DONALD TRUMP:
It is clear in Arizona that they must decertify the election.
NEWS CLIP 1:
Six months after the 2020 election, Arizona Republicans are still calling the election into question.
NEWS CLIP 2:
Efforts to undermine confidence in election results began in hotly contested battleground states.
NEWS CLIP 3:
A report written by Republicans in the Michigan state Senate has concluded there was no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud…
NEWS CLIP 4:
The talk of decertifying results came with recommendations like eliminate the Wisconsin elections commission.
FILM AUDIO [PLOT TO OVERTURN THE ELECTION]:
Decertify!
[crowd chants]
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
More than a year after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, around two-thirds of Republican voters believe his election was illegitimate, and the idea that the presidency was stolen from Donald Trump has become a defining issue in the Republican Party. FRONTLINE's new documentary, Plot to Overturn the Election, made in collaboration with ProPublica, examines the role of a handful of key people in spreading this stolen election myth. Today I'm joined by the producer and director of the film Samuel Black, and ProPublica senior reporter and FRONTLINE correspondent AC Thompson. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch. Sam, welcome to the Dispatch. A.C., welcome back.
SAMUEL BLACK:
Thank you so much for having us, Raney.
A.C. THOMPSON:
Great to be here.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
So AC let's start with you, uh, you know, with FRONTLINE and ProPublica, you've been following and covering the right wing political movements for a long time. What I'm wondering about is this, you look at the reporting in this current film, what do you see that’s different?
A.C. THOMPSON:
What's so interesting to me, and this is part of an ongoing conversation I'm having with academics and researchers is the way that the lines between extremists and mainstream voters are collapsing. The points of demarcation between what you would consider an extremist worldview. And now what you would consider a mainstream normie worldview — like, they're very hard to find distinctions in some regards, particularly around this election issue. There are millions of people in America — and the surveys show this one after another— who absolutely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from the rightful victor and the rightful victor was Donald J. Trump. And that the current President Joe Biden is an illegitimate usurper. And this puts them in a patently antigovernment stance that they believe they're living. The occupation of a bogus government that is a very extreme and radical worldview. And it used to be confined to a very small sector of this country. Now it is a massively popular worldview amongst Republican voters.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Right. Okay. So, and as you and Sam were thinking about how to chronicle this, how to tell the story, what was your first thought about what would be the best way to both investigate this, but also to understand this— this current that used to be an undercurrent, but which is really a prevailing current now?
SAMUEL BLACK:
The way we wanted to approach this, it was to go through it methodically and show how the myth was created, soup to nuts, how, you know, going back to election night and then showing how we ended up in this place where there's a mass movement of people who are now campaigning on this issue and leading protests on this issue. So, access is always an issue with documentaries. It's really the name of the game. And at the very beginning, we didn't have a lot of access. It was a question of how do we get in to the heart of this movement? For the first of the first thing we did is we started attending the rallies. We went to Michigan, we went to Georgia, we went to Arizona. Um, and we went to the places where on the ground, people were campaigning essentially on this issue and using the idea that the election had been stolen from Trump as an organizing strategy, uh, within the Republican Party.
FILM AUDIO [PLOT TO OVERTURN THE ELECTION]:
VOICE 1: An election permeated with fraud. Is that an election?
CROWD: NO!
VOICE 2: We’re going to find out today that we were lied to on November 3rd.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
AC, since you've been to a lot of these rallies through the years, what were you sensing that felt different when you were there
A.C. THOMPSON:
I was a little bit stunned. What I thought would happen was I thought there would be a chastening effect after January 6th, that people would pull back that they would be really perhaps more thoughtful about where all this rhetoric had led, that it had led to an attempt to overthrow the government and the deaths of several people and this massive national upheaval. So I thought like these rallies are going to be small people won't be coming out. The movement will be, um, a shell of itself. And what I found was that it was absolutely robust that the. Events of January 6th, hadn't really changed. People's outlook that if anything, more people were coming out to these events, that there were thousands of people gathered in fields in Georgia and out in the Arizona desert to see Trump. And the thing he's talking about the whole time is how the election was stolen. So I was surprised by that.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
So, AC, I was hoping you could walk us through some of the nuts and bolts of this. So, our film begins in Antrim County. Talk to me about that part of the story and why it's so significant.
