May 24, 2021 • 19 mins
There's been a lot of buzz about UFOs in the news lately. Some new video from 2019 was recently leaked showing an object flying by a Navy ship and disappearing into the water. Former President Obama was also recently asked about what he knew about these strange objects. This is all leading up to an upcoming report to be delivered to Congress that will supposedly detail what the Pentagon knows about unidentified aerial phenomena. Ginger Gibson, deputy Washington digital editor at NBC News, joins us for UFOs, Georgia and Arizona still looking into election results and the vote to create a Jan.6 commission moves to the Senate.
Next, President Trump and many of his allies continue to push the claim that there was mass fraud during the last election causing him to lose. Multiple lawsuits have been thrown out in court as there is no evidence to the claims. Arizona is currently going through an audit looking for irregularities. While many of these allegations have been pushed out for some time, where did they originate? Many of the key elements of the story saying the election was stolen from Trump were formed by a man named Russell Ramsland Jr. who was delivering presentations about fraud and voting machines as early as 2018. Jon Swaine, investigative reporter at The Washington Post, joins us for how the stolen election myth was made.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Monday. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
is the Daily Dive. There's been a lot of buzz
about UFOs and the news lately. Some new video from
ten was recently leaked showing an object flying by a
Navy ship and disappearing into the water. Former President Obama
(00:21):
was also recently asked about what he knew about these
strange objects. This is all leading up to an upcoming
report to be delivered to Congress that was supposedly detail
what the Pentagon knows about unidentified aerial phenomena. Gender Gibson,
Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News, joins US for UFOs,
Georgia and Arizona. Still looking into election results and the
(00:44):
vote to create a January six commission moves to the
Senate next. President Trump and many of his allies continue
to push the claim that there was mass fraud during
the last election, causing him to lose. Multiple lawsuits have
been thrown out in court as there's no evidence to
the claims, and while any of these allegations have been
pushed out for some time, where did they originate. Many
(01:04):
of the key elements of the story saying the election
was stolen from Trump were formed by a man named
Russell rams Lyn Jr. Who was delivering presentations about fraud
and voting machines as early as John Swain, investigative reporter
at The Washington Post, joins us for how the stolen
election myth was made. It's news without the noise. Let's
(01:25):
dive in what is true. Uh, and I'm actually being
serious here, is is that uh there are uh there's
footage and records of objects in the skies that we
don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how
they move. Joining us now was Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington
(01:48):
Digital editor at NBC News. Thanks for joining us, Ginger,
thanks for having me. UFOs have been in the news recently.
Last week we saw some new video from ten that
showed a UFO flying around a Navy ship off the
coast of San Diego. It was, you know, jittering around
and then all of a sudden kind of slipped into
the water and disappeared. Uh. We saw an episode of
(02:09):
Sixty Minutes where there was a Navy pilot describing his encounters,
and former President Obama was even asked about it on
the Late Late Show. Uh. You know, he was just
kind of having some fun with it and all that.
But it's, uh, you know, UFOs always kind of pop
up in the news and gets a lot of play.
But we're actually gonna be seeing a U S Intelligence
report being delivered to Congress. This is supposed to be
(02:32):
happening next month, and it's supposed to make public what
the Pentagon knows about UFOs unidentified aerial phenomena they call him. Now,
so what are we what are we expecting from this? Well,
first off, we're expecting that report, which is due to
this in an intelligence committee, to be delayed. We actually
don't think they're going to get it in June, even
though that was the deadline they were given to get
it together for for having the intelligence community put it together.
(02:54):
And so basically, what I think there's there's lots of interest,
lots of intrigue about the potent show for unidentified flying objects.
