QAA Podcast - Episode 171: Inside The Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories

Episode Date: December 21, 2021

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 Cy...ber 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. ↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓ https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Follow Get Innocuous: https://twitter.com/Get_Innocuous Our first QAA records release: 'Hikikomori Lake' by Nick Sena is available to listen for free at http://qaarecords.bandcamp.com (12 original tracks) QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com Episode music by Nick Sena (http://nicksenamusic.com)

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to Chapter 171 of the Q&N anonymous podcast, the election fraud conspiracy theory engine episode. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View. During an upcoming Christmas family gathering,
Starting point is 00:00:30 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 conduct 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 Cracken lawsuits. To guide us through the world of dedicated election truthers, Travis has interviewed the former vice president of cyber operations for ASAG, Joshua Merritt. Although you might know him by his code names, Spider or Jekyll, will also be joined by Twitter user
Starting point is 00:01:30 get innocuous, who goes by trapezoid of discovery as well, he's been researching Stop the Steel 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 ProCoo 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 6th is starting to run into the Gorpman-Bleamer problem, as I've seen some journalists calling. 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 Gortman,
Starting point is 00:02:10 who could testify against Bleamer, and it's not even lunchtime. Great work. Yeah, it's a very funny, classic. And, you know, that article highlighted the issue during the sort of the Mueller investigation and coverage that it seemed like, you know, there's 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.
Starting point is 00:02:35 And we're only one year into this. Imagine if it lasts as long as Russia again. 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.
Starting point is 00:02:49 Like, for example, like in 2017, I remember, 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 Bleamer in my mind instead. That's right. I bet I deleted cherished childhood memories from my brain just so I could absorb information about
Starting point is 00:03:12 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 Q&M blogger and podcaster from North Dakota who fakes
Starting point is 00:03:39 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 Beddows handed over a bunch of documents to the January 6th committee. One of these documents is an email he received on January 5th that include 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.
Starting point is 00:04:16 The document also claimed that all electronic voting machines were compromised and can't be trusted to provide an accurate count. After 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 in 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
Starting point is 00:04:49 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. 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 6th. 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
Starting point is 00:05:16 objections of Democrats and states where fraud occurred. So basically, we just, there's an alternative electors to a Republican. And if the Democrats say, no, you're actually subverting the election. will 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
Starting point is 00:05:57 like if on January 6th, Pence declared he couldn't move forward with verifying the election, the National Guardsman 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 want to see happen. The January 6th committee also recently revealed that, quote, Meadows sent an email to an individual about the events on January 6 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.
Starting point is 00:06:35 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 under-ended 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.
Starting point is 00:07:15 And their fixation on election fraud issues can be credited to ASOG official Russell Ramsland. It's one of the characters. This is the bleamer. Allies. I love it. So the Axis is like what, the Dems? That sounds plausible. Yeah, it sounds, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:29 Now, ASOG is a private security and intel company founded in June of 2017 by former DIA officer named Adam T. Kraft. Now, before ASAG 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 ASAG, Allied Special Operations Group.
Starting point is 00:08:21 ASAG is a group of highly trained professionals who have seen it all. From massive logistical problem-solving operations and combat zones to incredible private search and rescue missions that many of us only see in the movies. A Sog's team is comprised of military commandos, special intelligence operations agents, cyber intelligence geniuses, government engineers, and a team of lawyers. Aesog was assembled at the request of former officials in the U.S. government and is the only open network private intelligence collection corporation able to take direct global tasking. This plays like a Prager U educational video, just like kind of like weird off-center, like animations.
Starting point is 00:08:59 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. When 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 A-Sog. We are that guy or girl.
Starting point is 00:09:33 But mostly guys. Incredible. There's lots of things about that. Where you're pitching yourself is 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
Starting point is 00:09:57 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 lard. Yeah, everything's a fucking larp. Like, I feel like, I feel like the image of intelligence work, like, being, like, cool and sexy is destroying the world or has destroyed the world. We need, like, a PR campaign to make it, you know, make it see more boring and frustrating and not cool to all.
Starting point is 00:10:32 We need, we need more, you know, burn after reading in the world. Yeah, we need more, like, like, Inspector Clousseau. We need, enemy of the state with Will Smith, where he, like, easily outsmarts the intelligence agencies and, like, the first. 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, it claimed that the rise of Nazi Germany can be credited to the Muslim Brotherhood and
Starting point is 00:11:06 Antifa, which I don't think is positioned 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-fascists. They were very, very useful to the Nazis
Starting point is 00:11:33 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 to order. And when people are overcome with just collapse of society like this,
Starting point is 00:12:04 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 strong men 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 they, 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 Naziism. Imagine thinking that Antifa came before the Nazis. The Nazis rose as opposition to the anti-fascists. Absolutely.
Starting point is 00:12:47 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 the opposition party, they have an advantage during the midterms. But Ramsland was convinced that these losses were due to fraud.
