Italygate Election Conspiracy Theory Takes Kansas By Storm!
Michele Roosevelt Edwards, AKA Michele Ballarin, AKA Michele Golden, AKA Amira Ballarin, also styled herself a covert CIA operative, as well as the Great White Hope of the Somali people.
They call me the 'Mother of Somalia,'" she told the Washington Post in 2013, adding later that the entire country clamored for her. "It's like when you leave your 2-year-old in the day-care center, and he wants you to come back. I have 9 million children."
Edwards/Ballarin/Golden gave us this, the most wonderful image of 2021, when she appears to have used her real estate license to gain access to an unoccupied Virginia mansion, where her "private chef" unwrapped a box of coffee from CVS in a disastrous attempt to convince an Icelandic reporter that she was the secret owner of Icelandair.
How bountiful art thy blessings, o Lord!
SPICY MEATBALLS! Remember Italygate? Turns Out People Behind It About As Authentic As Pasta With Ketchup
Princess Amira of Somalia was joined by a woman named Maria Zack in peddling the Italian drivel, if not the Icelandic variant.
Let's let USA Today describe Zack's theories, shall we?
"The theft of the election was orchestrated in the Rome Embassy, on the second floor of Via Veneto, by an employee, Stefano Serafini, foreign service officer of over 20 years," she said. "Stefano Serafini coordinated with a General Claudio Graziano."
"General Graziano is on the board of Leonardo — the defense contractor, Leonardo SPA," Strollo Zack continued. "Leonardo used their military satellite uplink to load the software and transfer it over to change the votes from Trump to Biden."
She also alleged that recent arrests of employees at Leonardo were related to the incident, and that the plan was orchestrated by former President Barack Obama, with help from former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the CIA.
Renzi? Conte? Honestly, that discrepancy is the least of the problems here.
Anyway, as TPM pointed out this morning, Zack is still screeching incoherently about this whole Italian space laser thing. And in March, she showed up to brief Kansas legislators on it. Yes, Kansas, where Trump beat Biden by 15 points.
“Why Kansas? Because Kansas was a pro-Trump victor of electors,” Zack said. “But, I would argue, you don’t know. You do not know the real result of your election. You also probably have not been made aware of what was occurring in Italy.”
She then made them aware of "what was occurring in Italy" in excruciating detail. You can watch the whole thing on Rumble if you've got an hour to spare. Or you could spend that hour huffing glue — the result will be the same.
“I may not make it much longer,” she said, implying that she might be assassinated for telling her theories to Special Counsel John Durham. “So this is my way of telling the world exactly what is happening; I will die for my country and I hope everyone in this room will as well, because we owe it to every military person around the world who has sacrificed the same, and today we are faced with that same challenge.”
But the GOP's appetite for that shit is insatiable, and the more bugfuck, the better. So instead of asking if Zack needed to be put on a 72-hour hold, they got to work.
On April 22, the Kansas Legislative Post Audit Committee published this proposal to pay four people to spend seven months, or however long it may take, to figure out how to make sure Italy doesn't poke its space lasers into Kansas's elections going forward. Well, to be fair, it doesn't mention Italy specifically. But they are going to expend an enormous amount of taxpayer money to audit Kansas's election procedures, despite zero credible allegations of widespread fraud.
TL, DR? We live in a country full of crazy people. And this Italy shit is hilarious, and also, not funny at all.
OPEN THREAD!
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Acting DHS Head Chad Wolf Buried Memo On Russian Election Interference To Help Trump. Yeah, Don't Faint.
There is a process for I&A to produce intelligence memos, and it does not involve editing by the acting head of DHS. Nevertheless, when Murphy presented a memo for distribution to intelligence agencies saying that Russia was interfering to harm the Democratic nominee, Acting Chad told him to fix it so it wouldn't upset Poppy Trump by acknowledging the reality that he was once again the beneficiary of Russian electoral interference.
In June, Murphy was told to find examples of foreign election interference to help Joe Biden.
In an internal I&A email, the I&A official who authored the product described why providing examples of influence efforts targeting candidates from both major political parties might be difficult, because: [REDACTED]
In the document it looks like this:
Let's go out on a limb here and guess that it might be difficult to find counterexamples of foreign election interference to hurt Trump because America's adversaries were only delighted to watch the United States tear itself apart for four years under the leadership of a lunatic who bullied our allies, cozied up to dictators, and started massively destructive trade wars.
Anyway, Acting Chad wasn't going to put out a product that made Trump look bad during the election, so at a July 8 meeting he ordered I&A to put the kibosh on it. According to notes of the meeting, probably taken by Murphy, Acting Chad said the memo "will hurt POTUS -- kill it per his authorities."
The memo was eventually released, but with a "tone box" that suggested some parity between Russian efforts to promote lies about Biden's mental health and supposed efforts by China and Iran to denigrate Donald Trump.
LOL, remember when the entire federal government tried to help Trump get elected by pretending there was a plague of vote fraud, cities were on fire under Democratic leadership, and the real electoral interference was coming from Iran and GIIIIIIIIINA?
Fun times!
Anyway, the IG Report lays the blame for inappropriately politicizing the intelligence process and delaying the release of information regarding ongoing election interference on Acting Chad:
The Department of Homeland Security did not adequately follow its internal processes and comply with applicable Intelligence Community policy standards and requirements when editing and disseminating an Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) intelligence product regarding Russian interference in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. For example, I&A employees during the review and clearance process changed the product’s scope by making changes that appear to be based in part on political considerations, potentially impacting I&A’s compliance with Intelligence Community policy. Additionally, the Acting Secretary participated in the review process multiple times despite lacking any formal role in reviewing the product, resulting in the delay of its dissemination on at least one occasion.
It's always the ones you most suspect!
In response, Acting Chad insists that he was just violating internal DHS rules to stop Murphy from embarrassing himself, huffing that "the product I saw in July was written at the Fifth-Grade level. I expect more out of our component leaders." He neglects to mention that Murphy had just accused him of perjuring himself before Congress about the family separation policy, and that on August 1 he demoted Murphy, in what sure as hell looks like retaliation, sending an all-staff email saying that Murphy "had gathered and disseminated intelligence reports identifying reporters and other members of the press."
So, yeah, it's really fucking bad, just as we all suspected at the time. At the very moment when Trump was pretending that Joe Biden had bent America's foreign policy toward Ukraine in a cockeyed plot to help his son, and enlisting the Justice Department to investigate Rudy Giuliani's ridiculous allegations, his intelligence agencies were corruptly burying information that might hurt Trump's campaign.
But her emails, amirite?
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