How DJT Lost the White House, November 3 – December 23: All the President’s Team(s)

I am going to refrain from saying too much about mine and Sidney’s relationship. For one thing, over time it became something like I was working for her, helping her get answers to questions, and then, something like she became my lawyer. Whichever it was, in time the relationship became something for which privilege surely applies. One cannot selectively waive privilege, and just share the things one wants to share while claiming “privilege” on the others. I know that. But what I can say is that our relationship started out with me just a volunteer walking in off the street with information, and so I can talk about that phase of the relationship, but in time it became formal enough in one way or another I will not be able to say more.

Mayor Giuliani, however, never became my lawyer, and I will not be so constrained in my accounts, as my ultimate purpose, my only real purpose, is to deliver to the public as honest a rendering as I may construct of the events between November 3 and January 6. It seems like a historically worthy thing to do.

For my part, though they thought of me as a businessman, I introduced myself to them as the proprietor of this website, Deepcapture.com. I pointed out that it had won numerous awards for its business investigative journalism back in the 2008 era, and had also been voted the best journalism regarding corruption within the United States. I may have done other things in life but in addition I’m a journalist, and I have the rights any journalist has. Which means I can investigate what I want to investigate, I don’t have to reveal a lot of things about how I learn things, and if I feel like sharing some of my findings with lawyers like Sidney and Rudy, it is not different than the dozens of other times this website has investigated things, and shared its findings with such lawyers, or even law enforcement.

That first meeting with Sidney lasted perhaps 45 minutes. I found her sitting practically by herself, maybe an assistant and junior lawyer with her, in a nearly-empty space on one side of the office building. She was well-informed and open-minded. When I arrived, the air had the strange tingle it has when people have just had words. We quickly got to business, and it became clear she was on top of things. Soon she showed me that her information covered a portion of the narrative about which we had some knowledge but not much (mostly concerning the origin of the machines and their reason for certain design flaws). She was in touch with people from the earliest days of the creation of these systems. On the other hand, as we ran through what my side of the table had already teased out of the data in the three days since the election, she showed she understood what we were saying, and we quickly tied things into what she already knew. It was a highly-productive first conversation, and she ended it telling me that I needed to go to the other side of the office, find Rudy, and immediately tell him everything I had just shared with her.

So my cyberbuddy and I went to the other side of the office building, to Rudy’s side, which I understood to be the center of gravity of the operation.

I should explain what I expected to find. I expected to find a command post staffed by lawyers and quants. The quants would be doing the statistical work, driving answers that would feed lawyers being notified of the research into such oddities as I have walked through above, and would be availing themselves of whatever remedies the law surely applied in appropriate jurisdictions. There would be an information loop, obviously, such that the campaign headquarters in each state would be on a call once per day to receive daily updates on progress. Thinking that may be a fair bit for one 76 year old to manage, I imagined Rudy might have some strong COO who might be keeping assignments on track.

A conference room with a number of lawyers. At least 3 of them were good. These lawyers were the mules of the operation. They were each assigned one or more states. Yet there were things going on at the state level or below, bubbling up organically, research and lawyers jumping in filing actions. I came to learn that between Rudy’s legal team and the campaign staff there was 0 communication, even though they jointly occupied 2/3 of an office story. I don’t know if that was for a legal reason, or just the way they operated. Methinks the latter.

The Mediocrity – I am not going to be mean about it. For example, I am not going to reveal the gender or other details about this person (other than to say, imagine a person who is a lawyer and who had once made a career at one of the better-known government agencies). But given how stunningly horrible this person was to work with, how the Mediocrity went out-of-way to be horrible to work with, and because of how destructive this behavior was, I am simply to refer to this person as the ”Mediocrity”.

The Commish – Think of Mike, from Breaking Bad. The quintessential cop. Tough, perfectly correct and courteous, but stays poker-faced and dead-eyed at all times. Sits in meetings with his hand casually covering mouth, saying nothing. When asked something, might open his mouth, and if he does he invariably has something highly intelligent to say. Making one wonder, “Why does he work so hard to keep his opinion to himself?”

The Mayor – Rudy Giuliani. I was in the hospital in New York for the late 1980’s, and remember the occasional Mafia killings outside some mid-town steakhouse or Brooklyn joint (it was always good for business, they’d say). Rudy was US Attorney there and then, breaking up the Mob. I always felt some affinity for him because of that overlap in time and place. And of course, on 9/11,he became “America’s Mayor”. In the years after that our paths intersected a few times, but he never gave indication of remembering me anytime we crossed paths. His security company handled an issue for me when I was fighting with Wall Street. I doubt he remembers, but when he ran for President a dozen years ago and came through Utah, for some reason I was invited to introduce him at a gathering in some large Utah home. I studied up on him, drove over, and gave a short introduction on Rudy Giuliani to the crowd, lasting about 30 seconds. He took over and we shook hands, and that was the sum of my contact with Rudy Giuliani in his political days.

I do remember in the Q&A that day something interesting happening: a question on abortion came from the staunchly pro-life crowd. Rudy answered the questioner’s thrust, “No, I’ll never support a law that criminalizes abortion for the woman. Laws on abortion have always been directed at the activities of the doctors, not the mothers. I’ll never put a woman in jail for having an abortion. If that is what you folks are looking for, I’m not your guy.” He lost 2/3 of the audience in that moment, but gained the respect of 1/3, among them, myself, if only out of respect for such rare directness from a politician.

So 12 years later, on a Friday afternoon at about 3 PM, I walked into the office space that was being used both by the Trump campaign, and by the law firm that was forming up around Rudy Giuliani to investigate, address, and challenge, the election irregularities which were surfacing from the 2020 election.

It was nothing like the outfit that I expected to find (explained above), with data-gathering feeding decision-making feeding information loops to keep a large and geographically distributed workforce operating successfully. Law firms are notoriously poorly-managed businesses in any case, they truly are, but the law firm-campaign space that had taken shape within that office space was a particular shit-show. People wandered vaguely from meeting to meeting. The meetings I saw were run like bull sessions, with no agenda, no format, and no apparent sense of urgency.

Within about 45 minutes I was ushered to a room where I was to have 30 minutes with Rudy. Physically, he is more of a grandfather than I remember, hunched a bit more, sharp, irascible. I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math PhD Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories of porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. Given that he sat grunting stoically as I spoke, it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. Yet after only 10 minutes I saw Rudy checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat talking. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention to me, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.

Eventually I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for, well, one’s 76 year old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts and typing some people back…. Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office…. Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to decide, someone rushed in with something unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.

Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up desks in bankers’ boxes. I was perplexed, and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall, when I heard Rudy’s familiar voice saying, “…don’t understand a fucking thing this guy’s telling me…” drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.

Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.

Insulted at Mediocrity and the 20-soemthing staffers who were telling me how to write, and giving such asinine advice in the process, I promised I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I asked them for one favor: any requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my cyber-team, and that way we would have some structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs, so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.

