317. The American patriot Tom Paine wrote, “The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.” Soviet dictator Josef Stalin supposedly said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” In large and increasing part, “those who count the votes” in the United States are corporations owned by far-right Republicans, which corporations are beholden to (mostly) Republican politicians and appointed officeholders, who select the manufacturers of computerized voting machines, and favor them with lucrative contracts.

318. Following the debacle of “hanging” and “pregnant” chads in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, it was thought desirable to “modernize” voting by funding the replacement of old and, in some cases, unreliable equipment with more modern means to record and tabulate votes. However, the Enterprise – as a primary means of advancing its goal of de facto one-party (Republican) rule, while deceiving the broad public into believing that genuine electoral democracy continues to exist in the United States -- has energetically seized upon this movement toward “modernization” to promote the adoption of so-called “black box” voting machines, which may be described, generally, as computerized (in many instances, touch-screen) devices, as have been in use for years in automated teller machines in banks. Such devices can be “hacked” from without, which is to say the results tampered with, e.g., by modem, with such tampering being difficult or impossible to detect.

319. As always, the Enterprise has not let pass any opportunity to promote its criminal agenda at public expense. Accordingly, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (“HAVA”) was pushed through Congress and, as a result, nearly $4 billion in federal funds have been invested to purchase electronic voting machines. It is estimated that, in the 2004 national elections, between 25% and 30% of the overall vote will be recorded using the new machines.

320. Under HAVA, there was to have been an oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting machinery. These panels were not constituted in time, and thus tens of thousands of new machines have gone into use or been contracted for without the vetting that HAVA provided for.

321. Indeed, one member of the Republican Party’s slender majority in the United States Senate, defendant Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, gained his office in 1996, and was re-elected in a purported landslide in 2002, in elections in which roughly eighty percent of the vote statewide was tabulated by his own company. The company in question, Election Systems & Software, is owned by the McCarthy Group, founded in the 1990s by Michael McCarthy, campaign director to Sen. Hagel during the 1996 and 2002 elections. Hagel, even after his re-election in 2002, owned up to $5 million in the McCarthy Group, as well as shares in AIS Investors, Inc., a group of investors in ES&S itself. Hagel’s election as the first Nebraska Republican to win a senate seat in 24 years was hailed by the Omaha World-Herald newspaper, which happens also to be a large investor in ES&S.

322. Hagel did not disclose owning or selling shares in AIS Investors Inc. to the Senate Ethics Committee, not did he disclose that ES&S is an underlying asset of the McCarthy Group. Following disclosures due to investigation by Black Box Voting author Bev Harris and Alexander Bolton, a reporter from The Hill. Senate Ethics Committee counsel, Victor Baird, resigned after meeting with Hagel’s staff on the subject in January 2002. Baird’s successor, Robert Walker, obligingly provided a looser interpretation regarding what Hagel ought to have disclosed. When Hagel’s defeated opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka, wrote to Walker in October 2002 to request an investigation into Hagel’s ownership and non-disclosure of his interest in ES&S, Walker peremptorily dismissed Matulka’s complaint as lacking merit.

323. The second biggest company in the electronic voting machine market is Sequoia. In 1999, the Justice Department filed federal charges against Sequoia, alleging that employees paid out more than $8 million in bribes. In 2001, election officials in Pinella County, Florida, cancelled a $15.5 million contract for voting equipment after discovering that Phil Foster, a Sequoia executive, faced indictment in Louisiana for money-laundering and corruption.

324. Diebold is probably the best known of the three major manufacturers, owing to its unsuccessful attempts to thwart the release of thousands of inter-office memos over the Internet. Those memos showed that Diebold executives were aware of bugs in the company’s software, and warned that the network is poorly protected against hackers. Diebold also garnered negative publicity because of voting irregularities associated with its machines in the 2000 election in Florida. As a consequence of such bad publicity, and following an award of a contract to Diebold to supply machines statewide in Maryland, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego, California was hired to review the Diebold Election Systems software. Following the debacle of “hanging” and “pregnant” chads in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, it was thought desirable to “modernize” voting by funding the replacement of old and, in some cases, unreliable equipment with more modern means to record and tabulate votes. However, the Enterprise – as a primary means of advancing its goal of de facto one-party (Republican) rule, while deceiving the broad public into believing that genuine electoral democracy continues to exist in the United States, has energetically seized upon this movement toward “modernization” to promote the adoption of so-called “black box” voting machines, which may be described, generally, as computerized (in many instances, touch-screen) devices, as have been in use for years in automated teller machines in banks. Such devices can be “hacked” from without, which is to say the results tampered with, e.g., by modem, with such tampering being difficult or impossible to detect.

