Extract from the article by Marco Carta, Giuseppe Scarpa for www.repubblica.it
They tried to manipulate the latest US elections. Two powerful and wealthy American lobbyists close to the Republican Party attempted to do so from Italy. The two US citizens allegedly commissioned false documents from an Italian lawyer, documents then cunningly circulated on the web to destabilize American public opinion.
This is the fake news: Leonardo, the main Italian space defense company, changed the outcome of the 2020 American elections thanks to its satellite technology, causing Trump to lose. Leonardo would have acted on the electronic counting systems by transferring votes from Trump to Biden. In this case, and this is the big news, there is an investigation by the Rome prosecutor's office which has led to trial.
The trial is for defamation against Leonardo and the two American lobbyists, the Italian lawyer and the lawyer's right-hand man ended up in front of the judge. The story is complex and must be told from the beginning also because the US Congress and the FBI dealt with the case. But here's the story: two American lobbyists, a facilitator from Turin and 300 thousand euros in consultancy for a Sicilian lawyer. And finally Leonardo, accused (falsely) of having interfered in the US elections. In the background, supporters of the former president of the United States storm Capitol Hill shouting Italy did it.
At the center of the hoax there is «a General affidavit signed by D'Urso in which he falsely certified that a certain D'Elia Arturo, an employee of Leonardo, declared to the judicial authority of Naples that he had participated, using the technology made available to him by Leonardo in the city of Pescara, to a "hacking" campaign aimed at altering the result of the American presidential elections in 2020". The story that was reconstructed yesterday morning in the courtroom before the single judge of Rome is only partially known.
According to this completely invented theory, the order originated from the American embassy in Via Veneto, with the consent of former President Obama and former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. The creator and instigator of the fake news campaign #Italygate and #Italydidit - as reconstructed in a delicate investigation by the postal police's Cnaipic - was apparently Maria Strollo Zack, a lobbyist close to the Trump area and head of the Nations in Action organisation.
In fact, it is she who entrusts the task to the Catania lawyer Alfio D'Urso to draw up the sworn declaration ("affidavit") with which she confirms the conspiracy. On January 10, D'Urso published a video, which portrays him in the act of reading his own "affidavit" in which he claims to have had a mandate from D'Elia, who in December 2020 had been arrested by the Naples prosecutor's office with the accused of stealing 10 gigabytes of data and information from Leonardo between 2015 and 2017.
The hacker immediately denies having given any assignment to D'Urso. But the conspiracy theory is now viral. For this reason, when Leonardo presents a complaint to the Naples prosecutor's office, the postal police begins their investigation. “We analyzed the metadata of the written document and found that it was produced under the Microsoft license used by Michele Roosevelt Edwards.” […] “In a letter in English, Maria Strollo Zack thanked D'Urso and asked him to record a video of him reading the affidavit you created for us”. The 100,000 euro annual consultancy contract with the Trumpian lobbyist's organization was also found in D'Urso's laptop.
The agreement provides for "the preparation of opinions and documents requested by Nations in Action for its activity in Italy". The postal police officers find another large fee from the lawyer from Catania. Another 200 thousand euros, coming from USAerospace, for consultancy in the negotiation for the purchase of Alitalia. The detail is decisive, because the American space company is a direct competitor of Leonardo. In one of the many messages published on the website of Maria Strollo Zack's organization, the resolution of all economic relationships with Leonardo and the seizure of all assets were requested.
For this reason, investigators initially hypothesized the crime of market manipulation. The Italygate conspiracy takes on the darkest contours. The American lobbyists, in ingratiating themselves with Trump, supporting the alleged electoral fraud that would have made his competitor Biden win, are at the same time trying to penalize a competitor of USAerospace, Leonardo in fact. […]
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