Then I left and drove back to DC. By late that evening, I had learned that there were three different open requests from three people on Rudy’s team to various of my colleagues within the Bad News Bears. One was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type… And the shit-show began.

I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in and out). But the atmosphere was one of despair, there was zero leadership shown, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.

From occasional contacts with several of those solid staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had had happened that day just before I arrived. Rudy had declaimed that, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had declared it was not going to be the strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates due process and Equal Protection of the 14 Amendment.” So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a huge blow-up between Rudy and Sidney in front of everyone, with Rudy ending by shouting at Sidney Powell and sending her away, in front of an office of dozens of people. Declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his lawyers to work on their procedural filings.

Later, a participant from Rudy’s team told me that initially Rudy had not even wanted to do that much. He had wanted to make three more-or-less token challenges in three states, and call it a day. Sidney’s adamancy that he was missing the Big Picture had caused him ultimately to relent, a little, and allow a more aggressive posture to be taken. But still, nothing was to be about election fraud and the possibility of a mass rigging of the election. Rudy could tolerate hearing about a couple hundred dead people in Philadelphia voting, but he did not want to hear about anything more complicated than that.

That Friday afternoon just days after the election, I had, in fact, stumbled in on Sidney just as she was recovering from that exchange. And she had sent me back in to talk to Rudy about ways a new form of election fraud might have emerged that was not about hundreds of dead people voting in some city, but was about the possibility of several hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into certain key locations. Rudy had just not been processing any of it, and that was why he kept trying to talk with me about how many dead people did I think voted in Philadelphia.

Over that weekend, Sidney sent one of her brilliant junior attorneys over to sit with myself and a few of the dolphin-speakers (another name I use for the cyber-heads who sit in a room and geek out to each other in a technical language of acronyms). That junior lawyer had anticipated staying 30 minutes, but after an hour and a half she went into the next room and called Sidney. She told Sidney that we had the goods, or at least a well-developed understanding of what had gone on in various states, even specific counties. From that point forward our relationship with Sidney was perfect: as we researched and discovered things, we could bring them to her and she and her staff would patiently listen closely, and ask intelligent questions. And they began incorporating the material into their pleadings.

Mark Twain once ended a long letter to a friend by writing, “If I’d had more time I would have written you a shorter letter.” In those two days after meeting the Mayor in his offices I had time, and by Sunday afternoon I was putting the finishing touches on the most simplified one-page account that I could possibly create. My aim was to make the story so pared down that this time the Mayor could not lose the forest for the trees, that the Mayor would grasp the entire narrative in one succinct one-page read. At that point, once he understood the Big Picture, we could begin diving in on each of the sub-claims: data would be gathered, affidavits taken, and so on. But to begin with, Rudy needed to read and absorb a one-page briefing (in fact it was about 80% of a page), into which I had distilled the research of about a half-dozen different people who had been working down a half-dozen different alleys. It was as pure a distillate as could be achieved, if I say so myself. I included a second page with one graph, concerning one state, backing up a claim made in that one-page narrative: once Rudy grasped that, I figured, once we agreed where we were, I would then supplement with additional graphs for each of the other relevant states. Affidavits that were being gathered would be adduced to document each of the other points made. And so on and so forth. But this time we were going to crawl, walk, run.

Sunday evening I got a phone call at 11 PM, telling me Mayor Giuliani and his entourage were dining in such-and-such a Georgetown restaurant, and would I mind bringing what I had written over to them. I got dressed and went, but when I arrived his security told me to sit in the bar and wait. I did for 45 minutes, until someone came out of the Mayor’s private dining room to tell me the Mayor asked that I not come back to his table (security was concerned about me, for some reason), but asked me to simply send into the private dining room the paper I had written. I sent it in, then left.

Later, two people who were in that room told me what happened when my paper arrived.

First, in the 90 minutes between 11:30 PM and 1 AM, Mayor Giuliani imbibed three triple scotches on ice. Nine shots of alcohol. Those relating this story could not vouch for what he had drunk before 11:30.

Second, in front of everyone Rudy took my paper and read it for perhaps 45 seconds, then put it aside saying, “I’ll get to this later.”

Third, the Mediocrity was at the table. The Mediocrity picked up the one pager and, holding it between fingers like it was a turd, announced with a laugh, “Can you believe Byrne worked all weekend and this is all he wrote?”

Nine hours later, Monday morning at 10 AM, Rudy Giuliani took the stage at a joint press conference held with Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellison. Rudy was meant give a synopsis of where things stood, and then introduce Sidney Powell, who was going to discuss the possibility of mass election fraud on a scale no one was yet comprehending. That it was not about a couple hundred dead people voting here, or a few hundred people who had moved away there, but about something deeper, systemic….. Unprecedented.

Instead of going to plan, Rudy Giuliani got distracted, got carried away, and huffed and puffed his way around the stage for 40 minutes about how many hundreds of dead people had voted here and how illegal people had voted there….. As he worked himself up like Grandpa, repeating all the same points he had been making for days, hair die ran down both sides of his face, unnoticed.

Another story that came to me from those times within Rudy’s offices: One Pennsylvania lawyer, a female, had taken on the job of a filing in Pennsylvania. She received a message from opposing Kirkland & Ellis counsel that was so threatening, so unprofessional, that the Kirkland later had to withdraw from the case INSERT CLIPe. Shaken, the female Pennsylvania lawyer turned in a draft filing but withdrew her representation. Rudy had had to find a firm, overnight, that would finish the Pennsylvania filing. He finally found a lawyer in Texas with election experience who finished it, and got it filed in Pennsylvania. It made no mention of election fraud, and was instead focused on the procedural Equal Protection arguments. Rudy only read it on his way driving to the Pennsylvania court where he was to defend it: upon reading it, he apparently told his companions, This is the worst piece of shit filing I’ve ever had to stand up in a courtroom and defend. He went into that Pennsylvania courtroom and was destroyed.

We got a call from Rudy’s team that we needed to have a set of computer forensic specialists down in Georgia the following morning. They would be provided access to a set of voting machines they could “exploit”. The licensed and certified computer forensic people in question demanded answers, such as, “Where are the machines? What kinds of machines are they? Tampering and playing around with election equipment being a federal felony, so under what legal authority will we be operating? Will there be law enforcement of any kind to review and document all actions taken, for any chain-of-evidence questions that might later arise?”

The response from Rudy’s team was, “We’ve got all that covered. Get down to Georgia, stat!”

With misgivings, I caused the requisite people to fly in to Georgia from various locations. They were driven to some precinct where, it turned out, someone had indeed vaguely promised that some machines could be inspected…. But that person was not there that day. Or had changed his mind. The dolphin-speakers sat around most of the day, then were driven to another precinct where, this time, they were told there would be someone with a court order granting them access to certain machines. No such person was there, but a group of hostile county employees were. Again they sat around waiting for lawyers arranged by Rudy’s team to show up with paperwork, but they never arrived. After hours of waiting, in the early evening they drove away, and as they sat at a traffic light a half-mile down the street, they saw 17 cop cars, lightbars flashing, go rolling by to the building they had just left. My Bad News Bears quickly and safely returned to their dens.

