FLYNN 4 mike
1/22
MERRI OK
404 --> BAK --> FOUR
SEE JOE BRO ON CNP ED MARTIN THREE PRONG
SEE CONSP 6 RUSSIAGATE REBOOT OBAMA VS EPSTEIN IMPLODE
see reawaken tour
SEE INFOWARS JONES
see AM PROJECT ELECTION INTEGRITY BS}:
see byne pjt with roger stone voter suppress
see sis mary org AMERICA’S FUTURE RW CELEBS
sEE RAIKLIN
see hype fear grift human traffic coming for your kids
CNP? Ginni?
see 1s praetorian
what flavor of xian? islamophobe
see martial law // fascism coup
see dec 18 WH meeting unhinged
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MMA
02/20/26
February 18, 2026, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show
ALEX JONES (HOST): General Michael Flynn joins us. We had a very important discussion yesterday. He's very concerned, so am I. He was on a month ago to talk about Susie Wiles with opposition research against him and others. I've confirmed with Robert Barnes that he's been threatened, all because he was exposing that they were shutting down the antitrust lawyers' investigations.
So the Trump administration is overrun by corruption, and this Epstein cover-up is just continuing on. Over the weekend, they said they released everything. I believed it. Fox was running the headline. It wasn't true. So she just lied to Congress, Pam Bondi. This is outrageous.
Yes, there's all this great stuff Trump's doing on the border, and trying to stop wars, and taking back the Panama Canal, and finding half the missing kids that the Democrats brought in under Biden, and getting us out of the Paris accord, the carbon tax. That's all fabulous, but it's like, it doesn't matter if your grandpa's a nice guy and you find out there's a dead body buried in the backyard.
===
no lnx
Politics
Michael Flynn, DOJ in Settlement Talks Over $50 Million Claim
By Zoe Tillman
November 14, 2025
The Justice Department has been discussing settlements with two former officials from Donald Trump’s first term who — like the president — claim they’re owed major payouts from the US government as victims of politically motivated actions.
The administration has been in talks since at least late summer to resolve lawsuits brought by Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and former senior White House lawyer Stefan Passantino, according to court filings. Flynn is seeking $50 million for what he alleges was a wrongful prosecution, while Passantino says a House committee probing the 2020 election harmed his reputation by leaking private information....paywall blombrg
Bloomberg.com
Michael Flynn, DOJ in Settlement Talks Over $50 Million Claim
The Justice Department has been discussing settlements with Michael Flynn and Stefan Passantino, two former officials from Donald Trump's...
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GGL 2 26
[
KFOX
Gen. Michael Flynn says he will run for president if former Vice President Pence runs
Gen. Michael Flynn said that if former Republican Vice President Mike Pence runs for president in 2028, he would run.
.
Nov 10, 2025](https://kfoxtv.com/news/nation-world/gen-michael-flynn-says-he-will-run-for-president-if-former-vice-president-pence-runs-donald-trump-jan-6-2016-2024)
Advocate.com
Trump ally Michael Flynn submits ‘extreme’ legal brief brimming with bigotry in trans military case
He wrote that coupling transgender people "with ready access to fully automatic firearms and other powerful weapons might not be the best of...
.
Oct 1, 2025](https://www.advocate.com/news/talbott-amicus-brief-michael-flynn)
[
Reuters
Trump names former adviser Flynn to West Point board of visitors
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday named Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser who challenged the 2020 election results and...
.
Mar 17, 2025](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-names-former-adviser-flynn-west-point-board-visitors-2025-03-17/)
Axios
Trump's next national security adviser will be his sixth
President Trump's first national security adviser quickly resigned and later ended up in court. His next two clashed with him while in office and harshly...
.
May 1, 2025](https://www.axios.com/2025/05/01/trump-five-national-security-advisers-waltz)
[
Politico
Trump stacks military academy boards with MAGA loyalists, including Michael Flynn and Charlie Kirk
President Donald Trump on Monday named a raft of close allies, including conservative firebrands and controversial figures from his first administration, to...
.
Mar 17, 2025](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/17/michael-flynn-charlie-kirk-trump-appointments-00234637)
President Donald Trump on Monday named a raft of close allies, including conservative firebrands and controversial figures from his first administration, to boards overseeing some of the nation’s top military academies.
The appointments came after Trump last month purged the boards of visitors at the Naval, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard academies as part of his wider push to radically overhaul the military, which he has previously decried as too “woke.”
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social Monday, Trump said he had appointed former national security adviser Michael Flynn to the United States Military Academy’s board of visitors, along with Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas); Maureen Bannon, a West Point alum and daughter of MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon; Medal of Honor recipient David Bellavia; and retired major general Dan Walrath.
Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during the president’s first term before he resigned in 2017 after reports surfaced that he obfuscated his discussions with Russian officials to then-Vice President Mike Pence. He pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI regarding his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, though Trump later pardoned him.
“They will make our Country proud,” Trump wrote. “Congratulations to all!”
The president also named Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville, founder of conservative network Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk and former deputy national security adviser Dina Powell, among others, to the Air Force’s board of visitors.
Trump confirmed Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy; former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer; former White House physician Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas); and the president’s body man Walt Nauta, who was federally indicted alongside the president in the classified documents case, will sit on the Naval Academy’s board of visitors.
Spicer has served on the Naval Academy’s board before but was dismissed by the Biden administration in 2021 and lost a lawsuit challenging the decision. The charges against Nauta were dropped after Trump began his second term.
The boards are effectively advisory panels and can weigh in on curriculum, teaching, finances and other matters, with members nominated by Congress and the president.
Trump’s appointments fit a long-established pattern of rewarding loyalists, and come amid his and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bid to reform the military, including by issuing executive orders banning transgender service members and eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.
[
The Hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5662585-epstein-case-flynn-trump-response/)
---
TRUMP MENTION 9 25?
MMA
January 6 “false flag” claim made it to the president
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/29/25
The right-wing conspiracy theory that hundreds of plainclothes FBI agents who were deployed to respond to the riotous mob at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, had actually incited the crowd in a “Fedsurrection” spread through the right-wing conspiracy echo chamber over the weekend and reached President Donald Trump in just over 36 hours after its inception.
Elements of the right-wing media, led by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, spent years concocting an alternate narrative of January 6 in which the rioters were heroes, any violence was actually caused by federal agents, and the resulting prosecutions of perpetrators constituted a brutal campaign of government repression.
Following Trump’s return to office, his pardoning of the rioters, and the firings and demotions of prosecutors and FBI agents who handled their cases, this is effectively the position of the United States government.
Given those dynamics — and the president’s willingness to promote any lie, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it fits his biases — false claims supporting the narrative of January 6 as an “inside job” can spread with alarming speed.
Late on September 25, right-wing journalist John Solomon’s Just the News outlet published a story with the headline “FBI Bombshell: 274 agents sent to Capitol for J6, many later complained they were political ‘pawns.’”
“The FBI secretly deployed more than 250 plainclothes agents to the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, an operation so disorganized it unleashed searing frustrations among many of the FBI's rank-and-file that the bureau had lost its core competencies to ‘wokeness’ and allowed its employees to become ‘pawns in a political war,’ according to an after-action report kept from the public for more than four years,” Solomon and Steven Richards wrote in the article’s first paragraph.
