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Election deniers hail Trump’s mail-in voting executive order as a “win” that will leave Democrats “toast”

True the Vote: “The era of trust-but-don’t-verify is over”

Written by Alex Kaplan

:{Published 04/06/26

Figures involved in promoting false claims of widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election have praised President Donald Trump’s March 31 executive order regarding mail-in voting, calling it a “major win,” saying he’s “stepping to the plate” and issuing it “while the iron is hot,” and claiming it means “the democrats are toast.” Experts have said that the order, which follows years of right-wing media attacking mail-in voting, stands on dubious legal ground.

• ## Trump issued a legally dubious executive order on mail-in voting, which has been a frequent target of right-wing media

• • On March 31, Trump issued an executive order “that seeks to create lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state” and instructs “the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to verified voters.” As NPR further reported, the executive order “instructs the Department of Homeland Security, working in conjunction with the Social Security Administration, to ‘compile and transmit to the chief election official of each State a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens who will be above the age of 18 at the time of an upcoming Federal election and who maintain a residence in the subject State,’” and “then ‘requires the USPS to transmit ballots only to individuals enrolled on a State-specific Mail-in and Absentee Participation List, ensuring that only eligible absentee or mail-in voters receive absentee or mail-in ballots,’ according to a White House fact sheet.” NPR, [3/31/26]

• • Election law experts wrote that the executive order is “likely unconstitutional” and cannot be implemented by the 2026 midterm elections.NPR noted that “Rick Hasen, an election law expert at UCLA, wrote on his blog that the order is likely unconstitutional” and that he noted that “the timing here makes this virtually impossible to implement in time for November’s elections.” In a piece at Slate, Hasen wrote that “the order is so underwhelming that it suggests Trump’s real purpose was not its implementation but to create more confusion and litigation around elections, further undermining voter confidence in the integrity of American elections” and putting “into question the rules of an election that is just months away, giving voters reason to fear that the Postal Service could sabotage their ballots.” Another expert told Democracy Docket that the order was “convoluted” and “you can’t make [the Postal Service] the gatekeepers for ballot delivery.” And the director of the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights and Elections Program told The New York Times that “the president doesn’t have any authority to write the rules that govern our elections. The Constitution gives that power to Congress and to the states, not to the president.” NPR, [3/31/26; Slate, 4/1/26; Democracy Docket, 4/1/26; The New York Times, 3/31/26]

• • A previous executive order on elections that Trump issued in 2025 has been blocked by the courts. Multiple federal judges have blocked aspects of the order, which “calls for the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections,” “directs state or local officials to record and verify the information,” and “seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day.” Media Matters [10/28/25; The New York Times, 3/25/25, 6/13/25; The Associated Press, 1/30/26]

• • Some Trump allies have proposed Trump issue an executive order declaring a “national emergency” to prevent supposed election fraud. An advocate for the proposal, which has reportedly circulated within the Trump administration, said that it “would empower the president to ban mail ballots and voting machines as the vectors of foreign interference.” Trump allies reportedly spearheading the proposed order include attorney Peter Ticktin, a QAnon figure known as Juan O. Savin, and right-wing author Jerome Corsi. Media Matters, [10/28/25, 2/26/26]

• • Trump and right-wing media have spread misinformation about mail-in ballots for years. Despite their claims, there has not been evidence of widespread voter fraud or evidence of mail-in ballots being inherently corrupt. Media Matters, [8/21/20; CNN, 3/24/26]

• ## Election deniers praised the new executive order, calling it a “major win” and claiming “the democrats are toast”

• • Podcaster Jovan Pulitzer, whom the Arizona Mirror described as “a favorite of election fraud conspiracy theorists,” called the executive order a “major win” and said that “we’ve got to take the wins as we can get the wins.” Pulitzer called aspects of the order to supposedly force states to make sure their lists of voters are accurate “genius,” and he called the order “the clearest path for getting a thing done.” He described the effort as a “monumental movement” that is “going to create all kinds of hell.” Arizona Mirror, [4/30/21; Rumble, 4/1/26, 4/1/26]

• • True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht: While the executive order is “a slippery slope,” “it’s still worth doing. Somebody’s got to do something. And God bless President Trump for at least, you know, doing what he can.” Engelbrecht — who founded True the Vote, which aims to “restore America’s confidence in our electoral process” and was behind the claims of the election misinformation film 2000 Mules — went on to praise Trump “for at least stepping to the plate, putting it in writing, and forcing them to respond.” Additionally, True the Vote posted on Truth Social that the executive order means that “the era of trust-but-don’t-verify is over.” Media Matters, [9/15/22, 12/4/24; Texas Monthly, 8/22/22; True the Vote, True the Vote Now, 4/1/26; Truth Social, 3/31/26]

• • A QAnon influencer who goes by Juan O. Savin, and who previously recruited election denial candidates for positions where they would be in charge of election administration, said Trump was “really just kind of forcing all the various agencies to do their job” with the executive order. Savin said that “anybody thinks that this is doing something truly unique and new is probably wrong,” and he claimed Trump “has total authority to direct the actions to the post office” because “there’s no intrusion upon states’ rights.” Savin had previously said his team “wrote up” a different executive order regarding voting that has reportedly circulated within the Trump administration and would declare a national election emergency to crack down on supposed fraud. In a separate interview, Savin acknowledged that Trump’s latest executive order on elections was “not the complete executive order that my team put together in the 17-page executive order” and said the administration “may very well break that up into several pieces.” The Daily Beast, [11/2/22; Media Matters, 10/28/25, 1/26/23; Lawfare, 3/20/26; Rumble, Nino’s Corner, 4/1/26; Rumble, The B2T Show, 3/31/26]

• • Seth Keshel claimed the executive order was Trump “striking while the iron is hot and counting on the morons wearing out their welcome with the cheating.” Keshel is a former U.S. Army intelligence captain and blogger who “has become a darling among election deniers by factoring widespread voter fraud — the existence of which has been widely debunked — into his election predictions,” according to The New York Times. He posted on Telegram that “some communist court will strike down his mail-in voting order, which will then be expedited to SCOTUS,” which “is sick of mail-in ballot games and all 6 Republican-appointed justices appear to be ready to squash the concept of late-arriving mail-in ballots.” The New York Times, [10/15/24; Substack, accessed 2/5/26; Telegram, 4/1/26]

• • David Clements said the executive order was potentially “great” and “wonderful” and means “the democrats are toast.” Lawfare reported in 2024 that Clements had “criss-crossed the country to evangelize about purported election fraud,” and The Washington Post reported in 2022 that he was “traveling the country trying to persuade local leaders to withhold certification of election results.” In April 1 social media posts, he suggested that the order was not “violating state’s rights” because it “does not create new substantive rules from scratch; it directs federal agencies to implement and enhance existing federal statutory requirements." He also said the order means that “democrats are toast” and the “toys” from “the swamp” — i.e., existing federal election rules, which he claimed “the swamp used … to inflate numbers and commit massive fraud” — now “are being used against them.” On a podcast, Clements said he “got a bunch of texts from other election integrity folks” about the order, and “most of them were bummed” because it did not focus on the “big stuff,” but he said he thinks the order is “brilliant” and could potentially be “a great executive order. It's wonderful.” Lawfare, [10/31/24; The Washington Post, 9/8/22; Telegram, 4/1/26, 4/1/26; Rumble, Absolute Storm, 4/2/26]

• • Kris Jurski, “a Florida activist who has promoted election conspiracy theories,” wrote on his Substack that the executive order “proves the message is finally getting through: the voter rolls are the strategic foundation of every election.” Added Jurski, “If the list is corrupt, the outcome can be corrupt — regardless of how the votes are counted.” NBC News, [3/18/26; Substack, 4/5/26]

• • On Newsmax, Kari Lake called the executive order possibly “the most important executive order [Trump’s] ever signed.” Lake, a Trump administration official with the U.S. Agency for Global Media and former Arizona GOP candidate who focused intensely on election fraud claims during her campaigns, said on Newsmax that “the people of this country need some relief from the corrupt people running our elections.” The Guardian, [7/31/24; Media Matters, 6/14/23; Newsmax, Rob Schmitt Tonight, 3/31/26]

//

1. ### Right-wing figures and Trump allies are calling for Trump to declare a “national emergency” to prevent supposed election fraud

10/28/25 9:54 AM EDT

2. ### Election deniers have reportedly coordinated with the Trump White House on a draft executive order declaring a “national emergency” over elections

02/26/26 5:47 PM EST

3. ### “Exactly what we were asking him to do”: Election deniers cheer FBI's raid of Fulton County election center

02/05/26

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AN 6 24

no lnx

alternet-

‘They could have killed me’: Trump's 2020 'Seattle whistleblower' finally revealed

Michael Flynn (center) leaves a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., with Geoffrey Flohr aka "Yoda" (front) on Dec. 12, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Jordan GreenandRaw Story June 23, 2024

The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.

