Something you’ve probably heard by now is that Donald Trump believes the 2020 election was rife with fraud and that he, and not Joe Biden, should be the one in the White House right now. Obviously, that belief does not reflect reality whatsoever, which is another way of saying it’s absolute horseshit. But being full of horseshit has never bothered the 45th president of the United States, which is why more than six months after definitively losing his bid for reelection, he’s still talking about how he won to whoever will listen, including Mar-a-Lago wedding attendees held hostage by his rambling, incoherent rants. Who is to blame for this? Honestly, it probably has a lot to do with Fred Trump, whose rejection of his son would ultimately bite America in the ass. But according to a new report, the blame is shared by a Republican businessman you’ve probably never heard of named Russell Ramsland.

According to the results of a massive Washington Post investigation, key elements of the baseless claim that Trump won the election—the claim a disturbing number of Republican voters believe is true—first “took shape in an airplane hangar” in Addison, Texas, in 2018. In the wake of a blue wave in that year’s midterm elections, Ramsland and his associates, including former ally Laura Pressley, pitched candidates who had lost on the idea that (1) their opponents had won thanks to fraud, and (2) Ramsland and company had voting-machine audit logs seemingly containing proof. Of course, neither point was true, and the people Ramsland and Pressley had hoped they could convince to bring an election challenge—“We had to find the right candidate,” Pressley said. “We had to find one who knew they won”—smartly declined. At that point, Pressley told the Post, there were no legal avenues to pursue allegations of fraud in the Dallas midterm elections. So she and Ramsland set their sights on something bigger: the 2020 presidential election:

With Pressley in tow, Ramsland launched a fundraising blitz, traveling to the ranches and mansions of some of Texas’s wealthiest conservative funders. Ramsland told potential funders that their money would support legal challenges to ensure election integrity ahead of the 2020 election, Pressley said. “The hook was always Trump—that their guy could lose,” Pressley said.

Together, Ramsland and [Joshua] Merritt [a former employee of Ramsland’s company Allied Security Operations Group] painted a picture of an entirely porous voting system, wide open and hackable. Ramsland made a range of specific claims, including that hackers or rogue operators could direct vote data to a remote location, change it and then “re-inject” it, or they could unleash “some sort of a bot” to change the results without anyone noticing. He said there were indications that vote manipulation was already happening and said all major U.S. voting-machine companies were vulnerable.

Among his claims was that source code initially written by the company Smartmatic formed the basis of much of the election software used in the United States. Ramsland often pointed out, as other critics had, that Smartmatic’s founders were Venezuelan. Representatives of ES&S, Dominion, and Hart InterCivic, the nation’s three largest voting-machine companies, told the Post they do not use or license Smartmatic software. They all said their companies’ software code is not in any way based on Smartmatic code, and Smartmatic said its code is not incorporated in other companies’ software.

In media appearances, Ramsland also spoke of Scytl, an election technology firm based in Spain that he called a “somewhat disturbing company,“ saying, “They’re housing all of our votes, and they’re doing it in an insecure fashion.“ The following month, he threw out another baseless claim that American election votes were “being held on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.” Despite the fact that Scytl has said it has no servers in Frankfurt, nor are its systems used to count or “house” votes from U.S. elections, Ramsland told the Post in an email that “any 8th grader with a reasonable background in white hat cyber investigation tools” could trace votes to a Frankfurt-based Scytl server. In other words, you see why Trump and other irrational conspiracy theorists in the Republican Party liked this guy:

After the Nov. 3 election, to an extent not widely recognized, Ramsland and others associated with ASOG played key roles in spreading the claims of fraud, the Post found. They were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the “kraken” lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell—who the Post learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG—and aired publicly by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.

During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.

While Ramsland certainly wasn‘t the only person who suggested the election was stolen, Matt Masterson, a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official who ran a team tracking the integrity of the 2020 election for the Department of Homeland Security, said Ramsland and ASOG’s role was particularly unique. “It wasn’t just that the president would tweet about their stuff. It was all these little nuggets and grist that they provided or that were cited to them in testimony or in the ‘kraken’ cases. It provided the appearance of substance and fact to something that had no substance or fact,” Masterson told the Post. “It was like: ‘Look, these are professionals…. They have former military experience. And look at what they found.’ They gave those who wanted to push and believe in the lie something to hold on to.”

Scytl vehemently denied the allegations, saying in a statement that its products were not used to count votes in U.S. elections and that it “does not even have offices in Frankfurt and does not have servers or computers in the German city,” but Trump, of course, promoted the theory anyway, according to the Post. On November 15, he retweeted a clip of Ramsland claiming in a preelection interview that votes from 29 states were routed through “a server in Frankfurt, Germany,” and that Scytl “controls and reports your vote.”

Around the time that Trump hosted an hours-long meeting at the White House with Powell, disgraced national security adviser Mike Flynn, and others, in which attendees reportedly tried to convince Trump to name Powell special counsel to investigate the election, some White House lawyers, per the Post, “heard Trump make claims that made no sense or seemed ‘bat-shit insane’,” a former senior administration official said. Obviously, that was in no way out of character but a month later, that batshittery obviously became extremely dangerous.

At his “Save America” rally in Washington on Jan. 6, Trump made reference to [fraud claims pushed by Ramsland in Michigan] and “the troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” as an example of how he had been wronged. “In one Michigan county alone, 6,000 votes were switched from Trump to Biden,” he said. He also repeated Ramsland’s claim that there were more votes than voters in Detroit. “In Detroit, turnout was 139 percent of registered voters,” he said. “Think of that.”

He called the Nov. 3 vote “the most corrupt election in the history, maybe, of the world,” and then urged his supporters to march to the Capitol. By the thousands, they complied.

Through a spokesman, Trump declined an interview request from the Post. Through an attorney, Powell said that she had met Pressley but did not respond to questions about her work with Ramsland. Giuliani and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. Gohmert declined to comment on his interactions with Ramsland. Merritt, who told the Post last December that he had briefed Powell and Gohmert, declined to comment.

Ramsland confirmed to the Post that his company ASOG, “provided research for Powell and Giuliani” but said that he had never spoken to Trump himself and that ASOG was “one of many voices” that expressed concerns about election-system vulnerabilities. He insisted that election security has been a longtime, bipartisan concern and said that many others had “reached similar conclusions regarding irregularities in the election system.”

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