American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (18 page)

Playing devil's advocate for a minute, I heard from a Democratic friend who worked Ohio that they just didn't get the people out to vote like they should have. And I think the Democratic Party blew the 2004 election, to the point where it shouldn't have come down to Ohio. Why did they allow the Republicans to twist things around and make George Bush a war hero, when he was actually a draft-dodger? And then turn Kerry, who fought valiantly in Vietnam, into a coward? I would never have handled it that way. Let's pull the military records and compare them, find out who was the real guy serving his country. I can't understand why the Democrats allowed this to take place. But maybe Kerry had played too many games of compromise over his years in politics. He told my collaborator, Dick Russell, in 2008, and I quote: “I know I won the election. But by the time my lawyers could come up with a smoking gun in Ohio, it was too late.” My question is, how come Kerry has never come out publicly and talked about that. Doesn't he think he has a responsibility to try and stop history from repeating again?

The story of what went on behind the scenes in Ohio really started to surface as we approached the next presidential election in 2008. That's where things get interesting. To set the stage, we need to go back to a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in August of 2006. At the time, Blackwell was still secretary of state and was running for governor on the Republican ticket. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Anebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”
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The judge in the case followed up with a court order that all ballot evidence relating to the 2004 election be preserved for another year (beyond the legally required 22 months, which was about to expire).

After Democrats swept into the major Ohio offices in 2006, the judge ordered everything turned over to the new secretary of state, a woman named Jennifer Brunner. Well, guess what? The board of elections in 56 of Ohio's 88 counties had either lost, shredded, or dumped nearly 1.6 million ballots and other election records. The reasons? Oh, various things. Spilled coffee, a flooded storage area, some miscommunication with “greenies” there to pick up recyclables. All accidental, sorry about that.
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There were a lot of discussions after that between lawyer Cliff Arnebeck and government officials. They talked about a settlement, or a grand jury investigation, or Congress getting involved. Secretary of State Brunner wanted to focus on assuring the integrity of the next election, rather than be distracted by the past. So Arnebeck agreed to narrow things to taking the deposition of one man, Michael Connell, who was Karl Rove's computer expert and lived in Akron, Ohio.
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A friend of Connell's named Stephen Spoonamore had already decided to go public. Arnebeck says Spoonamore is “the best expert witness I've ever worked with, courageous and willing to take complex facts and circumstances and give you highly qualified, credible judgments.”
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His friends call him “Spoon,” and he's an expert in electronic data security and what's called “digital network architecture.” He'd designed or consulted on computer systems for MasterCard, American Express, the State Department and many more companies and government agencies. A registered Republican, Spoonamore was a staunch believer in the democratic process. Knowing plenty about how thieves could hack information, he'd been concerned about the prospects for fraud with electronic voting machines since the late 1990s.
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Spoonamore also happened to live in Ohio, and on election night 2004, was doing some monitoring when he began noticing trends in a number of Ohio counties where Kerry started out ahead but then radically different totals ended up favoring Bush. Spoonamore started thinking about the possibility of a “kingpin attack,” where a computer inserted into the communications flow has the ability to change information at both ends of an IT system. It's Greek to me, but for you geeks out there, it's also known as the “man in the middle” plan. Based on the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that were registering, Spoonamore figured out that the same server form was used by the GOP for most of their hosting, and that tracked back to a company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called SMARTech.

Here's an excerpt from the Chattanooga daily paper, from March 2004: “Along the information superhighway, the road to another term in the White House for George Bush begins in Chattanooga. From a second story suite in the Pioneer Bank Building on Broad Street, millions of Internet connections and e-mail blasts by the president's reelection campaign are regularly broadcast by SMARTech Inc.” The company was run by Jeff Averbeck, an “Internet entrepreneur who first began working as a consultant for the Republican National Committee in 2000.”
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Lawyers made a Freedom of Information Act request that confirms what Spoonamore uncovered. In November 2003, Blackwell's office had enlisted a company called GovTech Solutions, owned by Mike Connell, to establish a duplicate control center for election day '04. The results would be sent directly to subcontractor SMARTech and its backup server out in Tennessee. The contract specified that there would be “a hardware VPN device [that] will allow access to a private network connecting the servers for database replication services as well as remote admin[istration].” Meaning, I'm told, that anybody could get into the network and make whatever adjustments they wanted. The election results could be observed and changed, using remote access through high-speed Internet from any location.
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The primary control was SMARTech headquarters. “We have no idea what was set up in Chattanooga,” Spoonamore says. “There could have been 20 Republican operatives, and from that point they could have made a direct hop to the White House. They could have been running this from the War Room!”
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Early on Election Day, George W. Bush and Karl Rove flew into Columbus, Ohio, to meet with Blackwell.
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Connell managed the setup that enabled Blackwell to study maps of the precincts and voter turnout in order to figure out how many votes they needed.
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A third company that Connell brought into the scheme was Triad, a major donor to Bush's campaign. They were run by some far-right Christians, the Rapp family. Triad supplied the network computers that stored all the voter registration information, and hosted the county board of elections results on its Web server.
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Connell admitted making Govtech, SMARTech, and Triad look like a single unit for the Ohio election returns.
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Congressman Conyers had written to Triad in December 2004, asking about their ability to access the vote-counting computers remotely.
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Triad, it seems, had changed the hard drive in the tabulator computer before the recount. The only reason to do that, Spoonamore says, would be to erase and destroy evidence of a software manipulation of that tabulator.

