Doug Bock Clark Goes Full Baghdad Bob (A Preview Review of Pro Publica’s C-Grade Propaganda)

It feels mildly odd to be writing a review of a piece that will not reach the public for another 2 days, but I am comfortable enough in my suspicions of what is coming that I may as well write and publish the review now.

The long and short of is: Pro Publica will soon publish a piece by David Bock Clark etc. that will say they dug into the Election Integrity Movement and found it is based on misinformation. To support that assertion, Doug Bock Clark will ignore all the confirmation that has come into existence regarding our claims that breaking of laws by officials in the weeks leading up to Election Day 2020 and other officials on those days created a hopelessly compromised election in several key states. Instead, Pro Publica will center-and-debunk some peripheral 1% events that did occupied no more than 10 minutes of my life and that I even left out of my book (for the precise reason that I did not know what to make of them or put any faith).

That is to say: When Doug Bock Clark first contacted me to discuss this movements’ “efforts to overturn the election,” I pointed out to him that such phraseology begged the question, for we did not see ourselves as seeking to “overturn an election” but instead saw the November 2020 election as having been rigged, and we were trying to expose that peacefully. Our beliefs flowed from the fact that in the aftermath of the November 3, 2020 election, myself and a small cohort of specialists studied the matter and quickly formed the view that between Marc Elias tweaking of laws and some election officials ignoring other election laws, and sloppy cybersecurity associated with voting machines, and activities of lower-level officials on November 3 itself, the election had been rigged far past the point it could be unscrambled. Dozens of stories and tips came across my desk, such as a story about a South Korean jet with tens of thousands of ballots on it landing in Arizona, and a story about some miscreants in Italy, but I ignored those completely, instead passing them both off to two different agencies of the federal government for them to investigate or not as they thought wise, and never touched them again.

Doug Bock Clark claimed to understand all that, and in the time since then has communicated of our attempts to challenge the November 2020 election. And he has encouraged me to go deep on the sources for my beliefs about the election of November 2020, writing me such commitments as:

“Yes, we will fairly convey your views about election fraud – though I also want to be clear that we won’t necessarily agree with your POV and we can’t cover every point of debate between the sides… though we hope to address the major things. Maybe you7 can talk through some of the things you raise later this week? I do want to go deep on them.”

– Doug Bock Clark

So I have given Doug Bock Clark a great deal of time, answering detailed questions about the basis of our beliefs. Materials which have been brought to Doug Bock Clark’s attention include:

• In Georgia:
  • A whistleblower has come forward deserving his participation in a Georgia ballot stuffing scheme where he was paid $45,000 to stuff 4,500 ballots and claims he was average size out of 242 people doing the same in Georgia (“Georgia Ballot Trafficking Whistleblower Admits to Making $45,000 for Stuffing Ballot Boxes — Just One of 242 Traffickers”).
  • His story has been confirmed by an organization called True the Vote, which acquired 10 trillion cell phone pings from 5 states over the weeks before the election, and found the cell phone trails among voter drop boxes of a couple hundred Georgians doing just what the whistleblower claimed (as well as four other states, incidentally).
  • And then Dinesh D’Souza has obtained the videos of the drop-boxes, and found thousands of files of hundreds of people doping just what the whistleblower alleged (and snapping selfies at each drop-box stop so they can get paid), as is shown in his upcoming movie 2000 Mules (early May release).
  • All of which may tie into the fact that 2021, VoterGA reports demonstrated that 74 counties in Georgia cannot produce ballot drop-box transfer forms and two counties have over 300,000 missing ballot images each. A more recent report puts an end to any remaining questions of the severity of corruption within the Georgia Governer’s and Secretary of State’s offices.
  • Which may give some color to the fact that on December 17, 2020, Georgia State Senator William Ligon (Chairman of Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Election Law) issued a detailed report discussing a myriad of voting irregularities and fraud in the Georgia 2020 general election (from the Executive Summary: “[t]he November 3, 2020 General Election was chaotic and any reported results must be viewed as untrustworthy”).