A number of my colleagues interacted with Rudy from time to time, afternoons and evenings, over the next month and a half. Nearly all mentioned two things: the inordinate amount of attention he was paying to his daily podcast, and second, his drinking. Something was clear to all who were with him in the evening, and also to some of those who were with him in afternoons: he was perpetually shit-faced. His own staffers were mentioning it to us. Certainly every evening, or almost every evening, and most afternoons. That, and his podcasts, were the only guarantees in Rudy’s life.

Let me move on, and instead, describe what I have only previously hinted at. In the days after the election people were getting in contact from all over the country. Often, there were networks of people in various states, self-organizing and diving in on various aspects of the rig: what people had experienced in polling stations, what they had been told, what polling observers had experienced. These people sent delegations to find me. Soon there were witnesses to various events flying in, and their network “leaders” who ahd found me. I was deluged with offers of assistance: volunteers from all over the country, many with backgrounds in military and law enforcement, were getting in touch through the grapevine, and asking to be allowed to help in any way. So while these other political matters were going on, I was simultaneously fashioning, well, exactly what I expected to find in Rudy’s office. An “operation”, of some kind. We had the cyber-guys already, and quants. But we had so many whistleblowers and people with relevant stories seeking us out, and so many were flying to DC to find me, that we had to set up operations in hotels scattered around the city. Out of volunteers with background as military officers we found our debriefers, and created a system where they were privately and professionally meeting with the whistleblowers and witnesses, listening to their stories, and crafting summaries. These were being fed up a chain into some analysts, who were jockeying those pieces together with information coming together from our cyber guys, and other sources, and building a picture of increasing granularity of what had happened on November 3-4.

Somewhere in those months General Michael Flynn and I had met telephonically. There was a strange connection between us, a deceased man who had played a role in both of our lives decades past. Conversing with Mike was like meeting and speaking with another entrepreneur: we finished each other’s sentences, and saw what needed to be done almost without conversing. At some point he arrived on the scene, and I told him about this assemblage of talents that had come together in various ways: the cyber guys, the quants, the flow of witnesses and affiants into our circle, our structure of multiple debriefers, our information flow back up to a circle of analysts putting everything together. I had rough-hewn the whole structure expecting Mike’s eventual arrival,, with the understanding that when he arrived I would be handing the keys to it over to him.

I received a request from him to relocate the top of that structure to a location far away from DC, far away from any city, in fact. The information flow that was springing into existence was to come up those networks around the country, through the capillaries of the debriefers and report writers, and into a central analytic station. Mere yards away, there would be an office full of lawyers acting as the legal intake for the information we were drawing up. The structure I had built by instinct, he wanted plugged into the legal teams who would be doing the work. We agreed that Sidney and Rudy would both get any output from this work.

I moved the structure to the location he requested. There was a team of lawyers in place there. However, around them there were a variety of people with no discernible roles and who gave me the creeps. One ex-Agency female, a large, loud woman, and not a lawyer, suddenly sprung up and became quite the organizer and gatekeeper. Another participant, a cocky English man with a military background, was there, and suddenly announced that he was the gatekeeper between this room and that. It all began giving me quite a nasty feeling. But after only two days I got word from Flynn: things having been stood up and roughed-out as we had agreed (as had seemed obvious to both of us, with barely a need to converse), Flynn called and told me he wanted to fly in and take over, and have me go back to DC to start speaking to the public. We agreed we would cross paths for an hour in a certain location as we switched places

I got ready to leave. I told the cocky British man that I needed him to pass on three key messages to someone I was not going to have a chance to see before leaving. He agreed. I said each one simply, and he nodded curtly after each. When I was done I asked him if he understood. He said casually, “Yep. Got em all.”

“OK, repeat them back to me,” I told him. He stared at me, unblinking. “You say you got them, so repeat them to me.” He could come up with nothing. He had not actually listened to a word. I told him to get a pen and paper, and make three notes. He did so begrudgingly.

For some reason I was supposed to take the ex-Agency woman back to DC with me. We drove to the place at which Mike Flynn was arriving. Once there, it turns out she slipped off to the side and told someone that she had learned something that meant she had to stay behind. Flynn arrived, and we had 30 minutes on a tarmac together. We caught up, synched up. I told him that I had misgivings about this British guy who was at the camp, and about the ex-Agency woman who was hovering around. Then I left.

The next day, back in DC, I received word: the ex-Agency woman had made up a lie to get permission to stay. It had something to do with something I had asked her to do, or had asked her not to do, or some research, or something: whatever it was, it was fabrication, designed to get herself turned around and reassigned to stay in that operation in the countryside. She was confronted, and spilled the beans: she was actually working for someone else, and was supposed to stay down in that operation in the countryside, spying and reporting back. They also confronted the cocky British guy, and though I think he never broke, I am told he was definitely implicated in the minds of everyone there. Security walked both characters off of the premises. After their departure, a device of some kind was found wired in one of the key rooms on the premises.

Now this is not to say that all time was being wasted. The structure of information flow I described, the one that I had rough-hewn, was taken over by a three star General who had led a career in Military Intelligence, and he made it far better. Soon it was spitting out refined analyses, reports, information that began informing and filling up the briefs Sidney Powell was writing. We made sure that everything that was provided was also provided to Rudy.

That is the background to presentations such as the ones I have been referencing. Again, for an excellent example, watch Seth Keshel, here. Seth is a former Army Captain in Intelligence, and played a key role in that structure I just described. Seth is a quirky guy, certainly on the spectrum, but a polysci junky, and just all about the precinct math. That link goes to a 21 minute video that provides an excellent example of the kinds of work that was being done within the team that was self-organizing with some rough-fashioning from me, and lots of refinement from Mike Flynn. For a good understanding of the tyoe of work that was being done, you should watch at least a portion of this.

Still, back in DC, rejoined with my Bad News Bears friends, we became aware of a disconnect we could not seem to fix. The Mediocrity had evolved into our point of contact with Rudy’s team, and nothing seemed to flow well. On November 26, Thanksgiving Day, we were all sitting together in a restaurant in DC, and discussing their problems. How the Mediocrity seemed to think they were peons, were telling them, “Go here, go there,” with no explanatory information, no sense of “Hey teammates, this is what is going on, and we are going to work on it together!” Super-controlling about information, plans, access. Sitting there eating our turkey dinner, they gave me quite an earful. I had trouble believing the stories they were telling me. Among them were some truly horrible ones concerning the Mediocrities proclivity for hitting on people of the opposite gender, and possibly the same gender, in ways that were embarrassing to all present (one of my colleagues had been asked to go see the Mediocrity one evening, and when the hotel door opened the Mediocrity was standing there in underwear). But now it was boiling over, they said, because that day they had received an order that they were all to be in Antrim, Michigan the following day. Again, she would answer no questions about where they were going exactly, what machines they were expecting to confront, under whose authorizes would they be opening machines and imaging hard drives, even how long would they be there, should they arrange their own rental cars, etc. None of it was being explained. The Mediocrity had just sent word to be in such-and-such a place in Michigan, stat.

