webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

andrew kloster e s q

SEVERINO = LEO?

FLYNN BANNON

---}:

TPM

The top lawyer at the Office of Personnel Management is a self-described “raging misogynist” who for years has talked up a “campaign” to purge the federal civil service and staff it with MAGA diehards, per a series of previously unreported appearances on right-wing podcasts.

As envisioned, this campaign would intimidate federal employees into resigning or cow them into submission. Cabinet secretaries would devote all of their efforts to “cleaning house,” clearing the way for partisan cronies to dominate the workings of the federal government, all orchestrated by Trump appointees who have spent the past several years marinating in and reproducing online cesspits. The remarks by Andrew Kloster, the new general counsel at OPM, suggest a concerted, premeditated effort to both wreck the nonpartisan federal civil service and replace its remnants with workers easily under the President’s control.

Kloster revealed his aspirations for remaking the federal workforce in appearances on two podcast episodes hosted by Auron Macintyre in 2022 and 2024, and published a series of writings from 2021 through to the 2024 election on a Substack and Telegram channel reviewed by TPM. Throughout, Kloster, who served as acting general counsel at OPM in the last year of Trump’s first term, described a “government-wide” effort to “clean house.”

The comments prefigure what the country has seen for the past 10 days. In practice, that’s meant asserting the ability to fire categories of civil servants through Schedule F, firing nonpartisan DOJ staff, pushing employees to retire early, and urging federal employees to report on others who support DEI.

“People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone. It needs to be government-wide so that everyone has air cover,” he said in a June 2022 conversation with Macintyre on an episode titled “Staffing the Regime” of the program, The Auron Macintyre Show.

Two years later, he appeared with Macintyre again, in an episode titled “Replacing the Deep State.”

“I think a concerted political effort can take control of the civil service per se,” Kloster said, suggesting that the effort was intended to clear out existing career government workers and replace then with Trump loyalists.

“You need a pipeline. You need a lot of replacements,” he said. “You’re going to get a lot of flack for it.”

With Macintyre, himself an online provocateur, Kloster occasionally used internet-magnified threats, at one point joking about moving federal employees to Alaska. But he was clearly conversant in the ideas and language of the new right: He discussed how seizing the federal service could help “win on the other two elements of the cathedral,” a concept used by anti-democratic influencer Curtis Yarvin to describe society’s opinion-forming institutions. At other points, Kloster referenced Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard Law Professor who has argued for dramatically expanded presidential power guided by Christian teachings.

Kloster is not the only new hire at OPM. The new administration has reportedly stacked it with Elon Musk-linked appointees more committed to a DOGE vision of the federal workforce. One deputy counsel, Clayton Cromer, has experience working for a white shoe law firm and in the Austin AI and tech scene, TPM has learned. It’s not clear what he and other appointees bring to the table in terms of personnel law.

Kloster himself embodies the MAGA contradictions: as POGO and HuffPost reported, he’s a self-described “raging misogynist” who clearly enjoyed getting a rise out of people online. As reported, Kloster was also subject to a temporary domestic violence-related restraining order in Maryland, which was dismissed several days after issuance pursuant to an agreement. His first job out of law school was working for FIRE, defending sexual assault cases; TPM reviewed a “Rules for Radical Patriots” guide that Kloster published which included calls for business owners to “only hire or support people who want to preserve my community.”

:

At the same time, he has publicly expressed a clear vision of how to destroy the federal workforce’s nonpartisan identity and bring it under Trump’s direct sway.

“It’s not just the case that we have evidence that the experts get things wrong. I think that as a theoretical matter, the very notion of expertise and independence makes no sense,” he told the Yale Law School Federalist Society’s podcast in 2022. “So I very much rely more on structure and incentive and political control and unity between the technology and the people that are using the technology.”

OPM declined to comment. Kloster did not return an emailed request for comment.

After Trump left office in 2021, the MAGA movement was cut somewhat adrift. Though Trump and his supporters proclaimed at the time both that they had actually won the election and that the first term had been a success, that was belied by complaints from former administration officials. They echoed Trump’s complaints about the “deep state,” scapegoating federal employees and turncoat political appointees for the administration’s failures.

