Uncorroborated “Hammer” and “SCORECARD” Appear in Michigan Election Lawsuit Affidavit

by Sharon Rondeau

(Nov. 27, 2020) — An affidavit from a highly-educated and experienced “cyber security engineer” included as an exhibit in a lawsuit filed Wednesday challenging Michigan’s election results invokes an alleged government computer system, “The Hammer” and its reported accompanying software, “SCORECARD,” as tools utilized by “US intelligence analysts to conduct MITM (man in the middle) attacks on foreign voting systems…without leaving an electronic fingerprint.”

The 75-page complaint was brought by Dallas-based attorney Sidney Powell on behalf of six Michigan voters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and the Michigan Board of State Canvassers alleging “illegal conduct by election workers in collaboration with other employee state, county and/or city employees and Democratic poll watchers and activists,” [sic] among other claims.

On Monday, Michigan awarded its 16 electoral votes to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who took the lead over Trump on November 4 in what some say was an electronically-maneuvered switching of hundreds of thousands of votes from Trump to Biden.

On page 7 of the complaint, Powell asserted that “election workers illegally forged, added, removed or otherwise altered information on ballots, the Qualified Voter File (QVF) and Other Voting Records,” which she alleged included “Fraudulently adding ‘tens of thousands’ of new ballots and/or new voters to QVF in two separate batches on November 4, 2020, all or nearly all of which were votes for Joe Biden;…”

Referring to the aforementioned affidavit, Powell wrote on page 8:

Expert Navid Keshavarez-Nia explains that US intelligence services had developed tools to infiltrate foreign voting systems including Dominion. He states that Dominion’s software is vulnerable to data manipulation by unauthorized means and permitted election data to be altered in all battleground states. He concludes that hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump in the 2020 general election were transferred to former Vice-President Biden. (Ex. 109).  

In regard to “The Hammer” and SCORECARD, the affidavit of Keshavarz-Nia (spelled in the complaint as “Keshavarez-Nia”) relies on the “independent confirmation” of The Hammer and SCORECARD’s existence and capabilities by former NSA program developer J. Kirk Wiebe; Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (Ret); and “Dennis Montgomery, former CIA analyst.”

In item #11 on pages 5-6, Powell outlined a second expert witness’s affidavit stating his finding that a significant number of votes were redirected from Donald Trump to Joe Biden by “Dominion,” a voting tabulation system utilized by Michigan; Georgia, where Powell also filed suit Wednesday with similar allegations; and approximately 28 other states in the recent elections.

Plaintiff’s expert witness, Russell James Ramsland, Jr. (Exh. 101, “Ramsland  Affidavit”), has concluded that Dominion alone is responsible for the injection, or fabrication, of  289,866 illegal votes in Michigan, that must be disregarded. This is almost twice the number of  Mr. Biden’s purported lead in the Michigan vote (without consideration of the additional illegal,  ineligible, duplicate or fictitious votes due to the unlawful conduct outlined below), and thus by  itself is grounds to set aside the 2020 General Election and grant the declaratory and injunctive relief requested herein.

On November 5, Ramsland gave an on-camera interview to L. Todd Wood of CD Media detailing his company’s findings from a two-year study of vote-recording patterns in cities and states, concluding with the November 3 general election.  Using charts, graphs and screenshots from broadcast news coverage as well as his own data, Ramsland said manipulation of votes resulting in a dramatic swing from Trump’s favor to Biden’s took place during a three-hour time frame in six “swing” states, including Michigan, when election workers allegedly ceased counting for the night.

As The Post & Email has reported since mid-2019, in his responses to us about his knowledge of The Hammer, Wiebe indicated he has seen no evidence of the computer’s existence or utilization, but rather, is relying solely on Montgomery’s claims. 

In our most recent email exchange with Wiebe on November 8, he claimed Montgomery was awaiting “government authorization” to release the “forensic evidence” he claims to have of the role The Hammer and SCORECARD played in the election.  When we further asked Wiebe what caused him to be inclined to believe Montgomery without having seen any hard evidence of his claims, we received no response.

Based on government documents, there is no doubt Montgomery worked as a contractor for the NSA and CIA, ending his service in 2010.  However, he was never termed an “analyst.” 

Montgomery’s reported assertions as to the government’s alleged use of The Hammer and SCORECARD to switch votes from Trump to Biden began on October 31, 2020 at The American Report in an article by Mary Fanning and Alan Jones, one of dozens in which Montgomery is attributed with all types of claims about The Hammer which have morphed over the years and have never been corroborated independently.

After the election, Powell began invoking “Dominion” and “Smartmatic” as having allegedly played a major role in altering the results of the election in Biden’s favor.  On November 19, Fanning and Jones reported that Montgomery claimed he had testified to the FBI in 2015 about the nefarious capabilities of not only The Hammer and SCORECARD, but also Dominion and Smartmatic.

For his part, McInerney has said in recent radio appearances that his only source of information about The Hammer is Mary Fanning and thus, indirectly, Montgomery.  He also stated that he has not been briefed on the matter.  

