TIME admits ‘conspiracy’ of a ‘cabal of powerful people’ heavily influenced last election

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February 9, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — A TIME magazine article published on Friday explicitly reveals, in its own words, a “conspiracy” of a “cabal of powerful people” to “fortify” last fall’s election against former President Donald Trump.

In mid-November, while striving to find a suitable venue to adjudicate what they saw to be a clear and widespread enterprise to defraud the American people of their free and fair election, Trump attorney and former mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani asked at a press conference: “What happened on the morning of November 3, when they were going to count this new kind of ballot, this mail-in ballot? Did every Democrat leader — in Pennsylvania, and in Michigan, and in Wisconsin, and in Georgia, and in Nevada, and in Arizona — they all wake up and all separately have the same idea?”

“Did they all separately have the idea that we’re going to put Republican inspectors in pens? We’re not going to let them look at mail-in or absentee ballots?”

“This was a plan,” Giuliani said. “You’d have to be a fool not to realize that.”

Now, three months after election day, TIME magazine appears to agree. In a column titled, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” leftist author and journalist Molly Ball chronicles “the inside story of the conspiracy to,” in her words, “save the 2020 election,” which involved an array of political, labor, activist and business groups working in coordination — with Mike Podhorzer, the political director of the largest federation of unions in the United States, designated as “the architect.”

In the introduction of her story, Ball provided one example of the conspiracy: After the November 3 results, when Trump was seeking to have significant evidence of election fraud properly adjudicated, “corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede.”

According to Ball, a biographer of Nancy Pelosi, this was the result of “a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both [timely] curtailed the [Black Lives Matter] protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs.” It came from “an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

She described these groups who worked together for many months before the election as a “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding,” she wrote. “They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time.”

“They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation,” she continued, “and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction.” And, after election day, “they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result.”

Ian Bassin, who is identified in the column as the co-founder of Protect Democracy, is quoted as basically affirming Giuliani’s assertion, stating “it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally.”

Indeed, it appears these groups were quite successful in changing rules and laws in the states. The record shows how leftists worked fervently over the last year or so to undermine accountability in the voting process.

First, by exaggerating the danger of COVID-19 as a backdrop narrative, Democrat leadership across the country imposed significantly stricter lockdown policies on their constituents.

Having established this environment of “crisis,” virtually the entire Democrat Party marched in lockstep demanding, under the pretext of ensuring people are not deprived of their right to vote, that long-established logical safeguards put in place, even for centuries, to ensure the integrity of elections be loosened to the greatest extent possible at any, and every, location.

While the U.S. Constitution reserves the right to determine “[t]he Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives” to state legislatures and Congress, some mostly Democrat state officials violated state laws by unilaterally changing rules before this election.

In Michigan, for example, Democratic state secretary Jocelyn Benson, a George Soros-backed office holder, sent out unsolicited ballot applications to all registered voters, though state law requires that absentee ballots be explicitly requested and distributed by clerks. The Michigan Constitution reaffirms the right of the state legislature over election protocol and highly regulates opportunities for absentee voting.

Benson also created an online registration program, changing statutory signature requirements for applications. Millions of Michigan’s record-breaking, largely pro-Biden, 3.2 million absentee ballots might have been technically invalid as a result of the secretary’s unilateral initiatives.

In Wisconsin, election officials in urban counties also helped voters circumvent ballot safeguards, encouraging them to get around voter ID requirements by declaring themselves “indefinitely confined” due to COVID-19.

After state judges ruled against this strategy, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) impeded clerks from removing suspect “indefinitely confined” ballot requests. Nearly 216,000 Wisconsin voters said they were indefinitely confined in the 2020 election, up 400% since 2016.

Before a U.S. Senate committee, a Wisconsin judge testified that these — over 200,000 — ballots were not valid, and according to the law, “may not be included in the certified results of any election.” Biden’s reported margin of victory in Wisconsin was about 20,000 votes.

In Pennsylvania, another George Soros-backed Democrat secretary of state, Kathryn Boockvar, issued illegal directives multiple times on “curing” ballots, though this practice is not provided for in Pennsylvania’s election code.