And as President Obama said, you know, getting serious as
he joked about it, was that we just don't know
where they come from. And by that he means, you know,
they could be little drones from a foreign country spying
on us, or maybe they come from another planet. We
(03:17):
don't know. Um, And I think that that's the sort
of exciting speculation people are really enjoying right now. Yeah,
and you know, some of the new videos that have
come out have been from two thousand four nineteen, so
relatively recent. Uh. Marco Ruby is a funny one because
he always gets a lot of play. He always gets
asked about this for some reason, and he kind of
maintains that line, you know, if this is a foreign
(03:39):
military force or something flying over an air base or whatever,
we need to know about it. So he gets a
lot of play in this situation as well. And all
of this was done because it got slipped into the
two point three trillion dollar COVID relief build at President
Trump signed before he left office, that's right. So the
report was part of a larger bill, so it was
(03:59):
author as by Congress to do this investigation. And I
think that there's, as you said, there's a lot of
coy playing, a lot of folks who think that this
is really probably spies or some type of effort by
a foreign country. They don't want to tell us that
what we're seeing is their spy planes over our military
bases or just over parts of our own are non
(04:21):
military parts of our country. But I think that the
hope that people have about life out off of earth
is such that it keeps the hope alive, right definitely. Well,
I'm looking forward to that way in whatever fashion it
comes out, and it should could, it should be interesting.
Moving on a little bit, people are still trying to
question the election. We have two situations going on right
(04:42):
now with judge in Fulton County, Georgia that includes Atlanta,
said that absentee ballots can be unsealed and reviewed by
a group of electors who are claiming some type of fraud.
I think they were claiming that workers were counting counterfeit,
fraudulent ballots in Arizona. There's been this on owing audit
slash recount in Maricopa County. I think it's two point
(05:04):
one million votes there, but that's been full of problems,
and you know, they're saying that county, the county destroyed
evidence by deleting an election database. I mean, what are
we to make of situations like this, because it seems
like they're trying to move it on into other parts
as well. Well. They found that database, they just didn't
know how to search their computers for it, so it's
(05:25):
not lost. You know. I think that we're in this
really strange time where people are trying to contend that
something that happened didn't happen, and that's that Joe Biden
won the November election and wanted by a lot, and
that there's really no evidence of fraud, and so they're
looking for some type of evidence to try to continue
to bolster this false claim by Donald Trump that he
(05:47):
actually won the election. And look, there's a lot of
critics who say, no harm, go ahead, count we won.
And there's some critics who are concerned, particularly if you
look at places like Arizona, that the process has not
been secure and that even if they just point to
say tiny shift in the numbers, that maybe even when
you get them to win Arizona, that they'll use that
as evident to make people continue to believe the lie
(06:10):
that he won the election, right. And I think that's
the point right there, because I think in both situations
they've already said it's not going to change the outcome.
There's no such, no possible way they're going to reverse anything.
They're just looking for something that they can point to,
so we'll see what happens. There. And the last thing
I wanted to bring up is last week we saw
the House vote to approve legislation for an independent commission
(06:32):
to investigate the Capital riots on January six. All the
Democrats in the House voted for thirty five Republicans voted
for that. Now it moves on to the Senate. They
need ten Republicans to vote with them to approve this.
What does what does that possibility look like? I mean,
we're still looking at unlikely passage in the Senate, but
it appears that uh Senate Majority Leader Chuck Humor, the Democrat,
(06:56):
is going to put the bill on the floor and
let them vote and let Republicans vote as they may,
and if they filibuster it, then that's on them. I mean, really,
just in this remarkable time where like facts of assessing facts,
they're sort of a point of contention and whether or
not people believe things that are in fact factual can
be questioned, I think both of these things go for that,
(07:18):
and I think we're gonna see this debate play out
probably over the next week. Chuck Schumer has said that
they could vote this week on that legislation, And what's
the big opposition firm Republicans on doing this. I mean
it was, it was such a huge deal, you would
think they'd want some clarity on the issue. Some of
them have been pretty blunt and saying that they think
that this is a political liability for them, that they
(07:39):
think the Democrats who gave sort of a deadline in
this for this commission to come up with something by
the end of the year, are just doing it to
use against them in the midterm elections by pointing out
that it was supporters of the former president who stormed
the capital, and they're worried that it will make them
look bad, that it will become a political fight, and
for that reason they won't allow the US to move forward.
(08:01):
Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News, Thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me
in Savannah, Georgia. There is a remote excuse me, a
smart thermostat in one of the tabulation rooms that is
(08:24):
talking to a tabulation server and reporting the votes back
to China, and that was traced by a Microsoft engineer.
Joining us now was John Swain, investigative reporter at the
Washington Post. Thanks for joining us, John, Thanks for having me.