A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.

Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.

She did not want to go.

But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.

Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.

What was possibly happening here?

As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of which Raw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.

The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.

More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.

“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”

The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.

These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.

These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.

And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.

‘A plane full of ballots’

Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”

Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.

The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.

The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.

With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.

The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”

Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.

Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.

“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.

Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”

Enter Staci Burk.

Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.

But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.

Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.

“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”

“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”

Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)

“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”

What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.

Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.

Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.

Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’

On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”

Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.

“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.

“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.

“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.

As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.

Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.

Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.

Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.

“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”

At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.

At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.

Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.

Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.

The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.

“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”

As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.

In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.

And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.

‘He fabricated everything’

Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.

Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.

“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.

“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”

The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.

Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?

Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.

The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.

Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.

More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”

Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.

“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.

“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.

A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp

Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.

In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.

One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.

Except for the fact that it is real.

It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.

The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.

The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.

The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”

‘There was no goldmine’

Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.

She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”

Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.

“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.

But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.

“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”

This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”

No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.

“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.

“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”

The band breaks up

These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”

Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.

In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”

Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.

Some of the key players involved have also split up.

Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”

Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.

“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.

Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.

In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”

But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.

Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.

Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.

Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.

Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.

Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.

“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”

Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.

“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”

“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”

• * * * *

Key players

Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.

Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.

Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.

Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.

Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.

Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.

Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.

Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.

Shawn Wilson is the president of MSG Risk Management & Intelligence (formerly Mayhem Solutions Group). Jim Penrose told Staci Burk that he was initially concerned that Wilson, along with Kenneth Scott Koch, were “hostile actors” intent on harming Sabrina Keliikoa.

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===

https://www.thecentersquare.com/arizona/maricopa-county-audit-supporter-threatens-arizona-gop-lawmaker/article_1fa8dee6-14c5-11ec-abc0-3fee15ebc3d6.html

Center Square) – A Republican member of the Arizona Legislature says her family’s safety is her first priority after getting a threatening email over her scrutiny of Maricopa County’s 2020 election.

State Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, R-Scottsdale, posted a screenshot of an email from an account named Matt Boster that started out by calling her a racial slur.

The sender references the audit in the email, inferring that Ugenti-Rita is withholding it from the public.

“... you have one chance to give the American people the Audit report or [we’re] coming for you, we know where you live, we know where you get groceries, we know where your family lives,” the email read. “You better do the right thing or [you’re] going to feel the consequences.”

Ugenti-Rita said she had referred the matter to law enforcement.

“My family’s safety is my [No. 1] priority [and] I will NOT tolerate anyone going after me or my family," Ugenti-Rita tweeted. "Due to misinformation [and] the unmet expectations of the public surrounding the audit, threats like this will unfortunately continue.”

The post was apparently the reason Senate President Karen Fann released a statement hours earlier saying that, no matter where one’s opinions on the audit stands, threats against a lawmaker or their family are “unacceptable.”

“I understand passions run high on the issue of voter integrity, but personal attacks and threats of violence cross the line,” Fann, R-Prescott, said Friday in a statement. “It is not a partisan issue; party affiliation doesn’t matter when it comes to personal safety. Members of the Legislature receiving threats will report any acts of intimidation or aggression to the authorities.”

A Texas-based audit supporter named Seth Keshel shared Ugenti-Rita’s legislative email and phone number the day before she received the threat, suggesting people reach out to her regarding the results of an independent canvass of voters in Maricopa County led by Liz Harris, a former candidate for a seat in the state House.

“Here is a RINO that needs a serious assist,” Keshel said in a post to Telegram on Sept. 9. “Tell her and her staff you need answers on Maricopa canvass results and if they try to distract based on a published correction, tell them to read the report.”

Keshel was not reachable for comment Monday. His post had been viewed more than 100,000 times.

he released his own analysis of the 2020 election that accuses Maricopa County and many others of “rampant fraud.” Keshel’s report got the attention of former President Donald Trump, who released a statement praising it.

Ugenti-Rita is not the first state official to receive threats tied to the challenge of Maricopa County’s 2020 election. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey assigned Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, police protection in May after she reportedly received death threats.

no lnx grx

Investigations

Election deniers have taken their fraud theories on tour — to nearly every state

June 30, 20223:52 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

    Transcript

Seth Keshel speaks at a New Hampshire election security seminar presented by the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group in Manchester, N.H., on Nov. 19, 2021. Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army captain, has worked to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Brian Snyder/Reuters

On a quiet Tuesday night in Howard County, Md., dozens of people gather in a community center and listen to Seth Keshel's 10-point plan.

"Captain K," as he's known in election fraud circles, is a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, and he is walking through his go-to presentation: comparisons of vote totals from the past few election cycles, which he falsely claims prove President Biden's win in 2020 was illegitimate.His 10-point plan to "true election integrity" includes banning all early voting and requiring all American voters to re-register.

The next night, more than a thousand miles away in Minneapolis, in a small building across from a popular garden shop, roughly 60 people wait for David Clements to take the stage.

Clements, professorial in a tan blazer with a graying beard and unruly curly hair, begins his presentation with a prayer. Then he goes to the slideshow.

The audience, which appears to be all white and mostly middle-aged, occasionally gasps as he shows charts and graphs, which he claims contain evidence of widespread election fraud.

Sponsor Message

Clements ends his talk with a request to the people in the audience: Go to the offices of your local officials.

"They respond to fear," he says. "You need to hold these institutions with the contempt they deserve."

An NPR investigation found that since Jan. 6, 2021, the election denial movement has moved from Donald Trump's tweets to hundreds of community events like these — in restaurants, car dealerships and churches — led by a core group of election conspiracy influencers like Keshel and Clements.

These local gatherings may reach fewer people than viral internet posts, but they seem to effectively spur action by regular people, who are motivated by their almost evangelical intimacy.

"It's this constellation of election conspiracy theorists," said Chris Krebs, a former Department of Homeland Security official who oversaw the federal government's election security efforts in 2020. "You can see the complexion of local politics shifting as a result. They have decentralized post-January 6th and are really trying to effect change at the lowest-possible level."

NPR monitored the election-denial influencers through events advertised on their public social media accounts, the websites and social media accounts of local organizations, events NPR attended, video footage and news reports over the past 18 months. Four prominent purveyors of voting misinformation stood out, crisscrossing the country to appear at at least 308 events in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

NPR tracked Keshel and Clements, as well asDouglas Frank, who misleadingly claims to have discovered a secret algorithm that swings vote totals across the U.S. (his methodology has been widely debunked by voting experts), and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

The scale of their movements paints a portrait of an election denial movement that has evolved into a nationwide force, beyond just swing states — and despite the Jan. 6 Committee's investigation and efforts by voting officials at every level to combat disinformation. NPR's investigation is the first such effort to document the scope of these influencers.

:{"It's an existential threat to American democracy," said Franita Tolson, an elections expert at the University of Southern California. "If the numbers get big enough, it's unclear whether we will survive it."

The chain reaction}:

Carly Koppes, who runs elections in Weld County, Colo., says she noticed a tone shift in her county after Douglas Frank came to town.

She's reading over an email that just came in from one of her voters.

"Traitors will be exposed. These guys are going down and you have no chance..." She trails off as she scans. "You deserve everything coming your direction."

The Republican county clerk takes a long sigh.