Solomon and Richards did not reveal until the story’s 11th paragraph that the agents had been deployed “after the violence started.” The pair lifted up complaints from FBI agents that in an emergency situation — in which thousands of people had laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, assaulting scores of law enforcement officers and threatening the safety of the entirety of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who were assembled to count the electoral votes — those agents had been hurriedly assigned riot control duties even if they lacked training and gear for that purpose.
Solomon and JustTheNews both shared the story on X using the text of the headline. And right-wing conspiracy theorists quickly responded by assuming that the report fit their assumption that January 6 was a false flag operation.
Retired Gen. Mike Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term, said of the story: “The question this begs is; was there sedition or conspiracy committed on the part of the DOJ & FBI at the time?”
“You don’t just have 274 FBI agents or employees show up to execute this massive of a ‘fedsurrection.’ This required foreknowledge (intent),” he added.
MAGA poster Bill Mitchell likewise claimed that the FBI agents had been “infiltrators.”
Trump himself quickly adopted this misreading of the JustTheNews report. He posted to a Truth Social midday on September 27 that “it was just revealed that the FBI had secretly placed… 274 FBI Agents into the Crowd just prior to, and during, the January 6th Hoax.” He added that the reporting showed that “FBI Agents were at, and in, the January 6th Protest, probably acting as Agitators and Insurrectionists, but certainly not as ‘Law Enforcement Officials,’” and demanded the identities of the FBI agents involved.
Trump’s post brought a new wave of right-wing conspiracymongering over the report, with various MAGA figures claiming that it showed there had been a “Fedsurrection” in which FBI agents acted as “provocateurs.”
FBI Director Kash Patel stepped in to try to tamp down the situation. Without admitting that Trump was wrong, he said in a statement to Fox News Digital that “Agents were sent into a crowd control mission after the riot was declared by Metro Police – something that goes against FBI standards,” for which he blamed “corrupt leadership.”
Faced with the same situation, presumably Patel would have allowed the January 6 insurrection to proceed, rather than violating standards by sending FBI agents to quell it?
By Sunday morning, the false claim about the FBI agents had been thoroughly baked into mainstream GOP discourse.
When CNN anchor Jake Tapper asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) whether rule of law applies “to people who stormed the Capitol on January 6,” Johnson replied, “I’m glad you brought that up,” citing “new information over the last couple of days” about how “there were 274 FBI agents in the crowd on January 6.”
Tapper quickly cut him off, saying that according to Patel, “They were sent there to do crowd control because of everything that was going on. They weren’t — it wasn't a false flag operation, as President Trump suggested.”
But Johnson, who was among the members of Congress evacuated to a secure location during the riots, replied, “Well, Jake, wait a minute. Hold on, Jake. How do you know that? Right? There's a lot of questions.”
He added: “There's videos, and it's always been disputed, what involvement some of those persons engaged in, what involvement they had. Did they spur on the crowd? Did they open the gates to allow them in? I don't know. These are questions. But they should be answered.”
Johnson went on to say that a House subcommittee newly established to reinvestigate the attack would get to the bottom of the situation.
The campaign by the Trump administration and MAGA media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination to depict political violence as purely a phenomenon of the left raises some obvious questions, among them, “What about January 6?” A pro-Trump mob, summoned to Washington, D.C., by the president and incited by his calls for them to “fight,” descending on the U.S. Capitol and assaulting numerous law enforcement officers while sending Congress into hiding would surely seem to qualify.
The answer is that on the right, the January 6 rioters have been reimagined as the good guys.
//
01/06/25 2:12 PM EST
01/20/25 7:59 PM EST
02/05/2
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2X A DAY MMA EPSTEIN BS
July 21, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): General, your name is mentioned in these documents. You've been on our program for years. You've been writing books. You've been crying out from the wilderness about what they did to you. What a remarkable moment. And the floor is yours. The landscape has been set. General, what do you see happening next?
MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): Yeah. Well, a couple of things. I — and I have made this recommendation that I think that all of these people that are involved, starting with Obama on down, they all ought to have their passports revoked, and people need to be checking private airplanes and private airfields for anybody trying to abscond the country and get the heck out of dodge here. So, that's number one.
I do think that just as was done to President Trump, when they when they raided his home at Mar-a- Lago because they thought that there was — and they planted evidence there in that case — but I do think that what the DOJ should be considering, if not getting ready to conduct, is a raid of Barack Obama's home up there at Kalorama, in Washington DC where he's been since he left — you know, physically left the White House. You know, he's been running the White House, you know, all during the Biden regime.
And I do think that there's some other places that need to be raided where there are likely, you know, a lot of evidence, a lot of receipts, so to speak, in many of these people that are part of the Obama White House as well as the Biden White House. I mean, I just heard the great David Schoen talking about the former deputy attorney general of Monaco who also was the homeland security adviser to Barack Obama. So that's number one. That's — those are, you know, things that need to be considered right now. And I'm — I was ready to wake up this morning to hear about some of these raids that should have been going on.
There should, as a minimum, be a task force assembled by — of federal law enforcement authorities as well as a assigned dedicated, you know, prosecutor at the DOJ level, at the attorney general level, someone who is working directly for her and for the president of the United States. This has gotta happen very quickly.
//
July 21, 2025, edition of The Benny Show, streamed on YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): Final question, general. Since you are a military man, you rose to the highest conceivable ranks within the military and within the civilian structure in the White House. Your credentials are impeccable. When Stephen Miller calls this a seditious conspiracy, when Tulsi Gabbard calls it a traitorous act, treason against our country — those seem like legal terms, but also really military terms. And since Barack Obama was the commander-in-chief, what angle would it be to go at this from a military perspective? Perhaps you could explain what is treason and seditious conspiracy mean from a military perspective. Would you advise them to go after them on those terms?
MICAHEL FLYNN (GUEST): I would. I absolutely would. I would advise them to go after on those terms and make sure that they have them locked in tight in terms of the legalities.
But what I want people to understand is, you know, after World War II, we had the Nuremberg trials, and there was a lot of people that were found guilty. And because they stood at — when they got on the stand, they said, well, I was just following orders. Well, Jim Clapper, John Brennan, Jim Comey, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, and many others, Lisa Monaco, many, many others, you're not gonna get away with it.
If Barack Obama directed you, and it appears that he did — this is very intentional. This eight December 2016 meeting that they had where it looks like — which was something that was not on my radar, Benny. So this is a new piece of evidence that Tulsi has exposed.
That to me, you know, in addition to some of the other critical criminal evidence that has been discovered, yeah, I think that they're gonna have to look at conspiracy, treason, traitorous activities by some of these people and particularly starting at the very top, and that would be Barack Obama.
They were ready to convict and throw Donald Trump in prison for the rest of his life, Benny. And so, you know, all bets are off when it comes to immunity. There's no immunity for this president, not for President Obama for what he did.
JOHNSON: Could you have a military tribunal for the commander-in-chief?
FLYNN: I'm not — you know, I don't know. But, you know, but it'd ought to be explored, Benny. It should be explored.