Kloster reflected on this in a June 2022 interview with Macintyre, recalling how, in 2016, he laughed as former never-Trumpers scrambled and begged for administration jobs. “But the joke was on us because pretty quickly these grifters and people that were super anti-Trump and never Trump very quickly came back in and were able to get these positions,” he said.

It’s unusual for OPM or its staff to receive any public attention in an administration. Nominally independent, it mainly works as the human resources and employee benefits manager for the federal workforce.

But the segment of Trumpers who took the President’s complaint that the real problem was his lack of total control over the nonpartisan civil service set their sights on OPM as a vehicle to strip protections from federal workers and, potentially, replace them with people who are ideologically simpatico.

To Kloster, that means empowering the President to hire and fire any employee at will.

“Without that, you have nothing,” he said in 2022. “Imagine, again, Biden or Trump issuing a hundred executive orders and people just don’t listen to him. If he wasn’t able to remove people, he could have four years of him sitting in a box and the machine would run itself.”

Kloster described a campaign to enact this in a 2024 interview with Macintyre, saying that it would mean appointing cabinet secretaries who had the willpower and coordination to prioritize an assault on the civil service.

“The number one thing that you want government-wide is an understanding that personnel is difficult and will get you a lot of blowback, so you need to have the willingness to see it through,” he said. “You hear the refrain, I can either spend my time working on policy or I can spend my time cleaning house and I can’t do both. And I think that needs to be broken. People need to understand that they need to clean house, so we need barn burners, people with backbone, it needs to be government wide so that everyone has air cover.”

Later in the interview, Macintyre brought up the example of Louis XIV, and his decision to move the French nobility to “Versailles just so he could make sure to maintain control,” complaining that having federal employees in D.C. reenacts that situation.

Kloster replied with a joke about “reassignments to Alaska,” before expressing a hope for a “shock and awe campaign bigger than any particular policy with respect to the civil service or any issue under Trump.”

“I think the main thing is shock and awe,” he added.

The issue for Trump in 2025 is the same as it was during the first term: what he’s trying to do is against the law. It’s also counterproductive on it’s own terms. You can try to gut the civil service in order to bring it under control, but that leaves you with little left to enact your policies.

“There’s an effort both to dismantle, but also to occupy or to seize control of the administrative state,” Blake Emerson, a professor of law and political science at UCLA, told TPM. “And those two goals don’t necessarily align, and this is where we might get some friction.”

In the 2022 Yale Law federalist society chapter appearance, Kloster recognized some of these tradeoffs.

“It goes all the way to the top. So what may have been lacking in the last administration was a president who didn’t want to get involved. I mean, with Trump, everything was personal,” he said. “If Trump had died during his four years in office, who knows what would’ve happened because everything really did go to him. And the last person in the room with him might always win the argument or whatever. There are all these critiques, but it was him. He was the institution.”

Josh Kovensky is an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.

---

01/29/2025 MMA

by

Kyle Mantyla

At the signing of the Laken Riley Act, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is directing the opening of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold up to 30,000 migrants who are living illegally in the United States and cannot be deported to their home countries.

A leaked memo from the Defense Intelligence Agency shows personnel were instructed to suspend observances of certain holidays that do not specifically honor white men, including Holocaust Remembrance Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month.

The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash.

Andrew Kloster, a self-described “raging misogynist” with a public history of racist comments and insistence on loyalty to President Donald Trump, has been installed as general counsel for the federal government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

At a Jan. 28, 2025 press conference, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that, under a new policy, “independent journalists, podcasters, social media influencers and content creators” will be able to apply for White House press credentials. Since the announcement, several antisemitic and Christian nationalist figures claimed to have applied.

The Christian nationalist ideology sits at the core of Trump's plans for America. From cutting DEI programs to stripping away reproductive freedoms, Trump is privileging one, specific group.

