As revealed yesterday, there is an apparent link between the household of Sen. Jill Vogel (R-Fauquier) and email attacks against her chief rival for the Republican nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 2017. Emails from an apparently fictitious “Martha McDaniel” were circulated in September and October of last year to spread the rumor that Sen. Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) had been having a long-running affair with a campaign aide.
Sen. Reeves wasted no time in filing a defamation lawsuit against “Martha McDaniels,” whose only identifying information was a Gmail address suggesting she lived in Stafford County. Reeves’ initial complaint, in which he vigorously denies the charges, was filed on October 3, 2016 in Stafford County Circuit Court, and is embedded below.
“Martha McDaniels” appears now to be a pseudonym for someone operating from the home of Sen. Vogel, or wishing observers to think they were operating from the Vogels’ home.
Pursuant to Reeves’ lawsuit, his counsel were able to secure discovery on Gmail records indicating (a) the cell phone number associated with the “Martha McDaniel” account; (b) the IP addresses used to access the account; and (c) dates the account was accessed, prior to its owner covering his/her tracks by deleting it.
As the following image shows, the cell phone number associated with the account is (202) 669-XXXX (TBE has redacted this information to protect the privacy of its owner).
That number recently had the following outgoing voicemail message, indicating it belonged to Alex Vogel, husband to Sen. Vogel. This outgoing message was recently removed.
The cell phone is important, as it is the means by which Google verifies ownership of accounts. According to a reputable forensic investigator we consulted on this matter, having a new account associated with an existing account’s phone number is done precisely to avoid the new account (or any existing accounts) being hacked or otherwise compromised, as some verified link beyond the virtual world is required.
The Google information, provided in response to the subpoena from Sen. Reeves’ counsel, also shows two IP addresses as having accessed the account. (Again, TBE has redacted the full addresses to protect the privacy of the owners). Subsequent subpoenas to the internet service providers servicing these IP addresses show them belonging to next door neighbors: one at 10000 Mount Airy Road in Upperville (belonging to Jill and Alex Vogel) and one at 10027 John Mosby Highway in Upperville (belonging to the Vogels’ nearest neighbors, James and Lisa Gable).
As the aerial photo shows, the two properties are near enough that a wi-fi signal from one, particularly if it has an open line of sight, could conceivably be received at the other. According to the Washington Post, the neighbors report sharing an unsecured wireless access system between the two homes, though the record indicates they have separate internet service providers.
It should be reiterated that, in their statement released yesterday, the Vogels vehemently claimed they “have not sent, have not authorized, have not approved, and were not aware of any anonymous communications concerning either of her competitors.” Presumably this also encompasses the pseudonymous emails that are the subject of the Reeves suit. The Vogels also hinted at the possibility of a hack or other compromise of their devices’ security by outsiders may be to blame for the email being traced to their house and Mr. Vogel’s cell phone.
We continue to consult experts on the subject of a potential compromise in the Vogels’ security, and will report on that in a later iteration of this story. So far, the Reeves camp seems eager to test the hacking theory. From the Post:
Reeves’s campaign spokeswoman, Sam Azzarelli, responded to the hacking theory by suggesting that the Vogels agree to have their ‘phones, computers, and electronic devices forensically tested’ by a mutually agreed-upon third party.
‘We will help fund it to find out if they were truly hacked,’ she said.”
As we say, stay tuned…
UPDATE 1: Tom White at VARight has a very interesting technical analysis of the timeline, and when and exactly where the alleged conduct took place. Check it out. White’s analysis shows some potential weaknesses in any civil case that could be brought against the Vogels, and shows a way forward for the hacking defense (And thanks to Tom for pointing out my goof on the redactions. They’ve been fixed now.)
UPDATE 2: Very strong denial from Sen. Vogel herself, published in the Fauquier Times:
‘I am horrified by this and I am as upset as Senator Reeves,’ Vogel said in an email to The Fauquier Times. ‘Unfortunately, we only learned about this in the last few days and we are doing everything in our power to get to the bottom of it.'”
Read the whole thing here.
