The 2020 3:30 A.M. van in Detroit: how the story was steered away from ballots
Three of the people who witnessed the ballot drop all appeared disconnected but all seemed to have the same agenda - and it was not consistent with election integrity.
Three of the people who witnessed the now‑famous 3:30 a.m. 2020 ballot delivery are Shane Trejo, Kellye SoRelle, and Patrick Colbeck. Each had a megaphone. Each made choices that, in my view, pushed the public conversation away from ballots and toward the machine fraud PSYOP.
What happened in Detroit wasn’t transparency—it was statecraft: as a mysterious overnight drop went unchallenged, operatives helped script a machines‑over‑ballots narrative that hijacked the truth and the movement.

What still doesn’t add up
From the moment that van rolled up after 3 a.m., most of us wanted to know: Who loaded the vans? Where did the ballots come from? Why did they come so late? Those should have been first‑order questions for anyone on site. Instead, the energy that followed raced in other directions—viral clips with fake claims, “it’s in the routers,” and unrelated spectacles.
I believe this was part of an orchestrated Flynn network PSYOP intended to get us looking under the wrong rocks, creating false and misleading evidence to discredit the election integrity movement, and, as I have documented here, develop a false belief that the fraud was in the machines as part of a broader plan to set Trump up for what would have likely been charges of treason had he invoked the Insurrection Act.
Character 1: Kellye SoRelle — The Oathkeeper-linked, Fed-cooperating lawyer who went to Detroit “in PJs” and started recording, but got the wrong van
SoRelle was dating Oathkeepers founder Stewart Rhodes in November 2020 and later became his attorney. She told the January 6th Committee that she traveled to Michigan as a Lawyers for Trump volunteer, an organization she described to the committee as being comprised of libertarians and militia-minded people like herself. In her words, “I ended up volunteering for that,” and when she got to Detroit “we were…calling and getting volunteers to be at the polling locations and the [TCF Center] absentee‑ballot counting center.”
SoRelle told the Committee that she had worked with “the Feds,” meaning federal agencies, in her private legal practice going back to 2017 and that “I still assist the Feds in every way, shape, form, or fashion that I can.” The context of that statement was in a line of questioning about her support for Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.
She arrived in Detroit November 1 and, when national coverage announced battlegrounds were “shutting down,” she says she drove over to TCF: “I was, like, pretty much in my PJs. … grabbed my gun and my purse and my phone and went down there.” There, “it was fully still functioning… so I… camped out [and] started recording.”
She also testified that Stuart Rhodes arranged an Oath Keepers security detail for her in Michigan—“Yes, he did… [he said] I’m going to send Whip… Jeff Morelock and Michael Greene.”
Context for her network matters. In the same deposition, SoRelle described how the Stop the Steal rallies were coordinated: “Those are the ones that became… the center point,” she said of Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and Ali Alexander—adding that the First Amendment Praetorian (1AP) crew (which, according to Staci Burk, was comprised primarily of former Erik Prince/Blackwater operatives) was “orchestrating [the] majority of it.” She also noted prior “joint task force work with the Feds.”
Here’s my problem: SoRelle flew to Detroit specifically to ensure questionable ballots were challenged. She was outside of TCF, recording video at 3:30am when the van showed up.
But the video she promoted a few days later on Louder with Crowder wasn’t the van; it was a red wagon carrying media gear—an item a local outlet publicly said was their equipment. She claimed it was “thousands of ballots.” Why go on a national broadcast with that instead of capturing the real ballots you saw? Why not lodge immediate, formal challenges—the very job she’d flown in to do?
The most plausible answer is it was a deliberate PSYOP, and it worked: Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it, and when the story came out, it made MAGA look like fools.
Her choices were narrative choices, not legal ones. And they pulled attention away from the ballots.
I direct messaged SoRelle three days before publication for comment and she did not respond.
Character 2: Shane Trejo — Roger Stone dirty trickster, Michigan anti-Republican disruptor
Trejo was one of the witnesses. A devout libertarian, he later gained a platform in the Michigan Republican Party (delegate; chaired MI‑11). As I documented a couple months ago, Trejo currently works for Roger Stone and also bragged about causing Mike Rogers to lose his 2024 US Senate campaign. He recently launched a campaign for MIGOP “delegates’ rights,” which is a mainstay of Flynn network and libertarian power grab ops in state Republican parties. Calls among delegates for Trejo’s removal from the party have been growing, especially with his promotion of anti-Trump and groyper/white supremacist narratives.
Those actions matter for motive and network. They also fit a broader pattern I’ve documented: operations that fracture Republican parties, seed infighting, and keep us litigating theater instead of facts.
According to Kellye SoRelle, in her deposition with the J6 Committee, Shane Trejo and Patrick Colbeck are “the guys that, like, basically run the whole show up there… in Michigan.” The context was a discussion about Roger Stone’s Signal group “Friends of Stone,” that was used to coordinate with the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, First Amendment Praetorian (1AP), and others like Jason Sullivan who ran extensive ops attempting to incite violence inside the Capitol on J6. SoRelle told the J6 Committee that Trejo and Colbeck were, in essence, Stone’s guys in Michigan.
This is extremely significant, and indicates that there was likely some level of pre-coordination with Stone and Flynn, even before the election occurred.
Then SoRelle drops a bombshell, saying that she recorded Trejo at 3:30 in the morning talking about money, after the van full of ballots appeared. “It sounds to me as if he is negotiating dollar amounts,” she told the committee.


