide an accurate count.
You know, after, you know, like a year of lawsuits and recounts and audits that did not uncover anything nefarious, I think we can safely say that these claims of like massive fraud that just so massive that swayed the election just aren't very substantial.
Now, the fact that this sort of nonsense was circulating in Congress and the White House is alarming, but even more alarming is the recommended course of action in the PowerPoint.
It suggested that Trump should handpick someone to mobilize the National Guard to do a recount of ballots in all 50 states.
These ballots, according to that PowerPoint, would be secured by U.S.
Marshals.
It suggests that support for this operation would be provided by the DOJ and the DHS.
The PowerPoint also suggests three ways Pence could essentially hand the election over to Trump on January 6.
This is the famous Pence card that was touted in the run-up to that day.
The first option in the slide deck is that Pence seats Republican electors over the objections of Democrats in states where fraud occurred.
So basically, there's alternative electors who are Republican, and if the Democrats say, no, you're actually subverting the election, we'll say, just too bad.
That's one option.
The second option is that Pence rejects electors from states where fraud occurred, causing the election to be decided by the remaining electoral votes.
So just say, canceled.
Your votes don't count.
Bye.
And then just count the rest.
And the third option presented is Pence delays the decision in order to allow for a vetting and subsequent counting of all the legal paper ballots.
So just say, just kick the can down the road until, I mean, could you imagine like if like on January 6, Pence declared he couldn't move forward with verifying the election.
The National Guardsmen roll out all over America in every district to acquire ballots that have been seized by U.S.
Marshals.
I would not feel good about that situation, but this is what they wanted to see happen.
The January 6th committee also recently revealed that, quote, Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6th and said that the National Guard would be present to, quote, protect pro-Trump people and many more would be available on standby.
Now, the exact context of this email wasn't provided, but I don't know, it sounds very ominous.
I love that they basically got all their agencies and they're like, just send us PowerPoints on how we could, you know, make this work the other direction.
And they're just like receiving these shitty unedited PowerPoints from like someone's fucking Pepe nephew.
It's incredible.
But the relevant question for me is how exactly did these fringe theories about election fraud make it all the way to the White House and Congress in the form of that PowerPoint and other avenues?
A big clue comes in one line in the PowerPoint, which states, on December 5th, the ASOG forensics team examined the electronic voting systems in Antrim and observed overlapping subversions which led to their exposure.
ASOG.
So ASOG in that line refers to the Allied Special Operations Group.
And their fixation on election fraud issues can be credited to ASOG official Russell Ramsland.
He's one of the characters.
This is the bleemer.
Allies.
I love it.
So the Axis is like, what, the Dems?
That sounds plausible.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, ASOG is a private security and intel company founded in June of 2017 by former DIA officer named Adam T. Kraft.
Now, before ASOG focused primarily on these election fraud stuff, the company was envisioned as a one-stop shop for government and corporate clients seeking cybersecurity, physical protection, and sophisticated open source intelligence services.
It's like the CIA and Secret Service for hire, you know?
Great.
I think we should have more companies like this.
So this is a clip from a 2018 promotional video for ASOG.
The government attempts to protect U.S.
borders and regional first responders may try to help in an emergency.
But how can you protect your family, your business and your money when they can't help in time of crisis at home or abroad?
Introducing ASOG.
Allied Special Operations Group.
ASOG is a group of highly trained professionals who have seen it all.
From massive logistical problem solving operations in combat zones, to incredible private search and rescue missions that many of us only see in the movies.
ASOG's team is comprised of military commandos, special intelligence operations agents, cyber intelligence geniuses, government engineers, and a team of lawyers.
ASOG was assembled at the request of former officials in the U.S.
government.
This plays like a PragerU educational video.
Just like kind of like weird off-center like animations.
Maybe they paid somebody on Fiverr to do it.
This does not seem like a sophisticated, you know, intelligence and military private operation.
No, it doesn't.
But, you know, this is like one of the early ads.
It does seem very, very cheap.
One of my favorite bits from that promotional video comes a few minutes later in it.
Full spectrum business consulting and solution engineering in non-permissive environments.
When someone says, I know a guy, he's talking about ASOG.
We are that guy or girl.
But mostly guys.
Incredible.
There's lots of things about that where you're pitching yourself like, when someone says, I know a guy, we're that guy.
It's like when you want to get rid of your wife.
They fucking resurrected the editor for Salad Fingers to do it.
Russell Ramsland joined ASOG early on, and before he worked with them, he was a businessman and failed political candidate.
He failed to make it past the Republican primaries for congressional race in 2016.
According to Joshua Merritt, Ramsland had a romanticized view of intelligence work, to the extent that he drove around in an Aston Martin James Bond style.
The world is but a LARP.
Yeah, everything's a fucking LARP.
I feel like the image of intelligence work as being cool and sexy is destroying the world, or has destroyed the world.
We need a PR campaign to make it seem more boring and frustrating, and not cool at all.
We need more burn-after-reading in the world.
Yeah, we need more like Inspector Clouseau.
We need Enemy of the State with Will Smith, where he easily outsmarts the intelligence agencies in the first 15 minutes of the film and it ends.
I've seen that movie.
Ramsland has always been a bit of a conspiracist.
For example, in a 2017 talk to the Park City's Preston Hollow Leadership Forum in Dallas, he claimed that the rise of Nazi Germany Can be credited to the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa, which I don't think is a position that any historian takes.
So the Muslim Brotherhood becomes really important in this whole little deal going on here.
So now we got the Muslim Brothers and we got UBC.
The anti-fascists came in, Antifa.
Name you recognize?
Antifa starts back here.
It was those who claimed to be anti-fascist.
They were very, very useful to the Nazis because the Nazis, in order to take over, needed to create mayhem and violence in the street.
And they had the brown shirts, but they had to have somebody to beat up on or to beat up on them.
And so they actually encouraged some of the socialists and the communists and stirred up issues there.
So that they could have really important street fights, and eventually Germany got so tired of all of this that they just wanted order.
And when people are overcome with just collapse of society like this, they often turn to strong leaders, and in this case it was Adolf Hitler.
So that's how the hard left got involved.
Oh yeah.
All those strongmen on the hard left.
In America, I mean, you have what?
Bernie Sanders?
What a hard ass man.
A lot of people think of him that way.
Just a hard lad.
So what I see here is apparently the Nazis, they were the Harlem Globetrotters, and they needed an enemy.
And in the form of Antifa, they were just the Washington generals.
They needed someone to fight for the audience.
And that's why Antifa is made Nazism.
Imagine thinking that Antifa came before the Nazis.
The Nazis rose as opposition to the anti-fascists.
Absolutely.
That's fent.
That's great.
That's a great retcon.
Like, holy shit.
ASOG and Ramsland really got activated in 2018 when Republicans suffered from midterm losses in Texas and elsewhere.
Now, this was a pretty unsurprising development.
Usually, usually the opposition party, they have an advantage during the midterms.
But Ramsland was convinced that these losses were due to fraud, and he worked to convince other Republicans of this as well.
Starting in late 2018, Ramsland and his associates summoned conservative lawmakers According to reporting from the Washington Post, briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air.
Guests were asked to leave their cell phone outside before assembling in a windowless room.
alarming presentations on how compromised election voting systems are.
According to reporting from the Washington Post, briefings in the hangar
had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cell phone 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 codename. And that white hat hacker
is actually Joshua Merritt, who we'll be hearing from in a moment.
But again, more, you know, spy larping.
Ramsland's pitch to failed Republican candidates was that voting machine audit logs contained indications of vote manipulation.
However, despite many pitches, he was unable to get a candidate to actually bring a legal challenge based on these claims.
During this period, Asawg also briefed Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, Inspiring.
Representative Louie Gohmert. Another individual associated with Aesop during this time is a retired colonel named Phil
Waldron who specialized in psychological operations during his
military career. According to a recent report from Reuters, Waldron said that Flynn drafted him to go public with the
election fraud claims saying this, "No one else can do it.
It needs to be done. So go ahead and do it." Inspiring, inspiring words from the general.
You boy, you're the last hope we have. By late 2019, Aesop's examinations had moved beyond audit logs. Among other
claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the U.S.
originated in Venezuela. He said that nefarious actors could manipulate votes on a massive scale.
Since Ramsland had a tough time getting candidates to act on those conspiracy theories, he decided to take his case public.
He did this by appearing on the online show Economic War Room, hosted by Kevin Freeman.
Ramsland actually admitted this in a panel by saying, quote, "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."
Again, solving problems by posting.
At some point during this period, Aesog linked up with Conan Hayes,
a pro surfer and founder of the surf brand Ruka or RVKA.
Oh yeah, that's a very popular surf brand.
It's huge.
It was sold.
It's huge!
Sold to Billabong for tens of millions of dollars.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Yeah, you find that shit in like Pacific Sunwear.
Do they still have Pacific Sunwear?
I don't know.
Maybe they do.
I don't know.
When's the last time you stepped foot in a mall?
A couple days ago.
Oh, okay then.
