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lin wood e s q

Lin Woods, "formally retired from" his practice in Georgia "in an apparent bid to avoid being disbarred

seems to have found eco niche, oops broke out of it?!

March 13, 2024

Judd Blevins, a city commissioner in Enid, Oklahoma, marched in the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right rally. Now he faces a recall vote.

Judson Blevins, a city commissioner in Enid, Oklahoma, won’t refute evidence tying him to a secretive fascist group. Does the city care enough to recall him from office?

Former President Donald Trump has baselessly alleged that House Democrats used “Artificial Intelligence” to create a montage designed to show his lack of mental acuity, adding “‘Can’t do that Joe!!” on social media.

Former Trump attorney Christina Bobb, the new RNC counsel on election integrity, authored a book falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen.

With Trump allies taking over the RNC and cleaning house, one of the casualties was a minority outreach program that seemed to be working for Republicans.

The reason judge shopping works is that there are some jurisdictions with only one, or maybe two judges. File in the right place and you’re nearly guaranteed to get the Trump judge of your dreams.

Pro-Donald Trump defamation attorney L. Lin Wood was found liable for defaming his former law partners by a federal court on Tuesday.

no lnx an 723

Trump’s post-election 'elite strike force' has been facing a 'legal reckoning': ex-federal prosecutor

Alex Henderson July 26, 2023

In late 2020 and early 2021, Donald Trump had an entire team of attorneys who enthusiastically promoted his false and repeatedly debunked claim that the presidential election was stolen from him. Among them were Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The lawyers were not successful. On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden — the legitimate winner of the election — was sworn in as president. But the Big Lie and the January 6, 2021 insurrection raised troubling questions about the fragility of U.S. democracy.

In an article published by Politico on July 26, attorney and former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori examines the repercussions that some of Trump's 2020 lawyers have been facing.

READ MORE: 'Shot down in court': Report details the legal headaches dogging Trump’s allies

Giuliani, Ellis and Powell, according to Khardori, described themselves as Trump's "elite strike force team" after the 2020 election but are now experiencing "modest signs of a reckoning within the legal profession."

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"Giuliani had his law license suspended in New York, and early this month, a disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., recommended that he be disbarred for 'frivolous' and 'destructive' conduct," the attorney observes. "A federal appeals court recently upheld court sanctions against Powell for making 'entirely baseless' claims and 'frivolous allegations of widespread voter fraud.' And in March, Ellis was censured by a judge in Colorado for making false claims 'on Twitter and to nationally televised audiences' that 'undermined the American public's confidence in the presidential election.'"

Khardori adds that another pro-Trump lawyer, Georgia residentLin Woods, "formally retired from" his practice in Georgia "in an apparent bid to avoid being disbarred." And former law professor John C. Eastman, who wrote an outline for overturning the election results, is facing possible disbarment in California.

"This is to say nothing of the fact that most — if not all — of these lawyers appear to be under scrutiny by federal prosecutors at the Justice Department, as well as by local prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia," Khardori explains. "Against this backdrop stands the65 Project, a legal advocacy group that was created to pursue accountability for the lawyers who sought to subvert American democracy in the 2020 election."

READ MORE: DC legal committee calls for Rudy Giuliani’s disbarment over election interference: report

The 65 Project was co-founded by Media Matters' David Brock.According to Khardori, the group "secured" the "disciplinary action" against Ellis.

The former federal prosecutor notes, "The group was watching closely during the 2022 midterms, and it's now gearing up for plenty of fights in the courts ahead of another potentially chaotic national election as Trump, the current frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination, desperately fights for both his political and corporal lives."

READ MORE: 'Brutal': Rudy Giuliani mocked after blistering takedown from the D.C. Bar Association

Ankush Khardori's full article for Politico is available at this link.

A deafening silence from Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s Black football players

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terminal stage of BS: false flag; qanon is deep state

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/lin-wood/

bypassed by ziegler?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/mark-meadows/

i forgot ziegler:

an 6 22 raw story

Navarro, President Trump’s former trade advisor was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday due to his refusal to cooperate with the January 6th Committee, which has signaled interest in his communications with the president.

Less attention has been paid to Garrett Ziegler, a Navarro aide and zealous Trump loyalist who both supported his boss’ efforts and coordinated with a network of outside operatives who were promoting an onslaught of false claims about election fraud and legally dubious schemes to preserve Trump’s hold on power.

Ziegler received an email from the senior investigative counsel for the committee, which is scheduled to begin public hearings on June 9, requesting a meeting to discuss information he might have that is relevant to the congressional investigation.

Among his extensive efforts from his office at the White House, Ziegler facilitated a now-infamous late-night meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 in which attorney Sidney Powell, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tried to persuade President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-running elections in six battleground states he lost to Joe Biden.

Ziegler used his White House Worker and Visitor Entry System, or WAVES pass to let Powell, Flynn and Byrne into the White House, allowing them to hold an impromptu meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, as he later recounted in aninterview with fellow election denier David Clements. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone were caught by surprise by the meeting, which reportedly descended into a shouting match. Ziegler’s efforts bypassed protocol for White House meetings, and he said when it was discovered that he had let the plotters into the White House, his visitor’s privileges were revoked.

In Navarro’s book In Trump Time, he wrote that “to support the challenge effort, he allowed “several members of my staff to help out in the battleground states on their own time.” Navarro’s book describes “the young and always earnest” Ziegler venturing to an Indian reservation in Nevada to investigate alleged vote-buying shortly after the election. The work eventually culminated in the three-part Navarro Report, which asserted without evidence that the election had been stolen from Trump.

Around the time of the election, a man named Mark Cook took a photograph of cardboard boxes stacked on metal shelves that were labeled “Dominion Voting” and “Made in China.”

“My good friend Mark Cook took this picture,” Ziegler, who is now 26, wrote on his Telegram channel in June 2021. “We infiltrated the election equipment storage facility in Sacramento County, CA, and documented all of the violations of law.”

Cook’s photograph would later be used on the final page of a PowerPoint presentation entitled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN” put together by Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel with a background in psychological warfare that was shown to members of Congress on Jan. 4 and 5, 2021. The presentation recommended that Vice President Mike Pence set aside the electoral votes from the six battleground states carried by Biden, and also called on President Trump to order the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-count the ballots.

For his part, Cook remains active in the election denial movement. Last month, he and Clements, a former New Mexico State University professor, addressed a Republican-controlled board of commissioners in Surry County, NC. Introduced by Clements as “our hardware and IT cybersecurity expert,” Cook told commissioners: “If our Pentagon can’t secure a network, Department of Defense can’t secure a network, our Department of Homeland Security can’t secure a network, are we really so foolish as to think the only system that is completely impervious to any cyber-hack is our voting system?”

Cook’s 25-minute presentation omitted a simple fact — voting tabulation machines are not networked, and preliminary counts are transferred on a mobile drive to a computer to be uploaded from local election offices for election-night reporting.

Both Ziegler and Cook were trusted associates in the network of operatives and conspiracy theorists that worked under the competing legal teams headed by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and by Powell, alongside Flynn and Byrne.

In a private Telegram text to another election denier that has been reviewed by Raw Story, Waldron said, “Mark and Garrett have worked with us since 14 Nov 20.” He added that Ziegler and Cook “both passed rigorous background checks” after suspicions arose that CIA and British intelligence assets were attempting to infiltrate the network plotting to overturn the election.

“I have no idea what Waldron was alluding to,” Ziegler told Raw Story in an email. “None. I had an active [top secret/sensitive compartmented information] clearance at the time. I think he was just spinning a tale for others.”

Waldron declined to comment for this story.

Michael Trimarco, a Giuliani associate who rented a bloc of rooms at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in November 2020,also alluded to a dual role on Ziegler’s part in an interview with the far-right podcaster Ann Vandersteel earlier this year.

“I know some of the people that were his direct reports, because he wasn’t officially reporting directly to Peter,” Trimarco told Vandersteel. “So, I know some of these other people. And politically that didn’t make people around in Peter’s world very happy with Garrett in the inter-office kinda…. But from what I saw, he was well connected with Peter… and I know he furnished a lot of information for the report.”

While enmeshed with the outside election denial network, Ziegler also provided the external teams with a direct conduit to the White House and President Trump, to the extent that Trimarco said information about election irregularities would often reach Trump before even Giuliani knew about it.

“Ironically, a lot of the stuff that got back to Rudy didn’t end up coming through me,” Trimarco said. “Because once that connection was made, Garrett would give it to Peter, and Peter would give it to the president. And then it would circle back to Rudy.”

In his interview with Clements, Ziegler dated work on the three-part Navarro Report to Nov. 15 — one day after Waldron said he had started working with Ziegler. Ziegler said he and four other aides assisted Navarro with the reports.

“We prepared — Peter gave direction,” Ziegler told Clements. “He’s a fantastic, logical thinker, which is very hard — easier said than done. He laid it out, what his vision was. And our job was to get the first draft.”

Much of the information in the reports was funneled up from the outside team, Trimarco said.

“Peter put out a three-volume report together, and a lot of the information — not all of it — came from this group of analysts that work working out of the Westin that did not go toTomotley,” Trimarco said, referencing attorney Lin Wood’s estate in South Carolina, where Powell and Flynn established a working headquarters away from DC.

One day after Powell, Flynn and Byrne’s Dec. 18 visit to the White House to promote their plan to have the National Guard seize voting machines and re-run the election, Trump tweeted out a link to the Navarro Report, with an invitation to his supporters to attend a “wild rally” in DC on Jan. 6, 2021.

Similar to his former boss, since leaving the White House Ziegler has continued to deride a coterie of officials he considers weak and insufficiently loyal to the president. In interviews and Telegram messages, Ziegler has particularly singled out Meadows for savage criticism.

In Telegram message in late January 2021, Ziegler wrote that he feared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg would take control of the country and impose a dystopian “technocracy.”

“And I can assure you, from my standpoint in the WH, I did everything I could to prevent this,” Ziegler said. “I broke rules, protocol, etc. If I had a decade more of life under my belt, I would have had the formal power to get rid of Meadows, Cipollone, etc.”

Ziegler’s Telegram messages suggest he viewed Meadows as an obstacle to efforts to overturn the election. In one message, in February 2021, Ziegler faulted Meadows for citing an audit in Georgia as evidence of due diligence, writing that the chief of staff was “so fckn dumb (or compromised)” that he didn’t question whether an auditing company could be corrupted by “mob-like cartels.”

Like Navarro, who was indicted for contempt of Congress on Friday, Meadows is fighting a subpoena from the January 6th Committee. Last December, the House voted to hold Meadows in contempt, referring his case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Meadows played a critical role in shepherding an array of schemes entertained by Trump in his quest to hold onto power. That included hosting meetings with the president and members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a plan — much like Navarro’s “Green Bay Sweep” — to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to remand the electoral votes back to the battleground states and delay certifying the election for Biden, according to testimony to the January 6th Committee by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Meadows also hosted a meeting in which Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who is now the chair of the Freedom Caucus, expressed support for the idea of sending Trump supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, while others in the meeting remained silent, the New York Times has reported. Hutchinson also reportedly testified to the committee that she saw Meadows burn documents in his office fireplace after a meeting with Perry.

Ziegler has positioned himself to the right of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, of which Meadows was a chair before he left Congress to serve as Trump’s chief of staff.

“He’s a Freedom Caucus guy,” Ziegler complained to Clements during his July 2021 interviewed. “And what this means is — I call them ‘permanent hearing holders.’ So, Benghazi, Killary…. Nobody ever gets indicted with these jokers. Mark Meadows comes from that ilk…. So, how does this relate to the president’s chief of staff? He just wasn’t effective. He would get steamrolled by people.”