Last summer, a group of suspicious citizens here knocked on thousands of doors looking to uncover evidence of election fraud.

"It started because of Dr. Frank and his really bad data analysis," Koppes said. "Him and his people, unfortunately, just don't know how to read election records correctly."

Douglas Frank, a former high school math and science teacher from Ohio, gives a presentation to about 100 people in the Missouri Capitol rotunda on his theories about election fraud, on Jan. 6, in Jefferson City, Mo. Frank, whose ideas have been debunked, claims to have discovered secret algorithms that were used to rig the 2020 election in favor of President Biden.

David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP

In his former life, Frank was a high school math and science teacher in Ohio. He's moved now into touring the country spreading election fraud conspiracies full time.

He, and the other three men whose movements NPR documented, either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment for this story.

In the visit Koppes mentioned, on April 24, 2021, Frank held court in a DoubleTree hotel conference room near Denver. Dozens of people cheered as Frank pointed at graphs that he claimed showed how the 2020 election was marred by fraud (something that's been debunked many times by hand counts, audits and investigative reports across the country).

"Go knock on some doors!" Frank implored.

And many people in this Colorado community listened.

A group popped up there, dedicated to this sort of fraud-motivated canvassing, and they devoted their organizing playbook to Frank.

Jim Gilchrist, a doctor of holistic medicine in Colorado, saw an online posting of Frank's talk and volunteered to canvass with the group. He estimates he spent more than 20 hours last summer knocking on doors.

"I just kind of wished there was some mechanism for there to be a more transparent kind of way of making sure the vote was counted correctly," Gilchrist said in an interview with NPR. "Douglas Frank kind of offered a solution that we could do as citizens."

Influencing policymakers

The election denialists also frequently bump elbows with people in power.

NPR found that over the past year and a half, the men met or appeared with at least 78 elected officials at the federal, state and local levels — many of whom will have a role in how future elections are run and certified.

At least two secretaries of state, two U.S. senators, 10 U.S. representatives, two state attorneys general and two lieutenant governors met or appeared with the figures NPR tracked. More than three dozen members of state legislatures, many of whom have introduced legislation in their states that would affect how Americans cast ballots, have also appeared at events with them.

"Our voices have gotten bigger and bigger every single day since last year and you cannot stop that," said Mike Lindell, at a rally in January of 2022 attended by three members of Arizona's congressional delegation, Debbie Lesko, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar, all of whom voted not to certify Arizona's election results at the U.S. Capitol a year earlier. "We will get our country back."

Mike Lindell, political activist and CEO of MyPillow, speaks during a rally hosted by former President Donald Trump at the Delaware County Fairgrounds on April 23 in Delaware, Ohio.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

In some cases, the election denial influencers worked to persuade skeptical officials to embrace their claims.

In May 2021, Frank met with staff from the Ohio secretary of state's office for more than two hours.

:{NPR acquired audio of the meeting, which was first reported by The Washington Post, through a public records request.

The staffers in the meeting pushed back on Frank's many fraud accusations, and at one point he responded by threatening to send unauthorized people, or "plants" as he put it, into local voting offices.}:

"We have plants everywhere that go into buildings when your machines are on and capture your IP addresses. We have those, not necessarily in Ohio but we can arrange for that," Frank said, his voice rising. "So all I'm trying to point out to you is that this is coming. Be ready. And I'm not trying to fight you — do you see that I'm trying to help you?"

The staffers in that meeting didn't budge. But shortly after that meeting, someone did attempt to breach an elections network in Lake County, Ohio, though a state official told NPR that no sensitive data was ultimately accessed.

The four election denialists also appeared with well over 100 candidates for local, state and federal office in the 2022 primaries. Some, including U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois and state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who is running to be governor of Pennsylvania, have already won their party's nomination for the general election.

A fraud evolution

The highest profile of the group that NPR tracked is MyPillow CEO Lindell, a prominent and longtime Trump supporter.

Lindell says he has spent millions of dollars on his crusade, which started almost as soon as ballots were cast on Nov. 3, 2020. Sometime around March of 2021, he brought Frank into the fold and Frank's popularity skyrocketed.

"I went from being completely mum to suddenly 10 million people knowing me in about a week," he told a group in Utah last July.

David Clements talks to audience members after speaking to the Surry County board of commissioners during a presentation by several individuals that aimed to cast doubt on election integrity, urging the commission to replace existing voting machines with purely paper ballots in Dobson, N.C., on May 16.

Jonathan Drake/Reuters

Frank often speaks at events with Keshel and Clements. Clements is a lawyer and former professor at the New Mexico State University business school who was fired for not complying with the school's COVID-19 policies. Keshel is a retired Army captain and veteran of Afghanistan.

While those in the group often repeat talking points and appear together, they don't necessarily coordinate appearances or strategy. And other than Lindell, they were mostly unknown before 2020. Now they're influencers in the movement with online followings of hundreds of thousands of people. They even promote merchandise like T-shirts, books and body lotions, along with their election misinformation.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, says they're using election fraud as a vehicle to advance themselves.

"There's no shortage of ability to access the truth about our election system, yet there seems to be a proliferation of people willing to lie about it," Benson said. "I think it's logical to conclude that they know better. And that they're knowingly spreading misinformation ... to win elections, to raise money, to gain attention and celebrity."

Benson says her office has seen a direct correlation between election denier events in Michigan and a rise in harassment toward voting officials.

"Whenever there is an appearance in which the former president or Lindell or others come out attacking our system we know to expect an uptick in threats and add additional security as a result," she said.

But she, and the thousands of other Americans in charge of elections nationwide, have yet to figure out a truly effective way to fight back and break through to the two-thirds of Republican voters who believe voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election.

That's because election denialism has grown from a political movement into something almost religious, said Koppes, the Republican county clerk in Colorado.

Supporters of former President Donald Trump cheer as he speaks at a Save America Rally in Florence, Ariz., on Jan. 15. Mike Lindell and three Arizona lawmakers — Debbie Lesko, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar — also attended the event.

Ross D. Franklin/AP

"There's just so much that is incorrect that they just keep repeating and repeating and repeating," Koppes said. "And then as soon as I have absolutely blocked off that path with actual correct information, then they just move that goal post. And they keep just moving the goal posts. And moving the goal posts."

Between conversations with voters and research on all the separate false claims that have popped up over the past two years, she estimates she's spent thousands of hours dealing with the fallout of Donald Trump's misinformation campaign.

At this point, she says she's had to stop engaging with voters who are unwilling to listen to her.

"Some of these people really, truly believe they're doing the Lord's work," Koppes said. "But I think at the end of the day, they so desperately want to believe what they're being fed, that they're using all means to justify what they're doing."

Monika Evstatieva, Barbara Van Woerkom, Barrie Hardymon and Meg Anderson of NPR's Investigations team contributed reporting to this story. NPR's Nick Underwood contributed to the data visualizations.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/maga/

raw story

Patrick Bergy rode his Harley-Davidson to Austin, Texas, and was waiting for an interview with conspiracy-theory honcho Alex Jones in mid-August of 2020 when he learned about thearrest of Millie Weaver, who also happened to be a correspondent for Jones’ outfit InfoWars.'

The details were vague, but Weaver and her partner and producer Gavin Wince, along with her brother, had been arrested at their home in Ohio while Weaver was uploading the final cut of a documentary called ShadowGate, in which Bergy was featured as a “whistleblower” who spoke about his experience as a military contractor following his discharge from the Army in 2007. Given the urgency of the moment, Bergy looked up the address for InfoWars and walked into the studio without an appointment. Jones quickly recorded an interview for a breaking-news segment about the arrest of one of his contributors.

“I’m the pioneer of [Interactive Internet Activities], basically social media/fake news,” Bergy said,remarking on the irony that he was sitting in the guest chair at InfoWars. “The last place that I’m going to go is an organization called ‘Information Warfare,’ right?”

