While the media was transfixed by the spectacle of January 6th, the broken glass, the Confederate flags, the gallows on the lawn, something quieter, and arguably more dangerous, was unfolding just out of frame.
In the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, Trump’s team wasn’t just inciting the mob. They were working phones, rewriting documents, and drawing maps in seven states. Behind the scenes, they were orchestrating a paper coup, holding conference calls to pressure lawmakers to toss out the real results and swap in fake electors. Pressuring the DOJ to release fraudulent states claiming election fraud. Creating illegal copies of the Dominion machines election ware. Calling the Georgian Secretary of State and asking him to “find 11,780 votes”.
Donald Trump is still facing pending felony RICO charges in Georgia for this. Prosecutors describe Trump and 18 others as a “criminal organization”, unified in a scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results. That is the only place he was charged despite the prosecutions evidence of interference by the MAGA team in nearly every swing state.
And while they screamed about stolen votes and rigged machines, they were the ones rigging. They said they were trying to "stop the steal." But what if that was always projection? What if, in truth, they were actually building the blueprint to steal the next one?
Because here’s what no one wants to say out loud:
They knew Trump lost. They knew he was going to lose again.
And in the four years between defeat and resurrection, they didn’t rest.
They rewrote the rules.
What if they studied the system they failed to manipulate & and then found new ways in in 2024? What if they are using that to try to stay in after 2028?
What we do know is that they’ve purged watchdog officials like Inspector Generals illegally from several federal agencies, the GOP are actively working on passing new laws limiting the power of the court, they are criminalizing dissent, and replacing the apolitical with the loyal (which is in the Project 2025 guidebook).
State by state, they are laying the groundwork so that next time, they wouldn’t need to threaten to hang Mike Pence (or JD in this case) if he wouldn’t certify their fake elector votes. They’d already have the power before the vote was cast.
The lie of the stolen 2020 election wasn’t just a grievance. It was a strategy manual. A warning to anyone who thinks we’re still playing by the old rules.
Because since Election Day 2020, this movement has had one goal: never give up power again.
They Had the Plan Before the Votes Were Counted
Behind the scenes, forged elector slates were created in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
This means that a bunch of people came together and created fraudulent electoral certificates stating that Trump won the election. These certificates come from the states, and then are certified by the Vice President, formally & legally passing the office onto the next President.
None of the people who signed these false certificates had legal authority to act as electors. They were not chosen. They were not certified. They simply declared Trump the winner and mailed the documents in like it was real.
Many of the false electors came from government positions and used real governmental seals on these fraudulent elector slates.
This plot had started before the votes were even counted. Kenneth Chesebro, a Trump attorney, wrote internal memos as early as October 2020 laying out the fake elector strategy. So, when Trump lost in 2020, they already had the blueprint.
Even RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel admitted to the January 6 committee that John Eastman had contacted her for help coordinating the fake elector slates.
Every major player testified that Trump was involved and aware. Chesebro. Eastman. Giuliani. Clark. They all admitted it. Most of the signers of those documents and the co-conspirators have faced state or federal charges as a result.
This wasn’t a protest. It wasn’t a legal dispute. It was a coordinated, premeditated attempt to overturn a U.S. presidential election.
That wasn’t where it ended. They had actually taken a multifaceted approach to their treason.
So, before the gallows, before the mob, before the chants of “Hang Mike Pence,” there was request to the DOJ from President Trump. A request for a letter. A letter from the DOJ addressed to the state of GA simply stating that they had reason to believe there was election fraud.
No proof. Just the seal of justice on the biggest lie of the decade.
Attorney General Bill Barr wouldn’t do it. He’d already told Trump to his face: there was no fraud. Trump exploded. Barr resigned. That opened up the door for him to place an “acting” AG until the Senate could confirm a new one in the next presidency.
So, then came Jeff Rosen. Trump called him constantly. Demanded investigations. Pushed lies. Told him to “just say it was corrupt.”
Rosen said no. There was just no evidence. So did his deputy, Richard Donoghue.
So Trump went lower on the food chain. And there he found mid-level DOJ official Jeffrey Clark.
In 2025, Jeffrey Bossert Clark is now Acting Administrator of the Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget working under Russell Vought, one of the key authors of Project 2025. Clarks job now? Filter. He reviews and can block any major federal rule or regulation before it’s released to the public; especially if it costs over $100 million a year. He decides what data the government is allowed to collect through forms and surveys. Even agencies like the SEC and the FEC, which are supposed to be independent, now have to run their rules past him first.
At the time, clark wasn’t in charge of election law. He wasn’t in charge of criminal investigations. He was the head of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. An environmental attorney. That’s it. No voter fraud background. No authority. But he had one thing Trump valued above all: blind loyalty.
Clark, was a midlevel official who had also just been made acting head of the Civil Division, drafted a letter falsely stating the DOJ had uncovered serious irregularities in the election.
His plan? Send it to Georgia officials and pressure them to toss out Biden’s electors. Then copy-paste it to other swing states. One by one the dominoes would fall & those fake fraudulent slates would overturn the 2020 election.
Trump nearly made Clark acting Attorney General on the spot. See, on January 3, 2021, Trump summoned the DOJ brass to the Oval Office. He wanted Jeff Rosen gone, Clark in. He wanted the lie turned into law.
What stopped him? Everyone else in the room threatened to resign. It would have triggered a constitutional crisis in real time.
So Trump backed off.
That wasn’t all. In the weeks prior, Trump, Giuliani, and Eastman held a conference call with over 300 Republican state legislators. Their mission? Convince them to reconvene and accept the fake electors. Trump himself made the ask.
