Recently, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas was quoted as saying:
I can't say that I was familiar at that time with any specific evidence. | was just hearing it from news reports and friends on the ground, grassroots activists who were inside of various polling places that found things suspicious.
In other words, people told her there was voter fraud, but they never gave her any real evidence.
But where did this come from? Some person or group of people must have originated the story that the election was stolen.
Reuters has tracked down a man that they say is behind the myth of rigged voting machines: Dennis Montgomery.
In a special report, The man behind Trump World’s myth of rigged voting machines by Adam Roston and Peter Eisler, 20 December 2022, Reuters reports that one of the earliest versions of this conspiracy came from “an obscure right-wing website, [which] had a hero: Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer and self-described former contractor for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”
Montgomery claimed that a U.S. government surveillance tool designed to manipulate elections had been hijacked to steal the presidency for Joe Biden. This and other unproven claims fed right-wing conspiracies about the election. “Two years later, about two-thirds of Republicans say they believe Trump was cheated, Reuters polls show.”
Montgomery sold information regarding his claims to Mike Lindell, who has spent millions promoting the abolition of voting machines and his theories that the election was stolen.
Montgomery is not the only person who originated bogus claims of election and voter fraud. For example, Navid Keshavarz-Nia claimed that “U.S. intelligence services had developed tools to infiltrate foreign voting systems” and that “hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump in the 2020 general election were transferred to former Vice-President Biden.”
These various claims were picked up by the right wing noise machine and broadcast throughout the right wing bubble.
The Reuters piece takes a deep dive into the origins of the conspiracy theories behind The Big Lie.
I think it is important the DOJ track down the origins of these lies, because they have been used to defraud the American people out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Just the Trump Organization alone, according to the 1/6 select committee, squeezed around $250 million from unsuspecting marks as of last summer. As I pointed out in The Con Man, this is undoubtedly wire fraud, and the DOJ should seek to force the Trump Organization (and every other organization that has used this same lie to defraud people) to give that money back, along with a letter stating that the claims were bogus.
We should demand action from the Biden Administration. Where did all these lies come from? Who can be held accountable?
Because I believe there were crimes committed in these claims, and it is the responsibility of our government to track down the perpetrators of those crimes and make sure they see justice.