Loeffler, Raffensperger, Dominion and MITRE

Undermining confidence in Georgia election integrity

HANK SULLIVAN — JUNE 25 

Insincerity Rules Our Political World

Accord­ing to a recent Greater Geor­gia press release, “Today, for­mer U.S. Sen­a­tor and Greater Geor­gia Chair­woman Kel­ly Loef­fler called on the Geor­gia Sec­re­tary of State and the State Elec­tion Board to take emer­gency action to fix a long-exist­ing soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in Georgia’s vot­ing machines ahead of the 2024 elec­tion.” Greater Geor­gia is a new advo­ca­cy group chaired by for­mer Kemp-appoint­ed US Sen­a­tor, Kel­ly Loef­fler. Accord­ing to Greater Geor­gia, the group is tasked with the assign­ment to, “reg­is­ter, reach, and acti­vate more eli­gi­ble vot­ers in com­mu­ni­ties across the Peach State.”

Now, below, see Kel­ly Loef­fler on the Greater Geor­gia web­site, sit­ting at the head of a table with a black fam­i­ly eat­ing crois­sants. I drop that image in here because Loeffler’s efforts to ensure elec­tion integri­ty are about as sin­cere as an effort to depict her com­mon­ly sit­ting around with black peo­ple eat­ing crois­sants, all in their Sun­day best. This is not to say Loef­fler is a racist, not at all, only to say this vignette would nev­er occur unless a pho­tog­ra­ph­er were present to cap­ture the moment for pub­lic consumption. 

In case your mem­o­ry is a lit­tle fuzzy, Loef­fler and hus­band Jef­fery Sprech­er, CEO of Inter­con­ti­nen­tal Exchange and chair­man of the New York Stock Exchange, are report­ed bil­lion­aires. Now, there is noth­ing wrong with that. If you got it, you got it. But, when indi­vid­u­als have that much per­son­al wealth, it is prac­ti­cal­ly incon­ceiv­able that they wouldn’t con­sid­er using a pit­tance of it to help shape a few world events more to their lik­ing. To that end, short­ly before tak­ing the office of Gov­er­nor in 2019, a $500K loan Gov­er­nor-elect Bri­an Kemp guar­an­teed was mys­te­ri­ous­ly set­tled, with no details made pub­lic. That is not a small amount of mon­ey for reg­u­lar folks, but is a pit­tance for some­one like Loef­fler. Any­way, even­tu­al­ly, and com­plete­ly out of the blue, Gov­er­nor Kemp tapped Loef­fler as Isakson’s replace­ment. On that fact alone, whether there had been a finan­cial arrange­ment between Kemp and Loef­fler to pay Kemp’s debt in exchange for her appoint­ment, rec­og­niz­ing the impend­ing retire­ment of Isak­son, would be a nat­ur­al ques­tion to ask, which many peo­ple did and still do. 

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Now, I ques­tion the for­mer appoint­ed senator’s sin­cer­i­ty because she has been caught many times being at least ques­tion­ably sin­cere. Below you will see Kel­ly pos­ing as a hunter, albeit nev­er hav­ing owned a hunt­ing license. The insin­cer­i­ty of this ad is overwhelming. 

But, okay, I get it. If you want to be a politi­cian, you have to play cer­tain games. You have to estab­lish a mar­ketable image among the great unwashed if you have any chance of elec­tion. Yes, I under­stand. They all do it. It’s just a shame that politi­cians can’t get elect­ed out of sin­cer­i­ty, but I sup­pose that’s our fault, and not theirs. 

And frankly, all this is insin­cer­i­ty is pret­ty mean­ing­less. It real­ly doesn’t mat­ter that Kel­ly is not a hunter, although she tried to make us believe she is, or that she wants us to think she com­mon­ly sits around a table eat­ing crois­sants with black fam­i­lies, or that those folks in the pic­ture were not paid actors, or that those crois­sants were not cold, hav­ing come in a sack from Burg­er King a cou­ple of hours before the pho­to could be per­fect­ly com­posed. Now, if Kelly’s han­dlers want­ed to add a lit­tle real­ism to that pho­to, they could have at least ordered bis­cuits rather than crois­sants. If they are read­ing, I expect they are tak­ing note. 