I wanted to talk about a report that you guys
did there at the Washington Post about where the story
(08:45):
came from that the election was stolen from President Trump.
You know, it's always been a big curiosity. There was
a lot of claims, a lot of people saying there
was fraud, votes were being changed, and where is it
everybody getting this information from? And in your guys investigation,
your story, you point to a man named Russell Ramsland
(09:07):
and his group called Allied Security Operations Group. They had
kind of been setting this in motion for a number
of years, looking into a smaller races across the country,
looking into audit logs on these voting machines, and it
all kind of snowballed together and you know, came to
a head with the election. So John tell us a
(09:28):
little bit about how this all started and how everything
kind of blew up. So that's right. Russ Ramsland is
a wealthy businessman based in Dallas, Texas. He has oil
and gas interests. He's had an eclectic career running a
tex Mex restaurant in London and a venture to grow
crystals in space with NASA, and he kind of took
(09:49):
the reins of this security company you mentioned Allied Security
Operations Group, which is based just outside Dallas, and over
the two years before the election, he really focused the
company on the issue of election security and voting machines
and really began pushing the notion that those in machines
were being hacked and the votes were being sent overseas
(10:12):
and making claims that people will probably remember. Became quite
big in the days after the elections. So the issue
of Venezuela. For example, Russ rans Land and asks company,
they were big on this notion. But all voting machines
software in the US originates in Venezuela, And we saw
(10:34):
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who were lawyers close to
the president of the election fetuing this same notion, you know,
and it's not true. There's one company that services just
Los Angeles County who's founders are Venezuelan, but most voting
machine software in the US is run by other companies
and has nothing to do with Venezuela. And so, as
(10:56):
we wrote in our article, we really saw some of
the claims that Russ Randolin was king over the years
before the election being pushed by President Trump and his
allies in the days afterwards. A lot of this had
to do with voting machine audit logs. There were lines
of codes, time stamps, pretty hard to read, and I
think they were looking for irregularities in there and kind
(11:16):
of started developing this notion that these machines were getting
it all wrong. As I mentioned, Ramsland kind of caught
the ear of a lot of people in President Trump's circle,
and then that's how these reports and all this stuff
kind of started getting to him. But tell us a
little bit about Ramsland and kind of the early work
that they were doing. As I mentioned, this kind of
set the basis for everything to come. So Russ Ramsland
(11:39):
made a connection with the voter integrity activists in Texas
named Laura Pressley, and now she had run to city
council in Austin and she lost, but she was convinced
that her election had been stolen, and the reason was
she got all it logs from the machines in her race.
And these auditlogs have lots of lines of kind of
compute to code, and you know, if people have seen
(12:02):
computer code, they'll know that words like invalid and corrupt
and words technical language around computer programming, that kind of
thing featured in these logs, and if you look at
them as an outsider, as a layment, they can look
quite alarming, those errors being recorded and things like that.
But when you talk to experts about what these errors
(12:23):
actually mean, they say that they're just run of the
mill things. And actually, for example, if an election official
tried to connect a memory stick containing votes to the
machine and initially it didn't work, and then it worked
second time, there will be an error on the audit log,
but that doesn't mean that votes were stolen or rigged.
