The Stolen Election of 2004: One Step Closer to the Truth
What would you think if you found out that the web services and communications company of a high-level Republican consultant and long-time GOP operative (Michael L. Connell) who had provided web site hosting for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, the Republican National Committee, and other Republican candidates, also had another company that was asked by the the Ohio Secretary of State (who was chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort) to create Ohio’s official state election website (election.sos.state.oh.us), which would be used to present the 2004 presidential returns as they came in?
And what would you think if that same website - election.sos.state.oh.us - was hosted by SmarTech, a company in Chattanooga, TN, with a long list of Republican connections, including hosting the official 2008 Republican National Convention’s website, and providing email hosting services for the gwb43 domain, which was used by members of the White House staff - including Karl Rove - to send emails outside “official White House channels,” thereby evading freedom of information laws and requests?
Now, given that George W. Bush “won” Ohio and Ohio’s Electoral College votes gave him his reelection victory over John Kerry, it is extremely plausible, as Republican IT expert Stephen Spoonamore suggests, that the placement of the SmarTech servers “in the middle of the network, is a defined type of attack,” also know as a “Man in the Middle Attack” (MIM) and they could have “functioned as a routing point for malicious activity.”
RawStory has more the full story as well as excerpts of Spoonamore’s affadavit:
“Any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible, and in fact likely, that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose,” he adds. “In the case of Ohio 2004, the only purpose I can conceive for sending all county vote tabulations to a GOP managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Sec. of State, would be to hack the vote at the MIM.”
And, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff as reported by RawStory, there is a McCain connection:
“…John McCain’s presidential campaign paid nearly a million dollars for web services to a firm called 3eDC, created and partly owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. According to an archived version of a 3eDC webpage from 2007, that firm’s five “strategic partners” included not only Connell’s New Media Communications but also Campaign Solutions – a firm run by Connell’s sometimes-partner, Rebecca Donatelli – and a component of SmarTech called AirNet.”
Boggles the mind, we know.
There is good news, though. Connell has just been subpoenaed to testify in an Ohio case (King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell) brought by Columbus attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections. His testimony and these documents could once and for all prove that vote-tampering and civil rights violations took place during the 2004 presidential election.
Icing on the cake are the “Hold letters” that “were sent out in July to parties in the case, informing them of their obligation not to destroy relevant documentation.” One of these letters asks Attorney General Michael Mukasey “to advise the federal government of its responsibility to preserve emails from Rove,” known here from now on as “Teflon Turd Blossum,” who is hard at work to “swing” the election in 2008.