[MUSIC FADES IN]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, the anatomy of the "Big Lie."
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: In November of 2020, a group of people gathered on a former slave plantation in South Carolina.
Doug Bock Clark: It's a pretty spectacular piece of property. It's roughly 2,000 acres.
Basu, Narrating: The plantation belonged to Trump lawyer and QAnon conspiracy theorist Lin Wood.
Clark: It was sort of described as like a place that you could survive the apocalypse in.
Basu, Narrating: Joining Wood there was a coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and ex-military intelligence officers. This was days after the 2020 presidential election. Biden had been declared the winner, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Trump was not willing to concede. So, this team of people, they came up with a plan.
Clark: So, a lot of these people just started congregating there, and it became a headquarters of sorts for collecting research to try and prove the idea that the election had been stolen.
Basu, Narrating: Doug Bock Clark reported on this for "ProPublica." It's the inside story of what started as a few little lies to try to prove the election was stolen, how that snowballed to become Trump's "Big Lie," and the people who helped make it possible. I asked Doug to start by telling us who exactly was part of this group that assembled that weekend on the plantation, what he calls the "coalition."
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Clark: So, there are a number of people. Some of them were very well-known Republic … people like Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security advisor, or Sidney Powell, who is on the legal team for the Trump campaign challenging the election. A major financier, someone who was paying for flights, hotel rooms, was a man named Patrick Byrne, who's the former CEO of Overstock.com. All of these people would be very well-known deniers of the legitimacy of the election. But we also found that they were in very, very close contact with a number of people who aren't as well known and that they were coordinating behind the scenes and they were meeting in various hotel rooms around Washington, D.C. And these sort of lesser-known people would actually go on to play extremely important roles in furthering the idea of the stolen election.
Basu: And what was the shared goal? What was the stated goal of this group just after the election?
Clark: Well, many of them sincerely seemed to be searching for evidence of election fraud. In looking at private emails and messages back and forth, they really seemed to think there was no way that Trump could've lost and therefore that the election must have been stolen. The problem was when they started grabbing rumors off of social media. I mean, they would post a call-out on Twitter saying, send us your ideas about how the election was stolen. And unsurprisingly, they got a lot of unvetted rumors about what had actually happened. And they also …
Basu: Wait, so you're saying that they literally had posted to social media inviting any sort of tipsters to reach out to them?
Clark: Correct.
Basu: Right. And that, in and of itself, is not necessarily problematic. There are a lot of ways in which we generally ask for tipsters to contribute to things. This is a very common practice at "ProPublica," right? Hey, tell us about X, Y, Z that you're noticing in your own community. Fill out this form.
Clark: Absolutely. So, it's standard whether it's journalistic practice or anyone investigating anything, you do wanna listen to what's out there and get as many tips as you possibly can. But once you get those tips, then you have to vet them. And in investigating their investigation and looking at the steps they took, looking at literally hundreds of emails, talking to many of the people who are involved in this, both their investigators, them themselves, there was very, very little actual vetting of the information. And when they did vet something, when they found a claim that they were really excited about and they really wanted to prove, sometimes [CHUCKLES] they would spend significant resources trying to chase down this lead and would find it was not true. And their investigators would tell them that, at which point they would not inform the public, even if they had made public claims about these facts or had even used them in court documents.
Basu: Mm. Well, Doug, I thought maybe what we could do is just take a few examples of the little untruths that you mentioned and follow the process of how they snowballed into something bigger. So, someone in the coalition told you that, to this day, there is still a widespread belief in Arizona that hundreds of thousands of ballots were brought into the state on an airplane after election day from somewhere in Asia. So, tell us the anatomy of that fraudulent claim.