And yeah, Laura Pressley became closest with US Rounds and
(12:46):
in his company, and they examined all it logs from
the eighteen elections in Texas as well, and again found
error messages that they said, we're proof of fraud. And
again when experts looked at these logs, they said there
was nothing really untoward there. But these locks became a
real focus of Ramsland and his associates and their belief
(13:08):
of voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and in deep
but being hacked. Yeah, and you know, as we saw
in the days after the election, with all of these
claims that we're going through, things were just getting thrown
out of court. You know, they're saying there's no evidence
of any of this stuff. This happened early on with
Ramslin and Pressley, as you were just mentioning in her race,
she filed a lawsuit, it got thrown out. They said
(13:30):
it was frivolous. That showed that, you know, it shows
basically how thin a lot of these arguments were. And
it was basically the same thing that happened, but just
amplified because now it was the election and the president's
election that was stolen in that one. So tell me
a little bit about that. How really these claims didn't
get much play. They were recording other people who had
(13:53):
lost elections, and people were saying, no, you know, I
don't want to file a lawsuit because it could make
us look dumb kind of thing. So really they never
got traction other than just to kind of create the conspiracy,
that's right. So in and onwards they tried to sort
of get interest from Canadas. In Texas who had lost,
there was a state senator named Don Huffins and a
congressman named Pete Sessions who had lost. They actually got
(14:17):
back into Congress in twenty was there again. Now they
talked to these candidates, as you say, and they tried
to sell them on the idea that their races may
have been rigged, two were stolen in some way. Really,
these candidates took a look, they didn't really think there
was much to it, and they declined. And as you say,
surprisingly the candidate that really did take the range of
(14:38):
these theories was the President of the United States, and
they really were sort of thrust into the forefront of
the discussion around the election. So for Ramslin in his group,
as things started getting closer to the election, they were
holding these meetings and they were trying to talk to
lawmakers about this. You know, it seemed that the hook
was always to try to get to President Trump issue
(15:00):
that warning that the voting election machines, this fraud that
was going on in much smaller parts could possibly affect
our guy. You know, our candidate could lose because of
all this stuff that's already happening. So tell us where
it kind of made that jump where it really came
across to the president. So some of the people that
(15:22):
Russ Ramsler and his company were briefing in the years
running up to the election were people like Congressman Louie
Gomett of Texas, who was a very staunch defender of
President Trump, and Louis Gomant has said in some little
known public comments that a year before the election he
took claims from a group that matches Russ Ramslin's groups
(15:42):
description security private security outfit in Dallas, Texas Goverments, that
he took their claims to the president directly, and that
the President said, this is a real problem, and that
is one sort of direct route into the White House.
Another was Sydney Powell who in the year up to
the election, she too was briefed by Russ Ramsland and
(16:03):
his company, and then shortly after the election she became
quite close to President Trump. She had meetings with him
at the White House. That was taught that she may
have been appointed a special counsel to investigate the election.
In the end, that didn't happen. But really there were
these people who were briefed in the years and months
in the approach to the election who ended up getting
(16:24):
these claims and these theories to the president and to
people around the president. After that kind of the next
phase of that was the big media blitz, because you know,
all to this point really there had been no real
evidence of this any time that they had produced a report.
It was kind of blown out of the water. They said, well,
there's nothing there. And you even spoke to former senior
(16:46):
cybersecurity official who led the team that was tracking the
integrity of the elections, and they said, nothing really there.
This group, Ramslin and his group just kind of provided
this authenticity or something. They just made a believable enough
to catch enough traction, and Ramsland made all of the
media tours really pushing the idea. And as we know,
(17:08):
one of the former president Trump's strength is in repetition,
and all that repetition kind of just sold all of
those seeds of doubt. That's right. And we heard these
sort of sound bites and factoids created by Ramslands which
were repeated by the President and by his allies. Ramsland
submitted after David's for some of the lawsuits that Sydney
(17:30):
Powell brought. They contained these sort of false details, false claims,
such as turnout in Detroit being a hundred, meaning you know,
there were more votes than there were voters. President Trump
actually repeated that in his speech of the January six
Reality before the Capitol stormed. He repeated it also in
(17:50):
one of his calls with Georgia election officials when he
was trying to persuade them of re examine the result there,
and Ramsland made similar claims that were repeat that. There
was a claim he made about Amtrim County, Michigan about
how there was a error rate in voting machines there.
President Trump tweeted that and said, you know, that should
(18:10):
be investigated. And so as you say, you know, President
Trump was willing just to mindlessly rebroadcast these claims made
by Ramsilent without flat checking them because they were false,
and they made their way into the kind of conservative
media and the ecosystem around the president and some of
the supporters should continue to police them, and it really
(18:31):
changed public perception. I mean, there was so many times
when the President would tweet something out and it's kind
of like, I have no clue where he's getting some
of this stuff from. And that's why I love this article.