Further, she and other top Democrats undermined other statutory election safeguards, like the mail-in ballot deadline and postmark requirement. Local officials broke the law in more basic ways, openly counting and certifying thousands of undated and unsigned ballots, returning void ballots back to voters, and possibly accepting ballots without secrecy envelopes.

In her report, which repeatedly celebrates “Trump’s ouster,” Ball neglects to mention the illegality of these and many other measures. In fact, when Republicans sued in an effort to maintain election security and integrity, as they did in Pennsylvania with a failed appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Ball triumphantly lauds the “cabal’s” effort to fend-off these “voter-suppression lawsuits.”

In addition to praising the success of this “conspiracy” at convincing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg — and other big tech corporations, like Twitter — to censor political speech unfavorable to the Democrats, Ball goes on to laud the “philanthropy” of Zuckerberg’s foundation which “chipped in $300 million” to local election activities.

As was unveiled late last year by the Amistad Project, an election watchdog, Zuckerberg improperly injected $400 million into election processes across the country in 2020, largely benefiting Democrats. Grants in swing states tracked by the Amistad Project went almost exclusively to counties won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

State and local officials in heavily Democratic cities and counties “contracted with Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to make election plans against ones legally provided for by state legislatures under federal statutes,” the Amistad Project said in a report from December.

Among other things, the report outlines how four Wisconsin cities organized their election processes with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), devising the “Wisconsin Safe Election Plan” to receive millions in grant money from the nonprofit. This plan “was not authored by the state” and “undermines the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which requires state election plans to be submitted to federal officials and approved,” the Amistad Project noted.

“The provision of Zuckerberg-CTCL funds allowed these Democrat strongholds to spend roughly $47 per voter, compared to $4 to $7 per voter in traditionally Republican areas of the state,” the group continued.

“The disparate impact of Zuckerberg funding is also present in the analysis of CTCL funding in Pennsylvania,” the Amistad Project said. Thanks to CTCL, “[i]n Democrat Delaware County, Pennsylvania, one drop box was placed every four square miles and for every 4,000 voters. In the 59 counties carried by Trump in 2016, there was one drop box for every 1,100 square miles and every 72,000 voters,” according to the report.

Zuckerberg’s funding further helped swing state Democrats in their quest to override election law through legally unfounded rule-making and voting programs. As the Amistad Project related, CTCL grants “allowed Philadelphia to ‘cure’ absentee ballots in a manner not provided for in Republican areas of the state.”

In response to Ball’s revelations in the TIME article, one analyst called it a “confession,” while journalist Tim Pool made the observation that “it is the opposite of Democracy when a secret cabal of wealthy and politically connected elites conspire to manipulate the rules and laws of an election in order to win.”

“So the election wasn’t rigged,” another wrote. “There was only a secret cabal of powerful elites and corporate interests that worked together to overhaul election laws, influence media coverage, and convince big tech to crush dissent.”

So the election wasn't rigged. There was only a secret cabal of powerful elites and corporate interests that worked together to overhaul election laws, influence media coverage, and convince big tech to crush dissent. https://t.co/PLcG7yidNy

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 5, 2021

RealClearInvestigations senior writer Mark Hemingway pointed out the irony that “[i]f you had said this out loud on Twitter a few months ago, it would have gotten you banned.”

If you had said this out loud on Twitter a few months ago, it would have gotten you banned. https://t.co/hub7XtzKfh

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) February 5, 2021

Republican strategist Blair Brandt tweeted, “Turns out many of Trump’s ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the country’s most powerful forces conspired to remove him were … true.”

Turns out many of Trump’s “conspiracy theories” about how the country’s most powerful forces conspired to remove him were…true. https://t.co/rzdcNXhx27

— Blair Brandt (@BlairBrandt) February 5, 2021

Finally, Donald Trump Jr. Noted, “According to Time the election was ‘Fortified’ but not rigged. Definitely not rigged. This is insanity, but everyone should read to learn exactly how bad it was.”

According to Time the election was “Fortified” but not rigged. Definitely not rigged. This is insanity, but everyone should read to learn exactly how bad it was. https://t.co/dPbXhvGGcx

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 5, 2021