A.C. THOMPSON:
You know, so the thing that I didn't really realize until we, we got into this and I came to this realization, I should say, with the help of my colleagues at ProPublica, Doug Bock Clark and Alexandra Berzon. But what I, I started figuring out is like, hey, this little county in Northern Michigan or rural county became this sort of key point, this key sort of node in the stolen election myth, that this was one of the places from which the stories about the election sprang and then were made it all the way to Trump's desk and made it all the way to Trump's speeches. And what happened in Antrim is basically what you should expect to happen in any given election, we have a massively complex election system that's reliant on a ton of technology that's underfunded. And the county clerk in little old Antrim County made a mistake in how she set up the computer system for the 2020 election. And on election night, it showed Biden winning the vote rather than Trump. People freaked out because Antrim County is a pretty, a pretty big Republican area. Everyone expected Trump to win…
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Right, right.
A.C. THOMPSON:
…and when he doesn't win, um, people are freaking out. Now the clerk said, ‘hey, I made a mistake…’
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Right, but it’s a small county. But, but AC just to back up a little bit, this is a small rural county in Michigan, right? Why were people so focused on Antrim County in the first place? Like how did that become a story even?
A.C. THOMPSON:
I think that it was, um, this process of the votes are for Biden. Then the votes shift to Trump then the clerk, they said, oh, we made a mistake. And when people saw that sort of like very obvious shift in totals, Um, they said, oh, it must be manipulation. It must be what we've been looking for, which is proof of some sort of untoward, underhanded behavior. And most things that happen in elections are not that obvious. You know, most snafus are not like that. Like, oh, we got the numbers totally wrong. It's actually, this is the actual true number. You know, most of the time, it's, it's very, it's things that you're not going to detect. So that sort of big move, big swing in votes, even with the mea culpa from the county saying, oops, we made a mistake that drew all the conspiracy theory buffs to Antrim County and to look at it as perhaps, um, a, uh, evidence that the Dominion brand voting machines that Dominion voting system equipment had actually been set up to generate fraudulent results. And so it factored into this broader conspiracy theory about the whole election and about this technology in particular.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Yeah. I mean, what a story in its granularity, right? Because inside that story, you really start to understand some of the players who started to create, a story around the alleged faulty voting machines. Sam, can you take this a little bit further into the details of what then happens.
SAMUEL BLACK:
Yes. And I would just add to what AC said. The other reason why Antrim becomes such a big story is because after the election, after it becomes clear that the Biden has won the electoral vote, there are several groups of people, um, who are out there, some of them on behalf of Trump's campaign and some of them were independently, who are looking for any anomalies in voting and they're looking across the country. They're looking at county by county results. They're trying to find places where they can prove what Donald Trump has been saying for years, that if he loses, then the vote was rigged. And so in Antrim County, you know, just weeks after the election, a team arrives on a private jet, a team of cybersecurity people, um, who for a long time, whose whose identities were a mystery even to the county clerks, who dealt with them. And what our reporting and investigation shows is that that team that arrived and did a re- would do a report that that would help spread many inaccurate claims about what happened in Antrim county that was really driven by two groups: One, started with the key meeting of Trump supporters on a plantation in South Carolina, uh, owned by a conservative lawyer named Lin Wood, including most prominently, former general Michael Flynn, uh, Donald Trump's, former national security advisor, uh, and at that plantation, others were coordinating remotely with a Dallas based firm called Allied Security Operations Group. This was a little known firm that's really only known now because of their work after the 2020 election. Um, and that group Allied Security Operations Group were the ones who actually wrote the inaccurate, uh, really bogus report about what happened in Antrim County.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Okay. So let's talk about that report. Who did you talk to and what did you learn?