Trump owes his initial rise in part to Christian nationalists, who once considered him a modern Cyrus, or a flawed vessel for God’s will. In the years since he first came to power, he has become something of a holy figure, whom many consider to be anointed by God. When he survived an assassination attempt last July, some had all the proof they needed. God’s hand was on Trump — and to oppose God’s man was to oppose God Himself.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/mike-flynn/

no lnx

Inside the secret campaign to distance a former Trump NSA official from Michael Flynn's security team

Jordan Green and Raw Story July 28, 2022

In late 2020, Lt. General Michael Flynn sent a security team to the home of Staci Burk, an Arizona law student. The team leader asked Burk to prepare an affidavit with information about ballots on planes that could be used to support lawsuits filed by attorney Sidney Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Members of the security team, part of a group called 1st Amendment Praetorian, took Burk’s cell phone against her will. She later learned that it turned up in Washington, DC a couple of days before Trump supporters overran the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Burk herself was not in DC in December 2020 and January 2021. She said in a court filing in February 2021 that she learned on Jan. 11 that her phone was at the Willard Hotel, which has been described as a “command center” of the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

The 1st Amendment Praetorian security team’s seven-week residency at Burk’s home upended her life. Burk fled her home, incurred financial debt, reassessed her beliefs about the election and struggled to repair her reputation as various conspiracy theorists in the election denial world assailed her credibility.

Burk’s ordeal with 1st Amendment Praetorian — better known by its initials 1AP — pulled her into the orbit of a dizzying array of pro-Trump actors, including Arizona politicians, conspiracy theorists and associates of Flynn and Powell.

In January 2022, almost one year after her cell phone was confiscated, a lawyer who served in theTrump White House Office of Presidential Personnel namedAndrew Kloster reached out to Burk with an unusual request. He wanted a written statement from her disassociating a former National Security Agency official and Flynn associate from 1AP.

The request came just as the investigation of the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol was causing increasing unease among allies of the former president.

Kloster told Burk he was representing Trump NSA official Jim Penroseas a “sort of a favor” during the phone call earlier this year, which Raw Story is reporting for the first time. Kloster also indicated he was familiar with the former president’s interest in the widening congressional probe.

Described in his Federalist Society bio as “a longtime fixture of the conservative movement” who had worked at the Heritage Foundation, Kloster joined the Trump White House Office of Presidential Personnel in 2020. After Trump left office, Kloster served as chief of staff for a special counsel appointed by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to investigate the outcome of the 2020 election in Wisconsin.

“I was in the Trump White House, and I know many people; I talk with them continually about what’s going on,” Kloster said. “And I’ve been involved with some of these other January 6th matters. And it’s really — I think at the highest level, [Penrose is] not involved with anything untoward. But there’s always concern when you’ve got these giant Democratic sort of fishing expeditions that he just wants to button things up so that he can — if anyone does come to him, he can say, ‘Look, I had nothing to do with this. I had nothing to do with that.’

“So, it’s one of those things, like, a lot of people are concerned — Jim is concerned,” Kloster continued. “And it’s more like what can he do affirmatively before anything — before anybody does anything to kind of help him protect himself. And so, I think your issue is one of those loose ends that he just wanted to button up — not because he has any — you know, things could just continue and nothing could ever happen, and he could not get that from you and things could still be totally fine. Or, he might need it at some point.”

Emails to the January 6th Committee for this story seeking clarification on whether Penrose is under scrutiny went unreturned.

According to a professional biography, Jim Penrose retired from the NSA as a senior-level defense intelligence analyst in 2014. Lin Wood, the defamation lawyer who collaborated with Powell to file election challenge lawsuits, has confirmed that Penrose joined Powell and Flynn at his South Carolina estate in November 2020 to work on the election, along with Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, and Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas who would later lead the partisan review of the Arizona election.

Raw Story initially contacted Staci Burk in August 2021. She has continually expressed reluctance about going on the record due to her concern about ongoing threats from associates of Michael Flynn, including 1AP member Michael Kenny. She says she is releasing the recording now because she feels the public has a right to know about matters important to democracy.

Robert Patrick Lewis, the 1AP cofounder, received a subpoena from the January 6th Committee in November 2021, requesting that he appear for a deposition and turn over documents. Lewis’ lawyer, Leslie McAdoo Gordon, has since indicated that Philip Luelsdorff, the other cofounder, and the organization itself have also been subpoenaed. Lewis appeared before the committee in April and invoked the Fifth Amendment, on his lawyer’s advice.