There's so much information in this that you and your
team worked on, So I suggest everybody go out and
read it. There's a lot of backstory to a lot
of this, but this is the backstory. This is how
the story had been developed. And and we even saw
(18:53):
it on the campaign trail. The president had been talking
about voter fraud since the very beginning, almost laying the
ground work or so when he lost, it was easy
to just point back to all of that. So there's
a lot of information in your piece, John, as I mentioned,
I suggest everybody go out and check it out, but
just kind of the backstory to how the story that
(19:14):
the election was stolen blew up. John Swain, investigative reporter
at the Washington Post, Thank you very much for joining
us so much. That's it for today. Join us on
social media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter and Instagram.
(19:36):
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us on
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This episode of the Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright
and engineered by Tony Sorrentino him Oscar Ramirez, And this
was your Daily Dive
It's Monday. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and this
is the Daily Dive. There's been a lot of buzz
about UFOs and the news lately. Some new video from
ten was recently leaked showing an object flying by a
Navy ship and disappearing into the water. Former President Obama
(00:21):
was also recently asked about what he knew about these
strange objects. This is all leading up to an upcoming
report to be delivered to Congress that was supposedly detail
what the Pentagon knows about unidentified aerial phenomena. Gender Gibson,
Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News, joins US for UFOs,
Georgia and Arizona. Still looking into election results and the
(00:44):
vote to create a January six commission moves to the
Senate next. President Trump and many of his allies continue
to push the claim that there was mass fraud during
the last election, causing him to lose. Multiple lawsuits have
been thrown out in court as there's no evidence to
the claims, and while any of these allegations have been
pushed out for some time, where did they originate. Many
(01:04):
of the key elements of the story saying the election
was stolen from Trump were formed by a man named
Russell rams Lyn Jr. Who was delivering presentations about fraud
and voting machines as early as John Swain, investigative reporter
at The Washington Post, joins us for how the stolen
election myth was made. It's news without the noise. Let's
(01:25):
dive in what is true. Uh, and I'm actually being
serious here, is is that uh there are uh there's
footage and records of objects in the skies that we
don't know exactly what they are. We can't explain how
they move. Joining us now was Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington
(01:48):
Digital editor at NBC News. Thanks for joining us, Ginger,
thanks for having me. UFOs have been in the news recently.
Last week we saw some new video from ten that
showed a UFO flying around a Navy ship off the
coast of San Diego. It was, you know, jittering around
and then all of a sudden kind of slipped into
the water and disappeared. Uh. We saw an episode of
(02:09):
Sixty Minutes where there was a Navy pilot describing his encounters,
and former President Obama was even asked about it on
the Late Late Show. Uh. You know, he was just
kind of having some fun with it and all that.
But it's, uh, you know, UFOs always kind of pop
up in the news and gets a lot of play.
But we're actually gonna be seeing a U S Intelligence
report being delivered to Congress. This is supposed to be
(02:32):
happening next month, and it's supposed to make public what
the Pentagon knows about UFOs unidentified aerial phenomena they call him. Now,
so what are we what are we expecting from this? Well,
first off, we're expecting that report, which is due to
this in an intelligence committee, to be delayed. We actually
don't think they're going to get it in June, even
though that was the deadline they were given to get
it together for for having the intelligence community put it together.
(02:54):
And so basically, what I think there's there's lots of interest,
lots of intrigue about the potent show for unidentified flying objects.
And as President Obama said, you know, getting serious as
he joked about it, was that we just don't know
where they come from. And by that he means, you know,
they could be little drones from a foreign country spying
on us, or maybe they come from another planet. We
(03:17):
don't know. Um, And I think that that's the sort
of exciting speculation people are really enjoying right now. Yeah,
and you know, some of the new videos that have
come out have been from two thousand four nineteen, so
relatively recent. Uh. Marco Ruby is a funny one because
he always gets a lot of play. He always gets
asked about this for some reason, and he kind of
maintains that line, you know, if this is a foreign
(03:39):
military force or something flying over an air base or whatever,
we need to know about it. So he gets a
lot of play in this situation as well. And all
of this was done because it got slipped into the
two point three trillion dollar COVID relief build at President
Trump signed before he left office, that's right. So the
report was part of a larger bill, so it was
(03:59):
author as by Congress to do this investigation. And I
think that there's, as you said, there's a lot of
coy playing, a lot of folks who think that this
is really probably spies or some type of effort by
a foreign country. They don't want to tell us that
what we're seeing is their spy planes over our military
bases or just over parts of our own are non
(04:21):
military parts of our country. But I think that the
hope that people have about life out off of earth
is such that it keeps the hope alive, right definitely. Well,
I'm looking forward to that way in whatever fashion it
comes out, and it should could, it should be interesting.
