The second and final week of the disbarment trial of Donald Trump’s former DOJ official, Jeffrey Clark, began to wind down on Wednesday with more testimony from operations security expert Harry Haury. Clark, who is also a defendant in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ RICO prosecution, is being disciplined for drafting a letter that was never sent to Georgia officials after the 2020 election advising them of their options for dealing with the election illegalities.
The trial is expected to wrap up on Thursday with closing statements.
Clark’s attorney, Harry MacDougald, asked Haury about risk-limiting audits, which election officials tout as evidence that elections were secure. Haury said those audits “look at whether the counts and registration of precinct tickets and ballots seem to be accurate.” However, Haury said “they don’t look at it holistically.”
He added that they only cover an “extremely small portion of what’s required to determine whether or not a system is secure in a particular use context.”
“A normal FISMA review requires review of the source code,” Haury said. “To the best of my understanding, it’s been haphazard.”
The cyber security expert continued, “It’s like buying a car without being able to look under the hood.”
Addressing the destroyed ballot images in Fulton County, which VoterGA’s Garland Favorito testified previously was evidence of fraud, Haury said, “Auditable items is an affirmative requirement, so the destruction of them is against the concept of the risk management framework.”
He noted that a risk management framework analysis wasn’t conducted after Georgia’s 2020 election. He called it “a total breach” and said the “election wasn’t conducted according to the law.”
He mentioned the lack of signature verification on 160,000 votes, referring to it as “160,000 votes in the system that weren’t supposed to be there” with “no cure possible.”
He said that “the election was not valid by cybersecurity standards” and reiterated that “this is my area of expertise.”
Haury said the ballot scanning that occurred at night in Fulton County — referring to the election workers caught on video pulling ballots out from beneath tables and counting them after observers had gone home — was “an operational security breach that inserted an unknown number of invalid ballots into the system against the rules of conduct of the election.”
“If you can’t tell me who won, you can’t tell me certification was proper,” he declared. He said it is not known who won the 2020 presidential election.
“They didn’t conduct the elections correctly, not conducted by the law,” the cyber security expert added.
Haury said the ballots that had problems are technically called “illegal ballot[s]” and “accepting it is fraud.” He said the election was fraught with “massive operational security breaches.”
Haury discussed his work with The Amistad Project, trying unsuccessfully to obtain whistleblower status from the DOJ for Jesse Morgan, a USPS contractor who revealed he was assigned to transport ballots from New York to Pennsylvania. He said he was in the room when Tony Shaffer of The Amistad Project took a call from then-Attorney General Bill Barr. He said Barr was irate and told Shaffer to stand down on looking into the incident.
When the D.C. Bar’s attorney, Hamilton Fox, asked Haury about the U.S. Electoral Assistance Commission (EAC) certifying Dominion voting machines, Haury responded that he wasn’t sure the certification was legal. He observed that it wasn’t compliant with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA).
Fox asked about Georgia’s Secure Accessible and Fair Elections (SAFE) approving the Dominion machines. Haury said “the system they approved was changed,” and “separate and additional reviews were not done to approve the changes as required by law.”
Haury said he knew that changes had been made because the election commission told him personally that changes to code were made for the election.
Fox asked Haury about a statement put out shortly after the 2020 election by some officials and activists declaring that there was no fraud. Haury dismissed the statement, pointing out that the lead signatory was a lawyer and others were CEOs, not cybersecurity experts.
“This document means nothing to me,” he said.
Next, cybersecurity expert Shawn Smith returned to the stand. He testified the previous Thursday. He said election officials don’t have the background to determine whether voting machines are secure. The labs that certify “don’t look at the internal components,” he said.
Smith added that the machines come from “foreign supply chains” that are “manipulable and accessible by foreign powers.”
Clark’s attorney, Charles Burnham, addressed the court, asking to recess the proceedings and allow an expedited appeal. Clark also addressed the court, informally without being sworn in and avoiding breaching his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. He said one of the rules said he has a duty to appeal at this stage. Merril Hirsh, the chair of the disciplinary panel, refused the request.
🔥 @JeffClarkUS takes the podium at his DC Bar trial and argues that his due process rights have been denied again and again by the Bar Disciplinary Committee.
Source: @NTDNews pic.twitter.com/XJ4rjxyhNU
— Citizens for Renewing America (@amrenewcitizen) April 3, 2024
Burham produced a declaration from Representative Scott Perry (R-PA-10) that had been emailed a few minutes prior. Fox objected, in part because it referenced HR 1, “whatever that is.” Fox criticized Perry in such a manner that Hirsh reprimanded him and asked him not to denigrate Perry’s military service. Perry served as a Brigadier General in Bosnia and Herzegovina and commanded the 2nd Battalion, 104th Aviation Regiment, during its pre-deployment training and service in Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom. He flew 1,400 missions, accruing over 13,000 combat flight hours.
Hirsh allowed the declaration into evidence. It said that Perry voted against certifying Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and met with Trump and Clark regarding the problems.
He said, “Mr. Clark conducted himself honorably during that meeting and the other conversations we had about election integrity concerns. He did not in any way propose or suggest that he or anyone else engage in any impropriety or unethical, illegal, or immoral conduct. He conducted himself appropriately under the unusual circumstances our nation was confronting at the time.”
The trial resumes its final day Thursday on the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility’s YouTube page.
– – –
Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Harry Haury” by True the Vote.