Clark: Yeah. So, the person who we're quoting there isn't just even a "someone," it's actually a cybersecurity contractor named Doug Logan who would go on to run the Arizona audit, which was a process in which the Arizona Senate turned over roughly 2 million ballots to him and his company and the people working for them so that they could hand count and check the validity of the election in Maricopa County, Arizona, which is a key center of votes in one of the most important swing states. And so, what he told us is, we really felt we had to check this idea that there had been a plane that flew fake ballots for Biden out. We had to check this idea out because so many people believed it. And so, we wanted to confirm or disconfirm it in our audit. However, one of the striking pieces of evidence we found was a recorded call in which a man named James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been working with Logan at Lin Wood's plantation, had very much been part of this coalition, had been involved in all sorts of different activities they were doing. This man, Penrose, explained on the call that he'd spent $75,000 hiring private investigators to look into this theory. And he also explained that these investigators had found nothing. When they traced the origins of this false idea back to their source, what he found was an airline employee. And Penrose says on this call, when he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with, and he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane. That created the rumor. And yet, you still had various people within the coalition, like Sidney Powell, who is talking about this idea of planes flying in ballots at rallies. She was pushing this out on some right-wing media interviews and was also prepared to call a witness about this in court. They themselves knew it was false. And not only did they know it was false, these ideas kept going for months and months and months afterwards.
Basu: And to think it all came down to that one person. That airline employee who, as you said, made it up to sort of troll people. Wasn't, it seems at least, himself an election fraud proponent, or wasn't an election denier, but was sort of trying to prove a point it sounds like?
Clark: According to what Penrose says on his call, according to what his investigators found, yeah, that's what it sounds like.
Basu: Hmm. You write that one of the most consequential pieces of the stolen election myth was a report that claimed to have found intentional fraud in Dominion Voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. So, tell us about how that story started and where it took us.
Clark: So, one of the things that this group of people really became focused on was the idea that votes had been flipped in American voting machines. And a key piece of evidence that would have extraordinary repercussions, that would be talked about by President Trump, that would be used by Trump to lean on Department of Justice officials to try and get favorable outcomes in the disputes over the election, was this thing called the "Antrim Report." And what the "Antrim Report" was supposed to be was sort of a technical computer analysis of the hard drives of some of these Dominion Voting machines that had been imaged in a small rural county called Antrim County in Michigan. And it purported to have hard technical proof that these machines were designed in order to intentionally flip votes. And I'm gonna just take a second and actually read a quote to sort of show …
[PAPER RUSTLING]
Basu: Yeah, sure.
Clark: … how direct the version of the report was that was released. "The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systematic fraud and influence election results. This leads to voter or election fraud." And so, we went and tracked down and found one of the people who had actually written that report. And what that person said was, well, actually, I didn't write [CHUCKLES] the things that were in the report. Those things that I have just read off to you. What I did was I created a technical report. It found some things that I thought were suspicious. But I couldn't prove that the whole election was stolen just by looking at one of these machines. And I didn't write that. And so, what he told us was that he prepared this report, and he noted his suspicions, but he also tried to write sort of a careful technical document. We also talked to someone else who is familiar with that original version of the report. But then that report was turned over to Allied Security Operations Group, that security contracting company, and very shortly thereafter it was released in this sort of new, very politicized form of it.
Basu: To make sure I'm understanding you correctly, it sounds like there was the original report filed by cybersecurity experts. Technical report. And at some point, what actually got released was something that had added on conclusions. Politicized conclusions that were not reached in the original report. Is that right?
Clark: That's fair.
Basu: Yeah. So, let's talk about how, as you've mentioned, these claims about Dominion machines, they've just sort of lingered on. They continue to live on, and proponents of this stolen election myth continue to refer to it. What has Dominion said about these claims?
Clark: Dominion has strongly denied it. Independent fact checkers have knocked down a lot of these claims. Even more strikingly, the Trump campaign itself investigated these claims. And in emails and a memo that were released in the discovery phase of a lawsuit, it was revealed that the Trump campaign took less than a day to figure out that this stuff was not real.
[MYSTERIOUS MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Not only has Dominion strongly denied claims that the company was involved in election fraud, it's also taken legal action. Dominion has filed multiple billion-dollar defamation lawsuits against many members of the coalition, including former CEO of Overstock Patrick Byrne and former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell. It's also sued "Fox News," "Newsmax," and "One America News Network" for spreading these false claims. All of these cases are currently making their way through the courts. And in the meantime, these TV networks have been running disclaimers when covering voter fraud.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[INTENSE MUSIC]
[START NEWSMAX ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Reporter: No evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.
[END NEWSMAX ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: Another person being sued by Dominion is Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow. Lindell has been one of the most vocal proponents of the "Big Lie."