52 comments
[…] denied Senator Bryce Reeve’s request to depose Senator Vogel, her husband, and others about email accusations that Reeves was having an affair. Reeves wanted to depose six people so he could ascertain who he would be bringing suit against. […]
Tom White at VARight has posted his unbiased evaluation of the evidence presented on TBE of the email allegations.
Before you read what Tom White has said below, here are some facts I would also like you to consider:
1 email was sent to 1 SPECIFIC recipient (Travis Witt, a good friend and supporter of Bryce Reeves), by one unknown email originator. It was not addressed to a group, it was not send to a blind copy (Bcc) of unknown people, it was sent to ONE person by name.
That email was then shopped around to every major news outlet in the Commonwealth by none other than Bryce Reeves to try to threaten his opponent into getting out of the race. If it weren’t for Bryce Reeves taking this to every news outlet in the state, no one save Reeves and Travis Witt would have known anything about it.
I ask you; Is this the action of a man who cares about his wife and family?
Below is Tom White’s evaluation, and this is what Steve Albertson posted on the VA Right site comments regarding Tom’s post:
“Thanks, Tom. This is very helpful. I’ll send you unredacted versions. I don’t believe there has been a phone records subpoena, as neither Vogel has been a party to Reeves’ lawsuit, so as far as I know there is not yet any smoking gun one way or the other re the Google verification SMS.”
http://www.varight.com/opinion/my-unbiased-opinion-on-the-vogel-reeves-email-scandal/
Here is Tom White:
My Unbiased Opinion on the Vogel – Reeves Email Scandal
I am not supporting any State Senators in the Lt. Governor’s race this year. Neither Jill Vogel nor Bryce Reeves will see my endorsement for two reasons. First, neither has impressed me with their voting records. But the biggest reason by far is the balance of power in the State Senate. Vogel’s seat may be slightly easier to hold in a special election, but Reeves defeated long time Democrat Senator Edd Houck by a hair. And the last thing Virginia Republicans need is to lose the Senate majority. Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats have left the Commonwealth in a much weaker position and we will need both houses and the Governor’s office to restore the state to prosperity.
Right now, only Rep. Glenn Davis is in a position that will not adversely impact the Republican majority in the Legislature.
But if you have not seen the email story, it is in the Washington Post, and on TBE here and here. The second TBE link has several documents included which I have analyzed.
Just as a side note, I am currently an IT manager and have been in the computer and data communications field for over 30 years and have worked on computers for 44 years. I have been a consultant and have done corporate forensics and data restoration of deleted data. I have worked on military encryption gear and have basically spent my entire career in data and computer jobs.
Here is what happened according to the documents that were released.
On 9/22/2016 at 9:57 AM EDT a GMail account was created using the name Martha McDaniel. The email address was [email protected]. The IP address logged was 72.165.xxx.xxx. TBE redacted the IP address in most, but not all places. (They missed one.) Google requires a phone number or other means to verify the user. The phone number they used was 202-669-XXXX – again redacted by TBE. According to TBE, the cell phone number belongs to Jill Vogel’s husband, Alex. And they have a recording of the voice mail message which they claim has been removed that identifies the number as belonging to Alex.
Update – 1/3/17 3:21 PM
Steve Albertson was kind enough to send me the un-redacted documents and, as I expected, the IP addresses do indeed match. So I can verify that the redactions are not relevant to the story.
Problems I have with this:
We can’t verify the phone number because it is redacted and there is no Subpoena Duces Tecum providing records for the cell phone owner. And there is no way to verify the recording as being from the number that has been redacted. Absent some type of phone verification records, I cannot verify that the phone is actually the one tied to the Google account. But I assume they would be able to produce this verified evidence or open themselves up to a suit.
The next event of note was an email sent from this account on September 30, 2016 at 12:49 PM EDT. The IP Address used to log on and send the email was 2.165.xxx.xxx as redacted by TBE. Again, we have no way of knowing the important last two octets of the address.
Another problem with a potential defamation suit is that the email in question does not actually accuse or claim Reeves is having an affair, only that there are rumors.
