The mysterious, convenient solo-plane-crash death of "Karl Rove's IT guru" has to turn the soberest soul into a Konspiracy Kook

Thanks to Brad Blog for digging out this lovely photo. Brad recalls that Mike Connell "had reportedly been threatened by Karl Rove over the summer, just prior to being forced to testify by a federal judge in Ohio in a 2004 election fraud lawsuit."

"I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

-- the late Mike Connell

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

by Ken

I didn't pay much attention to this story at first. But it caught Howie's attention in Africa, and I took a closer look. Here is Lisa Derrick's account on FireDogLake's Campaign Silo:

Plane Crash Kills Rove IT Guy, Testified in OH Voter Fraud Case, Key in White House Email Scandal

By Lisa Derrick Saturday December 20, 2008 9:47 am

Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT guru -- who was compelled six weeks ago to testify in an Ohio vote-tampering case -- was killed late Friday night in a solo plane crash. His plane crashed into the garage of an empty house. Per Cybrinth CEO Stephen Spoonamore, Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.

According to Spoonamore, as reported by Rebecca Abrahams, at an October 11, 2006 meeting between Spoonamore, Connell, and GovTech Solutions President Randy Cole -- who ran and lost for State Representative in Ohio this election --

Connell asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Spoonamore said "If this is what I think you're talking about, this meeting is over."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are on site today. Investigations typically take weeks and even months or longer to complete, according to an FAA spokeswoman.

Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional who created the website for Ohio's secretary of state Kenneth K. Blackwell that presented the 2004 election results in real time as they were tabulated.

Connell created websites for Blackwell's election runs was well as the one which tabulated and displayed votes in real time. During the 2004 elections, Blackwell was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio, successfully leading the campaign for the 2004 Ohio Constitution Amendment banning state recognition of same sex marriage or civil unions. Blackwell was unseated in 2006 by Ted Strickland.

Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections until compelled by a judge on on November 1 of this year.

The Ohio RICO lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, brought by Cliff Arnebeck, alleged alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. The lawsuit maintains that Karl Rove, with the assistance of Mike Connell, designed, built and directed a strategy to manipulate elections through the use of computers. On November 1, 2008, a judge ordered Connell to testify, though his resulting deposition two days later was disappointing to many. Connell's attorney advised him to not answer many questions including, "Who directed you to set up the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth IT Network?"

In addition to his with his work creating Blackwell's election websites and the anti-Kerry website swiftboatvetsfortruth.org, per reporter Rebecca Abrahams, Connell also developed websites for the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Administration Committees. The builder of RNC.org, and head of IT for the McCain campaign, Connell was also

the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication. Connell is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and managing congressional email servers and firewalls.

In 1999, Connell told Inside Business magazine, "I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

Let's pause here and take a deep breath before venturing into territory where sensible people really shouldn't be venturing. Breathe in, breathe out. Again.

Okay. So in other words:

* Mike Connell knew all of Karl Rove's electronic secrets. All of the systems by which Rove organized and exercised his control over the GOP and executive-branch propaganda operations, which of course were merged into a single operation,
went through Connell.

To the extent that communications were involved in Rove's far-flung machinations to subvert the Constitution and the whole body of federal law in order to perpetuate the totalitarian regime he had played such a large role in establishing, which is to say both his life's work and his every waking hour's occupation, to that extent, everything went through systems devised Connell. This included the creation of parallel e-mail systems devised to circumvent the government record-keeping requirements of federal law, and also to circumvent the requirements for separation of government business and partisan political activity, a separation that ran directly counter to the fundamental operating principle of the Bush regime, which was not only to break down the separation between government business and partisan political activity but to make them exactly the same thing.

* Clearly, e-mail communications were not only central to the political purge of U.S. attorneys who resisted participating in Rove's transformation of the Justice Dept. into an agency of political hatchet folk and partisan enforcers, but were central to the unraveling, documentation, and eventual prosecution of the various conspiracies.tiy, we'll never know.

* What's more, Connell was deeply involved with the Karl Rove of Ohio, former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, including the period in which Blackwell likely oversaw the theft of the state's 2004 electoral votes for the presidential reelection campaign of George W. Bush, which enabled the never-elected president to steal a second term.

* Six weeks ago, after exhausting all efforts at stonewalling, Connell finally was forced to give a deposition concerning the Ohio electoral matters, though questions seem to have ranged into some of his other Rove-commissioned work.. He lawyered up, but what methods of persuasion might eventually have been brought to bear to persuade him to be more forthcoming, or what legal compulsions might in future have been applied to unearth what he knew about such other Rove secrets as the U.S. attorney firings, regarding which Rove himself is under increasing legal pressure to testy. Everything Connell knew about those activities also died with him in Friday night's plane crash.

* And that crash was of a single-passenger plane. All of a sudden, poof! No more Mike Connell. Oops. Well, accidents happen.

Now, I realize that this sounds like the most hysterical of conspiracy-mongering. It's just that where the activities of Karl Rove is concerned, it seems pretty clear that vast networks of conspiracies were in fact in daily operation, and that a substantial portion of the activity specifically involved bypassing or flouting the law. Where organized crime is concerned, such coincidences become automatically suspect, it seems hard to resist the suspicion that Karl Rove was a sort of operations manager for the most extensive political crime operation in the history of the republic.

Hmmm.


YOU ASK, WHO WAS MIKE CONNELL ANYWAYS?

Brad Blog has a veritable Mike Connell archive. The links are available on-site:

* 7/17/08: Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
* 7/22/08: GOP Tech Guru Mike Connell 'High IQ Forrest Gump...At Scene of Every Single Crime' Say Ohio Attorneys
* 7/24/08: Rove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not 'Take the Fall' for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says Attorney
* 7/25/08: Cliff Arnebeck, OH Attorney, Interviewed Live on Peter B. Collins Show
* 7/26/08: So Who Is Mike Connell? A Clip from 'Free For All' Gives You an Idea...
* 9/29/08: STAY LIFTED IN '04 OHIO ELECTION FRAUD CASE, GOP 'TECH GURU' SUBPOENAED
* 10/31/08: BREAKING: Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell To Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case
* 11/24/08: 'Document Hold' Served by OH Attorney to GA SoS in Advance of State's U.S. Senate Run-off Election

LARISA ALEXANDROVNA REPORTS: "HE WAS AFRAID"

Raw Story, whose investigative team headed by Larisa Alexandrovna has been all over the Connell story, naturally is on this story too.

Alexandrovna revealed on her own blog that Connell was a source of hers, adding:

[H]e had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened. . . .

I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. [emphasis in the original]

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