Moving on a little bit, people are still trying to
question the election. We have two situations going on right
(04:42):
now with judge in Fulton County, Georgia that includes Atlanta,
said that absentee ballots can be unsealed and reviewed by
a group of electors who are claiming some type of fraud.
I think they were claiming that workers were counting counterfeit,
fraudulent ballots in Arizona. There's been this on owing audit
slash recount in Maricopa County. I think it's two point
(05:04):
one million votes there, but that's been full of problems,
and you know, they're saying that county, the county destroyed
evidence by deleting an election database. I mean, what are
we to make of situations like this, because it seems
like they're trying to move it on into other parts
as well. Well. They found that database, they just didn't
know how to search their computers for it, so it's
(05:25):
not lost. You know. I think that we're in this
really strange time where people are trying to contend that
something that happened didn't happen, and that's that Joe Biden
won the November election and wanted by a lot, and
that there's really no evidence of fraud, and so they're
looking for some type of evidence to try to continue
to bolster this false claim by Donald Trump that he
(05:47):
actually won the election. And look, there's a lot of
critics who say, no harm, go ahead, count we won.
And there's some critics who are concerned, particularly if you
look at places like Arizona, that the process has not
been secure and that even if they just point to
say tiny shift in the numbers, that maybe even when
you get them to win Arizona, that they'll use that
as evident to make people continue to believe the lie
(06:10):
that he won the election, right. And I think that's
the point right there, because I think in both situations
they've already said it's not going to change the outcome.
There's no such, no possible way they're going to reverse anything.
They're just looking for something that they can point to,
so we'll see what happens. There. And the last thing
I wanted to bring up is last week we saw
the House vote to approve legislation for an independent commission
(06:32):
to investigate the Capital riots on January six. All the
Democrats in the House voted for thirty five Republicans voted
for that. Now it moves on to the Senate. They
need ten Republicans to vote with them to approve this.
What does what does that possibility look like? I mean,
we're still looking at unlikely passage in the Senate, but
it appears that uh Senate Majority Leader Chuck Humor, the Democrat,
(06:56):
is going to put the bill on the floor and
let them vote and let Republicans vote as they may,
and if they filibuster it, then that's on them. I mean, really,
just in this remarkable time where like facts of assessing facts,
they're sort of a point of contention and whether or
not people believe things that are in fact factual can
be questioned, I think both of these things go for that,
(07:18):
and I think we're gonna see this debate play out
probably over the next week. Chuck Schumer has said that
they could vote this week on that legislation, And what's
the big opposition firm Republicans on doing this. I mean
it was, it was such a huge deal, you would
think they'd want some clarity on the issue. Some of
them have been pretty blunt and saying that they think
that this is a political liability for them, that they
(07:39):
think the Democrats who gave sort of a deadline in
this for this commission to come up with something by
the end of the year, are just doing it to
use against them in the midterm elections by pointing out
that it was supporters of the former president who stormed
the capital, and they're worried that it will make them
look bad, that it will become a political fight, and
for that reason they won't allow the US to move forward.
(08:01):
Ginger Gibson, Deputy Washington Digital editor at NBC News, Thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks for having me
in Savannah, Georgia. There is a remote excuse me, a
smart thermostat in one of the tabulation rooms that is
(08:24):
talking to a tabulation server and reporting the votes back
to China, and that was traced by a Microsoft engineer.
Joining us now was John Swain, investigative reporter at the
Washington Post. Thanks for joining us, John, Thanks for having me.
I wanted to talk about a report that you guys
did there at the Washington Post about where the story
(08:45):
came from that the election was stolen from President Trump.
