The attorneys later said Connell's testimony on Nov. 3, 2008 turned out to be so valuable that he would be their star witness at trial along with Stephen Spoonamore, another Republican IT consultant. Spoonamore is a former IT director for GOP senator and 2008 Presidential nominee John McCain.
Spoonamore has said the system Connell set up enabled massive fraud that decided the nation's 2004 Presidential election. Connell, a longtime Republican activist, was suspected also of helping enable Bush-Cheney malfeasance in Florida in 2000.
After elections created a Republican majority in Congress House Republicans awarded Connell contracts to set up the email system serving both Congress and various partisan Republican organizations. SmarTech clients included the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. Also, it ran a private system for the Bush White House that enabled its users to bypass a government-run system subject to more rigorous oversight by Congress, the courts or other watchdogs.
Connell's 2008 testimony has been the subject of much speculation in voting rights circles. An expert pilot, he died at age 45 in a single-plane crash six weeks after his testimony. His Piper Saratoga plane took off from a Maryland airfield for a trip to Ohio. A preliminary federal investigation failed to reach a conclusion for the crash but found no signs of mischief.
Excerpted below are several of the most prominent commentaries on the likelihood of foul play in his death. One is by investigative reporter Wayne Madsen, who photographed the take-off airfield in College Park to show how easy it could have been for a saboteur to have slipped into the vicinity.
Madsen, a former Navy investigator, NSA analyst and frequent contributor to OpEd News, has written extensively about how small planes used by political figures are vulnerable to sabotage, including ground-to-air interference difficult for official investigators later to detect. A similar view was voiced in a 2009 column by Rebecca Abrahams, Mike Connell's Family Copes With His Mysterious Death, Tipsters, Legal Options.
Blackwell has taken a lead in denouncing accusers as sore losers. Like other defendants, he has denied wrongdoing both in court papers and in other public statements. But few reporters dare ever press for details or other comments, and Rove does not even bother mentioning the Ohio claims in his 2010 memoir, Courage and Consequence.
Cyber Trail
Connell was a longtime GOP activist motivated in politics by his strong anti-abortion views. In his testimony, he described how he founded two IT consultancies to provide services to the Bush White House, where he worked closely with Rove. Connell's firms were New Media Communications, Inc. and GovTech.
In 2000 and 2004, Connell's New Media Communications helped on campaign IT strategy for the Bush-Cheney ticket and the Republican National Committee. Connell's other firm worked for a various government clients, including: the U.S. House of Representatives; the House Republican Conference; the House Intelligence Committee; the House Judiciary Committee; the House Ways & Means Committee and the House Financial Services Committee.
Connell said he used GovTech for such official government work, and New Media for his partisan, pro-GOP political work. Also, Connell described in his testimony how SmarTech handled such sensitive matters as White House emails, which are supposed to be preserved as government records. Bush officials later said key emails were inadvertently lost. This was after congressional investigators demanded the emails as part of the House Judiciary Committee 2007 investigation of the notorious Bush DOJ purge of nine prosecutors in 2006.
Several of those fired were Republicans who had resisted political pressure to bring what they regarded as unwarranted voting fraud cases against Democrats. Among them was New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Another was Todd Graves, U.S. attorney for the Kansas City-based western district of Missouri.
Iglesias discusses voting fraud extensively in his 2008 memoir, In Justice: Inside the Scandal that Rocked the Bush Administration. Iglesias had been appointed to his powerful regional post in the first year of the Bush presidency.
He recalls in the book how his Bush colleagues at DOJ headquarters transformed DOJ's Voting Litigation Section: While the emphasis had formerly been on safeguarding the franchise for disadvantaged citizens of every description, the new emphasis was on using federal power to expunge from the rolls those who, for whatever reason, were judged not to belong there.
Iglesias noted that Graves, another 2001 Bush appointee, was replaced by Bradley Schlozman, "a DOJ attorney who had made a name for himself by digging up convenient voter fraud cases, real or imagined." Schlozman had led the transformation of DOJ's Voting Litigation Section.
As part of the U.S. attorney purge, Schlozman replaced Graves in March 2006 to announce voting fraud indictments against ACORN (The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Five days before the 2006 elections, just in time so that news reports would damage Democrats, Schlozman announced indictments against four former ACORN workers. They had earned $8 an hour to sign up voters in poor neighborhoods. The workers had been turned in by ACORN itself, and so it was an easy prosecution.
Congress cut off any federal funding for ACORN's varied community programs, in part because an embezzlement by its founder, and the organization dissolved in 2010.
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