Much of Ziegler’s rhetoric on Telegram is laced with racist vitriol that uses African nations as a stand-in for national decline, while Christian chauvinism as force for national rebirth.

“If we elect people like Mark Meadows — good, jolly, your brother next door — we’re gonna end up like Zimbabwe,” Ziegler said. “If I could do one thing — which is stop electing nice guys. We need Christian zealots, frankly.”

Ziegler expressed a similar sentiment in a March 2021 Telegram message, in which he wrote, “We could have a Third Great Awakening in the country, both religious and political. And the coup we just went through could be the flint that ignites it. Hopefully its ends will be a repentance to the Christ and a Republic that gets rid of this corrupt and satanic Oligarchy.”

Beyond the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting he arranged at the White House, Ziegler said he tried to help Powell get to the president on different occasion.

“I walked Sidney over to the residence one to try to get the president a binder full of evidence,” Ziegler said on a podcast in February 2021. “And we got blocked again there, too.”

Ziegler recalled that he would tell anyone who would listen to him in the White House: “Let’s just go look at the ballots. We don’t have to do it. Have the National Guard in Georgia do it.”

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/trump-election-lie/

By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.

After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”

“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”

“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.

“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”

That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.

Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela. He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed. Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.

When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, “I can show the similarity.” In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy. He claimed that the company’s software had been “purchased” by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.

Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to “a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community.” (He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.) From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.

Powell was on the hunt for just such information.

By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president’s legal team to challenge the results of the election. In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he “conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.” The day after the interview, Trump made Powell’s position official with an announcement on Twitter.

The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud. One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video “like the holy grail of evidence.” (In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen “a few minutes” of the video, in which he had “no interest beyond general curiosity.” Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)

There was just one problem. Salazar’s claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: “Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela,” “Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012” and “There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic’s Software In The 2020 Election Cycle.” Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions. 

Dominion later released a statementcalling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: “There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple.” He added that “Salazar’s testimony is full of inaccuracies,” strongly denied that Smartmatic’s technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has “registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach.” (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salazar’s story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.

Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.

Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they’d been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.

The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition’s chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.

Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden’s victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to “conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein.” The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Salazar’s declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show “the similarity” between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that “the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system” in the United States was potentially compromised.

Woodtold ProPublica, “I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell,” though his name appears as “of counsel” in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that “while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct.”

All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn’t just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition’s failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.

This is the story of how little untruths added up to the “big lie.”

When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips. This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.

Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself:There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them. ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition’s efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.

In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media. None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.

One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election. Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann’s claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.

By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story. Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond. Powell soon referred to Oltmann’s allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and “his background,” she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator’s assessment.)

Within days of the investigator’s Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.

In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created “an entirely fake online persona.” (Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain “unproven” despite the legal finding and that “false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties,” which include being a “former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.”)

Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. The individual claimed that there was “unambiguous evidence” that “foreign interference is present in the 2020 election” and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. The Washington Post later identified the declaration’s author to be Maras.

In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.

In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators’ assessment: “Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject 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.’” (“I tried my best to deceive” the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. “I was scared.”)

Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras’ right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election. (“She’s a friend and an ally, and I know that she’s a little goofy,” Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. “I think she has relevant knowledge.”)

Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren’t just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon. In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden’s favor.

Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon’s voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)

One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon’s analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from “a long track record of baseball statistics.” In the end, his level of expertise didn’t matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon’s claims.

Byrne used Solomon’s analysis in his book, “The Deep Rig,” to make the case that the election was fraudulent. In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree. The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon’s analysis, especially that the “vote shares” he suggested were suspicious were “not at all surprising,” and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”

A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how “fishing for a finding” can “lead an argument astray.”

Byrne kept promoting Solomon’s work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a “Renowned Mathematician.”

Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a “Mr. Solomon.”

In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election. In the first, Burk claimed that she’d spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as “election mail ballots” passing through the facility. The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.

A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a “Jane Doe” witness who would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona.” Burk told ProPublica that she was the “Jane Doe.” The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of “a plane full of ballots that came in,” and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, “We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in.” The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.

Burk’s theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk’s claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it “had been looked into and there was nothing there.” This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)

In late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, called Burk and explained that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories. On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them. “When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane,” Penrose told Burk. “That created the rumor.” The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose’s investigators that in trying to impress Burk “he fabricated everything.”

“I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it’s true?” Burk asked. Penrose replied: “Yes. I’m saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It’s all bullshit.”

Penrose’s team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, “We’re not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines.”

Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)

Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. “I obviously made a mistake believing lies,” Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends. “As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece.”

Burk’s stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million. The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.

“You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there’s 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane,” said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman’s theories were false. Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia. “Our goal in the audit was to figure out what’s really true and deal with it,” Logan told ProPublica. “That’s why we did paper examination.”

No fibers were found.

Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden. It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.

However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.

“There was no proof at that specific moment,” the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought “could lead to” election fraud. “But there was no, like, ‘There was election fraud,’” he said, “at least at that time in my mind.”

Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold. The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a clerical error had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden. After the clerk’s office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.

Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error. Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn’t been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself. Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.

The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim: Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business. Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.

Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a court order to allow the machines to be formally accessed. On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county’s election management server.

Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report. Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud. Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.

When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version. It had “REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2” and Ramsland’s name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation. “The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” it claimed. “This leads to voter or election fraud.” Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.

Hayes’ and Sanders’ names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new “information must have been written by” Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

It wasn’t just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland’s version was flawed. An analysis commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an “extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements,” including that “the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to” and were instead “benign” lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome. A bipartisan investigation led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are “a complete waste of time to consider.” (Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about revising the report. But he did tell The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security’s 29 “core observations.”)

Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, “MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realDonaldTrump must appoint a special counsel now.” Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.

In a statement, Giuliani said: “This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts.” (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)

Byrne described the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” posting it on his blog under the claim: “You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence.”

Trump tweeted: “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!” Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.

Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump’s personal secretary sent an email to the deputy attorney general with the subject line “From POTUS.” The Antrim report was attached to the email. An additional document included talking points (“This is a Cover-up of voting crimes”) and conclusions (“these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County”). That email launched Trump’s attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 report by Senate Democrats. In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.

When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” enough for him to win the state, in a recorded phone call on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times.

At the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and suggested that halting the certification of Biden’s victory was justified because of “these crooked Dominion machines.”

Trump’s speech emphasized the “highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.

Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades,Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was on the House floor objecting to the certification of his state’s electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory by Congress. He cited as evidence “the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.” About a minute later, Gosar’s speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, “No Machines Dominion STEALS.”

In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.

This transformation happened after Dominion’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general. Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims. The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)

By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard. The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election. It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell. Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.

Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can’t be disproven: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can’t. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery. The people promoting the theory claim he can’t reveal the evidence because he’s under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.

Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an online interview that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, “Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election.”

Montgomery has been accused of fraud by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations. In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. (It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer. In 2018, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” (Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)

The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen. According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn’t publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.

Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day “cyber symposium” he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent. Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online offer of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that “this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.” The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.

In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described “white hat” hacker — all of whom had been associated with Allied Securityat one time or another. (They called themselves the “Red Team” but coordinated on a group chat named “Purple Unicorns.”) Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by two independent forensic linguistic analyses as “Q,” the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.) Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.

Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn’t what was promised. “I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF,” Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team. “So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn’t include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake.”

“At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof,” another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn’t delivered on his guarantees. “If this software does exist, and the developer” — Montgomery — “is working with us, it shouldn’t take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data” that would prove his assertions.

According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.

For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged. Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn’t credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.

On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.

The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person. Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and “we’ve seen plausibility” and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.

By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell’s claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus: None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised, according to accounts from five of them. In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.

The data “was some gobbledygook,” said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump. Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen. Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times quoted him saying that “we were handed a turd.”

Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have “credible information on a threat in the data streams,” implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.

The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to Salon. At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium “really amazing,” and he has continued to praise Lindell’s efforts on his behalf. Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, “The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “and many others did a cyber attack on our election!”

In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.

Some of the responses were dismissive. “Stupid article,” wrote Michael T. Flynn’s spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. “No one we care about will read it.”

Others contested the article’s findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, “So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point.”

Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.

Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. “I was a member of said coalition,” wrote Seth Keshel.

“‘Coalition’ may not be the right word,” wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on “election integrity” efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn. “We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with ‘coalition.’” Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.

On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth. “I’ve not wavered on this,” Keshel emailed ProPublica. “I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this.” The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: “I don’t believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can’t say either way.”

Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition’s ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.

When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election. He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim. “I think that it’s picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff,” he said. He defended the coalition, saying, “I think they got the gestalt of it correct.”

Don’t pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked. (These errors included Allied Security’s central contention that Dominion machines were “purposefully designed” to create “systemic fraud” through a process known as “adjudication.” The machines in question did not have the “adjudication” software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.) Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines’ security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them. (The Michigan secretary of state expert found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that “the timing appears to be a coincidence,” though it said that having a limited amount of memory “is contrary to best practice.”)

Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren’t central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud.He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin. The report’s primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in “election bribery” by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic. The special counsel raised the possibility that the report’s findings were serious enough that Biden’s victory in the state could be decertified. (A federal judge in October 2020 rejected the argument that the nonprofit’s work was illegal, and courts have repeatedly come to the same conclusion.)

Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims. In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called “2000 Mules” by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden. “Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower,” Byrne wrote, “all point to about one million votes being stuffed” in Georgia.

There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.

Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren’t corrupted.

What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. “I’ve got my cards. You got your cards,” he said. “I’ll go all in.”

===

NEWSWEEK JAN 6 2021 8 PM?

With just hours to go until Congress meets to count the Electoral College votes to affirm President-elect Joe Biden's election victory, some of the main advocates behind the QAnon conspiracy theory are turning their attention to Vice President Mike Pence amid desperate hopes he will somehow help President Donald Trump overturn the election results.

Supporters of the radical conspiracy theory have continually pushed disputed claims or just plain misinformation regarding the election since November, fueled by Trump's continuing assertion that he only lost as a result of widespread voter fraud.

The latest prediction from the radical movement—following on from every single claim previously proven completely wrong—is that the outgoing vice president will play the so-called "Pence Card" during his constitutional role as presiding officer of the Senate and reject the Electoral College votes declaring Biden the 306-232 winner.

It is unclear what they expect Pence to actually do during his purely ceremonial role prescribed by law and the Constitution.

This hasn't stopped Trump himself appearing to throw Pence under the bus, tweeting that Pence has the "power to reject fraudulently chosen electors" and telling his supporters at a rally in Georgia on Monday night that he hopes Pence "comes through for us."

Following reports thatPence had to inform the president that he does not have the power to block Congress' certification of Biden's win, Trump issued a statement claiming that he and the vice president are "in total agreement" that he has several options, including decertifying the results or sending them back to the states.

Ahead of Wednesday's session, some of the most prominent figures behind the QAnon movement are now suggesting that if Pence does not stop the democratic process and help Trump remain in the White House, it is not because he is unable to but because he is a "traitor" to the president and their cause.

On Tuesday, Ron Watkins, former administrator of the controversial messageboard site 8Kun which is used as a hub for the QAnon conspiracy, tweeted a link to claims he said was proof that Pence and former House Speaker Paul Ryan had been "conspiring against" Trump in 2016.