A.C. THOMPSON:
So we wanted to, to find the people who'd helped craft, um, this conspiracy theory around the Dominion voting equipment and around Antrim County. And there were, you know, to be clear there's many authors of these conspiracy theories, but we focused in on the Allied Security Operations Group, this small firm out of Texas that did the Antrim report. They wouldn't talk to us, but we did speak to one of their former analysts. Somebody who'd worked for the company and somebody who worked with them after the 2020 election to help develop these theories. And his name is Josh Merritt. He's a, uh, army vet He basically on election night started looking at what was happening. The states that Trump was winning the states that Trump was losing. And he, he sort of said, oh, I see, I see a pattern here in these battleground states that Trump's losing. They all seem to be using Dominion voting systems equipment. And so he started developing these wild theories around that right on the spot. That information ended up getting folded into lawsuits that were filed on behalf of Trump, challenging the elections.
They went to Sidney Powell, the lawyer who put together the infamous Kraken lawsuits, and they informed the broader ideas around the notion that the problem here is this particular, um, voting equipment that that's one of the big problems is that the Dominion brand voting equipment has been set up to produce fraudulent results, which we know is utterly untrue and is fantastical.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Why do you think that spread like wildfire and people really started to believe this myth and conspiracy theory?
SAMUEL BLACK:
That conspiracy theory about Dominion machines was elevated by some very important people just in that first, several weeks after the election. And this was a time when a lot of people, a lot of Trump supporters were paying close attention to what Trump was tweeting and what his surrogates in the media were saying. Uh, and one of his key surrogates as AC mentioned, was, was an attorney named Sidney Powell who briefly was part of Trump's legal team. She stepped onto the national stage on November 19th, when she appeared at a press conference beside Rudy Giuliani and said that the vote had been tainted by fraud and blamed malicious actors in countries like Venezuela and China. And the theory that really got her laughed at on the late night comedy shows, and… but for a lot of people who are many, especially with people who are looking for something to point to that was a theory that would have permanence and it was things like this Antrim report we described, which is written several weeks after that press conference, that puts kind of the flesh on the bones of a theory like that. It offers a sort of veneer of technical sophistication to what is a bogus, uh, and fantastical theory. Um, and so it gave something for people to point to, and it got to the point where the report that was generated by Allied Security Operations Group was shared with the justice department, uh, in those key weeks when they were contesting the election in, in mid December, 2020, and then on January 6th, when Trump, you know, led a rally outside the White House and spoke to thousands of protestors. He made allegations that are exactly the allegations, uh, that are in the Antrim County report about votes being supposedly switched in a Michigan county. So it was very powerful for us to, to sort of try to understand the origin points of some of these slogans and rallying cries that became important to the political violence actually that happened on January 6th. And then that has extended beyond January 6th in a more bureaucratic form around the country.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
You also spoke to some experts about the claims in the Antrim report. Sam, can you talk to us a bit about what kind of response they had to, to what was written.
SAMUEL BLACK:
Yeah. After we dug into the Antrim story and spent some time in the county, talk to officials, including the county clerk, we, we made a beeline to speak to the person who had written really the authoritative account of what happened in Antrim County on behalf of the state of Michigan. He happens to be one of the prominent and renowned experts in voting technology and voting systems in the country. And his name is J. Alex Halderman. And he’s a professor at the university of Michigan. In his report about what happened in Antrim county, he found that the high-level claims were completely inaccurate. The claim that for instance, part of the Dominion software called the adjudication, which is essentially a way for if there's a ballot where a vote is unclear, it can be adjudicated by a clerk or set of clerks — part of the allegation was that that feature, adjudication, had been used to manipulate the vote. He found that the adjudication application has not even been installed in Antrim county. It wasn't used at all.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Right.
SAMUEL BLACK:
So it was clear that this group out of Texas had not done the work to look closely at what happened at all. And, and I would say Alex Halderman had a very blistering view of what they had done and was really concerned about how that report gave a bad name to the sort of technical analysis of voting systems that he's made his life’s work. Because part of it was interesting is Alex Halderman is someone who says there are issues, security issues with voting systems, um, that there was no, there was certainly no fraud in the 2020 election he would say, but this is, uh, an area in general where there should be better security. But when you have groups who are acting in a partisan way, putting out reports that seem to be trying to engineer a certain outcome, it gives a bad name to the entire type of analysis he's trying to do.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
So, the film covers a gathering at a former plantation in South Carolina. Um, let's talk about that meeting and what happened there.