So what are the un-redacted IP Addresses? TBE redacted a lot of IP addresses in the various documents, but they failed to redact two of the IP addresses. Jill Vogel’s IP address is 162.72.231.134. At the bottom of the page found here just below the redacted IP address that is circled shows the full IP on the bottom line. This is Vogel’s home IP. Or it was from September 19 – September 22 according to the document. And according to the document from Google, the Vogel household accessed the Gmail account 3 times for about 45 seconds total only on September 22, 2016. NOT the day the email was sent.
The account was accessed a total of 6 other times by IP address 72.165.161.144. (If you look at the top of the Century Link response found here you will find the un-redeacted address.) This is the IP address of Vogel’s neighbor who alleges that they operate an unsecured internet WiFi Connection.
So the Gmail account was created on 9/22/2016 from the Vogel neighbor’s internet for a period of about 40 minutes. 4 minutes later, the Google logs show an access from the Vogel’s internet address a total of 3 times for less than a minute altogether. The account was accessed from the neighbor’s account 8 days later on September 30, 2016 at 16:41 UTC which is 12:41 PM EDT. 5 minutes later, the person logged off at 12:46 PM. The email in question was sent at 12:49 PM on September 30, 3 minutes after the account was logged off. But that 3 minute gap is insignificant and most likely accounted for by clock drift. Then on October 1, 2016 the neighbor’s IP address was used to delete the Gmail account.
But what these documents produced so far show is that the Gmail account was not created using Vogel’s internet service. Rather, it was created using a neighbor’s account. And the email was not sent from Vogel’s account, again, it was sent from the neighbor’s account.
Just after the Google account was created using the neighbor’s internet account it was accessed using Vogel’s internet. Not long enough to do anything other than log on and off.
The bottom line is that the account was created on an open WiFi and the email was written on an open WiFi that does not belong to Jill Vogel. The fact that the account was briefly accessed using the Vogel internet service isn’t proof that she was responsible for the email sent 8 days later.
So Reeves will have a hard time proving not only defamation, but he will also have a hard time proving that Vogel even knew anything about it. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that gives way to a lot of interesting theories, but there is no proof.
I would urge TBE to republish the documents without redacting the IP addresses. Often, internet providers own large blocks of addresses. Class B or even A. The first two sets of digits (octets) are the only ones assigned to the owner of a Class B block. And the last two octets change. Not that I think TBE is playing with the redaction’s, but since they missed completely redacting the numbers, I would like to see the un-redacted copy.
The phone number is understandable. But a Subpoena of the phone records showing a text from Gmail would be helpful.
And again, at this point I do not plan to endorse either Senator, so I am not pulling for or defending anyone here. Just looking at the evidence.
One thing Tom did not address is the possibility of IP spoofing which can easily be done. See this entry on Wikipedia, and note that there are commercial software programs used for testing websites which allow the user to do this easily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
“…commercial testing products (such as HP LoadRunner, WebLOAD, and others) can use IP spoofing…”
Not only are these products available to anyone, HP LoadRunner (for one) offers a free trial, so it would cost nothing to use it once for nefarious purposes. I’m just saying it’s possible.
Here is second article that Tom White published explaining why he now believes the Vogel internet might have been hacked:
http://www.varight.com/news/i-now-believe-lt-governor-candidate-jill-vogel-may-have-been-hacked-heres-why/
Read them and come to your own conclusions if you can, but at least you will have all the information available.
[…] We previously reported on the subpoenas here. This email scandal began to unfold at the beginning of January and those details are here. […]
[…] by the Vogels, but so far that offer does not appear to have been accepted. Background can be found here and […]
[…] phone without alerting the phone’s owner. The audio recording of that query can be found here. Anyone can clearly hear the outgoing voicemail message stating that “Alex Vogel” owns the […]
Perhaps some readers have forgotten some of Vogel’s past dirty tricks,
but I’ve been keeping an eye on her ever since she, one of her campaign
staff, and Loudoun County’s Commonwealth Attorney James E. Plowman (R)
(a donor to Vogel’s campaign) framed her Republican primary challenger
so she could win the 2007 27th District GOP Virginia Senate primary.