I love malls, but I haven't seen a packed sun in a while, so I'm not sure if they're still around.
Under the Twitter handle WeHaveRisen, Hayes promoted QAnon as early as 2018.
So here is Conan Hayes, a man who literally could use his wealth to spend the rest of his life doing anything he wanted, like surfing, for example.
And instead, he makes a Twitter account and he posts.
And he travels the country trying to attempt to prove the election was stolen.
You know, sometimes when I think that maybe there's more to life than posting, there's this guy who decides to spend his time posting.
And like, you know, Elon Musk, who could do anything besides post, but decides to post.
Seems like no matter how much you have, there's nothing better than posting for some.
Not me.
As soon as I become as rich as Elon Musk, I'm actually buying Twitter and destroying it.
Oh, as soon as you become the richest man on Earth?
I guess you'll never stop posting then.
I don't know.
Who knows?
Maybe I could write the next great American screenplay.
Maybe I could write the new generation's version of Avatar, okay?
You never know.
Just become so wealthy that I buy Twitter and launch it in a rocket into the sun.
Or maybe you could get terribly hurt in a merry-go-round accident.
We don't know.
One of the two.
Through ASOG's attempts to prove election fraud, they also met up with a blogger, podcaster, and streamer who goes by the name Terpsichore Morris Lindemann, who is better known online as Tori Says, or sometimes just Tori, or even just Tor.
According to reporting, she has a history of exaggerating her resume and expertise.
For example, her profile on Together We Serve, which is an online veteran community, it stated that she reached the rank of lieutenant, served in combat zones of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and served in the Office of Naval Intelligence and was awarded multiple medals, including a Purple Heart.
According to a Washington Post investigation, she did serve in the Navy, but for less than a year and I can't help people from thinking that I'm awesome.
She told the post that she didn't know who created the now deleted profile if that's what if you want to believe that
Of course, yeah, just a fan. I love to have fans of my military record, right?
Who who who created this profile on this on this website talks about how awesome I am
It wasn't to be who could who could pot. Why would you think that I can't help people for thinking that I'm
awesome It says I killed a bear at the age of three
In a recent civil fraud case attorneys for the state of North Dakota said that Tory falsely claimed to be a medical
doctor And they have both a PhD and an MBA
They said that she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online resumes as part of what they called a persistent effort to deceive others.
Tori has also appealed to the QAnon community on her Twitch streams.
Sometimes the O in her Tori Says username is replaced with a Q and she uses the slogan, where we go one, we go all.
Now, this is quite a motley crew, but somehow they got powerful people to pay attention to their election fraud claims.
As a 2020 election approach, Ramsland privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security.
After Trump's election loss, ASOG associates became crucial to pushing narratives about election fraud.
When Sidney Powell filed her doomed Kraken lawsuits in an attempt to overturn the election, she relied on affidavits from Russell Ramsland, Tory, and of course, our guest today, Joshua Merritt.
In Merritt's affidavit, he was supposed to be anonymous, but due to some redaction errors, his name came out and was published in the Washington Post, which I sympathize with.
I know what that's like.
Russell Ramsland made some ludicrous errors in his affidavit by mistaking the locations in Minnesota for Michigan jurisdictions and falsely claiming that voter turnout in Detroit was 139.29%.
So he made, he just totally made mistakes.
And, but you think that like after years of working on this, he would like, you know, know how to calculate voter totals, some really basic, basic Basic ways to figure out what's going on in the voter rolls, but never quite acquired that skill.
Colonel Phil Waldron is responsible for the post-election conspiracy theory that the Army seized German election servers from a company called Seidel.
Now, the truth is that Seidel wasn't raided.
They don't even have offices in Germany.
Doesn't make sense.
According to reporting from Reuters, this story was sparked on November 8th, 2020, When Phil Waldron spoke on the phone with Representative Louie Gohmert.
Waldron said that he told Gohmert that he had tracked internet traffic that was routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany.
He claimed baselessly that these votes could be rerouted.
Waldron also says that Gohmert immediately called Trump with this information.
Gohmert and a lot of other pro-Trump people pushed this nonsense on Twitter, and actually four days after Gohmert had that phone call with Waldron, Gohmert was on Newsmax telling the host that the Army had seized the CIDL server.
This is just so wild.
It just sounds like a bunch of people who don't know how to interpret data, who are LARPing as security analysts, you know, misinterpret something, believe that they're the ones who are going to save the world, and rush and tell everybody.
And meanwhile, you have these GOP, like, you know, idiots who everybody in the world is telling them that they lost, and so they're looking for the one fucking Twitter account that's like, no you didn't actually, there was a secret raid.
Or like, ah, you didn't, there's like fraud here, and it's like, oh!
Oh, that's the truth, the thing that I already believe.
But Seidel, that's a place where all of this information was cycling through.
Not supposed to, but it was.
And actually, there was a German, as I was told, there was a tweet in German from Germany that the U.S.
Army had gone in and seized the Seidel server.
They're going through bankruptcy right now.
I read a tweet.
It was in a different language, but when it was translated to me, it said that, yeah, our forces were there.
Now, I work in government, but I don't know anything about that, where our forces might be, where a server farm might be.
It might be in Germany.
It might not be.
But this was not the end of the German server saga.
According to the book Betrayal, the final act of the Trump Show by John Carl, this conspiracy theory eventually made its way to Sidney Powell, who called Trump intelligence official Ezra Cohed Watnick to request a special operations team to go to Germany and fix the situation.
Sidney Powell apparently she had a big twist on him.
Here's from that book.
Ezra Cohen Watnick received a call from Sidney Powell, Flynn's former lawyer, who is now
advising President Trump and, like Flynn, promoting some of the craziest theories about
the election.
Powell called Cohen with a bizarre request.
Her request was specific, urgent, and highly sensitive.
It was also completely insane.
"CIA Director Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany," she told
Cohen.
"You need to launch a special operations mission to get her."
Cohen had never spoken to Powell and was shocked that she had called him at his direct phone
line in his office.
It's a phone that only rang with calls from within the Pentagon or from the White House,
an unpublished number that somebody with access to the internal directory had to have given
Powell went on to explain that Haspel had been hurt while on a secret CIA operation to seize a computer server from a company named Seidel.
The server, Powell claimed, contained evidence that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of votes, had been switched using rigged voting machines.
Powell believed Haspel had embarked on this secret mission to get the server and destroy the evidence.
In other words, the CIA director was a part of the conspiracy.
That's why Sidney Powell wanted Cohen to send his special operations team over to Germany immediately.
They needed to get the server and force Haspel to confess.
That's a Netflix series right there.
Yes, that is exciting stuff.
But what I love most about this story is like how it gets increasingly dramatic as it's retold.
So according to Phil Waldron, he just told Louie Gohmert that he found some internet traffic that's going through a server in Germany and then votes could be rerouted, whatever the hell that means.
So, this story in the hands of Gohmert somehow adds the seizing of a CIDL server in Frankfurt.
And by the time it's rattling around in the brain of Sidney Powell, the CIA director has double-crossed Trump and was wounded in a secret mission to recover the server.
Right, because everybody knows that when there's like a mission to go on, the CIA director, they get up out of their chair, they put on their flak jacket, it's like the scene in Commando where they're buckling all the straps and cocking the gun, all of that stuff, and you know, they put on full fatigues, face paint, and go in for themselves.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the story is, you know, totally true.
It really shows that, like, Sidney Powell is both a, I guess, a grifter and a mark, because she sounds like her brain is just porous.
And she also, like, she's a fan of drama.
She just buys into whatever the most insane bullshit that she hears and then takes it and then starts demanding special operations because she believes it so much.
Yeah, it's like they've already made the decision that this election was fraudulent or whatever, or that Biden somehow cheated.
And then basically any piece of information, whether it's through a game of telephone, whether they read it on Twitter, whether they read it on message boards, whether somebody casually goes, oh yeah, I haven't heard from Gina in a couple days.
Yeah, I called her, but she didn't write me back or whatever.
Then they're like, I wonder, I wonder.
It just sounds like they are willing to latch on to any potential piece of information that confirms the story that they've already made up in their head.
Waldron also takes credit for getting Rudy Giuliani on board with election fraud conspiracy theories.
Of course, Waldron is the one who circulated that coup PowerPoint.
He says that prior to January 6, he spoke with Mark Meadows, quote, maybe 8 to 10 times and briefed several members of Congress.
Waldron said he once briefed Senator Lindsey Graham at the White House in the chief of staff's office with Rudy Giuliani present.
And it's quite possible that that PowerPoint was put together by Tory.
Evidence of this can be found in a version of the PowerPoint that was uncovered by our guest today, Get Innocuous.
He found a version that included a logo that said Kraken Intel and included an image of two silver bars, which is the insignia for the rank of lieutenant in the Navy.
So Tori often referred to herself as the Kraken and claimed to be a lieutenant in the Navy.
So it's not 100% confirmed.
But it's possible that a QAnon-promoting podcaster was heavily involved in making that PowerPoint.
Does that claim include basically her kind of introducing the word Kraken to this entire thing?