Following Weaver’s arrest and while he was still in Texas, Bergy said he also spoke to a man named Robert Caron, a shadowy figure who claimed to have a background in intelligence. Bergy had met him before when Caron convened a meeting of his group Joint Task Force MAGA, or JTF MAGA — aself-described “MAGA counterstrike supergroup of American patriots to help expose illegal government surveillance and support President Donald Trump in Making America Great Again” — at a restaurant in the Tampa, Fla. area two years earlier, according to Bergy’s recollection. Bergy turned down an offer to join JTF MAGA, concluding that it wasn’t geared to his specific interest. But he had stayed in touch with Caron.

Caron then offered Bergy a $5,000 retainer to stay in Texas and work on a project, according to Bergy. As much as Bergy could discern based on the details offered by Caron, the job entailed setting up a website to promote JTF MAGA’s content. Bergy said he declined the offer, telling Caron he needed to get to Ohio to help Weaver and Wince.

Shortly after Weaver’s arrest, according to Bergy, he was contacted by Lara Logan — a former correspondent for CBS’ "60 Minutes" who had been widely praised for her coverage of Iraq and other conflict zones in the Middle East. At the time she was working for the Fox Nation streaming service. The claim was first outlined in an affidavit that Bergy executed in early December 2020 and that he provided to attorney Sidney Powell for use in her lawsuits seeking to overturn the presidential election.

Bergy did not disclose the identity of the “person that arranged the conversation,” but has since said that it was Caron. During a conference call with Weaver, Wince, Bergy, Caron, Logan and Logan’s husband, Joseph W. Burkett, Bergy wrote in his affidavit that “we were asked if we would meet them at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to discuss further; I declined and so did Millie and Gavin.”

Upon its release, the ShadowGatedocumentary took hits from all sides, withlegacy media assailing it as being “filled with false claims and insinuations,” and others on the far right questioning Weaver’s credibility because she was charged with domestic violence. The chargesreportedly stemmed from an incident in April when Weaver, her brother and Wince attempted to wrest a phone away from Weaver’s mother, prompting her to flee to a neighbor’s house and called 911. Shortly after the documentary’s release, Alex Jones — never shy about making outlandish claims himself — fired Weaver from InfoWars.

But Logan came to Weaver’s defense,tweeting on Aug. 22: “By now this is a familiar pattern — another tactic of information warfare that has proved so effective. I know many Americans are looking forward to getting the whole truth on this. It’s on all of our interests given the significance of what was done just to hold onto power.”

Logan’s endorsement carried some weight. On one hand, her credibility had sustained damage from a story about the 2012 Benghazi attack that “60 Minutes” was forced toretract (and much later would bepushed out of Fox Nation for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele). On the other hand, unlike Jones who built a career around promoting conspiracy theories,Logan had worked at the highest levels in journalism and was widely admired for her courageous reporting in Iraq and decades of experience.

Later, Bergy said Wince told him that Logan had Burkett reach "out to them with information that exposed the arrest of Millie Weaver was orchestrated” by military contractors in a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio.

Bergy noted that Burkett had previously worked as a military contractor himselfemployed by the public relations firm Lincoln Group, which was hired by the Defense Department toplant positive stories geared towards Iraqi audiences during the Iraq war. Bergy faulted Logan in his affidavit for not investigating information that she privately shared with Weaver and Wince, especially considering her track record as an investigative journalist.

“It is extremely concerning to all involved the claims made by the Logans [sic] and warrant further investigation,” Bergy wrote in his affidavit. “The arrest of a US journalist, orchestrated on a US military base, cannot be dismissed without a thorough investigation into the Logan’s [sic] claims.”

While Logan has not reported on the mysterious connection between Weaver’s arrest and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, her journalistic instincts would prove to be attuned to the behind-the-scenesefforts to overturn the election. On Jan. 5, 2021, one day before the assault on the US Capitol, Logantweeted out a link to a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” The document had been used in presentations byPhil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in information warfare, as hebriefed members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5. The PowerPoint called on Trump to order the National Guard, with support from the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, to conduct a recount of the 2020 election. On Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to meet to accept the presidential elections, the PowerPoint proposed three options for Vice President Mike Pence, all of which would have either delayed or prevented Joe Biden from becoming the next president.

“This is what is being briefed on the Hill today re election fraud — for those of you who want to go to the source rather than get it second-hand,” Logan wrote.

Logan and Burkett could not be reached for comment for this story.

The charges against Weaver and Wince were eventuallydropped. Whether there is any truth to the explosive claim that Weaver’s arrest was secretly orchestrated from a military base remains unclear. Regardless, it reinforced Weaver’s paranoid view of a Deep State intent on silencing Trump supporters.

“From what I hear, we’re in the jurisdiction for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base,” Weaver told her followers during a Periscopelivestream in late 2020. “And apparently it would have been really easy to have us at this jail here and then transferred to an espionage jail. What’s going on right now is insane, guys. It’s very creepy.”

‘They were setting all these scams up’

The ShadowGate documentary had been quickly debunked byUSA Today andPolitiFact, and although it reportedly drew millions of views, it receded from public discussion as just one more QAnon-inspired conspiracy vehicle, as violence inKenosha, Wis. andPortland, Ore. set the stage for the final tumultuous months of the 2020 presidential election campaign. While the documentary might have seemed obscure even for the far-right audience to which it was geared, its four principals would find roles in the network of conspiracy theorists and operatives that sprung into action to delegitimize the 2020 election and aid Donald Trump in his quest to hold onto power.

In addition to Weaver, the producer and writer of ShadowGate, Wince, credited as its director, and thedocumentary’s two featured “whistleblowers” — Bergy and pro-Trump podcaster Terpsehore “Tore” Maras — all wound up in Washington, DC in mid-November 2020.

The ShadowGatedocumentary had a particular utility in the effort to delegitimize the 2020 election, as Bergy himself would come to recognize. More than three months before attorney Sidney Powelltold radio host Glenn Beck on Nov. 20 that “our forces” confiscated servers held by an election technology company named Scytl in Germany, Weaver had narrated a similar scenario in ShadowGate.

“Scytl is one of the most notorious outsource companies for elections, with regular electronic voting machine problems, who also tabulate our election results and cloud services in Europe, aka servers outside the United States,” Weaver said. The claim was false.

Weaver could not be reached for this story.

Spurned by Alex Jones —who heavily promoted the Jan. 6 rally in DC and took to a bullhorn to address rioters at the Capitol that day — Weaver found a new patron in Patrick Byrne. After Jan. 6, Weaver collected and analyzed video for Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, in support of his effort to cast the attack as the work of “antifa” agent provocateurs.

Bergy told Raw Story that he also later learned that Logan was responsible for arranging for Weaver and Wince to come to Washington, DC after the 2020 election. Bergy said he was asked to come to DC by Weaver and Wince, and they were already there when he arrived around Nov. 15, 2020. Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO and significant financier for the election denial efforts, confirmed in a text message to Raw Story that he covered the cost of hotel rooms for Weaver, Wince, Bergy and Maras at the Westin Arlington Gateway Hotel in late 2020. But Byrne said he had no knowledge of Logan encouraging Weaver and Wince to come to DC and did not make any arrangements with her.

Byrne also footed the bill for a reporting trip to California by Weaver and Wince in late November 2020, according to Bergy. In a text provided by Bergy, Wince warned that alienating Byrne “could cost us our trip to CA.” Byrne did not dispute the claim that he covered the cost of the trip.

“No, I don’t have a specific recollection of this, it sounds plausible,” Byrne told Raw Story. “I’ll go farther: vaguely rings a bell. That is to say, I’m vaguely remembering that I did pay for a trip or two for them. Along with many dozens of others, incidentally.”

The catalyst for Maras to show up in DC in November 2020 is somewhat murkier. In a conversation on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras told Bergy that she had known Byrne “before everyone else.” Byrne gave a different account, telling Raw Story that he had “never met or heard of her until” he met her around Nov. 16, 2020. But Joshua Merritt, an IT consultant who provided a declaration to support Powell’s lawsuits attempting to overturn the election, has made statements in the past that predate the relationship between Byrne and Maras long before November 2020. In a reply to an April 30 Twitter thread, Merrittsaid Maras had been “brought in with Byrne” to work on investigating alleged election fraud after the 2019 election in Kentucky.