325. As always, the Enterprise has not let pass any opportunity to promote its criminal agenda at public expense. Accordingly, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (“HAVA”) was pushed through Congress and, as a result, nearly $4 billion in federal funds have been invested to purchase electronic voting machines. It is estimated that, in the 2004 national elections, between 25% and 30% of the overall vote will be recorded using the new machines.

326. Under HAVA, there was to have been an oversight committee, headed by two Democrats and two Republicans, as well as a technical panel to determine standards for new voting machinery. These panels were not constituted in time, and thus tens of thousands of new machines have gone into use or been contracted for without the vetting that HAVA provided for.

327. Certainly, SAIC is an ominous choice to insure the integrity of the voting software or, in light of its own history, the integrity of anything. SAIC is a large military defense contractor with a checkered history, and strong ties to the Enterprise.
328. A former president, chief operating officer and vice chairman of SAIC is Admiral Bill Owens. Owens served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was a senior military assistant to Secretaries of Defense Frank C. Carlucci and Dick Cheney. Mr. Carlucci is a managing director of the Carlyle Group; Mr. Cheney of course is the Vice President.

329. Another former SAIC board member is Robert Gates, former CIA director and veteran of the Iran-Contra scandal.

330. In a July 26, 2003 article, AP correspondent Elliott Spagat wrote of SAIC that “The federal government, its main customer, often doesn’t want the public to know what the company is doing and, as one of the nation’s largest employee-owned corporations, it escapes investor scrutiny.”
In 1990, SAIC was indicted by the Justice Department on 10 felony counts for fraud in its management of a Superfund toxic cleanup site. SAIC pleaded guilty.
In 1993, the Justice Department sued SAIC, accusing it of civil fraud on an F-15 fighter contract.
In May 1995, the same month SAIC purchased Network Solutions, Inc. (“NSA”), the company settled a suit that charged it had lied about security system tests it conducted for a Treasury Department currency plant in Fort Worth, Texas.
In 1992, one of SAIC’s government projects blew up in the firm’s face when it was charged with fabricating environmental testing from toxic waste dumps. SAIC eventually conceded to false claims, and paid $1.3 million in penalties, a small sum compared to the estimated $1.5 billion the firm was expected to earn in 1994.
The Los Angeles Times cited local officials declaring SAIC to be guilty of the “largest environmental fraud...we’ve had here” and an example of “corporate greed.”
On November 15, 2000, a joint venture between SAIC and Bechtel was awarded the contract from the Department of Energy to manage and operate the Yucca Mountain program and support extensive DOE studies of Yucca Mountain’s geology, hydrology, and climate.
In a November 24, 2002 article the Associated Press reported, “Some workers at the Yucca Mountain Project said there were flaws in the process scientists used to determine whether the site was suitable for disposing of the nation’s nuclear waste. At least two workers claim they were either fired or transferred after raising concerns about the project’s safety.”
It is also disquieting to many internet users that SAIC, a secretive military-related company with strong ties to the CIA and covert agencies, purchased NSI, which had received the no-bid, no-compete monopoly contract to privatize the government agency that registered domain names on the internet. Thus the “shadow government” controls domain names on the internet.419. SAIC has a recent contract to assist other corporations, including Northrop Grumman, in training the post-Saddam Hussein Iraqi army. Currently on SAIC’s board is ex-CIA director Bobby Ray Inman, whose tenure under President Reagan was marked by the prolongation of wars in Central America and Iran-Contra.

331. SAIC proudly lists DARPA as one of its prime clients. DARPA is a controversial subsidiary of the Department of Defense, which employed Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame and a leading proponent of governing through a parallel or shadow government. Poindexter proposed a massive program of electronic spying on American citizens that, although not adopted outright due to the furor raised by civil libertarians, is believed to be ongoing in significant part through funds discreetly provided to other government agencies.