Well, no, no, not introducing, but obviously Kraken was also the name that Sidney Powell gave to her lawsuits.
Yeah.
Okay.
So she was just kind of playing on what Sidney Powell was asking for.
Yeah.
Just sort of playing on.
Yeah.
She apparently on her podcast, Tori refers to herself as the Kraken a lot.
So that, that means that like, she didn't have a Kraken when she named that.
She's just like, Oh, I just said, I have a Kraken.
We're going to release the Kraken.
Better find a Kraken.
Even after Trump left office, people associated with ASOC worked hard to cast doubt on the election.
We saw this during the supposed sort of forensic audit in Antrim County, Michigan.
So this was sparked when there was a controversy stirred up during the election when a county clerk who was Republican briefly announced an incorrect preliminary vote count.
Before issuing a correction that show that Trump actually won the county.
Trump supporters seized on the error as evidence of widespread inaccuracies in the state's elections.
Following a lawsuit by a local man, the state allowed a team of expert witnesses to examine voting information in Antrim County's Central Lake Township.
These expert witnesses included Russell Ramsland, As the Daily Beast reported, Cohen and Hayes was also on the ground for Antrim County.
Under the account WeHaveRisen, he tweeted pictures of what he implied were raw vote tallies and photos of a dissected Dominion voting machine.
We also saw ASOG's influence during the Mike Lindell Cyber Symposium.
So if you remember, this is an event last August when Lindell summoned several cyber experts to a three-day streamed event that was supposed to show evidence of foreign vote manipulation.
Like we discussed in episode 155, the symposium did not provide evidence of election fraud, and even Lindell's own cyber experts said that his data was worthless.
It turned out that Lindell got a lot of bad data from a mysterious con artist named Dennis Montgomery.
But Aesog and his associates provided critical support to the symposium.
Phil Waldron was the leader of the symposium's so-called Red Team, and he also provided a pre-recorded video for the symposium, which delivers an apocalyptic message about the consequences of compromised elections.
After the 2018 midterm elections, an investigation was launched to delve into irregularities in the U.S.
election results.
Detailed logs documented entries into the tabulation system for the election itself, and the team saw many anomalies in areas of extreme concern.
Then in November 2020, multiple groups of concerned Americans came together because they all observed something incredible in the 2020 general elections.
The group's united to launch a full-scale investigation led by former members of the U.S.
intelligence community, the Department of Defense, NASA, the U.S.
National Laboratories, private investigations and cybersecurity companies, and legal firms from around the country.
The discoveries gained through intense forensic research left everyone involved deeply concerned about the future of our nation and our world.
While the U.S.
media will undoubtedly discredit this information as far-right conspiracy theory, the fact is, the people involved in this investigation represent all colors, all creeds, and all political parties.
To ignore this message is to surrender to a government takeover that will gravely affect the lives of every man, woman, and child of every nation.
Really just weird, weird shit.
It is weird shit.
I gotta say, his, um, you know, the dramatic lighting is sort of lessened by the blue Yeti microphone in the corner.
Just, just the, just the little silver bullet right there.
Yeah.
That's right next to Phil Waldron.
Very strange.
I can't tell these people are just kind of dumb and, and just believe, like believe this stuff.
Cause they're already like, you know, 75% or a hundred percent pilled anyways.
and it just kind of, you know, aligns with their natural worldview. Or if they
know what they're doing is made up, is wrong, and they're like, "Well, it doesn't
matter anyways. Like, if we can convince people this, then there will be
public support for it, and then we could, you know, we have a chance at
overturning the election or whatever." You know, I mean, my theory is that a lot of
these people, they believe what is empowering is what's true.
So they don't have this kind of epistemology where they have to find a particular truth claim that corresponds perfectly to reality.
They find the truth claim that is most empowering for them.
In this case, the only reason that they're out of power is because the election is stolen.
And they believe that's true, because if that was true, that would give them leverage, that would give them power, that would allow them to do things.
Right.
And there's still the good guys fighting the bad, you know, fighting the bad guys.
Our guest Joshua Merritt also participated in that symposium.
He told me in our interview that he worked to prevent the cyber experts from storming out of the event on day one because it was so transparently obvious even then that there was not anything worthwhile in that data.
Your job, alright, your job is to keep the people who actually know what they're doing here long enough to get pilled, if possible, and at least long enough to eat the lunch.
We've ordered so much, so many sandwiches.
I mean, yeah, he also went to the media and also told them the truth, which was that the data was worthless, which of course caused Mike Lindell to get very, very mad at Merritt, so he says, which, you know, surprising, surprising.
Seems like a chill guy, Mike Lindell.
But basically the fuel for like a lot of maybe the majority of these baseless conspiracy theories about just massive election fraud over the past year can be attributed to Russell Ramsland and a group of people affiliated with this organization ASOG.
To try to get an inside look regarding what went on with ASOG, I spoke with Joshua Merritt yesterday.
He was the vice president of cyber operations for that company.
I asked him about his involvement with the Powell lawsuits, the Cyber Symposium, and the now famous PowerPoint presentation.
One quick caveat before we go in.
I can't verify everything that he claims.
The biggest claim that Merritt makes is that Michael Flynn was subject to a FISA warrant that hasn't been reported anywhere and it would be big news if it were true.
It was reported that Trump campaign staffer Carter Page was surveilled with a FISA warrant.
I followed up with Merritt on that and I believe he is referring to the fact that Michael Flynn was unmasked in intelligence documents which transcribed Flynn's conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak.
Merritt also claims that Mark Meadows used campaign funds to purchase the encrypted messaging app Silent Circle through ASOG.
This has not been reported anywhere.
In her interview, Mayer also claims that starting in 2017, Vice President Pence and then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan were working on a plan to get rid of President Donald Trump.
I can't independently verify that claim either.
But despite those caveats, I think Joshua Mayer's perspective is very valuable because he was there for basically all of the events we talked about in this episode, and I'm grateful that he took the time out of his day to speak with us.
We're joined now by Joshua Merritt.
He's an Army veteran, IT consultant, and founder of the cybersecurity firm CyberOptics.
Mr. Merritt, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.
Thank you for letting me come on your show and I guess sort of spill the beans about all this craziness.
So how did you wind up connecting with ASOG?
When I was doing internship at Cyber Defense Labs at UTD, There's a gentleman there named Kevin Henson.
He passed away in November 2019.
Genius of a man.
He was a computer scientist.
He had worked at CERN.
He was a physicist.
We did a lot of work on inventions together.
Optical processors.
I worked on creating a new version of binary.
We've done a lot of work together.
And, uh, I had just gotten done with college for my network system administration degree.
And, uh, he knew Adam Kraft and Adam Kraft was the CEO of ASOL.
He had served, uh, in the army, made it up to major, got medically retired, and then worked at DIA with Michael Flynn.
Uh, so they started.
Uh, a SOG brought in, uh, Russ Ramsland and lock Neely.
And first the idea was to create a private intelligence company for civilian, uh, families in Texas who have a lot of money.
Uh, whether it's business intelligence, whether it's, um, red teaming, there was a lot of different type of.
Uh, work that we had done, but then at, uh, the midterms we had gotten dragged into Election fraud and voting fraud and started working in midterms on it.
And then Russ actually took over ASOG and I stayed on until November of 2019 as the Vice President of Cyber Operations.
So I worked there two years since they started just running all of the cyber operations at the company.
So was it like Russ's influence that really made it more focused on election fraud issues over like private security and intel issues?
Yes, and there was a lot of contention between Russ and Adam over that because Adam did not want to get into that realm.
And Russ did, and that's been always sort of my question was, was he doing it to legitimately go after this or was it because of his own political, because he had run for political office before and got primaried out because he was running against Pete Sessions here in Texas.
So that's always been something sort of in the back of my mind within that situation.
Russ had most of his experience in oil and gas.
That's how he had made his money prior to a SOG.
And I think at times Russ had this sort of romanticization of Intel type work.
You know, he, he actually owned legitimately owned an Aston Martin and had kept a Walther PPK in the club box.
So real 007 stuff.
Yeah.
Right.
And so I think that was, you know, one of those things that he sort of liked and why he wanted to get into things.
And, uh, you know, the actual background stuff we worked on was some pretty crazy high speed stuff, uh, for, and this'll be sort of a precursor to a lot of the election fraud, but there was one job that we had at ASOG that I actually pulled Made the company turn it down.
We had these two private investigators who brought in a packet and it had 25 Chinese nationals, military, business people, bankers, and they wanted not just a dossier on them.
But the client, their client, it actually requested Black Hat Ops to go into their emails to find out their travel patterns, where they were getting money from.
So first, that's a sort of red flag to me because if someone's asking you like outright for you to do illegal stuff, either they're really bad people or they're plants.
Trying to come in and set you up.
And I started looking through the people and I was finding a lot of these people had addresses in the United States with like 10, 15 people.
And that's sort of known within the Intel world as like a safe house.
You know, if you've got all these people in a house, that's sort of a waypoint to hide your assets.