The link shows a series of emails claiming to be from the project manager of a Pence-Ryan 2016 campaign website that was "called off after Trump won his second debate." However, the email chain is entirely fake and was created for parody news site RealTrueNews.org.

The fake news website, created by Marco Chacon, duped a number of conservative websites amid the 2016 election, including one which said Hillary Clinton described potential voters as a "bucket of losers" during a speech to Goldman Sachs. The site even has the slogan "fake, but accurate" under its online banner.

Discussing the Pence-Ryan email story picked up by Watkins, Chacon told NBC News: "It's an absurd story told in an absurd manner with absurd trappings. This is a testament to the power of confirmation bias. QAnon supporters literally can't tell the difference between truth and fantasy when it comes to anything with a partisan valence."

Read more

Watkins' tweet sharing the fake news was retweeted by attorney Lin Wood, a Trump supporting QAnon follower who has the abbreviation of its slogan "where we go one we go all" in his Twitter bio.

"Answer is YES," Wood tweeted in response to Watkins asking if Pence and Ryan conspired to get Trump "off the ticket" in October 2016.

"Paul Ryan & Mike Pence have been conspiring against Trump since 2016 to defeat President in 2020. These 2 traitors to We The People actually think Pence/Ryan will win 2024. Let them know what you think about their plans," Wood said.

Wood, who worked with fellow QAnon-supporting lawyer Sidney Powell in the widely dismissed and mocked "Kraken" lawsuits attempting to overturn election results, has posted dangerous and unhinged tweets to his 1.1 million followers in recent weeks, resulting in the GOP continually distancing themselves from him.

These include calling for martial law to help Trump win the presidency; wildly claiming Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is being blackmailed by the "Lizard Squad" hacking group after being forced to rape and murder a child on video, without offering any evidence; and suggesting Pence could "face execution by firing squad" after being arrested for treason.

In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly shared tweets from both Wood and Watkins which he believes help his claim that he won the election.

Speaking to NBC, Chacon said he is concerned about what QAnon supporters will do next after Biden is certified the winner of the Electoral Vote and later inaugurated.

"It seems like they've decided there's nothing but civil war," he said.

Wood has been contacted for comment.

===

https://www.thedailybeast.com/lin-wood-goes-to-war-with-kooky-far-right-reawaken-america-tour-beset-by-anthrax-rumors

Lin Wood Goes to War With Kooky Far-Right Conference Beset by ‘Anthrax’ Rumors

‘PAYTRIOT EVENT’

The QAnon-friendly lawyer is now embroiled in drama with a right-wing speaking tour, seemingly claiming it intentionally sickened its attendees.

Zachary Petrizzo

Media Reporter

Published Feb. 15, 2022

Following the COVID-19 death of a radio host after a ReAwaken America Tour event last year, QAnon-friendly lawyer Lin Wood has now publicly cut ties with the right-wing roadshow, seemingly accusing its organizer of intentionally making attendees sick.

The events, held at mega-churches across the country, had been headlined by Wood alongside MAGA dead-enders and luminaries like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Trump’s pardoned national security adviser Michael Flynn, and former Trump attorney Sidney Powell.

But now the pro-Trump lawyer, who once suggested that former Vice President Mike Pence should be assassinated, has been publicly bashing thetour, which is organized by right-wing conspiracy theorist Clay Clark. And this week Wood confirmed to The Daily Beast that he will no longer participate in the conference, which has upcoming events in Ohio and Oklahoma.

“I believe that I am following a different path than the one chosen by Clay to follow,” Wood said of his now-ended relationship with what he last month labeled a “traveling circus show.” (Wood did not speak at the latest ReAwaken America event, which was held mid-January in Phoenix, Arizona.)

Asked by The Daily Beast if his exit has anything to do with his very public spats with Flynn, his ally-turned-enemy, Wood simply responded: “No.”

[Far-Right Group Fantasizes They’ve Been Hit With Anthrax

‘PLEASE PRAY FOR HIM’

Zachary Petrizzo,

Kelly Weill]

One of the main issues for Wood appears to be the tour’s handling of the death of right-wing radio host Doug Kuzma, the lawyer’s pal and ally. The anti-vax conspiracy theorist died earlier this year following a battle with the coronavirus after attending the December stop of the ReAwaken America Tour in Dallas.

Former university professor turnedelection denialist David Clements, a close ally of Wood’s, has attempted to lay blame for Kuzma’s death on Clark. “I hope some of the questions asked surround the Dallas event, Joe [Oltmann] and many others falling severely ill, the death of Doug Kuzma, Clay being put on notice of those falling ill and then denying it,” Clements, who has also split from the tour, fumed on Telegram in late January.

In private, Clark alleged, Wood has told allies that the organizer has been “trying to make people sick” with the events.

In a recording of a phone conversation Clark shared with The Daily Beast, Wood purportedly and somewhat incoherently claimed the ReAwaken America Tour is “doing this to try and get people sick, go get mistreated with ivermectin, go back, they need to be treated with doxycycline—it’s bacterial, it’s not viral. It’s all a setup.” The lawyer added: “Clay Clark is responsible for it. That’s what I think.”

And over the past month, Wood has posted a flurry of messages to his Telegram channel personally attacking Clark, in one instance alleging the conference organizer is involved with the Illuminati, the shadowy cabal central to many outlandish conspiracy theories.

“I do not work with the Illuminati,” Clark responded. “Father of five kids,” he added before rattling off the churches where he regularly attends Mass. “I am not the Illuminati… and I am not a chain-smoking vaper that attacks people on Telegram,” he added in reference to Wood.

[Anti-Vax Host Who Got COVID at QAnon-Friendly Event Dies

‘TURN FOR THE WORSE’]

Elsewhere, Wood has labeled the ReAwaken America Tour to be a “grift” of sorts.

“I wonder if Clay Clark and Mike Flynn will invite Bill Maher to their next Paytriot event to speak on Covid?” Wood wrote in a late January post on Telegram. The insult “Paytriot” is the far-right equivalent of suggesting someone disingenuously associates with the diehard MAGA cause for the sake of making money.

The public beefing is just the latest bizarre saga for the ReAwaken America Tour, which has been continually engulfed in drama.

Late last year, after multiple attendees (including Kuzma, who died) fell ill following the Dallas stop of the tour, several far-right personalities baselessly fantasized that the conference had been the victim of an anthrax attack rather than facing the reality that it may have been yet another COVID-19 outbreak amid a global pandemic.

Zachary Petrizzo

Media Reporter

@ZTPetrizzo

zachary.petrizzo@thedailybeast.com

https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/qanon-influencers-are-urging-followers-get-involved-locally-and-school

many lnx vod

QAnon influencers are urging followers to get involved locally and with school boards

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM DANIL CUFFE, KAYLA GOGARTY & CLARA MARTINY

PUBLISHED 01/26/22

This past summer, a woman named Anna Desenze -- an anti-masker who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory -- spoke at a school board meeting in Broward County, Florida. While railing against a school mask mandate, she falsely claimed that “there’s so much science out there that proves that the masks are more harmful than anything else” and that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine can effectively treat the coronavirus. She later made similar claims at another school board meeting in October.

In July, the hosts of the MatrixxxGrooove Show, a show dedicated to QAnon, noted that Desenze was a listener of the show and claimed that they had encouraged her to take action. She’s “actually thanking us for her getting out there,” a co-host of the show said. They also posted and hyped the clips of her school board rants on Telegram.

intheMatrixxx Desenze post2

Similarly, in September, a group of anti-mask protesters disrupted a closed meeting of a California school board, forced it to adjourn, and then voted themselves in as new members without any legal basis. One of the protesters, a man named Derek Greco, was named president of the new (illegitimate) school board.

Days before that meeting, Greco had posted a video on Facebook featuring QAnon show host Scott McKay claiming that he had been texting with Greco and that Greco had invoked a post from “Q,” the central figure of the conspiracy theory, while speaking before a city council meeting. Greco -- who has also posted a video about “the Great Awakening,” a QAnon-connected phrase -- wrote that he had met McKay in June and that he had “forever changed my view on how to address these issues in our local governments.”

McKay in turn posted praise for Greco’s school board takeover, writing, “This is where the war is being fought today.” And on his show, McKay claimed that Greco credited the QAnon show host for his actions at the school board meeting. McKay added that Greco “showed you how it works,” in that “you go after these milquetoast pussies and cowards, the dumbest people in America, on these school boards.” McKay declared, “It’s training ground for the city councils. It’s training ground for the town councils. It’s training ground for these city commissioners.”

CitationFrom a stream of Patriot Streetfighter uploaded on Rumble on September 13, 2021

In November, McKay posted an “update” from Greco about “taking over the school board,” claiming the government had “weaponized law enforcement against parent’s asking questions” and asking for help contacting other QAnon influencers.

Desenze and Greco’s actions appear to be part of an effort among QAnon influencers to get supporters more involved with local office elections and school boards. Michael Flynn, a QAnon-supporting former national security adviser for then-President Donald Trump, seems to have played a major role in spurring the movement, which appears to have already shown signs of impact.

In May, Flynn urged followers in a Telegram post to “get involved,” “take responsibility for your school committees or boards,” and “run for local, state and/or federal office.” He also added that “local action = national impact” (the MatrixxxGrooove Show used a similar phrase when it posted about Desenze at the school board meeting). Over the coming months, Flynn continued to make the case for people to take “local action” for a “national impact.”

Flynn May post

Soon after Flynn’s call in May, attorney Sidney Powell also urged supporters to get involved locally. (Powell advised Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and also has extensive QAnon ties.) During a QAnon conference in May, Powell told attendees that “there are no military tribunals that are going to solve this problem for us” and “it’s going to take every one of us rolling up their sleeves.” She also specifically called for people to target school boards as part of this local effort.

And in July, Lin Wood, another QAnon-supporting attorneyinvolved with Trump’s election efforts and who unsuccessfully ran for chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, called for followers to “live local and take local action” and to “assemble and protest local school boards mandating masks or worse for our children.”

A number of QAnon influencers have since called for local action, such as telling people to go “to your school board meetings and demand they remove mask mandates and critical race theory.”

In August, “QAnon John,” the influencer who organized the May conference that Powell (and Flynn) attended, wrote that Flynn’s call was “VERY important.” An administrator for QAnon John’s group The Patriot Voice urged others to “get loud and in the face of school boards, city councils, county commissioners, [and] state reps.”

Zak Paine, a QAnon show host who participated in part of the January 6 insurrection, urged his listeners to “please consider running for school board,” adding, “Start going to the meetings and once you’re at the meetings, then you can start learning how they do their business and then you can go ahead and run for school board yourself.”

CitationFrom the October 28, 2021, edition of RedPill78

Jim Watkins -- the QAnon-supporting owner of 8kun, the site where Q posted -- argued that Q’s plan was “no more” and agreed with Flynn to “take action locally” instead. A major QAnon forum also added a banner featuring text from Flynn’s May post.

In October, amajor QAnon Telegram channel even posted a link to an article on how to join a school board, calling it “food for thought” because “this nation ain’t gonna save itself.”

QAnon school board link post

The influencers’ calls may be showing signs of impact, with some QAnon supporters claiming they’ve taken action in response. Some wrote that they were “running for school board” or were “in charge of my kids school board now.” Others wrote that they were helping to get “citizens involved on every level...city/county government, election boards, school boards, etc.,” or that they were “going to keep going every month” to school board meetings to attack mandates, noting that sometimes they were one of the few people there. “GhostEzra,” a neo-Nazi QAnon influencer, encouraged followers to run for office; in response, several said that they were “thinking about running for school board” or other offices like city council, including one follower who appeared to be a poll worker who was called as a “witness” by the Arizona state legislature following the 2020 presidential election to push voter fraud claims.