Then, life being as funny as it is, we looked up, and sure enough, there was the Mediocrity strolling through the restaurant not far from our table. We caught each other’s eye, and soon Mediocrity was standing over our table, talking. Thinking it was a nice opportunity to pour oil on troubled waters, I received Mediocrity gracefully, intending to converse in front of my colleagues civilly, and get things back on track.

Soon, the talk turned to Michigan, and I was asked would I be able to get the right people there in the morning at the appointed hour. Thinking I might use it as a moment of management development, I gently suggested, “You know, when we get requests like these, it would really be good to be better informed. My colleagues want to know things like, ‘Exactly where will they be going? Are the people there going to be cooperative? What kinds of machines might we be exploiting? What legal authority is enabling us to image one of these voting machine hard drives? Are people going to be staying overnight? Will there be rental cars provided?’ You know, just the basics before people get thrown on some mission like happened in Georgia.”

“Look,” the Mediocrity said, standing over us at late Thanksgiving Dinner. “First, what is your corporate structure?”

We all looked at each other, not having really given the matter much thought. We were just a bunch of people who had found each other and were trying to expose what looked like a world-historic crime together. Finally I said, “Our corporate structure is that we’re the Bad News Bears. I’m the team coach.”

“Ok Patrick,” the Mediocrity continued. “Here’s what’s going on. I’ve told you where you need to be in Michigan tomorrow Be there. Or tell us you cannot, and we’ll find someone who can.”

In my astonishment I began to respond, and to my further astonishment, the Mediocrity began speaking over me. “I’m telling you where you need your team to be. If you can’t handle it-“

I did something I had not used in a couple decades, something I had seen an economist professor friend do to another professor, a Lefty, who had continuously interrupted him (as Lefties are want to do in place of having good arguments). I just started speaking, “Well it may sound like I was finished speaking but I actually wasn’t and while you might think you are going to speak over me actually I am just going to continue talking like this until you shut up and I did not care if it takes all night because I know that it may have sounded like I was finished but actually I wasn’t and while you might think otherwise I promise you I can keep this up longer than you…” and so on and so forth. Without a break. For about 15 seconds until the Mediocrity got that I was serious, and was just going to continue speaking like that over and over until the Mediocrity shut up. Which eventually the Mediocrity did, looking somewhat astonished, having evidently gotten away with such behavior in decades of federal employment.

At which point I politely said, “Where in the fuck do you get off? We don’t work for you. We are volunteers here offering to help you do things you have no clue how to do. Go find someone else anytime you want. The way you folks work in this city is astonishing. If you ever try to work at a modern company like Google, or Facebook, your ass will be fired in a New York minute. You suck.”

I surprised myself, because I do not normally speak that way to people, but I did that time. I told Mediocrity that conversations with Mediocrity were constant games of narcissist deflection, how amateurish Mediocrity was, how anyone walking around saying “Failure is not an option!” and “Either you do this or I find someone who will!” is a mediocrity who may have learned management within the government but who if ever moved to the private sector would get fired by noon. Any reasonably competent person would provide, when making such a request to my colleagues, relevant information. Fill them in on the mission, let them brainstorm and contribute…. I saw Mediocrity’s eyes water, and realizing I was overdoing it, I got up to gently and softly escorted Mediocrity away from the table. I tried to soothe things over a bit, and put a nice façade on things, and not leave Mediocrity in embarrassment.

As we parted, Mediocrity turned to me and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll be with the President. I’ll make sure you get full credit for all of this.”

Exasperated, I returned to my seat and friends. Minutes later we saw that Mediocrity had, in fact, been part of a larger party, and walking out with that party was none other than Mayor Giuliani. I quickly saddled up to him on the side. It was about 10:30 PM, his step seemed unsteady, and I went to his elbow like one would escorting an unsteady Grandpa to his car. We tried speaking, but whatever he was saying was indistinct to me. Finally I told him, “Sir, this is not working out well with your colleagues. May I respectfully request a way that I might contact you directly, so we can keep things on better track?” The Mayor pulled out his cell phone and had me take his number.

In that weeks that followed I called and texted that number on at least a half-a-dozen occasions. Not once did Rudy ever respond to me.

Over these weeks there were a number of excellent White House staffers whom I got to know. Smart young men and women in their late twenties, generally. Some (but not all) were huge Trump enthusiasts. They filled me in on details here and there, snippets of what was happening behind the scenes between the campaign, Rudy, and the White House. One evening, once we were close enough, I let down my hair and said, “This is a shit-show. Is this …. normal?” One of the staffers (and, mind you, a very pro-Trump one) said, “This is it. This is the Trump White House. This is how everything has run for four years.”

The Bad News Bears got where they needed to be in Michigan, when they needed to be there. The Mediocrity was there, along with other lawyers and staff from Rudy’s team. They went to the precinct in which they were expected, and like Georgia, it was a bust. The machines were not tabulating machines such as we had been led to expect. No real authorities were there, or law enforcement, or warrants: just a mildly cooperative 75 year old lady working in a public building that had acted as a voting precinct.

While the Mediocrity hung around chatting up county workers of the opposite sex, the dolphin-speakers went to work. It turned out the 75 year old lady who ran the place had a story about how, on the day after the election, some people from “county” had shown up and instructed her to insert her card and re-run her machine using some different inputs. What she was saying did not make sense, and it was clear that they had chosen to an old woman who was probably not capable of sending her own texts. Finally she mentioned that, unbeknownst to county, she had kept both the paper audit trail of the original run, and the re-run, and had stored them in a closet. Our geeks got excited, and had her bring them out: they unrolled them on a long carpet, and in a few minutes of study, they began finding things. Alarming things.

The Bad News Bears finally got Mediocrity to break away from the coffee-klatch being had with the deputies, and pointed out what they were finding in the paper rolls. Finally they suggested, “You are a lawyer, right? Don’t you think you should be getting some affidavits from” the 75 year old lady and a couple other of the employees who had shared telling information? “Oh yes, of course of course,” scrambled Mediocrity, and did so.

Those learnings and those affidavits were fed to a Michigan lawyer who was pursuing his own election fraud case in Michigan. Days later a judge read it, and found it alarming enough he gave a court order for a formal exploitation of the Antrim County voting machines. The Bad News Bears returned to Antrum County and this time, with a proper court order in their pocket, they were able to image hard drives, and returned to base camp with those images. In the next four days they performed a month’s worth of work (by working in staggered shifts around the clock), first breaking the security on the imaged hard drives, then reconstructing the files, then analyzing them. That was all fed up through the system, and emerged about a week later as an eye-opening report that created a national stir, known as the Antrim County Computer Forensics Report.

