Robert Barnes On Sidney Powell

Within hours of last evening's announcement that Sidney Powell was no longer on the Trump legal team, Robert Barnes appeared on the Viva Frei YouTube channel to provide his insights into what happened. I've already said here that Barnes has proven one of the best analysts available in the current election cycle. He's the best of some very bad choices, but I'll go into that below.

To summarize Barnes's account, his view of Powell's professional background is that she has no experience in election law and no experience in civil law, both of which are key in the Trump effort. She does specialize in criminal appeals, which made her the best possible attorney for General Flynn, and this made her reputation. But she's completely over her head in the current cases.

He also thinks stress and fame have affected her judgment. But also, she seems to have swallowed QAnon conspiracy theories, one of which would be that Venezuela controlled the election count via the Frankfurt server. (She seems to be on the verge of alleging this outright.) In his view, she hijacked the Trump legal effort over the week of November 16, leading up to the Thursday press conference, where she took equal precedence with Giuliani and Ellis. From Barnes's viewpoint, this was a "public relations disaster".

I've also on my old blog cited a YouTuve channel called Hard Bastard as another very good source of analysis. The Hard Bastard's view tracks pretty closely with Barnes.

The overall problem we continue to have is that corporate media has been losing credibility throughout the Trump administration, in an environment where the CIA, FBI, and other formerly authoritative institutions have demonstrably acted in bad faith. Conventional wisdom had Fox News as a potential counterbalance, but recall that Fox worked against Trump in 2016 as well -- Megyn Kelly's debate performance that year destroyed her reputaion and career..

Bloggers and social media haven't filled the gap. Just since yesterday, the bloggers have mostly stayed on Powell's side, continuing to hope she'll come up with the evidence she's promised. The few sensible opinions, like Barnes and Hard Bastard, are on YouTube, where there's generally no transcript, and the discussion is by its nature desultory. Thus it's hard to quote excerpts.

In addition, there's no pattern of independent daily commentary on the news cycle. There were no intelligent, unhysterical voices as of Tuesday when Powell announced the kraken had already been released. (Commenting on last night, another blogger said the kraken died.) A Barnes might have provided a better warning at the time. The Thursday press conference salvaged Powell's credibility in my mind, for instance. Commentary by someone other than the pretty boy Carlson could have helped.

One problem is that the good independent commentators like those above aren't professional journalists. Their work appears at best every few days, and in Barnes's case, it's across a number of platforms. We need a predictable pattern of credible, pertinent comment.

Trump Legal Team Apparently Disavows Sidney Powell

Info here. I'll be following up.

Dominion Sidesteps On Fox

A spokesman for Dominion Voting Systems appeared on Fox News today to repeat, pretty much verbatim, the claims Dominion has made on its website about its role in the election. The spokesman on Fox, Michael Steel, is identified as a principal with Hamilton Place Strategies. Hamilton Place's website says, "We understand complex topics, explain issues to target audiences, and persuade critical stakeholders." In other words, it's a PR firm. I'd suggest Dominion needs a crisis management firm instead, but that's just me.

What's interesting here is that Dominion's own executives backed out of testifying at a Pennsylvania House hearing on Friday, but today, they've delegated to a PR flack to make statements that we may reasonably assume Dominion's attorneys advised its executives not to make, as they could either be taken as admissions against interest or statements that could be used to challenge them on cross-examination. I suspect as well that Dominion was nevertheless under pressure to say more in response to the continuing controlversy, and the clearly scripted exchange witn the Fox talking head implies that the controversy isn't going away.

Maria Bartiromo had a good list of questions that ought to be asked of Dominion on her show this morning:

Thee are questions Michael Steel isn't qualified to answer and will at some point need to be posed with Dominion. All Steel did was dismiss legitimate questions like these as "conspiracy theories". It sounds as if Bartiromo is talking with some serious people, and these questins aren't going to go away.

The Kraken, The Golden Mountain, Evidence, And Tucker Carlson

I don't believe I've ever watched more than the briefest excerpts from Tucker Carlson's Fox show. Now and then I watched O'Reilly, and before that, Greta Van Susteren a little more frequently, and I probably liked her best because she wasn't a glamour queen, and she dressed appropriately. Tucker, I'm sure, is headed on that same journey from which news readers do not return.

I checked the web, and the jury is out on whether his hair is natural, although the question I would have is why, if it's natural, he wears it like a toupee. Why go out of your way to look phony? Checking Wikipeida, he's the son of Richard Warner Carlson, an even better-connected media maven, so my guess is he's always had an easy ride, and he wouldn't know authentic if it walked up and shook his hand.

I listened to outtakes from his show on YouTube with his challenges to Sidney Powell to show him "evidence". One thing I noticed is that, although he's 51 years old, he speaks, or actually reads from the teleprompter, in a snotty puerile singsong. I'm not sure why anyone ever watched the guy, but they're right to ditch him now. So the kerfuffle with Sidney Powell on Thursday and Friday nights over whether she has "evidence" is, it seems to me, just evidence of a shallow, entitled guy who's realizing that not everyone just turns over whatever he wants.

