The web that tried to steal the presidency
Chapter 1
What is it that happens when first we practice to deceive? I forget.
If you are anything like me, you tuned into cable news coverage of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 and thought to yourself, "Hmm, this is bad."
Well, that's just us. A sizable and Donald-Trump-loyal segment of the population looked at it and thought, "Hmm, where'd antifa get all that Trump merchandise?" Or, "Gosh, I'm spotting lots of FBI here." Or, in some cases, "Hey, pretty good."
The riot was the culmination of months of effort by Trump and his allies to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election so that he could stay in office. This effort to functionally overturn democracy led, as one might expect, to a federal criminal investigation, one that ultimately led to Trump's indictment.
Which, I think I can safely say, he didn't like.
So it, like the Russia investigation before it, has become the focus of one of the tentacles of Trump's campaign of retribution. Anything that can be done to undermine the 2020 election probe is welcomed by the president, so — as with efforts to "prove" the 2020 election was stolen — any number of his allies have scrambled to meet the demand.
One of them is Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley. The Senate equivalent of the House's egregiously dishonest Oversight Committee, Grassley this week released nearly 200 subpoenas from Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the post-2020-election efforts, documents that sought information or testimony from a range of organizations and individuals. The scale of the document dump was the point; the argument was simply in the vein of "look at how deranged these guys were."
Looking at the documents, though, something stood out to me. It depicts thoroughness, not overreach. And buried in that thoroughness are patterns, implied connections between people and organizations that hint at the scale of the effort.
The word "implied" is important there. When Person A is asked for any information about Person B, it doesn't mean that Jack Smith knew the two were in cahoots. It just means that Smith and his team had reason to believe they might have been in contact.
That said, something interesting happens when you (as I did) walk through the 1,700-plus pages of documents and correlate all of the Persons A and Organizations B. You get a network of connections, one that also inherently highlights participants more important to the network.
Using the open-source visualization program Gephi, I created a visualization of those networks. Here's an early draft.
What's cool about the tool is that it algorithmically sorts the individuals and organizations into clusters based on incoming and outgoing links. In other words, the image above required no manipulation of the points by me; it's how the software understands their importance and relation.
There are a few things that stand out in that image, most notably that the Trump campaign ("Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.") is the largest node. That's because it has the most mentions in subpoenas which, given the context, isn't really surprising. It sits just above a muddy collection of other campaign and political entities, and is tied into clusters scattered around the image.
That version of the graphic used one sorting algorithm. It's a bit messy, though, so I switched to another, yielding a much cleaner layout of the web of connections, with Trump's campaign at the center,
(If you want to peruse a much larger version of the graphic above, click the image. It's big.)
Now let's zoom into it a bit.
At right and a bit below the middle, you can see a number of organizations tied both to former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and Trump's political committees. Parscale's name is mentioned a lot, in part because he's tied to so many of these companies that Smith's team believed to be involved in the post-election efforts.