But, you’re right; none of that real­ly mat­ters. All it does is demon­strate a pat­tern of insin­cer­i­ty not only attrib­ut­able to Loef­fler, but one which per­me­ates prac­ti­cal­ly every activ­i­ty most politi­cians desire to pub­li­cize. On the oth­er hand, what real­ly does mat­ter is the insin­cer­i­ty Kel­ly Loef­fler dis­played a cou­ple of years ago, on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021. That was the day Kel­ly Loef­fler threw the Trump pres­i­den­cy under the bus, act­ing the part of arriv­ing at the Capi­tol that morn­ing, insin­cere­ly express­ing that she ful­ly intend­ed, “to object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of elec­toral votes,” but because of the days events, for rea­sons she did not real­ly explain, she could no longer “in good con­science object to the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of these elec­tors.” As if that state­ment were not insin­cere enough, Loef­fler dou­bled down, “The vio­lence, the law­less­ness and siege of the halls of Con­gress are abhor­rent and stand as a direct attack on the very insti­tu­tions my objec­tion was intend­ed to pro­tect, the sanc­ti­ty of the demo­c­ra­t­ic process.” Thus, know that on Jan­u­ary 6th, 2021, Geor­gia Sen­a­tor Kel­ly Loef­fler decid­ed against pro­tect­ing the nation’s demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es because in her words, oth­ers had just that day direct­ly attacked them. Now, does that even make sense? Of course not. Her speech did not make sense because it was insin­cere and doubt­ful she even wrote it. Her speech was not sin­cere because her pur­pos­es were nev­er to pro­tect demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es in the first place. And although Kel­ly Loef­fler refused to pro­tect the Amer­i­can demo­c­ra­t­ic process­es when it real­ly mat­tered, she wants us to believe she is sin­cere in pro­tect­ing them now. I’m sor­ry, but as a friend says, after that “you can’t come back brand new.” The one sin­cere act of Kel­ly Loef­fler that day was, in walk­ing away from object­ing to the law­less­ness of the 2020 elec­tion, she also walked away from her sworn oath to defend the Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States. Yes, obvi­ous­ly, she sin­cere­ly intend­ed to walk away. In deny­ing her con­sti­tu­tion­al respon­si­bil­i­ties when the Trump pres­i­den­cy was on the line, she also, vol­un­tar­i­ly, and sin­cere­ly, walked away from the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty that her own sen­ate seat was stolen dur­ing 2020’s election. 

And now, Kel­ly Loef­fler wants us to believe she is sin­cere when the “Greater Geor­gia Chairwoman..called on the Geor­gia Sec­re­tary of State and the State Elec­tion Board to take emer­gency action to fix a long-exist­ing soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in Georgia’s vot­ing machines ahead of the 2024 elec­tion.” If it takes an emer­gency action to fix a long-stand­ing soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty ahead of the 2024 elec­tion, then that soft­ware was also vul­ner­a­ble in 2020 when she threw the Trump Pres­i­den­cy on the trash heap of his­to­ry, and walked away from her own REPUB­LI­CAN-held sen­ate seat, chang­ing the world in the process, because, as she wants you to believe, some­one else attacked the insti­tu­tions she came there to protect. 

So, even if Sec­re­tary of State Raf­fensperg­er takes the emer­gency action Kel­ly says is nec­es­sary, and even if Raf­fensperg­er gets that job done before the 2024 elec­tion, it means noth­ing. Insin­cere Kel­ly Loef­fler knows the soft­ware will still be as vul­ner­a­ble after the fix as it is today, as it was in 2020, as it was on Jan­u­ary 6, 2021 when she sin­cere­ly turned the office of the pres­i­dent and her own sen­ate seat over to the Democ­rats. Domin­ion wrote the orig­i­nal vul­ner­a­ble soft­ware and Domin­ion wrote Raffensperger’s fix. And it is Domin­ion who as a result has engen­dered the skep­ti­cism of the peo­ple of Geor­gia. Domin­ion will there­fore nev­er be able to fix the elec­tion integri­ty prob­lem. The peo­ple will nev­er accept it. 

Thus, while Kel­ly Loef­fler wants you to believe every­thing will be fine in Geor­gia elec­tions if we just get Raf­fensperg­er to install the Domin­ion soft­ware patch, (maybe we just ask Brad, “Pret­ty please?”) the only way to begin to know if the Domin­ion patch might result in a mod­icum of elec­tion integri­ty would be to hire a qual­i­fied, dis­in­ter­est­ed, 3rd par­ty to test the sys­tem after the fix. Enter Dr. Alexan­der Halderman. 

