Podcast of
Bob Fitrakis on “Fight Back” this week:
Bob and guest Cliff Arnebeck
Discussing the new court filing revealing how the 2004 election was stolen and the apparatus is still in place
http://www.talktainmentradio.com/pages/9504490.php right column, look for 07/27 date
Based on
“New court filing reveals how the 2004 Ohio presidential election was hacked” article on freepress.org
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4239
Posts
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
January 10, 2011
An epic legal battle now rages between Karl Rove and Ohio election rights attorneys. The question is whether the public has the right to see full transcripts of a court deposition that could shed explosive new light on the bitterly contested presidential election of 2004.
The deposition came from the late Michael Connell, Rove’s IT guru. Connell died in a mysterious plan crash in December 2008, one month after he spoke under oath to election protection attorney Clifford O. Arnebeck. Connell had implanted the state-contracted software used to compute Ohio’s electronic voting tabulations during the contest between Bush and John Kerry.
On December 10, 2010, attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association case moved to release the Connell transcript in an ongoing legal struggle with Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The King-Lincoln case was filed in 2006 by attorney Arnebeck alleging civil rights violations against blacks, young voters and others in Ohio’s 2004 election process.
Connell’s November 3, 2008 deposition in Cleveland concerned his role in the 2004 election and whether or not he was being threatened by Rove. Just over a month later on December 19, 2008, Connell died in the mysterious crash of his small plane near his Akron, Ohio, home. Suspicions of foul play surround the accident.
The Connell deposition has been sealed since his death. During the closing days of the 2010 election, King-Lincoln attorneys sought the deposition of Karl Rove in connection with his activities involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in all Ohio elections since 2000.
Rove and Chamber attorneys, as well as the Ohio Attorney General’s office, claimed that there was no connection between Connell’s deposition and more recent activities involving Rove and the Chamber.
Connell’s attorney, James L. Ervin, represented Connell at the deposition and also represented Connell’s estate. He filed papers with the court asking for a 30-day extension of time to file a response to the court on December 27, 2010 regarding the opening of Connell’s deposition.
According to Ervin, “Mr. Connell’s deposition is comprised of questions, answers, and topics that are privileged and/or confidential and are reflected as such by being designated ‘sealed.'” No part of Connell’s deposition has of yet been made public.
Arnebeck told how Connell described what he did: “One, he integrated voter data files with the vote tabulation process in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office in the 2004 election and two, he broadened the accessibility to this information, including facilitating its appearance on a mirror site at the SmartTech offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”
“His testimony provided facts of a general nature. He did not, as suggested by his counsel, reveal or discuss anything that could be fairly described as a trade secret or an expert opinion,” Arnebeck asserted.
In the spring and summer prior to Connell’s deposition, contacts were made on behalf of Connell with both U.S. Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich in an attempt to have Connell testify before Congress regarding his role in the 2004 election.
Memorandum to U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich [PDF]
Ervin’s motion before the court states: “During calendar year 2009, Mr. Connell’s businesses, New Media Communications and GovTech Solutions, came under new ownership, and Mr. Connell’s Estate was probated.”
These pleadings before the court may offer insight into who exactly owns Connell’s election computer businesses. Ervin’s motion states: “because the deposition transcript addresses issues that constituted privilege and/or proprietary matters, the new ownership of Connell’s former businesses may have an interest in the deposition transcripts and may be the owners of the transcript.”
Ervin concludes “Decisions must be made as to who owns Mr. Connell’s 2008 deposition transcript….” This same line of argument has been used to allow private vendors to use secret proprietary source code in election software.
In a democratic society, the people should own Connell’s deposition. Karl Rove should testify under oath about the electronic machinery Connell devised to link Ohio’s 2004 real-time vote count to an obscure company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That company was SmarTech, which according to public records, was hosting a website that was operating out of the White House on that election night.
Says Arnebeck: “Mr. Connell’s testimony is important to the plaintiffs and the public because it reveals how those seeking to steal the 2004 Presidential election in the State of Ohio, led by Karl Rove, were better able to do so through the utilization of these integrated data files and more accessible tabulation processes. SmarTech was simultaneously serving the electronic data processes for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in that election.”
