UPDATE: Thought I would revisit this post today;
So chew on this ‘nothing burger’. Do you remember Pat Powers and why he left his blog, Dakotawarcollege.com, back in 2010 only to return to it in 2012? Let’s rev up the wayback machine and look.
We at SouthDacola were a bit busy back then, helping a disgraced Secretary of State to NOT run for reelection, his aide to run back to Brookings with his tail between his legs and attempt to break a curious conspiracy to conceal unethical behavior.
On July 22, 2012 Powers made an announcement he was back at the blog…
We at SouthDacola will fill you in.
It is election season 2018 in Sioux Falls and South Dakota with some names and events hauntingly familiar from those halcyon days. Why? Keep in mind names like Pat Powers, Dakota War College (DWC), Jason Gant, Bill Clay, Rick Astley, Marty Jackley, Sen. Stan Adelstein, DCI, Click Rain, Paul TenHanken and more to mull over.
SOS Jason Gant hired his friend and confidant, DWC Pat Powers, to be a high-level employee in charge of the sensitive data systems in the SOS office as Deputy. You know the kind of data a government office can hold in a “trust� As in, you trust no one will do anything wrong with it? An unknown by the mystery name, Bill Clay, became the voice of DWC. To this day no one knows who this Bill Clay was (we assumed is was a fake screen name).
Back to our story, while doing a bit of research using the SD Secretary of State’s corporate database, a curious thing happened. A website previously unknown to the researcher called Dakota Campaign Store appeared when clicking a link trying to sell political postcards.
Why would the SOS office be selling campaign supplies? We started to look into the IP addresses of the SOS databases, the campaign store and DWC to see how they could be linked. Funny thing is, they appeared to be connected. As we exposed the links, these website IP addresses seem to move around the country together which I coined the case of the ‘musical servers’, how could this be? We started asking questions. Powers began to move websites around and created fake links.
The more we researched, followed the IP addresses as they traveled the nation, our questions were answered by Rick Astley. What became apparent was some shady type things were going on. Sen Stan Adelstein from Rapid City also started asking questions. He asked Attorney General Marty Jackley (2018 GOP candidate for Governor) and the Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) to look into the issues being brought up.
Instead of finding potential issues with the loss of the state’s confidential corporate database during the documented 4 moves, employee conflict of interest in running a political campaign consulting / sales business while managing the voter database and more, the Attorney General only said, no money was stolen so no harm done. In other words, go away and leave us alone while we bury this mess (Entire DOC: Jackley-Gant ).
When Powers announced his return to the blog Dakota War College writing “for the new owners†who were the new owners? It was announced at the time, the final resting spot was in an up and coming web services company, Clickrain owned by Paul TeHaken.
Well, Clickrain in Sioux Falls became a proud owner but at some time since we last reported, TenHaken must have turned DWC back to Powers:
Click to enlarge graphic
Remember Rushmore PAC owned by the SD Republican Party Chairman and former SD State Senator from Dakota Dunes who was (might still be) a longtime person registered in two states at the same time (Iowa and South Dakota) while being a SD State Senator? This is another story with interesting answers.
Who will ask these people what these people were doing hiding government information on web servers around the country and why? When will these people come clean with where the data is? With all the expense of rebuilding the lost SOS databases due to the apparent cross country moving, why didn’t the Attorney General prosecute or at least slap the Whopper Juniors out of the offender’s hands?
Maybe TenHaken should be included in this 2014 graphic;Â 2014 Scandal Republican-graphic
Still confused? It’s simple, basically we suspected under Gant & Powers watch at the SOS’s office they were using private servers owned by Clickrain who was owned by TenHaken to not only hide Powers involvement with his blog and campaign store, which was a clear conflict of interest as a state employee (we suspect why he was pressured to quit) but possibly hiding/holding government data. Which isn’t technically illegal if you have a state contract to do so. We have no clue if TenHaken had such a contract. We will never know because Jackley decided to bury that part of the investigation and basically tell us that Gant & Powers weren’t stealing money from the petty cash box.
Paul TenHaken has NEVER publicly talked about the Powers dismissal from state government. Gee, I wonder why?