Loeffler, Raffensperger, Dominion and MITRE

Undermining confidence in Georgia election integrity

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 a table with black people eating croissants. 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.

Kelly Loeffler sitting with black people eating croissants

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.

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 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.

MITRE Report Summary

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.”

It’s those same right-wing extremists who are asking for fair elections in Georgia

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.

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.

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 Dominion 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.