Inside the MAGA world scramble to produce findings suggesting the 2020 election was stolen

WASHINGTON — Days after the 2020 presidential election, before all votes were counted and Joseph R. Biden was declared the winner, cyber experts and analysts piled into suites at the Trump Hotel in Washington and other hotel rooms in the area.

The plan was urgent: Crowdsource evidence of electoral fraud to secure a Trump victory with the assistance of his legal team and White House staff.

Weeks later, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn urged leaders of the effort to move to a more remote location, an isolated South Carolina plantation owned by conservative attorney L. Lin Wood. There, they planned weeks of lawsuits, attempts to access voting machines and ways to convince lawmakers to reject key state election results, driven by a frantic mission whose goal was to keep thenPresident Donald Trump in office after an election he lost.

Since the violent attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop certification of the 2020 election results, much of the scrutiny has been trained on what Trump knew, as well as the involvement of those closest to him, including his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. But it was dozens of true believers gathered in hotels in Washington and at the South Carolina plantation who collected the information upon which the Trump campaign based its unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen, information also used to enlist state and federal lawmakers to assist in a bid to overturn the election results.

The House Jan. 6 select committee is making its case in hearings this month of a coordinated, multistep effort with Trump at the center to subvert the will of voters and keep himself in power — even though he had been repeatedly told there was no credible evidence of fraud that could overturn the election. Much of the proof offered in crafting the “Big Lie” came from a motley crew of both big players and people unfamiliar to the public, who left their daily lives, families and jobs for weeks to travel to Washington or submit affidavits to support the Trump campaign’s widely debunked claims of fraud.

Using public records, months of interviews with people behind the scenes and hundreds of never-before-seen documents, The Times assembled accounts of how the group came together and what it did in the frenetic weeks between election day in 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, to help Trump and his circle push the false theory that the election was stolen.

Several of those involved told The Times they spoke to the committee at length as part of its 10-month investigation, or turned over troves of documents and communications. Others said they haven’t been contacted by the committee.

Some of the key players in the group were already working together in New York City before the election to crack the laptop of Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic nominee, said former Overstock.com Chief Executive Patrick Byrne, who was a major funder of the effort. Byrne has increasingly spoken publicly about political conspiracy theories in recent years, particularly after leaving Overstock.com in 2019 over the disclosure that he was in an intimate relationship with Russian agent Maria Butina, who was convicted in the U.S. in connection with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Also a part of the effort were Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell and personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, along with his client, Michael Trimarco, a New York businessman who has previously worked with finance and technology companies and got involved with the group when Giuliani asked him to look at documents on the laptop.

The group set up shop in hotels around Washington to be ready for the election results, staffing multiple bases with a small army of cybersecurity experts, quantitative analysts, lawyers and former members of law enforcement, convinced that fraud took place and determined to prove it. Some said they believed Trump’s months of claims that he could only lose if the election was stolen, others cared less about politics and were already convinced that fraud tainted all American elections.

“Among the people who believe there were a lot of irregularities and saw the pattern in the irregularities, they were all there,” Byrne told The Times of the effort. “Everyone was there trying to do the same thing, to crack it (and) to find the evidence that could be exposed.”

THE BAD NEWS BEARS

Byrne said he rented a block of rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington for a team he called the “Bad News Bears,” where they worked to collect affidavits, look for anomalies in election results and process findings for Powell and Giuliani’s lawsuits. The initial members of Byrne’s team were Conan Hayes, a former surfer and a co-founder of Costa Mesa-based clothing brand RVCA; former Army Capt. Seth Keshel and cybersecurity consultant Todd Sanders, Byrne said. Retired Army Col. Phil Waldron also came with them, but he quickly moved to work closely with the president’s lawyers, Byrne said. Waldron became Giuliani’s main presenter to state and federal lawmakers.

“I brought them up thinking that they were going to become key in helping unscramble (fraud), which they were,” Byrne said.

In an interview with The Times, Trimarco said the group he led — which included attorneys, people who had previously worked in elections and others with ties to former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon — got rooms across the river at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel.

“There was a ton of information coming in from all over literally the world that needed to be vetted through very quickly and then, you know, interpreted to see if it was real or not, and then gotten up through the chain of command, which was to Rudy (Giuliani) so that if (it), I guess, passed muster there, then it would go to the president,” Trimarco said.

Byrne’s cyber team made its case to Powell and Giuliani on Nov. 9 in the Trump campaign offices as staff members were packing up their desks, theorizing that if bad actors had committed fraud in just six counties in swing states, it would have been enough to tip the 2020 election. They met for 45 minutes with Powell, who was so excited that she rushed Byrne and his team in to meet with Giuliani for 30 minutes, Byrne wrote in his book, “The Deep Rig.” Giuliani was less convinced, and asked for a memo outlining their theory, Byrne wrote.

Powell and Giuliani did not respond to interview requests from The Times.

A few days later, Powell and others staying at the Westin Arlington Gateway gathered to hear Russell Ramsland, the head of Dallas-based Allied Security Operations Group, and Waldron detail their own theories on how the system was hacked and what they would need to address it, Trimarco said.

Ramsland declined to speak to The Times and Waldron, who previously worked for Ramsland’s security firm, did not respond to requests for comment.

Ramsland and Waldron laid out the same theory as Byrne’s team but in more depth, Trimarco said, asserting that finding fraud in election machines in six key counties could turn an election.

“They propose a plan that would essentially involve the private contractors — I guess namely themselves — going to get access to these voting machines to go find these security breaches or flaws and be able to audit the results,” Trimarco said.

Since 2018, Ramsland, who ran an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2016 to unseat fellow Republican Pete Sessions in Dallas, had promoted a theory of foreign interference in voting machines to a succession of powerful Republicans, including several members of Congress. His conjecture was presented to but not substantiated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the months before the 2020 election, the Washington Post reported.

Byrne said he first met Waldron and some other cyber experts who would later join them in Washington in the summer of 2020.

Trimarco said when he brought Giuliani the plan by Ramsland and Waldron the day after meeting with them to get permission from the president to allow private contractors to seize voting machines and data, the president’s lawyer dismissed it outright. Giuliani told Trimarco that their focus would instead be on convincing state legislators that the wording of the Constitution gives them power to overturn, alter or “decertify” a state’s presidential election results — even if it changes whom voters selected. That reading of the Constitution is widely dismissed by constitutional experts, who say that elected state officials cannot change electoral college electors once they’ve been chosen by voters.

Though Giuliani rejected the idea, the concept of seizing voting machines would reemerge in mid-December when Trump was asked to sign an executive order authorizing the federal government to take control of state election systems.

CODE NAMES AND PSEUDONYMS

Emails and documents from those involved in the effort that were reviewed by The Times show several people used encrypted ProtonMail accounts or other email addresses connected to a private server. Some used code names in emails and identified themselves only by pseudonyms or initials.

“I’m loading a larger version of the Enola Gay,” Powell wrote in a Nov. 12 email to Wood — who brought an election lawsuit in Georgia arguing proper procedures weren’t followed in the election — in a nod to the American aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in World War II. It is unclear what Powell was referring to in her email.

Giuliani convinced Trump in a Nov. 12 Oval Office meeting to promote the theory that ballot counting machines owned by Dominion Voting Systems changed the results of the election and to allow Giuliani to guide efforts to contest it, the New York Times reported.