Revealed: Sidney Powell's secret witness 'Spyder' is an IT consultant and former mechanic who has NEVER worked in military intelligence
Conservative attorney Sidney Powell, who has been unrelenting in her battle on behalf of President Donald Trump to launch lawsuits in an effort to overturn results in battleground states that Joe Biden won has inadvertently revealed the identity of her secret witness 'Spyder'.
In November, Powell was thrown off Trump's campaign litigation that sought to team overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election but she has since launched lawsuits on her own in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona trying to do the same thing.
The identity of one witness in the lawsuit is redacted but have named that individual as 'Spider,' or sometimes 'Spyder.'
Sidney Powell has brought four lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and declare President Donald Trump the winner
President Donald Trump has refused to concede the 2020 election and has been trying to overturn the results in several states
Powell describes Spyder as a former 'Military Intelligence expert,' who armed with his expertise has alleged server traffic shows voting systems in the United States were 'certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China.'
But, according to the Washington Post, Spyder, is in fact 43-year-old IT consultant Joshua Merritt from Dallas. His name was found to be among metadata for the filings.
Powell's team had carefully filed a redacted declaration from the secret witness, but a bookmark that had been uploaded to the court's computer system was still visible, complete with Joshua Merritt's full name.
'One jackwagon forgot to clear out the data. I was really p****d,' Merritt said. 'The guy was like, 'I'm sorry,' and I was like, 'Well, you know, that and a bag of chips will still leave me hungry.' '
The lawsuits cite an individual identified only as 'Spider' or 'Spyder' who has alleged voting systems were compromised. Pictured, Rudy Giuliani points to a mad where lawsuits were being launched in November
In the lawsuits, Spider had declared himself to be a 'a former US Military Intelligence expert' in the Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan lawsuits and an 'electronic intelligence analyst' in the Georgia one.
He also claimed to have worked for the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, based in Arizona as a 'white hat hacker', although the unit actually serves as a training center for those entering the army.
Merritt was an Army veteran and he was enrolled at the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion for just seven months, 15 years ago, but never completed the entry-level training course.
'He kept washing out of courses,' said Meredith Mingledorff, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence. 'He's not an intelligence analyst.'
The Post got to see his separation papers which do not refer to any intelligence training.
Powell detailed in her lawsuits how 'Spider' claimed to be a former military intelligence official but he has been revealed as 43-year-old IT consultant Joshua Merritt from Dallas
Although he served in the Army for almost a decade he did so as a car mechanic.
Merritt also deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan working in security and route clearance. He was eventually honorably discharged in 2013.
Merritt notes that him being described as an 'electronic intelligence analyst under 305th Military Intelligence' is misleading, particularly as he was a student at the time and not an intelligence expert.
He lays the blame with 'clerks' for Powell's legal team who wrote his qualifications into the lawsuit. Merritt admits to not having read the document carefully despite signing his name swearing it was true.
'That was one thing I was trying to backtrack on,' he said on Thursday. 'My original paperwork that I sent in didn't say that.'
Now that his name appears to be circulating freely, Merritt told the Post that he is not going to have anything to do with the lawsuits whatsoever going forward.
Merritt said cybersecurity was a hobby when he was in the Army, and became a profession once he was out.
He ended up forming his own IT firm in 2019, Cyberoptyx, which specializes in building 'cyberinfrastructure' including making websites and setting up servers.
He said that he would not describe himself as either Republican or a Democrat but a 'Constitutionalist' who wants to see fair elections.
'Right now you're looking at two political parties that all they care about is power, they don't care about people,' he said. 'I swore my life to my Constitution and that's what I keep it at.'
Powell, meanwhile, appears to be attempting to still keep his identity secret and simply responded in a text to the Post saying: 'I cannot confirm that Joshua Merritt is even Spider. Strongly encourage you not to print.'
President-elect Joe Biden will enter the White House on January 20, 2021
The premise of Powell's lawsuits hangs on a conspiracy theory that Dominion, a company that produces voting machines, created devices that allowed votes to be switched from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.
Powell so far hasn't won a single election lawsuit, and her claims have been dismantled by judges and the lawyers opposing her case.
Merritt, writing as Spider states: 'Dominion Voter Systems 'have been accessible and were certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China', however he does not say he has personally analyzed any of Dominion's voting machines.
'Dominion neglectfully allowed foreign adversaries to access data and intentionally provided access to their infrastructure in order to monitor and manipulate elections, including the most recent one in 2020,' one lawsuit states.
Dominion has described the claims as 'non-sensical and unsupported by any presentation of evidence.'
CISA, the federal agency that oversees cybersecurity and infrastructure security, described the 2020 election as 'the most secure' in the country's history.
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