Citing a ruling by a federal judge in California that gave credence to an assertion made by the committee that President Trump participated in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election, McAdoo Gordon said in a letter to the committee that the committee’s position puts pressure on the US Department of Justice to pursue charges.

“Thus, the committee’s theory creates a genuine risk of criminal exposure for anyone who may have, in the opinion of motivated prosecutors, assisted former President Trump or his supporters in any way as they contested the election results between November 2020 and January 6, 2021,” McAdoo Gordon wrote.

In an addendum provided to the committee in July, McAdooGordon confirmed that Joshua James, who has pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, was “a member of 1AP for a very short time in 2020.” James was charged as part of a conspiracy with other members of the Oath Keepers militia. McAdoo Gordon told the committee that James left 1AP after being advised he could not simultaneously be in the Oath Keepers and 1AP. She added that James was not a member of 1AP in January 2021 and has had no association with the group since that time.

Kloster told Burk that Penrose told him he had previously approached 1AP with a similar request seeking a statement absolving him of responsibility, without success.

“It’s timely because of all this general January 6th stuff,” Kloster told Burk. “And he’s not involved with any of that. But it’s just like, they certainly are at one level or another. And they’re probably flailing about. I mean, part of the reason — you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe they would collude to give him that’ — no, they don’t want to give him that because what they’d rather do is have anything to pin on anybody to save their own butts. But, according to him, they had talked and approached them several times to get some letter like this from them. And that is his interpretation of them kind of stiff-arming him is that they want to have him in their back pocket, along with whatever else they have, just to save their own butts on X, Y and Z.”

Burk did not accede to Kloster’s request because she told him that would be a lie, and she said he did not contact her again.

‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’

Based on his conversations with Jim Penrose, Andrew Kloster told Burk he understood his client’s relationship with 1st Amendment Praetorian to be minimal.

“It seems like he thinks that his relationship was that they were there in the mix and that he would talk with people because they reported to other people,” Kloster said. “He comes in as a contractor with a very limited relationship on his technical stuff. He sticks to that lane, but of course, everyone’s talking with everyone, and so he will talk to people. But he was not in the chain of command. He had no idea about X, Y and Z with your phone or whatever.”

As previously reported by ProPublica, Penrose told Burk during a phone call in late December 2020 that he had spent $75,000 to pay former FBI agents to look into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots delivered by plane in Phoenix and Seattle.

“Let me be crystal clear: I’m investigating this on behalf of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, right, the people that are going to take this right up to the president and the Supreme Court and work on these cases,” Penrose told Burk during that call.

The call, which Burk recorded, took place on Christmas day after she and a 1AP member named Brandon Pittman had returned from a local shooting range. According to an incident report by the Florence Police Department, Richard “Chi” Chichester, a former correctional officer from Massachusetts who was also a member of the 1AP security team, reported that two black SUVs had followed Burk home from the shooting range. The incident also prompted a phone call to Penrose.

The recording reveals that Penrose, who expressed concern about Burk independently investigating the two ballots-on-planes leads, set parameters and conditioned the 1AP security team’s continued presence at her home on her compliance.

“Here’s the deal: If we’re going to protect you, we need to have some kind of understanding about what the parameters are and the way you’re going to engage publicly and how you’re going to expose yourself to threats publicly,” Penrose said. “Because it’s all of us, right? We’re all in this together.”

Penrose added that anything Burk did — from picking up the phone to inviting someone into her home — was “impacting the guys in the room with you, and anybody who’s going to be assigned to your protective detail.”

Burk told Raw Story she turned over her recording of the phone call to the January 6th Committee in October 2021.

Raw Story reviewed more than 20 recordings — which Burk has not publicly shared — that provide a picture of how her cell phone was stolen and how it wound up at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, just before Jan. 6.

In recorded statements, Pittman and Chichester — the two 1AP members assigned as Burk’s protective detail at the time — have both admitted that her phone was stolen, while giving conflicting accounts of how it took place. In one of the recordings, Pittman told Burk that he learned that Chichester had her phone in Washington, DC.

