What Who Knew When: An FBI Story
The entire 2020 election saga, including the Gretchen Whitmer entrapment and January 6th riots, is predicated on one simple question.
Where is the FBI?
And why are they so feckless so always?
What did they know, or why didn’t they know it? When did they know what, and why didn’t they address it?
Who should be held responsible for the repeated total failure of federal law enforcement?
Who should be rewarded for braving the greatest chain of consecutive “unfortunate” legal missteps in the entirety of American history?
False voter registrations fall into the FBI’s “election crime” purview.
Always double verify the information you find is absolutely accurate.
The Backdrop
The original focus behind this story was based from breaking reports of a small business named Konnech, from a quiet community in rural-suburban Michigan. In question was a trove of alleged poll worker data found on servers in Wuhan, China.
The owner of the company has since been arrested on precisely these charges and with the help of evidence brought forth by Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips.
Catherine Engelbrecht of True The Vote and Gregg Phillips of OPSEC were sent to jail on October 31 in contempt of court. They were ordered to jail for one day and until their compliance for failing to disclose a source, citing the person’s confidential informant status.
Allegedly contained within this data was “personally-identifying information” — or PII. There were subsequent reports of True The Vote — the original disseminators of the story — alleging to have worked on a private-public partnership with the FBI out of Detroit.
Leading up to the 2020, there was no shortage of election-related concerns, cybersecurity concerns, or national security threats concerning China. For a taxpayer-funded agency to willfully abdicate its duties in these regards would, in fact, be tantamount to treason.
The Story
In the year or so leading into the 2020 general election, the entirety of the U.S. intelligence community was inundated with hacks and cybersecurity breaches on a scale that under normal circumstances, would give any sovereign government pause at the attacks’ scope and depth.
In 2016, there were multiple noted incursions by foreign “state-actors.” Many of these were memory-holed entirely and never heard from again.
Ultimately, the lack of response led to more of the same to be expected in 2020. Any breaches in cybersecurity would prove to be forewarned, foreshadowed, and any opportunity to take subsequent action also foregone.
With this in mind, it provides a much clearer context surrounding the 2020 elections and what was known.
It also provides how all of the issues, overlooked and disregarded, in the ‘most safest, most secure election ever’ could very well have been the warning sirens blaring, while the structure was melting from beneath our feet.
This brings us to what could still yet turn out to be the most consequential cybersecurity breach in human history.
SolarWinds and The FBI
The SolarWinds hack is reported to have begun in September of 2019 — about three years following the cybersecurity concerns of the 2016 election. During Covid and before the 2020 elections, new cybersecurity threats emerged that were serious enough to be addressed by both the FBI and CISA.
However, most of these were memory-holed, their being buried in Covid, “insurrection,” and “domestic terrorists.” Have a look for yourself and see how many of these you remember hearing of:
The infected Orion software began incrementally seeding malware code into United States Government (USG) software through what we now know as the SolarWinds hack undetected for almost seven and a half months before the 2020 election, and for nine months before the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) acknowledged the breach publicly.
Around seven weeks after the Sunburst-infected Orion updates started going out, the infected software was so undetectable that the USIC issued a public statement about potential cyberattacks — while it was happening under their noses.
That statement declared that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was spearheading an investigation through a Cyber Unified Cooperation Group (UCG), which includes FBI, CISA, ODNI, along with support from the NSA. It also specified that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was in contact with entities within the private sector.
A handful of weeks later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) began to “mysteriously scrub over a dozen gene sequences from its databases,” at the same time that China was being accused of attempting to hack the database. This is also the same general time-frame that the USIC was hacking the Wuhan Institute of Virology databases in Wuhan. All of Wuhan’s cloud has recently been unified, as shown in “Konnech, The Cloud, & 3-Letter Tramps.”
After a month of self-reportedly “working non-stop” and 2 months since the election — which happened in the midst of a previously undetectable cyberattack — the Cyber Unified Cooperation Group (UCG) issued another statement announcing their partnership with the private sector, and their intent to keep the Public abreast of its investigations. The promise to “share information” has since proven fruitless.
Eventually, the USIC collectively identified serious cyberthreats posed by allegedly Chinese and Russian hackers that were seeking data from within the U.S. on Covid-19’s origins and, presumably any other valuable data available in the USG’s own system. All of this happened while an ongoing attack was compromising the United States Government’s own data networks.
Even with the presumption of no official investigations operating behind the scenes, still at least one active investigation is apparent to have been proceeding at the time. No other potentially classified investigations have reached a public conclusion, even at the time of writing this article — five years after the aforementioned warning.