Three days later, his team tried another route. They slipped fake elector slates into Mike Pence’s lap with zero warning and told him to reject the real votes. Pence refused. He was an American at the end of the day. This was a coup. Treason.
Then came the January 6th insurrection.
“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved…. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
… So we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. And I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women.
… Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.”
He didn’t actually walk with them. After inciting the crowd, Trump returned to the White House and watched the chaos unfold on television.
In an attempt to pressure him into certifying the false elector slates, Trump reportedly told texted Pence, “You can go down in history a patriot, or you can go down in history a pussy.”
When he didn’t get the answer he wanted, he sent a tweet to the MAGA insurrectionists:
This tweet was posted after the mob had already breached the Capitol, and while Pence was being rushed away by the Secret Service to avoid the crowd that was, quite literally, calling for his execution.
Mike Pence later reflected on this saying that Trump not only endangered his life, but his entire families. To this day Pence still receives death threats from MAGA loyalists.
As we all know, none of this actually ended with Trump stealing the 2020 presidency, but what it did do is lay the foundation for what happened next.
Forensics of a Fraud: How the Right Weaponized Election Software
Beginning in the weeks after the 2020 election, allies of Donald Trump launched a covert campaign to access the very core of America’s voting infrastructure. At the center of the scheme was MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell (who is now broke from all the lawsuits & says they ruined him), who worked to convince local election officials, often in conservative counties, on how to clone & hand over Dominion voting machines or allow forensic clones to be made. The stated reason was to prove fraud. Prove the election was stolen. But that was never the real goal.
At the same time, Trump attorney Sidney Powell paid the Atlanta-based firm SullivanStrickler to carry out what she described to the courts as “election audits.” But what they actually did was far more sinister. They cloned entire Dominion systems: Election Management Systems, voter rolls, BIOS setups, internal logs, the Dominion ImageCast software, you name it. These weren’t audits. They were full extractions of secure, proprietary government election software.
And the data didn’t stay locked away. It was passed around like contraband at Lindell’s “Cyber Symposiums.” He actually held symposiums showing the in & outs of this stolen election-ware.
There, MAGA tech operatives, conspiracy theorists, and far-right programmers dissected the files like vultures picking through a carcass. They mapped vulnerabilities. Built exploits. Studied Dominion’s source code.
Some of this stolen data made its way into dark corners of the internet. Discord channels. Encrypted email lists. Alt-tech forums. The cloned systems became prototypes for how to breach, exploit, or outright manipulate real elections.
This is actually how these MAGA operatives got caught. They doxxed themselves. No, I’m not kidding. Some of the images shared were blatantly taken from places like Mesa County, CO. That is how Tina Peters, Belinda Kinsley, and Sandra Brown were all charged for crimes related to election fraud.
See, on at least TWO occasions, Peters & her other co-coconspirators? They’d turned off security cameras, allowing Lindell’s operative Canon Hayes to access the system fraudulently using an election officials badge. They wouldn’t have gotten caught if those images were not shared. They intentionally did it before a big update believing that the update would wipe access logs & audits. Hiding his access. He returned again AFTER the update, too. Some cybersecurity experts later warned of spyware embedded deep in the infrastructure though state authorities have yet to confirm that publicly.
In Coffee County, GA, they were caught after Scott Hall, MAGA loyalist, was caught bragging about how they’d done it. They love to tell on themselves. He went on about how they’d cloned the election data and the system it was on. See, this actually the foundation for the RICO charges in GA. Officials heard about his bragging & had checked security cam footage and saw the entire thing. Election clerk Cathy Latham, ironically also one of the fake electors, had allowed them in and granted them access so that StrickerSullivan could “audit” the system. They actually made forensic clones.
It should be noted that in other states, they pulled the same stunt.. just with less press.
In Michigan, Trump allies breached election offices in at least three counties and made off with full forensic copies of Dominion machines, often with the help of friendly officials. In Nevada, Sidney Powell’s did the same thing. They weren’t auditing. They were harvesting the source code of American democracy. This is all named in the on-going RICO case in GA.
And here's the kicker: even after major cities retired their 2020 hardware, some of the exact same cloned systems, or ones very similar in function, are still in operation across rural America. Vulnerable. Unpatched. Unmonitored. Even with minor changes, they had the brain of the election ware.
Also, at some point in Michigan, a bunch of MAGA GOP were also charged with felonies after they stole election tabulators & broke the apart, sending hardware & software clones of them to Mike Lindell, too.
Based on what we could find, they likely cloned ElectionWare version 5.13 & 5.17, a system still in use across much of the country, often bundled with Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 and ImageCast components. Once it was copied, it became a blueprint for how to breach an election from the inside… and if you want to see which counties still run that vulnerable setup, your best bet is Verified Voting’s tracking tool: https://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/
The Change
Just months before the 2024 election, Pro V&V pushed through de minimis software changes for the systems.. without an announcement, without robust testing. These weren’t even necessarily minor updates. Some added functions. Others changed how tabulators interacted with central reporting software.
Then they filed software changes as minor changes and disappeared. Their website is now a shell with no working buttons, no real information, only an email address & a phone number.
Now I, Dissent in Bloom, want to know:
What exactly did these updates contain? No known proof of anything… But the timing, the players, the secrecy… it all stinks like three-day-old corruption. So while the rest of America was looking for a clean break after 2020, they were digging in.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:
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Thank you for being here.
— Dissent ♥
Thank you for dot-connecting to the present and the encompassing review. The barrage The Felon throws at us every day is calculated to make us forgetful when it is the lessons of the recent history line that keeps us aware of what he’s doing now and how he is manipulating to crush democracy and destroy the country.
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