In retrospect, Bergy said he has come to see that the claims put forward in ShadowGate performed a valuable service in preparing the ground for the broad election denial narrative that Trump’s supporters worked to build in November.

“That was two or three months before the election,” Bergy said. “That was right after ShadowGatewas released. What else was in ShadowGate? Scytl. They knew November 3rd was going to happen, let alone January 6th. They were setting all these scams up. It sure seems like they were putting these things in place at least three months ahead of time to be able to prepare for Trump’s loss.

“It was useful,” Bergy added. “If they didn’t plan it, they should have.”

Bergy said he learned later that Waldron, the retired Army colonel, praised ShadowGateto Weaver and Wince at a party at Trump International Hotel on Nov. 14, 2020.

“Phil Waldron approached Millie and Gavin, and said he was the biggest fan of ShadowGate,” Bergy told Raw Story. “He identified himself as Phil Waldron and said he believed everything in ShadowGatebecause he replaced the IIA chief after I left. He said he knew who I was, and he understood my background in ShadowGate.”

Waldron could not be reached for comment for this story, while Byrne denied that the content of ShadowGateplayed any role in shaping his initial impressions of Weaver, Wince, Maras and Bergy.

“No, never heard of them or that movie until mid-November 2020,” he told Raw Story. “They were on their own path when I met them, and they have continued so. None of them have ever taken any direction from me.”

‘Calling out too many people… will backfire’

Lara Logan’s behind-the-scenes role would prove to be a source of ongoing tension among the principals in the ShadowGatefilm during the period they were working out of the Westin hotel to aid the effort to overturn the election.

“Calling out too many people (Logan, Burns [sic]) will backfire,” Wince told Bergy in November 2020, according to a text obtained by Raw Story. “It could compromise things we have in the works.

“Pissing off Burns [sic] could cost us our trip to CA we have planned that are important, and pissing off Logan while mentioning Millie could piss off Millie and/or cost her ability to use that channel,” he added.

Wince could not be reached for this story.

In Bergy’s view, his duty as a whistleblower obligated him to tell the whole truth, no matter whose sensibilities might be offended.

“When you say we need to be putting this s*** out because nothing’s getting done,” he told Wince, “I didn’t link to Millie, and I’m posting my affidavit tomorrow online which literally includes Lara’s/Joe’s involvement.”

The central focus of Bergy’s 70-page affidavit was the development of “social media psychological warfare weapons and techniques'' that he had observed as a military contractor, and his position that they were being applied on domestic targets in the United States. The affidavit traced a history from a complaint filed by Bergy to the Department of Defense Inspector General in 2015, and then name-dropped a wide array of prominent figures with whom he interacted in his quest to bring the information to light, including Logan and her husband, Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro, InfoWars host Alex Jones, “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander and Trump confidant Roger Stone.

Bergy has said his sole objective during his time in DC was to get his information to Trump.

In August 2021, Bergy asked Byrne to explain what happened to his affidavit once he submitted it to the legal team led by Sidney Powell so that he could include his response in a book. Byrne obliged.

“Your affidavit was read and absorbed,” Byrne confirmed. “The whistleblowers were met with and debriefed. Everything they and you had to say got put into a larger picture we were forming. The information from the whistleblowers in Arizona could immediately inform what we were doing; your bigger picture information, while accepted as truthful, did not have a precise application, though it was valuable for our situational awareness.”

In contrast to Bergy’s affidavit, Powell filed a 37-page anonymized declaration submitted by his fellow ShadowGate“whistleblower”Terpsehore “Tore” Maras in support of her lawsuits in Wisconsin and Arizona.

Maras’ declaration mentioned Scytl, the Spain-based election technology company, a total of23 times, echoing the claim made by Weaver three and a half months earlier in ShadowGate. In her declaration, Maras claimed that votes cast in the 2020 election were put through a “mixing phase” while an “algorithm redistributes votes.” Her declaration also claimed that “Scytl re-encrypts ballot data” and has the ability to access the vote through “backdoors” that could “alter the range of the algorithm deployed to satisfy the outcome sought in the case of algorithm failure.”

Maras’ claims represented a fundamental misunderstanding of Scytl’s role in US elections. The company provides election-night reporting services that offer a visual representation of votes tabulated by local election officials, but as it noted in a fact-checkingstatement issued more than two weeks before Maras executed her declaration, Scytl does not tabulate votes.

“On election night, each election office tabulates the vote using their tabulation vendor’s physical machines and uploads those results to Scytl’s [election-night reporting program],” the company explained. All ENR servers being used for the US elections are physically located in the United States. Scytl does NOT tabulate, tally or count votes.” Scytl’s statement was cited by a fact-check published byReuters, which rated as “false” a claim by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) that the US Army had seized Scytl’s servers in Germany.

Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who assisted Powell’s team in preparing the lawsuits, cautioned another election denier in a private Telegram message in August 2021 that Maras’ claims shouldn’t be taken at face value.

“Tore is not credible,”Keshel wrote. “I was on the initial teams drafting lawsuits over the states with Sidney and Flynn. Our teams researched her heavily and found many problems.” He added that “unfortunately she wound up as a key witness in one of our cases.”

Byrne told Raw Story in an email that he “had no hand” in preparing the lawsuits, “and was not aware until much later that Tore had provided the affidavit.”

But Byrne was sufficiently concerned about Maras’ credibility that he tasked a team with interviewing her a couple of weeks after the declaration was filed in federal court.

“Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know in the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side,” Byrne told Bergy in his August 2021 email. “They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subjects rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours (precisely as I warned her they would do if she did not heed a little coaching from me).”

Maras defended her qualifications in an email to Raw Story.

"If you read my affidavit, you would know that I am an amateur cryptographer," she said. "Therefore, I am very familiar with cryptography, ethics and research surrounding it. I participate in attending such conferences and seminars when I can."

Robert Caron, who had initially put Bergy, Weaver and Wince in touch with Lara Logan, was in and around DC from November 2020 through January 2021, according to Bergy.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Maras perceived him as a threat. Speaking with Bergy on the Stereo app in July 2021, Maras fumed about a host of obscure operators vying for Powell and Flynn’s attention in late 2020.

“And you have this motherf***er standing there, bidding to help you?” she said. “They’re there to destroy you. And they are seeing everything we are giving you. And they are dismantling it. Like, that other guy, f***ing, you know, Caron, right, popped out of nowhere.”

While Maras distrusted Caron, she felt differently about Lara Logan.

“You know who hooked me up to Logan?” Bergy asked. “Because I introduced Logan to Millie and Gavin. You know who hooked me up with Logan? Our friend, Robert. She’s got interesting friends. If known contractors and CIA assets are arranging your introductions to journalists that are married to military-industrial complex psy-op contractors, am I wrong in thinking possibly a lot of people that are passed along or networked through Lara are basically…?”

Maras interrupted Bergy.

“Well, you and me are going to disagree on Lara,” she said. “I like Lara…. If it came down to it, and I had to trust someone with something, I would actually trust her.”

A plan to order the National Guard to shut down Congress

Caron’s background remains murky. In one of the few publi with him that is available, Caron was identified in a March 2018 story that aired on the far-right network One America News as “the spokesman for JTF MAGA, the collection of veteran members of the intelligence, law enforcement and military communities dedicated to exposing the dark secrets of the Deep State.” The “team” page for awebsite that houses reports by JTF MAGA, including one proclaiming retired Lt. General Michael Flynn’s innocence and another that disputes claims about collusion between the Trump campaign — has at various times included photos of Caron and Veterans for America First co-founders Joshua Macias and Vlad Lemets.

When Caron arrived in DC, Wince and Bergy viewed him as a replacement for Dennis Nathan Cain, a cybersecurity expert brought in to analyze the results of the 2020 election.

Cain told Raw Story that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon recommended him to White House trade advisorPeter Navarro, who published a series of reports claiming without evidence that the election had been stolen. Cain said he worked on a three-man team that included another man named Harry Haury and a third person whom he declined to identify. Cain said he primarily worked with Phill Kline, a former Kansas attorney general whoreportedly promoted a scheme to submit pro-Trump electors in the six swing states carried by Joe Biden.