[START MONTAGE OF ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIPS]
[CNN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Mike Lindell: After they're tabulated, they can get hacked after the fact, which they were, because Donald Trump is gonna win anyway.
[WORLDVIEW WEEKEND BROADCAST NETWORK ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Mike Lindell: Right now, the biggest concern is getting this election pulled down. Donald Trump won.
[REAL AMERICA'S VOTE ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Mike Lindell: And the election of 2020 is going bye-bye.
[C-SPAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Mike Lindell: If anybody doesn't believe that all this corruption and election fraud is real, they couldn't be more wrong.
[END MONTAGE OF ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIPS]
Basu, Narrating: In fact, Lindell has said many times that the evidence of a rigged election was so strong that he told his followers that Trump would be reinstated as president on August 13th, 2021.
[START THE ERIC METAXAS RADIO SHOW ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Mike Lindell: And I fully believe that myself. He'll be back in.
[END THE ERIC METAXAS RADIO SHOW ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: Doug explained how Lindell's faulty predictions, and some of his claims about voting machines, are linked to a widely debunked conspiracy theory called "Hammer and Scorecard."
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Clark: It's a rather convoluted story, but at its base, what it holds is that there was a CIA supercomputer named "the Hammer," which was used for domestic surveillance and possibly also interfering with foreign elections. And at some point, it was moved out of the government and either taken over by liberals or taken over by foreign governments, including possibly China, Iran, Venezuela, so on and so forth. And that supercomputer, the Hammer, using a software called "Scorecard" was potentially sort of the agent by which votes had been flipped in the 2020 election.
Basu: So again, this is all [SIGHS] at completely theoretical level. Fair to call it a conspiracy theory, even, would you say?
Clark: It's often been described as a conspiracy theory, and no evidence has ever emerged about it. And when people have tried to bring up ideas like this in court, they have universally been knocked down.
Basu: I see. Okay. So, how did Mike Lindell get linked into this?
Clark: So, Lindell was part of [CHUCKLES] the many people who arrived in Washington after Trump lost the election. You know, was a very, very strong Trump supporter and sought to help the man that he believed won the election. And according to what we've been told, give or take January 2021, he becomes fascinated with this idea of "Hammer and Scorecard." And that what he was gonna do was pour in millions of dollars of his own money in order to prove that "Hammer and Scorecard" was not actually a conspiracy theory, but that it was true. He himself has claimed in recent interviews that - there's no way to independently verify this - that he spent $35 million on what's called "election integrity efforts." And some of that money went to both funding people who had worked with this sort of coalition back in November and December of 2020, who were sort of doing the original work on finding and searching for so-called evidence of election fraud. A lot of them ended up sort of moving over into an effort that Lindell called his "cyber symposium." So, in this cyber symposium, he promised that he was gonna hold a three-day event in South Dakota and that he was going to invite lawmakers, journalists, election integrity experts, cyber experts, and he was gonna provide the data. Finally provide sort of the technical data that would prove that votes had been flipped in American election machines and that Trump was the actual winner of the election. And so, [CHUCKLES] in August, a lot of people ended up heading off to South Dakota hoping to sort of see this final promised proof.
Basu: And what happened at this symposium? What was presented?
Clark: So, what was presented was many hard drives' worth, many terabytes' worth of data that Lindell claimed to actually prove the fraud. However, we obtained the private chat messages between a group of cyber analysts that were supposed to look through this data and vet it and be able to use it in order to prove that the election was stolen. And in this chat, they're very explicitly discussing, this data doesn't show what we were promised. We were promised that it would contain evidence of "Hammer and Scorecard," but it doesn't. [CHUCKLES] Why after months and months of being promised that we were gonna be given the data to prove "Hammer and Scorecard," why aren't we being given it? And it's very frank. I can read off some of the direct quotes from those messages.
[PAPER RUSTLING]
Basu: Yeah! Do. Do.
Clark: "I have checked them all, and they are NOT PROOF." And "not proof" is all in capitals. And the other person writes back, "At the eleventh hour, why do we still have zero proof? If the software does exist and the developer is working with us, it shouldn't take 'em 10 months to figure out how to extract the data" that would prove this person's assertions.
