‘Italygate’ election conspiracy theory was pushed by two firms led by woman who also falsely claimed $30 million mansion was hers
Her name is Michelle. Her last name has been Golden, Ballarin, Roosevelt Edwards, maybe some others either involving marriage or whatever she wanted to call herself at the time.
She married a rich guy in 1979 who she met while a student at WVU. She was 24 he's was 59. She ran as a Republican for Congress in 1986 in WV and lost by the usual amount. Got divorced, married another older man and relocated to outer NOVA in the 2000s and ingrained herself with the upper crust there but also got involved in delusions of being a savior of Somalia.
It led to wacky series of claims and events chronicled here
Pirates and warlords aside, Michele Ballarin believes she can turn Somalia around
By 2009-10 everyone kind of figured out that she was a total wack job though there were new rubes to try to sucker in, but for most of the 2010s she disappeared, until 2019 when as Michelle Roosevelt Edwards (the Roosevelt Edwards name was in honor of her grandfather), she bought the rather meager assets of a failed Icelandic airline, WOW, and made wild claims of how she was going to reinvent air travel.
A West Virginia Heiress-Turned-Arms Dealer Bought Wow Air and Will Restart Flights Next Month
So, that led to an Icelandic media group to go to NOVA and interview Michelle at her palatial estate
Waiting game or game over? The story of New WOW
Except it wasn't her estate, the people who own it don't know her and she had no right to be there (though she does have a relator license and the estate is for sale)
So, that leads us all back to original link of a fake woman and fake companies sending fake letters to a desperate dumbass like Mark Meadows leading to a referral to the DoJ which the DoJ called "pure insanity"
Or as Republicans like to call it--Tuesday.
Because of course wikileaks would be somehow involved with this:
"Ballarin’s work incensed the Ukrainian government at one point, according to a 2009 Wikileaks cable, after she became involved in negotiating the release of a ship full of Soviet-made tanks that was being held hostage. Ukraine’s foreign minister accused Ballarin in a cable to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “becom[ing] an intermediary of the sea corsairs” and of “incit[ing] the pirates to the groundless increase of the ransom sum.”"
from here, a non-paywall article (darn WaPo)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/feature/italygate-is-the-crown-jewel-of-big-lie-conspiracies-and-it-just-got-a-lot-wilder