In response to a link shared in a QAnon channel about how to run for school board, users wrote that they “needed this” and asked for “a guide on how to become part of your city council and how to be appointed or elected to your county’s election board” as well. One follower of a QAnon influencer also bragged that she had joined her town council in West Virginia after encouragement from the influencer, sharing a video of herself being sworn in.

QAnon supporter school board post6

Some QAnon shows have also highlighted what they claim are signs of impact. The MatrixxxGrooove Show highlighted a video of a QAnon-supporting follower of the show making false claims about vaccines at a board of supervisors meeting in California and saying that “nothing can stop the awakening of humanity.” The man wrote that he credited the show’s hosts and Michael Flynn “for giving me the courage to do this,” with the hosts on the show urging Flynn to share the video and claiming that they had sent it to his brother. (Flynn did share the video as well, repeating his “national impact” slogan.)

CitationFrom the November 17, 2021, edition of the MatrixxxGrooove Show

Another QAnon show, SGT Report, has also featured an interview with an Ohio man who “read [his] school board the riot act, the legal riot act,” over mask mandates, and the man credited the show for his action. The host said the incident was part of “a great awakening,” and the man invoked Flynn’s “national impact” line for inspiring his strategy.

Video file

CitationFrom a stream of SGT Report uploaded on Rumble on November 17, 2021

There have also been multiple reported instances of school board members and candidates supporting QAnon in Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (While responding to a question about her QAnon posts, the Michigan school board member falsely claimed, “There’s no such thing as QAnon.” She was echoing Q’s call from late 2020 urging followers to stop using the term “QAnon” and to instead deny its existence.) A Rhode Island woman who invoked the QAnon slogan -- “where we go one, we go all,” or “wwg1wga” for short -- formed an anti-critical race theory group to target her school committee and wrote that she planned to “run for school committee.”

Other people who have expressed support for QAnon have also been elected around the country or tried to run for office, such as Tracy “Beanz” Diaz, one of the first people to popularize QAnon, being elected to a position in the Horry County, South Carolina, Republican Party, and QAnon supporter Gene Ho unsuccessfully running for mayor of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The QAnon community’s focus on school boards was also noted at QAnon John’s follow-up QAnon conference in Las Vegas in October. While discussing how attendees could get more involved, the conference’s emcee said, “What's happening in the school boards is magic.” The National Education Association, a labor union, also warned in June about QAnon school board candidates as an increasing issue nationally.

Citation From the "Patriot Double Down" QAnon conference in Las Vegas on October 23, 2021

In addition to the “local action equals national impact” plan, the QAnon community has also embraced a plan called the “precinct strategy” to sign up as Republican precinct committee members -- who are involved with election activities -- which multiple QAnon supporters have also since done. Others on the far-right have also focused on local positions as a strategy for consolidating power and gaining influence in recent months.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/election-deniers/

no lnx

Election deniers organize to seize control of the GOP — and reshape America’s elections

Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Gage Skidmore]

ProPublica September 05, 2021

by Isaac Arnsdorf, Doug Bock Clark, Alexandra Berzon and Anjeanette Damon

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.

One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump's supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We're on the point of attack," Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow." The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It's them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?"

When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room" podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action," Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.

The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up. Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure: the precincts. “It's going to be a fight, but this is a fight that must be won, we don't have an option," Bannon said on his show in May. “We're going to take this back village by village … precinct by precinct."

Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.

After Bannon's endorsement, the “precinct strategy" rocketed across far-right media. Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.

In Wisconsin, for instance, new GOP recruits are becoming poll workers. County clerks who run elections in the state are required to hire parties' nominees. The parties once passed on suggesting names, but now hardline Republican county chairs are moving to use those powers.

“We're signing up election inspectors like crazy right now," said Outagamie County party chair Matt Albert, using the state's formal term for poll workers. Albert, who held a “Stop the Steal" rally during Wisconsin's November recount, said Bannon's podcast had played a role in the burst of enthusiasm.

ProPublica contacted GOP leaders in 65 key counties, and 41 reported an unusual increase in signups since Bannon's campaign began. At least 8,500 new Republican precinct officers (or equivalent lowest-level officials) joined those county parties. We also looked at equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge.

“I've never seen anything like this, people are coming out of the woodwork," said J.C. Martin, the GOP chairman in Polk County, Florida, who has added 50 new committee members since January. Martin had wanted congressional Republicans to overturn the election on Jan. 6, and he welcomed this wave of like-minded newcomers. “The most recent time we saw this type of thing was the tea party, and this is way beyond it."

Bannon, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

While party officials largely credited Bannon's podcast with driving the surge of new precinct officers, it's impossible to know the motivations of each new recruit. Precinct officers are not centrally tracked anywhere, and it was not possible to examine all 3,000 counties nationwide. ProPublica focused on politically competitive places that were discussed as targets in far-right media.

The tea party backlash to former President Barack Obama's election foreshadowed Republican gains in the 2010 midterm. Presidential losses often energize party activists, and it would not be the first time that a candidate's faction tried to consolidate control over the party apparatus with the aim of winning the next election.

What's different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump's insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can't let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.

“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him," said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again."

It has only been a few months — too soon to say whether the wave of newcomers will ultimately succeed in reshaping the GOP or how they will affect Republican prospects in upcoming elections. But what's already clear is that these up-and-coming party officers have notched early wins.

In Michigan, one of the main organizers recruiting new precinct officers pushed for the ouster of the state party's executive director, who contradicted Trump's claim that the election was stolen and who later resigned.In Las Vegas, a handful of Proud Boys, part of the extremist group whose members have been charged in attacking the Capitol, supported a bid to topple moderates controlling the county party — a dispute that's now in court.

In Phoenix, new precinct officers petitioned to unseat county officials who refused to cooperate with the state Senate Republicans' “forensic audit" of 2020 ballots. Similar audits are now being pursued by new precinct officers in Michigan and the Carolinas. Outside Atlanta, new local party leaders helped elect a state lawmaker who championed Georgia's sweeping new voting restrictions.

And precinct organizers are hoping to advance candidates such as Matthew DePerno, a Michigan attorney general hopeful who Republican state senators said in a report had spread “misleading and irresponsible" misinformation about the election, and Mark Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers militia who marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6and is now running to be Arizona's top elections official. DePerno did not respond to requests for comment, and Finchem asked for questions to be sent by email and then did not respond. Finchem has said he did not enter the Capitol or have anything to do with the violence. He has also said the Oath Keepers are not anti-government.

When Bannon interviewed Finchem on an April podcast, he wrapped up a segment about Arizona Republicans' efforts to reexamine the 2020 results by asking Finchem how listeners could help. Finchem answered by promoting the precinct strategy. “The only way you're going to see to it this doesn't happen again is if you get involved," Finchem said. “Become a precinct committeeman."

Some of the new precinct officers were in the crowd that marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to interviews and social media posts; one Texas precinct chair was arrested for assaulting police in Washington. He pleaded not guilty. Many of the new activists have said publicly that they support QAnon, the online conspiracy theory that believes Trump was working to root out a global child sex trafficking ring. Organizers of the movement have encouraged supporters to bring weapons to demonstrations. In Las Vegas and Savannah, Georgia, newcomers were so disruptive that they shut down leadership elections.

“They're not going to be welcomed with open arms," Bannon said, addressing the altercations on an April podcast. “But hey, was it nasty at Lexington?" he said, citing the opening battle of the American Revolution. “Was it nasty at Concord? Was it nasty at Bunker Hill?"

Bannon plucked the precinct strategy out of obscurity. For more than a decade, a little-known Arizona tea party activist named Daniel J. Schultz has been preaching the plan. Schultz failed to gain traction, despite winning a $5,000 prize from conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie in 2013 and making a 2015 pitch on Bannon's far-right website, Breitbart. Schultz did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In December, Schultz appeared on Bannon's podcast to argue that Republican-controlled state legislatures should nullify the election results and throw their state's Electoral College votes to Trump. If lawmakers failed to do that, Bannon asked, would it be the end of the Republican Party? Not if Trump supporters took over the party by seizing precinct posts, Schultz answered, beginning to explain his plan. Bannon cut him off, offering to return to the idea another time.

That time came in February. Schultz returned to Bannon's podcast, immediately preceding Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who spouts baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

“We can take over the party if we invade it," Schultz said. “I can't guarantee you that we'll save the republic, but I can guarantee you this: We'll lose it if we conservatives don't take over the Republican Party."

Bannon endorsed Schultz's plan, telling “all the unwashed masses in the MAGA movement, the deplorables" to take up this cause. Bannon said he had more than 400,000 listeners, a count that could not be independently verified.

Bannon brought Schultz back on the show at least eight more times, alongside guests such as embattled Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, a leading defender of people jailed on Capitol riot charges.

The exposure launched Schultz into a full-blown far-right media tour. In February, Schultz spoke on a podcast with Tracy “Beanz" Diaz, a leading popularizer of QAnon. In an episode titled “THIS Is How We Win," Diaz said of Schultz, “I was waiting, I was wishing and hoping for the universe to deliver someone like him."

Schultz himself calls QAnon “a joke." Nevertheless, he promoted his precinct strategy on at least three more QAnon programs in recent months, according to Media Matters, a Democratic-aligned group tracking right-wing content. “I want to see many of you going and doing this," host Zak Paine said on one of the shows in May.

Schultz's strategy also got a boost from another prominent QAnon promoter: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law and “rerun" the election. On a May online talk show, Flynn told listeners to fill “thousands of positions that are vacant at the local level."

Precinct recruitment is now “the forefront of our mission" for Turning Point Action, according to the right-wing organization's website. The group's parent organization bussed Trump supporters to Washington for Jan. 6, including at least one person who was later charged with assaulting police. He pleaded not guilty. In July, Turning Point brought Trump to speak in Phoenix, where he called the 2020 election “the greatest crime in history." Outside, red-capped volunteers signed people up to become precinct chairs.

Organizers from around the country started huddling with Schultz for weekly Zoom meetings. The meetings' host, far-right blogger Jim Condit Jr. of Cincinnati, kicked off a July call by describing the precinct strategy as the last alternative to violence. “It's the only idea," Condit said, “unless you want to pick up guns like the Founding Fathers did in 1776 and start to try to take back our country by the Second Amendment, which none of us want to do."

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By the next week, though, Schultz suggested the new precinct officials might not stay peaceful. Schultz belonged to a mailing list for a group ofmilitary, law enforcement and intelligence veterans called the “1st Amendment Praetorian" that organizes security for Flynn and other pro-Trump figures. Back in the 1990s, Schultz wrote an article defending armed anti-government militias like those involved in that decade's deadly clashes with federal agents in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas.

“Make sure everybody's got a baseball bat," Schultz said on the July strategy conference call, which was posted on YouTube. “I'm serious about this. Make sure you've got people who are armed."

The sudden demand for low-profile precinct positions baffled some party leaders. In Fort Worth, county chair Rick Barnes said numerous callers asked about becoming a “precinct committeeman," quoting the term used on Bannon's podcast. That suggested that out-of-state encouragement played a role in prompting the calls, since Texas's term for the position is “precinct chair." Tarrant County has added 61 precinct chairs this year, about a 24% increase since February. “Those podcasts actually paid off," Barnes said.

