American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [84]
A meeting was arranged with Congressman Conyers’s office. The memo prepared for the House Judiciary Committee said: “Well before the 2000 election, one of Connell’s employees created a ‘Trojan Horse’ software application which, when installed on one computer, allows its remote control by another computer. Prior to the 2004 election in Ohio, Connell administered and developed important parts of the Secretary of State’s computer network including the election results reporting server systems.... During the 2004 (and 2006) elections, Connell routed the election results from the OH SOS office through SMARTech servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”35
Then, at the last minute, Spoon says Conyers’s office “dropped the ball. Mike was going to come forward and talk about everything he’d seen and been asked to do, in regard to voting machines. I even had a senior priest who he really respected, and who he’d never lie in front of, agree to come with him. I have no idea what happened.”
In July 2008, attorney Arnebeck asked U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to hold onto all of Rove’s e-mails. Rove was identified in the lawsuit as the “principal perpetrator of a pattern of corrupt activity” under the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act. “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell ... that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed law lobby violations.”
Then, in September, Connell got issued a subpoena. His attorney, Bill Todd, who happened to also have been legal counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04, said that Connell couldn’t be deposed before the election because he was too busy working for the John McCain campaign.36 Shortly before the November election, Connell appeared with a trio of lawyers before an Ohio judge, who ordered him to give a deposition. With the election one day away, Connell denied any role in recommending the Chattanooga SMARTech company to Ohio officials in 2004, but he did admit for the record that his company had subcontracted with SMARTech.
This might have shaken up Rove and company. In mid-October, Rove had an article in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Obama Hasn’t Closed the Sale.” The latest Gallup tracking poll showed nearly twice as many undecided voters than in the 2004 election, Rove said, so Obama’s 7.3% lead didn’t necessarily mean that much. McCain, entering the final weekend of the race, predicted a come-from-behind victory, based on how things were looking in battleground states like Ohio. But then suddenly, on Monday night, after Connell gave his deposition, it all changed. The new Rove electoral map predicted a 338-to-200 electoral vote margin in favor of Obama. Rove had basically done a 180-degree turn.37
Spoonamore told us: “I have had conversations with knowledgeable people who say that there were significant discussions as to whether or not, if they manipulated the election, they’d get caught this time. Their biggest fear, and frankly it was rightfully so, was that there were a number of us who were working to hack into the systems to watch for their hacking.”38
Personally, I don’t think they dared fix the election, because the people knew overwhelmingly that Obama was going to win. If it would all of a sudden have come back McCain, I think there would have been an outcry in the streets that would have gotten the Bilderberg types upset—if you know what I mean.
So then, on December 19, 2008, Michael Connell, 45 years old, father of four, went down in the fiery crash of his Piper Saratoga II single-engine plane. He was flying back alone from a meeting in Maryland and only two and a half miles from the Akron airport. The airplane’s right wing clipped a flagpole in the front yard of