Unfortunately for her challenger (Mark Tate), he couldn’t prove his
innocence until after the primary, when those 11 felony charges related
to campaign fraud were thrown out of court. http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
Regardless, where does a good man go to regain his reputation
afterward, and this present kerfuffle again reeks of a political hit job
by Vogel, just as it did in 2007. Should it be proven true, well, at
the very least, the world should be informed in regards to one Jill
Vogel, whose entire campaign revolves around “Strong Family Values”.
Walks like a duck…
[…] if you have not seen the email story, it is in the Washington Post, and on TBE here and here. The second TBE link has several documents included which I have […]
[…] After they were unable to locate or verify the sender, who used the name of Martha McDaniel, the Reeves campaign began investigating the email’s origins. It was later discovered that the originating email was not only sent from an IP address that […]
1st Update — Martha used shared neighbors WAP.
2nd update — parse the statement.
Ok, time to start the pool:
1) Holiday-induced nervous breakdown.
2) Self-medicating an old running injury leads to opiod trouble.
3) It truly was deported Russians wardriving through Hunt Country on their way to the airport.
Ok, how long has Steve known about this? For 3-4 months? Is somebody throwing it out there now to take the focus off what is going on in Washington yesterday and today? Hell, congress threw ethics in the trash can yesterday. That’s a far bigger deal than this.
Dam right, I question your timing, Mr. Albertson. You are not clean on this.
I have long suspected that the Washington ruling elite often uses TBE to deflect attention from national politics.
I suspect Cardinal Findlay uses this to his advantage.
Say what you want, but there is reason for the timing.
You need to speak with the Washington Post about that. They broke the story.
Findlay with a stopwatch.
And today, the US House took the ethics bill back out of the trash can that they secretly threw it in yesterday, and reinstated it because people like me called up there the first thing this morning and raised so much hell about it. Did you call? I doubt it.
Jobs. communist China, Mexico, the economy, healthcare.
Goodlatte, what a loser. idiot, and embarrassment to the Republican Party he is.
Thank goodness no other Virginia legislators supported or climbed on board this horrible notion.
Sorry, but this doesn’t pass the smell test. Anyone with half a brain would have a distant cousin hire a friend in some distant small town in west Texas or Idaho so the crack investigator would be chasing his tail for the next several years and if/when he found something it would not point back to the person who did it.
I hear some of the Vogel supporters trying to push the “we were hacked” narrative, specifically wardriving. Wardriving is the use of software to locate unsecured access points to the Internet while driving around in a vehicle, and is relatively easy to do and can be effective in typical neighborhood, but given the terrain and distances involved at Casa Vogel, these assumptions change. The nearest road is about 450 feet away and the neighbor in which the internet is shared is about 1000 feet away, based on the Fauquier GIS information These distances require a directional antenna with an amplifier, as the signal is highly degraded by both distance and vegetation. Generally, a home wifi router is limited to about 300 feet, give or take. So, in order for someone to ‘wardrive’ their residence, they generally would need to be within 300 feet or so, or in their driveway. On at least 3 occasions and for 45 minutes the day the account was created based on the Google records. And then return to the vicinity of the Vogel residence to delete the account a week later. They would also need to access Mr. Vogel’s cell phone to obtain the authentication code at the precise moment it is sent, then delete it before he sees it, and then use the code to verify the Gmail account. Entirely possible in a technical sense, but highly unlikely.
This is an image of the distances involved. http://imgur.com/a/dINm5
They musta used drones! And Guy Fawkes masks!
New talking points out! ” yawn” ” Can’t we talk about issues” and my favorite ” well, even IF the they did it , it’s not LEGALLY defamatory”.
Steve, I believe that you may be in error when you reference the Vogel “home” in that overhead picture. Where I come from, we would refer to that as a “compound”, not just a home.
Also, can you tell us just what is in this disclosure for you?
What an idiotic thing to say. It’s news that is very pertinent to folks in Virginia who have an interest in politics. There’s nothing in it for Steve. Nothing.