You know, it's always been a big curiosity. There was
a lot of claims, a lot of people saying there
was fraud, votes were being changed, and where is it
everybody getting this information from? And in your guys investigation,
your story, you point to a man named Russell Ramsland
(09:07):
and his group called Allied Security Operations Group. They had
kind of been setting this in motion for a number
of years, looking into a smaller races across the country,
looking into audit logs on these voting machines, and it
all kind of snowballed together and you know, came to
a head with the election. So John tell us a
(09:28):
little bit about how this all started and how everything
kind of blew up. So that's right. Russ Ramsland is
a wealthy businessman based in Dallas, Texas. He has oil
and gas interests. He's had an eclectic career running a
tex Mex restaurant in London and a venture to grow
crystals in space with NASA, and he kind of took
(09:49):
the reins of this security company you mentioned Allied Security
Operations Group, which is based just outside Dallas, and over
the two years before the election, he really focused the
company on the issue of election security and voting machines
and really began pushing the notion that those in machines
were being hacked and the votes were being sent overseas
(10:12):
and making claims that people will probably remember. Became quite
big in the days after the elections. So the issue
of Venezuela. For example, Russ rans Land and asks company,
they were big on this notion. But all voting machines
software in the US originates in Venezuela, And we saw
(10:34):
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who were lawyers close to
the president of the election fetuing this same notion, you know,
and it's not true. There's one company that services just
Los Angeles County who's founders are Venezuelan, but most voting
machine software in the US is run by other companies
and has nothing to do with Venezuela. And so, as
(10:56):
we wrote in our article, we really saw some of
the claims that Russ Randolin was king over the years
before the election being pushed by President Trump and his
allies in the days afterwards. A lot of this had
to do with voting machine audit logs. There were lines
of codes, time stamps, pretty hard to read, and I
think they were looking for irregularities in there and kind
(11:16):
of started developing this notion that these machines were getting
it all wrong. As I mentioned, Ramsland kind of caught
the ear of a lot of people in President Trump's circle,
and then that's how these reports and all this stuff
kind of started getting to him. But tell us a
little bit about Ramsland and kind of the early work
that they were doing. As I mentioned, this kind of
set the basis for everything to come. So Russ Ramsland
(11:39):
made a connection with the voter integrity activists in Texas
named Laura Pressley, and now she had run to city
council in Austin and she lost, but she was convinced
that her election had been stolen, and the reason was
she got all it logs from the machines in her race.
And these auditlogs have lots of lines of kind of
compute to code, and you know, if people have seen
(12:02):
computer code, they'll know that words like invalid and corrupt
and words technical language around computer programming, that kind of
thing featured in these logs, and if you look at
them as an outsider, as a layment, they can look
quite alarming, those errors being recorded and things like that.
But when you talk to experts about what these errors
(12:23):
actually mean, they say that they're just run of the
mill things. And actually, for example, if an election official
tried to connect a memory stick containing votes to the
machine and initially it didn't work, and then it worked
second time, there will be an error on the audit log,
but that doesn't mean that votes were stolen or rigged.
And yeah, Laura Pressley became closest with US Rounds and
(12:46):
in his company, and they examined all it logs from
the eighteen elections in Texas as well, and again found
error messages that they said, we're proof of fraud. And
again when experts looked at these logs, they said there
was nothing really untoward there. But these locks became a
real focus of Ramsland and his associates and their belief
(13:08):
of voting machines were vulnerable to hacking and in deep
but being hacked. Yeah, and you know, as we saw
in the days after the election, with all of these
claims that we're going through, things were just getting thrown
out of court. You know, they're saying there's no evidence
of any of this stuff. This happened early on with
Ramslin and Pressley, as you were just mentioning in her race,
she filed a lawsuit, it got thrown out. They said
(13:30):
it was frivolous. That showed that, you know, it shows
basically how thin a lot of these arguments were. And
it was basically the same thing that happened, but just
amplified because now it was the election and the president's
election that was stolen in that one. So tell me
a little bit about that. How really these claims didn't
get much play. They were recording other people who had
(13:53):
lost elections, and people were saying, no, you know, I
don't want to file a lawsuit because it could make
us look dumb kind of thing. So really they never
got traction other than just to kind of create the conspiracy,
that's right. So in and onwards they tried to sort
of get interest from Canadas. In Texas who had lost,
there was a state senator named Don Huffins and a
congressman named Pete Sessions who had lost. They actually got
(14:17):
back into Congress in twenty was there again. Now they
talked to these candidates, as you say, and they tried
to sell them on the idea that their races may
have been rigged, two were stolen in some way. Really,
these candidates took a look, they didn't really think there
was much to it, and they declined. And as you say,
surprisingly the candidate that really did take the range of
(14:38):
these theories was the President of the United States, and
they really were sort of thrust into the forefront of
the discussion around the election. So for Ramslin in his group,
as things started getting closer to the election, they were
holding these meetings and they were trying to talk to
lawmakers about this. You know, it seemed that the hook
was always to try to get to President Trump issue
(15:00):
that warning that the voting election machines, this fraud that
was going on in much smaller parts could possibly affect
our guy. You know, our candidate could lose because of
all this stuff that's already happening. So tell us where
it kind of made that jump where it really came
across to the president. So some of the people that
(15:22):
Russ Ramsler and his company were briefing in the years
running up to the election were people like Congressman Louie
Gomett of Texas, who was a very staunch defender of
President Trump, and Louis Gomant has said in some little
known public comments that a year before the election he
took claims from a group that matches Russ Ramslin's groups
(15:42):
description security private security outfit in Dallas, Texas Goverments, that
he took their claims to the president directly, and that
the President said, this is a real problem, and that
is one sort of direct route into the White House.