For weeks, about five people a day called to become precinct chairs in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, southwest of Green Bay. Albert, the county party chair, said he would explain that Wisconsin has no precinct chairs, but newcomers could join the county party — and then become poll workers. “We're trying to make sure that our voice is now being reinserted into the process," Albert said.

Similarly, the GOP in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, is fielding a surge of volunteers for precinct committee members, but also for election judges or inspectors, which are party-affiliated elected positions in that state. “Who knows what happened on Election Day for real," county chair Lou Capozzi said in an interview. The county GOP sent two busloads of people to Washington for Jan. 6 and Capozzi said they stayed peaceful. “People want to make sure elections remain honest."

Elsewhere, activists inspired by the precinct strategy have targeted local election boards. In DeKalb County, east of Atlanta, the GOP censured a long-serving Republican board member who rejected claims of widespread fraud in 2020. To replace him, new party chair Marci McCarthy tapped a far-right activist known for false, offensive statements. The party nominees to the election board have to be approved by a judge, and the judge in this case rejected McCarthy's pick, citing an “extraordinary" public outcry. McCarthy defended her choice but ultimately settled for someone less controversial.

In Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 1,000 people attended the county GOP convention in March, up from the typical 300 to 400. The chair they elected, Alan Swain, swiftly formed an “election integrity committee" that's lobbying lawmakers to restrict voting and audit the 2020 results. “We're all about voter and election integrity," Swain said in an interview.

In the rural western part of the state, too, a wave of people who heard Bannon's podcast or were furious about perceived election fraud swept into county parties, according to the new district chair, Michele Woodhouse. The district's member of Congress, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, addressed a crowd at one county headquarters on Aug. 29, at an event that included a raffle for a shotgun.

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“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, it's going to lead to one place, and it's bloodshed," Cawthorn said, in remarks livestreamed on Facebook, shortly after holding the prize shotgun, which he autographed. “That's right," the audience cheered. Cawthorn went on, “As much as I'm willing to defend our liberty at all costs, there's nothing that I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American, and the way we can have recourse against that is if we all passionately demand that we have election security in all 50 states."

After Cawthorn referred to people arrested on Jan. 6 charges as “political hostages," someone asked, “When are you going to call us to Washington again?" The crowd laughed and clapped as Cawthorn answered, “We are actively working on that one."

Schultz has offered his own state of Arizona as a proof of concept for how precinct officers can reshape the party.The result, Schultz has said, is actions like the state Senate Republicans' “forensic audit" of Maricopa County's 2020 ballots. The “audit," conducted by a private firm with no experience in elections and whose CEO has spread conspiracy theories, has included efforts to identify fraudulent ballots from Asia by searching for traces of bamboo. Schultz has urged activists demanding similar audits in other states to start by becoming precinct officers.

“Because we've got the audit, there's very heightened and intense public interest in the last campaign, and of course making sure election laws are tightened," said Sandra Dowling, a district chair in northwest Maricopa and northern Yuma County whose precinct roster grew by 63% in less than six months. Though Dowling says some other district chairs screen their applicants, she doesn't. “I don't care," she said.

One chair who does screen applicants is Kathy Petsas, a lifelong Republican whose district spans Phoenix and Paradise Valley. She also saw applications explode earlier this year. Many told her that Schultz had recruited them, and some said they believed in QAnon. “Being motivated by conspiracy theories is no way to go through life, and no way for us to build a high-functioning party," Petsas said. “That attitude can't prevail."

As waves of new precinct officers flooded into the county party, Petsas was dismayed to see some petitioning to recall their own Republican county supervisors for refusing to cooperate with the Senate GOP's audit.

“It is not helpful to our democracy when you have people who stand up and do the right thing and are honest communicators about what's going on, and they get lambasted by our own party," Petsas said. “That's a problem."

This spring, a team of disaffected Republican operatives put Schultz's precinct strategy into action in South Carolina, a state that plays an outsize role in choosing presidents because of its early primaries. The operatives' goal was to secure enough delegates to the party's state convention to elect a new chair:far-right celebrity lawyer Lin Wood.

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Wood was involved with some of the lawsuits to overturn the presidential election that courts repeatedly ruled meritless, or even sanctionable. After the election, Wood said on Bannon's podcast, “I think the audience has to do what the people that were our Founding Fathers did in 1776." On Twitter, Wood called for executing Vice President Mike Pence by firing squad. Wood later said it was “rhetorical hyperbole," but that and other incendiary language got him banned from mainstream social media. He switched to Telegram, an encrypted messaging app favored by deplatformed right-wing influencers, amassing roughly 830,000 followers while repeatedly promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.

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Asked for comment about his political efforts, Wood responded, “Most of your 'facts' are either false or misrepresent the truth." He declined to cite specifics.

Typically, precinct meetings were “a yawner," according to Mike Connett, a longtime party member in Horry County, best known for its popular beach towns. But in April, Connett and other establishment Republicans were caught off guard when 369 people, many of them newcomers, showed up for the county convention in North Myrtle Beach. Connett lost a race for a leadership role to Diaz, the prominent QAnon supporter, and Wood's faction captured the county's other executive positions plus 35 of 48 delegate slots, enabling them to cast most of the county's votes for Wood at the state convention. “It seemed like a pretty clean takeover," Connett told ProPublica.

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In Greenville, the state's most populous county, Wood campaign organizers Jeff Davis and Pressley Stutts mobilized a surge of supporters at the county convention — about 1,400 delegates, up from roughly 550 in 2019 — and swept almost all of the 79 delegate positions. That gave Wood's faction the vast majority of the votes in two of South Carolina's biggest delegations.

Across the state, the precinct strategy was contributing to an unprecedented surge in local party participation, according to data provided by a state GOP spokeswoman. In 2019, 4,296 people participated. This year, 8,524 did.

“It's a prairie fire down there in Greenville, South Carolina, brought on by the MAGA posse," Bannon said on his podcast.

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Establishment party leaders realized they had to take Wood's challenge seriously. The incumbent chair, Drew McKissick, had Trump's endorsement three times over — including twice after Wood entered the race. But Wood fought back by repeatedly implying that McKissick and other prominent state Republicans were corrupt and involved in various conspiracies that seemed related to QAnon. The race became heated enough that after one event, Wood and McKissick exchanged angry words face-to-face.

Wood's rallies were raucous affairs packed with hundreds of people, energized by right-wing celebrities like Flynn and Lindell. In interviews, many attendees described the events as their first foray into politics, sometimes referencing Schultz and always citing Trump's stolen election myth. Some said they'd resort to violence if they felt an election was stolen again.

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Wood's campaign wobbled in counties that the precinct strategy had not yet reached. At the state convention in May, Wood won about 30% of the delegates, commanding Horry, Greenville and some surrounding counties, but faltering elsewhere. A triumphant McKissick called Wood's supporters “a fringe, rogue group" and vowed to turn them into a “leper colony" by building parallel Republican organizations in their territory.

But Wood and his partisans did not act defeated. The chairmanship election, they argued, was as rigged as the 2020 presidential race. Wood threw a lavish party at his roughly 2,000-acre low-country estate, secured by armed guards and surveillance cameras. From a stage fit for a rock concert on the lawn of one of his three mansions, Wood promised the fight would continue.

Diaz and her allies in Horry County voted to censure McKissick. The county's longtime Republicans tried, but failed, to oust Diaz and her cohort after one of the people involved in drafting Wood tackled a protester at a Flynn speech in Greenville. (This incident, the details of which are disputed, prompted Schultz to encourage precinct strategy activists to arm themselves.) Wood continued promoting the precinct strategy to his Telegram followers, and scores replied that they were signing up.

In late July, Stutts and Davis forced out Greenville County GOP's few remaining establishment leaders, claiming that they had cheated in the first election. Then Stutts, Davis and an ally won a new election to fill those vacant seats. “They sound like Democrats, right?" Bannon asked Stutts in a podcast interview. Stutts replied, “They taught the Democrats how to cheat, Steve."

Stutts' group quickly pushed for an investigation of the 2020 presidential election, planning a rally featuring Davis and Wood at the end of August, and began campaigning against vaccine and school mask mandates. “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery," Stutts had previously posted on Facebook, quoting Thomas Jefferson. Stutts continued posting messages skeptical of vaccine and mask mandates even after he entered the hospital with a severe case of COVID-19. He died on Aug. 19.

The hubbub got so loud inside the Cobb County, Georgia, Republican headquarters that it took several shouts and whistles to get everyone's attention. It was a full house for Salleigh Grubbs' first meeting as the county's party chair. Grubbs ran on a vow to “clean house" in the election system, highlighting her December testimony to state lawmakers in which she raised unsubstantiated fraud allegations. Supporters praised Grubbs' courage for following a truck she suspected of being used in a plot to shred evidence. She attended Trump's Jan. 6 rally as a VIP. She won the chairmanship decisively at an April county convention packed with an estimated 50% first-time participants.

In May, Grubbs opened her first meeting by asking everyone munching on bacon and eggs to listen to her recite the Gettysburg Address. “Think of the battle for freedom that Americans have before them today," Grubbs said. “Those people fought and died so that you could be the precinct chair." After the reading, first-time precinct officers stood for applause and cheers.

Their work would start right away: putting up signs, making calls and knocking on doors for a special election for the state House. The district had long leaned Republican, but after the GOP's devastating losses up and down the ballot in 2020, they didn't know what to expect.

“There's so many people out there that are scared, they feel like their vote doesn't count," Cooper Guyon, a 17-year-old right-wing podcaster from the Atlanta area who speaks to county parties around the state, told the Cobb Republicans in July. The activists, he said, need to “get out in these communities and tell them that we are fighting to make your vote count by passing the Senate bill, the election-reform bills that are saving our elections in Georgia."

Of the field's two Republicans, Devan Seabaugh took the strongest stance in favor of Georgia's new law restricting ways to vote and giving the Republican-controlled Legislature more power over running elections. “The only people who may be inconvenienced by Senate Bill 202 are those intent on committing fraud," he wrote in response to a local newspaper's candidate questionnaire.

Seabaugh led the June special election and won a July runoff. Grubbs cheered the win as a turning point. “We are awake. We are preparing," she wrote on Facebook. “The conservative citizens of Cobb County are ready to defend our ballots and our county."

Newcomers did not meet such quick success everywhere. In Savannah, a faction crashed the Chatham County convention with their own microphone, inspired by Bannon's podcast to try to depose the incumbent party leaders who they accused of betraying Trump. Party officers blocked the newcomers' candidacies, saying they weren't officially nominated. Shouting erupted, and the meeting adjourned without a vote. Then the party canceled its districtwide convention.

The state party ultimately sided with the incumbent leaders. District chair Carl Smith said the uprising is bound to fail because the insurgents are mistaken in believing that he and other local leaders didn't fight hard enough for Trump.

“You can't build a movement on a lie," Smith said.

In Michigan, activists who identify with a larger movement working against Republicans willing to accept Trump's loss have captured the party leadership in about a dozen counties. They're directly challenging state party leaders, who are trying to harness the grassroots energy without indulging demands to keep fighting over the last election.

Some of the takeovers happened before the rise of the precinct strategy. But the activists are now organizing under the banner “Precinct First" and holding regular events, complete with notaries, to sign people up to run for precinct delegate positions.

“We are reclaiming our party," Debra Ell, one of the organizers, told ProPublica. “We're building an 'America First' army."

