American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [83]
Spoonamore told us, “Mike was a front-end guy, who built Web sites and really sophisticated databases to track voters. The way computers actually function and talk to each other, he didn’t have the expertise and would have to work with others, like the guys at SMARTech.”32 When he and Connell first met in Washington, Spoonamore didn’t reveal his own interest in the electronic voting world. The two hit it off, and started working together on a couple of unrelated overseas projects. Then, when they happened to be at the same conference in London, somebody pulled Connell aside to warn him that Spoonamore was “an insane guy who opposes voting machines.” Connell told Spoon, “You have some people who are really nervous about you.”
As they became friends, Spoonamore sensed that Connell was having second thoughts about what he’d been doing for the Republicans. Maybe you’ve followed some of the flap about all of those e-mails of Karl Rove’s that somehow disappeared over time. Well, it was Connell who set up the site used by Rove for 95 percent of his e-mail communication, known as GWB43.com. At the end of a private meeting in 2006, Connell asked Spoonamore what he knew about “the complexity of trying to erase e-mail.” Spoon explained that, in most cases, it can’t be done. Connell pointed in the direction of the White House a few blocks away, saying that he’d “kinda been asked to look at a challenge, whether you could recover or get back e-mails.” Spoonamore recalls: “He was fishing around for what the steps might be. I said, ‘Mike, I’m involved in a lot of stuff to protect people’s privacy and bank accounts, but I don’t use those skills to destroy information. And I would encourage you to tell people to walk away from this because, one, it doesn’t work and, two, the cover-up is always worse than the crime, Mike.’”
With the 2008 election year coming up, Spoonamore decided to “stop opposing things in the background and go very public.” He approached Arnebeck’s legal team in Ohio and offered himself as an expert witness. He also went to Connell. “I basically said, ‘Mike, there’s a lot of people you work with—and frankly, some of them I’ve worked with as well, and with some I still do—who treat democracy as a game, where if their side wins it doesn’t matter if you cheat. Mike, I don’t think you’re in that camp but I do think you’ve worked very closely with some of the people who are. I intend to spend some of my time and resources and reputation on making their lives uncomfortable. And I’m giving you a heads-up about it.’ Well, Mike didn’t react the way I expected. He reacted by taking my hands and asking to pray, and he said, ‘I don’t think you know how far over your head you’re gonna get.’”
At that point, Spoonamore didn’t know how involved Connell had been in the Florida 2000 situation. A guy named Roy Cales had been Connell’s top computer expert for a long time. In the summer of 2000, Jeb Bush had appointed Cales as Florida’s first Chief Information Officer, or tech czar, and gave him the authority to take over all of Florida’s government computer systems, which included “unrestricted access” to all election reporting and tabulating computers used by Secretary of State Katharine Harris.33 Cales resigned in early September 2001, after being charged with grand theft in connection with a 1996 forgery.34
Learning more about this, Spoonamore invited Connell to breakfast. It went on for five hours. Spoonamore revealed he was “going forward with attorneys, and I have no question it’s going to end up in discovery on your desk. I hope we continue with our friendship, but there’s a period of