American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [81]
Playing devil’s advocate for a minute, I heard from a Democratic friend who worked Ohio that they just didn’t get the people out to vote like they should have. And I think the Democratic Party blew the 2004 election, to the point where it shouldn’t have come down to Ohio. Why did they allow the Republicans to twist things around and make George Bush a war hero, when he was actually a draft-dodger? And then turn Kerry, who fought valiantly in Vietnam, into a coward? I would never have handled it that way. Let’s pull the military records and compare them, find out who was the real guy serving his country. I can’t understand why the Democrats allowed this to take place. But maybe Kerry had played too many games of compromise over his years in politics. He told my collaborator, Dick Russell, in 2008, and I quote: “I know I won the election. But by the time my lawyers could come up with a smoking gun in Ohio, it was too late.” My question is, how come Kerry has never come out publicly and talked about that. Doesn’t he think he has a responsibility to try and stop history from repeating again?
The story of what went on behind the scenes in Ohio really started to surface as we approached the next presidential election in 2008. That’s where things get interesting. To set the stage, we need to go back to a lawsuit brought by a group of citizens against Ohio officials in August of 2006. At the time, Blackwell was still secretary of state and was running for governor on the Republican ticket. A well-known voting rights attorney named Cliff Anebeck set out to charge Blackwell and his cronies with “election fraud, vote dilution, vote suppression, recount fraud and other violations.”18 The judge in the case followed up with a court order that all ballot evidence relating to the 2004 election be preserved for another year (beyond the legally required 22 months, which was about to expire).
After Democrats swept into the major Ohio offices in 2006, the judge ordered everything turned over to the new secretary of state, a woman named Jennifer Brunner. Well, guess what? The board of elections in 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties had either lost, shredded, or dumped nearly 1.6 million ballots and other election records. The reasons? Oh, various things. Spilled coffee, a flooded storage area, some miscommunication with “greenies” there to pick up recyclables. All accidental, sorry about that.19
There were a lot of discussions after that between lawyer Cliff Arnebeck and government officials. They talked about a settlement, or a grand jury investigation, or Congress getting involved. Secretary of State Brunner wanted to focus on assuring the integrity of the next election, rather than be distracted by the past. So Arnebeck agreed to narrow things to taking the deposition of one man, Michael Connell, who was Karl Rove’s computer expert and lived in Akron, Ohio.20
A friend of Connell’s named Stephen Spoonamore had already decided to go public. Arnebeck says Spoonamore is “the best expert witness I’ve ever worked with, courageous and willing to take complex facts and circumstances and give you highly qualified, credible judgments.”21 His friends call him “Spoon,” and he’s an expert in electronic data security and what’s called “digital network architecture.” He’d designed or consulted on computer systems for MasterCard, American Express, the State Department and many more companies and government agencies. A registered Republican, Spoonamore was a staunch believer in the democratic