Starting point is 00:13:10 and he worked to convince other Republicans of this as well. Starting in late 2018, Ramsland and his associates summoned conservative lawmakers, activists, and donors to meet in an airplane hangar in Addison, Texas. There, the people who were assembled, they were shown alarming presentations on how compromised election voting systems are. According to reporting from the Washington Post, briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air.
Starting point is 00:13:36 Guests were asked to leave their cell phone outside before a 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 the 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 piece, period, Aesog also briefed Cracken lawyer Sidney Powell and Representative Louis Gohmert.
Starting point is 00:14:15 Another individual associated with Asog during this time is a retired colonel named Phil Woldren, who specialized in psychological operations during his military career. According to a recent report from Reuters, Woldren 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, Asog's examinations had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used
Starting point is 00:14:54 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 his 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. So again, solving problems by posting. At some point during this period, ASOG linked up with Conan Hayes, a pro surfer and founder of the surf brand Ruka or RVK.
Starting point is 00:15:38 K-A. Oh, yeah, they, 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, yeah, you find that shit in like, like Pacific Sunwood. Do they still have Pacific Sunware? I don't, maybe they do. I don't know. Was the last time you stepped foot in the mall? A couple days ago. Oh, okay, then. I, I, I love malls, but I haven't, no, I haven't seen a pack sun in a while, so I'm not sure if they're still around. Under the Twitter handle, we have risen. Hayes promoted Q&N 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
Starting point is 00:16:29 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 the 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 he'll never stop posting, then.
Starting point is 00:17:02 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 destroy 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.
Starting point is 00:17:24 One of the two. Through A-Sog's attempts to prove election fraud, they also met up with a blogger, podcaster, and streamer who goes by the name Terpsicery Morris Lindemann, who is better known online as Tori. says or sometimes just Tory or even just Tor. According to reporting, she has a history of exaggerating her resume and expertise. For example, her profile on Together We Served, 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 more than two decades ago. She told the post
Starting point is 00:18:12 that she didn't know who created the now deleted profile, if that's what, if you want to believe that. Of course. Just a fan. I love to have fans of my military record. Right. Who who created this profile on this website? Talked about how awesome I am. Who was it to be? Who could who could 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 Tori falsely claimed to be a medical doctor and have both a PhD and an MBA. They said that she used multiple aliases and social security numbers and created exaggerated online resumes of part of what they called a persistent effort to deceive others. Tori has also appealed to
Starting point is 00:18:56 the QAnon community on her Twitch streams. Sometimes the O in her Tori says username is replaced with a cue, 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
Starting point is 00:19:20 and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security. After Trump's election loss, A-Sog Associates became crucial to pushing narratives about election fraud. When Sidney Powell filed her doomed crack in lawsuits and attempt to overturn the election, she relied on affidavits from Russell Ramsland, Tori, and of course, our guest today, Joshua Merritt. In Merritt's affidavit, he was supposed to be anonymous,
Starting point is 00:19:42 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 139.29.29%. So he made, just totally made mistakes. But you think that, like, after
Starting point is 00:20:09 years of working on this, he would like, you know, know how to calculate voter total, some really basic, basic, basic ways to figure out what's going on in the voter rolls. But, um, no, 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 Cytle. Now, the truth is that Cytle wasn't rated. They'll even have offices in Germany. It doesn't make sense. According to reporting from Reuters, this story was sparked on November 8th, 2020,
Starting point is 00:20:44 when Phil Waldron spoke on the phone with Representative Louis 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, Goldron was on Newsmax telling the host that the army had seized the sidal server. This is just so wild. It just sounds like a bunch of people who
Starting point is 00:21:21 don't know how to interpret data, who are larping as securely 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
Starting point is 00:21:40 like, no, you didn't actually. There was a secret raid. Or like, oh, you didn't. There's like fraud here. And it's like, oh, that's the truth. The thing that I already believe. But CITL, that's a place where all of this information
Starting point is 00:21:55 was cycling through, not supposed to, but it was. And actually, there was a German that, as I was told, there was a tweet in German from Germany that the U.S. Army had gone in and seized the civil 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.
Starting point is 00:22:23 Now I work in government, but I don't know. 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 Kohid Watnik to request a special operations team to go to Germany and fix the situation. But 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.
Starting point is 00:23:05 Powell called Cohen with a bizarre request. Her request was specific, urgent, and highly sensitive. It was also completely insane. Quote, CIA director Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany, she told Cohen, you need to launch a special operations missions 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 her. Paul 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.
Starting point is 00:23:50 Powell believed Haspel had embarked on this secret mission to get the server and to 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 Loe Gohmert that he found some internet traffic as going through a server in Germany and then votes could be rerouted, whatever the hell that means.
Starting point is 00:24:29 So this story in the hands of Gohmert somehow adds the seizing of a sidel 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 flack jacket. It's like the scene in Commando where they're buckling all the stress and cutting the gun, all of that stuff. And, you know, they put on full fatigues, face paint, and go in for themselves.