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four books on election protection are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Disclosure: Fitrakis serves as co-counsel with Arnebeck in the King-Lincoln case and was at Connell’s deposition.
Original article posted here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4046
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
October 29, 2010
Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck has filed a two-count complaint against The Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.
Arnebeck charges that the Partnership is “…not truly independent, but rather has been coordinated with the Republican candidates, their agents, committees, parties and their de facto coordinated national campaign being directed by Karl Rove.”
He also charges that when the Partnership claims in its advertising that it’s “not authorized by a candidate or a candidate’s committee” that they are making an illegal “false statement.”
Arnebeck is lead attorney in the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville class action lawsuit stemming from the theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. We are co-counsel and plaintiff in this lawsuit. On Sunday, October 24, Rove was served with a subpoena agreed to by Ohio’s Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, in conjunction with that lawsuit.
The new complaint was filed at the Ohio Election Commission in downtown Columbus on Thursday, October 28.
The complaint reads that “…we identified Karl Rove as the principal perpetrator in an Ohio racketeering conspiracy.” The complaint goes on to explain that: “in the current election cycle the election corruption enterprise of Rove and [Tom] Donahue [head of the US Chamber of Commerce] is being manifested through the influx of billionaire/global corporate money where the actual source of the funding and speech is concealed.”
Arnebeck wants the Election Commission to find that there is probable cause to believe that “…this secret money is an in-kind contribution to these campaigns.” Arnebeck hopes that the finding of probable cause from the Commission “will enable private parties seeking to uphold the integrity of the election process to conduct discovery to prove their case which under the Ohio racketeering statute must be done as a pre-requisite to an assertion of criminal liability.”
The filing has resulted in the scheduling of a hearing at 9am Monday, November 1, in Columbus. If the Commission grants Arnebeck’s probable cause request, it would open Rove and the Chamber of Commerce to widespread discovery that, according to Arnebeck, could lead to criminal prosecution based on charges of racketeering, money laundering and conspiracy.
According to Arnebeck, the United States Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision allows independent contributions from wealthy private and corporate donors. Coordinated activities between partisan candidates and groups like the Chamber of Commerce’s Partnership for Ohio’s Future and Rove’s American Crossroads are illegal.
The complaint also discloses new information about the December 19, 2008, air crash death of Michael Connell, Rove’s computer guru. Connell was deposed one day prior to the November, 2008, presidential election. He has been linked to construction of a computer apparatus that was tied directly to Rove and was capable of election manipulations. These activities have been at the center of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit. We will report further on this matter in an upcoming story.
“Tom Donahue, head of the United States Chamber of Commerce, has been quite outspoken and proud of his accomplishments in delivering vast sums of money to Karl Rove and to Karl Rove’s operation, often through non-profit corporate entities, the names of which conceal the identity and character of the actual contributors,” Arnebeck says.
Arnebeck’s complaint suggests there may have been illegal contributions from a foreign corporation. “In a meeting I had with Lloyd Mahaffey, of the United Auto Workers,” Arnebeck writes, “he told me that when representatives of Daimler-Chrysler were confronted by the union concerning their expenditures to influence the Ohio Supreme Court race in 2000, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, their representatives assured Mahaffy that the decision to make that contribution was made in Germany.” Such a decision-making process for contributing funds to a U.S. political campaign would be clearly illegal.
Arnebeck asserts that he has “…a confidential source who personally witnessed Karl Rove and Tom Donahue coordinating their activities to determine the outcome of a state Supreme Court election.” Such coordination would also be illegal under state and federal election laws.
The injection of huge sums of cash into partisan election operations has re-defined the process of American democracy in this and several previous election cycles. This filing with the Ohio Election Commission is a critical step in testing the legalities of these coordinated efforts.
—
Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection and are co-counsel and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville class action lawsuit. Contributions to this suit can be made through http://www.freepress.org, where the FITRAKIS FILES can be found. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at http://www.harveywasserman.com.