• In Michigan
  • A decision of the Michigan Court of Claims of March 9 2021 “invalidates absentee/mail-in ballot rule as improperly established” (a ballot rule that just five months earlier, in November 2020, affected 3.2 million votes). They found also that “actions of the Secretary of State Benson’s guidance regarding mail-in ballots and signatures were also “unlawful”.
    • Benson’s guidance, issued on October 6, 2020, directed local clerks to treat signatures as valid if there are “any redeeming qualities in the application or return envelope signature as compared to the signature on file.” “Redeeming qualities” are described as including, but not being limited to, “similar distinctive flourishes” and “more matching features than non-matching features.” Allegan County Clerk Robert Genetski and the Republican Party of Michigan filed suit against Benson, alleging that her guidance violated the state’s election laws and the Administrative Procedures Act. The plaintiffs asked that the court strike down the guidance as unlawful and enjoin its enforcement in future elections.
    • Murray sided with the plaintiffs, finding that Benson’s guidance was in fact a rule “that should have been promulgated in accordance with the APA. And absent compliance with the APA, the ‘rule’ is invalid.”
  • The original Antrim County Michigan Report from ASOG, the official response to it by Michigan, and the flaws in that official response including:
    • It never addressed the central finding of the ASOG report: that Antrim deleted their Security Logs at 11:03 PM, November 4, 2020 (thus in the end nothing we know about their machine can be known with certainty, because they could have done anything and then just deleted the Security Log);
    • Explanation for the lack of any Adjudication Files (though the files for 2016 and 2018 were present on the machine).

• In Wisconsin
  • A Wisconsin Supreme Court decision of December 2020 that the actions of the Wisconsin Election Commission regarding “indefinitely confined” voters were unlawful.
  • Retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice and now Senate Office of Special Counsel Michael Gableman  has put forth one report that says the election officials are engaged in a cover-up, and a more recent report that says

• In Arizona:
  • As is ably discussed in a report put together by Senator Wendy Rogers:
  • the Maricopa Audit, actually found that of Maricopa’s 2.1 million ballots, there are serious discrepancies (i.e., missing ballots and/or images) for 367,584 ballots (in a race won by 10k votes). A full 740k do not have a proper chain of title. But only if you count them all does Biden win by 10,000 (which our dutiful “independent” press reported as “Maricopa Audit shows Biden still won by 10,000!”).
  • The Maricopa Canvassing report that shows about 300,000 illegal votes.
  • A Pima County, Arizona canvass that shows so many laughable irregularities (e.g., 35% of households have “discrepancies” such as a fraternity generating 27 votes from men of average age 45 whose names are not recognized by those who live there) that it has been mathematically proven that Pima County (Tucson) Arizona is a stellar example of election fraud.

• In Colorado, a Mesa County, Colorado forensic analysis of its election  equipment reveals that the November 2020 election has been 100% wiped out so that there is no way to audit it, as well as proof that before it was wiped, the equipment showed that the November 2020 election had been compromised, with multiple election databases and an injection of 29,000 ballots.

• For final measure, the Halderman Expert Rebuttal Declaration (which, while not the full report, is devastating in its own right) has also been proved to Pro Publica.

And so on and so forth.

There was a day that an enterprising young journalist with ambitions be enticed by such materials as these to look deeper and get past the “Baseless!” genuflections of his contemporaries. Not, however, at today’s Pro Publica. Instead, it seems (David Bock Clark has informed me) that the clever strategy of Pro Publica is going to be that none of it exists.  

Instead, Pro Publica intends to go with, “Because South Korean jet!” And “Because Italygate!”

Which is to say, Pro Publica is going to center peripheral stories such as the Korean jet and Italygate (neither of which even deserved a mention in my book), and “debunk” them as a way of claiming that this movement is based on misinformation. And they are going to Baghdad Bob the mountain of evidence touched upon above that does not fit their narrative.

Which means Doug Bock Clark just wasted three months of my time pretending to be willing to be something other than another brick in the wall.

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.