What exactly is the ‘operation’ you are referencing?
What I am suggesting could happen is not a matter of how the operation is performed, but who performs it, or who is involved in performing it. The ‘event’ is completely lacking in detail, and it is within the realm of possibility that some US military could be involved in the transfer of evidence or materials.
Where the SOFA is involved, things don’t always work the way you’d think.
As for whether it actually happened, I’m dubious that a massive fraud with the folks involved could get electronic fraud and physical ballot counts to match. It would necessarily have to be limited in scope (albeit not size) or it would be easily demonstrated where they botched it up.
What I’m referring to is the claim—which I first saw in a tweet by Louis Gohmert—that “the U.S. Army,” or any element of the U.S. armed forces, seized servers in Frankfurt belonging to Scytl or some other private company. There’s no way that could happen, under the NATO SOFA or otherwise. You are right that elements of the U.S. military could have some involvement in a seizure by German authorities, although I’m not sure that would implicate the SOFA.
I don’t know what exactly Powell said on Beck. In the press conference yesterday, she stated that it was “true” that, in the words of the questioning reporter, “There were reports that a piece of hardware, possibly a server, was picked up in Germany.” That is, in fact, true as a broad statement, I suppose: A server was in fact seized in Germany, by German authorities, in July, from a “wikileaks” type group that had information stolen from a law enforcement database in Houston. If that’s what she’s referring to, though, then Powell is wrong when she said “It is somehow related to this.”
I’m with you on the rest. I think the Dominion stuff and other claims of electronic vote tampering are a red herring and a distraction from the real problem: the unprecedented amount of voting by mail. If this election was swung by any illegality, it’s going to be in the mail-in votes in the form of ballot harvesting and mail-in voting fraud. The Democrats have already perfected ballot harvesting in California, and ballot harvesting laws are difficult to enforce even where its illegal. And it would not take too many people or much technical sophistication to mine public voter rolls and other public information to find a good number of registered voters who are probably dead or otherwise inactive, and then apply for mail-in ballots on their behalf.
That’s where the focus needs to be, both now and over the next several years to prevent this from happening again. Let no Republican-controlled state legislature in the country begin their next session without introducing bills to: (1) prohibit any “no excuse” mail-in voting; (2) ensure real verification measures to prevent fraud with whatever absentee ballots are still permitted; and (3) require aggressive auditing and purging of dead or relocated voters from the rolls.