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wiki
In December 2015, Michael Flynn was paid $45,000 by Russia Today, a Kremlin-supported television channel, for delivering a talk in Moscow, and Russia provided him a three-day, all-expenses-paid trip.[70] As a retired military intelligence officer, Flynn was required to obtain prior permission from the Defense Department and the State Department before receiving any money from foreign governments; Flynn apparently did not seek that approval before the RT speech.[71] Two months later, in February 2016 when he was applying for renewal of his security clearance, he stated he had received no income from foreign companies and had only "insubstantial contact" with foreign nationals.[72] Glenn A. Fine, the acting Defense Department Inspector General, confirmed he was investigating Flynn.[70]
On November 10, 2016, President Obama warned President-elect Trump against hiring Flynn.[73][74] Trump appointed Flynn as National Security Advisor on November 18, 2016, but Flynn was forced to resign on February 13, 2017, after it was revealed that on December 29, 2016, the day Obama announced sanctions against Russia, Flynn discussed the sanctions by phone with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn had earlier acknowledged speaking to Kislyak but denied discussing the sanctions.[75][76]
On March 2, 2017, The New York Times reported that Flynn and Kushner met with Kislyak in December 2016 to establish a secret line of communication (backchannel) between the Trump administration and the Russian government.[77] In May 2017, it was further reported that at that December meeting, Kushner and Flynn asked the Russians to set up a direct, encrypted communications channel with Moscow, so that Flynn could speak directly to Russian military officials about Syria and other matters without the knowledge of American intelligence agencies. Kislyak was hesitant to allow Americans access to Russia's secure communications network, and no such channel was actually set up.[46][48]
On May 31, 2017, the House Intelligence Committee served Flynn with subpoenas for testimony and production of personal documents and business records.[78][79] On September 13, The Wall Street Journal reported that Flynn promoted a Russian-backed, multibillion-dollar Middle Eastern nuclear plant project while working in the White House.[80] The project involved building 40 nuclear reactors across the Middle East, with security provided by Rosoboron, a Russian state-owned arms exporter that is under American sanctions.[81] On September 15, BuzzFeed reported that Flynn, Kushner, and Bannon secretly met with King Abdullah II of Jordan on January 5, 2017, to press for the nuclear power plant project.[82]
On December 1, 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI[83] and was later pardoned by Trump.[84]
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an 7 25 robt r
Anyone wanting to understand the brouhaha over Pam Bondi’s refusal to turnover (or even acknowledge) the Epstein files need look no further than what the Supreme Court just did.
In McMahon v. New York the Supremes gave Trump a simple way to revoke federal spending authorized by Congress: just fire everyone responsible for implementing that spending.
The high court is allowing Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fire over half the people who work for the Department of Education until there’s a full hearing on the constitutionality of their action. But by then it will be too late to save much of the department.
Note that the Supreme Court made this astounding decision on its so-called “shadow docket” where it doesn’t even have to explain itself (the only record we have is Justice Sotomayor’s dissent).
No matter that Congress created the Department of Education; apparently, Trump can effectively end it. No matter that Congress in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act prohibits a president from unilaterally refusing to spend money that has been authorized by Congress; apparently, Trump can disregard the Act.
Trump now has unbridled power to repeal federal laws by the simple expedient of firing federal employees who implement them.
Why? How? On what basis? Who’s behind this? We don’t know. We may never know.
Which gets us to the brouhaha over Jeffrey Epstein.
For years, Trump has talked darkly of a “deep state” — a secret cabal intent on destroying America by harming the nation’s children.
Such as, perhaps, six justices who let him shut down the Education Department without even setting out their reasons?
Recall “Pizzagate,” the QAnon conspiracy theory that in 2016 allegedly linked Democrats to a ring of child sex-traffickers. It’s still around but has morphed into a less partisan conspiracy theory involving an alleged worldwide elite of child sex-traffickers.
Jeffrey Epstein and his death fit perfectly. Many right-wing media personalities have posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling sex-trafficking conspiracy.
Senior Trump administration officials built up great fanfare around the release of the supposed Epstein “client list.”
Even JD Vance accused the government of hiding the list. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case,” Vance said, “you should be ashamed of yourself.”
But that was back in 2021, before Vance became part of the, um, conspiracy.
In February of this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi acknowledged the existence of Epstein’s client list. She said the client list is “sitting on my desk right now.”
Now the Trump-Vance administration says Epstein’s client list doesn’t exist.
The Epstein case illustrates Trump’s “deep state” no less than does an unsigned “shadow docket” Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to wipe out the Department of Education.
The phrase “Epstein didn’t kill himself” — a rebuttal to the official explanation of Epstein’s death — has taken on a cultural meaning way beyond the facts of the case. It means an unaccountable elite doing evil things in secret.
Trump built his political base on that premise. Once in office, he said time and again, he would expose that unaccountable, secret, evil elite.
No wonder 70 percent of voters believe “law enforcement is withholding information about powerful people connected to Epstein,” including 61 percent of Trump voters. And 58 percent of voters said Trump “maybe was or definitely was” involved in a cover-up.
Conspiracy theories thrive when elites act in secret. I have no idea whether Epstein killed himself or was murdered. But Wired Magazine’s metadata — showing that the FBI’s “raw” surveillance video from the night Epstein killed himself is seemingly missing 2 minutes and 53 seconds — got my attention.
As did the Supreme’s bonkers secret decision in McMahon.
And I’m no conspiracy theorist.
After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.
As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”
Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.
Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.
Mike Flynn — who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term — wrote in a lengthy X post on Wednesday that Trump needed to “gather your team and figure out a way to move past this.”
“The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that,” Flynn wrote. “Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”
Elon Musk — with whom Trump had a blowup fight last month in which Musk accused Trump of being named in the Epstein files — criticized his former boss for trying to paint the whole situation as a hoax.
“He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.
The MAGA meltdown over Epstein “could be his Afghanistan going into the fall,” Mark Mitchell, head of polling and operations at Rasmussen Reports, told Steve Bannon Tuesday on his “War Room” podcast.
“People are trying to say this isn’t a big deal,” Mitchell said. “People are trying to say nobody wants this Epstein information out. It’s an absolute misdirection. This is horrifying. And if it isn’t corrected, it threatens derailing Trump’s agenda, getting rid of his political capital.”
“This is not about a guy who died in 2019, this is about a representation of two-tier justice and about unaccountable government,” Mitchell told Bannon.
On Wednesday, conservative political commentator John Solomon told Bannon that he had interviewed the president, and that Trump supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate elements of the Epstein case as part of a broader look into a supposed deep state conspiracy to punish the Republican Party.
“I think he’s frustrated by all the social media chatter by people who don’t really know what’s in the Epstein files,” Solomon said. “He was very pointed about that, let’s stay focused on the things that matter to the American people. ‘I want the answers to Epstein like everyone’, he said, so let the prosecutor do that.”
The Epstein fiasco also prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to split with Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Department of Justice to release all the information it has on the sex offender in the name of “transparency.”
“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, adding that Bondi should explain her previous claims of having the elusive Epstein “client list.”
