Draft 1.0 – The Inside Story Of The Steal

Preface

I had a ringside seat to election events from November 3, 2019 to January 6, 2021, and feel a duty to explain to the world what really happened. I will not be regurgitating the headline events that anyone can read, but will aim to explain what was going on behind the scenes, and give my best account of why things played out as they did.

Out of an interest in not letting the public suffer any longer from my procrastination and weakness (I tested negative today after a 12-day bout with Covid) , I will be writing and publishing this story in installments, reserving  the right to edit and re-edit as I go. Once complete and final, I will let the public know that it is final. Thus, you might think of this exercise as an odd one, where I am drafting a long magazine article for the world but doing so publicly, that the public need not wait to begin having its understandable curiosity addressed.

It will be natural for the reader to question my motives, my background, to wonder if I have some axe to grind or might be trying to accomplish something in writing this other than what I claim (that I simply feel a duty to my country and to history to give an honest account of what happened and what I saw over those nine weeks).  So I will close this preface with four short statements that may clarify to some from where I am coming from philosophically.

1. My own family’s history is one of the Horatio Alger dream.  My folks were of working class Irish roots from New Jersey (Bridgeport, Patterson, Atlantic City, Wildwood, and Cape May). My Pop was Rutgers ’52 (Air Force ROTC), and my folks were living poor as church-mice on the GI Bill at University of  Michigan, my Pop studying actuarial math, when their three sons began popping into existence. I was the youngest, born in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in 1962.  We grew up bouncing around New England as my father changed life insurance jobs nearly every year. Passed over in 1976 in Hartford for a promotion at Travelers Insurance that he thought he deserved, my Pop took a job at a broken and nearly insolvent auto insurer in the South: a month later an odd fellow from Omaha showed up on our doorstep, met my dad, and began investing heavily in his new firm. That same day, my Pop cancelled his order for our family’s first new car (a station wagon) and sunk it into stock in his new friend’s firm. My dad’s firm, GEICO, went on to big things, and my dad’s investment in the stock of his new friend from Omaha, Warren Buffett, worked out immensely well for my family. More importantly, Buffett became my great tutor in life. As  the years went by and my family grew wealthy (by the time I was 16 my parents were millionaires, and by the time I finished college they were millionaires many times over), and Buffett grew into a billionaire and then into the mythical figure he has become. All along the way, a continual topic of conversation among Buffett, myself, and my parents, the most continual conversation, was the role of the rich in society, their proper behavior, their duties to other citizens and to the country (unlike lots of other rich guys, both Buffett and my Pop were always intensely patriotic men). Donald J. Trump is the living embodiment of everything I was raised to understand was wrong about rich people in America. After JFK my parents probably never voted anything but Republican, but my mother did not vote for Trump in 2016, and by January 6 of this year was screaming at me, “This monster cannot stay in the White House!” My father died in 2013, but I doubt he would have voted for Trump in 2016, and am sure he would not have in 2020. So if you wish an honest account of the intellectual milieu from which I hail, that would be it.
2. I have always voted Libertarian for President. So voting for Trump was never really a consideration for me, one way or the other.
   • On the other hand, I agree with about 80% of Trump’s policy positions. Our nation is supposed to embody “consent of the governed”, and I do not remember “the governed” ever agreeing to disbanding our borders, or signing up for forever-wars, or outsourcing our middle class to China. I remember our elites doing that, but not the governed. So I agree with a lot of Trump’s policy direction, but still fault him for one big thing: he should have made race relations more central to his presidency. And I am not sure that he did not, on occasion, tickle racist sentiments deliberately.
   • Qhile I have tried to maintain a position of being Left-friendly in life, and was even at times Left-curious, I confess that at this point I find the overwhelming majority of activist Democrats to be intellectually dishonest phonies, lacking in the most fundamental understanding of what made our republic and how to fix it, and am disgusted by the Goonism they have embraced as a political creed. In my eyes most Left Democracts are one step above loathesome, and not a big step.
3. Having been inside this election fraud issue for months, having gotten to know the best brains in it, professors and technologists and computer scientists, the best estimate that I have heard comes from one of them: Donald Trump probably got  79 million votes and Joe Biden got 68 million votes. Through chicanery Trump ended up with 74 million, Biden with 80 million. The professor in question may not be exactly right, but his numbers convey my rough sense of the magnitude of the steal of this presidential election.
4. This election steal should have been child’s play to reveal and reverse. On December 23, President Trump and I spent 4.5 hours together, and I let him know that defeating it was a 3-foot putt (I’ve never golfed a hole in my life, but I figured the metaphor might finally reach him). His team was pursuing a 40 foot shot from the sand trap that they had to sink, but if he would just listen to Flynn, Sidney, and me there was an easy 3 foot putt he was missing. Somehow over the course of that 4+ hour meeting there came a moment that I felt something much different for Donald J. Trump than I had expected I would feel, something that made me want to go put my arm around the man and give him a long squeeze of reassurance. What was it I felt? I’m still not sure: A kind of love? Commiseration for a broken man? Or just deep sadness, that I knew he understood he was failing on the most colossal of scales, he was losing, but he could not put the pieces together himself anymore. Yet it was child’s play.

So that is where I am coming from.  Enjoy the story. I won’t enjoy writing it but I think I owe it to you.

Your humble servant,

Patrick M. Byrne

CHAPTERS TO COME

Introduction – How I got involved

What I learned before November 3

November 3 – November 10 – The Reverse-Engineer & the  President’s Team(s)

November 11 – Christmas – the Wicked Doldrums

Christmas – January 6

The Aftermath

This story was first published on Deep Capture. Deep Capture features original investigative reporting on the all-too-cozy relationship Wall Street has with regulators, media, government and the intellectual establishment.