Cain filed an expert report in a civil suit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona to challenge the election results. Cain opined that based on his assessment that the election error rate in Arizona during the 2020 election failed to meet the standard set under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the election result should not have been certified.

“I was specifically looking at the certification and accreditation of the system,” Cain told Raw Story. “I had no interest in looking at any of the technical aspects from the standpoint of whether they were hacked, because you can’t do that unless you have access to the machines.”

Cain told Raw Story that he and Caron met in DC at Caron’s request, and that Caron wanted to join his team. Cain said he declined Caron’s request because he had been working without compensation in DC for two months. Cain had set up a GoFundMe page, but it only covered about half the cost of their hotel bill at the Westin. By the time Caron approached him, Cain said he considered his work to be complete. He disbanded the team, and went home after Christmas.

Cain said he came to regret his meeting with Caron.

“He went out and wrote some emails; some of the people that were associated with me didn’t like that,” Cain said. “It kind of did some damage with some people that I was working with that didn’t care for him.”

After Cain left DC, his name appeared on a document arguing, among other things, that the states were not in compliance with the Help America Vote Act and concluding bizarrely that Trump had a “mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation” of the Constitution and declare Congress “illegitimate” as a prelude to ordering the National Guard to shut down Congress.

“President Donald J. Trump, to preserve our sovereign form of government, has the mandatory duty to immediately declare the 2020 election in violation of our United States Constitution and declare the 117th Congress illegitimate, then access and direct the National Guard already sent by the mayor, to prevent entry into their offices and the Capitol,” the document declared.

Entitled “Invincible Argument, the document was dated Jan. 4 and featured a dozen names, beginning with Caron and also including Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers general counsel Kellye SoRelle, Veterans forAmerica First co-founder Joshua Maciasand Latinos for Trump President Bianca Gracia. Eleven members of the Oath Keepers, including Rhodes, have been indicted for seditious conspiracy. Macias wasarrested on weapons charges outside the Philadelphia Convention Center, where votes were being tabulated, on Nov. 5, 2020, and was present at the US Capitol on Jan. 6.

Jerome Corsi, who heavily promoted thefalse claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not qualified to serve as president, was also named on the document, and Corsipublished it on his website on Jan. 5, the eve of the assault on the US Capitol.

Cain said he did not authorize his name to be used on the document.

“I am familiar with my name being on there,” he told Raw Story. “It was done without my permission. I don’t have any comment to give on what the legal ramifications of the system not being compliant with HAVA might be.”

Caron’s name also appeared at the bottom of the document’s Forward, and another section was credited to Caron and SoRelle.

On the same day Corsi published the “Invincible Argument” document, Caron was quoted in astory published by Vision Times News headlined, “Over 400 ex-intelligence officers have started investigating election fraud.” The story quoted Caron as saying, “The fraud was so massive and so blatant, despite what the mainstream media said, that we need to get this information out to the public.”

Caron could not be reached for this story, but he has toldCNN that he was approached by two FBI agents at a hotel in Toronto last December. According to CNN, Caron said the agents told him they were investigating events that led up to the violence on Jan. 6 and that he sat down to speak with them about “key people” involved in the effort to overturn the election.

Rhodes, SoRelle, Macias and Gracia were all filmed in a meeting in ahotel parking garage with Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Tarrio has beencharged with conspiracy, along with five other Proud Boys leaders, for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

The “Invincible Argument” document” wouldform the basis of another lawsuit seeking to overturn the election, this one filed not by Powell and her team, but by SoRelle, the Oath Keepers’ general counsel.

A transcript of an Oath Keepers teleconference that took place on Nov. 9, 2020, shows that the militia group was working on a legal track even as they prepared to mobilize a tactical force at the US Capitol. Asked by Rhodes to update members on the “legal fight,” SoRellementioned Giuliani as heading up one of several legal teams working to overturn the election.

“And then you have the Giuliani pals, I guess, previewing the Campaign pod that’s trying to solve the mystery of the ballots,” SoRelle said. “So, I’ve been in communication. I obviously work the RNC version of it, and then I’m in — I like the Q crowd, they’re kind of fun, and then I’ve been meeting with the Campaign crowd.”

The lawsuit sputtered almost immediately when friction arose between SoRelle and her co-counsel, Paul M. Davis, over Caron’s involvement in the litigation.

In a February 2021 filing, Davis reported that he had “expressed concern to SoRelle that Bob seemed to have some sort of undue influence over the plaintiffs and was poisoning their thinking about the case strategy with suggestions of inclusion of what the whole team had previously agreed were frivolous legal claims (this has always been a case strictly about violations of election law and NOT a case about election fraud).”

Davis went on to suggest SoRelle was disclosing confidential attorney-client communications to Caron, who was not a plaintiff.

SoRelle responded, Davis reported with incredulity, that Caron had been “listening in on our comms.”

https://www**.reuters.**com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-military/

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after Donald Trump lost the White House, ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and three other current and former U.S. Army officers challenged the vote’s legitimacy and pushed baseless conspiracy claims. Military ethicists say their actions threaten to weaken the public’s faith in democracy.

By ARAM ROSTON, BRAD HEATH, JOHN SHIFFMAN and PETER EISLER in DRIPPING SPRINGS, Texas Filed Dec. 15, 2021

During the Afghan and Iraq wars, the careers of two military officers often intersected. Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in both countries, Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.

Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”

Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.

For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy. They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.

“I think we’re doing a huge service,” Waldron told Reuters in an interview.

In these efforts, Flynn, Waldron and their colleagues publicly touted their military-intelligence training, arguing that their expertise on the battlefield provided them special insight into alleged election fraud at home in America.

“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded.”

Roger Herbert, recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy

The military men’s false assertions are dangerous, said Roger Herbert, a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”

Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request about the role military figures have played in his quest to overturn the election.

One Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, is now facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated Reserve rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters. In an election forum last month in New Hampshire, Raiklin touted his military experience – Special Forces commander, deployments battling the Taliban and the MS-13 gang– to say he has the intelligence wherewithal to find fraud. “So I have a little bit of experience looking at threats, right?” he said.

Raiklin declined to be interviewed.

Waldron says he and the Flynn circle are not using military techniques on Americans. He maintains the actions they are undertaking for Trump don’t undercut American democracy because he’s convinced they are ferreting out voter fraud.

The veterans’ false claims shifted over time. They have pinned Trump’s loss on actions by the Chinese government and voting technology companies, alleged misconduct by U.S. state and local election officials and said hackers had used the internet to change votes after they were cast. They have blamed old-school ballot stuffing, perhaps involving dead voters or Venezuelan interests.

Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.

The military-intelligence officers’ battle is part of a larger Republican movement that has led disgruntled Trump voters to endorse threats of violence as a means to regaining power. As Reuters has documented, Trump supporters are waging a campaign of intimidation against election workers around the country. In a review of more than 800 emails, calls and online posts made by backers of the ex-president, Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials and featured in public campaigns attacking the vote’s integrity.

A false claim pushed by Flynn and his cohorts that voting machines were hacked to steal votes from Trump is a common theme in many angry messages. The machines “are rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” said an email accusing election officials in Yavapai County, Arizona, of complicity. Invoking General Flynn by name, the writer added, “every lie will be revealed, every traitor will be punished.”

Efforts by Flynn to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory have been the subject of extensive reporting by a number of U.S. media outlets. The Reuters examination of Flynn and his colleagues provides new details about the origins of the former intelligence officials’ collaboration and the extent to which they worked together in a bid to undo the 2020 election.

The reporting, based on interviews with participants, military ethicists and others, plus an examination of Reuters’ database of threats against election officials, reveals how Flynn drafted Waldron and others to actively contest the 2020 vote. Flynn and his small circle were distinctive because their military credentials provided a patina of respectability to even the most far-fetched claims.

Among the military veterans to play a role in “Stop the Steal” were:

Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor in 2017, who was involved in pushing the most dramatic of conspiracy claims. He urged the president to deploy the military to overturn the election in December 2020, then went on a public speaking campaign sowing doubts about the vote and urging states to conduct their own reviews.