Starting point is 00:25:04 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if this story is, you know, totally true, it really shows that, like, Sidney Powell is both, 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
Starting point is 00:25:31 was fraudulent or whatever, you know, or that the, you know, Biden somehow cheated. And 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. I, Yeah, I called her, but she didn't write me back or whatever. Then they're like, I wonder, I wonder. You know, maybe she's, it just, 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.
Starting point is 00:26:11 Of course, Waldron is the one who circulated that two PowerPoint. He says that prior to January 6th, he spoke with Mark Meadows, quote, maybe eight to ten 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 Tori. 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, crack an intel, and included an image of two silver bars, which is the insignia for the rank of lieutenant in the Navy.
Starting point is 00:26:52 So Tori often referred to herself as the Cracken and claimed to be a lieutenant in the Navy. So it's not 100% confirmed, but it's possible that a Q&N promoting podcaster was heavily involved in making that PowerPoint. Does that claim include basically her kind of introducing the word Cracken to this entire thing? Well, no, no, not introducing.
Starting point is 00:27:13 But obviously, yeah, Cracken was also the name that Cindy 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 Cracken a lot. So that means that like she didn't have a Cracken when she named that. She's just like, I just said I have a crack. We're going to release the Cracken. Better find a Cracken. Even after Trump left office, people associated with A Soxog worked hard to cast doubt on the election. We saw this during the supposed sort of forensic audit in Antrim County,
Starting point is 00:27:45 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 and Colonel James Waldron. As the Daily Beast reported, Cohen Hayes was also on the ground for Antrim County.
Starting point is 00:28:25 Under the account, We Have Risen, he tweeted pictures of what he implied were raw vote tallies and photos of a dissected dominion voting machine. We also saw Aesog'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 excerpts said that his data was worthless. It turned out that Lindell got a lot of bad data from mysterious con artist named Dennis Montgomery.
Starting point is 00:29:04 But ASOG and his associates provided critical support to the symposium. Phil Waldron was the leader of the symposium 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. Detail 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 concern Americans came together because they all observed something incredible. in the 2020 general elections. The groups united to launch a full-scale investigation
Starting point is 00:29:47 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.
Starting point is 00:30:08 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 quarter, just, Just the little silver bullet right there that's right next to Phil Waldron.
Starting point is 00:30:46 Very strange. I can't tell these people are just kind of dumb and just believe, like believe this stuff because they're already like, you know, 75% or 100% 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 can, 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.
Starting point is 00:31:24 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, on this case, the only reason that they're out of power is. the election stolen, and they believe that's true because if that was true, that would make them, 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.
Starting point is 00:31:56 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. It's like, your job, all right. Your job is to keep the people who actually know what they're doing here, long enough to get pilled, if possible, 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
Starting point is 00:32:27 was worthless, which, of course, caused Michael Lindell to get very, very mad at Merritt. So he says, which, you know, surprising, surprising. Seems like a chill guy. down. 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 A-Sog. To try to get an inside look regarding what went on with A-Sog, 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,
Starting point is 00:33:05 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. They 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 transcribe Flynn's conversations with the Russian ambassador Sergei Kisliak. Merritt also claims that Mark Meadows used campaign funds
Starting point is 00:33:42 to purchase the encrypted messaging app Silent Circle through A-Sog. This has not been reported anywhere. In her interview, Merritt also claims that starting in 2017, Vice President Pence, and then-speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, 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
Starting point is 00:34:09 episode. I'm grateful that he took the time of his day to speak with us. We are joined now by Joshua Merritt. He is an Army veteran, IT consultant, and founder of the cybersecurity firm Cyberoptics. Mr. Merritt, thank you so much for taking 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 intern, at cyber defense labs at UTD. There's a gentleman there named Kevin Henson. He passed away in November 2019.
Starting point is 00:34:44 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 I had just gotten done with college for my network system administration degree, and he knew Adam Kraft.
Starting point is 00:35:13 And Adam Kraft was the CEO of ASO. He had served in the Army, made it up to major, got medically retired, and then worked at DIA with Michael Flynn. So they started, ASAG, brought in Russ Ramshland and Loch Neely. And first the idea was to create a private intelligence company for civilian families in Texas who have a lot of money, whether it's business intelligence, whether it's red teaming. There was a lot of different type of work that we had done. But then at 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 a SOG. And I stayed on until November of 2019 as the vice president of cyber operations.
Starting point is 00:36:09 So I worked there two years since they started just running all of 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 uh russ did out 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 uh and got primaried out because he was running against pete sessions here
Starting point is 00:36:47 in texas um so that 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 uh that's how he had made his money prior to ASOG. And I think at times Russ had this sort of romanticization of Intel-type work. You know, he actually owned, legitimately owned an Aston Martin and had kept a Walther P.P.K in the club box. So real 007 stuff. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:19 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, you know, the actual best. background stuff we worked on with some pretty crazy high-speed stuff for in this will 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 made the company turn it down um we had these two private investigators who brought in a a packet and it had 25 Chinese nationals in um military business people bankers and they wanted not just a
Starting point is 00:37:59 dossier on them. But the client, their client, it actually requested black cat offs to go into their emails, to find out their travel patterns, where they were getting money from. So the 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 their 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.
