In the beginning, the Big Lie was simple. When Rudy Giuliani first stepped up to talk about his supposed “proof” of election fraud in the hours and days following the election, his position was ridiculous, but always the same. There was, said Giuliani, “a plan” to plant fake ballots at polling stations. That plan was “specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats.” 

So Giuliani’s basic accusation was that in “big cities controlled by Democrats,” Democrats turned out a lot of votes. Imagine that. Still, Giuliani said, “I know crimes, I can smell them.” And to Rudy, half a million or so Pennsylvania votes were stinky. As utterly unfounded, unsupportable, and unbelievable as it was, Giuliani’s basic version of the Big Lie was at least something that could be explained in a sentence: There was a grand plan to plant fake ballots in big cities across the country. Or, as this readily translates to Donald Trump’s core audience, Black people took away your president.

It wasn’t until Sidney Powell joined in at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020 that the Big Lie became a theory that was so wild, Trump actually had Giuliani issue a statement distancing him from Powell’s claims. Then, over a surprisingly short time, Powell’s utterly ludicrous concoction—one that involved long-dead Venezuelan dictators and a conspiracy involving hundreds of Republican officials who threw the race to Joe Biden—became the official position of the never-ending Trump campaign.

There’s a reason. The Kraken didn’t emerge fully grown from Powell’s glistening forehead. It had been growing among Republican ranks for years, carefully nurtured and drip-fed. It started with presentations in a secret airplane hangar, and went door to door on visits with Republican donors.

And what it told them was exactly what they wanted to hear.

As The Washington Post reports, the origin story of Powell’s mythology doesn’t start with Giuliani, Powell, or anyone else who made an appearance at Four Seasons Landscaping. The man at the back of the story is a longtime Republican hustler named Russell Ramsland who has bounced among wildly different jobs in his effort to find “the next big thing.” That includes raising cattle on South Pacific islands, selling Tex-Mex cuisine in London, and growing crystals in space.

But in 2018, Ramsland was hooking into a real growth market, because that’s when he began selling Republicans on the idea that there was a vast conspiracy to steal elections using electronic voting machines. The 2018 midterm elections had just handed the House over to Democrats and left  Republicans with aching losses at the state level in areas they thought were safely red. This is the point where parties traditionally do a post-mortem of the past election and resolve to make changes to improve their performance in the next round.

Only Republicans—especially state- and county-level Republicans in places like Texas—already seemed convinced that Trump was supported by 101% of the American people, making the results of the election incomprehensible. They didn’t go looking for, “How can we do better?” They went looking for, “How did we get cheated?” And Ramsland was there, with top secret hearings conducted in an out of the way airplane hanger under strict “no electronic devices” protection.

At those hearings, hundreds of Republicans “learned” what the rest of the nation would have to wait two years to see blurted out while hair dye poured down Giuliani’s face: Republicans had actually won all those races they thought they lost in 2018, only electronic voting machines were changing the results in favor of Democrats. All voting machines, according to Ramsland, were actually based on the same code—code written by the company “Smartmatic.” That common code base meant that all the machines were “wide open,” filled with “backdoors,” and ripe for fraud.

None of this is, of course, true. Well before the hangar sessions, Ramsland had been trying to break into what he saw as the lucrative new field of selling Republicans bog-foolish conspiracy theories. That included claims that the deaths of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi were actually an intentional move by the “deep state,” and a supervillain origin story for George Soros that included Prescott Bush and the Muslim Brotherhood. But Ramsland saw his opportunity when met an Austin city council candidate who lost her race by a 30-point margin (after, among other things, talking about 9/11 being an inside job). That candidate “knew in her heart that she had won” and was waving around audit logs of voting machines in Austin that she claimed backed up her “heart.”

When the candidate took her case to court, she lost. And appealed. And not only lost, but was slapped with a fine for bringing a frivolous suit. Even so, Ramsland knew a good story when he saw one. The “evidence” that the failed candidate presented in her failed court case became a core part of Ramsland’s initial pitch to frustrated Republicans; a pitch that said even someone who lost by 30 points might really be the winner if it wasn’t for the crooked machines.

Ramsland cooked it up good. Not only were the meetings held at a secret location in a windowless hangar, and not only where the attendees required to leave all electronic devices outside—once his flock of GOP sheep arrived, they were greeted a “white hat hacker” who identified himself using only a code name. That hacker then spread out a tale that told Republicans they were all winners. They couldn’t fail. They could only be cheated.

Soon enough Ramsland’s company, Allied Security Operations Group, took the show on the road for big money Republican donors. And Ramsland finally had what he couldn’t find selling burritos on Fleet Street or pitching machines to purify blood with light: a winning investment. Allied Security Operations Group panhandled from Republicans eager to believe that every loss was a conspiracy, and gained the support of such brilliant GOP luminaries as Rep. Louie Gohmert.

And when 2020 came around, Ramsland found that he had a candidate on his hands who was absolutely perfect: desperate, willing to believe anything that said he was a winner, and able to lay his hands on unlimited campaign funds. 

And a hardworking con man finally had his ultimate pigeon.