Just a day prior, the Louisiana Republican had defended Bondi, choosing to defer to the Trump administration instead of criticizing the attorney general.
But Trump appears to remain unmoved despite growing rebellion within his MAGA cohort.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claims that the whole ordeal was a “hoax” peddled by Democrats and once again defended Bondi’s handling of the case.
“She’s done very good. She says ‘I gave you all the credible information,’ and if she finds any more credible information, she’ll give that too. What more can she do than that?” Trump said, adding that he had “lost a lot of faith in certain people” over their outcry on the administration’s approach to the issue.
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https://davetroy.medium.com/the-big-history-behind-january-6th-part-6-the-big-bet-4e8ba00eeb2c
...Michael Flynn was pardoned by the president and by William Barr on November 30, 2020. He and his attorney Sidney Powell met with the president on December 18 to convince him to declare martial law. White House Counsel Pat Cipillone is said to have talked him out of it.
The danger was palpable. On Sunday, January 3, anticipating what appeared to be brewing within the defense and intelligence community, all ten living former Secretaries of Defense issued a joint letter, stating: “*Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic.”
For a full account of the lead-up, see this exhaustive play-by-play going back to September from The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Lab.
...
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5 25
earl mathews dod cnsl? nat g blamed by flynn bro for slow resp j6
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RWW
04/28/2025
by
Richard Mack, a former Arizona county sheriff and founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, is making the rounds of right-wing podcasts demanding that President Donald Trump pardon a sheriff who was convicted in December on federal charges of conspiracy, fraud, and bribery.
Mack recently appeared on the show hosted by intensely antisemitic far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters as part of his campaign to win a pardon for Scott Jenkins, the former sheriff of Culpeper County, Virginia, who was convicted by a jury and sentenced last month to 10 years in prison. Peters introduced Mack as “a longtime friend of the Stew Peters show.”
Mack portrays Jenkins as the victim of political persecution. Here’s how the Justice Department described the evidence against Jenkins:
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Jenkins accepted cash bribes and bribes in the form of campaign contributions…
In return for the bribes, Jenkins appointed each of the bribe payors as auxiliary deputy sheriffs, a sworn law-enforcement position, and issued them official Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office badges and credentials. The bribe payors were not trained or vetted and did not render any legitimate services to the Sheriff’s Office or the citizens of Culpeper County.
Some of the money Jenkins received was reportedly in the form of $15,000 cash in a bag. More details from NBC channel 4 in Washington, D.C.:
Each of the bribe payors was sworn in as an auxiliary deputy and given a badge allowing them enhanced gun rights and, as some testified, the hope they could get out of speeding tickets. Others used the badges in attempts to get a COVID test, drive in highway emergency lanes or get around a TSA line.
Jenkins’ lawyer suggested that the scheme was a “creative” effort by the sheriff to get around Virginia legal limits on gun ownership. Mack, who made a name for himself as a plaintiff in a successful challenge to part of the Clinton-era Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, praised Jenkins’ oppositionto gun regulation:
…this guy, this Sheriff Jenkins, was the first sheriff in the country to respond to Joe Biden and say, there will be no gun confiscation, not on AR-15s or AK-47s—nothing. Nothing will be confiscated in my county by your federal government. Don't allow them to come in here. If they do start to come in here, I will deputize every single person in my county, and they will be required to keep their guns and be armed with high-powered rifles. Don't try it.
On Peters’ show and a recent appearance on Michael Jaco’s podcast, Mack complained that he, former Trump aide Michael Flynn, and MAGA rocker Ted Nugent had all tried to get Trump’s attention to promote a pardon for Jenkins, but that they had run into “blockers” in the White House. Flynn has also raised money for Jenkins' defense. On Jaco's show, Mack compared Jenkins’ badge-selling to the badges Mack offers in return for membership in CSPOA’s posse for a $760 fee. Mack and Jaco also commiserated about federal judges who have ruled against Trump actions and about what Mack called “some real evil RINO Republicans” in Congress.
Before introducing Mack, Peters delivered a rant denouncing immigrants as “parasitic criminals” and “savages.” He slammed the Trump administration for not delivering sufficiently on its promise of mass deportations. “Sheriffs have the power to enforce federal immigration laws in their jurisdiction,” Peters said, “and they also have the power to arrest treasonous government officials who allow this country to be invaded.”
Mack didn’t disagree with anything Peters said, though Mack said he was “really thrilled” that Trump was elected, and that the president has made a “good start” in securing the border in his first 90 days. He said there's "no way" that mass deportation will be successful without sheriffs' participation.
Mack and the CSPOA train law enforcement officers in Mack’s views about the Constitution and his belief that sheriffs are the “only legitimate law enforcement officers in this country,” as he told Peters. Mack partners with far-right figures like neo-Confederate Michael Peroutka and participated in the ReAwaken America tour, which brought together conspiracy theorists, MAGA insiders, and far-right activists. The often-unaccountable power of local sheriffs and the impact of Mack’s “constitutional sheriff” movement are exploredin a recent book, “The Highest Law in the Land: How The Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy,” by journalist Jessica Pishko.
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omg
jan 6
From 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. on January 5, a series of Trump rallies were held at Freedom Plaza.[154] Notable speakers included Alex Jones, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone.[161]
Both Flynn and Stone had received presidential pardons in prior weeks. On December 8, Trump pardoned retired US Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to "willfully and knowingly" making false statements to the FBI about communications with the Russian ambassador. Flynn, a prominent QAnon proponent, participated in the D.C. events on January 5, while his brother, U.S. Army general Charles Flynn, would participate in a conference call on January 6 when he would refuse permission to deploy the National Guard after the breach of the Capitol.[162]
On December 23, Trump pardoned Roger Stone, who had been found guilty at trial of witness tampering, making false statements to Congress, and obstruction. Stone, who had longtime ties to both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, employed Oath Keepers as security on January 5.[163] Stone's Oath-Keeper driver was later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in plotting and executing the following day's attack.[164]
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mojo
Late Friday, newly sworn-in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave access to the agency’s payments system to representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump and headed by Elon Musk. A strike force of Musk lackeys appears to be pursuing a takeover of key background systems of the US government—from human resources to physical buildings to software systems to, now, what is essentially the country’s central bank account. At this point, Musk’s people reportedly cannot control payments, only view them, but how long that arrangement will last is unclear.
Treasury’s payment system processes more than $5 trillion annually, paying the country’s bills. This includes Social Security checks and tax refunds, which means the system includes sensitive personal information on tens of millions of Americans. A Sunday headline from New York Magazine, “Elon Musk May Have Your Social Security Number,” is not an exaggeration.
When Musk, the world’s richest man, took over Twitter, he cut costs by simply refusing to make payments. From rent for the company’s headquarter offices in San Francisco to janitorial services, Musk’s approach was to simply stop paying the bills and see what happens. (Employees were forced to use bathrooms in other buildings.)