Waldron, who insists Trump won. He gained attention last week when the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riot revealed it was in possession of a PowerPoint presentation he’d shown to U.S. lawmakers outlining methods for overturning the election. Earlier, he lobbied state officials and spoke on rightwing media about his stolen-election theories. Waldron said Flynn drafted him to go public, saying, “No one else can do it. It needs to be done, so go ahead and do it!”

Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.

Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence and who claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent. After the election, Keshel told Reuters he contacted Flynn on LinkedIn and they began collaborating. Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim, saying the report came from a “highly respected Army intelligence captain.”

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Keshel told Reuters he stands by that assessment but never called for violence. “Personally, I believe the election was compromised,” he said, adding, “I can’t control anybody else.”

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Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator. Raiklin has said he worked with Flynn. Keshel said he reached out to the general to share his concerns, and the two worked together in the weeks after the election. Waldron said Flynn pushed him to go public with his research.

‘CORRUPTION CURTAIN:’

Keshel’s work helped fuel calls by Trump followers in many states for audits of the election results. His analysis, which provided no documented evidence of fraud, was discredited by political scientists, statistical experts and Republican and Democratic election officials. In a post on Telegram, Keshel himself described his study as “lenient.”

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His work nonetheless spurred a torrent of emails to election officials in areas where his analysis suggested fraud. In Pasco County, Florida, a Republican county Trump won, officials were deluged with emails demanding an audit after Keshel’s report.Keshel’s analysis “is literally devoid of statistical validity,” said Brian Corley, the Republican county supervisor of elections. “People just took it as fact.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment on the Flynn circle’s activities.

Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College, said a key issue is whether Flynn’s associates are publicly citing their military training to lend legitimacy to a partisan political cause.

“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed,” said Shanks Kaurin. She said she was speaking in her personal capacity, not on behalf of her government employer.

Waldron disputes such criticism. “I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack from foreign and domestic enemies,” he said. “They want to undermine the republic through the election process.”

Earlier this month, a Reuters reporter met with Waldron at One Shot Distillery and Brewing, which he runs on Texas Hill Country’s “Whiskey Trail.” Silver-labeled bottles of rum, vodka and whiskey were on display as Waldron descended the stairs wearing a gray One Shot Distillery t-shirt, with a Glock-19 in a holster fastened to his belt.

Waldron, with an affable bearing and a beard dappled with gray, retired as an Army Reserve colonel in 2016. He said he’s fighting powerful forces in a quest for the truth.

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“You talk about PSYOPS,” he said. “The election (voting machine) companies and the media have done the biggest PSYOP on the American people.”

In a series of interviews this year, Waldron vowed he was on the cusp of breakthrough proof the election was stolen. “We are decrypting the satellite packets right now,” he said in January. In October, he cited a “37 terabyte” tranche of data he believed could unmask fraud.

A new mission

Four days after the election, as ballot counts continued in a handful of swing states, the U.S. media projected Biden had won, establishing an insurmountable lead.

Trump refused to concede. That day, November 7, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then Trump’s lawyer, held a press conference in Philadelphia in which he claimed the result had been swayed by suspect mail-in ballots and votes cast in the names of dead people.

The next day, Waldron said he was on the phone with Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas. Waldron, who ran a cyber security company after leaving the military, said he had been researching vote hacking since August; Biden’s victory accelerated his efforts. Waldron said he told Gohmert he had tracked internet traffic routed through a server in Frankfurt, Germany. Votes could be rerouted, too, he told Gohmert. Election officials say this assertion is false, and no evidence for it exists.

Gohmert immediately called Trump, Waldron said. A spokesman for Gohmert declined to comment.

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Two days later, Waldron said, he was on a plane to Washington. “It started getting sporty about then,” he said, with his theories gaining traction.

First he met with Sidney Powell, the lawyer for his old commander, Flynn. Waldron said he met Powell in a hotel conference room that functioned as her headquarters, briefing her in the early morning hours. A lawyer who worked with Powell, Howard Kleinhendler, confirms Waldron was part of the group. Powell declined to comment.

Then Waldron huddled with Giuliani. “We were supposed to have a 10 minute briefing but it went 45 minutes,” Waldron said. When Giuliani said he wanted to discuss voter fraud, Waldron said he pressed upon the former mayor that the fraud was on a larger, and global, scale. “We kept going over it and going over it. He finally came aboard,” he said.

Giuliani did not respond to interview requests. He confirmed in a legal deposition that Waldron shared fraud allegations with him.

“Colonel in the military, great war record,” Giuliani testified. “I’ve had substantial dealings with him and he’s very, very thorough and very experienced in this kind of work.”

By the second week of November, Waldron said he began working closely with Flynn.

After a stellar military career, Flynn was appointed chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama, but was fired in 2014, in part because the two clashed over the general’s hardline views on countering Islamic extremism. Flynn became a key 2016 Trump campaign advisor and was installed by the new president as national security advisor. He resigned weeks later after it was disclosed that he had held secret talks with Russia’s ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump took office. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about those talks. Trump would eventually pardon him.

In the days after Biden won the 2020 election, Flynn had set up camp at the sprawling South Carolina estate of lawyer L. Lin Wood, another supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.

Wood told Reuters that Flynn and Powell arrived shortly after the election. So did Keshel, then working as a technology salesman. Flynn and Keshel stayed through Thanksgiving, where Flynn carved the turkey.

The group, operating from a sitting room on Wood’s estate, created something of a clearinghouse for election fraud claims. “They all appeared to be working together,” Wood said.

In an interview, Keshel said he spent his time “scanning the numbers and helping write affidavits” for lawsuits Powell was preparing. “There wasn’t a lot of sleep going on there,” Keshel said.

Powell’s lawsuits helped fuel some of the hostility encountered by local officials. Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state debunked Powell’s allegations of election fraud, citing audits and recounts affirming the state’s tallies. In response, one angry emailer accused them of resisting further investigation “because of the Sidney Powell lawsuits and vengeance and no other reason. … We know China interfered with this election by remote and shipped mail in ballots.”

A clandestine operative goes public

Three weeks after the election, Giuliani and his associates pushed a new strategy: attempting to persuade conservative state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and declare Trump the winner of their states’ Electoral College votes. The Constitution, Trump’s team argued, granted this power.

With Pennsylvania a focus, Flynn dispatched Waldron to a state Senate hearing held by Republican lawmakers there.

For decades, Waldron had operated behind the scenes. So, he told Reuters, in November 2020 he initially resisted going public with his findings. But he said Flynn and Giuliani pressed him to testify about stolen votes. “Rudy’s team had asked me three times.”

On November 25, wearing a blue jacket, blue shirt, striped tie and blue COVID mask, Waldron appeared in person at the Pennsylvania Senate hearing to air his fraud claims. He cited his military credentials. “I’m a retired Army colonel, 30 years,” he said. Then he claimed all the voting machine technology in the United States could be hacked.

“I took an oath to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and I believe that our republic is under attack.”

Phil Waldron, 30-year military veteran

“Our experts and other academics,” Waldron continued, “believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent.” Only a “detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated.”

At the end of the hearing, President Trump joined in on the speaker phone. “I’ve been watching the hearing on OAN,” the far-right television news channel, Trump said. “I’m in the Oval Office right now, and it’s very interesting to see what’s going on.”

Waldron said he visited the White House later that day with Giuliani and others. “That was great!” he said Trump told them.

The White House focus turned to pushing Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to replace Biden electors with those for Trump. “That whole strategy started from that Pennsylvania hearing,” Waldron said.

That same day, Trump pardoned Flynn in the Russia inquiry case.

In the end, no state legislatures swapped out their electors. Now Flynn helped pitch a new plan to Trump.

Election by military might

MILITARY INTEL: Click to hear audio of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin introducing himself by citing his military intelligence and legal background to a crowd gathered in Manchester, New Hampshire, last month to hear his claims that the 2020 election result should be reversed.]