332. A lesson the Enterprise learned from the Bush-Gore 2000 presidential contest in Florida is that a true count delayed will probably be a true count denied. Thus, if “black box” machines can be made to yield initially-favorable results, ensuring Republican control of legislative majorities and key executive offices, the later detection of software designed to tabulate, as Republican votes, votes that the persons casting them intended for Democratic or other opponents, or the “hacking” of the results by modem or otherwise, will rarely if ever affect the outcome. By and large, the public wants speedy results. The threat of protracted court proceedings, which moreover involve arcane and technically dense issues, plus a highly-financed personal attack, whereby the Democratic candidate is attacked as a “sore loser” who is “trying to steal the election,” will deter effective protests to the theft of elections by “black box” voting.

333. Another, not-inconceivable weapon in the quiver of the Bush II Administration’s arsenal to stave off electoral defeat in November 2004 is the possibility of exploiting, or even engineering, a new “terror attack” (real or threatened) and call of the election altogether. A “trial balloon” to measure public reaction to such a possibility was sent aloft by Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security, in a recent press conference in which he solemnly intoned that, although DHS had no specific intelligence providing a target, date or location for the attack, the United States allegedly has “credible” information that al-Qaeda “is preparing a large-scale attack in the United States aimed at disrupting this year’s electoral process.” Such possibility is not to be discounted, especially in light of the President’s poor, even alarming performance in the first debate with Senator Kerry on September 30, 2004.

334. Among other problems encountered with electronic machines, as described in Bev Harris’s seminal work Black Box Voting, are that:
In the Alabama 2002 general election, machines made by ES&S flipped the governor’s race. Six thousand three hundred Baldwin County electronic votes mysteriously disappeared after the polls had closed, and everyone had gone home. Democrat Don Siegelman’s victory was handed to Republican Bob Riley. The recount Siegelman suggested was denied. “Something happened,” Mark Kelley of ES&S said. “I don’t have enough intelligence to say exactly what.”
In the November 2002 general election in Scurry County, Texas, poll workers became suspicious about a landslide victory for two Republican candidates for commissioner. Told that a “bad chip” was to blame, they had a new computer chip flown in, and also counted the votes by hand. They found that the Democrats had, in fact, won by substantial margins.
In 1986, Democrat Donn Peevy was running in Georgia for state senator in District 48. Electronic voting machines said he lost the election. After an investigation revealed that a Republican elections official had kept uncounted ballots in the trunk of his car, officials admitted that a computerized voting program had miscounted. Peevy insisted on a recount. His defeat was overturned.
Harris quotes the Wall Street Journal as reporting that in the 2000 general election in Allamakee County, Iowa, an optical-scan machine was fed three hundred (300) ballots, and reported four million (4,000,000) votes. The equipment in that instance was made by ES&S.
In the 1996 McLennan County, Texas, Republican primary runoff, one precinct tallied about 800 votes, although only 500 ballots had been ordered. With the insouciance that is all too typical when problems with electronic voting arise, the local Elections Administrator, Linda Lewis, said, “It’s a mystery.” The county Republican Party Chairman, M.A. Taylor, said, “We don’t think it’s serious enough to throw out the election.” Executives of black box voting machine manufacturers make claims of 99.99% accuracy (or better) for their machines; election officials dismiss as trivial, as in this case in Texas, margins of error of 60%.
In the 1994 general election in one precinct near Tucson, Arizona, 826 votes – roughly two-thirds of the votes cast – disappeared. No recount was done. Election officials blamed a “faulty computer program.”
Tom Eschberger became a vice president of ES&S not long after he accepted an immunity deal for cooperating with prosecutors in a case against Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, who pleaded guilty to taking kickbacks and bribes in a scheme related to computerized voting systems.
Dallas County, Texas employed a new, $4.8 million high-tech ballot system in the November 1998 election. It missed 41,015 votes, refusing to count votes from 98 precincts, telling itself that those votes had already been counted. Operators and election officials didn’t realize they had a problem until after they had released “final” totals that omitted one in eight votes. ES&S, apparently intending to assure everyone that things were not all that bad, claimed that the votes were never “lost,” but merely “uncounted.”
In recent months, it has been in the news that Enterprise/U.S. government officials are seeking to undermine the left-leaning Chavez government in Venezuela. Not surprisingly, American “black box voting” manufacturers are plying their wares there. In May 2000, Venezuela’s highest court suspended elections because of problems with the tabulation, sending an air force jet to Omaha to fetch ES&S technicians to attempt to fix the problem.
In the 1998 general election, computerized voting machines recorded no votes for 24 precincts in Pima County, Arizona, although voter rolls showed thousands had voted at those polling places. Pima used Global Election Systems machines, which now are sold under the Diebold Company name.
Officials in Broward County, Florida, the largely Democratic Ft. Lauderdale area in Jeb Bush’s Florida, used new, unauditable ES&S machines in the November 5, 2002 election (in which Gov. Bush defeated his Democratic opponent). Officials said all precincts were included, and that the touch-screen machines had counted the vote without a major hitch. The next day, the County Elections Office discovered that 103,222 votes had not been counted.