Other telling things were happening nationally. Some of the concerned federal employees mentioned earlier had been tracking events in a Western state, and were sure they knew how the vote flipping was being done there. The problem is, the relevant judge (a Democrat), when asked to allow inspection, would insist on stalling for a few days, thus giving time for the opposition to go in and do a “smash-down” (a computer scientist’s term for fixing the evidence after-the-fact, in anticipation of an audit, and making sure everything ticked and tied correctly). But they made a mistake in one location, and their smash-down did not work. The data that turned up was so telling, and so indicative of fraud, that the lawyers went back to the judge arguing it provided grounds for a far more sweeping order that would let them examine machines across the state. The judge agreed in principle, but suggested that the precinct needed to have its data verified again before he could use its discrepancies to justify such a sweeping order. The concerned federal employees put the location in question under observation, and sure enough, that night there were three cars in the precinct parking lot. They were redoing their smash-down so that this time it would work. The license plates on those cars tracked back to a left-wing union which shows up repeatedly in the background of many of these matters. But in the morning, the data was fixed, and no further orders were coming out of that judge. However, unbeknownst to them, the scientists in question had recovered enough material both to document the original, and the smash-down.

Meanwhile, back in DC, I was hearing odd things out of the Rudy-world. I was hearing that he was getting paid $100,000/week, and there were those in his environ claiming he was just mailing things in for a paycheck.

More importantly, from Rudy’s operation we began hearing the number “$207 million”. The claim was that the Republican party had raised $207 million to “stop the steal”. In one version it grew past $300 million. In one version of the staff rumor, the finger on the button for those millions was a high-level woman at the Republican National Committee. In another version, it was all being jointly managed by that RNC woman and the Commish, and they were keeping an eye to the future. In almost everyone’s version of the story, $100 million had been set aside by Jared and Ivanka for future legal defense. But whoever was in charge, they were sitting on all the money, and I can promise, not one penny of it spent in any way to help “stop the steal”. Whatever Republican loyalists around the country coughed up those hundreds of millions, in donations of $10 and $20…. They were all fleeced. It became a big joke: there was a pot of hundreds of millions of dollars given by Republicans to Republicans to help reverse-engineer and unscramble whatever the hell had had happened on November 3, and not a penny was going to any activity related to doing so. It was all being held by people at the top licking their lips.

In Georgia, the fight became surreal. A young man who was dating the daughter of the governor got involved, then his car exploded in an accident (see “BIZARRE EXPLOSION CRASH IN GEORGIA – KILLS HARRISON DEAL” December 5, 2020). Truly, it was on a highway, it got struck on the side, and it blew up. The engine was thrown 75 yards. Videos of the accident (most of which seem to have been removed from the internet) showed a car burning in a fireball: it was quite an ornery car crash.

Then the Georgia Bureau of Investigation got involved. Three days later, the officer conducting the investigation committed suicide.

One faction from Georgia had been in touch with me from days after the election. This was an interesting network of people with law enforcement and quasi-law-enforcement backgrounds. Since November 4 they had been reverse-engineering the steal there. They had put people and locations under observation, had been filming varieties of activities through telephotos. They mapped and tracked numerous parties involved, and even tracked the organizers down to a small element, a Leninist cadre, who were staying in a motel together and managing shenanigans around the state. For their own reasons this network helping me needed to stay in the shadows, yet as the weeks rolled by they were providing good information helping us reconstruct what had happened in Georgia.

A technologist named Jovan Pulitzer (inventor of the now ubiquitous QR-code) went public regarding his investigations into the Georgia election. The best short video of Jovan explaining his work is here:

Over those weeks, Rudy managed to schedule a few hearings in a few states. Some were quasi-official, but most were conducted out of rented hotel spaces. His star witness was the Colonel from military intelligence with whom I had been working since August, who essentially was brought to these different states to report and synthesize the information that the Bad News Bears were surfacing. He did an able and convincing job, but we all began to wonder: what’s the strategy here? Is there a strategy? Rudy’s strategy (if there is one) seems to be a long march through the courts. Taking cases to the states and appellate levels. Imagining he was going to win just by running the tables through the court system. But that was not going to work, as the courts are ponderous anywhere, especially disinclined to get involved in election matters, and were already setting court dates out past January 20. Yet Rudy just kept plodding along, with an occasional hearing, a daily podcast. It did not seem to make any sense.

One activity that began bearing fruit was our investigations into foreign involvement in the election. This will be the subject of a piece of its own.

Mike, Sidney, myself, and others developed a solution-in-a-can. It was the same solution we had started within in mid-November, and ran like this: Under various orders signed previously by both Obama and by Trump, if an election had foreign entanglement, the President had quite a rather broad spectrum of powers. There was indisputable evidence of foreign involvement on countless fronts, but we were asking that only a narrow set of his powers be invoked: based on the information that had been turned up, the President should use his powers under the requisite Executive Orders simply to send US Marshalls and the National Guard into the five problematic counties, open up the paper ballot backups, and recount them right there, on livestreamed TV. If there were no big discrepancies, Trump would concede. If there were big discrepancies, such as half-a-million vote discrepancies that we suspected might fall out, then more aggressive courses of action could be countenanced, such as re-rerunning the election in those counties or states. The recount of the five counties could be easily done in under a week, and if it justified further action, the entire resolution could still be done on a Constitutional timeline.

It was either that, or an election whose integrity was doubted by 47% of the electorate had to be choked down.

General Flynn drafted a beautiful operational plan for such a mission. One signature from the President, and the whole thing would be set in motion. The right teams created from the right military and National Guard Units, the precise directives to each… The most expansive version of the plan had the first wave of recounting to be conducted in 17 counties around the nation, Democrat and Republican, so no one could claim that results were cherry-picked. That most expansive version of the plan envisioned paper ballot recounting, plus imaging of hard drives of these voting machines for further forensic analysis (but not “seizing” the machines: they were to be left in place, and just have their hard drives imaged). However, in a pinch, we could hit just five counties and recount the boxes of paper ballots and have a preliminary answer in 2-3 days, thus ending a great deal of national drama. Mike and Sidney had the legal research, the draft finding, the general’s Execution Checklist that would, upon Presidential signature, make everything run like a Swiss watch.

And yet, things slid and slid. Rudy went off to organize a hearing in a hotel room and needing one of our people there to speak…. Days spent waiting for warrants that never came…. Absolutely no sense that there was anyone with a plan, executing it. We saw the Constitutional deadlines beginning to loom…

The days turned into weeks. December came, then mid-December. Yes we had matters spinning in various states, yes we had cyber-teams inspecting packet traffic and finding foreign influences, yes we were finding smart thermostats that had been breached from overseas, yes we were learning why voting rolls were kept live overseas….. But Mike and I had a sense that our side was chasing its tail. That the other side was just running out the clock. And Rudy’s approach would surely allow that.