Joe Flynn, Michael Flynn’s brother, corroborated the account in a phone call with Burk.When the matter was brought to his attention, Flynn indicated he turned to a man named Geoffrey Flohr for an explanation.

Flohr, whose nickname was “Yoda,” was a former Michigan State Police officer and former polygrapher with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Pittman described him as the “team leader,” and Chichester called him “the guy in charge.”

“Yoda told me that Chi took it out of your hands,” Flynn told Burk. “Or something like that. And when I heard that, I said, ‘What are these people doing taking somebody’s property without their permission?’”

In his phone call to Burk in January, Andrew Kloster said that Jim Penrose acknowledged he was engaged with 1AP “as a general matter, about security.” If Penrose expressed the view that Burk’s phone was needed, Kloster suggested, the 1AP members took it to a level that his client never intended.

“I mean, it’s almost like the Thomas Becket [quote], ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’” Kloster told Burk. “And then they take it as an order to murder the bishop—same thing. Like, ‘We’ve got to worry about our phones. And here’s a phone.’ And then they take that as, ‘Well, let’s go steal the phone.’ That is the darkest interpretation that you can reasonably draw.”

“They decided to do that, yes,” Kloster continued. “And again, I don’t know. But they decided to do that. And then claim that it was an order to, like, cover their butts. Which shouldn’t cover their butts…. But it just makes it look worse for all involved… when really they’re just overzealous nutcases.”

The precise reason why Burk’s phone was stolen and who, if anyone, ordered it remains unclear. Regardless, responsibility for the misdeed ultimately fell to Flohr, who also served in Michael Flynn’s personal security detail for his speech in front of the Supreme Court during the Jericho March on Dec. 12, 2020.

Chichester told Burk he encountered Flohr at the Willard hotel after Burk’s phone surfaced in DC.

“He just tapped me on the shoulder, didn’t say a f***ing thing, okay?” Chichester recounted. “And I was just watching him as he came past, all right? I was angry. I probably showed a little bit of anger in my face or something because I was pissed off at him because of the whole clusterf***…. Because of the whole thing — the stealing — the phone being stolen. The way he did things, it was just all f***ed up, and he was the guy in charge.”

James Curtis, a Marine Corps veteran who replaced Chichester on the 1AP protective detail at Burk’s house, also blamed Flohr.

“Seeing Yoda plan the theft of the phone — that by itself is problematic,” Curtis said. “But the timeline that sets this in motion and moves this off of you being a team player and to a target is knowing that on day one, they came asking for your phone.”

In a call with Burk, Flohr told her he was told “to be quiet” about the phone debacle “because this had the potential of blowing up all over the place. You literally hold — I’m telling you right now — you literally hold 1A Praetorian in your hand. That’s how it’s viewed. But I wanted the f***ing truth.”

Flohr said he reported the matter to Matthew Wallach, a prominent 1AP member.

“We want to do the f***ing right thing,” Flohr said. “And it’s all on my shoulders. So, listen up. It’s all on my shoulder. I went and told him forty-five seconds after f***ing numb nuts there right next to you told me what it was. I went and drilled it right into the people that run this place. And I said, ‘We got to fix this. We gotta f***ing fix this.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re gonna take it under advisement, get through the DC op, and then address it.’”

Flohr ended his involvement with 1AP shortly after Jan. 6, 2021. After the phone debacle, Pittman told Burk that Flohr’s departure was directly linked to the handling of her security detail.

“Because of the issues that we had with you, and the way that they were handled was a bunch of bulls***, and Yoda was the guy that was like, ‘This is a bunch of bulls***,’” Pittman told Burk. “And so, Yoda, like, shields me from a lot of flak, because I tell Yoda, and Yoda tells the bosses. The bosses hit back at Yoda, and then Yoda hits back at me, you know?”

As previously reported by Raw Story, Flohr was on the grounds at the US Capitol, along with a second 1AP member named Alan Kielan.

Leslie McAdoo Gordon, 1AP’s lawyer, said in a statement provided to the January 6th Committee in early July that she learned following Robert Patrick Lewis’s deposition that “two members of 1AP went with or followed the portion of the crowd from the Ellipse that went to the Capitol grounds.” McAdoo Gordon minimized Flohr and Kielan’s connection to the organization, writing, “They had already completed their work with 1AP at that time.” She added that the two men went to the Capitol “without the knowledge or approval of 1AP or Mr. Lewis.”