In the 2000 general election, a single missing ballot box found in a Dade County, Florida church daycare center excited considerable media attention. 103,222 uncounted votes represent the rough equivalent of a thousand ballot boxes. Broward Deputy Elections Supervisor Joe Cotter called the mistake “a minor software thing.”
ES&S machines were used in an election in Lake County, Illinois election held on April 1, 2003. Democrat Rafael Rivera sensed that something was awry when his own precinct showed zero votes for him. Having voted for himself, Rivera felt certain that the ES&S vote tally had to be in error.
Ten days after the November 2002 election, Richard Romero, a Bernalillo County, New Mexico, Democrat, noticed that 48,000 people had voted early on unauditable Sequoia touch-screen computers, but only 36,000 votes had been tallied. Sequoia vice president Howard Cramer apologized for not mentioning that the same problem had happened before in Clark County, Nevada. A “software patch” was installed, and Sequoia technicians in Denver e-mailed what they claimed were the correct results.
In a July 1998 election between Sharon Cooper, a moderate Republican, and more conservative Republican Richard Daniel, a “software programming error” caused some votes for Cooper to go unrecorded. According to news reports, the problem required “on-the-spot reprogramming.” As Harris observes, “on-the-spot reprogramming” is no answer at all, because it can be used to alter vote totals.
In November 2002, in Comal County, Texas, in an election using ES&S machines three winning Republican candidates in a row tallied exactly 18,181 votes. No one thought this was sufficient grounds for an audit.
In November 2000, in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, machines in Pittsburgh’s 12th and 13th wards and other predominantly black neighborhoods malfunctioned in Election Day. They began emitting smoke and spitting out jammed and crumbled paper. Poll workers waited hours for repairs; voters unable to spend most of the day waiting for the machines to be repaired were effectively disenfranchised.
The foregoing are but a sample of the difficulties encountered with electronic scanners and touch-screen voting machines. Literally hundreds of problems have been reported, with the anomalies, in an overwhelming number of cases, favoring Republicans.

335. Bev Harris, probably America’s leading advocate for fair, verifiable voting, reports that the U.S. Secret Service is openly harassing her. According to Harris, a bogus “Vote Here” organization, its board laden with “defense industry types” such as former CIA Director Robert Gates and Admiral Bill Owens of the Defense Policy Board” has claimed that its website was “hacked,” this hacking being blamed on activists who are protesting against unauditable computer voting and in favor of verifiable voting. These claims, according to Harris, have triggered repeated visits to Harris by the Secret Service, who display little interest in the supposed “hack” but a great deal of interest in internal memos, highly damning to Diebold, that appeared on the internet after being leaked.

336. Now, Harris claims, the federal agents are threatening to subpoena the logs from her website, including all forum messages and IP addresses – in other words, the identities of everyone whose interest in the voting issue has led them to log onto HYPERLINK "http://www.blackboxvoting.org" www.blackboxvoting.org. It is still unlawful, of course, for nosy federal agents to simply demand a list of all of the members of a group. What Harris alleges the government is trying to do is to misuse the “Patriot Act” to circumvent the law in that respect, to obtain the membership list and all of the correspondence from Harris’s organization. This is an unvarnished attempt, worthy of a frankly fascist government, to intimidate Harris and others who are active or might become active in efforts to ensure that the counting of votes in U.S. elections does not become the sole prerogative of right-wing corporations linked to the Republican Party and to the Enterprise, with the methodology of voting rigged to effectively foreclose recounts and verification.

