There is so many angles to this story, I could have never imagined this many termites coming out of the woodwork.

Apparently this all started in 2010 when Gant was running for office, with the help of BK Jr;

In light of the recent developments regarding Secretary of State Jason Gant and his possible impeachment, I would like to bring forth additional information that shows this inappropriate commingling of business and public service between the duo goes back at least as far as his run for the current office he now holds.

Back in my run for office in 2010 against Jason Gant and Ben Nesselhuf, I wanted to order signs from a South Dakotabusiness. The only one that I could find online just so happened to be Pat Powers’ business. The reason I completely ruled it out was that Gant had basically taken over part of his website stating that using this business would be like contributing to his campaign for Secretary of State. He implied in writing that proceeds from Powers’ sign business would help him to get elected.

There were 3 things that had immediately jumped out at me regarding this situation:

1. Any contributions made through doing business with Dakota Campaign Store would be in essence unreported and undisclosed political contributions that could be hidden from the public under the disguise of sales by a business rather than political contributions subject to reporting requirements and the maximum donation limit by an individual of $4,000.

2. In Sioux Falls alone, Jason Gant’s signs blanketed the area. If these signs were in a round about way donated to Jason Gant’s campaign through Pat Powers’ business, the value should have been in the thousands of dollars and should have been reported as “in kind” contributions on Gant’s campaign finance report. I never found anything on his reports that could have taken into account the potentially large dollar amount of the value of these signs.

3. Any candidate that had a potentially unlimited supply of campaign materials would certainly hold an unfair advantage over his 2 opponents.

Oh, but Stacey’s story is just the tip of the iceberg (a IT specialist who just happens to be a loyal foot soldier sent me this information this morning);

DWC was down so they could move their server to a private server routed through an Albany NY service from a public Utah service.  In this process they can attempt to lose the archives to send investigators into blank servers.  The data posted as #50 testor15 on 05.11.12 at 4:21 pm was the old server where the offending data was located.

dakotawarcollege.com, dakotacampaignstore.com, patpowers.com all have the same hidden webserver 66.152.109.31.

The last known link to each is through an IP, Tech Valley Communications, Albany NY.  Tracing route to each is  [66.152.109.31] you will notice in the document below 16 jumps labeled “ *        *        *     Request timed out.”  This means the IP translation service is attempting to find the actual server but is now hidden.  It could be located in a garage in Pierre or Timbuktu.  This is very likely someone playing a game they should not be.  Someone in Pierre with Brookings connections may have been working very hard on his ‘vacation’ from the web to cover his tracks.

PP is trying to keep the site private.  “Bill Clay” was on ‘vacation’ during the time it was ‘down’. His post telling us so:

Stop jumping to conclusions

Jun25
2012 4 Comments Written by Bill Clay

I went on a family vacation for a week and when I got back to town I was told told a certain respectable legislator wants to put my face on a milk carton for a missing persons report.

(I suppose I should have given notice before going out of town)

Lots has happened over the past week and I’m looking forward to posting about it.

IP trace document; trace