So the hairs in the back of my neck stood up.
I thought, and there's a term we use for it, it's called a knock list.
A list of spies or double agents that an intel agency wants taken out.
So I turned down the job because I said it looked like a knock list.
And people within ASOG had actually taken it to the FBI and showed them, hey, this is, you know, this packet has a red stamp on it that says records protect, which is something that comes from the State Department.
So somebody in the State Department was leaking this info.
As part of this turn to focusing more on these election fraud issues, you took part in meetings in a hangar in Addison that was reported in the Washington Post, which some people were interested in what you and the company had to say about supposed vulnerabilities in the election system.
Could you describe what took place during these meetings?
So when after the midterms, we had Dr. Laura Presley and a couple other individuals who came to us at ASOG and asked to help on the cyber research side.
And really what it was was sort of just understanding what information we were seeing from like server logs because they had gotten a copy of the server log.
Now in Texas, we don't use Dominion.
Texas has refused to certify Dominion's equipment in here in the state.
So we use a company called ES&S which is headquartered in Nebraska.
So we started the investigation looking at the server logs, looking into the companies, looking at their diver and infrastructure.
Back then I was able to do scans on their websites and sort of see not just their They're front end but also see the back end that was tied to those websites.
And we helped on a couple of court cases having to do with ES and S hearing.
In Texas and specifically over in Dallas.
And then we also went and ended up doing work for Matt Bevins in Kentucky when he lost being the governor there.
And now whenever I was working at that, that was whenever I met Tor, who is sort of a central figure now.
When we were at ASOG, we would give, because Russ was doing fundraising for our research on election fraud.
So that's really the purpose for why we were doing those briefings.
So we had business figures who came in, politicians.
That was where I first met Sidney Powell, Alan West.
I got to meet Herman Cain before he passed away.
We had, I think, the main briefing that we gave, there were about 25 key figures that were at the conference room that was talked about on the Washington Post.
So during this time, you were working anonymously.
But through ASOG, you were introduced to Sidney Powell.
And because your affidavit was included in the Sidney Powell lawsuit in the aftermath of the 2020 election, you were outed.
So how did that go down?
Well, so the backstory to that, I had done a number of videos on Kevin Freeman's economic war after the midterms.
I did not put my face on camera.
Everything was filmed over my shoulder, and you can see pretty much it's all the same stuff that I talk about in my affidavits.
And there are various reasons why I did not want to be public.
I actually have a price on my head because of going after bad guys.
I've stopped terrorist attacks in other countries.
I've been involved in investigations in other countries.
So I wanted to stay anonymous for safety of my family.
And an individual who was tied to Kevin Freeman actually saved my documentation under my name and had uploaded it to Sidney Powell's website.
It was literally up for three minutes before I called him and yelled and said, hey, take that down.
It's under my name and I myself and some of the guys I work with because I have guys overseas that helped me on some of the work that I do.
They were all calling me saying, hey, you just got outed by Sidney Powell for that document that got sent up on the page.
And like I could watch Twitter and I could watch all of these Internet researchers just like Formed this huge balloon around me and everyone pull all this, you know, my company, because I'm listed on a Dun and Bradstreet.
I have my cage codes, all my other information.
And they just like surrounded me in less than a day.
And it was sort of laughed about it.
I'm like, well, now that I'm out in front now, I had to switch my role.
Um, but really the purpose behind it was to protect my family.
And sadly enough, In the whole string of events since November up to today, nobody on the left has threatened myself, my wife, or my children.
No one on the left has been disrespectful, but the death threats and the disrespect have all come from people on the right.
So all of the stuff that went through court, I think a lot of it was there were a lot of people who were misrepresenting information.
There were people who Didn't understand the information, and I shouldn't expect a lawyer to know how to explain cyber problems, cyber issues.
That's not their forte.
However, when they were getting so many affidavits and coming in so many different directions, I don't think they vetted everything properly.
And even to a certain degree, I became a victim of that because when I passed my information up, someone else created my legal document.
Because up until that point, I had never done legal documents.
I just gathered data and passed it on, and someone else would make those reports.
So my intro ended up just being a verbal diction that I had given to somebody, and it did not come out how I specified.
So there were problems like that.
There was no And in the Q world, everyone always goes on about, uh, trust the plan.
I hate to tell people there is no plan.
There was no control, uh, early on in the beginnings of November, 2020, December, 2020, it was literal chaos.
There was no command though.
There was no central organization you had.
Maybe 20 or 30 key people who were running around trying to find things.
And so I was having Russ call me, I was having proxies call me between Sidney and myself, because at the time I wouldn't talk to Sidney directly.
Sidney had been working on Michael Flynn's case, and Michael Flynn had been subject to a FISA warrant.
So I didn't know if Sidney was still under that type of an issue, and I didn't want to get One degree separation sucked into a FISA warrant, so I had other people talk to her so I wouldn't get drug into that.
When I did my affidavit, I talked about a unit in TRADOC, and that's where I put 305th MI.
And I put that unit on there because I didn't want my active duty unit to get sucked into the insanity.
Because my active duty unit that I deployed twice with, they're on a deployment rotation like every six months to somewhere in the world.
They don't have time to deal with insanity.
And so that was another reason why I just specified I had been assigned to 305th MI.
Because I didn't want my active duty unit to deal with crap.
So that's why your affidavit states that you were an analyst with the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, which led to Sidney Powell erroneously referring to you as a former military intelligence expert in legal filings.
That caused some controversy when your identity was exposed.
Right.
Which, when I laid that out to the guy I talked to, he asked me, well, what units did you serve in?
And I said, well, I'm not going to specify my active duty unit.
So I told him my TRADOC unit.
And he said, well, what's the, what was the job I went for?
It was 98 Juliet, which was electronic intelligence analyst.
It was looking at binary signals from a radar to be able to tell if it's a SAM-2 or a SAM-5.
And that's what the job was.
But I went to the school.
And while I was there, the MOS went away.
So to me, it was a benign statement that I didn't think would give away who I was, but wouldn't cause such a stir.
Granted, I didn't know that like a year or two after I left Fort Huachuca, Michael Flynn ended up being in charge of its parent unit.
I had no idea on that because everyone was trying to say, oh, well, he's a Flynn junkie.
No, I've never met Flynn.
I've never talked to Flynn.
A couple of times I've asked his brother Joe to talk to him, but Like Joe being his gatekeeper.
I've been kept away from flame, so it is what it is.
Could you talk about Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium, which took place last summer in South Dakota?
This was a three-day event in which Lindell claimed he had PCAPs, or packet captures, that included evidence of foreign election interference.
Lindell summoned several cyber experts to examine this evidence, including yourself, but the data he provided simply did not show what Lindell claimed it showed.
What was your role in that?
August 4th was when I got pulled in to be a red team member for Lundell to evaluate the information before it was presented to the symposium.
So I was given an NDA that I wasn't supposed to talk about any of this, and Colonel Waldron specified that I was supposed to be paid for my talk.
So we start looking at all of the information and I want to make sure that I say, yes, I was supposed to be paid for that because I want people to at least know that was my purpose in going.
And the reason why I needed it was because my grandmother who passed away, my mom was in charge of her property.
So I was going to the symposium to raise the money to pay for my grandma's taxes on her property so we could keep that.
So that was my motivation and my thought process.
Even though my wife, my wife was vehement against me going.
She said, no, this is a setup.
You're going to get screwed over.
Uh, which she's batting a thousand when it comes to that kind of stuff.
Um, so I, we look over the information days leading up to it.
We were using element, uh, a chat app on Android to communicate with all of the red team members.
So it was myself.
Doug Logan was a member for the first two days.
Conan was in the group.
Conan James Hayes was in the group.
Code Monkey, Mark Cook, Sean Smith.
Who's a retired Air Force Colonel from Pararescue and then Lisa Draza and a couple of other people.
We're all in this room in this element chat board.
Conan's dropping files and information because Mark Cook had set up a cloud drive and that's where we were looking over the information.
And days leading up to the symposium, we found that the information did not hold up to what Lindell claimed.
And we had I told Colonel Waldron that, who was supposed to be the head of all of our red team.
And then when we all went on the plane, because they got on the plane on August 9th to go to South Dakota, the days leading up to the symposium on the 10th and the morning of the 11th, we kept telling Lindell, hey, this information is not what is claimed.
He wouldn't have it.
Even his own attorney told him, look, there's some problems here.
Because he admitted to us that he had never seen that information.
The only people who kept telling him that the information was legitimate was Conan, was Flynn, was Mary Fanning.
And all of this had originated from Dennis Montgomery.
And they were purposely Trying to hide that.
After it had flopped before, after the problems that had come up with the spreadsheet that Mary Fanning had posted, where everyone started looking and saying, hey, why are all the MAC addresses scrambled that don't tie to any machines?
All of the precursor information was showing not to be legitimate.
So he just decided to hide that type of information from the public, but still talk about PCAPs.
So when we were looking at the information, there was no legitimate PCAPs.
