Donald Trump, his Trump Tower Russian server, Betsy DeVos, voting machines, and the Michigan upset
Now that a Freedom of Information Act request has resulted in ninety pages of voting machine flaws in swing states in the 2016 election (link), it’s time to go back and revisit how and why Donald Trump truly won the state of Michigan. And that story involves the infamous Trump Tower Russian email server, its connection to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
During the recount effort, Palmer Report reported heavily on the voting machine flaws that were surfacing, based on accounts we were receiving directly from recount observers (link) and the efforts of local reporters (link). But the story never went national, and the Michigan recount was shut down by the courts long before it was completed, meaning we never did get proof of why such an extraordinary number of voting machines just happened to malfunction in the most Democrat-heavy districts in the swing states in question.
But now that the FOIA request has officially confirmed the breadth of the voting machine malfunctions, thus vindicating the local and anecdotal reports of malfunctions we’d been reporting at the time, it brings us back to another story that took far too long to gain mainstream traction. Back in October, Slate first reported on what appeared to be private email server inside Trump Tower that was set to only communicate with two Russian banks and a health care company in Michigan. That latter part made no sense until after the election, when Trump nominated Betsy DeVos to his cabinet.
At that point Palmer report pieced together that the Michigan health care company in question was controlled by Betsy DeVos and her husband (link). Our reporting was largely brushed off, until a month later when CNN ran essentially the same story and splashed the words “Breaking News” across the screen. But even since that time, the story has taken a backseat to the more easily digestible Trump Russia scandals – until now.
With official confirmation that Michigan’s voting machines malfunctioned in extraordinary numbers on election day in a manner which just happened to help Donald Trump win a state that he had no real chance of winning, this raises several essential questions. Why were Russia, Trump Tower, and the DeVos-controlled company in Michigan sharing so much private data during the election? Why did Trump spend so much time trying to win Michigan, a state everyone knew he couldn’t legitimately win? Is this why Trump gave a cabinet position to DeVos after he won?
It raises other questions as well. Whatever this Trump-Russia-DeVos scheme in Michigan might have been, was it limited to just the general election? Could it have been in place to cause the impossible result in which Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary despite Hillary Clinton having been up by twenty points? No other state in the democratic primary race had results that were anywhere near that far off from the polls. Bernie certainly didn’t cheat in Michigan. But did Trump and his allies rig the Michigan primary against Hillary, in order to slow her momentum? Keep in mind that if Hillary had won the Michigan primary, Bernie probably would have dropped out two months sooner than he did.
Considering that the end result was Russia illegitimately installing Donald Trump as president, these details matter. And now that we know the voting machines were broken in Michigan in such strategically convenient yet widespread fashion that it would be hard to explain away through mere happenstance, every aspect of Michigan must be reexamined within the context of the Trump Tower Russian email server. Help fund Palmer Report