A similar approach to the United States government, however, promises to be catastrophic. One scenario is that shutting off payments to federal grantees and nonprofits could cause rapid harm. And this could come at the whims of extremist ideological allies of Trump. For example, his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a Christian nationalist and purveyor of misinformation (who lied to the FBI and was later pardoned by Trump), posted on X information about federal payments to Lutheran Family Services, which along with its affiliates provides a wide range of services, including counseling. Musk retweeted Flynn’s post promising “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.” The illegal actions would in fact appear to be Musk’s own—Congress appropriates federal funds, but Musk is acting as if the law will never catch up to him.
Disgraced General Michael Flynn Has Made a New Movie—About Himself – Mother Jones
Musk’s tweet may be getting ahead of the reality of what he and his team are doing at the moment. But imagine if the US government were to stop paying bills because a billionaire saw a social media post from a conspiracy theorist urging him to do so.
“Fitch and everyone else should downgrade US credit,” Dean Baker, and economist at the progressive Center for Economy and Policy Research, posted on Bluesky. “If a bill gets paid only if Elon Musk or Donald Trump feels like it, then the US is not very creditworthy.”
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, issued a similar warning. “To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” he said in a statement late Friday. “The federal government is in a financially precarious position, currently utilizing accounting maneuvers to continue paying its bills since it reached the debt limit at the beginning of the year. I am concerned that mismanagement of these payment systems could threaten the full faith and credit of the United States.”
Economists have long warned that should the United States miss a debt payment, it would send shockwaves through the world economy. On the domestic front, the Trump administration this past week attempted to withhold billions in federal aid through an Office of Management and Budget memo instructing agencies to temporarily halt payments. The attempt was “wildly illegal,” according to experts, and two federal judges have halted much of that effort. Now, it may be possible for Musk and his underlings themselves to simply withhold payments they disagree with. Theoretically, rather than asking agencies to cut spending, Musk could move to cut off the funds from Treasury.
“I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs,” Wyden said in statement.
According to reporting in Politico, the Doge team doesn’t have the capability to withhold or change payments—at least not yet. Instead, access by Doge’s Treasury representative, software executive Tom Krause, is “read-only.” But warning signs of a hostile takeover have been flashing. For example, Musk’s team literally took over Office of Personnel Management computer systems this past week, locking OPM officials out of them. They have been taking down entire government websites and datasets, causing public-facing information and research to disappear before Americans’ eyes in Orwellian fashion. And over the weekend, Doge representatives demanded classified information from USAID that they lacked clearances for, according to CNN, despite that the executive order creating Doge explicitly exempts classified information from its efforts. When USAID security officials refused to comply, they were put on leave.
US Government Websites Are Disappearing in Real Time | WIRED
The power that comes with controlling US government payments is vast. How Musk and Trump might try to leverage that against political or legal opponents—say, against states that file lawsuits they don’t like—is sobering to consider. So far, the GOP-controlled Congress seems willing to let them do whatever they want.
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US Government Websites Are Disappearing in Real Time | WIRED
Several government websites have been taken down, including the USAID.gov, ForeignAssistance.gov, NeglectedDiseases.gov, and ChildrenInAdversity.gov. A WIRED analysis of more than 1,000 federal .gov websites found that at least seven sites linked to a USAID server went offline in a two-hour span on Saturday afternoon.
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12/11/2024 RWW
by
- Diana Falzone @ Mediaite: ‘Will Result in Termination’: Newsmax Bans Criticism of Pete Hegseth After Trump Fumed Over Host’s Attack
Newsmax instructed staff to lay off Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host Donald Trump nominated to serve as his secretary of defense, after a segment bashing the pick sparked the ire of Trump himself.
- Alexander C. Kaufman @ HuffPost: Trump Names Price For Avoiding All Environment Regulations: $1 Billion Or More
President-elect Donald Trump said Tuesday he planned to expedite federal regulatory approvals, including all environmental permits, for any company or individual proposing to invest $1 billion or more in a construction project.
- Sean Craig @ The Daily Beast: Mel Gibson Threatens ‘to Kill Someone’ While Fearmongering at Mar-a-Lago
A cavalcade of supporting characters in the MAGA universe, and President-elect Donald Trump, showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to attend a soirée for the conspiratorial, QAnon-adjacent conservative nonprofit America’s Future.
- Nikki McCann Ramírez @ Rolling Stone: Advocacy Group Calls B.S. on Nancy Mace’s Claim That She Was Assaulted in Capitol
A man has been arrested, and Nancy Mace is wearing a wrist brace and shoulder sling after the South Carolina congresswoman said she was “physically accosted” in a Capitol office building on Tuesday afternoon.
- Peter Drier @ Talking Points Memo: Trump Does Not Have Mandate
Newspaper headlines have called Donald Trump’s victory “decisive,” “massive,” “resounding,” “historic,” and “sweeping.” Trump himself has described his win as a “landslide.” On election night, he claimed that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” None of those things are true.
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TDB REF
A cavalcade of supporting characters in the MAGA universe, and President-elect Donald Trump, showed up at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday to attend a soirée for the conspiratorial, QAnon-adjacent conservative nonprofit America’s Future.
Mel Gibson, the traditionalist Catholic actor and director, told the crowd, “I got nine kids. If one of them got stolen or trafficked, I’d have to kill someone.”
That chimes with the kind of themes promoted by the group’s chairman, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who has remade America’s Future in his own image. Since his appointment in 2021, the formerly meat-and-potatoes conservative group has shifted to promoting QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories about a clandestine cabal of pedophiles controlling media and government.
Last year, Gibson executive produced Sound of Freedom, a Christian thriller starring QAnon conspiracist Jim Caviezel that stoked QAnon paranoia. He praised Flynn for exposing “wolves in sheep’s clothing that prey upon our young” during Tuesday night’s speech at Trump’s club.
In addition to Gibson—who arrived in a polo shirt, shorts, and Crocs before changing into a more appropriate suit and tie—other attendees included British comedian turned conspiracy theorist Russell Brand, car dealership fortune heir turned working-class poseur Kid Rock, Fox News outcast Tucker Carlson, and former Trump adviser Roger Stone.
Trump was listed as an “invited honored guest” and was seen alongside Flynn before he briefly addressed attendees outside, accompanied by Flynn, Carlson, and Kid Rock, who he called “great people.”
Carlson and Kid Rock, née Robert Ritchie, were given “Champion for Freedom” awards by Flynn.
Carlson once called QAnon supporters—who believe a cabal of clandestine, Satanic child molesters are working against Trump—“gentle people waving American flags.” America’s Future, under the professed mandate of combatting human trafficking, has promoted similar conspiracies.
“They have organ harvesting,” says Flynn’s sister, Mary O’Neill, who was appointed executive director after he became chairman, in a video on their site. “They have also found a way to take the blood, and use the blood, to make themselves youthful.”
One attendee, who posed with Stone, commented on Instagram that they saw one-time television actor turned COVID and election denier Kevin Sorbo, who has been known to frequent Mar-a-Lago.
But the biggest name on hand, after Trump, was the pope-denying Gibson.
He called the Biden administration “four years of thinly veiled Marxism” and the incoming Trump administration as “a four year grace period,” adding “we’ll see how much this administration can claw back from the Philistines.”