The Halderman Report

Alex Hal­der­man, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan pro­fes­sor, is uni­ver­sal­ly-rec­og­nized as a qual­i­fied, dis­in­ter­est­ed, 3rd par­ty capa­ble of test­ing the vote-count­ing sys­tem once the Domin­ion patch has been installed. In fact, Dr. Hal­der­man has already test­ed the Domin­ion sys­tem, his results filed in fed­er­al court in 2021 as plaintiff’s evi­dence in an ongo­ing law suit, Curl­ing v. Raf­fensperg­er (Civ­il Action No. 1:17-CV-2989-AT, U.S. Dis­trict Court for the North­ern Dis­trict of Geor­gia, Atlanta Divi­sion). But the Hal­der­man report, doc­u­ment­ing, “crit­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties that can be exploit­ed to sub­vert all of its secu­ri­ty mech­a­nisms, includ­ing: user authen­ti­ca­tion, data integri­ty pro­tec­tion, access con­trol, priv­i­lege sep­a­ra­tion, audit logs, pro­tec­tive coun­ters, hash val­i­da­tion, and exter­nal firmware val­i­da­tion,” was not pub­licly released. Instead, the judge prompt­ly sealed the report as soon as it was received. Why did the judge seal this evi­dence? We can only assume the Hal­der­man Report was sealed because at the time Sec­re­tary of State Raf­fensperg­er had no response to argue against its find­ings. Fast forward…Last week the judge final­ly unsealed the Hal­der­man Report, but also unsealed a report sub­mit­ted dur­ing the inter­im by Sec­re­tary Raf­fensperg­er, pre­pared by the MITRE Cor­po­ra­tion and paid for by Domin­ion. Impor­tant­ly, while Pro­fes­sor Hal­der­man received unfet­tered access to the sys­tem to per­form his tests, as the judge ordered, MITRE chose not to access the equip­ment, instead only respond­ing to Dr. Halderman’s find­ings with no inves­ti­ga­tion of the sys­tem itself. 

The MITRE Report

The MITRE Report essen­tial­ly dis­miss­es the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties doc­u­ment­ed in Halderman’s Report sim­ply say­ing they are, “oper­a­tional­ly infea­si­ble.” A full analy­sis of these reports is beyond the scope of this arti­cle. But I do want to speak to the inher­ent unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of the MITRE Report. The MITRE Report is inher­ent­ly unre­li­able because in many ways the MITRE Cor­po­ra­tion is an insin­cere shill, in this case for Domin­ion and Raf­fensperg­er. To con­clude that, first of all, ask your­self whether you believe Domin­ion would hire a wit­ness who would not sup­port their inter­ests? Of course not. But the inher­ent unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of MITRE itself goes much deep­er than sim­ply pro­tect­ing a defen­dant who hired them in a court case. 

Who is MITRE?

So, Who is MITRE ? Who runs MITRE and what are their motivations? 

MITRE is a not-for-prof­it, fed­er­al­ly fund­ed research and devel­op­ment com­pa­ny. The MITRE Cor­po­ra­tion was cre­at­ed out of a 1950’s mil­i­tary think tank that ini­tial­ly oper­at­ed with­in research facil­i­ties of the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (MIT). Its ini­tial focus was to per­form research to aid in build­ing air defense sys­tems. It’s ini­tial Board of Direc­tors includ­ed indi­vid­u­als from MIT, Gen­er­al Motors, RAND Cor­po­ra­tion and The Ford Foun­da­tion. It is struc­tured as a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion, so it does not pay tax­es and has not since its cre­ation over 60 years ago. 

We talked about RAND a few weeks ago. RAND is a glob­al­ist think tank. It’s pur­pose is the psy­cho­log­i­cal indoc­tri­na­tion of entire pop­u­la­tions to believe in and sup­port glob­al­ist pur­pos­es. I recent­ly wrote a col­umn includ­ing Rand, what they do and why, and how they are present­ly pro­mot­ing, “glob­al cit­i­zen­ship,” around Amer­i­ca, in par­tic­u­lar around my home­town in Geor­gia. I wrote, “Rand works in par­al­lel pur­pos­es to the Unit­ed Nations, devis­ing pro­grams to alter pub­lic per­cep­tions to favor var­i­ous pub­lic ini­tia­tives, includ­ing the even­tu­al over­throw of nation­al sov­er­eign­ty around the world, and in the Unit­ed States.”