There was nothing that, you know, I could handle to hand to someone like Robert Graham or some of the other awesome cyber guys that were in there, and they could look at it and go, okay, this shows a sign for concern.
And that's why I couldn't, you know, you can't stop fraud by then being involved in more fraud, because all that's going to do is destroy what you're doing.
And for me as a cyber guy, I like working in this realm.
I've worked You know, the first time I got busted for doing anything on a computer, I was seven, and I hacked into a government computer.
Now, granted, that's 1984.
It was a lot easier back then.
But I couldn't, especially because one day I'm working on trying to get my CISSP.
You can't have an integrity violation and hold those type of credentials.
So, Waldron, about an hour into the beginning of the symposium, it was falling apart.
All of the cyber experts that were in the room were ready to walk.
And Waldron sent me into that room to placate them and keep them from leaving.
And so in the Washington Times article from my comments, I made a comment of I was trying to polish a turd into a diamond.
And that's why I said that, because we were handed something that we knew was BS.
And now all of a sudden we're receiving new information.
Conan had been giving a hard drive to Lindell that had other factual PCAPs, which I'll get into where that ties in, but we had those PCAPs and other data that was coming in, and then we were getting the digital ISO images of the Dominion systems from Conan because Tina Peters had come in the night before.
And so I, you know, split second decision said, okay, the only way we're going to save this, they're all telling me all this is legitimate.
They deleted info.
The trusted build was clearing out all of the forensic data.
So I said, okay, let's prove it.
Because if we could prove it, then that would be an important piece.
So I take it back to the cyber expert room and I handed it specifically, the first guy I handed it to was Harry Hurst.
And I said, Hey, look over these in case images, because supposedly they show that data was deleted.
So he started looking over it.
And that's what I lifted and shifted everything towards to be able to, you know, we're, we've got two rooms full of cyber experts with like $200,000 an hour of cyber capability.
And I didn't want that to be lost.
And all of the guys who were there, whether it was Robert Graham, Harry Hurstie, O'Donnell, a lot of the other guys that were there.
Yeah, I had cyber experts from the left, cyber experts from the right, all spectrums that were there just to honestly look at information.
And so I felt an obligation to do the right thing and at least giving them something to work on instead of them getting mad.
Because if they had been mad and walked out on the first day, Regardless of the situation, it would have left an egg on the face of all of the, there are a lot of people in the background, a lot of honest citizens out there that say, hey, we want our election system to be working correctly.
And that's what I also felt a responsibility towards because I didn't want the symposium to ruin all the hard work that a bunch of citizens have been involved in.
I want to circle back a little bit to talk about Dennis Montgomery, because this is a very strange, mysterious figure who has been selling essentially, I mean, sometimes scams straight to the federal government.
So I'm curious how you found out that he was the one who provided this data, which you say was just simply no good, to Lindell.
So the guy who brought the information to Lindell was Brandon House, H-O-W-S-E.
Very early on in December, Brandon brought the information having to do with Scorecard to Lindell.
They start presenting this information that Mary Fanning had created in an Excel spreadsheet called 6.5M, which supposedly shows all of the alterations within the election night reporting data stream.
And Lindell, that was around the time Lindell was starting Frank Speech.
Uh, he actually put Brandon House on as his main, uh, anchor on that show.
Um, they started pushing that information.
Conan was dealing with Montgomery and Florida, which I found out at the symposium, uh, Montgomery ended up getting a million and a half dollar house in Naples, Florida.
That's under a family trust.
Uh, from the money he had collected from Lindell.
So it was very marketable and profitable for, uh, Montgomery to be pushing all of this and the other people under him.
Um, when we got the initial files, I saw there was a six, that 6.5 M Excel spreadsheet was included in everything.
Uh, in the background while we're talking, we all knew already that it was Dennis Montgomery's information.
And I had talked to a couple of the guys in the red team and said, y'all know Dennis Montgomery defraud, right?
Like, I've read all the stuff from Abram Rosten, from Kurt Weeb, from all the guys who have cataloged Dennis Montgomery.
And I had raised concerns about it before the symposium took place because we didn't know how bad the fraud really was.
Now, since the symposium, I've actually found the software that was used to fabricate it.
So not only was it not true, it was fraud and fabricated data.
And that was the biggest thing I was worried about was that someone was fabricating information to push a narrative that if it ever did make it to the Supreme Court would end up getting slapped down and get slapped down so bad that anybody around it We're going to end up being taken out as a casualty because I think the ultimate goal of it was to make Donald Trump actually look bad and keep him from being able to run again.
I heard that because you decided to be honest about the worthlessness of Lindell's data at the Cyber Symposium.
Mike Lindell is suing you through arbitration.
Is that correct?
Yeah, he is.
He claims that I violated his non-disclosure agreement.
Which in Texas, a non-disclosure agreement is required to also have an employee contract or a temp worker contract, and it did not.
Waldron enticed me to going by claiming they were going to pay me $30,000 for a week's worth of work, of which did not happen.
So the day after Lindell went on Frank's speech and spent two hours bashing me, he called me a traitor.
He said that if China Defeated America, it would be my fault.
He slandered my wife because of a conversation we had with Pete Santilli.
I talked to Pete because he was a friend of mine.
The Friday after I get back to the symposium, I'm on the phone with him and I talked about some of the stuff that was going on because I didn't tell him anything while I was at the symposium and Pete was there.
So what Pete does is he takes and records my phone conversation And then gives it to Lindell and in it, cause that was pissed Friday morning.
I'm supposed to be coming home.
Waldron tells me, okay, my Ron time was four 30.
So I had to get up at three 30 in the morning.
We were going to fly on Lindell's plane back to Addison, Texas at the ASOG office.
And then at three 30, Um, Waldron says, Oh, you've been bumped off of the flight because we're flying Tina Peters to Dallas.
And so I had to catch a commercial plane.
So I was sort of grumpy on Friday because I got bumped at the last minute so they could move what now came out to be a fugitive, uh, to hide her in Texas.
Uh, so, and then Lindell got mad because I disclosed a lot of this.
Uh, disclosed the dishonesty that was going on backstage.
He knowingly frauded the cyber experts that were there by saying there was a $5 million reward to prove that his information was wrong.
But he knew that no one would be able to win it because while we're in the red team room, He checked with his lawyer to make sure that it was worded so that nobody could win.
So yeah, he decided to now go after me in arbitration and I'm putting out to their lawyers that the arbitration is not valid because the NDA is not valid.
You can't have an NDA to uphold fraud.
I also have to ask about the famous PowerPoint presentation that was recently in the news in a big, big way.
That PowerPoint mentions ASOG and was reportedly distributed to members of Congress in the White House by Phil Waldron.
Trapezoid of Discovery found a version of that PowerPoint that had a hidden logo for something called Kraken Intel and there was also a hidden image of two silver bars.
So do you have any theories or clues about how this PowerPoint came together?
Well, Tori already came out and said she was the Kraken.
She admitted Kraken Intel and the captain's bars that are on there are also lieutenant's bars in the Navy, and she claimed to be a lieutenant in the Navy.
So, within 90% certainty, I would say it's Tori and her circles.
Which TOR is working directly for Patrick Byrne.
Patrick Byrne, initially in the midterms, he was funding us at ASOG for voter fraud investigation.
So Byrne had involvement very early on, and then he's the one, and TOR was involved in the midterms as well.
When we were in Kentucky on the Matt Bevin case, I was dealing with TOR back then.
And so I know that She's the one who has involvement in at least a couple of the panels.
A couple of the panels are mine, although they misrepresented the information where they're talking about files that were found on, uh, they call it dark web on Tor.
And so what was happening was Russ in the background is getting information from me.
He didn't understand the information.
He's passing it up because Waldron has been working for Russ the whole time.
Because a former employee of ASOG brought Waldron into the mix on this.
A gentleman by the name of Jason Alpers, who served with Waldron in Afghanistan.
Alpers was Psychological Operations.
Waldron had involvement with Psychological Operations.
And that's how Waldron got brought to Russ, was through Jason Alpers.
So, all of this information's getting sent up.
Hardly anybody understood my information.
Because it was me, And I had a team of three guys that were helping me from all over the globe who were helping me pull information since the midterm.
So I'm passing this information up and they all created that PowerPoint from everybody's different pieces of information that was coming in.
And it's funny because I heard that Meadows was in that briefing, and it was Meadows who turned that over to the January 6th Commission, and it was the 6th Commission who leaked that out.
Prior to January, or prior even to December, Meadows never wanted to hear a briefing.
We were in DC after the midterms, and I met with Meadows.
I didn't find this out until the other day, but he had bought some software from ASOG, a secure communications app called Silent Circle, but he paid for it with campaign money.
I just found that out too.
And then he bought a device that I use called a D-Auth card.
It's an ESP8266 card that you can put scripts on it And it kicks anybody off of Wi-Fi that's not on 8211 in.
It deauthenticates people.
And he wanted it.
So, you know, ASOG bought it.
And Russ, I believe, is the one who got the money from Meadows on that.
So Meadows didn't want to hear any of the election fraud investigations at midterms or after.