I notice commentators, even semi-conservative ones, insist that affadavits aren't "evidence". I've sat in on enough court cases, as a witness, juror, and spectator, to know this simply isn't true. My wife, a retired attorney, sent me a link to this website, which says that affadavits, while considered weak evidence, are in fact used in court, especially when seeking temporary restraining orders, which are exactly what the Trump legal team is seeking in its initial filings.

So an affadavit is exactly what Sidney Powell did, by her account, send Carlson, along with a YouTube video outlining the Trump team's theory of the case. My guess is that Carlson was looking for a much bigger scoop to resuscitate Fox's (and of course, his) ratings, and that's not what he got, so he lashed out on national TV. Powell, an adult, had the overall case in mind, and she wasn't going to telegraph legal strategy by releasng anything prematurely. She has plenty of other platforms to present her case, and she's using them. Carlson hates this, as it puts him behind Newsmax and the others.

The main Trump team, where Powell works, is focused on what seems to be called the "Dominion" strategy, which is that machines, software, and personnel from Dominion Voting Systems actively worked to switch votes from Biden to Trump over the night and early morning of Nov 3-4, in sufficient numbers to invlidate the results of the election. I would say there are two sub-parts to this strategy, one I would call the kraken, the overall plot, and the second I would call the golden mountain, the Frankfurt server that is, among other things, alleged possibly to contain evidence of a 400-plus vote Trump Electoral College victory.

I posted on this possibility last Monday. Since then, leaks have gradually come out that suggest the Larry Johnson version I discussed then is the closest fit to what may have happened. Powell herself has alluded to such a server's existence over the course of the last several days. Yesterday, Emerald Robinson of Newsmax appears to have had independent confirmation that "a piece of hardware has been secured" from Germany.

Dominion updated its home page yesterday to include, among other things, a more specific statement that "There have been no 'raids' of Dominion servers by the U.S. military or otherwise, and Dominion does not have servers in Germany." But the Larry Johnson version does not attribute any specific ownership to the hardware that, through the leaks we've had, was seized, but the Johnson version suggests it/they was/were on US government property in Frankfurt, which is how US authorities could seize it/them.

Powell and Giuliani have referred to "Scytl servers" in Frankfurt. Exactly why they're referring to them that way isn't clear, although they've been consistent in that usage. Scytl's November 13 press release does acknowlege that there were in fact servers owned by Scytl in Frankfurt, but "Servers in Frankfurt were used for a specific project for the European Parliament in 2019. These back-up servers were closed in September 2019." In addition, Scytl says, "The U.S. military has not seized anything related to Scytl in Frankfurt, Barcelona or anywhere else." Neverthless, this wording does seem extremely careful, and the Johnson version implies that, although the US military was involved in the Frankfurt seizure, it did not itself seize the hardware.

Detectives on true crime shows often say that when they get suspects to tell them lies, it's as valuable as a direct confession. I wonder if this is the case here. We'll find out more in coming days and weeks.

The Dominion Incompetence

One thing i'm doing to work my way though the current uncharted territory is to rely on my own life experience. I've never been in politics, and I've never canvassed an election. I spent most of my career in the corporate world, and due to the unstable tech environment of the 1980s and 90s, I worked for several companies that went belly-up. Corporate sinking ships are something I'm familiar with. So what can I apply to situations like Fox News, Dominion Voting, or Smartmatic that can give me clues to what's going on, irrespective of the election?

One thing I learned in that corporate environment was the need to maintain situational awareness and, as contingency planners might put it, always have an updated backup copy of your resume offsite. Inevitably I began to learn the signs that my employer was going south, just to know it was time to polish the resume again. A big sign was corporate whistling-past-the-graveyard in PR statements, or in worst cases, outright lies.

So let's look at Dominion Voting in the past several days. They haven't changed the angry all-caps assertions on their home page that I noted on Thursday, including 1) VOTE DELETION/SWITCHING ASSERTIONS ARE COMPLETELY FALSE. But this story reports,

Santa Clara County, California, as part of its agreement with Dominion Voting Systems, stipulates that the company's software must allow county staff "to adjust tally based on review of scanned ballot images."

. . . "This is normal," [the county spokeswoman] said. "Anybody who has Dominion has this. We’re not the only county that has to adjudicate ballots."

Sidney Powell, in her numerous recent interviews, has begun to point to training materials from Dominion that document such capabilities, something I predicted last week.

Smartmatic has a similar problem. I've already cited its statement, still on its site, that "Smartmatic has never provided Dominion Voting Systems with any software, hardware or other technology." But this story reports that in 2007, Smartmatic sold its subsidiary Sequoia Voting Systems to Dominion. Web references to the announcements of this transaction have been scrubbed, but as usual, nothing really disappears from the web.

Leaving the election completely aside, if I were working for either Dominion or Smartmatic, this would be a sign for me to update that offsite contingency resume and start checking the job sites. Election schmelection, this is a sign of either gross incompetence or deliberate coverup, and the company will be heading south sooner than anyone expects.