MITRE Under the Radar

MITRE oper­ates a low pro­file. In 2012, Fast Com­pa­ny declared MITRE Cor­po­ra­tion as “The most impor­tant com­pa­ny you have nev­er heard of.” In 2020, Forbes Mag­a­zine described MITRE as “America’s Secre­tive $2 bil­lion Research Hub” that was “armed with 8,000 employ­ees and an annu­al bud­get between $1 bil­lion and $2 bil­lion of tax­pay­er mon­ey.” Some of MITRE’s projects high­light­ed by Forbes includ­ed col­lect­ing fin­ger­prints from Face­book, hack­ing Smart­watch­es, and, of course, fight­ing Covid-19. Forbes report­ed that in 2019 the CDC spent $20 mil­lion with MITRE on dis­ease sur­veil­lance tech­nol­o­gy and ser­vices. Thus part of what MITRE does is intrude into your per­son­al privacy. 

MITRE’s range of tech­no­log­i­cal influ­ence seems with­out lim­it, from elec­tion process­es and tech­nolo­gies, to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, defense, trans­porta­tion, health care and cli­mate change. 

MITRE runs the Nation­al Elec­tion Secu­ri­ty Lab (NESL) but it is list­ed under the MITRE Part­ner­ship Net­work, which includes oth­er part­ner­ships, such as Microsoft’s Democ­ra­cy For­ward Team. 

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MITRE’s Board of Trustees

Chair­man of MITRE’s Board of Trustees is for­mer Michi­gan Con­gress­man, for­mer Chair of House Intel­li­gence, Mike Rogers. Rogers also sits on the Atlantic Council’s Board of Direc­tors. We have also talked about the Atlantic Coun­cil before. As we not­ed, the Atlantic Coun­cil is a neo­con­ser­v­a­tive think tank, whose stat­ed pri­ma­ry pur­pose is to gen­er­ate ideas to meet chal­lenges to glob­al­ism, and to fos­ter “dra­mat­ic eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal change” by inform­ing and “gal­va­niz­ing” glob­al­ist lead­ers to shape pol­i­cy choic­es and strate­gies to accom­plish its world­wide pur­pos­es. By “dra­mat­ic eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal change,” the Atlantic Coun­cil real­ly means, “regime-change.” Fur­ther­more, the Atlantic Coun­cil pro­motes Diver­si­ty, Equi­ty and Inclu­sion phi­los­o­phy through­out its sphere of influ­ence. In the pho­to below, the glob­al­ist influ­ence over the pur­pos­es of the Atlantic Coun­cil is on dis­play. These are some of Mike Rogers’ clos­est friends and allies. 

Next, pic­tured below, you will see Vic­to­ria Nuland, the archi­tect of the 2014 Ukrain­ian regime-change oper­a­tion even­tu­al­ly pre­cip­i­tat­ing today’s war with Rus­sia. Here she is address­ing the Atlantic Coun­cil less than three months pri­or to the coup. Regime-change oper­a­tions are not autho­rized under the US Con­sti­tu­tion and vio­late inter­na­tion­al law. They do it anyway. 

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And so that you tru­ly under­stand the man at the very top of MITRE, short­ly after the 2022 mid-terms, rumored to be con­sid­er­ing a run for the pres­i­den­cy him­self, MITRE’s Chair­man of the Board of Trustees, Mike Rogers, informed the media of his opin­ion, “It’s time to move on from Trump.”

Now, what bet­ter way to “move on from Trump,” than to sup­port SoS Raffensperger’s argu­ment that the 2020 elec­tion was valid. 

Rogers was the per­fect man for the job of MITRE Chair­man. In 2013, the Chair­man of House Intel­li­gence dis­played par­tic­u­lar dis­dain for con­sti­tu­tion­al per­son­al pri­va­cy pro­tec­tions, when he claimed dur­ing an open hear­ing, “You can’t have your pri­va­cy vio­lat­ed if you don’t know your pri­va­cy is violated.”

By that same rea­son­ing, we can infer Rogers would believe, “You can’t have your elec­tion vio­lat­ed if you don’t know your elec­tion is vio­lat­ed.” This is the atti­tude of the indi­vid­ual at the very helm of MITRE, whose pur­pose in writ­ing the MITRE report for Sec­re­tary of State Raf­fensperg­er, on behalf of and paid by Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems, would like­ly be to fur­ther the impres­sion that if no one real­ly knows that the 2020 elec­tion was vio­lat­ed, the elec­tion must not have been violated. 

Among oth­er MITRE board mem­bers, one will find Sue Gor­don, who “served for 29 years at the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency (CIA), ris­ing to senior exec­u­tive posi­tions and serv­ing as a cham­pi­on for the LGBTQ com­mu­ni­ty. She also led the estab­lish­ment of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s ven­ture arm.” We have talked about In-Q-Tel in the past. ‘Nuff said about Ms. Gordon. 

