The U.S. Presidential race is all but over with states continuing to certify electoral college votes. As it turns out, despite mounting allegations about widespread voter fraud from President Donald Trump's camp, his legal team has not been able to provide enough evidence to prove the claims.
Trump's legal team has filed more than 40 lawsuits in six key battleground states. But with most lawsuits being dismissed, Trump will have to vacate the White House and make way for Joe Biden on January 20 even if he doesn't concede.
However, despite no evidence, his thoughts on voter fraud have been shared by millions of his supporters and some who claim not to support Trump. One among them is Overstock founder and former CEO, Patrick Byrne. He too believes voter fraud was real and that cost Trump a second term. Now, Byrne has hired a "team of hackers and cyber sleuths and other people with odd skills" to unearth evidence.
"We have been on this since August. One side story being pursued someday is that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) was warned of all this in August and September. We tried very hard but it was all cramped down... I mean from the high level," Byrne told One America News (OAN) on November 24.
Who is Patrick Byrne?
Those who may not know Byrne, he is the founder of Overstock.com, an online home décor store in 1999. He took the company the company public in 2002 and became a millionaire. He advocated for cryptocurrency and made Overstock the first major online retailer to accept bitcoin. But in 2019, after successful years as the CEO, he was forced to resign by the investors following his claims of romancing with a Russian agent named Maria Butina and his involvement in a deep-state investigation.
In a statement, Byrne said that "Men in Black" who were supposed to be from the federal government urged him to be involved in a romantic relation with Butina. That time, Butina, now a convicted Russian spy, was trying to get into conservative circles, pretending to be a gun-rights activist. But according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report, Butina's boyfriend Paul Erickson claimed that Byrne was "stalking" her and made her an offer of $1 million to having his child.
Election Fraud
Now, Byrne claims that Biden's chances of getting thousands of back-to-back votes from even a pro-Biden area are one in a quadrillion-quadrillion or next to nothing. To back his claim, he provided "evidence" on his blog. But it was in August 2020 that his team of hackers realized that Dominion voting machines could be manipulated to steal the election.
Trump supporters have also claimed that the same machines have been rigged to favor Biden. However, any concrete proof is yet to surface and Byrne hasn't disclosed details about his hacker team.
It should also be noted that Biden urged his supporters to vote via mail-in-ballot due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Hence, the mail-in-ballots that mainly came from big Democratic stronghold counties overwhelmingly preferred Biden.
The millionaire even supported former Trump lawyer Sydney Powell's claims that deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had meddled with the U.S. election. He believes that Smartmatic is part of the Dominion voting system that has been used in 30 states during the 2020 elections.
Many claim that the source code of Dominion's voting system depends on Smartmatic, which had ties with the Venezuelan government. The voting system's software had privileges for the administrator who could wipe out votes or even rewrite it. But the company has denied the claims while there has been no evidence that it originated in Venezuela.
"Sidney was the first to really get it, and to get what we're saying is so vast, that you need kind of a very open-minded person to get it," he told the InTheMatrixxx podcast. While his views are similar to conspiracy theorists and Trump's team of lawyers and supporters, Byrne said that he neither voted for Trump nor did he receive funding from any MAGA support group. "I'm a free agent, and I'm self-funded, and I'm funding this army of various odd people. It's really going to make a great movie someday," he added.
Byrne has also appeared on a show hosted by a QAnon conspiracy theorist Cirsten W, whose bizarre claims include that Bill Clinton and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (who was Trump's close friend) had been cloned. As for Byrne, he said he could be a reincarnation of an ancient Chinese monk. "I love the Chinese, I speak Chinese, I think I'm the reincarnation of a Shaolin monk, maybe," Byrne said on the podcast.