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mma
November 15, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): By the way, a couple of reporters called me last night after a couple of my rants and said, hey we’re getting text messages from a lot of the producers, particularly younger producers at MSNBC and they’re saying is Bannon serious or is he just being Bannon, right?
I am 100 percent serious.
MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): I am too.
BANNON: You know what you did with various people out there you had on your shows. You are part of a vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump and that is going to be drilled down.
11/15/24
11/15/24
November 15, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Donald Trump and his revolution is in charge now. And that revolution is going to make its way from Mar-a-Lago and from every part of the country, like Andrew Jackson, it's going to converge on the imperial capitol in late January. And yes, we're going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground. Because you know why? They need to be burned down to the ground. Metaphorically. As the process of creative destruction. The process of the structure of revolutions, the paradigm shift has impact.
...
We're not going to cave. We're not going to give up on Gaetz. We're not going to give up on Tulsi Gabbard. We're not going to give up on Pete Hegseth. We're not going to give up on RFK Jr. We're not going to give up on anybody. And you know why? If President-elect Donald J. Trump wants them, he's going to get them.
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vets doku Against All Enemies – FULL MOVIE jdv flynn greitens
why can’t we have coup mil like myanmar? infowars, covid steal electin, new world order fauci = mengele enemy list
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rww --> tpm 11 24
bishop Leon Benjamin had an ominous warning for his flock.
“We are at war and the war is very real,” Benjamin said during the meeting that his organization dubbed a “training.”
To Benjamin, a self-described “prophet to the nations,” the enemies include both political figures and more mystical forces. He told his audience that their “primary enemy is the shadowy government that is manipulating you” through “hybrid” warfare and influence operations. Benjamin suggested this dark plot was also being aided by “witchcraft, sorcery, word curses,” and “voodoo.”
“That’s some serious witchcraft. That’s some serious covert … operations right under your nose — in your face,” Benjamin said. “This is some witchcraft stuff where people can say things to you, curse you with their words or do certain things to get you to start to be confused.”
Benjamin’s disturbing sermon was conducted under the auspices of a group he is involved in called the “Coalition of Leaders United.” Audio of the event, which was apparently posted about a year ago, was featured on the group’s site. The talk was filled with grim assessments of the state of the country and intense conspiracy theories. Benjamin suggested former President Donald Trump was the answer to all of these dark scenarios. He also repeatedly pointed to another man in Trump’s circle, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, whose book “The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare” was the subject of the training session.
“We must destroy the enemies, the networks of globalist power brokers who wish to destroy the individual identities of nation states to establish a new normal — a.k.a. New World Order. General Flynn says all of this is for the what? The Great Reset,” Benjamin declared, later adding, “Everything is planned by design for this Great Reset. They have this idea of utopia, which is communism.”
Flynn wasn’t just an inspiration for Benjamin. According to Federal Election Commission records, the pastor’s “Coalition of Leaders United” received at least $75,000 via four donations made between April and August of this year. The cash came from a political action committee spearheaded by Flynn. That group, “Fight Like A Flynn,” was largely backed by a company linked to entrepreneur Patrick Byrne.
Both Flynn and Byrne previously worked together to promote false claims that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was fraudulent. The pair also tried to convince the former president — including during an infamous December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office — to have federal troops intervene in the result. TPM reviewed FEC records for “Fight Like A Flynn,” which show that — with the help of a seven-figure sum that has come from a business managed by Byrne and a longtime partner — Flynn is once again working to influence the current presidential election by backing a network that includes far-right organizations, candidates, groups with ties to Trump and the Republican National Committee, and at least one sitting member of Congress. Flynn and Byrne did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
This money trail is a clear example of how some of the most extreme election deniers have remained active and coordinated ahead of this year’s race. It also illustrates how there are extensive links between the most conspiratorial and fringe elements of the MAGA movement and more seemingly mainstream elements of the GOP.
Along with Benjamin’s effort to recruit fighters for a war against the “New World Order,” the groups backed by Flynn include QAnon activists and multiple figures who participated in the Jan. 6 protests against Trump’s last defeat. “Fight Like A Flynn” has also given money to ventures tied to local GOP candidates, a firm that has worked on Trump’s legal team, a group focused on voter registration that is a favorite of Trump’s daughter-in-law-turned-RNC Chairwoman Lara Trump, and the campaign of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Benjamin alluded to the breadth and ambition of the groups in Flynn’s orbit as he concluded the “training” call with a pro-Trump prayer. While the audio posted on his site did not detail the other participants on the call, Benjamin implied the group included faith leaders and some of the many Trump supporters who have become involved with politics at the hyperlocal level.
“I want to pray a supernatural blessing upon each and every one of you all. Some of you all I know are running for office. Some of you all are running for your city, local leadership. Some of you all have jobs, your businesses, ministries. I want to pray this blessing over you,” Benjamin said, adding, “Bless these networks like never before. Unite them oh God with the right people, the right place, the right time, with the right resources. … Let it begin now oh God. And we pray for President Donald Trump. We pray for his team. We pray, oh God, no matter what it looks like.”
Benjamin is a direct example of the Trump faithful who have run for office. He mounted unsuccessful congressional bids in Virginia in 2020, 2022, and a special election last year. During that second race, reporters noted Benjamin posted Facebook photos on Jan. 7, 2021 indicating he attended Trump’s fiery speech in Washington D.C. the day before. During those remarks, the former president railed against his loss and urged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol as his defeat was being certified inside. Pro-Trump crowds began to storm the building during his speech. Benjamin’s social media shots from the protest include pictures that apparently show him with Byrne and Flynn’s son, Michael Jr.
FEC records show “Fight Like A Flynn” was organized on June 25, 2023. Since then, records show it has taken in $1,261,940.76 and disbursed $1,078,575.95. Between September and December 2023, the group received three separate donations totaling $1 million from a corporation called “Haverford Valley L.L.C.” based in a UPS Store in Potomac, Maryland. The contributions represent over 79 percent of “Fight Like A Flynn’s” funding. Haverford Valley L.C., a firm which is based in Utah and which Byrne long co-managed with his associate John Pettway, used the same Maryland address. In an email to TPM, Pettway said he has stopped working with the company.
“I no longer work for the Haverford Group,” Pettway wrote.
“Fight Like A Flynn” is headquartered at a Post Office in Palm Beach, Florida, about four miles from Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago. The group’s treasurer, Robert Kiger, is a fixture in the tony beach town’s political scene. Kiger is a local businessman who had what reporter Zach Everson described as “extraordinary access” to the presidential motorcade and Air Force One during Trump’s administration. He also founded a pro-Trump PAC, has worked on multiple GOP campaigns, and self-published a memoir titled “From Poverty To Polo To Politics – A Life Leading To Trump.” In an interview with TPM on Monday evening, Kiger said the committee was “not affiliated” with anything militant or extreme, and referred all requests for comment to Flynn.
“I’d suggest you take it up with the office over at General Flynn, because I’m not really at liberty to comment as the treasurer,” Kiger said before hanging up.