That wasn’t my comment, I been hacked! Help me somebody! Ha, ha, ha,
Well, I think it’s a ‘no’ to all the Vogel online ads.
1. A “hacker” or whoever would need access to the cell phone in question for only a few seconds – to receive and delete a text message with a security confirmation code. So it is possible someone “borrowed” a phone while visiting, and then used their own device on the household open WiFi to do the rest. Just saying, is possible.
2. One does not need to criticize another Republican in order to take sides in a primary, and thus not violate the 11th Commandment.
3. I’m not taking sides.
And when that account was accessed from another device, they would have to ‘re-hack’ and delete that notification as well, do we really want to play show and tell between Google logs and “I know nothink!”
The Vogel’s hacking theory is starting to sound like Hunter Biden’s claim that somebody set up a fake Ashley Madison account for him that had all of his personal private information.
I’m also sure Ed Gillespie *loves* hearing about Jill Vogel and shady ethical scandals.
It shows that some of our potential nominees have past experience that can help them to avoid the pitfalls of the last Republican Governor.
Yeah, like this is good for anybody.
This is what you get with a weak party — still feeling the love?
Anyone spending any time investigating what Reeves might have been involved in. No defamation if the allegation is true.
You obviously don’t know Bryce Reeves, or you wouldn’t insinuate what you just did!! He is an honorable man. There is absolutely no truth to the allegations circulated in these emails. This is a clear, unfounded attack on his character and I pray it is fully investigated and the guilty prosecuted.
I don’t know either of them but it disturbs me that the “investigation” is decidedly one sided. There were, apparently, rumors floating around so if this is to continue it should include who the staffer was, why she left sudenly, etc. After all, John Edwards was about to become VP of the United States.
People involved know who the staffer was and she left to go to work for the incoming Trump administration. The investigation has been ” one sided” because only one side was slandered. Bryce Reeves has offered to fund a forensic investigation of the Vogels devices but they have not accepted the opportunity to clear their names and prosecute whoever they claim hacked them. Lastly Bryce Reeves is not an idiot, he wouldn’t risk taking this ,this far if there was any truth to these allegations.
Wasn’t defamation, was a ‘rumor’ from a cell-phone confirmed sock puppet that happened to be owned by Jillex.
[…] x2: Now this I find extremely odd, from over at The Bull […]
Ethics or winning, Jill chooses…
I don’t think winning is an option anymore.
So now Bryce has to decide whether or not to amend his complaint to join the Vogels as defendants and serve them with discovery requests. Responses to interrogatories are made under oath and subject to penalties for perjury.
So is it a game of political chicken?
Bryce has nothing to lose by moving ahead Jillex — everything!
Don’t Blink!
Terrible. Just terrible.
So they deny sending ” anonymous emails” eh? Too bad they haven’t denied sending the email in question. Lots of legalese in their statement. Well, actually in their campaign managers statement. Jill seems unwilling to answer these allegations. You would think she would want to help investigate these charges, clear her name and prosecute whoever hacked her system. If thats what happened.
If smut sells, sell more of it. What was the Reagan commandment again?
It’s a good thing no Republican ever takes a side in a primary. That would violate the 11th commandment, wouldn’t it?
Of course there are times when we are compelled to criticize a Republican, particularly when they lie and break the law. I continue to hope the Vogels have done neither, but it’s not looking good for them.
Eh, everything is negotiable but I would think an ethics lawyer could (should?) be able to figure it out without having to go “there”
Edit: of course, thinking this through, if he runs w this, it could secure the “grab ’em by the :$&@” voting bloc for him
Drip drip drip, AND the death of a 1000 cuts.
Does that count in primaries?
The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. This is not something that gets better by staying silent.
Who is staying silent? The Vogel camp already issued a statement.
Yes, the “hacking.” Letting it ride is doubling down.
Perhaps it will all die down and go away. Perhaps people will send flowers to Martha in Upperville.
It was a political blunder and they got caught. Lessons from Watergate?
Just a complete embarrassment