Under normal rules, the wave of new precinct delegates could force the party to nominate far-right candidates for key state offices. That's because in Michigan, party nominees for attorney general, secretary of state and lieutenant governor are chosen directly by party delegates rather than in public primaries. But the state party recently voted to hold a special convention earlier next year, which should effectively lock in candidates before the new, more radical delegates are seated.

Activist-led county parties including rural Hillsdale and Detroit-area Macomb are also censuring Republican state legislators for issuing a June report on the 2020 election that found no evidence of systemic fraud and no need for a reexamination of the results like the one in Arizona. (The censures have no enforceable impact beyond being a public rebuke of the politicians.) At the same time, county party leaders in Hillsdale and elsewhere are working on a ballot initiative to force an Arizona-style election review.

Establishment Republicans have their own idea for a ballot initiative — one that could tighten rules for voter ID and provisional ballots while sidestepping the Democratic governor's veto. If the initiative collects hundreds of thousands of valid signatures, it would be put to a vote by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. Under a provision of the state constitution, the state Legislature can adopt the measure and it can't be vetoed.

State party leaders recently reached out to the activists rallying around the rejection of the presidential election results, including Hillsdale Republican Party Secretary Jon Smith, for help. Smith, Ell and others agreed to join the effort, the two activists said.

“This empowers them," Jason Roe, the state party executive director whose ouster the activists demanded because he said Trump was responsible for his own loss, told ProPublica. Roe resigned in July, citing unrelated reasons. “It's important to get them focused on change that can actually impact" future elections, he said, “instead of keeping their feet mired in the conspiracy theories of 2020."

Jesse Law, who ran the Trump campaign's Election Day operations in Nevada, sued the Democratic electors, seeking to declare Trump the winner or annul the results. The judge threw out the case, saying Law's evidence did not meet “any standard of proof," and the Nevada Supreme Court agreed. When the Electoral College met in December, Law stood outside the state capitol to publicly cast mock votes for Trump.

:{

}:

This year, Law set his sights on taking over the Republican Party in the state's largest county, Clark, which encompasses Las Vegas. He campaigned on the precinct strategy, promising 1,000 new recruits. His path to winning the county chairmanship — just like Stutts' team in South Carolina, and Grubbs in Cobb County, Georgia — relied on turning out droves of newcomers to flood the county party and vote for him.

:{

}:

In Law's case, many of those newcomers came through the Proud Boys, the all-male gang affiliated with more than two dozen people charged in the Capitol riot. The Las Vegas chapter boasted about signing up 500 new party members (not all of them belonging to the Proud Boys) to ensure their takeover of the county party. After briefly advancing their own slate of candidates to lead the Clark GOP, the Proud Boys threw their support to Law. They also helped lead a state party censure of Nevada's Republican secretary of state, who rejected the Trump campaign's baseless claims of fraudulent ballots.

Law, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has declined to distance himself from the Las Vegas Proud Boys, citing Trump's “stand back and stand by" remark at the September 2020 presidential debate. “When the president was asked if he would disavow, he said no," Law told an independent Nevada journalist in July. “If the president is OK with that, I'm going to take the presidential stance."

The outgoing county chair, David Sajdak, canceled the first planned vote for his successor. He said he was worried the Proud Boys would resort to violence if their newly recruited members, who Sajdak considered illegitimate, weren't allowed to vote.

Sajdak tried again to hold a leadership vote in July, with a meeting in a Las Vegas high school theater, secured by police. But the crowd inside descended into shouting, while more people tried to storm past the cops guarding the back entrance, leading to scuffles. “Let us in! Let us in!" some chanted. Riling them up was at least one Proud Boy, according to multiple videos of the meeting.

At the microphone, Sajdak was running out of patience. “I'm done covering for you awful people," he bellowed. Unable to restore order, Sajdak ended the meeting without a vote and resigned a few hours later. He'd had enough.

“They want to create mayhem," Sajdak said.

Soon after, Law's faction held their own meeting at a hotel-casino and overwhelmingly voted for Law as county chairman. Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, a longtime ally of Law who helped lead Trump's futile effort to overturn the Nevada results, recognized Law as the new county chair and promoted a fundraiser to celebrate. The existing county leaders sued, seeking a court order to block Law's “fraudulent, rogue election." The judge preliminarily sided with the moderates, but told them to hold off on their own election until a court hearing in September.

To Sajdak, agonizing over 2020 is pointless because “there's no mechanism for overturning an election." Asked if Law's allies are determined to create one, Sajdak said: “It's a scary thought, isn't it."

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621 an half a dozen states reps visit?!

A fundraising group, under the direction of a One America News Network (OAN) host, is now footing the bill to cover travel expenses for out-of-state Republican legislators to tour the botched election audit currently underway in Maricopa County, Ariz.

According to Talking Points Memo, Voices and Votes is the group led by Christina Bobb, a former Trump administration official who currently works as a host for the One America News Network (OAN). Back in April, Bobb gradually became more vocal about the group's fundraising efforts noting that it had surpassed the $150,000 milestone.

At the time, pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood confirmed to the publication that his own group Fight Back had also contributed $50,000 to Voices and Votes. His admission came as he admitted that he had personally spent time with Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the top contractor conducting the audit. At that time, Wood claimed Logan told him he was "working on the investigation into election fraud."

At one point, she also incorporated an on-air campaign to promote fundraising efforts for the group.

"Voice and Votes is an organization that I started, and I'm working to help other state senators get a close-up view of the Arizona audit," Bobb said. "If you'd like to help fund other state senators to get an up-close and personal view of the Arizona audit, you can donate at VoicesandVotes.org."

Now, those funds are being utilized to help Republican lawmakers travel to the state so they can get a firsthand experience of how the audit is being conducted which may influence future audits in similar fashion in other states.

While many Republican legislators have expressed interest in touring the audit, there are a number of reasons why there are concerns about this. The audit may not be the best reference to model after as it is being conducted by an inexperienced firm. It has also been a subject of intense scrutiny over the last several weeks.

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Pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood calls on supporters to dig up dirt on Georgia officials

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

Lin Wood—the pro-Trump attorney turned far-right conspiracy theorist and QAnon celebrity—has called on hundreds of thousands of his supporters to dig up dirt on Georgia officials

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/lin-wood-claims-clinton-pence-and-chief-justice-roberts-conspired-to-murder-federal-judges/

called to hang vp?  guy w/ handgun and zip tie cuff on flr?

an 121

no lnx vid

Here's the disturbing spin right-wing media is trying to put on pro-Trump chaos that erupted at the US Capitol

Tucker Carlson speaking with attendees at the 2018 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Credit: Gage Skidmore

Meaghan Ellis January 07, 2021

Most Americans watched in horror as angry supporters of President Donald Trump breached the U.S. Capitol. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle made it clear that what they witnessed was disturbing, grotesque and un-American.

But despite what Americans saw transpire with their own eyes Wednesday, right-wing media outlets are already trying to point fingers at anyone besides Trump and his supporters.

According to Axios, right-wing publications, news outlets and other conservative media platforms "mostly blamed left-wing activists, the media, Vice President Pence — and even police officers — for the riots that some suggested were the start of a 'civil war' in America."

The publication went on to note just how far Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmax went to hold everyone accountable but the people who were truly responsible for the chaos.

Trump campaign lawyer and known conspiracy theorist Lin Wood even attacked Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter as he leveled a dangerous allegation at him. Not only did Wood describe Pence as a "traitor" but he also described him as a "communist sympathizer" and "child molester" as he suggested that the vice president be locked up. That tweet is what led to Wood being banned from Twitter on Wednesday.

==

an 11

far-right attorney L. Lin Wood has been in the headlines a great deal in recent weeks because of his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and his unhinged tweets, including a December 1 post in which he predicted that the United States is "headed to civil war" and called for President Donald Trump to "declare martial law." But according to some former law partners, Wood's behavior was unhinged long before the election.

The ex-partners are Nicole Wade, Jonathan Grunberg and Taylor Wilson, who left the firm L. Lin Wood, P.C. and formed their own firm, Wade, Grunberg & Wilson, LLC.

Law & Crime reporter Adam Klasfeld explains, "The former partners claimed that their relationship with Wood spanning roughly half a decade started deteriorating late last year as Wood began to exhibit 'erratic, hostile, abusive and threatening' behavior."

In a legal brief, they allege that the Atlanta-based Wood physically attacked Grunberg and Wilson. The attorneys wrote, "In the fall of 2019, defendant Wood also committed assault and battery on Grunberg in an elevator of a hotel during an out of town deposition. In both assaults, there was essentially no reason whatsoever for the attack, and defendant Wood later acknowledged and apologized for this violence."

Good morning. Our country is headed to civil war. A war created by 3rd party bad actors for their benefit - not fo… https://t.co/J3hCjuW8x3

— Lin Wood (@Lin Wood)1606834823.0

Almost year ago, I came to strongly believe God created @realDonaldTrump to be President in 2016 & that he would be… https://t.co/kaFSGM4Pst

— Lin Wood (@Lin Wood)1609386177.0

The attorneys also allege, in the complaint, that "Wood has admitted to these assaults on multiple recordings" and that he has made anti-Semitic comments. On February 17, 2020, they allege, Wood left a voicemail for Grunberg saying, "You look in the mirror, and you're gonna see a Chilean Jewish fucking crook."

Wood's clients have ranged from Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse to the late Herman Cain (who ran for president in 2012) to Rep.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional race in Georgia this year and is known for promoting the QAnon conspiracy cult. And Wood has allied himself with Sidney Powell, another far-right pro-Trump attorney, on some of her election lawsuits.

Wood's ex-partners allege that he has a history of comparing himself to biblical figures, saying, for example, "I might actually be Christ coming back for a second time in the form of an imperfect man, elevating Christ consciousness." And the attorneys also allege that Wood can be heard in a recording saying, "I represent Moses. I represent Ananias the believer. I'm like the power of King David. Now look, you all, I told you I was going to pray tonight to my God, not to myself, because to me, there's God and there's me."

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Wednesday, pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood took to Twitter to attack Chief Justice John Roberts, suggesting a wild conspiracy theory that he may have been involved in, or had advance warning of, Justice Antonin Scalia's death in 2016.

"You are recorded discussing Justice Scalia's successor before date of his sudden death," said Wood. "How did you know Scalia was going to die?"

For good measure, Wood also threw in allegations based on the QAnon hoax: "Are you a member of any club or cabal requiring minor children as initiation fee?"

[twt]

this is not the first time Wood has directed his ire at Roberts, who has repeatedly refused to intervene in the ballot counting process in states. Last week, he tweeted a demand for Roberts to resign.

Wood, who has represented a number of high-profile right wing clients and has been involved in unsuccessful lawsuits alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election, has increasingly aggravated even members of President Donald Trump's campaign with his behavior — particularly his suggestion that Republicans should boycott the Georgia Senate runoffs to ensure the incumbents' loyalty to Trump.

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alexh

reporter Ben Collins, in an article published by NBC News' website on December 22, takes a disturbing look at QAnon supporters who are yearning for President Donald Trump to impose a fascist military dictatorship and end liberal democracy in the United States.

President-elect Joe Biden enjoyed a decisive victory in the 2020 presidential election, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating Trump by over 7 million in the popular vote. But QAnon supporters view Democrats as their enemy and have been promoting the hashtag @CrossTheRubicon — which, in QAnon terminology, means imposing a military dictatorship. And QAnon supporters, Collins reports, are urging Trump to "cross the Rubicon" and become a full-fledged dictator.

"With Trump's days in office dwindling," Collins explains, "QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant — urging him to #CrossTheRubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kickstarting the Roman Civil War and Caesar's dictatorship."