A.C. THOMPSON:
What we know is that in November and December, there were, uh, basically a loose group of election fraud conspiracy theorists who gathered at this plantation owned by a defamation attorney named Lin Wood, who's a conservative activist. The people who showed up were people like Patrick Byrne, who features prominently in our film, who is the former CEO of overstock.com and a tremendously wealthy individual. There are people like Sidney Powell, the attorney, people like Michael Flynn, the former, uh, Lieutenant general who left the Trump administration after making misleading statements about his contacts with Russian officials. And so all these people convene there and they're taking all this information that they're hearing from across the country, second by second, minute by minute, about allegations, about fraud and corruption in the election, and they sort of launch a campaign to undo the election, and they're talking about filing lawsuits. They’re talking about persuading the public through putting out new information. They're talking about getting access to voting machines and being able to get their eyes on the fraud that they believe is happening.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
So have you spoken to Lin Wood and others at the plantation from that meeting about your reporting about ProPublica's reporting? Um, and, and if you have, what do they say about what happened?
A.C. THOMPSON:
Yeah, well, we've contacted everybody that was sort of key players in this group, including Lin Wood. We asked Lin to go on camera when we were in South Carolina and he declined to do that. But, um, my colleagues sent him a letter saying, hey, look, this is what's going to be in the film, and this is what's going to be in an upcoming ProPublica story. And he made basically blanket denials, you know, about most of what we're covering here. The problem is that my colleagues obtained a massive trove of emails, text messages, documents that make it clear that his home absolutely was a sort of nerve center for this movement And I would say other people like Patrick Byrne, who's in the film, you know, it says like, yeah, I was there, I would say I'm probably the king pin or leader you know? So we've gotten different sort of responses from people about this.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
What were you and your colleagues at ProPublica able to learn about how these ideas of fraud reached the President — at the time President Trump, of course?
A.C. THOMPSON:
What we know is that they got there in a few different ways. There's an email trail, for example, showing that, um, executive assistants to then President Trump emailed information about these conspiracy theories to the Justice Department.
But we also know that even more directly, Patrick Byrne, Sidney Powell, and Michael Flynn visited the White House, and went and said, look, um, we agree there was massive fraud, and these are the steps that you should take. We believe that you should get the military or another, um, armed government, uh, branch of the government to seize voting machines in multiple states and rerun the election, or at least open up the machines and let us see what's in there. Um, you know, that is the idea that they brought to the President in December, 2020. And obviously the President didn't act on that, but that was, that was the thing that they were circulating.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
What did Trump do at the time when he learned of this? Do we know anything about that?
A.C. THOMPSON:
You know, it's not entirely clear what, what exactly happened after that. What we know is that the staff, the council to, to President then President Trump who were present or on the phone for this meeting, were not enthused about this idea. You know, bring in, bring in the national guard. They did not like that idea. They thought it was bad and we know that he didn't end up acting on it.
SAMUEL BLACK:
When Trump's lawyers essentially counsel him and tell him not to do that, and he ultimately does not go along with that, the focus really shifts to a plan to try to get state legislatures members of Congress and ultimately vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election on January 6th. And the group that we looked at was involved in that as well. There were meetings in the Trump hotel and elsewhere, that at least Byrne was present for, where this push to get members of Congress and ultimately vice-President Michael to delay the election. This was all happening in this stew of activity on January 4th, 5th, and then in the run-up to the 6th. Ultimately of course, Mike Pence does not go along with them, but for them, at least, it was a very dramatic moment.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Hmm. AC, Did you have anything to add to that as well? Just hearing those details again, you know, it's quite surreal, but what, what are you thinking when you're listening to that, and in that moment in the documentary as well?
