IIt was considered an “explosive report” on the “external links” of the Dominion Voting Systems election technology company, which Donald Trump’s legal team sent to state lawmakers to provide a “summary” of alleged electoral fraud. the 2020 elections. But despite the Trump team’s apparent desire to promote its report and statements in December 2020, three months later, no one seems to want to confront its author.
Katherine Friess, a volunteer for the Trump legal team, whose name is on the cover page of the report, entitled “Dominion Voting Systems Overview 12/2/20,” and in the metadata embedded in the document, says it has nothing to do with This one. Friess and Bernie Kerik, a former New York City police chief under former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and a Trump legal team volunteer, say the report was sent to the legal team by a then-White House aide to the former commercial adviser. Trump. Peter Navarro. Former senior Trump official declined multiple opportunities to comment on the recording of this story.
The difficulty of identifying an author for a report that Trump’s team once seemed happy to brag about underscores the extent to which Dominion Voting Systems ‘imminent threat of lawsuits has affected veterans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. $ 1.3 billion lawsuits against Trump’s personal attorney Giuliani, pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell and pillow mogul Mike Lindell for their alleged defamation of the company’s voting software, with several lawsuits on the way.
Senior Trump campaign officials, including former president and legal team leader Giuliani, have been publicly publicized since denying conspiracy theories about Dominion. non-existent ties with Venezuela to falsify “deleted” votes. But Friess and Kerik’s claims that a Trump administration aide shared the relationship with the campaign’s legal team suggest that the White House was even more involved in the effort to raise questions about Dominion products.
The Dominion report went public in early December in an article about Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump conspiracy site. The story claimed that the Trump campaign used the document to inform state lawmakers about their electoral fraud claims. The report describes an “overview” of Dominion Voting Systems’ “history, directors, voting manipulation capacity and design” and “foreign links” and repeats a number of statements that have been discredited since then, including that Dominion has links to “Several Venezuelan state-run software and telecommunications companies” and that the company’s products use software from another electoral technology company, Smartmatic.
Friess’s name appears on the cover page and metadata embedded in a PDF uploaded to Archive.org related to The Gateway Pundit. In an email to The Daily Beast, Friess insisted it had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name got on the document.
“I had nothing to do with researching, writing or producing the Dominion report. I have no idea how my name got on a cover page, who did it or why, “Friess told The Daily Beast, claiming that the report was” broadcast “by a member of Navarro’s team.
Kerik, who was pardoned by Trump on a series of murder charges and later helped Trump’s legal team on its crusade to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory, said Friess was not involved in producing the Dominion report. “It was actually sent to the mayor’s legal team by [a person with] Peter Navarro’s office [on] 11/29, however, I’m not sure [Peter] we saw him before we received him. ”
Kerik continued: “I don’t think Navarro saw her and I don’t think he was the author. However, it was sent to me and the legal team through a then White House counselor who worked for Peter. ”
In a phone call Monday, Kerik read The Daily Beast’s e-mail from “then-White House assistant” on Nov. 29, but declined to name who sent it. The Daily Beast has since confirmed that the sender was indeed an official working at Trump’s White House.
Kerik worked with Giuliani on Trump’s legal team, collecting statements on statements they claimed were irregular in the 2020 election and “connected with people who wanted to discuss the issue with the president or mayor,” he said. Kerik added that Friess “never met with Giuliani or the president before entering and volunteering to help with the legal effort. I was the one who presented it to the mayor. I was in the White House with her the first time she met [Trump], and this was a meeting with Giuliani and [others]. ”
Navarro, a loyal Trump loyalist, also wrote three documents, collectively referred to as the “Navarro Report” (“Immaculate Deception,” “The Art of Theft,” and “Yes, President Trump Won”), which erroneously widespread voter fraud and irregularities that tipped the election from Trump to Biden.
Friess made headlines recently when her name appeared as part of a visit by a Giuliani liaison team that traveled to Antrim County, Michigan in November to copy voter data in connection with a local lawsuit against county officials. Record Eagle reported that Friess “boasted” that he recently dined with Trump and Rudy Giuliani in front of local officials, but Friess says he never had dinner with Trump and “certainly” never claimed to have done so. ”.
Friess says he joined Trump’s legal team as a “volunteer lawyer to ensure the integrity of the election, as well as hundreds of other volunteer lawyers across the country.”
According to Kerik, she “attended the preparation of legal documents, interviews and revised the statements; and coordinated travel, legislative hearings and meetings, as directed by the mayor or mine ”.