A Few Thoughts On Weird Foreign Governments and Assets Hacking Our Elections, Or How I Became A 2004 Election Denier Thanks To My Liberal Spook Grandpa
A Few Thoughts On Weird Foreign Governments and Assets Hacking Our Elections, Or How I Became A 2004 Election Denier Thanks To My Liberal Spook Grandpa
Whatever happened to voter.com and Diebold anyway?
In my last piece on Keith Rabois’s ties to Netanyahu and the Israelis I promised an account of voter.com and how it was a Likud intelligence operation masquerading as a voter turnout operation.
I highly recommend people examine how much of a booster Rabois is of Netanyahu and how he seems to ignore the perspective of actual Israelis. Is it too much to ask him to make Aliyah and leave America? After all, he’s a self-described “big fan.”
In 2015 Rabois had claimed he hadn’t been to Israel. Was he lying?
Let’s delve deeper into Rabois’s Likud ties. Consider Rabois’s CV, reproduced here.
What exactly was this job? Voter.com?
This is after Rabois was handling Quayle as well, which he obviously doesn't mention on Quora.
Rabois goes into minimal detail about what voter.com was in his interview with his weird protégé Delian.
Rabois just presents himself as a humble Stanford grad who went to a law firm, then just took a risk and switched careers. I find this extremely hard to believe.
But what if joining PayPal was a continuation of his service to the Israelis?
What was Voter.com anyway? There’s not a lot of information out on the Internet and perhaps that’s
How do you raise $20m with no business plan? Why you’re an op!
Rabois tries to pretend that voter.com was a startup but it smacks of an intelligence op. Voter.com was harvesting voter data and apparently looking to be an online voting portal.
Gee, where have I seen this same thing recently?
So a pro-Bibi guy who had been spying and involved with very Israeli flavored investigations just happens to be "seduced" into joining an election platform set up by actors in the same vein. Including a Clinton aide? Did I mention that voter.com was run, in part, by Barbara Boxer’s son Douglas? And what should we make of Senator Boxer later becoming a lobbyist for the Chinese surveillance company Hikvision? Or having her phone stolen by God knows who?
What exactly is going on here? Could it be that the Chinese, working with the Israelis, were collecting data on the voting public?
We know that Doug Boxer ran Voter.com but what of the other two politicians mentioned here? There’s Gray Davis — “California’s first Jewish governor” — who was recalled and Senator Bob Graham of Florida who strenuously favored bombing Iran.
Naturally Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote for Voter.com and was even the site’s executive editor before drawing his attention to a book he was doing on Hillary Clinton.
Here’s how the Washington Post described it in 2001.
The site was founded early last year by Craig Smith, former political director of the Clinton White House, and Randy Tate, former executive director of the Christian Coalition. "We were able to prove there is a nexus between politics and the Internet," Smith said. "What we were unable to prove is that there is profit in that."
Smith was the first hire for President Clinton’s campaign and was once described as “something of an adopted son” to Bill and Hillary Clinton. He started working for Clinton in Little Rock.
Randy Tate was a former Republican congressman from Washington State. He, like Rabois, was very close to Netanyahu and hosted a “rapturous reception” for him.
Here’s the Washington Post.
Yesterday, Netanyahu was interviewed by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, another religious right activist. "Many of the evangelical denominations of the United States came together; I understand that I was able to unite them. And I think it wasn't me -- it was their love of Israel," Netanyahu said on Robertson's "700 Club."
Monday's rally, which also featured Christian Coalition executive director Randy Tate, was a contrast to the low-key reception planned by the administration. Although Clinton said that his meetings with Netanyahu were constructive -- and he denied any personal tension between himself and the Israeli prime minister -- he did express his unhappiness in private to Netanyahu about the meeting with Falwell, aides said.
Later the voter.com database was for sale and ultimately ended up getting weaponized in the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot when activists from across the country descended on Florida. They were led by Roger Stone who has considerable ties to Israeli and Russian intelligence thanks to his own sexual and financial blackmail networks. Those ties continue into 2016 and indeed the present day. Haaretz identified Stone’s cut out as the Israeli cabinet minister without portfolio Likudnik Tzahi Hanegbi.
Our unwillingness to talk seriously about Israel has real consequences for our national security as my friend Arthur Bloom rightly notes in his Substack.
If this situation drifts too far, it poses risks to American Jews. If you think anti-Semitism is bad now, wait till you see what happens if Israel becomes a Chinese client. A lot of things that seem like fringe positions today will come into the mainstream: BDS will have to be considered. Major pro-Israel organizations will have to register under FARA. This drift risks rendering every Zionist a proxy of America’s chief geopolitical rival. To the extent that this drives emigration to Israel, the Israeli right is perfectly happy with that.
Benjamin Netanyahu has been touting this direction for years. In 2017 he called Israel a “perfect junior partner” to the Chinese. Even the Trump administration occasionally was at odds with Israel over their links to China—Mike Pompeo, as staunch a supporter of Israel as you will ever find, warned the Israelis about this problem repeatedly in his visit there.
Perhaps that’ll change under President Biden. I look upon the decision to send U.S. arms from Israel to Ukraine as a welcome departure from a status quo. As I have increasingly argued Ukraine is the new Israel and Mexico is the new Afghanistan.