Original article here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3981
The suspicious, disturbing death of election rigger Michael Connell
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 20, 2008
Michael Connell, the crucial techno- lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.
Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.
A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various interviews and a deposition Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.
Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama’s election: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now.” Connell wrote: “This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.”
Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com. The SmartTech servers at one point housed Karl Rove’s emails. Some of Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.
In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.
At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.
But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.
Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.
Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”
Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key pieces of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.
There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.
Revised December 21, 2008
———-
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION…, available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
October 1, 2008
Ohio 2008 has opened with a surge of first-time voters and the subpoena of a shadowy Bush electronic operative who may have helped steal the White House, a subpoena that may be followed by one for Karl Rove.
The presidency could again be decided here by how well what’s left of the American democratic process can be protected. So election activists are asking concerned citizens everywhere to become registration volunteers, poll workers and judges, Video the Vote observers and to conduct post-election hearings with legal standing.
In-person balloting began Tuesday, September 30, as new Ohio voters registered and voted simultaneously. Thousands crammed into county facilities throughout the state. Set to continue until October 6, the innovation came by accident in an otherwise repressive piece of legislation foisted on the state by Republican legislators after the theft of the 2004 election.
The GOP has since sued to stop this simultaneous register-and-vote process, but lost 4-3 in the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court. Thousands of new Buckeye voters have now surged into election centers, and may do so through October 6.
Election officials predict as many as a third of Ohio voters—around 2 million—will vote absentee this year. But the GOP now appears to be mailing to Democratic voters fake absentee ballots with bogus return addresses and features that could result in their being discarded. The Republicans are also using caging techniques, such as fake mailings, to eliminate likely Democratic voters from the registration rolls.
Democratic Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has tried to make paper ballots available at every polling station for those who don’t trust electronic touchscreen machines. But GOP legislators intervened, claiming “cost problems,” and Brunner so far has limited availability to just a quarter of the potential demand. Pro-democracy activists are suing to make them universally available.
While that fight proceeds, Attorneys Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck have subpoenaed IT specialist Michael Connell, a shadowy operative who managed the Bush-Cheney 2000 web site. Connell has a checkered history in highly partisan behind-the scenes information manipulation (https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2008/1665).
In 2004, Connell was paid with state funds by GOP Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell to shunt the Ohio vote count was shunted to the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which housed the servers for the Republican National Committee. In the wee morning hours of election day, vote counts mysteriously shifted from John Kerry to give George W. Bush his second term in the White House.
Connell has since been fingered by Stephen Spoonamore, a McCain supporter and GOP computer operative who has charged that Connell may have manipulated the Ohio 2004 vote count. As a Repubican insider, Spoonamore’s sworn testimony is being given legal credence by Federal Judge Algernon Marbley, who certified the subpoena against Connell.
Connell and the GOP are certain to continue fighting demands for public testimony. But as the case escalates, it becomes increasingly likely that Connell’s close associate, former White House advisor Karl Rove, could also be subpoenaed as part of the on-going King-Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit.
The final outcome of the case is not likely to be settled until long after the 2008 election. Amidst what is likely to be the largest voter turnout in US history, election protection activists are recruiting and training thousands of democracy advocates to register new voters and to check the registrations of those who may be knocked off the rolls without their knowledge. More than 300,000 Ohio voters were disenfranchised in the run-up to 2004, and at least 170,000 have since been eliminated in Franklin County alone. Many citizens who believe they are registered may not be.
Democracy advocates are also asking citizens throughout the nation to serve as poll workers, poll judges and Video-the-Vote observers, and to organize post-election pubic hearings. With thousands of new voters already surging to the polls, with millions of absentee ballots beginning to pour in, and with an energized electorate expected to overwhelm the precincts on November 4, the difference between what happened in 2004 and who next enters the White House will likely be determined by how well the 2008 electoral process can be protected.
—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO, now at www.freepress.org, where they are publisher and senior editor. They are zattorney and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit.
Original link;
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3214
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