337. Although “black box” voting machines are too subject to tampering to be trusted, the touchstone of the Enterprise’s efforts is its opposition, as a condition to the use of the black-box voting machines in elections, to the requirement that the machines produce a “paper trail” that can be audited in the event of a dispute. Certainly, the touch-screen and other electronic machines can be made more difficult to tamper with, by requiring that they be built to generate two paper receipts immediately following the casting of each elector’s vote. The voter would retain one such receipt, the other inserted into a locked box at the polling place, for a count by hand if necessary. Subject, obviously, to the condition that the voter have a sufficiently understandable receipt, and the effective opportunity to register a protest if the receipt does not match his or her intended vote, the “paper trail” would make the computerized devices more reliable.

338. The need for a “paper trail” as well as major media complicity with the Enterprise is underlined by the fact that exit polls, for years done through the joint efforts of major news organizations, have quietly been retired. When major news organizations, employing statistically-validated sampling techniques, questioned voters as they exited the polls, major discrepancies between the news consortia’s exit poll results and actual voting results as tabulated by rigged “black box” voting machines would raise alarms. As a consequence, the major media – all or most of which are controlled by corporations that wish for consolidations and privileges that are within the power of the Republican Party to bestow – have virtually abandoned exit polling, and have greatly under-reported the enormous scandal represented by the numerous problems encountered with electronic vote-scanners and touch-screen machines.

339. Diebold, of course, is best known to the public as the manufacturer of ATM machines, all of which offer a paper record to the user. It is impossible to assert that Diebold and the other principal “black box” manufacturers are not able to design their machines to yield a paper trail. Rather, as two at least of the three principal manufacturers -- Diebold and ES&S – are integral components of the Enterprise, the truth is that these manufacturers don’t want a paper trail. What they want is sales of equipment, and voting tabulated by computers that are little understood by the broad public and that can be discreetly tampered with, while maintaining a façade of being “up-to-date” and more reliable than paper ballots or other means of recording votes.

340. Two additional circumstances are important to mention in respect of electronic voting, and the plans of the Enterprise to rig all future elections. One is that Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, and Accenture (formerly known as Andersen Consulting, a part of Arthur Anderson) were major promoters of HAVA and are supporting an “alliance” to “deliver comprehensive election solutions to governments worldwide.” “Solutions,” in the lexicon of the military-industrial complex, global corporations, and the CIA, apparently means to maintain the appearance of electoral democracy, while eliminating the unseemly possibility that the “wrong people might win.”

341. On February 25, 2004, there appeared in the Free Press of Columbus, Ohio, an article by Bob Fitrakis entitled “Diebold, Electronic Voting and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.” That article praised Athan Gibbs, an accountant who had devised a “TruVote” machine that Fitrakis described as follows:
After voters touch the screen, a paper ballot prints out under Plexiglas and once the voter compares it to his actual vote and approves it, the ballot drops into a lockbox and is issued a numbered receipt. The voter’s receipt allows the track of his particular vote to make sure that it was transferred from the polling place to the election tabulation center.

342. Gibbs was quoted as saying the following about electronic voting machines that do not provide any paper trail:
I’ve been an accountant, an auditor, for more than thirty years. Electronic voting machines that don’t supply a paper trail go against every principle of accounting and auditing that’s being taught in American business schools...No business in America would buy a machine that didn’t provide a paper trail to audit and verify its transaction. Now, they want the people to purchase machines that you can’t audit? It’s absurd.

343. TruVote inventor Athan Gibbs, whom Fitrakis described as “the man asking the obvious question, and demonstrating an obvious tangible solution,” was killed when an 18-wheeler struck his auto on March 12, 2004. 433. The issue of paper receipts continues to be a divisive one. Officials are dismissing demands for paper receipts as limited to a “tiny, vocal minority” and claiming that retrofitting electronic machines with paper receipts in time for the 2004 election would cause “chaos.” Los Angeles election chief Conny B. McCormack said that “touch screens have a proven track record of doing the best job.” This is both untrue and ignores that it is impossible to measure honestly the performance of voting machines that are designed so as to be impossible to audit.

F. ADDITIONAL PREDICATE ACTS UNDER THE RICO ANTI-RACKETEERING STATUTE: THE ENTERPRISE’S FLORIDA RECOUNT RIOT
344. In July 2002, hundreds of pages of Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign and/or recount committee documents were released to the Internal Revenue Service. These records showed expenditures of about $13.8 million by the Bush committee(s) to stop the recount of votes in Florida.

