“I have been internally decapitated, and, yet, I live…. The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.” Thus speaks the oracle at the center of the great conspiracy theory that nearly toppled the American republic. The writer was an unnamed correspondent of Sidney Powell, the most visible—and most unhinged—promoter of the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen by Joe Biden. A vast tranche of damning discovery and testimony surfaced late last week as part of the $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News in March 2021. The company’s petition for summary judgment furnishes the basis for this dumbfounding saga; you can read the 200-page document here.
The head-challenged wind-talker reached out to Powell at a pivotal moment in the crank lawyer’s effort to delegitimize the 2020 balloting. Shortly after the election, Powell had gamely floated a theory during an interview with Fox News host Lou Dobbs that a secret CIA program called “Hammer and Scorecard” had been flipping ballots in Biden’s direction, but the attempt to foment scandal fell flat. Powell fielded the e-mail from this, uh, jumpy and suggestible source the day after her Dobbs appearance, and found one of the claims in it explosive: that Dominion Voting Systems had harnessed a recondite algorithm to manipulate vote counts in favor of the Democratic presidential ticket. (The correspondent threw in a couple of other claims as a bonus—that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been taken out during a human-hunting expedition near the Bohemian Grove plutocratic retreat in Northern California, and that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the latter of whom had at that point been dead three years, met regularly in order to
— source thenation.com | Chris Lehmann | Feb 20, 2023