Mike Flynn Jr. (left), Leon Benjamin, Patrick Byrne (right), and others in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo: Facebook/Leon Benjamin)
Flynn has been a prominent part of Trumpworld for years, although his official stint in the White House was brief and consumed by scandal. As an Army Lieutenant General, Flynn was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until 2014, when he was reportedly forced out in a leadership shakeup. Two years later, Flynn was a prominent supporter of Trump’s first presidential campaign. After Trump took office in January 2017, he made Flynn his first White House national security adviser.
Flynn resigned from that post after just over three weeks when it was revealed he lied to former Vice President Mike Pence and others about his communications with the Kremlin’s ambassador to the U.S. Flynn subsequently pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian diplomat, however, after Flynn hired the conservative attorney Sidney Powell, he withdrew his guilty plea. The Justice Department under Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr then tried to drop the case, but the move was challenged by a federal judge. Trump ultimately pardoned Flynn in the final days of his administration.
After leaving the Trump administration and during his legal drama, Flynn increasingly dabbled in far-right politics and promoted slogans affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. As his legal bills mounted, Flynn and his family were involved in a series of businesses that mixed fringe politics, merch sales, events, and his own defense fundraising. His attorney, Powell was involved in some of these efforts. Using his expertise in unconventional warfare, Flynn consistently promoted the idea of an ongoing conflict as he sought to build a force of “digital soldiers” for himself and Trump.
The crosspartisan reform group Issue One previously examined a non-profit linked to Flynn which directed money to a constellation of right wing groups while also paying multiple members of Flynn’s family. Along with its political contributions, “Fight Like a Flynn” has also paid over $37,000 to “Resilient Patriot LLC,” a Florida corporation that Flynn is the manager of.
Byrne has had, perhaps, an even more unique path to presidential politics and election activism than Flynn. He launched the online retailer Overstock.com in 1999. While at the helm of the company, Byrne created his own website, “Deep Capture.” On that page, Byrne detailed his “theory” that Wall Street was “dominated by a group of players who first pushed the laws to their limits” including unethical short selling practices that Byrne blamed for harming his business.
Byrne eventually began dabbling in crypto and, while speaking on the topic at a conservative conference in 2015, he met a young Russian woman named Maria Butina. The pair had a romantic relationship. In 2019, after Butina was arrested and charged with being a Kremlin spy, Byrne went public with his connection to her and began to claim he was embroiled in a sprawling and complex series of investigations where he was working as some kind of deep cover asset for multiple government agencies. Amid the drama, Byrne resigned from Overstock as his claims unspooled through a bizarre press release and intensely emotional cable news interviews.
Flynn and Byrne ultimately teamed up as they both promoted false claims that Trump’s 2020 loss was fraudulent and offered wild proposals to reverse the election. On December 17 2020, Flynn appeared on the conservative cable channel Newsmax where he suggested Trump could seize voting machines, or perhaps take even more drastic measures.
“It’s not unprecedented — I mean, these people out there talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done,” Flynn said.
The next day, Flynn and Byrne ended up meeting with Trump inside the Oval Office and White House residence. They were accompanied by Powell who, after her work with Flynn, masterminded the infamous “Kraken” lawsuits that she claimed would overturn Trump’s defeat, but that flamed out and resulted in a series of charges and sanctions against her. Axios, among the first to report on the meeting in depth, dubbed the sitdown “the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency” and said the group sought to convince Trump he should “take extreme measures to keep fighting” his election defeat. Byrne told the story of the meeting in a rambling series of posts on his website where he said they aimed to get Trump to, among other things, “direct a federal force” to go to six counties they deemed “problematic” to recount paper ballots or potentially even conduct a do-over of the election.
“We suggested US Marshall Service + National Guard,” Byrne wrote of the proposal.
This checkered conspiracy-filled history and effort to involve the military in the last election has not stopped at least one current member of Congress from accepting funding from Flynn in the current campaign. According to FEC filings, the “Fight Like A Flynn” PAC gave $2,500 to Ted Cruz’s Senate campaign on Oct. 21. The committee also gave $50,000 to back ads opposing Cruz’s Democratic Party opponent in the race, Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX). Cruz’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the support from Flynn’s PAC.
Other Republican candidates have benefited from Flynn’s largesse. “Fight Like A Flynn” made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Dan Franzese, a Trump loyalist mounting a longshot congressional bid in Florida. Silent Majority Foundation, a group affiliated with Pete Serrano, who is running to be attorney general in Washington State, received $15,000 from “Fight Like A Flynn” on Feb. 15. Franzese and Serrano did not respond to requests for comment.
In addition to making donations, “Fight Like A Flynn” has also paid some vendors, including Binnall Law Group. FEC filings show the firm received $16,656.59 from Flynn’s group in eleven payments made between July 2023 and August of this year. The payments were identified as “LEGAL FEES,” “LEGA FEES,” and “LEGA FEESL.” Jesse Binnall, who is the firm’s name partner, is a member of the Republican National Legal Association and has worked on Trump’s legal team. Binnall did not respond to an email from TPM on Monday. Reached via phone on Tuesday morning, which was Election Day, he declined to comment.
“It’s a busy day. I’m not going to be able to talk to you about that today,” Binnall said.
When pressed, Binnall claimed to be unaware of groups the committee has funded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but good luck to you,” he said before hanging up.
Some of the organizations that have been backed by Flynn’s PAC blend more fringe activism with high-level Republican politics. FEC records show the group “Moms For America,” which is dedicated to building “a national movement of moms to promote the principles of Liberty [and] restore the Republic,” received $160,000 from “Fight Like A Flynn” in three payments made between November 2023 and August of this year. On Facebook, Kiger, the committee’s treasurer, posted a picture on March 2 showing he and Flynn handing over a large ceremonial $100,000 check to the group at one of its events. “Moms For America” participated in “Stop The Steal” demonstrations against Trump’s 2020 loss. The group, which did not respond to a request for comment, hosted a town hall with Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) last month.
Michael Flynn and Robert Kiger presenting a check to “Moms For America.” (Photo: Facebook)
“Fight Like A Flynn” also made two contributions this year for a total of $95,000 to Early Vote Action PAC, a group founded by the activist Scott Presler, which is dedicated to registering Republican voters in key swing states. Presler was billed as a speaker at the “Wild Protest,” which was one of the main demonstrations against Trump’s loss outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
He also has promoted a series of conspiracy theories, including QAnon. In mid March, RNC Chairwoman Lara Trump, who is also the former president’s daughter in law, claimed she wanted to hire Presler to work with the party. The announcement received pushback due to Presler’s more fringe activism and the RNC subsequently announced he would not be employed by the party. That flap did not entirely deter Lara Trump from associating with Presler. On March 26, a week after the report that he would not work for the RNC, Lara Trump posted a picture to her personal Facebook page where she posed with Presler inside the party headquarters.
“Exciting things to come!” Lara Trump wrote.
She posted another picture posing with Presler on Facebook in June with a caption describing them as a “team.” Presler did not respond to a request for comment about the funding he received from Flynn or the other groups involved with the committee.
“Fight Like A Flynn” also gave at least $75,000 this year to “Catholics For Catholics,” a staunchly pro-Trump religious organization. Flynn is a senior adviser to that group and it has promoted the movie tour he led this year, which featured conspiracy theories and screenings at which Trump was encouraged to target political enemies after an election victory.
