President Trump is bringing back the most bizarre conspiracy theory for why he lost the 2020 election. It’s ItalyGate, which pins his loss to Joe Biden that year on an elaborate conspiracy in which Barack Obama and China teamed up to use Italian military satellites to zap the election away from him.
Trump boosted the idea this week in a series of posts on Truth Social. In one, he posted a link to a QAnon-promoting X account which laid out the very entertaining theory in detail.
The timing was propitious. Trump made the posts after FBI agents descended on Fulton County, seizing 2020 ballots and other records from the election that year. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was photographed peering out from the building, raising even more questions from the reality-based community about what the Trump administration thought was happening.
The usual crowd of 2020 dead-enders went out of their minds with joy at the searches. Michael Flynn, the former general-turned-martial law advocate, broadcast his excitement; Patrick Byrne, the ex-Overstock CEO who purportedly financed a series of increasingly quixotic attempts to investigate the 2020 result, said on Mike Lindell’s network, “I’m excited. It doesn’t surprise me that our illustrious DNI Tulsi Gabbard was involved…I’m very confident what they’re gonna find.”
Gabbard’s presence is interesting. The Wall Street Journal reported that she’s leading a government-wide charge to support conspiracy theories around Trump’s loss in 2020. The intelligence agencies that she runs, by law, are usually barred from conducting operations in the U.S.
The whole effort, and the motley crew behind it, is in service of one person: President Trump.
ItalyGate blew up on the internet in December 2020. Trump was grasping at straws for anything that would keep his bid to steal the 2020 election alive. That included far-out legal ideas that would turn the Constitution on its head, but also narratives that might persuade anyone who wanted to be convinced that he had not lost.
The Italy theory was special in part for its audacity, and in part for how it distilled the action movie themes that ran through many of the 2020 election conspiracy theories. It was also an ad libs of various complaints about Obama-era foreign policy: per the theory, Obama secretly took the “pallets of cash” that, right-wing media held, had been delivered to Iran as part of the 2015 nuclear deal. The money was then supposedly sent to Italian operatives, where a defense contractor named Leonardo used military satellites to zap votes in their machines away from Trump and to Biden.
China oversaw the whole thing, according to the theory’s main proponent, a former Georgia lobbyist named Maria Strollo Zack.
She, TPM reported in 2021, claimed that she told Trump about the theory on Christmas Eve 2020. She had other ties to the conservative movement: her nonprofit, Nations in Action, counted GOP voter fraud alarmist and attorney Hans von Spakovsky as a board member. He left the group on Jan. 8, 2021.
Zack wasn’t alone. She teamed up with Michele Ballarin, a onetime Somali hostage negotiation impresario and Virginia realtor who, at the time, was trying to insert herself into the Italian airline market.
From there, everything got weirder.
Emails released in June 2021 showed that, in late 2020, Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pushed to investigate the theory. A letter written on letterhead belonging to a company that Ballarin ran laid out the theory; Meadows on Dec. 30, 2020, forwarded it to DOJ leadership at the time, a set of officials in acting roles following Bill Barr’s Dec. 14 exit.
“Can you believe this?” then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen asked another top DOJ official.
It was a different time. Kash Patel’s reported role in the scandal offers a nice contrast.
Patel, the Jan. 6 Committee later found, used his position as chief of staff to then-acting Secretary of Defense to push for an investigation into the theory by the Department of Defense. It came up with nothing.
Trump’s return to the theory this week involved reposting to Truth Social a tweet from an X account called “The SCIF.” A closer look at a Rumble page linked to on the account’s page shows various QAnon-related videos, including one recounting the PizzaGate conspiracy theory with this memorable cover image:
The account describes itself as a “Digital Intelligence Operator researching and exposing the satanic global elite and fighting against the human trafficking epidemic.”
The White House did not return TPM’s request for comment.
Down the rabbit hole!!1!!2211````!
They are all mentally unwell.
And here I thought it was the Venezuelan voting machines!! What’s up next, the Death Star was involved?
Yet if I said the President will kidnap the leader of Venezuela and use a secretive cartel to sell the oil to and park the money in a private account in Qatar to distract us from proof of a powerful cabal of child molesters you’d say I was crazy , wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you??!!!
There is an immediacy to the crisis at hand. I really do wish the politicians with the “disarm” keys to the system would do their jobs. And I know they almost certainly will not, because many of them are literally parroting everything said by person creating the crisis.
I am living in the strangest timeline.