Was Shane Trejo talking about money at 3:30 in the morning after witnessing a mysterious ballot drop? If so, why? In text messages, Trejo told me he doesn’t know who SoRelle is. When asked if he really didn’t know that Stewart Rhodes’ girlfriend and attorney mentioned him by name to the J6 Committee, he claimed he did not. It was hard for me to believe I could be the first in the media to ask him about that, about 3 years after the deposition occurred. Many in the media have investigated Trejo, and he even had an alleged sexual relationship with Amanda Moore, a reporter on the left.
He said he has not seen the video SoRelle said she captured of him, and that he wasn’t paid: “I don’t even think I was talking to anyone on the phone at all that night,” he said in a text.
He also insisted that he did not know Roger Stone in 2020, and that he started working for him after they met in late 2023 “because Roger is the man. It is an honor to work for the legend,” Trejo said.
Character 3: Patrick Colbeck — The early pivot to “it’s in the routers,” and the Lindell money
An affiant on the ground at TCF Center, Jose Aliaga, said in his affidavit video that Colbeck told him in the middle of the night—”You know, Jose, the cheating is right there,” while pointing at the routers and computers. “By this time tomorrow,” he continued, “Biden wins. All these routers, I know how this works. You’re gonna see them.”
That is an awfully specific prediction to make before any investigation had been done. It also dovetailed with the immediate post‑election machine‑fraud narrative pushed by Flynn, Lindell, Powell, and Byrne.
Again, SoRelle told the J6 Committee, as an attorney under oath, that Colbeck and Trejo were Roger Stone’s guys “running the show” in Michigan, suggesting that Colbeck had likely been primed on the narratives he was to promote following the election.
The indications that Colbeck was working on behalf of the Flynn network run further still.
In Colbeck’s own book, he features praise from several Flynn network operatives. Two of them, in particular, support the theory that Colbeck was working with the Flynn network in November 2020.
Phil Waldron, a retired military intelligence colonel with strong ties to Flynn who played an integral role in Flynn’s 2020 ASOG operations, said, “Almost immediately after the 2020 general election, Senator Colbeck and I began collaborating and investigating election irregularities.”
Mike Lindell said, “Pat has been over the target since the beginning when he let everyone know about Dominion voting system internet connections in Detroit.”


Josh Merritt told me in Part 2 of my extended interview that Mike Lindell was paying Colbeck $10,000/month. For years now, Colbeck has talked nonstop about election fraud, but never anything actionable or solution oriented. He did help the Democrats substantially in 2022 with the “it’s all rigged so what’s the point” PSYOP, however.
And here we have a bombshell from this old affidavit interview with Jose Aliaga. On election night, he was promoting a precalculated misdirection play: Don’t look at the ballots. Look at the machines.
I watched Colbeck’s public commentary drift into dense “chain‑of‑custody” monologues and claims of the Election Management Systems (EMS) being connected to the internet—pages of jargon, but nothing that would ever gain traction in court—and I never saw him lead with the 3:30 a.m. delivery he witnessed but did nothing to stop. Again: narrative choices.
Colbeck declined to comment for this story.
The through‑line: Messaging that led us away from the evidence in front of us
SoRelle—sent to Detroit to get questionable ballots challenged, embedded with Oath Keeper security, and networked with Stone–Jones–Ali/1AP—came home with a red‑wagon clip of camera batteries, not ballot footage.
Trejo—who “ran the show” with Colbeck per SoRelle and is tied to Roger Stone by his own words—didn’t build a real‑time ballot challenge but did brag later about sinking a GOP Senate campaign.
Colbeck—on site—told people the fraud would be in routers before anyone had examined ballots, then kept the public talking about everything but the ballots.
When you map incentives and networks, the pattern is the point.
Unanswered questions
Who decided—early and centrally—to steer the conversation from ballots to “the machines”? Was that messaging coordinated across the Flynn/Stone/Jones/Ali/1AP orbit and the Lindell machine‑fraud push? David Hancock and others have indicated that Flynn was heavily involved in post election plans with Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, intelligence asset Patrick Byrne and others as early as March 2020, while the rest of us were focused on COVID.
Why was Kellye SoRelle really in Detroit, and under whose direction? She told Congress she flew in as a Lawyers for Trump volunteer to staff poll challengers at TCF and elsewhere, and that she was on site in the middle of the night “in PJs-comfy clothes” and “started recording.” Yet the footage she elevated wasn’t the van, and there was no immediate, forceful legal challenge to the delivery she says she witnessed. Given her own testimony about prior joint work with federal task forces, and her proximity to the Stone/Flynn/Ali/1AP hub, was she there strictly as campaign volunteer—or wearing another hat? We don’t have that answer.
I’m not asserting a conclusion on #3. I’m saying this: for someone who flew to Detroit to ensure questionable ballots were challenged, the choices made that night did the opposite.
Why this matters
In 2020, every recount that has been done has indicated there was a ballot for every vote, with minor exceptions. If there was fraud, it was in the unchecked mail-in ballots. The best way to ensure it would never be found was to herd the movement into a cul‑de‑sac: routers, algorithms, and endless “word‑salad” panels. The result wasn’t proof. It was paralysis.
We can and should debate machinery, security, and law. But first: we have to recognize a simple, uncomfortable reality about that night in Detroit. The people with the best vantage point to force clarity didn’t, and the loudest narratives from that circle led us away from ballots.
That wasn’t an accident.
Bottom line: If your objective on election night is transparency and lawful process, you document the ballots and you fight the fight where the fight is. Detroit didn’t get that. It got a story. And the story sent us chasing ghosts - and by people with extensive ties to Roger Stone and Mike Flynn.