Flohr could not be reached for comment for this story.

After Burk’s phone was stolen, James Curtis accurately predicted that she would become the target of a campaign to discredit her. He also entertained the possibility that Penrose bore some responsibility for the theft.

“I don’t know Penrose, but if he’s self-serving enough to take your phone, he’s also self-serving enough to help fabricate tales about you that aren’t true,” Curtis said. “But right now, your actions are being defined probably — I’m making some assumptions here — your actions are being defined by whoever it was that wanted your phone. And so, your actions are not going to be defined in a way complimentary to you or the truth you understand, right? They’re going to be defined in ways that benefit whoever took your phone — presumably Penrose, right?”

When Kloster called Burk nearly a year later, she told him that's almost exactly what ended up happening.

“He pushes this out there: ‘She’s crazy, she’s this, she’s that,’" Burk said of Penrose. "And tries to discredit and do all of this stuff, which leads all of those minions who thought they were saving the country and all of that to then chase me out of town and dox and harass and threaten."

Penrose could not be reached for this story.

Reached by Raw Story by phone, Joe Flynn said he doesn’t know why Burk’s phone was stolen, but indicated he was surprised to hear Penrose’s name come up in connection with the episode.

“It was inconsequential,” Flynn said during a brief interview. “It doesn’t mean much to anybody.”

Joe Flynn has acknowledged his role in assigning the 1AP security team to Burk’s home.

“At the time we were working with 1st — 1A Praetorians,” Flynn said in an interview for the QAnon-aligned Patriot Voice channel on Telegram in January. “We were working with them for a very short period of time, just after the election when we were participating in the rallies in Washington. And their team provided General Flynn, myself, Sidney, Patrick [Byrne] and a few others security…. By the way, they provided that security free of charge.At the time, we didn’t have any money, so that was a benefit not having to pay that money. As I understand it, we sent a team out to watch over her out in Phoenix.”

Joe Flynn told Raw Story that his brother “didn’t have anything to do” with the decision to assign a security team to Burk, but Flohr gave a different account to Burk.

“It started with Joe,” he told Burk. “I got a call from him. He goes, ‘And we need ya in the Southwest.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He says, ‘Hold on.’ And then Mike comes on the phone. He says, ‘Yoda, this is Mike Flynn. I need you to get to the Southwest for a whistleblower that we have down there. How long is it going to take you to get there?’ I said, ‘I haven’t been out to Arizona before.’ I said, ‘It’s going to take me a day and a half.’ He says, ‘Get going.’ And so, I did, because I had to pack my car. Two and a half hours later, I was on the road.”

Before 1AP’s arrival, a man named John Shattuck, who is linked to Michael Flynn through the Gold Institute for International Strategy, arranged for a local firm in Arizona called Mayhem Security Solutions to provide security for Burk.

Joe Flynn later explained to Burk that Mayhem was replaced because their fee was too expensive.

“We couldn’t afford it,” Flynn told Burk. “We weren’t going to be able to pay them. They wanted us to pay them thirty thousand dollars. We don’t have that kind of money. So, we said, ‘Okay, we got this other group who can do it for free.’”

‘If there’s going to be a second Trump term…’

Burk, who has since concluded there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, looked into two separate allegations about potentially illegal ballots on planes shortly after the Nov. 3, 2020 election. She said that Geoffrey Flohr, the team leader for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security detail at her house asked her to prepare an affidavit for Powell. Burk said assertions about extensive fraud by Powell and Michael Flynn helped convince her there must be something to the allegations of ballots on planes, which Powell herself mentioned in a speech at a Dec. 2, 2020 rally in Alpharetta, Ga.

“I listened to General Flynn and Sidney Powell say they had reliable evidence there were bad actors rigging the election and their team validated there was a great deal of corroborating evidence it was true and that I was in grave danger of being killed and needed a security team,” Burk said in a statement to Raw Story.

