The U.S. Government & The Third-Party Vendor Are One
A lawsuit in Colorado alleges that a private company currently trying to chill free speech in America is actually the government itself.
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-us-government-and-the-third-party
Excerpt:
Earlier this month, a rather extraordinary lawsuit was filed in Colorado on behalf of eight Michigan poll watchers against the most infamous third-party vendor in the world. (For the duration of this article, let’s call that overly litigious entity: Opinion Voting Systems or OVS.) The details contained in that lawsuit are striking for a number of reasons, and not the least of them is the “Lawfare” strategy that OVS employed to silence any criticism of the company. (The entire lawsuit can be found here.) This “lawsuit warfare” campaign was so extensive that it (allegedly) chilled the free speech of regular Americans who volunteered as poll watchers and didn’t make any public statements about the company at all:
As part of this campaign, OVS publicly boasted, with the assistance of
Hamilton Place Strategies, LLC (“HPS”)—OVS’s Public Relations Firm—on its website and in interviews that its lawyers, Clare Locke, LLP (“Clare Locke”) sent letters to over 150 individuals demanding they cease and desist from “taking part in defaming OVS and to preserve all documents and communications that may be relevant to OVS’s [unspecified] pending claims” and threatened ruinous “imminent” litigation—even if the recipients of the letters did not make any public statements about OVS.
These were odd and intimidating letters. They informed people that the letter was “your formal notice to cease and desist taking part in defaming OVS and to preserve all documents and communications” without listing exactly where or how the person had “defamed” OVS in any way.
That’s not all. In these letters, OVS (and its lawyers) demanded that recipients “confirm receipt of this letter and that you intend to adhere to our request to retain documents” without providing any address or contact information to do so. The letters demanded the retraction of statements that were never identified. They demanded the retention of documents that didn’t exist:
Said another way, the Letters were boilerplate directives meant to instill fear
and intimidation. Despite failing to identify the alleged defamation, OVS then illegally demanded these private citizens preserve all communications, emails, texts—private or otherwise—and a host of other materials.
According to the lawyers who filed the suit against OVS, the letters were designed to stop ordinary Americans from talking about election security regardless of the validity of those claims:
For example, Plaintiffs are restricted—according to the Letters—from
speaking about a topic of major public concern: the largest cyber breach in U.S. history. In December 2020, the U.S. government announced it suffered the largest cyber breach in history through the Solar Winds hack. This breach demonstrates how vulnerable electronic voting systems are to hackers because those systems are, directlyor indirectly, connected to the internet. Despite the OVS CEO’s claims that OVS had never used SolarWinds, an archival screenshot of OVS’s website shows a now–erased SolarWinds logo. Based on this evidence, it appears that OVS did use SolarWinds software.
In other words, OVS was (allegedly) trying to suppress the American public from discussing election integrity in general. The “lawfare” letters sent out to these 150 people were merely one part of a much larger campaign to stop anyone from criticizing the results of the 2020 election:
Public debates, audits, and/or investigations of the 2020 General Election are currently being conducted or contemplated by state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and other states to ascertain the scale of vulnerabilities and whether they were exploited. By widely publicizing its intimidation campaign, OVS and its co-conspirators seek to intimidate and silence not just Plaintiffs and the Class, but also the public at large from exercising their right to speak and to share their own testimonial evidence relevant to proceedings investigating election fraud in the November 2020 election.
Does this sound like the behavior of a third-party vendor to you? Have you ever heard of a private company waging war against the free speech of its customers? Of course not. These things do not happen for obvious reasons. ....the lawsuit drops the most important and explosive allegation contained in any lawsuit filed in America:
OVS has not waged its Lawfare campaign as only a corporate citizen,
but also as a state–actor, i.e., the government. OVS is a state–actor because States across the United States have outsourced their constitutional obligation to run elections by deferring to OVS’s professional experience and contracting out the administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results through voting technology, software, and thousands of hours of technical and election services. For example, Georgia paid OVS roughly $90,000,000 for a complete, end–to–end election solution in their Master Solution contract. In the Master Solution, Georgia specifically stated “[t]he unique abilities, knowledge, and skills of [OVS] constitute a material inducement for State entering into this Agreement.” Such reliance and partnership between OVS and States, according to which OVS itself takes the place of the government, makes OVS’s conduct of elections and all its related activities a state-action. The administration, collection, counting, recording, and auditing of ballot results in elections are inherently a traditional, exclusive public function. So not only have these Americans received Letters from a corporate citizen with tens of millions in annual revenue and private equity support, but they have also been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.