At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, Rudy Giuliani and the Mediocrity were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending his days sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President what was going on and what his options were. At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but I confirmed it. The Mediocrity and the Mayor were the ultimate point-people on the mission of stopping this world-historic task.

Flynn and I felt sick. A frequent subject of mutter between us ran along the lines, “Why the fuck are we doing this?” The president’s children were off, uninvolved, or planning retirements, or pep-rallying. We could detect no discernible strategy out of the President’s team, no marching orders, just an organization wandering around and melting as it did so. A Mediocrity who was so bad, we had had to make special arrangements such that the Mediocrity did not have direct contact with our people, or they were going to flee. And the whole mess was led by a 76 year old gentleman, a man mujch beloved by his country, but who six weeks into what might be the most sophisticated cybertheft in all of history, could still not have a coherent conversation beyond, “Did you hear that 211 dead people in Philadelphia voted? Dead people?!?!? And they voted! Have you heard?!?”

And then we would remember why were doing it: America’s brand is “elections”. It is what we do. We had a national election that appeared to have been compromised in a remarkably precise and strategic way, it showed the hand of foreign involvement, it might be part of a Chinese psyop to take over our country, and there might never be a free, non-gooned election in America again. That’s why we were not supposed to quit.

Which is why, a few days before Christmas, Mike, Sidney, and I decided it was time to take a chance. With no invitation, by hook or by crook, we were going to Jedi-mind-trick our way into the White House, get to the Oval Office, and talk to the President ourselves.

Patrick Byrne is a tad on the 'eccentric' side, to say the least:

The Exclusive Inside Story Of The Fall Of Overstock’s Mad King, Patrick Byrne

Aug 22, 2019,02:49pm EDT

This story appears in the September 30, 2019 issue of Forbes Magazine.

Patrick Byrne, the founder and longtime CEO of former e-tailing giant Overstock.com, recently resigned, saying his involvement as a federal informant in the investigation of accused Russian spy Maria Butina made performing his duties impossible. That’s not the whole story. This is.

It’s early May and Patrick Byrne has just gotten off the phone with hip-hop artist Akon and is roaming barefoot in the elegant three-room suite on the top floor of the Jefferson hotel, a stone’s throw from Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. He grabs a Diet Coke, a pack of gummy bears and some M&Ms from a minibar hidden in a tasteful armoire, settles on a plush cream-colored sofa and begins to boast about the circumstances around which the Senegalese-American celebrity sought him out. “I hear he’s a musician. We share ambitions for Africa,” says Byrne, popping a gummy bear into his mouth.

Byrne, who bought Overstock.com in 1999 and ran it for two decades, has always been a man of many ambitions. High on his list: transforming the African continent and its 1.3 billion people via blockchain technology. Like an infomercial for the nascent decentralized, distributed ledger technology that underlies cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, he waxes poetic about a future in which corruption is wiped out, people are freed from poverty and developing nations can leapfrog ahead by putting government functions like voting, property records and central banking on the blockchain. Characteristically low on his priority list: The economic interests of the thousands of shareholders in his publicly traded former e-tailing giant.

For the last several years, Byrne, 56, spent no fewer than 220 days a year on the road spreading his blockchain gospel, despite the fact that Overstock was hemorrhaging cash. “Over the next five years, we can change the world for 5 billion people,” says Byrne. “Well, at least a billion. Maybe 5 billion.”

Byrne is vague about why he is in the nation’s capital this week and mentions a meeting with representatives from Africa about his blockchain projects. However, he later reveals that he had been meeting with the Department of Justice. Byrne claims he’s been serving as a government informant, feeding information since 2015 to the “Men In Black,” as he puts it, on Maria Butina, a vivacious Russian grad student with whom he struck up a romantic relationship. She is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent, in connection with her efforts to infiltrate conservative political circles before and after the 2016 presidential election.

In his resignation letter, Byrne cited his involvement in “certain government matters” as complicating “all manner of business relationships from insurability to strategic discussions regarding our retail business.” Byrne says what he has done (exactly what that was remains unclear) “was necessary for the good of the country, for the good of the firm.” Byrne concludes his letter by stating cryptically:

“Coming forward publicly about my involvement in other matters was hardly my first choice. But for three years I have watched my country pull itself apart while I knew many answers, and I set my red line at seeing civil violence breaking out. My Rabbi made me see that ‘coming forward’ meant telling the public (not just the government) the truth. I now plan on leaving things to the esteemed Department of Justice (which I have doubtless already angered enough by going public) and disappearing for some time.”

In a call from his car minutes after delivering a farewell speech to his surprised employees, Byrne said he had his bags packed. “I will be sitting on a beach in South America shortly, and that is all I want to think about,” he says. “I want to focus on getting back into good shape, doing yoga and becoming a vegetarian.”

Welcome to Patrick Byrne’s bizarre world. The existential crisis Byrne is putting his Salt Lake City-based company through comes after an impressive career pioneering e-commerce. Nearly two decades ago, Byrne was lauded as “The Renaissance Man of E-Commerce.” The closeout store he took control of in 1999 for a mere $7 million was on its way to becoming an e-tailing phenom and eventually came to command a market capitalization of $2.2 billion. But in the hyper-competitive digital age, disruptive business models don’t last long, and today Overstock—once an innovator—is a has-been.

This isn’t any secret. By the time of his resignation, Byrne had all but given up trying to compete with the likes of Amazon and Wayfair, and he had spent the last two years unsuccessfully attempting to unload Overstock’s retail business. Just as e-commerce captivated Byrne at the turn of the millennium, blockchain was his shiny new obsession. So Byrne funneled Overstock’s dwindling resources into blockchain ventures—more than $200 million since 2014. About 30% of that sum went into 18 early-stage companies that are building a suite of blockchain technology products he wanted to sell to governments. The rest has been seemingly squandered on a personal vendetta: Overstock is creating a blockchain version of Nasdaq, which Byrne believed could right some of the evils of Wall Street—particularly the naked short-selling that he claims plagued his company for much of the last 15 years. Byrne attracted an eclectic mix of allies to his corner doing what he called “God’s work,” ranging from Akon and the World Bank to the infamous short-seller Marc Cohodes and the city of Denver.

But the walls closed in on Byrne’s quixotic adventure. Overstock’s heavily shorted stock plummeted from $87 in the beginning of 2018 to about $17 today as some $1.6 billion in market capitalization has evaporated. Once reliably profitable, Overstock lost $206 million last year and $110 million in 2017. In recent months, Byrne fired some 400 people.

Even worse were the cracks forming in Overstock’s new strategy. The company’s prized crypto offering, Tzero, is the subject of an SEC investigation, and a highly-anticipated private equity investment into the fledging exchange has withered away. Its blockchain investment arm, Medici Ventures, has yet to generate meaningful revenues and racked up losses of $61 million in 2018. With many big companies now embracing blockchain technology—including a bold new plan from Facebook—Byrne’s strategy shift to blockchain suddenly looks as challenging as Overstock’s online retailing business.

