Anita Bartholomew - Siege: An American Tragedy

Anita Bartholomew

SIEGE

An American Tragedy

First published by Bartholomew & Co., Inc. 2022

Copyright 2022 by Anita Bartholomew

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition

ISBN: 978-0-9839922-3-3

Cover art by Nanjar Tri Mukti
Illustration by (cover photo) 72westy / Shutterstock.com

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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This book is dedicated to the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol despite being greatly outnumbered and subjected to grievous injuries and abuse.

The republic you helped save that day owes you its gratitude.

Just say that the election was corrupt

and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.

Then-President Donald Trump to Department of Justice officials

O n November 15, 2020, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo had some shocking revelations to share with her Sunday Morning Futures viewers.

According to her featured guest, Rudy Giuliani, former New York City Mayor and current personal attorney for President Donald J. Trump, something had gone very wrong in the recent presidential election. And it hadnt happened by chance. Giuliani made the connection between rampant vote tampering in the presidential election and a software company with businesses in Cubaand links to China.

When Giuliani appeared on screen, he dropped another bombshell: Smartmatic software was designed by and for none other than the late socialist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

And this company has tried-and-true methods for fixing elections, he explained, by calling a halt to the voting when youre running too far behind.

While that was sinking in, Bartiromo showed her audience a graphic that indicated Smartmatic software was used on voting machines in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Smartmatic was also, she claimed, the owner of Dominion Voting Systems.

As regular Fox viewers probably knew by then, Dominion Voting Systems was one of the top voting technology purveyors in the US.

If true, this intel was beyond damning. It was explosive. It could offer the proof that Trump had been right all along: the election had been rigged. And foreign nationalssocialists and communistshad been involved in the rigging.

The only problem? Almost none of what Bartiromo and Giuliani stated with such authority was accurate. Though its owners were Venezuelan nationals, Smartmatic was an American election software company. It didnt own the entirely separate electronic voting machine maker Dominion Voting Systems. It had no businesses in Cuba. It had no known links to China.

But even if all of what Bartiromo and Giuliani alleged that morning about Smartmatic were accurate, it couldnt have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

In all of the United States, Smartmatic software was used in a single county only: reliably Democratic Los Angeles, California, which hadnt been won by a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984.

None of that mattered. The disinformation campaign narrative that originated with Trump loyalists like Giuliani, and was being promoted unskeptically by friendly media, was as riveting as any spy thriller.

Trump and his allies would eventually claim that a massive conspiracy cost Trump seven states the six in Bartiromos graphic plus New Mexicothat hed actually won. And the accusations went beyond vote-switching election software and machines to include fake registrations, counterfeit ballots, illegal votes by hordes of undocumented immigrants, votes cast mysteriously by long-dead citizens, and legal ballots discarded.

Who could be trusted any more?

County employees who mailed out and processed registration forms would have to have been in on it. Election workers who counted the ballots? At least some of them would have had to know. Not even those friendly seniors who came out of retirement each year to man the polling stations on election day were above suspicion. Judges, postal workers, printers, Democratic politicians at every level of government, all were targeted as co-conspirators. As the campaign to persuade voters that their votes had been stolen continued, Trump loyalists would add more conspirators to the list. The CIA. Foreign operatives in Italy and Spain. And that amorphous amalgam of faceless bureaucrats known as the Deep State.

Pundits in the Fox media empire, throughout Trumps presidency, had regularly lent credence to Trumps positions and rhetoric on virtually every topic. It was the most watched cable TV news network in the United States. There was probably no better place to sow seeds of fear and doubt, and hope they would spread like kudzu.

Nevermind that Dominion was also among the major voting technology companies in 2016the year Trump actually won the presidency. Nevermind that other Republicans had won races in the 2020 election.

Claims of election fraud by those in the Trump universe were also being telegraphed to the far fringes of the web. There, the allegations expanded, morphed, and got molded into dark fables too preposterous and paranoid for even the most evil of Marvel Comics super-villains. Most in non-Fox mainstream media didnt immediately seem to grasp that such blatant nonsense would stick. If they took note at all, it was to point fingers and chuckle.

By four days after the election, although several states had not yet been officially called, it was clear that Trump had indeed lost. It would soon become apparent that former Vice President Joseph Biden had won the popular vote by more than seven-million and the electoral college vote by seventy-four. Yet, Trump insisted that he, not Biden, had actually wonby a lot, suggesting, like his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, that Biden was attempting a coup against the rightful president.

Trump announced that Giuliani would give a press conference on November 7, 2020, at the Four Seasons, to update everyone on their plans for legal challenges.

Anyone reading the announcement assumed that meant Philadelphias posh Four Seasons Hotel. A clarification soon appeared: the press conference would be in the parking lot of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping Company, an unassuming business in an industrial part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Reporters who attended gleefully pointed out that the venue was across the street from a crematorium and down the block from where the Fantasy Island sex shop was running a Dildo Madness sale.

Giuliani seemed almost pitiful as he insisted Trump had won, nevermind the vote count that said otherwise. He alleged that ballot boxes in Pennsylvania had been stuffed with the votes of dead people. He promised lawsuits. In the midst of all this, word came out that the Associated Press had just called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. Someone in the crowd yelled, Go home. The game is over.

Reporters began leaving before the press conference ended. Although Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia had yet to be called (and all three would go to Biden), Pennsylvanias twenty electoral votes gave Biden the two-hundred-seventy he needed to win, plus three to spare. Case closed.

Or so most of the world believed at that moment.