Just read those key sentences again:
The supposedly third-party vendor which presents itself as a private company “is a state actor, i.e., the government.”
“These people have been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.”
That’s why a cyber security expert on stage at Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium said: “The question is: who’s running our elections? I think the third-party vendor is running our elections. I think this has been happening for a long time.”
That’s because the U.S. Government and the third-party vendor are one and the same. These people have been threatened by, in effect, the government itself.
****
Iran’s ‘Butcher of Oberlin’: Outrage at college for whitewashing prof.
Excerpt:
Why is Oberlin College hiding its report about Iran’s ‘Butcher of Oberlin’?
...The Post has learned that Kamitsuka has gone to great lengths to insulate Mahallati from the devastating allegation of crimes against humanity [made] against the former Iranian regime envoy, and has refused to respond to the Post query.
Why is Dean Kamitsuka so determined to shield Mahallati from claims that he lied at the U.N.? What’s wrong with providing a copy of the investigation report, together with the sources relied upon to compile it, to the media? Who was And why should Oberlin administrators object to an “independent inquiry” by outsiders into the alleged cover-up by Mahallati? The complete exculpation of Mahallati by internal – i.e,, Oberlin — investigators, is suspect.
Those involved seemed most interested in avoiding the embarrassing conclusion that for decades Oberlin has had on its tenured faculty someone who lied about the crimes of the Islamic Republic. But that is not the only charge against Mahallati that should embarrass Oberlin..
In an October 2020 email, Mahallati denied to the Post the allegations that he aided Iran’s regime in its crimes against humanity. However, the Post has reached out to Mahallati a number of times since February to answer queries about his UN speeches opposing Israel’s existence, promoting genocidal antisemitism, encouraging violent jihad against the Jewish state, and denigrating the Baha’i faith. He has refused to answer.
It turns out that Mahallati did more than deny that the Iranian government had engaged in mass executions of political dissidents in 1988. He also gave speeches at the General Assembly, denying Israel’s right to exist, encouraging a violent Jihad against the Jewish state, and “promoting genocidal antisemitism.”
...It was not only Jews who were the object of Mahallati’s hatred and contempt.He also attacked the Baha’i, a sect whose members have suffered terribly under the Islamic Republic.
...The Oberlin Review noted that “the Chair of the Geology Department, Amanda Schmidt, was the Baha’i affiliate with the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life when the accusations were initially made.”
Schmidt reacted by saying that “I was not reached out to by anyone in the administration to follow up on or provide support for the Baha’i students on campus [or] Baha’i faculty and staff members related to these accusations.”
...Mahallati delivered slashing attacks against the persecuted Baha’i community while he served at the UN.
Melissa Landa, a graduate of Oberlin and founding director of Alliance for Israel, said that “either Oberlin College did not do its homework on Mahallati when it hired him, or it didn’t care about his criminal history. Finding against him in their internal investigation would have meant admitting to one of the two. That wasn’t going to happen.
On a campus that specializes in anti-Israel forms of antisemitism, from the silence of its Hillel director and the abdication of its administration to the relentless attacks of JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] and SFP [Students for a Free Palestine], Oberlin College was never going to object to Mahallati’s praise for violence against innocent Israelis.”
...Even worse, he claimed that Mahallati’s ‘record at Oberlin includes no instances of the antisemitic or anti-Israel behavior of which he has been accused.’ That’s a lot like giving war criminals a pass because they didn’t commit any recent war crimes while in hiding,” they wrote.
...Mahallati, who sports the title of “Professor of Peace” at Oberlin [because he’s such a relentless proponent of interfaith understanding], defended [at the U.N.] the Islamic Republic’s attacks on US military personnel in 1988.
According to a New York Times article, Iran’s regime attacked the American guided-missile cruiser Wainwright, resulting in the death of two US crew members: Capt. Stephen C. Leslie of New Bern, North Carolina, and Capt. Kenneth W. Hill of Thomasville, North Carolina….
It’s not just Iranians in exile, or Jews, or Baha’is, or the parents of present or prospective Oberlin students, but many others, too, who now want to know why President Ambar insists on shielding Professor Mohammad Jafar Mahallati from a serious investigation. Why? Come out of your office, President Ambar, without a media advisor at your side, and explain to all of us why.
Barack Obama Signals That Democrats Intend to Cheat in the Virginia Governor’s Election
* * * Dominion Election Systems Lawfare * * *