Eventually even Byrne’s most loyal shareholders—blockchain believers among them— were in open revolt. Fumed Byrne in May, after investors bombarded him with calls and emails when he sold 900,000 shares of stock, “Frankly, I had no idea that shareholders would demand explanations of why and how I might want to use my cash derived from my labor and my property to pursue my ends in life.” Byrne is the son of the late John “Jack” Byrne, a University of Michigan-trained mathematician and renowned insurance executive credited with turning around Geico in the mid-1970s and persuading Warren Buffett to invest in the auto insurer. Geico would eventually become one of the biggest contributors to Berkshire Hathaway’s bottom line, and Buffett once described Byrne’s father as “the Babe Ruth of insurance.” When Byrne was in middle school, he gravitated toward his father’s friends. Bethesda neighbor Gordon Macklin, the president of Nasdaq from 1975 to 1987 (and later the chairman of San Francisco investment bank Hambrecht & Quist), would drive Patrick to school regularly. Buffett was an occasional house guest, and Byrne’s parents would allow him to skip school to spend time with the investment maven.

Says Byrne, who now refers to the Omaha billionaire as his Rabbi, “My mom would get a case of Pepsi, and Buffett, who is a teetotaler, always carried a hip flask of cherry syrup like a drunk. We’d sit there and over an afternoon polish off 18 Pepsis.”

Byrne’s father later went on to turn around American Express’s Fireman’s Fund and eventually created his own insurance holding company, called White Mountains Insurance. His stake, worth hundreds of millions at his retirement in 2007, formed the basis of the family’s wealth.

Patrick was the youngest and most precocious of Jack’s three sons. In 1981, he headed to Dartmouth to study philosophy and Asian studies. Shortly after his graduation, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. After treatment, he celebrated with a cross-country bicycle ride with his two older brothers. The cancer would come back two more times in quick succession and keep him in the hospital for much of his 20s. To keep his mind occupied while he was bedridden, he began pursuing a graduate degree in mathematical logic from Stanford. In 1988 he headed to Cambridge University as a Marshall Scholar and eventually received his philosophy doctorate from Stanford. Byrne speaks Mandarin and several other languages and once translated Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching (The Way Of Virtue) into English. “I was one of those guys who actually studied philosophy because I was trying to figure out man’s place in the universe,” says Byrne, whose dissertation explored the virtues of limited government and drew from libertarian Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia.

Despite his years in academia, Byrne pivoted hard to the pursuit of wealth in the late 1980s. “I had grown up in a very business-oriented household … I never anticipated staying in a university setting,” he says. In 1987 he bought a bankrupt hotel with his older brother called the Inn at Jackson Hole for about a million dollars, which they sold several years later for $4 million. In 1989, they started buying distressed consumer debt at 5 cents on the dollar during the S&L crisis. In the early 1990s, Byrne led a $1 million investment into the development of the Red Dolly Casino in Colorado, which was later sold for $5 million. He also invested in distressed strip malls, office space and apartment buildings across the country. His dad often loaned his sons money and in later years put up mezzanine capital, collecting a preferred, 15% return and half as much equity.

Nothing kept Byrne’s attention very long. In 1994, he led an investment into Centricut, a New Hampshire-based industrial torch-part manufacturer, and served briefly as CEO when the current management fell ill. In 1997, he left to run Berkshire Hathaway’s Fechheimer Brothers, which made uniforms for police, firemen and military. In 1999, seeing an opportunity to sell leftover inventory online, his investment holding company, High Plains Investments LLC, acquired a majority stake in D2-Discounts Direct for $7 million. He renamed it Overstock, and when 55 venture capitalists declined to fund the company’s growth, he turned to friends, family and his own checkbook. His timing was perfect. The company began scooping up inventory from bankrupt dot-coms, whether it was consumer electronics, jewelry or sporting goods, then selling it on the cheap. In 2002, Overstock’s revenue hit $92 million and Byrne took the company public via a Dutch auction, which allows investors (not bankers) to set prices for the stock offering themselves. (Google went public the same way.)

By 2005, the company’s stock, which had skyrocketed post-IPO, began to slide as its losses widened. Byrne became convinced it was because of naked short-selling, an illegal practice in which investors sell shares in a company without actually borrowing the shares, typically using leverage. In a now-infamous August 2005 conference call, he ranted about how hedge funds, journalists and regulators were conspiring to push down the company’s stock price under the direction of some faceless menace he called the “Sith Lord.” Overstock sued short-selling hedge fund Rocker Partners and research firm Gradient Analytics, which had been critical of the company. Then, in 2007, he filed a $3.5 billion lawsuit against 11 of the biggest banks on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse among them), accusing them of participating in a “massive, illegal stock market manipulation scheme” that distorted the company’s stock price by facilitating naked short-selling.

The crusade cost him two directors, plus the confidence of his father, who threatened to step down from the board because he believed his son was distracted from Overstock’s core business. The litigation dragged on for over a decade and resulted in a handful of settlements, including a $20 million payment from Merrill Lynch in 2016. “I think he won the battle but lost the war when it came to naked short-selling,” says Tom Forte, long the lone analyst covering the stock. In the years Byrne spent chasing short-sellers, Overstock’s stock sagged and revenue drifted slowly upward, hitting $830 million in 2008, $1.3 billion in 2013 and $1.8 billion in 2018. And while the company never racked up massive losses like Amazon or Wayfair, as Byrne likes to point out, its profitability has been modest. Overstock broke into the black in 2009, then eked out small profits for the next seven out of eight years.

In 2017 and 2018, as Byrne shifted his attention to expanding in crypto and blockchain, the company began bleeding red ink—a whopping $316 million over two years, which is more than twice the profits Overstock has ever delivered. Byrne chalked his market share declines up to competitors with seemingly endless piles of cash to blow through. “The thing I never anticipated … was that I would be in an industry that tolerated people losing $500 million, $1 billion or $3 billion forever. We started drawing copycats who came in and seemed to have unlimited capital,” he says, not hiding his disdain for and jealousy of Wayfair.

However, former employees say Byrne was distracted by his short-selling crusade and failed to take competitors seriously. Internally Byrne’s ADD management style—enthusiastically starting up new projects but then losing interest—was jokingly referred to as the Overstock “ovolution.” In 2004, the company spent a couple of million to develop an online auction platform akin to eBay, but it struggled to turn a profit and was shut down in 2011. (Byrne later said he wished he hadn’t abandoned it.) In 2014, Overstock invested $400,000 to facilitate pet adoptions by working with shelters, which it still runs but describes as a “public service.” The company started selling home, auto and small business insurance in 2014, too, which Byrne described as “a long-term play” before trashing it as not doing “particularly well” three months later.

“Patrick gets very focused on something, and then when he sees the financials didn’t work out, he basically forces layoffs,” says Chad Huff, a former software developer. “Initiatives would get started, then shelved. Or they’d be half done and not in a great state but rolled out anyway.”

