Last Thursday, I ran a column pointing out that all the folks trying to convince us that Trump has no chance of prevailing when the winner of the 2020 election is decided have been serially lying about his imminent political demise for going on five years now.
In fact, the Democrats & their blue media allies are trying to demoralize us and force Trump to concede by repeating the lie that Joe Biden’s already won an election that won’t even be decided until the Electoral College votes on December 14.
Our enemies are nothing if not shameless.
I also pointed out that people who’ve been stalwart allies against the forces trying to tear this country down have assured us that Trump’s team has the goods. It makes more sense to give such folks the benefit of the doubt on issues that will be settled one way or another in a very short time rather than getting taken in by people whose raison d’etre is gaslighting patriots.
One such stalwart ally I mentioned was Sidney Powell, the tenacious former federal prosecutor who saved General Flynn from Mueller and the DOJ’s efforts to crush him.
However, as deserving as Powell was of the benefit of the doubt, the very next day, crackerjack independent journalist Jordan Schachtel published a piece exposing her story about the supposed CIA election-fraud software, Hammer and Scorecard, as being—whether she herself knows it or not—a total scam.
Shachtel’s specialty is exposing widely accepted but nonetheless totally fake stories. Some of the most important revelations on the hideous deceptions behind the COVID-19 panic and the catastrophic pseudoscientific response used to defile America’s founding commitment to individual liberty and crush its people have come from his keyboard.
Schachtel is very good at what he does. So, when I read his report on Friday, claiming that he’d traced the story about Hammer and Scorecard back to a single very disreputable source, I was pretty sure that, for whatever reason, Sidney Powell was barking up the wrong tree here.
Schachtel reported that:
Discussion over “Hammer and Scorecard,” an alleged CIA program that supposedly works to fix elections all over the world, is setting the media ablaze, thanks in large part to high-profile right-of-center media personalities. Yet there is no evidence that Hammer and Scorecard is a real program that ever existed. The idea is the work of a serial fraudster by the name of Dennis Montgomery. He is the single source for this claim. After conducting a detailed investigation, I can confirm that there are no other first-hand sources for Hammer and Scorecard. All of the claims originate with Mr. Montgomery, which, as you’ll see, is crucial to understanding the lack of legitimacy for these assertions.
Schachtel goes on to lay out a history of sensational but, alas, fraudulent claims that Montgomery has concocted to scam donations out of decent hardworking patriots. According to Schachtel, there’s literally not a shred of evidence that Hammer and Scorecard even exists apart from one reprehensible conman’s say-so.
Crucially, the main thing propping up Montgomery’s tale has been the word of “a retired Air Force General named Thomas McInerney, who has been promoting Mr. Montgomery’s claims since at least 2017.”
But, alas:
Many have incorrectly concluded that Gen. McInernery can vouch for the program because he has the credentials to do so. However, he can not possibly be a first-hand source for an application that allegedly relies on sophisticated computer software that features mobile application technology. He retired from the military in 1994, well before a program such as Hammer and Scorecard could have been created.
Schachtel uncovered a lot more very damning stuff and you can read the whole thing here if you want all the gory details. I haven’t verified them but, knowing his work as I do, it would be astounding if what Schactel’s saying isn’t right.
Besides which, the story of Hammer and Scorecard always sounded more made-for-TV than real life. Honestly, it was a whole lot more surprising to see a heretofore reliable and stalwart ally like Sidney Powell peddling it than hearing it’s a load of BS was.
The greatest marketing department in the world couldn’t have come up with a pair of handles more evocative of rigging vote tallies than Hammer and Scorecard. And the idea that anyone would so transparently name software designed to enable such egregiously illicit activities is almost as implausible as Mueller’s preposterous garbage that Russian spies used Twitter to send WikiLeaks an encryption key for a trough of DNC emails and gave their whole game away by naming it “wk_dnc link1.txt.gpg.”
You also kind of have to forget everything you know about computer programs to buy what Montgomery’s peddling. I’m not talking about anything technical here. Just the basic fact that, though its unprecedented utility amply compensates for its ubiquitous bugs, computer software is one of the least reliable inventions ever devised by man. All the more so when designed to interact with the code of other complex programs.
The possibility that they’d wind up wrecking the software used to tally votes or not get the results they were trying to engineer would discourage any miscreants from manipulating an election using a black box of complex computer code.
Bugs in the programs might easily wind up spitting out patently impossible tallies—like one candidate getting a trillion votes—that would have made forestalling a serious investigation into election fraud equally impossible. Think of how often the computer programs you use are buggy and how vastly better tested & more widely used popular commercial software is bound to be—and, hence, how much more likely it is to be debugged—than anything designed to manipulate election tallies.