A.C. THOMPSON:
The thing that, that stood out to me is that we asked Patrick Byrne about this. We said, look, that sounds like a military coup to us. You don't think people would have freaked out about a military coup about the military getting involved directly in election, seizing voting machines, or as Michael Flynn said, rerunning the election like that doesn't strike you as a little out of the ordinary? And Byrne's, uh, response to us was, well, that seems like less of an offense to the constitution than the massive fraud that had already happened. Um, the problem is there was no fraud.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
Um, what would Byrne say to that? What would he say when you confronted him about the lack of evidence?
A.C. THOMPSON:
This is the thing… I told him, I said, look, I saw your PowerPoint. I've read your book or watched your film. I saw the blog posts you sent me, and I don't find the evidence or presenting compelling. I'm not convinced. At all. I just think you're wrong about this. You're a smart guy. You're a thoughtful person, but I think you're just wrong. And, and there's no, there, there to me. What Patrick would say —and you know, he says a version of this in the film —it's like, you just need to look at the evidence. You need to open up the ballot boxes in these key, um, counties in the battleground states, reassess what happened, and we'll find what the real answer was. And the real answer will be that the election was riddled with fraud and that, um, you know, if not for the votes being stolen in this handful of jurisdictions, Trump would still be the President. That is not true, but that is his perspective.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
So now Patrick Byrne, major financier of the movement, when he was talking to you, I'm just curious, was his pushback a hundred percent? Did he at all nod to anything that gave you a sense of, that he was pushing an agenda rather than believing it?
A.C. THOMPSON:
Sam, you should wait in here in a sec, but let me say this first. Um, I believe that Patrick Byrne is 100% a true believer that he is utterly convinced that we have seen, um, historic fraud and rip off. And what seems different though, is that some of the other people that you meet, the politicians and others who are running on this stolen election myth seem more like it's politically expedient for them to do that, to push it, and also that it is a really good fundraising tool. The politicians who are pushing this, this election fraud, conspiracy are raking in money.
So I really think there's kind of two categories of actors in this space. What would you say, Sam?
SAMUEL BLACK:
Yeah. So I think, um, some there's some background about both Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn that's very interesting. It gives you a sense of where they're coming from. They both believe that they, there is something called the deep state — you know, really a Trump, uh, Donald Trump-influenced term that, that has targeted them in their personal and professional lives. And, in the case of Byrne, he had to resign as CEO of his company, after it was revealed, he had a romantic relationship with someone who was a Russian agent, a woman named Maria Butina. With Flynn, he was, much more prominently Flynn had to resign as Trump's first national security advisor after only three weeks on the job, and then ultimately pleaded guilty to, um, lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian Ambassador. And he hires a woman named Sidney Powell to be his lawyer who was an aggressive attorney in Dallas, who also believes that there's some government malfeasance happening in these kinds of what she considers political prosecutions. So that's the kind of the embryonic moment for Powell, Byrne, and Flynn, who all believe that there's, you know, there's stuff going on behind the scenes, even before they even get into elections, they believe that there's some kind of conspiracy.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
And that is something that we're going to continue to look at because it does run through a lot of their beliefs and appreciate that you shared that backstory. Sam and AC, thank you both so much for coming on the Dispatch, for doing this important work. And this is a continuation of work that we've done over the years, but this one really clarified for me what happened with the election, what happened with the myth around the election and how we might consider the conversations happening now about the midterms and the Presidential election to come. So thank you both for the really important work.
SAMUEL BLACK:
Thank you.
A.C. THOMPSON:
Thank you so much.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH:
To watch Plot to Overturn the Election now, head to frontline - dot- org, where you can read, watch, and listen, to all of our original reporting on this film, and many other stories. This podcast was produced by Emily Pisacreta. Maria Diokno is our Director of Audience Development. Katherine Griwert is our Editorial Coordinating Producer. Frank Koughan is our Senior Producer. Lauren Ezell is our Senior Editor. Andrew Metz is our Managing Editor. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, executive producer of FRONTLINE. Music in this episode is by Stellwagen Symphonette. The FRONTLINE Dispatch is produced at GBH and powered by PRX. Thanks for listening.