The angry public statements from both companies are an indication they're in what they may fantasize as "crisis management" mode, but the only way you succeed with crisis management is to be completely transparent. Clearly neither is doing this.

In fact, I would say this provides insight into why Dominion withdrew from testifying in a Pennsylvania House committee hearing yesterday, at a time when, from a crisis management standpoint, the company should be wanting to get its side of the story out.

It's hard not to conclude that Dominion's lawyers told its executives not to make public statements. But why lawyer up? I think the problem their lawyers see is that their involvement in the election could become a criminal matter. That's fine, but what's happened clearly is that the company's executives have dropped the shareholders' interest -- being transparent to allow the enterprise to continue -- in favor of their own -- saying nothing for the public record to reduce exposure to criminal prosecution.

The Dominion board should terminate everyone involved in that decision for conflict of interest, but that's not going to happen. They're incompetent as well.

One way this relates to the election is that neither Smartmatic nor Dominion is a reliable partner for the Democrats. Beyond what they've said on their websites, which is proving untrue, the companies won't be able to provide public support to the position that the election was fair.

More On The Next Enrons

It looks like Fox's prime time hosts are under pressure. Overnight, it seems a kerfuffle has arisen over whether, by Tucker Carlson's account, Sidney Powell "got angry and refused to provide evidence for voting software flipping votes" when he requested it.

Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox, interviewed Powell on the phone this morning, and Powell replied

I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. . . But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.

It looks like Maria Bartiromo is getting off the reservation, and she and Fox will almost certainly come to a parting of the ways. Bartiromo has a serious journalistic career behind her, and I assume she has fallbacks if this happens. Tucker, on the other hand, is a pretty boy, not much different in his way from Megyn Kelly, and if he leaves Fox, the multimillion-dollar money spigot will be turned off, likely without anything like the settlement Megyn got. UPDATE: Don Surber comments, "If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson."

And at this point, I'm not sure how many Megyn style settlements they can pay. (Bartiromo, of course, won't get anything like that anyhow and will just have to go on working for a living.) Fox is making it plain that it wants to go from the market leader to a third-place CNN wannabe. Leaving the election entirely aside, I've got to question what's on their minds just as a business decision.

My guess is that the word has gone out to the prime time hosts -- Hannity may not be in the same boat here -- that there are going to be cuts, and they'd better be on their best behavior. Based on my last post, Laura Ingraham is clearly nervous.

But Fox's audience is already leaving for Newsmax and OAN, while CNN's won't go over to Fox.

But it also looks like Dominion Voting has writen off its chances as a continuing enterprise. It pulled out of testifying before a Pennsylvania House hearing this morning, which will do nothing but continue to destroy its business reputation in any conventional sense. It presumably has lost any chance of ever selling another Dominion machine, at least under that brand.

The Next Enrons

Regardless of the election's outcome, some corporations are going to be joining Enron in the industrial Great Beyond. Fox had been hurting its reputation for weeks prior to the election, especially with Chris Wallace's moderation of the first debate, but since calling the Arizona election on November 3, it's fallen behind CNN and MSNBC.

Here's a sign of the times:

I would guess that Ingraham is beginning to feel quite insecure in her position and is taking things out on whatever target she can find.

I noted the other day that both Dominion Voting and Smartmatic are likely to have their brands irreparably damaged in the current controversy and show signs that they're beginning to recognize that. Dominion's home page is now devoted entirely to denying allegations that have come up in recent days. It's dated most recentlyh November 17, which was Tuesday, and it contains, aomng other denials:

DOMINION VOTING SYSTEMS CATEGORICALLY DENIES FALSE ASSERTIONS ABOUT VOTE SWITCHING AND SOFTWARE ISSUES WITH OUR VOTING SYSTEMS.

The problem is that the Trump team has been making entirely credible assertions that someone, quite possibly Dominion, or using Dominion capabilities, did in fact switch votes in specific cases in Georgia and Michigan, and such instances have been multiplying.

Dominion's reply is to cite now-fired DHS cybersecurity director Chris Krebs, who said, the 2020 general election "was the most secure in American history." In light of the substantiated allegations now in the public record, this assertion seems at best highly exaggerated -- and it leaves out the allegation from Rudy Giuliani in today's press conference that a senior Dominion manager went to Detroit on election night to facilitate in person the task of manipulating totals.

Smartmatic has left up the earlier "fact checks" on its website with no alteration.

Both compnies are apparently in a pseudo "crisis mode", trynig somewhat lamely to evade bad publicity. The problem for them is that as the scandal moves forward, their assertions will be dscreditied -- as it appears now that they're false, and their brands will become the punch lines of jokes.

Based on remarks at the press conference, Dominion employees are already bailing out, and as I noted the other day, hundreds are deleting their employment histories there from Linkedin.

Laura Ingraham, by the way, went to Dartmouth and worked on the Dartmouth Review as a protegee of Jeffrey Hart. None of this surprises me.