In an example of “circular” reporting, in 2017 Fanning claimed to former MCSO “Cold Case Posse” lead investigator Mike Zullo, who supervised Montgomery as an MCSO confidential informant but reported that Montgomery produced none of the evidence he had claimed to have, that she “confirmed” the existence of The Hammer with McInerney.

Of two recent interviews featuring McInerney on November 23 and November 1, with Brannon Howse and Dave Janda, respectively, Zullo remarked, “Interestingly, McInerney appeared on Dave Janda’s podcast two days before the election and described the entire vote-stealing event allegedly using The Hammer days before it was to take place. In the interview, he went into great detail and spoke with conviction. So which one is it: ‘I know nothing’ or ‘I was briefed and was not truthful in the other interview’?”

As The Post & Email reported on Thursday, Montgomery has either not proffered the source(s) of his claims or has never been pressed to divulge them.  According to Fanning and Jones, Montgomery is limited as to what he can say about his activities while a government contractor, yet he has made claims to various parties about The Hammer to the ACLU, Atty. Larry Klayman, reportedly to the FBI and Barack Obama, and the MCSO, among others.

In 2013, several months after Edward Snowden, with documentation, revealed the NSA’s broad collection of Americans’ daily communications without a warrant, Montgomery approached the MCSO with the claim that he possessed evidence showing that Donald Trump and members of his family, more than 150 federal judges, Alex Jones and other prominent American media and business figures were subjects of illegal government surveillance by “The Hammer.”

Initial unsourced information Montgomery provided to the MCSO was never followed by any hard evidence of the bank-account breaches Montgomery claimed the government conducted against more than 150,000 Maricopa County residents, to which Zullo testified in a federal court case in November 2015.

Prior to his termination approximately ten days ago, then-Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs termed “Hammer” and “SCORECARD” “nonsense.”  However, Krebs’s group, in coordination with several other governmental and private entities, claimed the November 3 election was “the most secure election in American history,” a claim Krebs continues to make.

According to mainstream reports, Krebs expected to be fired several days before Trump tweeted his decision to do so on November 17.  According to Trump, Krebs was issuing inaccurate statements about the integrity of the election. 

At the same time, Trump tweeted, “The only thing secure about our 2020 Election was that it was virtually impenetrable by foreign powers. On that, the Trump Administration takes great credit. Unfortunately, the Radical Left Democrats, Dominion, and others, were perhaps more successful!”

Montgomery maintains a website which seeks donations to allegedly expose corruption on the part of a defunct private company in which Montgomery was a partner and the U.S. government.  The site boldly proclaims, “HAMMER AND SCORECARD ARE REAL AND ANYONE TELLING YOU DIFFERENT IS LYING!”

To that Zullo said, “Outside of the Scorecard thing, this is the same information he gave us in 2013. He was paid 120K for that. Now he is working the public for money offering the same garbage he was already paid to produce.  It’s always about money.”

Another claim on the website reads, “Once again SCORECARD was used against the American people to determine the outcome of an election.”

After reading Keshavarz-Nia’s affidavit, Zullo made the following observations:

The expert is representing that Wiebe and McInerney have verified the claims about The Hammer, and they are on record saying they haven’t.  There is a contradiction and an impeachment in this expert’s affidavit; just because you see it in an affidavit doesn’t make it true.

When Montgomery first claimed The Hammer was going to alter votes in the November 3 election, he didn’t mention “Dominion” or “Smartmatic.”  He claimed VR Systems was affected, which hasn’t even been mentioned.  He’s on the wrong piece of equipment, so how does that square?

VR Systems’ website states it has customers in California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, Indiana, New York State, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. As of Sept. 24, 2020 VR systems received Certification in Texas.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/05/vr-systems-russian-hackers-2016-1505582

So where is the steal? Trump handily won Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and West Virginia. So did Montgomery’s super-secret Hammer/Scorecard fail in those states or was it never used? How could Montgomery get it so very wrong? How could he even know. and there was no mention of Dominion or any other software.

Zullo told The P&E that Montgomery never mentioned a program called “Scorecard” at any time in the 16-month-long MCSO investigation. “A detailed timeline Montgomery was asked to compile by his own hand outlining every government program he claimed to be involved with failed to mention Scorecard or secret vote-tabulation software,” Zullo said.

Expanding on that experience, Zullo told us:

Be very careful on this. The affidavit asserts that this software leaves no digital fingerprint. This is a typical Montgomery storyline. It is so good no one can verify if it was used, only Montgomery will claim to have the very special encryption key that will let you see it. I have heard this kind of thing before from him. So how are they going to prove it?

Here is the biggest problem with the paragraph in the affidavit: The Affiant has no direct knowledge and is relying on representations of McInerney, who is on record stating he has no direct knowledge and was not briefed, and gets all his information from Fanning.

Fanning has no direct knowledge. Kirk Wiebe is on record again with Janda stating he has no direct knowledge and he has not seen anything that Montgomery claims to have and he has no working knowledge of the system.  None of these people can testify to anything. 