Neither did Ted Cruz, because Russ and another employee, James Keith Lewis, were trying to push to get to brief Ted Cruz, and he wouldn't hear it.
So what do you think changed and made Meadows more open to the kind of election fraud claims that Phil Waldron was pitching in that PowerPoint presentation?
So like I said, my point whenever I put out my affidavits was to enact Executive Order 13848, which was something that Trump had put in after the midterms, which had to do with foreign interference into the elections.
And I believe after my information had been put in, It was presented as such to enact that executive order, and that's why Navarro and Pompeo would later put out their reports, because that was a requirement.
So I believe since Meadows was Trump's chief of staff, he sort of had to get a feel of what info was known.
You know, at the time, they're attempting to get Pence to bring in the alternative electors.
So I believe They're trying to show Meadows so he had an understanding to be able to get Pence to be able to do that lift and shift.
But I don't think Pence was ever willing to do that to begin with.
As much as everyone thought it, Pence was not as pro-Trump as everyone thought he was.
Going back to 2017, him and Paul Ryan were actively working on a plan to get rid of Donald Trump.
Because I know one of the guys who was in the room when they had that meeting.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Joshua.
Yes, sir.
Thank you for having me on.
Okay, that was fascinating stuff.
I obviously can't verify how much of it is true, but it's certainly fascinating stuff.
To get another perspective on the Stop the Steal efforts over the past year, I'm speaking to Trapezoid of Discovery, who's also known as get underscore innocuous on Twitter.
Trapezoid, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, thanks guys for having me.
Yeah, really, really fascinating research that you've been doing and publishing on Twitter.
So we've talked a bit about ASOG in this episode, we interviewed Joshua Merritt.
So how did ASOG first get on your radar and your research?
Yeah, so I first...
Really took note of ASOG through Russ Ramsland's affidavits, which had made the news specifically after he mixed up, I think it was Minnesota and Michigan, he had mixed up the state abbreviations and drew some insane conclusion from some math he did based off that, which he probably didn't do that math to begin with.
And that kind of made Made the news in an egg on your face type way.
So I took note of it there.
Didn't really pay a ton of attention until I noticed that there was a team in Antrim, Michigan from a company called ASOG that seemed to be positioned to do some forensic work.
And that's when it really registered that, you know, maybe I should look closer at them.
Yeah, that was a really fascinating story.
I was really wondering, how is it that you work, supposedly work on election fraud issues for years, but can't do sort of basic, you know, quantitative analysis of like, you know, voter tallies and stuff?
It's such a basic, basic error for someone who's supposed to be an expert.
Yeah, there was the math aspect, which, you know, I'm not by any means great at math, so I kind of glossed over that in a lot of his affidavits, and then honed in on the technical aspects, and specifically the information security aspects of it.
And those were what really started to set off a lot of red flags, specifically around QSnatch, which we'll probably get into later.
But basically, it was just full of either intentionally misrepresented data or Data that was put together through incompetence.
I haven't figured out which it is yet.
That is really the eternal question.
Yeah, malice or stupidity.
It's never never an easy thing to pick apart.
So yeah, you've been digging into like, Stop the Steal efforts and campaigns for, you know, pretty heavily for the past year.
And one of the most fascinating things that you uncovered was the true identity of We
Have Risen, who is this QAnon promoter on Twitter, who turned out to be an ex-pro surfer
and entrepreneur named Conan Hayes.
So how'd you go about discovering this weird Twitter account and Conan Hayes?
Yeah, so it's kind of a wild story that took, I think, probably almost six months, maybe
five months before I really was sure of who it was on the other side of that account.
I first noticed their account after following Ron Watkins throughout 2020.
He started to pivot from COVID.
Denialism and disinformation and to stop the steal stuff and I had noticed that you know one of the accounts he had retweeted a few times was we have risen and That specifically caught my eye again because of you know some of the the bad information security takes that were on that account Again didn't really pay a lot of attention to that account specifically until the Ramsland affidavits Specifically I noticed that Ramsland included a screenshot that I had I remembered seeing on Conan's account.
So that set off a light bulb for me.
It was specifically, again, around QSnatch.
And my thought at the time was, okay, Ramslan's just ripping off data from random Twitter
users and throwing it in his affidavits.
I did not think that he was actually working for ASOG.
I just had a quick question.
How did you get into this stuff?
You were mentioning the bad takes on that account.
How did you get into all of this research?
I've been in information security for 15 years.
I was luckily able to get a low-paying InfoSec job.
right outside of high school and have been kind of immersed in it for a while.
I've done different things within the field since that's kind of a broad title.
But specifically for a few years did network intrusion analysis and mobile malware reverse engineering.
And you know through the summer of 2020 I think like a lot of people,
I found myself bored and on Twitter and it was like I'm gonna
search for for COVID and see what dumb things people are saying.
I did not expect to see people actually talking about dumbs as in like the deep underground military bunkers.
And, uh, I had known about QAnon thought that kind of faded out.
Uh, it turns out it was like thriving.
And, you know, started kind of following a lot of the QAnon researchers, found you guys, found Poker Politics, Dapper Gander, Sarah Hightower, like all of these incredible people.
I didn't really have a lot to contribute to that specific field because, you know, you guys had it covered really well.
So when I saw that the election fraud Claims were really and intersecting with information security.
I was like, here's my moment.
I can shine cool, but yeah, so Once I noticed the screenshot was was essentially taken straight from Conan's account.
I started digging into it more and noticed that it was either in another ramblin affidavit or And the one of the filings for the Antrim case that
actually got them the court order There was a preliminary report dated November 29th from Antrim,
Michigan Where they had you know shown some images of like voter
rolls on the ground and things like that I had also at the time been digging through
We have risen Conan's account pretty extensively trying to find the source of the Q snatch picture that I had seen
and Happen to notice on November 27th. He was posting pictures
of what seemed to be voting equipment and also voter rolls laid out on carpet and so I looked closer
at the carpet and the the course.
Court docks and notice that it was the same shade and kind of like pattern is the carpet that Conan had been posting Looked more at the pictures because there there was an entire thread of them Notice he had posted a picture of a private jet where you could see the the Antrim Airport sign and then you know he had posted a picture of Like them landing and there's actually a very distinct lake that you can see on Google Maps that match the same shape.
And so I was like, okay, this, this guy was in Antrim.
Yeah, that's, that's, that's amazing.
That's, that's like, like beyond me when you start doing like, like Google Map matching.
I also want to touch on the, the PowerPoint presentation that Outlined basically, you know, coup strategies.
That was presented by ASOG sort of, I guess, associate Phil Waldron and was circulated in the White House and Congress.
Now, that PowerPoint presentation, it does actually specifically mention ASOG on one of the slides.
But is there anything else like about it that was like, oh, this information just came from this group of people is very distinctive.
Yeah, I guess to continue on the Conan track, since I had been paying attention to what they were posting pretty heavily at the time, the four or so slides I think that have the charts with the Supposedly election spikes that were created from the Edison New York Times data that was scraped I had recognized those from Conan's feed He had posted them.
I found out recently I was able to go back and find them like November 24th and then the the mention of Q snatch in general again was something Conan had talked about a lot and I Then the block diagram slide that, you know, looked really complex, but literally it doesn't really say anything without additional context.
And even with additional context, like it's, it's wrong.
All of those things were, were images and slides that I had noticed towards the end of 2020.
So when I saw that, I was pretty certain it was, I gotta have a hand in it.
Yeah, so let's talk about QStach because that PowerPoint, it includes one particularly batshit slide titled where and how it's done high level view of voting system and networks and includes a bewildering diagram and the phrase changes in cloud can be uploaded backwards because of a harvester called QStach.
So QSnatch is real malware.
It's called QSnatch because it targeted this company that makes network-attached storage devices called QNAP.
And essentially, you know, they're kind of like Internet of Things devices where They don't tend to get patched very frequently.
The security practices when they're deployed or installed tend to be pretty lax.
And so QSnatch was a worm that would crawl the internet looking for QNAP devices because there was a remote code execution vulnerability that would allow them to essentially automatically infect the devices, harvest credentials, do some of the things that the PowerPoint claims.
And I was actually able to match up a lot of those bullet points to an official CISA, I always forget what the acronym actually is, but
essentially the US Cyber Security Agency advisory on QSNACH. So like, the first three or four are
basically copy-pasted directly out of a CISA advisory.
Then they tacked on some additional color, I guess, to kind of prove their point.
But the main thing that got my attention is this was malware specifically targeting these QNAP network-attached source devices.
It was not just crawling websites randomly and able to magically infect them somehow.
So the the idea that there is some like central vote tallying system that was exposed that somehow Q snatch was able to Infect is just like it.
It doesn't make any sense.
Really, you know, one thing I want to touch on is I I guess this is an eternal problem in talking about debunking, but I think it's even more troublesome when we're talking about debunking technical things, which it always takes way more effort to unpack a lie than it is to make a lie.
Especially these sorts of things, like the diagrams and stuff.