Another warning was issued following a definitive statement by the CIA to Congress in 2017 of the alleged 2016 Russian state-sponsored hacking of American elections systems in 2016.
As for public record, neither the FBI nor any other agency inside the USIC is on record as having alerted any of these twenty-one states that they were allegedly targets of the alleged Russian operation.
States unaware of their being targeted — entered into Congressional record in 2017 — nor officials from the UCG or USIC at-large have offered any definitive statements into whether election or administrative officials in these states ever received a briefing on the ongoing cyberthreats to their election infrastructure.
In August of 2020, NBC printed the headline, “Foreign governments are trying to hack the election, but states are better defended, officials say.”
Now, if it wasn’t for:
the timing
the FBI’s purview
the number of newly discovered data-security breaches of a specific company in Michigan (repeatedly over 15 years)
the alleged inaction of the FBI
and the subsequent events surrounding Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips,
the following timeline would not be relevant or necessary to highlight the depth and scope of the U.S. Government’s commitment in both ignoring national security and actively engaging in behavior that enabled its compromise. But, it is necessary:
It’s since been unearthed the extent of the FBI’s involvement with the individuals responsible for carrying out the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot — that it was not even possible without their active participation.
Another Timeline!
Center into focus the announced investigation into the SolarWinds breach, as well as collecting intelligence on the cyberthreats that were alleged by the United States Intelligence Community, itself. Contrast that against the Public statements issued after the incident.
The State of Michigan itself even had to make a public statement that they had not been hacked after voters’ data surfaced online. It’s very curious against the backdrop of the latest knowledge into Konnech and the elections, but I digress.
Clearly, multiple probes were launched and, subsequently, all of these probes were effectively memory-holed with help from legacy media outlets, streaming media, and the horde of social media platforms as well as nearly every operable search engine.
This includes a breach of the virtual entirety of the U.S. Government’s neural network.
The day after the election, records were being seized that coincidentally are precisely also the type of information given to the FBI. Why was law enforcement so eager to raid someone’s home for this information if the same kind of information from Phillips and Engelbrecht would ultimately just be buried — the same as they did Elliot Kerwin?
Then, the FBI did what the FBI does — leaked information about the raid.
In light of the accusations of FBI impropriety, after being given highly sensitive information pertinent to national security, and in light of the office claimed to have been involved — the Detroit Field Office — this is where my focus will lie until more information is available. To date, this subject has been met with stunning silence.
The FBI was so aware of the political corruption in Michigan, that they went so far as to raid Detroit City Hall itself. It was only one more instance in a succession of dirty politics in the state.
There’s no real need to relitigate all of the inconsistencies during the election here. Above are examples of either corruption, voter data theft, election fraud, or disastrous mail-in ballot delivery to polling stations in Michigan and Arizona.
The FBI, in spite of these co-mingled investigations with the Intel Community at-large into cybercrimes and national security, have categorized the purveyance of any conclusion that casts doubt onto our intelligence and justice apparatuses as a dangerous behavior.
If this were not alarming enough, these very agencies have officially ordered their own agencies to the ready for a proportionally insignificant threat of violence from this group, also claimed by the same agencies to be hackers.
Here is a quick look into the FBI’s leadership at a place in time most critical to national security:
Elizabeth Johnson
Mrs. Johnson served as Executive Manager of Intelligence for the FBI in Detroit from February of 2018 until July of 2022. She would presumably have been the senior-most eyes on any matter that Engelbrecht and Phillips would have brought to the Detroit Field Office’s attention.
She left very soon following the alleged FBI heel-turn on True The Vote and OPSEC. She lives in Arizona — another state in hot pursuit of election integrity.
Nikki Floris
Mrs. Floris was the entire FBI’s election security lead during the 2020 presidential elections.
She also served as the Deputy Assistant Director of the Counter-Terrorism Division at FBI headquarters in 2017, then moved into Deputy Assistant Director of the Intelligence Branch in 2018.
She is also the first person to serve as Intelligence Analyst In-Charge in the Washington, D.C. Field Office since May 20, 2022.
Timing is important.
The man who oversaw the Detroit Field Office while these threats were still active and ongoing was transferred to head the Washington, D.C. Field Office.
He was leading the office during the January 6th riots and attacks.
He oversaw the raid of President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence while he was gone.
The office has been at the center of every FBI scandal and outrage since October of 2020.
STEVEN M. D’ANTUONO
D’Antuono has a long history of scandals and missteps using the power of his FBI posts. Recently, True The Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht revealed in a related court case that the DC Field Office had turned the Konnech investigation a bit political.
Lots of nuggets here. Thank you for your reporting.