Starting point is 00:38:49 I thought, and there's a term we use for it, it's called a knock list, a list of sports. 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 sort of this turn to sort of like focusing more on these,
Starting point is 00:39:25 election fraud issues, you took part in meetings in a hangar in Addison that were as reported in the Washington Post, which some people who were interested in what you and the company had to say about supposed vulnerabilities in the election system. So, you know, could you describe, like, what took place during these meetings? So when, after the midterms, we had Dr. Laura Presley and a couple of 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
Starting point is 00:40:16 here in the state. So we use a company called ESNS, which is headquartered in Nebraska. So we started the investigation looking at the server logs, looking into the companies, looking at their divering infrastructure. Back then, I was able to do scans on their websites and sort of see not just their 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 ESNS here 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.
Starting point is 00:41:20 So we had business figures who came in, politicians. That was where I first met Sidney Powell, Alan West. I got to meet Herman Kane 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.
Starting point is 00:41:49 And because your affidavit was included in the Sydney Powell lawsuit in the aftermath of the 2020 election, you were out of it. 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 room 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 talked about in my affidavit. And there are various reasons why I did not want to be. be public. I actually have a price on my head because of going after bad guys. I've stopped
Starting point is 00:42:24 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 help 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.
Starting point is 00:43:09 And like, I could watch Twitter and I could watch all of these internet researchers just like form this huge balloon around me. and everyone pull all this, you know, my company because I'm listed on Dun & Bradstreet. I have my cage codes, all my other information, and they just, like, surrounded me in less than a day. And I just sort of laughed about it. And I'm like, well, now that I'm out in front, now I had to switch my role. 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
Starting point is 00:43:48 threatened myself, my wife, or my children. No one on the left has been disrespectful, but the death threats and the disrespect of 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 problem, cyber issues. That's not their foretay. However, when they were getting so many affidavits and coming in so many different direction, I don't think they vetted everything properly.
Starting point is 00:44:30 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 in the Q world, everyone always goes on about trust the plan. I hate to tell people there is no plan. There was no control. Early on in the beginnings of November 2020, December 2020, it was literal chaos. There was no command, though. There was no central organization.
Starting point is 00:45:24 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 Sydney and myself, because at the time I wouldn't talk to Sydney directly. Sydney had been working on Michael Flynn's case, and Michael Flynn had been subject to a FISA warrant. So I didn't know if Sydney 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 talked to her, so I wouldn't get drug into that. When I did my affidavit, I talked about a unit in tray dock. And that's where I put 305MI. 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
Starting point is 00:46:16 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 305MI because it didn't want my active duty unit to deal with crap. So that's why 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. Now, 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 trade
Starting point is 00:46:59 document. 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 Wachuka, 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,
Starting point is 00:47:46 but like Joe being his gatekeeper, I've been kept away from Flynn. 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 P-Caps 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
Starting point is 00:48:36 supposed to be paid for my time. 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 was Veman against me going. She said, no, this is a setup. You're going to get screwed over, which she's batting a thousand when it comes to that kind of stuff. So we look over the information, days leading up to it. We were using
Starting point is 00:49:22 element, a chat app on Android to communicate with all of the red team members. So as 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.
Starting point is 00:50:01 And days leading up to the symposium, we found that the information did not hold up to what Lindell claimed. And we had 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 I got on the plane on August 9th, to go to, South Dakota, the days leading up to the symposium in the 10th and the morning of the 11th, we kept telling Lindell, hey, this information is not what his claim. And 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
Starting point is 00:50:55 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 the 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
Starting point is 00:51:42 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, but I couldn't, especially because one day I'm working on trying to get my CISP. 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.
Starting point is 00:52:27 And Waldron sent me into that room to placate them and keep them from leaving. And so in the WAPO or 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 were receiving new information. Conan had been giving a hard drive to Lindell that had other factual P-Caps, which I'll get into where that ties in. But we had those P-Caps and other data that was coming in. And then we were getting the digital ISO images of the demand.
Starting point is 00:53:11 dominion systems from Conan because Tina Peters had come in the night before. And so I split second decision said, okay, the only way we're going to save this, they're all telling me, oh, this is legitimate. They had 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 Hirstie. And I said, hey, look over these in case images because supposedly they show that data was deleted.
Starting point is 00:53:52 So he started looking over it. And that's what I lifted and shifted everything towards to be able, you know, 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 Hirstie, O'Donnell, a lot of the other guys that were there, 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,
Starting point is 00:54:43 it would have left a 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 the 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 Lundell. So the guy who brought the information to Lundel was Brandon House, H-O-W-S-E. Very early on in December, Brandon brought the information having to do with scorecard to Lundel.