On December 17, Flynn told the rightwing cable network Newsmax that the president could use the armed forces to conduct a do-over election in several swing states he lost. Trump, he said, “could take military capabilities and place them in those states and basically re-run an election in those states.”

A day later, Flynn, Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump at the White House. They urged the president to deploy the U.S. government to make digital copies of the hard drives in some voting equipment to investigate the machines and conduct recounts in at least six counties, Byrne told Reuters. Trump was receptive to the idea, said Kleinhendler, the lawyer working with Powell, but the government never took those steps. It is unclear why.

At the same time, Army reserve officer Raiklin, a Flynn ally and former Green Beret, was pushing election fraud theories on social media and on rightwing websites. Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer, but he doesn’t appear to practice that area of law. A Reuters review found he has not argued such a case or written scholarly articles on the topic.

SCREEN TIME: Ivan Raiklin, at right, sharing his vote fraud conspiracies last month.]

On a December 7 podcast and in tweets, Raiklin laid out a plan to reverse the vote, alleging conspiracies involving Pence, intelligence agencies, big tech, China and the postal service. He urged Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system” and used the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn. “We the people are going to force this plan on them,” he said.

Raiklin’s efforts drew attention on Twitter. On December 22, Raiklin tweeted a copy of a two-page open memo to Trump, detailing “Operation Pence Card.” The pitch: Pence, acting as “the Representative of the Federal Seat of Government,” would reject votes from states where Trump alleged fraud, flipping the election. The memo was retweeted 23,700 times.

“We the people are going to force this plan on them.”

Army reserve officer Ivan Raiklin]

Raiklin’s conduct is now under government scrutiny. The Army Reserve’s chief spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Flake, said Raiklin’s superiors are “aware of the situation and investigating,” but that privacy rules restrict him from providing details.

Flake added: “The U.S. Army Reserve follows the Department of Defense’s long standing policy in regards to forbidding service member involvement in partisan political campaigns to avoid the perception of DOD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of any partisan political candidate, campaign, or cause.” Raiklin did not answer questions from Reuters about the inquiry.

On New Year’s Day, Keshel gave an interview carried on YouTube in which he said the election’s results were “definitely irregular” because they disrupted what he said were historical trends in U.S. elections. “I served one tour in Afghanistan … with a primary focus on understanding enemy activity,” he said. Now, he said, his focus is on unearthing the election’s “data irregularities.”

PODCASTS, TWEETS, FORUMS: Ivan Raiklin lays out his case in New Hampshire. Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, has worked with former General Michael Flynn to challenge the 2020 election. REUTERS/Brian Snyder]

Conspiracy PowerPoint

In early January, Waldron said he flew to Washington bearing a 36-page PowerPoint presentation he said he helped prepare. Its goal was to convince Congress and the White House the election was stolen and Pence should stop the certification of Biden’s win. This month, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, produced a copy of that PowerPoint in response to a subpoena.

Waldron’s presentation was called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” He said he briefed legislators on Capitol Hill on January 5, explaining a document whose recommendations included, “Declare National Security Emergency” and “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”

Waldron’s pitch mirrored arguments being made by Trump, who at the time was publicly urging Pence to refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes from a handful of swing states and either declare Trump the winner or not declare a winner at all. Waldron proposed going further, such as deploying U.S. marshals and the military to seize ballots nationwide. “A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS” to recount all the votes, the PowerPoint said.

HOW TO UNRAVEL AN ELECTION: Pages from a PowerPoint Phil Waldron presented in D.C. this year. The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has obtained a copy. REUTERS/Courtesy Phil Waldron

“US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states,” the PowerPoint said. “The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot.”

On January 5, Flynn told a pro-Trump crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., “We will not stand for a lie!” The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has subpoenaed Flynn to testify about his efforts to overturn the election.

A week after the attack, Waldron told Reuters he blamed Pence for the chaos. Pence’s offense, he said, was to refuse to go along with the plans to block Biden’s certification. That was the riot’s primary cause, he said. “You could logically argue that he had more to do with inciting the riot than anyone else on that stage,” he said.

The Secret Service had to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol complex during the riot. Videos show some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol chanting, “hang Mike Pence.”

A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.

Congress’ votes in the early morning hours of January 7 to ratify Biden’s victory brought an end to nearly all of the Trump camp’s efforts in the courts to keep him in power.

“After that, it was pencils down,” said Powell colleague Kleinhendler. “There was just nothing else to do.”

The Flynn circle wasn’t ready to let go.

Arizona audit

Everett Stern, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who runs a private intelligence firm, said he was approached in April by two Republican political operatives who urged him to gather information on elected officials to help prompt a state audit of the 2020 vote. They also helped connect him with Raiklin, said Stern, who said the operatives told him they were acting at Flynn’s direction. Stern said he declined to take part because he viewed the approach as an “extortion” attempt and alerted the FBI, which said it had no comment.

In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate pushed for a “forensic audit” of the vote in the state’s largest county.

Arizona’s Senate president, Karen Fann, turned to Florida cybersecurity contractor Doug Logan to do the job. Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas, had no experience running audits or elections, though Logan said he had done previous work reviewing 2020 election disputes. Logan told Reuters he wasn’t sure how his company was picked for the task; he said he didn’t submit a proposal until Fann contacted him.

Logan did have connections, though. He confirmed to Reuters he was among those who huddled with Flynn at Wood’s estate after the election. And he received an endorsement from Waldron, who called him “very reputable” in a text message to Sen. Fann before she selected him to run the audit, records released in a public records lawsuit show.

“If you’re talking to an audience that cares what General Flynn thinks, and you tell the audience, ‘I did this in this military,’ then they’re more likely to be impressed.”

Pauline Shanks Kaurin, a professor of military ethics at the U.S. Naval War College]

“We did things the right way,” Logan said. Through a spokesman, Fann declined to comment.

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The Arizona Senate audit cost $5.7 million. It was largely financed by Flynn’s team.

Nearly $1 million came from a nonprofit called America’s Future, which until then had been largely dormant, Internal Revenue Service filings show. Flynn now chairs its board. His brother Joe Flynn was a director. And his sister, Mary O’Neill, was executive director.

Joe Flynn declined to comment. O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael and Joe Flynn also briefly served as directors of Powell’s nonprofit Defending The Republic, which kicked in $550,000 for the Arizona audit.

Another $3.5 million came from The America Project, whose website features a video from Flynn declaring, “Our great nation was under a new type of attack.” Joe Flynn is one of the nonprofit’s three board members, and Flynn its senior strategic advisor.

The America Project’s chief executive, former Overstock CEO Byrne, told Reuters Flynn “asked me to come down and set this up.” Flynn “is a driving force” to continue fighting the results of the 2020 election, said the group’s operations officer, Carl Johnson. The America Project told Florida regulators it expected to raise $50 million this year, records show. Byrne said the group raised closer to $10 million, mostly from him.

The resulting Arizona audit featured reviewers with little training who scrutinized ballots using procedures that were widely criticized by election experts; Logan defended the auditing work. The review confirmed Biden won.

This November 19, retired captain Keshel and current reserve lieutenantcolonel Raiklin were featured speakers at an “election integrity” rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Citing polls saying a growing number of rightwing Americans believe the election was rigged, Raiklin and Keshel told a crowd of about 75 that their movement is succeeding.

Noting his legal and military intelligence background, Raiklin laid out what he called a “deep state” conspiracy theory of a stolen election. “I connected these dots,” Raiklin told the crowd.

Keshel, now a paid consultant for The America Project, said Trump supporters faced a “two-front war” – auditing the 2020 election and preparing for 2024.

“It sounds a little crazy,” Keshel said. “But I do believe wholeheartedly … that the future will reflect the truth of the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was illegitimately elected.”

Both men received standing ovations.

FIGHTING WORDS: Supporters of President Donald Trump have used virulent language in spreading false fraud claims. Here, a Trump backer at an “Election Security Seminar.” REUTERS/Brian Snyder

REUTERS INVESTIGATES

Additional reporting by Chris Kahn and Brian Snyder

The Election Foxhole

By Aram Roston, Brad Heath, John Shiffman and Peter Eisler