“Those were obviously lies,” Burk continued. “I believed the lies because, at the time, I thought, why else would they be taking the South Korean plane story so seriously when it was their associates who were on the ground with the plane taking video.I now see in their psyop I was a pawn, and it was much easier to raise money if they terrorized the witnesses and then said they needed money to protect the witnesses. I was just a pawn in their elaborate money-making venture,” Burk added.

Burk claims that in late December 2020, she had not been aware of a Dec. 18 meeting that took place at the White House in which Flynn, Powell and Byrne urged President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and order the National Guard to seize voting machines.

“It was my understanding Trump had a plan, and I trusted that,” Burk said. “As things came to light, I now see everything their associates did with me between November 2020 and May 2021 was all gaslighting, cover up and narrative control with an ends-justifying-the-means mentality and little care or concern for how their actions terrified my family and disrupted our lives.”

Joe Flynn said in a text to Raw Story that his brother was not interested in responding.

“This is a story about nonsense and nothing,” he said, “and anyone who reads Raw Story needs to get a mental exam.”

Sydney Powell could not be reached for this story.

Despite describing Penrose as a “contractor” during the period he engaged with 1AP, Kloster also suggested to Burk that his client’s relationship with Michael Flynn was insignificant.

“He knew General Flynn,” Kloster said. “He knew who he was. They had some communication. There was no hand in glove. He didn’t report to him, or vice-versa.”

Kloster also dismissed the notion that Penrose was working on behalf of President Trump, telling Burk: “I’m a little bit closer to some of that stuff. I kind of know — yeah, that’s a little bit, uh, that’s on the order of puffing up, for sure, yeah.”

Kloster did not return messages for this story. But in a post on Telegram in early July, he announced a new project to protect the professional reputations of so-called “America First” public servants.

“We’re just getting started, but if you’re looking to assist in giving our conservative public servants the tools they need to survive attack, pls look at this new org run by our former WH staff,” Kloster wrote.

The website for Personnel Policy Operations describes the new nonprofit’s foundational precept as a belief that conservative public servants targeted for “persecution” by “the radical left, corporate media, tech companies, leftwing NGOs and other activists” need support in order to succeed, while warning that without a robust safety net, “others will be deterred from entering public service in the first place, or from taking real action for their country.”

Klosterrecently spoke up in defense ofKenneth Klukowski,a former senior counsel to Trump Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. Kuklowski reportedly helped Clark draft a letter to state officials in Georgia in late December 2020 requesting that they delay certifying their votes to allow time for federal prosecutors to investigate election fraud allegations.

“The January 6th investigation is all about attacking mid-level and senior staff like Ken, to ensure that we don’t have a farm team in 2024, no matter who the president is,” Kloster told The Federalist last month. “This isn’t about the truth, but about making it impossible for conservatives to successfully enter and leave government.”

In a recent Axios report, Kloster was named as part of a group of “former Trump administration and transition officials working on personnel, legal or policy projects for a potential 2025 government.”

Jack Posobiec, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a political operative who is “known primarily for creating and amplifying viral disinformation campaigns,” praised Kloster’s Personnel Policy Operation while filling in as a host on the “War Room” show for former White House strategist Steve Bannon on July 1. (Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress on July 22 for refusing to cooperate with the January 6th Committee.)

“We’ve got the precinct project that’s going on here from the War Room,” Posobiec told Kloster. “That’s precinct by precinct across the country. We’ve got the dismantling of the administrative state. That’s the other project. But what you just said, I think, is one of the most important lessons, shall we say, from the first Trump term, which is that personnel is policy.

“If there is going to be a second Trump term — and that’s basically been kind of the theme of this show today — that this key office, the PPO and the staffers across the government, right, getting into the administrative state and wrestling down with Leviathan.”

It was through another Trump administration official that Kloster became acquainted with Jim Penrose, he told Staci Burk earlier this year.

“So, I got connected with Jim through a friend of mine who was in the administration, who’s very, very good,” Kloster said. “I had reached out to him thinking it was not quite a pro bono, but sort of a favor, because I don’t actually represent people too often. Then, I spoke to Jim, and I thought, ‘My gosh, he’s done a lot, he’s good, and a lot of people are vouching for him.’ And then, so I’m now representing him.”