And some of this information is talking about is beyond me in a technical way. I don't know, maybe. So
what do we do about this problem where basically people can sort of like spin up these massive
lies and it takes like, you know, there may be only a handful of people in the country who really
have the technical knowledge to really take the time to explain and unpack why it's wrong.
Yeah. I mean, I think we need to kind of step back and approach it from the perspective of
like media literacy and internet literacy and being able to discern, I guess, saying fact from
fiction kind of seems like it's still just we'd end up in the same spot, but it...
I mean, it gets tricky because obviously, you know, cybersecurity is incredibly complex and you can't educate everyone in the world to a degree where they understand and they can start to pick this stuff apart.
So I think really teaching people to think critically and helping them understand, you know, The sources they're getting their information from and having some level of skepticism when they approach that would be like the ideal state.
But on the flip side, I think we're kind of beyond that in a weird way because of the de-platforming on Twitter, which helped keep a lot of that off Twitter, just pushed them into Telegram and Gab and spaces that are a little bit harder to monitor and harder to moderate.
The problem becomes more siloed and I think harder to tackle in that perspective.
So, in another impressive feed of research, you uncovered an editable version of that PowerPoint.
And in that version, you discovered that there was a hidden logo for something called Kraken Intel.
And there's a little, you know, illustration of a Kraken.
And it also included an image of like two silver bars.
Now, Joshua Merritt tells me that because of this, he was I'm pretty convinced that this was evidence that Torrey was uniquely responsible for putting together the PowerPoint.
So would you agree with that analysis?
Do you have any theories about how this PowerPoint came together?
Who exactly is responsible for it?
Yeah, I have some like rampant speculation, but nothing that I've been able to nail down, you know, in any way that I'd be willing to commit or put any money on.
I think Tori is definitely a good candidate.
She, for a while, was kind of portraying herself as reaching the the rank of Lieutenant in the Navy.
Their insignia is also, it's the 03 officer rank.
They use the same insignia.
Another name I've seen floating around is Captain Seth Kessel.
Same thing, also officer rank, so, or 03.
So also the same insignia.
And it's known, especially, you know, today Reuters dropped that great article
talking about Flynn, Kessel, Waldron, and Ivan Rakin, you know, four former military guys
that have gone out there and really perpetuated all of these Stop the Steal claims.
Kessel was confirmed in that article to be at Linwood's ranch with Mike Flynn,
Linwood, Doug Logan, kind of working on all this stuff to feed information to Sidney Powell and Linwood.
So I think definitely, you know, Cashel could have been involved.
It could be Torrey and Cashel.
There's a lot of different players that it could kind of map to.
I think there's definitely at least a handful of people, though, that Cracking Intel is, and not just one specific person.
That's my guess.
Oh, great.
So you've brought us another cue.
Just fantastic.
No, no.
Just lead in questions and do your own research.
Connect the dots.
Now, one strange thing is like you, the place that you found this PowerPoint was a Spanish language website.
Um, apparently, do you have any clue how it might have wound up there?
I haven't dug into that site specifically a ton.
It does look like it's a Spanish language, uh, conservative organization.
of some kind and in Spanish as in like they're based in Spain and
that particular post was about Jovan Pulitzer
Posting the slide deck the the coup slide deck on his me we
Account and I think he had also posted on telegram at around the same time January 12th
So the the article was covering that post And and they have similar articles around the same time
covering other soft the steel antiques And then they get into some other really, like, fringy stuff that you, you typically see adjacent to, to this kind of, uh, news or, or whatever you call it.
Do you, do you ever get depressed that we, you know, in our kind of work, we have to say sentences like, he published the coup deck to his miwi?
That we might be in the dumbest historical moment that, honestly, historians shouldn't even bother.
Just put a big, like, paste over the pages for these years.
Just glue them together.
Just glue them.
So it's just one big, thick page.
Absolutely.
Jake will come over and glue those pages together for you, if you know what I'm saying.
I knew it.
I knew it.
I set myself up for that.
Yeah, I'm glad I've already gotten over my existential crisis, because if I was at the point now where I'm trying to figure out what the point of everything is, uh, yeah, who knows how that would have ended.
Oh man.
I feel for all the Zoomers, you're right.
Yeah.
Now, you've described the forensic audits that are going on as a constant shifting of goalposts and straw grasping.
So what do you mean by that?
Yeah, so it's been interesting watching that unfold.
I'd say like the first goalpost was Let's get these forensic audits going because they're going to be the hammer that drops and puts Trump back in office.
And so we've seen these efforts kind of spread up across the country to get forensic audits going.
And Arizona is, of course, uniquely positioned with their Senate and people like Sonny Borelli, Wendy Rogers.
Mark Fincham To kind of get these things started
So it it happened to take place starting in in Arizona and the goal was like let's look at the machines
Look, let's look at the ballots. We're gonna find that the machines were totally compromised
We're gonna find that the ballots are all you know, fake bamboo paper
and then the Arizona audit kind of like came and went and It seems like a lot of Arizona natives were really paying
close attention to it but you know, it didn't deliver the storm that everyone was
expecting and And so, you know, from there it became kind of shifting the goalposts to, okay, well, we can't really detect the fraud because the machines, you know, maybe they were compromised, maybe they weren't, but the ballots, and the ballots are real, but the ballots came from phantom voters, you know,
So they, that's the whole effort to do citizen canvases across the country because the idea is that there's all of these ballots being sent in from like frat houses for frat brothers that never actually voted, things like that.
So, you know, that was kind of shifting it further and their whole idea was like, these are ballots for people that exist, or sorry, that don't exist.
And then the latest shifting that I've seen is that, OK, no, no, no.
The ballots are for people that exist, but the Democrats have figured out an algorithm that can predict when people aren't going to vote.
So they will send in legitimate ballots on behalf of those people because they know they're not going to send in ballots themselves.
And you know then you get then then for me I think that the canvases take on a new darker turn because you have people Then that are gonna show up at your house and say like, you know does just so-and-so live here or how many people live here?
But now it's going to be how many people live here.
And did you actually cast this vote?
So now they're like questioning whether the the legitimacy of your vote You know, being cast is real and I feel like that's really kind of veering into voter intimidation territory, although it does seem like so far the canvases have been, you know, they are legal for better or worse.
Yeah, this was recently reported by Sarah Mims for BuzzFeed recently and others, but there's a movement now for pro-Trump people who are very convinced of election fraud to go door-to-door and ask people about whether or not they voted, because they think that for some reason this will help Uncover the fraud that they are certain is there that it's like it's like it's like an article of faith where it's like all the failure to uncover the evidence Is not does not mean that they were mistaken.
It was simply a failure to uncover the evidence That's real even though it happened.
So it's like, you know, it's like like someone convinced that like, you know, there's like a pot of gold, you know and Somewhere in an island so those just keep digging everywhere and they'll they won't stop until they they find their exhaust themselves and So yeah, it is frustrating because now they're like, you know, these people who are these election fraud truthers, they're like, you know, they're going out to the real world and they're trying to interact with like real people.
And yeah, I think we're right.
It's legal.
It's not it's not that there hasn't been any reports that I've heard of these canvases turning violent or anything like that, but like the fact that they're Out and interacting with people with the conviction that the election was stolen.
I don't know.
It starts to point in the direction of dangerous territory.
Yeah.
And, and the one organization in particular, uh, USIP or U S E I P, which is, uh, the U S election integrity plan, her project, they kind of switch what the P stands for, uh, depending on the documentation.
Uh, the, I think it was the Colorado times recorder, uh, Posted an article they had obtained internal chat logs where People were talking about you know being armed before they went out on canvases for their own safety They've also posted about making their own badges things like that.
So they're kind of showing up in this law enforcement ask capacity or giving that impression off at least and you
know the the idea of someone armed coming to my door and giving me a hard time because they think that I
Didn't actually send in the ballot. I sent in but it was some
Democrat driven Soros algorithm is a kind of a nightmare scenario
Sure is.
So any open source investigation tips for budding researchers out there?
Yeah.
Weirdly, I find most of my stuff on Google.
Just like the way I found the actual editable PowerPoint was taking snippets of phrases
from the PDF, putting them in quotes, and searching that on Google. So I think the one that found
the one on the Spanish language site was because of QSnatch. Because again, QSnatch is going to
haunt me. And then using search operators like the site colon and URL colon. If you search
for Google dorks, which is a kind of OSINT way of referring to them. You'll find a whole ton of
different tips.
I've also found that Google is getting, for better or worse, more aggressive with their algorithm and how it ranks content that may be misinformation, which is great for preventing people from accidentally stumbling on things that may take them down a dark path.
When you're actually trying to seek this stuff out, it can be a little tricky.
So I've been going back and forth between Google and DuckDuckGo.
Other than that, you know, DocumentCloud.org, a lot of news organizations and other investigative publications have been uploading a ton of documents there, a lot of court documents.
So I've done a lot of searching there.
That's where American Oversight has been putting all of the Arizona text messages, emails, audit communications that they've obtained.
Uh, you can typically find a lot of information there as well.
Fascinating stuff.
