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Sometime during October 2033, there was a meeting of several Conservative members of Congress to discuss potential actions regarding the information that the Congressional Committees had received from the FBI regarding its investigation of Diane Anthony’s usage of a personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device while she was Secretary of Defense. Aside from the FBI investigation team’s decision to not pursue prosecution for gross negligence, their Congressional staff members had not found anything significant.
Someone joked that they ought to release the transmails that were now marked classified by the FBI or the Pentagon to WikiLeaks and claim that they were originally sent with classification markings by Anthony or her staff. Afterward, two members of Congress thought this would be a good idea, and pursued this by making contact with an intermediary of WikiLeaks and providing copies of the classified transmails, all property marked now by the FBI or the Pentagon.
In October, the campaigns continued, pinging from one national event to another, as day by day someone said something controversial. The public was confused about where each candidate stood, polls tightened, polling percentages increased, one candidate was ahead in this state, etc. It was a campaign of change, and unpredictability.
Nation-wide polling up to October 31st showed Diane Anthony with an average 5% lead over Thayer Powers. State-by-state polling suggested she would win between 28 and 35 states and would receive from 330 to 370 votes in the Electoral College, more than enough to get the 270 needed at the time.
At approximate 2 am Eastern Time on October 31st, WikiLeaks posted on their website copies of about 113 transmails that were marked “Top Secret,” “Extremely Top Secret,” or “Really Secret and the British Can Read It.” This group also sent a transmail to several thousand addresses announcing their posting. Approximately thirty minutes later, the copies were no longer available due to a hacker attack that shut down their server. Subsequent postings were quickly hacked or the website shut down. We now know, but the public did not know at the time, that the United States Cyber Command was responsible for conducting the hacking and preventing the disclosure of classified information.
American news networks did take notice of the WikiLeaks transmail within about an hour. Although they had no access to the actual transmails, most of the networks then began to report that additional Anthony transmails from her personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device had now surfaced and that they contained Secret and Top Secret information that was marked. This was in conflict with her Congressional testimony. At about 4 am, Thayer Powers sent a comment via transmail, demanding that Diane Anthony quit as the Progressive nominee for lying to Congress. Anthony’s rapid reaction group responded immediately that there was no evidence that such transmails even existed, as no one had access to the actual transmails on the website due to the hacker’s denial of service attacks. There was no evidence that either campaign knew anything about how WikiLeaks obtained the transmails or who was involved in the hacking.
The Saturday news cycle was filled with speculation about the transmails, with some news reports even interrupting college football games. Because of previous WikiLeaks disclosures, it was assumed that it had obtained and posted Anthony transmails from her personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device, and that they contained marked classified information. Late in the afternoon, the FBI Director returned from a college football game, and directed his subordinates to conduct an immediate investigation of this situation.
The Sunday morning news shows continued the speculation, now focused on whether Diane Anthony would actually quit the race – since if the disclosure was true, it contradicted multiple statements made by her about the transmails on her personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device. Anthony surrogates focused on the fact that no one has actually seen the transmails in question claimed to be posted by WikiLeaks and suggested this was a cruel hoax. This continued to dominate the news cycles throughout Monday. Spot polling suggested that support for Anthony was being eroded.
Likewise, the FBI investigation also had not obtained the transmails from any website. By chance, an FBI Agent contacted the liaison from United States Cyber Command, and they provided copies of the transmails to the FBI from the WikiLeaks website before it was shut down. On Monday morning, a FBI Agent involved in the original Anthony personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device investigation was asked to review these transmails, and this Agent identified that the transmails were not the actual ones found in their investigation, and the classification markings were added by other agencies to the transmails during the investigation. The startling finding was that these copies of transmails matched the ones provided by the FBI in early August 2032 to the House and Senate Committees looking at the Anthony usage of her personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device.
This finding changed the whole focus of the current FBI investigation, as the Agents then went to the Congressional offices to speak and ask questions of Senators, Representatives, and Congressional staff members who had access to files. Nearing midnight on Monday night, two members of Congress admitted providing WikiLeaks with copies of the classified transmails, falsely claiming that they were originals from Anthony’s personal wrist-embedded telecommunications device. This information was relayed to the FBI Director and the Attorney General, who quickly informed President Eric Trump. The President convened a meeting of his key advisors, and at 2 am, the networks were informed that Trump would be speaking to the nation at 3 am.
In the first address to the nation by a President in the early morning that was also an Election Day, President Eric Trump calmly reported the facts as provided by the FBI, without providing the names of the two members of Congress, pending further investigation and determination by the Department of Justice of how to proceed with any criminal prosecution. President Trump stressed, “that citizens should vote for whoever they want for President, but should not let the information on these classified transmails influence their decision, since there is no evidence at this time that any campaign was involved in creating this hoax. There was no leak of classified information by Diane Anthony when she was my Secretary of Defense. There appears to be an unauthorized release of classified information by two members of Congress.” The speech drew mixed responses from each major campaign, media network commentators, and each political party’s supporters.
THE ELECTION SURPRISE (November 2-3, 2032)
The Powers Campaign records show that its campaign manager felt that her own internal polling showed a small shift in voters away from Anthony due to the weekend transmail accusation. At best, this might result in moving one or two of the nine battleground states where Anthony had a small lead. She had high hopes of at least getting 200 Electoral College votes. Most of the campaign staff felt on Tuesday that this was their last day working there, and many spent time looking at job postings or communicating with others who might know of some unposted positions.
The Anthony Campaign had gone into the weekend with high confidence of a large Electoral College victory by winning thirty or more states. The data analytics unit was unsure the effect of the hoax except to anticipate that voter turnout might be reduced by the “last straw” for many voters in a crazy campaign. Efforts were redoubled to have state and local operations push to get folks to the polls to counter the weekend setback.
The public polls turned out to be wrong, as did the campaigns’ internal polling.
Meanwhile, there were groups remotely associated with the Powers Campaign who planned to stage some sort of fear campaign to depress Progressive turnout at the precincts. One of the most common practices was to post a police car with a uniformed policeman near the polling entrance. There were also at least 300 documented incidents of voter suppression efforts by individuals working in the polls who were accused of not accepting proper identification or failing to find a voter on the registration rolls.
A local tele
vision station in Portland, Oregon filmed a man dressed in a suit and tie and wearing an official-looking badge standing outside the precinct entrance and reviewing each person’s identification, suggesting to some that they would not be able to vote with that id. A post-election tally identified almost 10,000 instances of voter suppression documented by independent groups, and there were only two prosecution attempts made by authorities, both resulting in no conviction. There were five investigations of voter fraud, four of which led to charges, and two convictions.
The networks re-played President Trump’s early morning address to the nation several times during the day, and many stressed that Anthony was a victim of a hoax and that there was no evidence of direct involvement by the Powers campaign. Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s office was considering what course of action they would do concerning the two members of Congress, who had been interviewed on Monday night in their hometowns.
The first polls closed at 7 pm (all times were eastern modern time) in Kentucky, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Indiana. Most networks and the Associated Press