Starting point is 00:55:45 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 might reporting data. string. And Lendell, that was around the time Lendell was starting Franks Beach. He actually put Brandon House on as his main anchor on that show. They started pushing that information. Conan was dealing with Montgomery and Florida, which I found out at the symposium, Montgomery ended up getting a million and a half dollar house in Naples, Florida that's under a family trust. from the money he had collected from Lundell. So it was very marketable and profitable for Montgomery to be pushing all of this and the other people under him.
Starting point is 00:56:40 When we got the initial files, I saw that 6.5M Excel spreadsheet was included in everything. 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, you all know Dennis Montgomery is a fraud, right? Like I've read all the stuff from Abram Rostin, 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.
Starting point is 00:57:21 Now, since the symposium, I've actually found the software that we 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 were 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 Cybers symposium. Mike Lindell is suing you through arbitration. Is that
Starting point is 00:58:11 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 Santilly. I talked to Pete because he was a friend of mine
Starting point is 00:58:59 the Friday after I get back to the symposium on the phone with him. And I talked about some of the stuff that was going on because I didn't tell them anything while I was at the symposium and Pete was there. So what Pete does is he takes
Starting point is 00:59:12 and records my phone conversation and then gives it to Lundell. And in it, because I was pissed. Friday morning, I'm supposed to be coming home. Waldron tells me, okay, my ron time was 4.30, so I had to get up at 3.30 in the morning. We were going to fly on Lindell's plane back to Addison, Texas at the ASOG office. And then at 3.30, Waldron says, oh, you've been bumped off of the flight because we're flying Tina Peters to Dallas.
Starting point is 00:59:42 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. to hide her in Texas. So, and then Lendell got mad because I disclosed a lot of this, 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,
Starting point is 01:00:21 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 A-Sog 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 Cracken Intel,
Starting point is 01:01:04 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 Cracken. She admitted cracking 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 Tor in 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.
Starting point is 01:01:49 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. They call it Dark Web, I'm toward. 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 in this, a gentleman by the name of Jason
Starting point is 01:02:33 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 Alper so all of this information is getting sent up
Starting point is 01:02:51 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 and so I'm passing this information up and they all created that that PowerPoint from everybody's different pieces of information
Starting point is 01:03:17 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 sixth commission who leaked that out. Prior to January or prior even to December, Meadows never wanted to hear a briefing. we were in dc uh after the midterms and i met with meadows uh he even 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 um and then he
Starting point is 01:04:01 bought a device that i use called a de off uh card um It's an ESP 8266 card that you can put scripts on it, and it kicks anybody off of Wi-Fi that's not on 82-11 hit. It de-authenticates people. And he wanted it. So, you know, A-Sog 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 Keat 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?
Starting point is 01:04:59 So like I said, my point whenever I put out my affidavits was to enact executive order 138-48, 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. Because, 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.
Starting point is 01:06:06 As much as everyone thought it, Pence was not as pro-Trump as everyone thought he was. And 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 a fascinating stuff. To get another perspective on the stop-to-steal efforts over the past year,
Starting point is 01:06:39 I'm speaking to Trapezoid of Discovery, who's also known as Get underscore Anacuous on Twitter. Trapezoid, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks guys for having me. Yeah, really fascinating research that you've been doing in publishing on Twitter. So we've talked a bit about A-Sog in this episode. We interviewed Joshua Merritt. So how did A-Sog first get on your radar and your research? Yeah, so I first really took note of A-Sog through Russ Ramlett, 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
Starting point is 01:07:16 state abbreviations and drew some insane conclusion from some math he did based off that, which he probably didn't do that Matt to begin with. And that kind of 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 fast. fascinating story. I was, 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 air for someone who's supposed to be an expert. Yeah, the, there was the math aspect, which, you know, I'm not by any means agree on math. So I kind of glossed over that in a lot of his affidavits, but, and then honed in on the technical aspects and specifically, like the information security aspects of it. And, and those were what, really started to set off a lot of red flags, specifically around like Q snatch, which we'll
Starting point is 01:08:28 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 steel efforts and campaigns for, you know, pretty heavily for the past year. And what of the post fascinating things that you uncovered was the true identity of We Have Risen, who was this Q&on promoter on Twitter, who turned out to be an ex-pro surfer and entrepreneur named Conan Hayes. So how did you go about discovering this weird Twitter account and Conan Hayes?
Starting point is 01:09:12 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, you know, following Ron Walkins throughout 2020, he started to pivot from COVID denialism and disinformation into Stop the Steel 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 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
Starting point is 01:09:57 specifically, I noticed that Ramsland included a screenshot that I had remembered seeing on Conan's account. So that set off a light bulb for me. It was specifically, again, around Q snatch. And my thought at the time was, okay, Ramsland's like 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. Like, how did you get into this stuff and into, you know, you were mentioning the bad takes on that account?
