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Trump Revives #Italygate — The Weirdest 2020 Election Conspiracy of Them All
**In a bizarre twist of events, President Donald Trump has reignited one of the most outlandish conspiracy theories to emerge from the aftermath of the 2020 election: #Italygate.
On Wednesday, Trump shared a screengrab of an X post on Truth Social, claiming that Italian officials at defense contractor Leonardo SpA used military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines and flip votes from Trump to Biden using CIA-developed tools like Hammer and Scorecard.
The theory, which alleges that China coordinated the operation, was allegedly overseen by the CIA and covered up by the FBI, is a convoluted tale of global intrigue that has been circulating online for years.
According to ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl's 2021 book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, the story began with Virginia businesswoman Michele Ballarin, who presented herself as a wealthy intelligence insider. Ballarin claimed that Italian military satellites had remotely altered U.S. voting machines and shared her claim with National Security Council's then-cybersecurity director Josh Steinman in a clandestine meeting at a grocery store parking lot.
Steinman dismissed the claims to a colleague as "totally crazy," but curiosity around #Italygate soon reached the Pentagon and senior officials, who were pressed to investigate claims that two men imprisoned in Italy had confessed to hacking the U.S. election using satellite technology.
The investigation found no evidence tying the men to altered vote totals, but conspiracy theorists had fixated on one of them, Arturo D'Elia, an Italian IT specialist previously charged over cyber intrusions involving a defense contractor. Italian authorities denied any connection between D'Elia and the election.
Despite being internally dismissed as untrue, #Italygate continued to circulate online under the hashtag #ItalyGate. Inside the White House, the conspiracy was taken seriously enough to generate emails, phone calls, and repeated requests for further review.
The theory found a political advocate in Maria Strollo Zack, founder of the group Nations in Action, who became one of its most visible promoters and claimed she briefed Trump on the theory during a December 2020 dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The sharing of these conspiracy theories comes as federal agents executed a search warrant Wednesday at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center outside Atlanta as part of an investigation related to the 2020 election.
Trump's evidence-free insistence that the election he lost to Biden was stolen and rigged against him shows no sign of fading. Whether the claim involves ballots, machines, satellites, or foreign intelligence agencies appears almost beside the point.
What matters is the narrative itself: defeat can always be explained away, and any conspiracy, no matter how implausible, is useful so long as it keeps the underlying claim alive.
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