Work it backwards:

Keshavarez-Nia:   no direct knowledge

McInerney:           no direct knowledge

Fanning:               no direct knowledge

Wiebe:                  no direct knowledge

Montgomery:      no direct knowledge

When you come right down to it, it circles back to Dennis Montgomery, who claims all of this is happening and to have direct knowledge of the suspect Hammer and Scorecard and its uses, yet to date he has proven neither.  Montgomery has no direct knowledge of any government use of any computer system since 2010 and especially in the 2020 election, as he has not been in government service for over 12 years.  Simple question: How do you know, Mr. Montgomery ?

Trace it all back.  Where does it originate?  Dennis Montgomery.

At some point in time, this complaint is going to have to be investigated by federal authorities, not Sidney Powell.  The complaint is a synopsis of all the information she has, but the expert referring to The Hammer doesn’t have firsthand knowledge. 

It’s all hearsay, because McInerney has no firsthand knowledge, either. 

It’s actually hearsay four deep:  the general doesn’t know about it; Wiebe doesn’t know about it; Fanning doesn’t know about it; Dave Janda doesn’t know about it.  And as for Montgomery, we don’t even know if he is telling the truth. 

This is so classic of Montgomery. Everything he does is either hidden behind State Secrets Privilege (SSP), SAP [Special Access Program], protective order, “The FBI has it”…and now it’s so sophisticated – only Dennis Montgomery could make something so sophisticated – that you can’t tell whether it was used or not.  This goes full-circle back to why there’s a big problem with Dennis Montgomery:  his credibility is terrible. 

Zullo pointed out that to him, “what is even more disturbing in the Fanning article is this new revelation.  Fanning now asserts that DOJ attorney Carlotta Wells instructed Montgomery that the SSP or Protective Order cannot be invoked by the government for the purpose of covering up its own malfeasance. If covering up government malfeasance is the government’s intention, Wells reportedly told Mongomery, the muzzle order is null and void.

“So wait a minute,” Zullo said. “All this time Fanning and Montgomery have been screaming that he can’t talk because of SSP and he hides behind that when pressed for the truth.  We have been arguing that SSP does not apply, but now it’s all OK because Montgomery is exposing corruption. He has been doing this since 2013; he came to the Sheriff’s Office under that pretense. We were right all along: SSP does not apply and he hides behind it when he can’t answer the hard questions. More Montgomery-Fanning double-talk.  

“He can say anything, but if he can’t prove it, it doesn’t matter what he says.  The expert’s paragraph about The Hammer is easily defeated by the other side.

“This is the same thing as if I said, “I have information that the CIA altered votes.”  OK, so how did I get the information?   Talking to McInerney on the phone? I heard it on Dave Janda’s radio show?  That won’t get you too far in a courtroom.   

“Maybe Montgomery will pull a rabbit out of his hat, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.

“They will claim I am being ‘unpatriotic,’ but ‘patriotism’ has always been about finding the truth and standing on the truth.  What Fanning and Jones and Janda are doing is intellectually and journalistically dishonest.  They’re not presenting it in an objective fashion; if they were, they would have to come to the same conclusions we are.

“Early on, if Montgomery had been real, it would have boded very well for me.  This is a presidential election; the fate of the nation hangs on this.  Dear God, please don’t tell me that Dennis Montgomery is the one who we lay our country’s future on to tip the scale.

“By everything we’re seeing now, there is no proof that The Hammer was used in this election.  From Ramsland’s account, a kid could have done it with a cell phone.

“The problem is that the expert makes the statement that the information about The Hammer was verified by the general, who’s relying on the representations of Mary Fanning.  That’s where they all get pulled into the sandbox. By not asking the truth-probing questions and not reporting on the plethora of background documentation and firsthand interactions readily available on the originator of this information, Montgomery’s claims advance as if they are confirmed truth.

“On another level, Mary Fanning’s own conduct raises questions.  She purposely misleads the public by putting forth a timeline of events trying to create an impression in people’s minds that she is, in fact, the person who ‘broke’ this ‘Hammer’ story when I can tell you emphatically that she was not.  She also tries to take credit for bringing forth McInerney and putting him on Dave Janda’s show, thinking that sparked all kinds of chaos in the White House and in the three-letter agencies when I can emphatically tell you that’s not true, and I have the information and the documentation to back up my claim.  So even the reporter is misguiding the public, and you have to ask, ‘What’s the motive?’”

In conclusion, Zullo said:

Another indication that “The Hammer” was likely never used in the election is the massive amount of fraudulent ballots injected into the vote counts in Wisconsin, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other places, according to Powell and other sources. 

It shows just how dangerous this kind of “journalism” is. They all are running a great risk of destroying their own credibility and reputations and in the process taking the entire country on a mind-bending ride.

[Editor’s Note: Early last week, Zullo commented to this writer that “The Hammer” and SCORECARD would likely “end up in a filing somewhere.” The prediction was made prior to the initiation of Powell’s lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia.]