To understand why QAnon believes that Trump deserves to be a full-fledged dictator, one needs to know about their bizarre and outlandish conspiracy theories. QAnon believes that the United States' federal government, especially the Democratic Party, has been infiltrated by an international cabal of Satanists, child sex traffickers, pedophiles and cannibals and that Trump has been put in the White House to fight the cabal. "Q," according to QAnon, is an anonymous figure who is providing updates about Trump's battle.

Claiming, without evidence, that the election was stolen from Trump because of widespread voter fraud, some far-right Trump supporters have been urging the president to declare martial law in order to prevent Biden from being inaugurated on January 20, 2021 —including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Atlanta-based attorney Lin Wood and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

"Flynn, a hero in the mythology of the QAnon conspiracy theory who once took a QAnon 'oath' on video, has said in appearances on the conservative media channel Newsmax that Trump should use the military to'rerun' the election," Collins observes.

QAnon terminology, Collins points out, is being used by some prominent Republicans. For example, Kelli Ward, who chairs the Arizona Republican Party, has used the #CrossTheRubicon hashtag. And attorney Sidney Powell, who has been working with Wood on election-related lawsuits, has used the QAnon hashtag #TheStormIsComing, which, Collins notes, is "a QAnon phrase that refers to the extrajudicial roundup of Democrats at the heart of the theory."

Mr. President @realDonaldTrump - we are with you in #Arizona. We are working every avenue to stop this coup & to st… https://t.co/CP7RNETBdk

— Dr. Kelli Ward (@Dr. Kelli Ward )1608429214.0

Michael Flynn's new attorney, Sidney Powell, has repeatedly retweeted major QAnon accounts, including one of the 3… https://t.co/0DGjSw3Wf0

— Alex Kaplan (@Alex Kaplan)1560371762.0

Sidney Powell was probably the most powerful person to have ever believed in deep, mystic, devout QAnonism. Her Twi… https://t.co/9KWYwHGxt1

— Ben Collins (@Ben Collins)1606090386.0

According to Collins, "Some QAnon followers believe Trump is left with no choice but to declare martial law — a belief based in part on a series of wildly false news articles that have claimed that Trump is in a secret, ongoing land war with China in parts of the U.S. A series of fake news articles, YouTube videos and tweets that went viral among QAnon acolytes last week led followers to believe Trump was conducting clandestine military operations on U.S. soil."

Ron Watkins, who formerly ran the QAnon hub 8kun, recently tweeted:

Will @realDonaldTrump #CrossTheRubicon? Spread the hashtag and show POTUS how you feel about it.

— Ron (@Ron)1608307687.0

Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican with libertarian leanings, has been warning about how dangerous QAnon is. The outgoing Virginia congressman, who will be replaced by far-right wingnut Rep.-elect Bob Goodin January, told NBC News, "I'm losing friends and family over a straight-up cult based on anti-Semitism, fantasy and just bizarre made-up tripe. It's an idiocracy based on a digital prophet."

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1220 rww

...

And yet, this is not the only example of infighting among conservatives. Lin Wood,one of Rittenhouse’s attorneys, has spread baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, many of which are linked to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. He appeared at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia last Wednesday alongside infamous “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell (whom Right Wing Watch reported on in-depth here) and told those in attendance not to vote in the Jan. 5 Senate runoff elections in Georgia. Instead, he demanded that Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler pressure Republican Gov. Brian Kemp to call a special session of the legislature to name pro-Trump electors.

“They have not earned your vote,” Wood said at the rally. “Don’t you give it to them.”

Wood, who had previously called for Trump to declare martial law and use the military to oversee a new election and told Steve Bannon that people need to be prepared for “another 1776,” faced backlash from Republicans for telling attendees not to vote in the Senate runoff. In an attempt to discredit Wood, who seems to have gone too far for even Trump, the president’s campaign suggested that the Atlanta-based lawyer is actually a Democrat planted to sow discontent within the Republican Party.

While the American right continues to be embroiled in a game of one-upmanship over how best to support Rittenhouse, white supremacists and neo-Nazis around the world have embraced the teenager as a propaganda tool for their ideology. To them, Rittenhouse is no longer just a kid forced to defend himself but a warrior who killed two demonstrators at a protest for Black lives while defending the Americans who matter most.

...

beware fluff?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Lin_Wood

lucian Lincoln "Lin" Wood Jr. (born October 19, 1952) is an American attorney based in Atlanta, Georgia. He represented Richard Jewell,[1][2][3][4] the security guard falsely accused in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996. Wood's representation of Jewell helped transform Wood from a personal injury lawyer to a nationally known defamation lawyer.[5] 

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After Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election and Donald Trumpmade false claims of fraud in the election,[6] Wood litigated on Trump's behalf to seek to prevent the certification of election results.[7]

Following his graduation from law school in 1977, Wood worked for decades as a personal injury lawyer, focusing specifically on the then-burgeoning field of medical malpractice litigation. He later shifted his focus, becoming known as a "celebrity lawyer" with a specialization in defamation lawsuits. In addition to representing Jewell, Wood has represented the family of JonBenet Ramsey in defamation suits.He also represented former U.S. Congressman Gary Condit and Republican political candidateHerman Cain, defending both men from charges of sexual and other misconduct.

Early life

Lin Wood was raised in Macon, Georgia, since age 3. He stated that his family struggled financially with frequent episodes of domestic abuse involving his parents.[8][9] He has one sister, Diane Wood Stern, born February 1951 and a half sister, Linda Martin, born in 1946. After a school dance, the then 16-year-old Wood returned home to find his father had beaten his mother to death.[8][9][10] L. Lin Wood Sr. pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, a charge reduced from first-degree murder.[11] He served a little over two years in prison. Wood has stated that it was this experience that solidified his earlier decision to become a lawyer.[8][9][10]

Wood lived with friends and graduated from Mark Smith High School in Macon, Georgia in 1970. He went on to attend Mercer University, graduating cum laude in 1974, and Walter F. George School of Law, graduating cum laude in 1977.[12][better source needed] From 1977 to 1996 Wood litigated personal injury cases and medical malpractice cases in the State of Georgia.[8][9]

Career

Richard Jewell

Wood's first libel and defamation client was Richard Jewell,[1][2][3][4] the security guard falsely accused in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta in 1996. Wood sued a number of media outlets, as well as Jewell's employer. Wood reached monetary settlements from Jewell's employer, CNN, and NBC, while Time published a clarification, but paid no settlement.[13] In 2012, after fifteen years of litigation, the Georgia Supreme Court upheld trial court decisions ruling against Jewell in his libel suit against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.[14]

JonBenet Ramsey

Jewell was quickly followed by other high-profile cases, including John and Patsy Ramsey, the parents of JonBenét Ramsey.[15] Wood represented John and Patsy Ramsey and their son Burke, pursuing defamation claims on their behalf against St. Martin's Press, Time Inc., The Fox News Channel, American Media, Inc., Star, The Globe, Court TV and The New York Post.[citation needed] The lawsuit against Star was settled.[16]

John and Patsy Ramsey were also sued in two separate defamation lawsuits arising from the publication of their book, The Death of Innocence. The suit was brought by two individuals named in the book as having been investigated by Boulder police as suspects in JonBenét's murder. The Ramseys were defended in those lawsuits by Lin Wood and three other Atlanta attorneys, James C. Rawls, Eric P. Schroeder, and S. Derek Bauer. The lawsuits against the Ramseys were dismissed.[17]

In 2016, Wood represented Burke Ramsey, older brother of murder victim JonBenet Ramsey, in a pair of related lawsuits stemming from the CBS network docuseries The Case of: JonBenét Ramsey. The first suit was filed against Dr. Werner Spitz, a Michigan-based forensic pathologist, over his assertion in a promotional CBS Detroit radio interview that Burke killed his sister when a young child.[18] The other suit was against CBS and other parties involved in the docuseries, where the same allegations were made. Both lawsuits were settled out of court.[19]

2020 election

Wood withPresident Donald Trump in 2020

In November 2020, Wood filed a lawsuit in Georgia challenging the state's process for voiding absentee ballots due to a lack of matching signatures.[20] Wood's lawsuit failed after a Trump-appointed judge found "no basis in fact or in law" to stop Georgia's certification of its election results at such a late stage, as this would "breed confusion and potential disenfranchisement". The judge also ruled that Wood had no legal standing to bring the lawsuit, and that Wood had failed to show that he had been harmed.[21] Wood later called for would-be Republican voters to "threaten to withhold your votes" and monetary support for Georgia's Republican candidates for the Senate, incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, if they did not demand "investigations" into the election.[22]

Wood has claimed without evidence that Trump won the presidential election with 70% of the vote.[23] While litigating on Trump's behalf, he has falsely asserted to the media and in court that more votes were cast in Michigan during the 2020 presidential election than the entire population of eligible voters in the state, a conclusion he drew from a mistaken comparison of the Michigan vote total with Minnesota population data.[24]

Wood has circulated multiple debunked videos alleging that Cobb County shredded evidence of voter fraud in the November 2020 general election, and his Twitter profile includes the hashtag #WWG1WGA, which is associated with the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory.[25]

Some Republicans cast doubt on Wood's representation of Trump by noting that Wood had donated to numerous Democratic candidates for office as recently as 2018.[26] Due to his past support of Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, Wood was accused by Breitbart of "sabotage" against Republicans, specifically against Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the January 2021 runoff elections for both of Georgia's Senate seats. Wood rebutted the allegations on Twitter, writing, "Breitbart is dishonest. Historically, I am nonpartisan. This year, I was partisan because I love [Donald Trump]" and describing hundreds of thousands of dollars he had donated to Republican-affiliated candidates and political action committees in 2020.[27]

Other significant lawsuits

Wood went on to represent former U.S. Congressman Gary Condit, and the alleged victim in the Kobe Bryant case.[28]

In November 2011, Wood was hired by then-presidential candidate Herman Cain, in his efforts to fight off sexual harassment accusations.[29][30]

Wood was a lead attorney in a whistleblower case against DaVita Healthcare. The suit was settled in 2015 for $450 million plus up to $45 million in fees.[31]

Wood was the lead attorney in Nicholas Sandmann's defamation suit against The Washington Post.Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School, was a party to the January 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation. The suit was settled in July 2020.[32]

In December 2019 Wood lost a multi-million defamation case for Vernon Unsworth against Elon Musk who had branded him a "pedo guy". The case was lost because the jury felt that Musk's tweet did not properly identify Unsworth, as he was not mentioned by name.[33]

In July 2020, Wood was retained to represent Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America's Frontline Doctors, who was fired for appearing in a video making false claims about COVID-19.[34][better source needed][35]

In August 2020, Wood volunteered to work on the defense team for Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old charged with homicide for shootings during the Kenosha unrest over the shooting of Jacob Blake.[36][better source needed]

Personal life

Wood lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and has four children, two of whom are attorneys.[37] Wood and Mercer University announced a one million dollar fund set up by Wood at his alma mater to be called the "L. Lin Wood Fund for the Enhancement of Mercer Law School".[38]

Reference

wa exmr

former national security adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn promoted a petition this week that calls for the temporary suspension of the Constitution and a re-vote for the 2020 election.

“Freedom never kneels except for God,” the recently pardoned Flynn tweeted along with the petition advertising the We The People Convention.

#WeThePeople @SidneyPowell1 @LLinWood @DanScavino @LouDobbs @MariaBartiromo @marklevinshow @lofly727

Freedom never kneels except for God

— General Flynn (@GenFlynn) December 1, 2020

A letter alongside the petition urged President Trump to declare martial law to temporarily suspend the Constitution for the sole purpose of a national re-vote overseen by the military that “reflects the true will of the people.”