****
My beloved grandfather, Colonel Carl Lundquist, went to his reward in summer 2020 thinking that the 2004 election had been stolen. Apparently he wasn’t alone. Politico, which is backed by Axel Springer and the Chinese through KKR, published a story “What Happened to the Democrats Who Never Accepted Bush’s Election.”
At the time I had dismissed my grandfather as a liberal loon but nowadays I’m not so sure gramps was wrong or even all that liberal. (Gramps once worked for E Systems, a known CIA front.)
I’m told by those close to Secretary John Kerry that he, too, believes he won the 2004 election and that the only reason he didn’t object to 2004 election results is that he felt that he could well have ripped the country apart. Perhaps Kerry was right. But maybe all that’s needed for oligarchy to triumph is for good men to do nothing? It’s interesting to think of a counterfactual presidency where President Kerry solves climate change.
There would be no Barack Obama and no Donald J. Trump. I guess it was cool to do the first black and first orange president thing but it would have been way cooler to have the first green president.
Anyway, the canonical example of the case against Bush’s reelection in 2004 comes from the Columbus Free Press, “Diebold Indicted: Its spectre [sic] still haunts Ohio elections” and indeed local Ohioan journalists even predicted before any votes were cast that Diebold was going to be a major problem due to a company culture of bribery and corruption.
Here’s the Columbus Free Press:
Diebold: the controversial manufacturer of voting and ATM machines, whose name conjures up the demons of Ohio’s 2004 presidential election irregularities, is now finally under indictment for a “worldwide pattern of criminal conduct.” Federal prosecutors filed charges against Diebold, Inc. on Tuesday, October 22, 2013 alleging that the North Canton, Ohio-based security and manufacturing company bribed government officials and falsified documents to obtain business in China, Indonesia and Russia. Diebold has agreed to pay $50 million to settle the two criminal counts against it.
Left unsaid by the DOJ was Diebold’s conduct within the United States. If you’re paying bribes around the world to get business why wouldn’t you pay them in the United States?
And if you want to go really far down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, the Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Diebold’s acquirer in March 2010 — Election Systems & Software — and forced ES&S to divest voting systems. The company which purchased Diebold’s voting machines? Dominion Voting Systems.
It gets weirder still when you look closely at Election Systems & Software as DC Report did.
Voting results in three states that saw surprising majorities by vulnerable incumbent Republican senators—Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina—were almost all tabulated on ES&S machines.
SC Dems were accusing Lindsey Graham of using these machines to steal the election from Harrison. Could they be right?
Is it possible that Dominion Voting Systems is the deep state approved voting machines? And if so, what does their lawsuit against Fox News — which recently took $100 million from the Bank of China — really mean?
The Guardian asks if the Dominion Lawsuit might finally sink Fox News. Let’s hope so. I, for one, am getting tired of Likud asset (and my one time friend) Sean Hannity prattling on about this or that outrage.
And if Dominion does, what will that mean for a Republican Party which once thought Fox News worked for it, but found that it ultimately works for Fox?
****
In the run up to the January 6th incident I was asked by some congressional Republican friends what I thought of people objecting to the electors. I said that I didn’t think it made much of a difference and that President Joe Biden was going to be president and that I thought that was probably a good thing. This statement of the facts as I saw them did not win me many friends. Besides I said, even if I agreed with them which I didn’t I pointed out in my good-natured way that I think a great many elections are rigged and that perhaps they shouldn’t be so surprised that the 2020 election was too. The implications of this line of reasoning did not go over well with people addicted to getting votes.
My Republican congressional friends pointed out — quite correctly — that a number of Democrats had objected to the 2004 election and indeed had never thought any election in the 21st century that Republicans had won was legitimate.
“But what if they are right about that?” I rebutted before pointing out that aforementioned research about Diebold’s “worldwide pattern of criminality.”
Try as I might I can’t get too excited about all the civic pieties about democracy and how we have to save it. To be honest I rarely vote unless I know the person on the ballot and even then I resent doing it. If voting really mattered, I say to myself, do you really think that they’d let us do it? There’s a long list of “controversial elections” over at Wikipedia.
Call me a cynic if you want but maybe the 2020 election was stolen — and maybe given all the close intelligence ties of Jared Kushner to the Chinese and to the Israelis and the Saudis — that’s a good thing. Maybe the U.S. deep state should steal more elections. I get that this takes “the election was stolen and I support it” puts me in a vanishingly small minority but maybe that’s the kind of honesty we need to restore civic peace.
If you’re under an occupation maybe the most patriotic thing you can do is steal an election. What an interesting paradox! Why should we fetishize elections anyway? Wasn’t Hitler democratically elected?
I don’t think such a paradox would have been lost on the American founders. Maybe we are all like Mrs. Eliza Powell who once asked Ben Franklin if we had a republic or a monarchy. “A republic—if you can keep it,” Franklin is said to have replied.
It’s up to all of us to keep our fragile young Republic.
Are you doing your part? Or are you aligned with the technocratic oligarchy? I know what side Ben would have been on and I know what side I’m on. Do you?
Gray Davis Jewish? Seriously ?
I will always remember Sen Ted Kennedy on air as results coming in for 2004 election saying with genuine confidence that America would have a President from Massachusetts again and how good that was.