Starting point is 01:10:29 Like, how did you get into all of this research? Yeah, so I've been in information security for like 15 years. I was, you know, likely 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 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 going to search for COVID and see what dumb things people
Starting point is 01:11:09 are saying. I did not expect to see people actually talking about dumbs as in like the deep underground military bunkers. And I had known about Q&O. thought that kind of faded out. It turns out it was like thriving and, you know, started kind of following a lot of the Q&ONR researchers, found you guys, found poker politics, dappergander, 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 an intersection. with information security, I was like, here's my moment. I can shine. Cool. But yeah, so
Starting point is 01:11:54 once I noticed the screenshot was essentially taken straight from Conan's account, I started digging into it more and noticed that it was either in another Ramsland affidavit or in 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 shown some images of voter rolls on the ground and things like that. I had also at the time been digging through we have risen slash Conan's account pretty extensively trying to find the source of the Q-snatch picture that I had seen and happened 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
Starting point is 01:12:45 closer at the carpet in the court docks and notice that it was the same shade and kind of like pattern as the carpet that Conan had been posting looked more at the pictures because there was an entire threat of them notice he had posted a picture of a private jet where you could see 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 matched the same shape And so I was like, okay, this guy was in Antram. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. That's like beyond me when you start doing like Google map matching.
Starting point is 01:13:26 I also want to touch on the PowerPoint presentation that outlined basically, you know, coup strategies. That was presented by A SOG, sort of, I guess, associate Phil Waldron and was circulated in the White House and Congress. Now, that PowerPoint presentation, it doesn't. does actually specifically mention A-Sog on one of the slides. But is there anything else about it that was like, oh, this information just came from this group of people is very distinctive.
Starting point is 01:13:56 Yeah, I guess to continue on the Conan tracks 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 like 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 mention of Q snatch in general, again, was something Conan had talked about a lot.
Starting point is 01:14:35 And then the block diagram slide that 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 images and slides that I had noticed towards the end of 2020. So when I saw that, I was pretty certain. It was, I got to have a hand in it. Yeah. So let's let's talk about Q-Stash, because that PowerPoint, it includes one particularly batchit slide titled where and how it's done, high-level view of voting system and network. and includes a bewildering diagram and the phrase, changes in cloud can be uploaded backwards because of a harvester called Q-snatch
Starting point is 01:15:22 grabs all counties credentials. So we explain what exactly is Q-Snatch about. So Q-snatch is real malware. It's called Q-snatch because it targeted this company that makes network-and-hatch storage devices called Q-Nap. And essentially, 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.
Starting point is 01:15:51 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 CESA the, I always forget what the acronym actually is, but essentially the U.S. cybersecurity agency advisory on Q-Snatch. So like they're, the first three or four basically copy-pasted directly out of a CSA advisory, then they tacked on some additional color, you know, I guess to kind of
Starting point is 01:16:33 prove their point. But the main thing that, you know, got my attention is like, this was malware specifically targeting these Q-NAP network attached stores devices. It was not. just crawling websites randomly and able to magically infect them somehow. So 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 guess this is an eternal problem in talking about like debunking, but but it's like I think it's even more troublesome when we're talking about debunking technical things, which it always takes way more effort to, like, unpack a lie than
Starting point is 01:17:19 is to, like, make a lie. Like, especially, like, these sorts of things, like the, like the diagrams and stuff. And some of this information is, like, you know, talking about is, is beyond me in a, in a, in a technical way, whatever, like, I'll know, maybe. So is that, I mean, what do we do about this problem where, where basically people can sort of, like, spin up these massive, you know, these massive lies and it takes like there may be, you know, 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
Starting point is 01:18:06 saying fact from fiction kind of seems like it's still just, We'd end up in the same spot, but 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 the 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, you know, the platforming on Twitter, which helped keep a lot of that off Twitter, just push them into Telegram and Gab and spaces that are a little bit harder to monitor and harder to moderate. So, you know, the problem becomes more siloed and I think harder to tackle in that perspective. So another impressive feed of research, you uncovered an
Starting point is 01:19:10 editable version of that PowerPoint. And in that version, you discovered that there was a hidden logo for something called Crackin Intel. And there's a little, you know, illustration of a Cracken. And it also included an image of like two silver bars. Now, Joshua Merritt tells me that because of this, he was pretty convinced that this was evidence that Toray was uniquely responsible for putting together the PowerPoint. So I mean, would you, would you agree with that? analysis? Do you have any theories about like 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
Starting point is 01:19:58 Torre is definitely a good candidate. She for a while was kind of portraying herself as reaching the rank of lieutenant in the Navy. Their insignia is also, that's the O3 officer rank. They use the same insignia. Another name I've seen floated around as Captain Seth Keschel, same thing, also officer rank, so, or O3, so also the same insignia. And it's known, especially, you know, today Riders dropped to that great article talking about Flynn, Keschel, Waldron, and Ivan Ralkin, you know, four former military guys
Starting point is 01:20:38 that have gone out there and really perpetuated all. of these stop the still claims. Keschel was confirmed in that article to be at Linwood's ranch with Mike Flynn, Lynn Wood, Doug Logan, kind of working on on all this stuff to feed information at Sidney Powell and Linwood. So I think definitely, you know, Keschel could have been involved. It could be Tori and Keschel. There's a lot of different players that it could kind of map to you.