The letter also discussed the actions that President Abraham Lincoln undertook during the Civil War when he ordered newspapers to be shut down, arrested an Ohio congressman, signed an arrest warrant for a Supreme Court justice who ruled against him, and arrested citizens suspected of supporting the South.

The letter states that while those decisions are still being debated today, it is undeniable that Lincoln’s actions “saved the Republic” and are part of the reason he is viewed as one of the country's greatest presidents.

“You must also act, like Lincoln did, to silence the destructive media’s one-sided propaganda designed and proven to influence the election outcome, and end the unlawful censorship of Big Tech, to restore the confidence of the American People in our electoral process or we cannot continue as a nation,” the letter reads. “Failure to do so could result in massive violence and destruction on a level not seen since the Civil War. Limited Martial Law is clearly a better option than Civil War!”

The petition was also posted by attorney Lin Wood, who is part of the legal effort to overturn election results in several key states in response to allegations of rampant voter fraud.

“@realDonaldTrump should declare martial law,” Wood tweeted, arguing that the United States is on the brink of another Civil War.

Good morning.

Our country is headed to civil war. A war created by 3rd party bad actors for their benefit - not for We The People.

Communist China is leading the nefarious efforts to take away our freedom.@realDonaldTrump should declare martial law.https://t.co/h3Ym5ytMYt

— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) December 1, 2020

All major news outlets have called the presidential race for Joe Biden as Trump continues to mount legal challenges. The president has said he will leave office if he is not the winner after the Electoral College voters convene later this month. However, he and other Republicans, including Republican Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks this week, have also signaled the fight could continue after that.

rt richter

QAnon movement gets assertive

Star MAGA attorney Lin Wood strutted across a stage in Georgia on Wednesday, riling up the crowd with a southern revival energy and, at one point, waving around a coonskin cap he had found in the crowd. He was in his element. And at one point, he inspired a “lock him up” chant aimed at the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

But within the pomp, Wood had a serious message for the audience: don’t vote for Republican Senate candidates in the state’s upcoming runoffs, unless they meet our demands.

"They have not earned your vote,” Wood said. “Don't you give it to them.”

Until then, most Republican officials were happy to ignore Wood’s hapless attempts to save the election for Donald Trump, which involved wild allegations of a deep, corrupt scheme to shift thousands of votes to Joe Biden. Telling his fans not to vote for Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, however, appeared to be a step too far. Within hours, Breitbart denounced Wood as a former Democratic donor in an attack that was picked up by the Trump campaign. Soon after, other conservatives were piling on too, with Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) accusing Wood of being a plant and Rush Limbaugh and Roger Stone distancing themselves from him. 

The fault lines made clear just how contentious the post-election political environment has become for the Republican Party. And it underscored a new problem that it faces, mainly the rise of an aggressive, increasingly assertive QAnon wing. The GOP is now divided between  conspiracy theorists and those who want to keep at least a toehold in reality.

Both Wood and former Trump lawyer turned professional conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell, who joined him on the stage, have built up their ties with QAnon believers. Wood includes a reference to the QAnon motto “Where we go one, we go all” in his Twitter bio, and recently endorsed a call for exactly the kind of military rule QAnon believers eagerly hope for.

Wood’s demand is also the quintessential QAnon demand: endless investigations until what he wants to come true finally happens. Wood and his supporters claim to want Perdue and Loeffler to back a special session of the Georgia legislature to investigate the 2020 election. But, since Georgia recounts have proven the race wasn’t affected by fraud, this demand really equates to the kind of endless investigations QAnon supporters crave. 

At the end of the investigation, the thinking goes, there’ll be some kind of catharsis — in QAnon’s case, a violent “Storm” that features mass-arrests of Trump’s enemies, or, in Wood’s case, Georgia’s legislators assuring that the state’s electors be handed to Trump.

In the meantime, as long as the investigations are ongoing, QAnon believers won’t have to face reality: that no such arrests are coming and that Biden will be sworn into office.

That puts Republican officials in a bind: keep up the farce and order endless probes into the 2020 election, or face the wrath of QAnon believers and other Trump supporters living in their individual fantasy lands.

Wood’s intra-Republican fight has drawn in a number of other fringe groups. Interestingly, the influential “The Gateway Pundit” blog sided with him and accused Breitbart—the bane of the pre-Trump GOP establishment's existence—of carrying water for the Republican establishment. Columnist Michelle Malkin, who’s now palling around with racist college students in the “groyper” movement, slammed Crenshaw for attacking Wood.

At his rally, Wood even raised the prospect of pulling support more broadly from Republicans.

“Maybe it’s time to look beyond the Democrats and the Republicans,” Wood said, to cheers.  “Maybe it’s time for the party of the people.”

Wood’s ambitions to shake up the GOP — or at least pressure it into meeting his demands — could extend for years. At one point in the rally, Wood donned a “FLYNN” cap, a reference to former Trump national security adviser and central QAnon protagonist Michael Flynn.

“How about Sidney Powell and Mike Flynn in 2024?” Wood said, floating the QAnon dream ticket.

Sidney Powell falls for The Voice parody

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we the ppl org? w/ powell?

Many Americans were shocked to wake up Wednesday to see former Trump National Security Adviser **Mike Flynn** calling for martial law so the U.S. military can hold a "do-over" election. Flynn is not alone, there is a large number of people promoting this lawless and unconstitutional behavior, all in service to Donald Trump.

Flynn and other far right wing "leaders," including pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood, are pushing a Tea Party group's statement "demanding that President Trump Invoke limited Martial law in order to allow the U.S. Military to oversee a new free and fair federal election if Legislators, Courts and the Congress do not follow the Constitution."

To be clear, there was no significant election fraud or voter fraud. Even Trump's own Attorney General Bill Barr made that declaration on Tuesday.

The far right has taken over the main Republican Party, and this is a direct result.

Many on social media are furious, especially since no Republican, especially President Trump, has called to put a stop to this dangerous incitement. Many are rightly criticizing these self-declared "patriots" – many of whom are coming close to appearing to embrace sedition – as astonishingly hypocritical.

Why?

They are 100 percent OK with suspending the U.S. Constitution because Trump legitimately lost, holding a military-overseen election "do-over" because Trump lost (by nearly 7 million votes), but wearing a face mask to prevent the spread of a deadly virus violates their "rights" and is "fascism."

Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell is challenging his GOP peers to denounce the hypocrisy:

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/rittenhouse/

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The headline was jarring: "Black Man Who Spent 25 Years Incarcerated for a Murder He Didn't Commit Has Been Exonerated," The Root's homepage shouted at me. The story of 62-year-old Jaythan Kendrick, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit on Thanksgiving Day 1994—when he was just 36—is a familiar one to anyone who's paid attention to the chronic miscarriage of justice Black people face: Had law enforcement and or prosecutors actually done their job, Kendrick could have been home in time for Christmas, or maybe never arrested at all. The evidence was thin—at best. It also was manipulated.

But this story is not about Jaythan Kendrick.

With a quick click of the Back button, and I was back to The Root's homepage; just below the Kendrick story I'd just read was the face of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old high schooler who definitely murdered two—almost three—Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisc. with an illegally obtained AR-15 rifle back in August. Rittenhouse was released Friday on a cash bail of $2 million, paid in part by Mike Lindell—the Trump fanatic usually referred to as the My Pillow Guy—and Rick Schroder, an ex-child actor best known for the vapid 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons.

While both Kendrick and Rittenhouse will be home just in time for Thanksgiving, the justice system journeys for these two men—one guilty, and one innocent, one white, and one Black—couldn't be more different. And so I rage.

Lin Wood, attorney for the newly-freed yet wholly unrepentant Rittenhouse, posted a photo of the grinning (and maskless) homicidal teenager to Twitter Friday evening.

Rabid militia enthusiasts, endorsers of white supremacy, and lovers of Donald Trump have all latched on to the murderous teen, elevating him to hero status in their hateful white power fantasies;over half a million dollars has been raised for Rittenhouse beyond the bail money, according to the local CBS affiliate.

Most of the money came from small donations, and Rittenhouse's attorney took to Twitter thanking donors and saying,"We the peopledid not let him down."

Rittenhouse, who again, absolutely killed two people, has a fucking fan base. A rabid one, with deep pockets.

The murderer, who has admitted to two murders and one attempted murder, told police "No, I don't regret it" at the time of his arrest, and is currently enjoying some surreal hero's life, admired by the sort of folks who vicariously watched cell phone footage of his cold killings and opened their wallets in support. These folks know exactly what Rittenhouse did and respect it. They consider his actions right and just, even as they smear his victims—all white men—to help justify their cold-blooded murders.

db 920

https://www.thedailybeast.com/devin-nunes-may-be-trumps-person-who-witnessed-the-antifa-plane-firsthand

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defenders of accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse, who is in jail after allegedly fatally shooting two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, have insisted that he was merely acting in self-defense.

But Rittenhouse’s attorney, John Pierce, is mounting a more impassioned, perhaps novel, case to win his client’s freedom. Rittenhouse, Pierce argues, is the first hero of a new American Revolution.

“Kyle Rittenhouse will go down in American history alongside that brave unknown patriot at Lexington Green who fired ‘The Shot Heard Round the World’ on April 19, 1775,” Pierce wrote in a since-deleted tweet on Tuesday. “A Second American Revolution against Tyranny has begun.”

Despite not being a criminal-defense attorney, Pierce has become the public face of a growing legal and financial effort to acquit Rittenhouse, appearing on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, promising to send a “special forces team” of lawyers to Wisconsin, and taking the unusual step of posting audio from a jailhouse phone call with Rittenhouse on Twitter to thank his supporters.

Pierce has teamed up with famed defamation attorney Lin Wood to launch #FightBack Foundation, a nonprofit with a dizzying array of goals that includes saving Rittenhouse, “contesting surveillance abuse,” and “stopping human trafficking.” That fundraising effort has been endorsed by far-right columnist Michelle Malkin and former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernie Kerik. At least some of the money donated to the foundation from Rittenhouse’s supporters will go toward Pierce’s own law firm, Pierce Bainbridge, as part of the legal defense, according to Pierce.

What may not be clear to donors, however, is that Pierce and the once-prominent firm he founded are mired in millions of dollars of debt, while a payday-lender-style loan to cover his own expenses prompted him to take a leave of absence. As Pierce’s firm totters around him, he appears to be using Rittenhouse’s legal defense to give himself a new persona as a trash-talking, right-wing firebrand.

Asked for comment for this story, Pierce didn’t directly address the turmoil at his firm or the allegations of financial mismanagement that have been levied against him.

“I am not quite the rapscallion you make it seem, Will ;),” Pierce wrote in an email. “But I do love my God, my Country and Notre Dame, and I will fight to the death for Kyle Rittenhouse.”

Pierce’s collaborator in the Rittenhouse case did offer what could be described as a qualified defense. Wood said the #FightBack Foundation would have strict rules about approving expenses, including payments to Pierce’s firm.

“I have to draw a fine line, a sharp line, between his involvement with the foundation and his defense of Kyle,” Wood said.

Asked about Pierce’s financial problems, Wood said he didn’t know enough about them to comment.

“I will say this generally speaking: If you’re looking for a pristine lawyer in this country, good luck,” said Wood, who has represented Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann in lawsuits against various media outlets. “Last I checked, we’re all sinners, and that includes non-lawyers.”

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