The fact is, there are a lot of easier ways to commit voter fraud if that’s what someone’s determined to do. In my previous article, I linked to a very long list of irregularities that Twitter user Maria Romanetti has helpfully compiled, any one of which is hard to explain without supposing cheating on behalf of Biden.
There were, for example, an extraordinarily high number of ballots cast just for Biden containing no vote for any downstream candidates. As Romanetti notes:
Yes, it’s theoretically possible people hate Trump enough to only cast that single vote, but it only happened in great numbers in a handful of Democrat-controlled cities.
2) Massive undervoting. Completely abnormal proportion of "Biden-only" ballots. Yes, it's theoretically possible people hate Trump enough to only cast that single vote, but it only happened in great numbers in a handful of Democrat-controlled cities. pic.twitter.com/i4CrxRHV0X
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) November 13, 2020
A number of the cities that turned in such a high percentage of Biden-only ballots also just so happened to see “outrageous levels of voter turnout.” Most of them are forced to claim that basement-dweller Joe Biden somehow managed to get more votes than both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.
3) Voter turnout. Several of these same cities/states had outrageous levels of voter turnout. You can argue that they were super driven to defeat Trump or something, but the levels in most cases exceed what Hillary or Obama got, so it’s a thin argument. pic.twitter.com/giBFyFQYqv
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) November 13, 2020
Of course, we witnessed the perennial post-Halloween spectacle of voters rising from the grave to cast ballots for the Democrat candidate. In the crucial state of Pennsylvania, the number of registered voters over 90 or too old to even have a known birthday has remained pretty constant for over a decade. Yet somehow, in the middle of this alleged pandemic, almost 4 times more people of such very advanced age registered to vote than in 2016.
4) Dead or imaginary people voting. I think this one graph kind of says it all. It no doubt happens every time, but the rate of people >90 yo or with 1/1/1900 birthdates (ie no known DOB) quadrupled in PA this time. pic.twitter.com/asicufE4MQ
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) November 13, 2020
Known cases of votes that were fraudulently cast for dead or other living people and illegal ballot harvesting have also been uncovered.
5) Fraudulently voting for other known, living people and/or illegal ballot harvesting. pic.twitter.com/a9z6533xdO
— Maria Romanetti (@WriterRomana) November 13, 2020
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to see a lot more evidence of irregularities that, taken together, are impossible to explain without supposing the election was rigged for Biden, check out the rest of Romanetti’s thread.
RedState’s own resident expert on polling, Scott Hounsell, has also been working overtime exposing all the flagrantly suspicious election results and activity we saw in crucial swing states this year.
Excuse Me While I Call BS: In Michigan
Excuse Me While I Call BS: In Wisconsin
Ballot Clerks in Wisconsin Allegedly Added Witness Statements To Thousands of Invalid Ballots
Excuse Me While I Call BS: In Arizona
Excuse Me While I Call BS: In Georgia
That’s a whole lot of evidence and, crucially, neither Romanetti nor our good friend Scott even bothered mentioning the implausible story about Hammer and Scorecard.
Sidney Powell, unfortunately, however, did. But that was her mistake and, as the President’s lawyers have made clear, she has no official connection to any efforts on his behalf.
As one of my colleagues at RedState privately pointed out, Powell’s expertise is in criminal not civil law. So, if she wanted to be involved in the efforts to expose the election fraud that put Biden over the top, she needed to find some kind of criminal activity.
Perhaps out of the best of motives, Powell allowed herself to be taken in by a conman because it gave her the wedge she needed to be a part of the legal efforts to see that President Trump’s victory in November isn’t stolen. Who knows, perhaps her motives and understanding of the situation were less admirable.
Who cares? There’s no reason to pile on here. People make mistakes and Sidney Powell is owed a little slack for the work she did in exposing Comey & Mueller’s scurrilous plot to destroy General Flynn and all the reprehensible crimes committed along the way.
And, even on the most uncharitable reading of what she’s been saying about the election, Sidney Powell’s sins pale in comparison to the four-year-long attempted coup against President Trump we’ve witnessed and its culminating attempt to steal the 2020 election through voter fraud.
If conservatives do lose this battle, the enthusiasm so many of us show for picking away at ultimately trivial transgressions committed by allies and treating them on par with our enemies’ most despicable crimes will be no small part of the explanation.
For whatever reason, Sidney Powell made the mistake of creating a huge sideshow. She’s not part of the president’s legal team and whatever false claims she’s made have absolutely no bearing on the huge volume of evidence that the election is being stolen by Biden or their efforts to see that it isn’t.
We’re at a critical juncture here, folks. And this is no time to get distracted by irrelevant nonsense.