One will also find George C. Halvor­son, the for­mer chair­man and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Kaiser Per­ma­nente, whose inter­ests while chair­man includ­ed vio­lat­ing per­son­al med­ical pri­va­cy con­sid­er­a­tions, build­ing “one of the world’s largest DNA data sets for health care research.”

Accom­pa­ny­ing Halvor­son on MITRE’s board would be for­mer Chair­man of RAND Cor­po­ra­tion’s Board of Trustees and Atlantic Coun­cil con­sul­tant, Paul G. Kamin­s­ki. (See RAND above.) 

And board mem­ber Cathy E. Mine­han is for­mer, “pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of the Fed­er­al Reserve Bank of Boston, one of 12 region­al Reserve Banks that, togeth­er with the Board of Gov­er­nors, form the Fed­er­al Reserve Sys­tem. In total, Ms. Mine­han served 39 years in the Fed­er­al Reserve Sys­tem, includ­ing posi­tions at the Fed­er­al Reserve Bank of New York and on the the Board of Gov­er­nors in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.” The Fed­er­al Reserve is the pri­vate bank­ing sys­tem respon­si­ble for the con­trol and issuance of Amer­i­can cur­ren­cy. It is that sys­tem, and the adher­ence to its poli­cies by the US Gov­ern­ment, which is respon­si­ble for the US nation­al debt. 

Raffensperger’s Statement Introducing the Conflicted MITRE Report

In intro­duc­ing the MITRE Report, Sec­re­tary Raffensperger’s state­ment tells us that Domin­ion Vot­ing Sys­tems retained the NESL (essen­tial­ly MITRE) to “pro­vide an inde­pen­dent review.” For the rea­sons we have doc­u­ment­ed, we know just how con­flict­ed an orga­ni­za­tion MITRE is regard­ing that pur­pose. Nowhere in its char­ter does MITRE’s pur­pos­es include the pur­suit of truth and jus­tice. MITRE did not test the Domin­ion equip­ment. The MITRE report only tells us that in its opin­ion, Dr. Halderman’s cyber attack sce­nar­ios were, “oper­a­tional­ly infea­si­ble,” swat­ting away Halderman’s research with the back of the hand. In oth­er words, MITRE would like the pub­lic to believe the Domin­ion sys­tem is secure because no one would, or per­haps could, under­take the oper­a­tions nec­es­sary to break through and cor­rupt its out­comes. Think about that for a minute. Do you real­ly believe no one would or could, if they invest­ed the time and resources, cor­rupt the out­come of an elec­tion Dr. Hal­der­man has shown is quite pos­si­ble? That’s a pret­ty skin­ny defense MITRE offered up. Per­haps MITRE was oper­at­ing on a lim­it­ed Domin­ion bud­get. I guess you get what you pay for. 

Conclusion

Either way, the bot­tom line is that, accord­ing to the res­i­dent, impar­tial, uni­ver­sal­ly-rec­og­nized expert on elec­tion sys­tem vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, Dr. Alexan­der Hal­der­man, whose report doc­u­ments every way he per­son­al­ly hacked the sys­tem, using oper­a­tions which are repeat­able, the sys­tem is not secure, and fur­ther­more can­not be retro­fit­ted to become secure. No report, espe­cial­ly one writ­ten by a polit­i­cal­ly-inter­est­ed, gov­ern­ment-biased shill orga­ni­za­tion such as MITRE, can change any of those facts. No amount of con­form­ing to the wish­es of a sim­i­lar­ly-inter­est­ed, for­mer­ly-appoint­ed US Sen­a­tor such as Kel­ly Loef­fler can change any of those facts. The dis­en­fran­chised pub­lic will nev­er accept any out­come based upon Domin­ion fix­ing its own prob­lems. The pub­lic does not trust Domin­ion. The pub­lic does not trust Sec­re­tary of State Raf­fensperg­er. For these rea­sons, the pub­lic will not, and should not trust the MITRE Report either. 

The only way to restore pub­lic trust in the Geor­gia vot­ing sys­tem is by decen­tral­iz­ing any pow­er which could be used to deter­mine out­comes, cre­at­ing an auditable, phys­i­cal pub­lic record of the vote col­lec­tion and tal­ly­ing, and pass­ing leg­is­la­tion into law pro­tect­ing pub­lic scruti­ny of those records. Until that hap­pens, there is no hope in achiev­ing ver­i­fi­ably-cor­rect elec­tion results in Georgia. 

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