Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1480970
15 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 5 OCTOBER 2022 WORLD ated a politically explosive fin- ger-pointing extravaganza. The end result was that the Blue Team became a bit of a backwa- ter. Several witnesses they tried to interview remained elusive and the committee gave Blue no means to compel testimony. Lat- er on, I would find myself smack in the middle of this mess. We called the main link map "The Monster." The targets of our investigation were divided up into five major categories: domestic violent extremists, which included militant groups like Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and 1st Amendment Praetorian; rally organizers; officials, which included members of Congress and local politicians; Trump associates, which included top advisers and staff; and the pres- ident's family. We also tracked a sixth group of unaffiliated indi- viduals, who were mainly people we identified because they faced federal charges for breaking into the Capitol. The telephony team's maps were made up of link lines. Each line represented an incoming or outgoing communication from a call detail record. If you zoomed in, you could see each line criss- crossing the white screen. The numbers were shown at the end of the line along with a small phone handset icon. Zooming out, the "Monster" looked like a lopsided hexagon with six ma- jor connected hubs representing each of our five categories and the unaffiliated rioters. It had a strong skeleton of link lines wo- ven between each node. Loading up "The Monster" took hours, even with our mil- itary-grade computers. The map was based on a massive amount of data. It was a visual representation of a searchable database based on all of the call detail records compiled by the committee. Putting it together required using a few different types of computer software. In some cases, they had to be repurposed to work together. The data was also in different formats. Each telecommunications company had its own version of the same product. They had slightly dif- ferent fields. Some were in dif- ferent time zones. Glenn Bard and Mark Tomallo of PATCtech, the firm I chose for the telephony analysis con- tract in support of the select committee, had to come up with procedures that combined all of these records across formats into a single system where they could be compared and analyz- ed. The software suite we used needed to be reworked so that it could look across the entire network of linked call records all at once. We had multiple technical meetings with IBM as they developed software solu- tions in real time. We also set up semiautomated systems for investigators to request new call detail records to add to our files. When it came in, the informa- tion needed to be entered and checked by hand—and we're talking about millions of lines of call data. The data sets for our link maps were so massive that the team would sometimes leave the computers overnight to load them up. It was an incredibly intricate, intense, and time-con- suming process. Given the sen- sitivity of the evidence, the lab at PATCtech was locked down. Everything was on site and en- crypted. No data ever left the building. When we examined the link maps, it was easy to see the centers of gravity. They showed up as dark spots where many different link lines came togeth- er. When you searched for an individual number, all link lines associated with that number would light up in blue. At one point, we found a cell phone that we tied to Trump himself. It appeared on the map as a kind of oval island connect- ed to the other Trump asso- ciates by a thin bridge of a few link lines. Over six thousand calls and messages went to that cell phone during the roughly three months between the election and the end of his term. All of it was incoming, but the phone was never turned on. Everything was forwarded to a voicemail box, which was filled to the brim. Based on the records we had, it was unclear whether any- one ever listened to the messag- es or made room for new ones. That wasn't the only phone we found that seemed to belong to Trump, but I won't go into de- tail on the others due to the on- going investigations. There were people on the maps of Trump's family and their as- sociates who seemed to regu- larly retire numbers. We would see lines that popped up for a few days and couldn't be tied to an individual registration. We thought they looked like burner phones or VOIP numbers gen- erated through an app. One was active for about a week and only showed up in communication with the Trump family. It was hard to say—or to know—what that meant. Someone in the president's innermost circle had very good OPSEC. Another odd find came when the data team found a batch of numbers that, through the other investigators' work, we believed were associated with the White House. Those lines started with digits that didn't match any known area code or exchange. These ghost numbers were just one of the many examples of evidence that was coming in during the spring of 2022. We kept finding new evidence for the call records team to analyze. It all added to my feeling that we should have gotten started a lot earlier. I also couldn't help but wonder how much we were going to leave on the table when the committee concluded its hearings. Throughout our work there were four people who were ex- tensively connected to all six clusters on "The Monster." They were in contact with mi- litias and the highest levels of Trump's inner circle. We saw them as the key touch points: Bianca Gracia, Alex Jones, Kris- tin Davis, and Roger Stone. Stone, long one of Trump's closest advisers, had a hidden phone number and a security detail comprised of extremist militia members. Glenn saw a lot of wild stuff during his time on this team, but when he found Stone on the link map, he was as excited as I ever heard him. When Glenn called to tell me about what he saw, he let me know right away that it was big. "Denver," he said. "I found a nuclear bomb."