In the Spotlight
By Jim Hoft Aug. 21, 2023
From The Gateway Pundit
UPDATE 28th August 2023: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/08/gabe-sterling-bragged-about-hiring-aclu-operatives-process/
We are seeing a pattern here.
Here is the timeline after the 2017 KSU election hacks in Georgia. A FOIA document revealed the FBI never investigated the hacks and turned on the whistleblowers instead.
One of the most detailed examples of the FBI’s failure to investigate election fraud involves Georgia and KSU. Until a few years ago, Kennesaw State University ran the election servers for the State of Georgia. In early 2017 they were hacked, and the FBI was brought in. The FBI purposely shelved their investigation shortly after they opened it.
We can finally explain what happened over the years.
In August 2016 cyber security researchers Logan Lamb and Christopher Gray discovered it was easy to access the Georgia voting databases. This included staff passwords, access to software that runs the devices, and data on their 6.7 million voters. Lamb notified KSU of the security vulnerabilities. KSU asked Lamb to keep quiet. Over the next few months, KSU elections IT staff noticed intrusion attempts by DHS. KSU Elections Systems answered to Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State at that time.
In December of 2016, to appease the KSU IT staff, Kemp sent a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson. He asked why the DHS tried to penetrate Georgia’s election servers at least 10 times. Other DHS attacks were documented to be Nov. 7th and 8th, the day before and day of Trumps election win. But Kemp’s letter only asked about one specific attempt, a week after the election, on November 15th at 8:43 AM. He did not mention these other attacks. The Digital Forensics and Analysis Unit of the DHS OIG were tasked to investigate this one instance. Was it deliberate to focus on just this one instance?
A few months later, in March 2017, the KSU servers were breached. They were hacked, data was deleted, and altered. Because of the previous whistleblower warnings, Kennesaw State’s CIO Stephen Gay was forced to alert their Center for Elections Systems about this “data breach”. Gay also had to contact the FBI. The FBI opened an investigation into the hacking. The FBI went to KSU and made forensic images of the election servers.
Three months later, in June 2017, Republican Karen Handel beat Jon Osoff by 3.8% in a District 6 runoff election. Liberal activists alleged the system might have been hacked. On July 3rd 2017, they filed a lawsuit in Fulton County Superior Court (Curling v. Kemp). Their lawsuit wanted Georgia to replace the outdated (DRE) election machines. The lawyers who defended SOS Kemp in this lawsuit were from the Georgia AG’s office.
Two days after the (Curling v Kemp) lawsuit was filed, the DHS responded to Kemp’s KSU intrusion letter, sent 7 months earlier. The DHS OIG concludedthe “November 15th scan” was residual traffic from an employee at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They said that the employee was just checking the Georgia firearms license database. The OIG said Microsoft Engineers even agreed. That was it, case closed. There was no investigation into intrusion occurrences that occurred the day before, during, and day after the 2016 election.
Three days after the (C v K) lawsuit was filed, the administration at KSU had their staff delete all the election servers. Their IT staff admitted they DBAN’d (nuked) the servers. Their internal KSU emails showed on July 6th2017, that “election hard drives were degaussed three times”. The backup servers were deleted on August 9th. This data removal was kept from the public, until October 2017, when journalists obtained those KSU’s internal emails.
The Georgia AG’s office, those defending Kemp, continued to lie to the Plaintiffs. The AGI said the server data could not be provided, it was deleted before their lawsuit. But the AG’s office knew KSU ordered the servers to be wiped after the lawsuit was filed. These AG lies were made public when the “Georgia Wipes Servers” story broke on October 26th 2017 and showed the KSU emails. A few days later, Assistant AG Cristina Correia withdrew the entire AG’s office from the (C v K) case due to “newly found” conflicts of interest. The Plaintiffs immediately requested the FBI turn over their copy of the KSU servers. The FBI stalled this release for 26 months, with no justification why.
After the GA AG’s office withdrew, the U.S. House held a hearing, in December 2017. FBI Director Wray refused to answer if the FBI was investigating the Georgia KSU election hacking. He wouldn’t even admit if they had the server data. In early 2020 a judge hearing a FOIA case forced the FBI to turn over communications. It was then provided to the Associated Press. It showed why FBI Wray was silent. The docs show the FBI never examined the KSU server for tampering by malicious outsiders.
Instead, the FBI targeted and attacked the two researchers who earlier alerted KSU about their election security risks (Lamb & Gray). An FBI document dated Oct. 23, 2017 said the FBI planned from the onset for the entire matter to be shelved once the forensic drive image was placed in the case file. FOIA docs show the FBI did nothing for months, closed the case, and no one was ever charged.
Judge Amy Totenberg’s decision in the (C v K) lawsuit gave Georgia the green light it needed to purchase new election equipment. In July 2019, Kemp who was now governor, signed an $107m agreement with Dominion. In December 2019, only after Georgia took delivery of the Dominion equipment, did the FBI release their KSU server copy to the Plaintiffs (Curling). The Plaintiffs then offered this copy to Brad Raffensperger, who was now the new GA Secretary of State. Raffensperger refused to submit the server data to a forensic examination.
The Plaintiff’s created a team to inspect the KSU server data, which included Logan Lamb, the original whistleblower. Lamb’s affidavit says logs were deleted and data altered. “Logs only go back to November 10th, 2016, two days after Donald Trump was elected.” It appears hackers accessed the system and conveniently deleted logs covering all the DHS intrusions. Lamb says he found “scores of files” that had been deleted on March 2, 2017, which is just a few days before KSU handed the server over to the FBI. Numerous other breaches were detected and millions of voter records were accessed. Lamb noted “an attacker obtained full control of the server way back in 2014 by exploiting a bug”.
A protective order was placed on Logan Lamb to prevent him from speaking about his findings. Neither the FBI or DHS did anything about the KSU election server breach. The DOJ did nothing about the corruption by the Georgia AG’s office. It’s probably no coincidence the FBI refused to cooperate until after a Dominion contract was negotiated with GA, and $106 mil worth of equipment was delivered?