---

---

no lnx

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-trump-official-working-on-wisconsin-election-probe/2021/09/15/

Sections

Democracy Dies in Darkness

Politics

Former Trump official working on Wisconsin election probe

By Scott Bauer?|?AP

September 15, 2021

MADISON, Wis. — A Republican attorney who worked in former President Donald Trump’s administration and falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen in Wisconsin appears to have been hired to help with the taxpayer-funded investigation into how the election was run.

Andrew Kloster was listed as the author of a letter signed by lead investigator Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, sent in an email to county election clerks this week. Gableman has a budget of nearly $680,000 to hire whomever he wants to assist with the investigation, which was ordered by Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

Gableman and Kloster did not immediately return messages Tuesday or Wednesday asking about Kloster’s role in the investigation.

Kloster worked as an observer for the Wisconsin Republican Party on election night and was accused of yelling at election workers and police in Green Bay, a claim he disputes.

Kloster’s name showed up as the author of a pdf attachment to an email sent Monday to election clerks and signed by Gableman. That email, sent under the name “john delta,” asked clerks to retain election data, which state and federal law already requires them to do.

Clerks told The Associated Press that the email raised security concerns because it had an attachment and came from a Gmail address rather than a state government account. It was flagged as junk mail in at least eight counties.

Shortly after being contacted for comment Tuesday, Kloster deleted nearly all of the tweets on his Twitter account, where he describes himself as an “ecumenical rightist.”

Gableman’s investigation has already drawn bipartisan criticism and news of Kloster’s involvement was likely to increase skepticism about the legitimacy and fairness of the probe.

Gableman has not announced the names of anyone he has hired for the investigation or submitted any invoices for expenses. Vos has said the probe would be independent and resolve any questions about whether anything irregular or illegal occurred in the election.

Republicans have questioned numerous aspects of the 2020 election, but produced no evidence of widespread fraud. President Joe Biden’s win over Trump by just under 21,000 votes has also withstood recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties and numerous state and federal lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters. To date, only two people out of 3.3 million votes cast have been charged with election fraud.

Kloster, who has deep conservative roots, has been outspoken proponent of Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen from him.

Gableman also told Trump supporters in November that he thought the election had been stolen. After he was hired as special counsel, Gableman said he was committed to conducting an evidence-based investigation that will thoroughly examine the election and ensure that people are confident their vote counts.

:{:{}:

}:

Kloster is active with the Federalist Society.A biography on its website says that he has a “long tenure in the conservative legal movement, at the Scalia Law School, the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and elsewhere.”

Kloster served in the Trump administration as deputy general counsel at the Office of Personnel Management and associate director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. In January, just before Trump left office, Kloster was appointed to the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States.

After his work observing the election in Wisconsin, Kloster submitted an affidavit making unsubstantiated claims about wrongdoing in Brown County and in April published a blog post where he said, without evidence, “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square. No use complaining.”

Amaad Rivera-Wagner, who works as a community liaison in Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich’s office, described a confrontation with Kloster on election night in an email he sent to the city’s attorney in mid-November.

Rivera-Wagner said Kloster verbally accosted him, screamed at election workers who were counting ballots, accused Rivera-Wagner of not working for the city and yelled at police.

“I then turned to him and said ‘Sir, I work for the city and I am talking to Green Bay Police Officers, I need you stop following us,’” according to Rivera-Wagner’s email. “I asked the police to ask him to stop following us.”

Other poll workers gave similar accounts in sworn affidavits.

In his statement, Kloster gives a different version of events, saying Green Bay police were called after he was asking questions of county election officials.

“At some point, I was surrounded by City of Green Bay police and was prevented from observing,” Kloster wrote.

Vos, who hired Gableman to run the investigation, did not immediately return a message Wednesday asking about the apparent hiring of Kloster. Vos consulted with Trump about the probe, promising to give the former president regular updates.

:{:{}:

}:

Separately, Republicans have authorized an investigation by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau, which is expected to be done this fall. A handful of Republicans, including the Assembly elections committee chairwoman, are pushing for a broader review similar to the much-derided effort in Arizona led by Cyber Ninjas, a small cybersecurity firm based in Florida picked to lead the review.

---