345. According to the records, during the 36-day recount battle that culminated in the Supreme Court decision that gave the presidency to George W. Bush, his campaign (or his recount committee) put about 250 staffers on payroll, spent about $1.2 million to fly operatives to Florida (and elsewhere) and paid hotel bills adding up to about $1 million. A fleet of corporate jets was assembled – including planes supplied by Enron and Halliburton – to add flexibility to travel arrangements.

346. On November 22, 2000, a violent crowd of about 150 Bush supporters rampaged through Miami’s County Hall, after the canvassing board decided to concentrate its recount on the approximately 10,000 “undervotes.” The Republican demonstrators banged and kicked on the doors and windows of the 19th floor office where the board had moved the count, and assaulted a number of Democratic Party representatives who were present.

347. Shortly after this disturbance, the canvassing board stopped its manual recount, which had been authorized the previous day by the Florida Supreme Court. Thus, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” succeeded in its purpose of stopping the lawful recount of votes.
348. After the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” following a lavish dinner given for the Republican operatives at the Hyatt Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, a conference call from George W. Bush and Cheney, including joking references approving of the previous day’s incident in Miami, was broadcast to the rioters and others. IRS records show that the “stop the recount” celebration cost the Bush recount committee $35,501.52.

349. Upon information and belief, the Republican operatives sent to Florida were recruited by Republican Congressional Whip Tom DeLay, offering free travel, accommodations and food in Florida, all paid for by the Bush campaign. Reportedly, New York Republican Congressman John Sweeney issued a specific directive for Republican thugs to “shut it down” (referring to the Miami-Dade recount) and this was transmitted to the “troops” by Brendan Quinn, executive director of the Republican Party from New York.

350. In addition to stopping the recount on November 22, 2000, the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and other violent and menacing conduct likely affected the vote of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who reportedly, like many commentators, considered that Republicans posed such a threat of widespread violence were the election outcome to be unfavorable, that it was in the national interest to award the election to Bush, notwithstanding the thinness of the legal arguments in favor of so doing.

351. Whether they affected the outcome or not, the rioters’ conduct constituted the crime of extortion under the law of Florida, where the riot occurred. Plaintiff asks the Court to take judicial notice of Fla. Stat. 836.05, “Threats, extortion,” which in relevant part provides that:
Whoever . . . verbally . . . maliciously threatens...an injury to the person . . . of another . . . with an intent to compel the person so threatened, or any other person, to do any act or refrain from doing any act against his or her will, shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree.

352. Upon information and belief, each of defendants Schlapp, Pyle, Murphy, Malphrus, Royal, and Smith were present at the canvassing board office, and took part in the “Brooks Brothers Riot” of November 22, 2000.

353. Upon information and belief, each of defendants Schlapp, Pyle, Murphy, Malphrus, Royal, and Smith traveled to Florida from out of state, which is to say that each of them crossed state lines using facilities in interstate commerce, upon the direct or indirect orders of persons including defendants DeLay and Sweeney, to take part in the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and other, similar coercive activities, with the specific intent of stopping the recount of votes in areas thought likely to produce additional votes for Vice President Gore.

354. Upon information, at or immediately prior to their travels to Florida to take part in the “Brooks Brothers Riot” and other “dirty tricks” and unlawful, intimidating and coercive activities for the Bush-Cheney 2000 ticket, all of defendants Schlapp, Pyle, Murphy, Malphrus, Royal and Smith were employed by Republican politicians, or other Party-affiliated agencies. Schlapp was a Bush campaign staffer based in Austin. Pyle was a staff aide to House Majority White Tom DeLay. Murphy was a fund-raiser for Rep. DeLay. Malphrus was majority chief counsel to the House Judiciary subcommittee on criminal justice. Royal was a legislative aide to Rep. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Smith was a former Republican House staffer.

355. Each of said Defendants received payment of monies from the Bush-Cheney campaign committee in connection with his activities in Florida during the election recount controversy.
356. Defendant Schapp was further rewarded for his unlawful actions with a job in the White House, as a special assistant to the President. Malphrus was likewise awarded with a job as Deputy Director of the President’s Domestic Policy Council.

RICO Complaint (to be continued soon)