Basu: I'm curious also, if you can speak to, how did Lindell take that news [CHUCKLES] that frankly, the information, the data that he was promising just wasn't there?
Clark: One of the people on that team told us that when he informed Lindell, Lindell basically just refused to listen to what he was being told. He just ended up yelling at this person and telling them that they were wrong. And the cyber symposium rolled on, and the people who publicly got on stage kept sort of pushing the idea that they would have proof of the election. That they'd actually seen plausibility from the data. That this was real. But again, privately, the people behind the scenes were saying the exact opposite thing.
Basu: I understand that many of the coalition members who responded to your reporting sort of doubled down on their belief in the election having been stolen. I guess I wanna know your thoughts. I mean, what's in it for everyone involved in the coalition to keep on supporting the "Big Lie"?
Clark: It's very hard to read people's mind. It's very hard to sort of extrapolate out and say what someone else's motivations are. In our reporting, we tried to be very, very careful. These are their own words. This is where we have recordings of them, this is where we have their internal messages, and really show that they knew at points that some of the evidence they were pushing was just incredibly flawed. But as you note, despite that fact, many of them just sort of doubled down. A spokesperson from Michael Flynn just said it was, quote, "a stupid article. No one we care about will read it." Other people would say, "You're wrong," but they wouldn't actually respond to many pages of fact checking letters that we sent them as well as many, many interview requests. And some of the people, like Patrick Byrne, who's emerged as sort of a de facto spokesman for a lot of these ideas, who engages with the press while a lot of the other ones don't do that, he told us, some of the ideas we had, they were wrong. But he told us that he thought it was sort of nitpicking to look at this stuff, and he kept pushing new ideas of election fraud. Sort of new reports, new analyses that he claimed were more valid this time. And so, in a lot of ways, it's just this [SIGHS] unending pattern. There's always gonna be another report, another sort of debunking of the debunking. And because the social and media sphere that these people live in, and the sort of traditional media sphere that they live in, doesn't really push back, doesn't really dig down into the evidence of the things that they're saying, they can just keep saying more and more things. And those things never get vetted.
Basu: Yeah. I mean, you cite polls that show over two-thirds of Republican doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Did knowing that inform your approach to the story? Were you thinking of those people? What's the message that you're trying to relay to people who do still believe the election was stolen?
Clark: I would just say, look at the evidence, look at the quality of the evidence, trace it all the way back, look at the foundational stuff, and you'll just find that the evidence collapses repeatedly. And that even a lot of the people who are selling these ideas, who are pushing them, know that key pieces are not valid. It's an extraordinary thing to think that a small group of people has spread an idea to millions. But, at least in the case of suspicions about voting machines, which this group was really, really instrumental in pushing, a lot of that can be traced back to them.
Basu: Hmm. Now, I don't have polling numbers around this, but maybe this is just my general sense of things. Being in news, talking to folks about news, talking about news on the weekends [CHUCKLES] in social context, I don't know if this has happened to you, if you've ever been telling folks about what you're reporting on or what your latest reporting was on, and sort of seeing the apathy, I suppose, [CHUCKLES] that some people sort of receive this with. Are you concerned that people are losing interest in the story about the "Big Lie"?
Clark: I am concerned. I don't think that the country is paying enough attention to the pernicious effects that this belief that the election was stolen is having on our political system. If you can't trust the electoral system, if you can't trust that your vote and other peoples' votes are going to be correctly counted, that removes the foundation of democracy. How can elections work? How can our government work? And I think it's really an existential crisis. And as you note, a lot of people are frustrated about hearing about this all the time. Or they just don't react to it anymore. Some of it may be they've heard it so much. Another thing that I've sort of encountered reporting is the idea that, well, what can I do about it? These things are so entrenched in our very partisan political system. This is just the way it is. And I think that sort of that apathy and that cynicism is extraordinarily corrosive and let's these pernicious ideas spread. And this is something we really do have to care about, and we do have to get right. And we do have to try and bring the narrative back to the truth. Otherwise, the country's gonna be in a very bad place.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu: Doug, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for your reporting.
Clark: Thanks for having me on.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Doug Bock Clark's article for "ProPublica" on Apple News. You can find a link on our show notes page.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]