Out of the blue, Connell called Spoonamore late in 2005. They'd never met before, but Connell had heard of the systems Spoonamore developed to protect democracy advocates from being hacked in hostile overseas environments. In one such location, Connell was helping out some Christian advocacy groups. Unbeknownst to Connell, Spoonamore already knew a fair bit about him from his research into election activities and the voting machines. Connell had created Web sites for Jeb Bush's run for governor, and for George W. in 2000. Connell's company got the first private contract to build and manage congressional e-mail servers and firewalls. This gave him the ability and means to read documents and e-mails, copy data, and set up “back doors.”
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Then he did the Web site for Blackwell's office in Ohio; another client of Connell's was Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that went after Kerry on his service record!

Spoonamore told us, “Mike was a front-end guy, who built Web sites and really sophisticated databases to track voters. The way computers actually function and talk to each other, he didn't have the expertise and would have to work with others, like the guys at SMARTech.”
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When he and Connell first met in Washington, Spoonamore didn't reveal his own interest in the electronic voting world. The two hit it off, and started working together on a couple of unrelated overseas projects. Then, when they happened to be at the same conference in London, somebody pulled Connell aside to warn him that Spoonamore was “an insane guy who opposes voting machines.” Connell told Spoon, “You have some people who are really nervous about you.”

As they became friends, Spoonamore sensed that Connell was having second thoughts about what he'd been doing for the Republicans. Maybe you've followed some of the flap about all of those e-mails of Karl Rove's that somehow disappeared over time. Well, it was Connell who set up the site used by Rove for 95 percent of his e-mail communication, known as
GWB43.com
. At the end of a private meeting in 2006, Connell asked Spoonamore what he knew about “the complexity of trying to erase e-mail.” Spoon explained that, in most cases, it can't be done. Connell pointed in the direction of the White House a few blocks away, saying that he'd “kinda been asked to look at a challenge, whether you could recover or get back e-mails.” Spoonamore recalls: “He was fishing around for what the steps might be. I said, ‘Mike, I'm involved in a lot of stuff to protect people's privacy and bank accounts, but I don't use those skills to destroy information. And I would encourage you to tell people to walk away from this because, one, it doesn't work and, two, the cover-up is always worse than the crime, Mike.'”

With the 2008 election year coming up, Spoonamore decided to “stop opposing things in the background and go very public.” He approached Arnebeck's legal team in Ohio and offered himself as an expert witness. He also went to Connell. “I basically said, ‘Mike, there's a lot of people you work with—and frankly, some of them I've worked with as well, and with some I still do—who treat democracy as a game, where if their side wins it doesn't matter if you cheat. Mike, I don't think you're in that camp but I do think you've worked very closely with some of the people who are. I intend to spend some of my time and resources and reputation on making their lives uncomfortable. And I'm giving you a heads-up about it.' Well, Mike didn't react the way I expected. He reacted by taking my hands and asking to pray, and he said, ‘I don't think you know how far over your head you're gonna get.'”

At that point, Spoonamore didn't know how involved Connell had been in the Florida 2000 situation. A guy named Roy Cales had been Connell's top computer expert for a long time. In the summer of 2000, Jeb Bush had appointed Cales as Florida's first Chief Information Officer, or tech czar, and gave him the authority to take over all of Florida's government computer systems, which included “unrestricted access” to all election reporting and tabulating computers used by Secretary of State Katharine Harris.
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Cales resigned in early September 2001, after being charged with grand theft in connection with a 1996 forgery.
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Learning more about this, Spoonamore invited Connell to breakfast. It went on for five hours. Spoonamore revealed he was “going forward with attorneys, and I have no question it's going to end up in discovery on your desk. I hope we continue with our friendship, but there's a period of time when this is gonna get ugly.” Spoonamore described whom he believed the guilty parties were, starting with Rove. “You're really good at this,” he remembers Connell saying. Then Connell admitted he'd gone too far, and there were things he was ready to get off his chest.

A meeting was arranged with Congressman Conyers's office. The memo prepared for the House Judiciary Committee said: “Well before the 2000 election, one of Connell's employees created a ‘Trojan Horse' software application which, when installed on one computer, allows its remote control by another computer. Prior to the 2004 election in Ohio, Connell administered and developed important parts of the Secretary of State's computer network including the election results reporting server systems.... During the 2004 (and 2006) elections, Connell routed the election results from the OH SOS office through SMARTech servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”
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Then, at the last minute, Spoon says Conyers's office “dropped the ball. Mike was going to come forward and talk about everything he'd seen and been asked to do, in regard to voting machines. I even had a senior priest who he really respected, and who he'd never lie in front of, agree to come with him. I have no idea what happened.”

In July 2008, attorney Arnebeck asked U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to hold onto all of Rove's e-mails. Rove was identified in the lawsuit as the “principal perpetrator of a pattern of corrupt activity” under the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act. “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell ... that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall' for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed law lobby violations.”

Then, in September, Connell got issued a subpoena. His attorney, Bill Todd, who happened to also have been legal counsel for Bush/Cheney '04, said that Connell couldn't be deposed before the election because he was too busy working for the John McCain campaign.
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Shortly before the November election, Connell appeared with a trio of lawyers before an Ohio judge, who ordered him to give a deposition. With the election one day away, Connell denied any role in recommending the Chattanooga SMARTech company to Ohio officials in 2004, but he did admit for the record that his company had subcontracted with SMARTech.