Most of the people around Trump are frauds, like him.
Sidney Powell’s secret ‘military intelligence expert,’ key to fraud claims in election lawsuits, never worked in military intelligence
By Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites
Dec. 11, 2020 at 6:29 p.m. EST
The witness is code-named “Spyder.” Or sometimes “Spider.” His identity is so closely guarded that lawyer Sidney Powell has sought to keep it even from opposing counsel. And his account of vulnerability to international sabotage is a key part of Powell’s failing multistate effort to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Powell describes Spyder in court filings as a former “Military Intelligence expert,” and his testimony is offered to support one of her central claims. In a declaration filed in four states, Spyder alleges that publicly available data about server traffic shows that voting systems in the United States were “certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.”
Spyder, it turns out, is Joshua Merritt, a 43-year-old information technology consultant in the Dallas area. Merritt confirmed his role as Powell’s secret witness in phone interviews this week with The Washington Post.
Records show that Merritt is an Army veteran and that he enrolled in a training program at the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, the unit he cites in his declaration. But he never completed the entry-level training course, according to Meredith Mingledorff, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, which includes the battalion.
“He kept washing out of courses,” said Mingledorff, citing his education records. “He’s not an intelligence analyst.”
In an interview, Merritt maintained that he graduated from the intelligence training program. But even by his own account, he was only a trainee with the 305th, at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and for just seven months more than 15 years ago.
His separation papers, which he provided to The Post, make no mention of intelligence training. They show that he spent the bulk of his decade in the Army as a wheeled vehicle mechanic. He deployed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he said he worked in security and route clearance. He held the rank of specialist when he was honorably discharged in 2013, having received several commendations.
Merritt acknowledged that the declaration’s description of his work as an “electronic intelligence analyst under 305th Military Intelligence” is misleading. He said it should have made clear that his time in the 305th was as a student, not as a working intelligence expert.
He blamed “clerks” for Powell’s legal team, who he said wrote the sentence. Merritt said he had not read it carefully before he signed his name swearing it was true.
“That was one thing I was trying to backtrack on,” he said on Thursday. “My original paperwork that I sent in didn’t say that.”
On Friday afternoon, as his name increasingly circulated on social media, Merritt said he had decided to remove himself from the legal effort altogether. He said he plans to close his business and relocate with his family.
Asked about Merritt’s limited experience in military intelligence, Powell said in a text to The Post: “I cannot confirm that Joshua Merritt is even Spider. Strongly encourage you not to print.”
Of her description of him as a military intelligence expert, she said, “If we made a mistake, we will correct it.”
Federal judges have in the past week rejected all four of the complaints Powell has filed seeking to overturn the presidential election — lawsuits popularly known as the “kraken” suits, after a mythical sea creature she has harnessed as a sort of mascot — ruling either that the challenges should have been filed in state courts or were meritless.
In Michigan, attorneys for the state argued that Powell's complaint was based on "fantastical conspiracy theories" that belong in the "fact-free outer reaches of the Internet." A federal judge ruled this week that the allegation that votes were changed for Biden relied on an "amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation."
A federal judge in Arizona similarly tossed out a case Wednesday that relied in part on an affidavit from Merritt, writing that allegations “that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court” and “most certainly cannot be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.”
Powell is appealing all four of those losses.
more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/sidney-powell-spider-spyder-witness/2020/12/11/0cd567e6-3b2a-11eb-98c4-25dc9f4987e8_story.html
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