Why I'm Here

I built Overstock.com from a $7 million investment into a company doing $1.8 billion a year. I have a PhD in philosophy from Stanford — Marshall Scholar, with studies at Dartmouth and Cambridge. I've also been called a conspiracy theorist, a domestic extremist, and a few things I can't print here. All of that is on my record and I'm not running from any of it.

I started an investigative project called Deep Capture almost twenty years ago to document what happens when the institutions that are supposed to protect the public get captured by the interests they're supposed to oversee. I've spent most of my adult life learning what that kind of capture looks like — first on Wall Street, where I fought naked short selling and regulatory corruption for years while polite people said I was crazy. Then 2008 happened. Suddenly some of those questions didn't seem so crazy anymore.

That experience taught me something I've never forgotten:

When a system is corrupted, the truth usually sounds ridiculous right up until the moment it becomes obvious.

I'm starting this Substack because that lesson now applies to something much bigger than Wall Street.

What This Is

This is a place to publish records. Filings. Transcripts. Exhibits. Technical reports. Timelines built from source material you can go verify yourself.

I'm not interested in producing content that burns hot for six hours and disappears — there's plenty of that already. I'm interested in building a record. I want to build something cumulative — a body of work, an archive, a place readers can return to and see how pieces fit together over time.

Three commitments:

The Pattern

Over twenty years of doing this work, I've learned something more important than any single case:

Institutional failure isn't random. It follows a pattern. The same pattern — every time.

First, incentives shift — quietly, for reasons that sound reasonable at the time. Then oversight weakens. Not because anyone announces it, but because the people responsible for enforcing the rules become dependent on the system they're supposed to police. The public narrative simplifies. Complex realities get reduced to slogans. Questions that require nuance get reframed as threats. And anyone who keeps asking those questions gets labeled — irresponsible, conspiratorial, dangerous.

Then, eventually, the record catches up. Documents surface. Testimony changes. Internal contradictions become visible.

And the same people who dismissed the questions move on without ever revisiting what they said.

I watched that cycle play out in finance. I watched it play out in media. And I believe we are watching it play out again right now — in systems that matter even more.

This publication exists to document that process as it happens. Not after the fact. Not in hindsight. Now.

Why Now

There are facts sitting in the public record right now that fit this pattern and deserve serious, sustained attention. Not outrage. Not dismissal. Attention.

Here are three. All sourced to official records and the companies' own statements.

The Serbia office. In October 2016, CSO Online reported that Dominion Voting Systems had a software development office in Belgrade, Serbia. A Dominion spokesman confirmed it on the record: "Some of our software development is undertaken outside the U.S. and Canada, specifically, in Serbia, where we have conducted operations for 10 years." That means since roughly 2006. Plenty of technology companies use overseas developers — but election systems aren't ordinary technology. They operate under legal and procedural constraints that most commercial software doesn't. The company whose machines are used in approximately 30% of American counties had foreign developers writing election code for a decade before most people knew about it. That's the company talking, not me.

The vulnerabilities. In June 2022, CISA — the federal government's own cybersecurity agency — issued Advisory ICSA-22-154-01 identifying nine vulnerabilities in Dominion's Democracy Suite ImageCast X. These included the ability to forge voter authentication, install malicious code via removable media, and escalate system privileges. CISA also noted that exploitation would require physical access to individual devices or access to the election management system, and said they had "no evidence" these vulnerabilities had been exploited in an election. All of that matters — the vulnerabilities are real, the access requirements are real, and the absence of evidence of exploitation is real. The question worth asking is whether the system's security posture and oversight are adequate given what CISA itself found.

The certification machinery. The Election Assistance Commission runs the federal testing and certification program for voting systems. The EAC's own website lists Sequoia as a company purchased by Dominion — which means ownership history, certification history, and system lineage are part of the official federal record. HAVA allows commissioners to continue serving in "holdover" status after their terms expire until successors are confirmed — but two of the EAC's four commissioners are Obama-era appointees who've now been in holdover for roughly seven years. That raises a reasonable governance question: what does accountability look like when the people overseeing certification have been operating without reconfirmation for the better part of a decade? And then there's this: in November 2025, the EAC certified Smartmatic's VSR1 2.1 system. Weeks earlier, DOJ had announced a superseding indictment naming SGO Corporation Limited — identified as part of the Smartmatic group — as a corporate defendant on FCPA and money laundering charges. Those are separate public facts. The question is what due diligence the certification process actually requires when facts like that are already on the table.

None of these are conspiracy theories. They're public facts — documented by the government's own agencies, confirmed by the companies' own spokespeople, and sitting in federal court dockets. You can check every link above yourself.

Start with the record. That's what I do. That's what this publication does.

What's Ahead

I'm currently a defendant in a federal defamation case — Coomer v. Byrne, Case No. 8:24-cv-00008, Middle District of Florida. Eric Coomer, former Director of Product Strategy and Security at Dominion Voting Systems, sued me over claims I made in the film The Deep Rig.

I mention this upfront because any serious reader deserves to know where I sit. I also mention it because this case has produced sworn testimony — a deposition transcript that was recently unsealed — and what's in that transcript is why I'm writing this today instead of next month.

Let me be clear about the context. Fox News settled Dominion's defamation case for $787.5 million in 2023. That happened. It's part of the landscape. And it's exactly why I'm not asking anyone for blind faith. I'm asking you to read documents, compare sworn statements, and think for yourself.

I'm going to be precise about what I say regarding active litigation. I'll separate what's in the record from what I believe it means. But I'll say this much: if sworn testimony conflicts across proceedings that carry legal consequences — that's not a footnote. That's something the public deserves to examine carefully, line by line.

When I walk through the Coomer deposition in my next post, the transcript pages will be right in front of you. You can read the words yourself and decide what they mean.

What You'll Get Here

I'll be publishing regularly — expect a new post each week, sometimes more when documents break. Here's what's coming:

• The Coomer deposition — a walkthrough of the unsealed transcript, with the sworn testimony side by side so you can compare what was said then and what's being said now.
• The Smartmatic–Sequoia–Dominion pipeline — the corporate acquisition chain, sourced to EAC records, CFIUS filings, and the companies' own press releases.
• The Halderman report — Professor J. Alex Halderman's 96-page expert analysis of Dominion's machines, filed in federal court and sealed for two years before it was finally released.
• The certification question — who's minding the store at the EAC, and what happens when the people overseeing our elections haven't been reconfirmed in seven years.

A Final Word

People ask me why I do this. I had it made. I was running a billion-dollar company. I could have kept my mouth shut and played golf for the rest of my life.

But I was trained as a philosopher, and that ruins you for looking the other way. When you see what I've seen — when you watch institutions that are supposed to protect a country become instruments of something else entirely — you don't get to stay quiet. Not if you want to live with yourself.

This Substack starts with the record. It starts with sworn testimony. It starts with the idea — still somehow controversial — that when something touches the machinery of elections, the public has every right to ask hard questions and demand straight answers.

Not reassurance. Answers.

Welcome. Let's get to work.