Um, you guys have any further questions?
One question I had was, you know, there, there are two separate claims here, obviously, that there was manipulation in the election data and that, um, there are vulnerabilities in the election system.
Uh, how would you help people kind of differentiate those and ascertain whether one is a real Yeah, that's a great point.
Great question.
One thing to fully acknowledge is that there are vulnerabilities in these voting machines.
That's a great point. Great question. One thing to fully acknowledge is that there are vulnerabilities in these
voting machines. There are computers. There's vulnerabilities in every single computer, no matter how big
or small.
So to pretend like there's not is a mistake. It is definitely going to turn people who think otherwise away.
And then to kind of pretend like Democrats hadn't been ringing the alarm bells about this for a while and voting integrity experts haven't been talking about this for a while.
Uh, I think also is a mistake.
So, uh, you know, acknowledging that there are weaknesses in the systems, uh, is helpful, but then also understanding that, uh, you know, a weakness can exist and not be exploited.
Uh, you know, if you leave your door unlocked, uh, you can't just then call the cops and say that your neighbor broke into your house.
have to have some type of evidence that that happened. And so far, we haven't seen any of
that evidence. So there's that one side of it. And then as far as the data, that one definitely gets
trickier to dissect because you have people like Doug Frank, Seth Kessel putting together
these charts with all sorts of really scary looking trend lines that make it seem like
thousands of dead voters sprung up and started casting Biden ballots. And I think there,
it's really just kind of teasing out where the data came from and trying to get some transparency
into the algorithms or calculations or whatever it was that they ran to end up with that data,
try and reproduce it yourself, make sure you understand what it actually is. Because I think
a lot of the time, the same way people are doing it with information security, they're doing it with
with the--
Do you think that maybe networks are not right for voting and we should go back to, you know, paper ballots and that kind of thing?
whether or not these numbers make sense.
So we'll just put them together and throw them out there and people are gonna take it for what it is.
Do you think that maybe networks are not right for voting and we should go back to paper ballots
and that kind of thing?
I mean, there's definitely, and this is another issue, is like there's networked machines
and then there's machines connected to the internet and there's a big difference there.
You can have networks and machines in a local area network that are not connected to Wi-Fi, that are not connected directly to the internet, that aren't connected elsewhere in a local county intranet, that you could maybe compromise a machine for a clerk and then pivot to the election systems.
Uh, and, uh, you know, that's a decent mitigation and that's kind of actually what we saw, uh, in Lake County recently.
There's been news about, um, some, uh, like a potential network compromise that happened and it turned out someone, uh, was in Lake County and recorded packet capture data that was released through the cyber symposium.
Uh, but they weren't able to actually record voting machine traffic because the network was segmented such that they couldn't access that.
Uh, coincidentally, It really seems like the person that did that was Conan Hayes.
And then he hopped on a surfboard.
Yes.
And rode off.
Rode off, got some fish tacos.
Yeah.
Hung out with his bros.
It turns out when it comes to surfing the internet, we should have been looking at people surfing the waves.
Right.
Yeah.
Because they learned it.
Yeah.
I can't believe we didn't make that connection in all of these years.
I mean, the only other surfer connection we've had so far on this show was the guy who, you know, basically murdered his children.
So, you know, surfers obviously very sus right now.
They are.
Especially like, like what kind of surfer, what kind of surfer says like, you know, what I want to do is like, I want to go to Michigan in January.
Yeah.
I would like these election results to hang loose.
Yeah.
This is all such a mess because there are so many people out in the world, you know, such as such as myself, who are desperately looking at this data.
We want to see what the data means, but we understand nothing about even how the Internet, why couldn't, if you held a gun to my head and you were like, How does the internet work?
I would be like, it's fucking magic.
Like, I don't know.
I plug, I plug this shit into the back of my rig and I talk to, and I talk to my friends.
I go, I hunt zombies online.
Um, so it's, you know, it's even scarier, I think on, on some degree, you know, that there are people who have a lot of money who are connected to, you know, connected to people within power, connected to people, um, who, uh, can, uh, They've got contributor money.
If they're a contributor, they have the ear of the people they contributed to, so when they fucking get pissed off at
their TV, they can do a lot more than us.
Yeah, yeah, exactly! And it's just like, it is this- I- I- I- I- Just based- Based on these- these two interviews with-
with uh, both yourself and- and Joshua, it's just like, I get the sense that it's just like,
Everybody is out here... LARPing, but it's- but also for real, like they're- they're- they are doing real things
that have real-world impact, and it's- Oh it's just such a mess like I don't even know where like I don't even know how we begin to you know begin to really solve this because it was like you were saying earlier you know people can look at this you know they can look at the data know that it's totally bullshit or not understand it and just go like well this kind of lines up with like what I think anyways so like might as well be true I'm gonna move forward as if it's true because what do I have to lose you know what do I I you know it's it's just like yeah
I went on a tangent recently.
Something that struck me as a weird parallel recently was how some of this stuff kind of resembles tech support scams.
I've had my wife's grandmother, actually two of them, end up falling for that because they They get these phone calls from people who sound very convincing.
They have you go on your computer, you open up the command line, they ask you to type in, like, netstat or some completely innocuous tool.
It pulls up all of this data that looks very scary, and they're like, oh, your firewall's at 20%, like, you're completely screwed, the hackers are in there.
And then they bamboozle them out of, like, hundreds of dollars and get them on these support plans and convince them to give them access to their computers.
And it's kind of the same thing, you know, In the context of the coup PowerPoint, but worse, because when you have a respected military colonel like Phil Waldron walking into Capitol Hill with the ear of lawmakers that want to believe that there was voter fraud and are already halfway there, the bar is so low for just saying, for convincing them and using totally made up data to do it.
that something nefarious happened. Like it all the hard work of a tech support scam is done by the
time that, uh, you know, they even start talking. So from there, it's just like, uh, put some,
and that's probably that's in my opinion, finding a mark.
One of the reasons that the PowerPoint was so low effort, like it looked terrible. Like it was just,
it was a mess. And that's what's so funny is like, at this point, if you can do social
engineering with web 3.0, like you're going to gonna make Kevin Mitnick blush, you know?
He could only wish to have the circumstances like these.
Yeah, you know, yeah, we decided to allow these machines to control and sort of document every area of our lives.
But machines are outside the realm of understanding of like most people now.
And so that allows that allows like anyone to come up and like, tell me it's like, oh, your machines are running wrong, and they're making everything break.
And like, I'll Baby, I don't know.
So we're all, we're all, we're all sort of, you know, in this weird limbo place where like the, the way everything functions is just a total black box.
And as someone, we can sort of allow anyone to come up and tell me a story about like how, um, you know, the, the society functions is breaking or on a break or it's vulnerable, whatever.
And no, I can't, I can't say the wrong, I don't know.
Yeah, it's like when you go to the car mechanic and the guy's like, he's like, oh yeah, your belt is a little bit frayed, but you know, it's not bad yet.
Like you could probably wait like another six months, but that's something that you like, you want to, you know, that's something that you would want to fix.
And then you go to a different car mechanic who's maybe like a little bit more desperate and like, you kind of look like a dummy and they're like, oh, they're like, you need to replace this like Yesterday, like, here's what we're gonna do, we're gonna get you a, it's a $500, we're gonna do this, and you need a new oil filter and all of this stuff, and it's just like, it's the same thing with, like, data, because there's only a certain amount of people who can look at data and know exactly what it means, know exactly what the parameters were.
Well, if in six months Jake's belt gives out, we know which one he listened to.
Hey man, no no no, you can't play me like that.
I'm very on top of car making.
I blew up a Subaru once.
I had a Subaru that I inherited from my mom.
And I didn't know that you... I was a new-ish car owner.
I did not know the frequency at which you were supposed to replace the oil.
So I was driving back from a wedding in Santa Barbara and the car blew up on the freeway.
And I was like, oh no!
I was like, surely this will be fixable, and the AAA guy opened the hood and he was like, well, time for a new engine.
And I was like, what does that mean?
Thanks so much, Trapezoid, for all of your insights.
Yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Yeah, really fascinating stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you guys for having me.
And where can people follow you online?
I'm on Twitter at get underscore innocuous.
I have a substack that I hyped up for like two weeks and then contributed two articles to and then not touched since at trapezoid.news.
Really selling it.
Keep your eye because he might go back to that substack.
So you should go there and check it out.
He might go back.
You better.
Yeah, check it out.
You know, if it says three, that's that's one more.
Just be there.
Be there in case something happens.
Potentially good content in the future, no promises.
Check out his sub stack.
Definitely check out his Twitter and sub stack.
You never know.
Yeah, great research.
Keep it up.
Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks, guys.
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It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
This is un-American.
The children are the future.
Who do you think you are?
That's not your house!
That's the people's house!
We are in a spiritual battle for the survival of the Republic as our founding fathers envisioned it.
America remains the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
It is up to us to maintain it.
This is the greatest nation on God's Earth.
If you give up on this, the greatest experiment in democracy, you don't deserve to call yourself an American.