A couple of months before his resignation, as sheets of rain blanket Overstock’s new headquarters at the base of Utah’s Wasatch Mountains—a building designed to resemble a peace sign when viewed from above—Byrne has finished sitting through a scheduled business luncheon and gone missing. Several minutes later, after his assistant tracks him down, he glides into his office, where posters of Bob Marley and Pulp Fiction give it a dorm-room feel. He sits down and begins ruminating on his two decades running Overstock. “It’s kind of imagination land,” says Byrne, dressed in a black long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes.

Strangely, Byrne’s Overstock was long immune from activist shareholder campaigns and boardroom coups and what ultimately prompted his sudden departure is still murky. Investors like Marc Cohodes had called for Byrne to step aside as CEO and move into a chairman position. Despite recent stock sales, Byrne remains the company’s largest shareholder, with a 14% stake and says he wasn’t pushed out. “This is not about pressure from shareholders. The only pressure—or actual issue— was that the insurance companies were having conniptions,” he says.

Byrne began chasing crypto in late 2013 when he asked dozens of staffers to work over the holiday break to fast-track a bitcoin payment feature. The price of bitcoin had skyrocketed that year from about $13 to more than $1,000, and in January 2014, Overstock became the first major retailer to accept bitcoin as payment.

Before long, Byrne began tapping Overstock’s balance sheet to fund bigger and bigger blockchain initiatives. The crown jewel: a digital stock exchange called Tzero, which is seeking to allow investors to trade so-called security tokens that represent traditional securities, like stocks, bonds, real estate, private equity and art on the blockchain. Proponents say this will improve access and liquidity for certain investments, plus cut down settlement times for stocks and bonds from up to two days to mere seconds. A bonus: The system would make naked short-selling impossible because there is no longer a lag time between a buy and sell order.

On the plus side, Tzero has satisfied a set of fearsome regulatory requirements, most notably acquiring a company licensed as an alternative trading system. The problem is, with just two tokens—representing Overstock’s and Tzero’s own shares—available to trade on Tzero’s platform, almost no one uses it. The company says it is aiming for 5 to 10 tokens by the end of the year. In May, it announced partnerships with Saudi real estate giant Emaar Properties, to list $2 billion in real estate, and Securitize, a startup that packages regular assets into digital tokens that can be traded on the blockchain. While it hopes to generate revenues from listing fees, trading commissions, interest on lending assets and more, it first needs to create liquidity by attracting quality issuers and investors to its platform.

Byrne was also developing a securities lending platform as part of Tzero, which would connect asset-rich institutional investors like pension funds (who make money by lending their stock) directly with short-sellers (who borrow stock to make trades). Both parties stand to benefit from lower fees, plus would receive a blockchain-enabled digital locate receipt that proves the shares have actually changed hands. The service takes dead aim at banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which currently sit in the middle of these transactions. It’s been tried before: A company called Quadriserv created a similar stock lending platform named AQS in 2006, but alleged in a recent lawsuit that banks conspired to “boycott AQS and starve it of liquidity.” In 2016, AQS was sold in a fire sale for $4 million.

“It’s the last great business on Wall Street,” says Byrne. “Pension funds are going to understand they have been deprived of tens of billions of earnings a year. That money is turning into Maybachs in the Hamptons.”

At the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May, Byrne fielded tough questions from investors. While the price of bitcoin had climbed some 60% in the last five months, Overstock’s shares were sliding. And after months of delays, Overstock just dropped a bombshell: Tzero would receive a measly $5 million in the form of Chinese renminbi, U.S. dollars and other Hong Kong-traded securities from Asian investment firm GSR Capital, after the company originally touted a deal size of as much as $404 million.

Over time Byrne developed a dilettante’s reputation for overpromising and underdelivering. In 2016 Byrne boldly told investors that Overstock would be issuing the world’s first equity security using the blockchain. “The history of capital markets is entering a new era,” he said. Byrne personally ended up buying 50% of the $2 million preferred stock offering.

In 2017, Byrne announced a joint venture with Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar that would “challenge global poverty and inequality” by creating a blockchain-based global land registry. But when the two couldn’t agree on terms, Byrne ended up contributing $7 million of his personal capital to take a 43% stake in the newly formed Medici Land Governance.

Overstock began exploring a sale of its retailing business in 2017, but to date no buyers have materialized. There was also Tzero’s troubled “initial coin offering,” which set out to raise $250 million but, ultimately as crypto prices were dropping, generated $105 million in August 2018 at an expense of $21.5 million to corporate parent Overstock. The offering is now being investigated by the SEC as part of a broader ICO crackdown.

Many investors grew tired of Byrne’s promises. “Basically, every initiative they put forward, they promised or signaled to the market that this is an incredible layup and they will get it done in three to six months,” says Kevin Mak, a lecturer at Stanford Business School who invested in the company in 2017 and sold his shares last fall. “I ultimately exited when I found that the information I was getting from management was no longer—I want to pick the right words—reliable.”

In the end, Byrne was forced to spend a considerable amount of time hunting for fresh funds to keep his dream alive. In November 2017, Overstock borrowed $40 million from his mother (trusts in her name own 5% of the company) and brother at an interest rate of 8%. Over the next few months, during the height of crypto-mania, the company received $150 million from two investors, including George Soros, after they exercised warrants in exchange for stock (the investors have since dumped their shares). In August and September 2018, the company raised another $95 million by issuing new shares of common stock in an “at the market” offering.

The problem is, unlike most companies that buy back shares as prices decline, Overstock is selling, diluting the company’s equity. Shares outstanding have climbed to 35 million from 25 million in the last two years. In the first quarter of 2019 Overstock committed to another quick stock sale, raising $31 million to partially offset a $51 million cash burn.

Meanwhile, Overstock’s original business is running on fumes. “It was kind of a fight to run retail because it was never his priority,” says Stormy Simon, former president of the operation who left in 2016. Since then, there have been several rounds of layoffs in the retail business, leaving a raft of empty desks in Overstock’s new $100 million headquarters. And yet, to his blockchain staffers, Byrne was like Daddy Warbucks. Tzero CEO Saum Noursalehi was paid $4.8 million last year, while his brother and Tzero vice president Nariman earned $1 million. Tzero chief technology officer Amit Goyal made $1.8 million—and his brother Sumit earned an additional $765,000.

In Overstock’s recent quarterly filings, it indicates that it should be able to fund its current obligations for another 12 months, but after that, additional capital may be needed “to be able to fully pursue some or all of our strategies.” The ominous disclosure seems to have had little effect on Overstock’s languishing shares, because by now many investors have given up on the company.

Byrne never showed much respect for Wall Street or small-minded shareholders—and maybe that’s what got him in the end. “We’re like a Russian icebreaker trolling across the Arctic ice field. It’s three or four yards at a time and enormously expensive,” says Byrne. “When you’re talking about the kinds of numbers we’re talking about and freeing up trillions of capital … I think there is going to be so much money in it it’s kind of silly to try and model it.”

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