Starting point is 01:21:05 I think there's definitely at least a handful of people, though, that Krakken 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 leading questions and do your own research.
Starting point is 01:21:19 Connect the dots. Now, one strange thing is, like, you, the place that you found this PowerPoint was a Spanish language website. Apparently, do you have any clue how I have wound up there? I haven't dug into that site specifically a ton. It does look like it's a Spanish language conservative. organization of some kind. And Spanish as I'm like, they're based in Spain.
Starting point is 01:21:44 And that particular post was about Joe Von Pulitzer, posting the slide deck, the coup slide deck on his Miwi account. And I think he had also posted on telegram and around the same time, January 12th. So the article was covering that post. and they have similar articles around the same time covering other soft-the-steel antics and then they get into some other really like fringy stuff that you typically see adjacent to this kind of news
Starting point is 01:22:20 or whatever you call it. 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.
Starting point is 01:22:46 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, uh, the forensic audits that are going on as a constant shifting of goalpost and straw grasping. So what did you mean by that? Yeah. So it's been interesting watching that unfold. Uh, I'd say like the first goalpost was, uh, you know, let's get these forensic audits going because they're going to, to be the hammer that, that drops in and puts Trump back
Starting point is 01:23:31 on in office. And so, uh, we've seen these, uh, 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 Borrelli, Wendy Rogers, Mark Fincham, to kind of get these things started. So it happened to take place starting in Arizona. And the goal was, like, let's look at the machines. Let's look at the ballots. We're going to find that the machines were totally compromised. We're going to find that the ballots are all, you know, fake bamboo paper. And then the Arizona audit kind of like cam 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
Starting point is 01:24:16 expecting. 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 the whole effort to do uh citizen canvases across the country because the idea is that uh there's all of these ballots being sent in from like frat houses for uh frat brothers that never actually voted uh things like that so you know that that was kind of shifting it further and their whole idea was like these are ballots for people that uh exist or sorry that that don't exist uh and then the the latest shifting that i've seen
Starting point is 01:25:03 is that, okay, 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 for me, I think the canvases take on a new darker turn
Starting point is 01:25:31 because you have people then that are going to show up at your house and say, like, you know, does 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 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 canvas. have been, you know, they are legal for better or worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is, yeah, this was recently reported by Sarah Mims for BuzzFeed recently and others, but there's, yeah, 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, you know, whether or not they voted and they, they, because they think that for some reason this will help uncover the fraud that they are certain is there. It's like, it's like an article of faith where it's like, a failure to uncover the evidence
Starting point is 01:26:36 does not mean that they were mistaken. It was simply, you know, a failure to uncover the evidence as real, even though it happened. So it's like, you know, it's like someone convinced that like, you know, there's like a pot of gold, you know, somewhere in Ireland. So those just keep digging everywhere and they won't stop until they find their exhaust themselves. 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.
Starting point is 01:27:04 And, yeah, I think we're, you're right, it's legal. It's not, it's not, 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 a point in the direction of dangerous territory. Yeah. And the one organization in particular, USIP or USE, IP, which is the U.S. election integrity plan or project. They kind of switch what the P stands for, depending on the documentation. I think it was the Colorado Times recorder posted an article.
Starting point is 01:27:46 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-esque capacity or giving that impression off at least. And, you know, 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 to in, but it was some Democrat-driven Soros algorithm is kind of a nightmare scenario. Sure is. So any open source investigation, Tim, for budding researchers out there?
Starting point is 01:28:29 Yeah. Like, 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, like, because of Q snatch. Because, again, Q snatch is going to haunt me.
Starting point is 01:28:54 You know, and then using search operators, like the site colon, in URL colon, if you search for Google Dorks, which is a kind of an OSN 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 like great for accidentally stumbling or 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 duck.com.
Starting point is 01:29:34 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. And so you can typically find a lot of information there as well. Fascinating stuff. You guys have any further questions?
Starting point is 01:30:03 One question I had was, you know, there are two separate claims here, obviously, that there was manipulation in the election data and that there are vulnerabilities in the election system. How would you help people kind of differentiate those and ascertain whether one is a real danger and the other one is, you know, potentially, obviously, you know, based on kind of data that was faulty to begin with. Yeah, that's a great point. Great question. One thing to fully acknowledge is that, you know, there are almost certain, I mean, not almost, there are vulnerabilities in these voting machines. They're computers. There's vulnerabilities in every single computer, no matter how big or small. So to pretend like there's not is a mistake and is,
Starting point is 01:30:53 you know, 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, I think also is a mistake. So, you know, acknowledging that there are weaknesses in the systems is helpful, but then also understanding that, you know, a weakness can exist and not be exploited. You know, if you leave your door unlocked, you can't just then call the cops and say that your neighbor broke into your house. You 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.