Another was Sydney Powell who in the year up to
the election, she too was briefed by Russ Ramsland and
(16:03):
his company, and then shortly after the election she became
quite close to President Trump. She had meetings with him
at the White House. That was taught that she may
have been appointed a special counsel to investigate the election.
In the end, that didn't happen. But really there were
these people who were briefed in the years and months
in the approach to the election who ended up getting
(16:24):
these claims and these theories to the president and to
people around the president. After that kind of the next
phase of that was the big media blitz, because you know,
all to this point really there had been no real
evidence of this any time that they had produced a report.
It was kind of blown out of the water. They said, well,
there's nothing there. And you even spoke to former senior
(16:46):
cybersecurity official who led the team that was tracking the
integrity of the elections, and they said, nothing really there.
This group, Ramslin and his group just kind of provided
this authenticity or something. They just made a believable enough
to catch enough traction, and Ramsland made all of the
media tours really pushing the idea. And as we know,
(17:08):
one of the former president Trump's strength is in repetition,
and all that repetition kind of just sold all of
those seeds of doubt. That's right. And we heard these
sort of sound bites and factoids created by Ramslands which
were repeated by the President and by his allies. Ramsland
submitted after David's for some of the lawsuits that Sydney
(17:30):
Powell brought. They contained these sort of false details, false claims,
such as turnout in Detroit being a hundred, meaning you know,
there were more votes than there were voters. President Trump
actually repeated that in his speech of the January six
Reality before the Capitol stormed. He repeated it also in
(17:50):
one of his calls with Georgia election officials when he
was trying to persuade them of re examine the result there,
and Ramsland made similar claims that were repeat that. There
was a claim he made about Amtrim County, Michigan about
how there was a error rate in voting machines there.
President Trump tweeted that and said, you know, that should
(18:10):
be investigated. And so as you say, you know, President
Trump was willing just to mindlessly rebroadcast these claims made
by Ramsilent without flat checking them because they were false,
and they made their way into the kind of conservative
media and the ecosystem around the president and some of
the supporters should continue to police them, and it really
(18:31):
changed public perception. I mean, there was so many times
when the President would tweet something out and it's kind
of like, I have no clue where he's getting some
of this stuff from. And that's why I love this article.
There's so much information in this that you and your
team worked on, So I suggest everybody go out and
read it. There's a lot of backstory to a lot
of this, but this is the backstory. This is how
the story had been developed. And and we even saw
(18:53):
it on the campaign trail. The president had been talking
about voter fraud since the very beginning, almost laying the
ground work or so when he lost, it was easy
to just point back to all of that. So there's
a lot of information in your piece, John, as I mentioned,
I suggest everybody go out and check it out, but
just kind of the backstory to how the story that
(19:14):
the election was stolen blew up. John Swain, investigative reporter
at the Washington Post, Thank you very much for joining
us so much. That's it for today. Join us on
social media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter and Instagram.
(19:36):
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This episode of the Daily Divers produced by Victor Wright
and engineered by Tony Sorrentino him Oscar Ramirez, And this
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