Starting point is 01:31:39 And then as far as the data, you know, that one definitely gets trickier to dissect because you have people like Doug Frank, Seth Keschel putting together. these charts with, you know, all sorts of really scary looking trend lines that make it seem like, you know, thousands of dead voters sprung up and started casting Biden ballots. And I think there, you know, it's really just kind of teasing out where the data came from and, you know, trying to get some transparency into, you know, 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, you know,
Starting point is 01:32:24 the same way people are doing it with information security, they're doing it with the math figures and, you know, just say like people aren't going to be able to dissect whether or not these numbers make sense. So we'll just put them together and throw them out there and people are going to take it for what it is. 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? 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. So, you know, you can have networks and machines in a local area network that are not
Starting point is 01:33:05 connected to Wi-Fi that are not connected directly to the internet that, you know, 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 and that's a decent mitigation and that's kind of actually what we saw in Lake County recently there's been news about some
Starting point is 01:33:28 like a potential network compromise that happened and it turned out someone was in Lake County and recorded packet capture data that was released through the Cyber Symposium but they weren't able to actually record voting machine traffic because the network was segmented such that they could have access that. Coincidentally, you know, it really seems like the person that did that was Conan Hayes.
Starting point is 01:33:50 And then he hopped on a surfboard. Yes. And Rodoff. Rodoff got some fish tacos. Yeah. Hung out with his brus. It turns out when it comes to surfing the internet, we should have looking at people, we should have been looking at surfing the waves. Right.
Starting point is 01:34:04 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 suss 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.
Starting point is 01:34:31 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 myself, who are desperately looking at this data. We want to see what the data means. we understand nothing about, even how the internet, I 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,
Starting point is 01:35:12 connected to people within power, connected to people who can, you know, they've got fuck you money if they want to start a security firm they can, you know? 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 with their TV, they can do a lot more than us. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 01:35:31 And it's just like, it is this, I, just based on these two interviews with both yourself 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 are doing real things that have real world impact and it's it's just such a mess like I don't even know where
Starting point is 01:35:54 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
Starting point is 01:36:10 anyways, so like, might as well be true. I'm going to move forward as if it's true, because what do I have to lose? You know, what do I, you know, it's just like... Yeah, I went on a tangent recently. Something that struck me as a weird parallel recently was how some of the stuff kind of resembles tech support scams. Like, I've had, you know, my wife's grandmother, actually two of them, end up falling for that because they get these phone calls from people who sound different.
Starting point is 01:36:40 very convincing. They have you go on your computer. You open up the command line. They ask you to type in like Netstad or some completely innocuous tool. It pulls up all of this data that looks very scary. They're like, oh, your firewall's at 20%. Like you're completely screwed. The hackers are in there. And then they bamboozled 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 like the coup power point, 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 like halfway there, like the
Starting point is 01:37:27 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 you know they even start talking so from there it's just like put some and that's probably that's in my opinion finding a mark
Starting point is 01:37:46 one of the reasons that 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 make Kevin Mittnick blush you know he could only
Starting point is 01:38:03 wish to have the circumstances like these. Yeah, you know, yeah, we decide 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. I'm like, oh, baby, I don't know. So we're all, we're all sort of, you know, in this weird limbo place.
Starting point is 01:38:33 where, like, the, the way everything functions is just a total black box. And if someone, we can sort of allow anyone to come up and tell me a story about, like, how, you know, the society functions is breaking or on a break or it's vulnerable, whatever. And, you know, I can't, I can't say they're 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 afraid, but, you know, it's, it's not bad yet. like you could probably wait like another six months but that's something that you like you want to uh 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 you kind of look like a dummy and they're like
Starting point is 01:39:14 oh they're like you need to replace this like yesterday like here's what we're going to do we're going to get you uh it's a 500 dollar we're going to do this and 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 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.
Starting point is 01:39:43 Hey, man, no, no, no, you can't play me like that. I'm very on top of karma. 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, new-ish car owner. I did not know the frequency at which you were supposed to replace
Starting point is 01:40:01 the oil. So I was like driving back from a wedding in Santa Barbara and the car blew up on the freeway. And I was like, oh, no, what? 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 this. 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 sub-snack that I hyped up for like two weeks and then contributed two articles to you
Starting point is 01:40:37 and then not touched since at trapezoid dot news Really selling it Keep your eye because he might go back to that substack So you should go there and check it in He might go back, you better, yeah, check it out, you know? If it says three, that's one more Just be there, be there in case something happens. Potentially good content in the future, no promises.
Starting point is 01:40:59 Check out his substack. Definitely check out his Twitter and, uh, Yeah, you never know. Yeah. Great research. Keep it up. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Q&Nan Anonymous podcast. Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonanonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second
Starting point is 01:41:16 episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. There are now 152 of them, so lots of content there. When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent. For everything else, there's Q&M. on Anonymous.com. Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact. And now, today's auto-cube. The fair 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.
Starting point is 01:41:53 We are in a spiritual battle for the survival of the republic as our founding fathers in vision. America remains the greatest nation of 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 disparity democracy, you don't deserve it for yourself in America. What an incredible sight.

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