In May, Flynn’s committee also gave $50,000 to “Spartan Sword,” a group focused on suicide among veterans that is led by Boone Cutler, who is the co-author and publisher of Flynn’s “Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare.” Cutler did not respond to a request for comment.
Some of the organizations funded by Flynn’s pack sit firmly on the fringe. In February, the group gave $50,000 to “Operation Free Nation,” a South Carolina group led by activist Chad Caton. On Facebook, the group’s page declares, “Welcome to the resistance Patriots. Operation Free Nation is about DOING not talking.” Caton attended the protests against Trump’s loss in D.C. on Jan. 6 but has vehemently denied any wrongdoing. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In February, “Fight Like A Flynn” gave $15,000 to “Advocates For Citizens’ Rights,” a California organization affiliated with Leigh Dundas, a prominent anti-vaccination activist. On her Instagram, Dundas has promoted QAnon content. She also appeared in a photo Benjamin, the pastor who led the “training” on Flynn’s “warfare” book, posted where he posed with “Stop The Steal” activist Ali Alexander during the demonstrations against Trump’s loss in D.C. Dundas did not respond to a request for comment.
For his part, Benjamin, in an interview with TPM on Monday evening, rejected the notion Flynn or his book are extreme or militant. He suggested any talk of “war” was merely verbal and religious.
“I believe that where we are right now, spiritual warfare has been, at its height, a war of words,” Benjamin said.
When we pointed out that Flynn and his allies seemed to, at points, call for the involvement of actual armed forces in the election, Benjamin turned the tables. Before saying he had to leave and hanging up the phone, Benjamin left us with a question.
“Are you for America or are you against America?” he asked. “Which one are you for?”
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AN 11 24
In her campaign stump speeches, Vice President Kamala Harris has contrasted herself with former President Donald Trump by saying she's going to enter the White House with a "to-do list," while her opponent would begin his administration with an "enemies list." One far-right activist adjacent to Trump's inner circle recently created such a list.
The Atlantic reported that Ivan Raiklin, who is a retired Army Green Beret and self-described "constitutional lawyer," recently sat down with insurrectionist cattle rancher Cliven Bundy (famous for instigating an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014). He called himself Trump's "secretary of retribution," and said he had come up with a "deep-state target list" of roughly 300 people for the former president to persecute first should he be elected to a second term next week.
According to the Atlantic, Raiklin recalled to Bundy how the Department of Defense initially mandated that all members of the military get vaccinated for Covid-19. However, the mandate was later rescinded after thousands of service members refused the shot. Raiklin said the mandate was the precursor to the "total destruction of our constitutional order." The Atlantic's Shane Harris wrote that all members of the military are routinely required to get up-to-date vaccines for polio, influenza and typhoid, among other diseases.
READ MORE:Project 2025 org publishes hit list of 10 gov’t employees referred to as 'targets'
"There must be consequences," Raiklin said, in reference to the "unlawful, immoral, unethical, illegal" mandate, which he baselessly claimed was responsible for the deaths of "lots of people."
Raiklin's list includes current and former members of Congress, journalists and other government officials he says are deserving of "lawful justice." Some people on the color-coded list are also family members of those individuals. Harris wrote that Raiklin's list "reads like a greatest hits of all the supposedly corrupt plotters who Trump and his supporters allege have targeted them."
"Among others, it includes FBI officials who worked on the investigation into potential links between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia; lawmakers and congressional staff who managed both Trump impeachments; members of the Capitol Police who defended Congress from pro-Trump rioters on January 6, 2021; witnesses who later testified to Congress about the attack; and the senior public-health officials who led the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic," Harris wrote.
"As if to demonstrate that even the closest of Trump’s allies can still be in league with the forces of government treachery, the former president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped speed development of the COVID vaccine as a member of Operation Warp Speed, also made Raiklin’s list," he continued.
READ MORE:[Mike Flynn film 'starkly silent' about his role in 'spreading Christian nationalism'
While Raiklin has no official ties to Trump or his campaign, he's a board member of America's Future, which is headed by disgraced former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Even though Flynn served in that position for less than a month, Trump has promised to bring him back into the fold if he wins reelection.
Since leaving the Trump administration, Flynn has become a prolific spreader of far-right conspiracy theories. This includes baseless claims that the 2020 election was supposedly stolen from Trump. Flynn even called for martial law in the aftermath of the 2020 election after President Joe Biden was declared the winner. CNN recently reported that Flynn has co-founded a nonprofit that raised more than $21 million from "unknown donors" since 2021.
"Not only have [Trump and his allies] managed to convince large swaths of the country that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — they've made a business out of it. No one has cashed in quite like Flynn," CNN wrote.
Click here to read the Atlantic's report in its entirety (subscription required).
READ MORE:[Former Trump officials consider loyalist Kash Patel 'especially dangerous'
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10/31/24 mma
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an 10 24
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is among the many far-right MAGA Republicans who promoted the conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Flynn even called for then-President Trump to impose martial law in December 2020, and although his false claims have been repeatedly debunked, he continues to promote them anyway.
In an article published by CNN on October 24, reporters Tierney Sneed, Zachary Cohen and Em Steck stress that Flynn has turned "baseless conspiracy theories into a cottage industry centered around live events, a documentary and political fundraising through dark money groups."
"Flynn — a retired Army lieutenant general who once led the Defense Intelligence Agency, and someone Trump has indicated he would include in a second administration — has been one of the biggest promoters of the same baseless voter fraud allegations that have spawned criminal investigations, a congressional inquiry and, in the case of Dominion (Voting Systems), a $787 million defamation settlement from Fox News," the CNN reporters explain. "Yet Flynn has so far skirted any legal jeopardy himself, maintaining a unique place within the MAGA movement thanks to his relentless promotion of baseless election lies, and his continued loyalty to Trump."
READ MORE:Man charged for shooting at Dem field office had 120 guns, 250K bullets and grenade launcher
Sneed, Cohen and Steck report that "Trump and his allies," including Flynn, have "gone from claiming the 2020 election was rigged to casting doubt on the integrity of this one."
"At its heart is an informal confederation of Trump allies who have spent the past four years spreading the lie of voter fraud," the journalists note. "Not only have they managed to convince large swaths of the country that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump — they've made a business out of it. No one has cashed in quite like Flynn."
Sneed, Cohen and Steck continue, "Along with the ReAwaken America Tour, Flynn also co-founded The America Project, a nonprofit group which has raised at least $21 million from unknown donors since 2021, according to tax filings, while peddling baseless claims about the 2020 election."
Conservative Republican Olivia Troye, who served as a national security aide for former Vice President Mike Pence but is supporting Kamala Harris for president in 2024, warns that Flynn has become thoroughly "radicalized."
READ MORE:[James Carville is 'certain' Harris will win — Here are 3 reasons why
Troye told CNN, "The concern about people like Mike Flynn is that he was once a very well-respected military officer. The issue is that he, someone like that, is fully capable of radicalizing others in the military, and others, like our former military, because he brings that stature."
READ MORE:['Within two seconds': Trump vows to fire special counsel Jack Smith if elected president
mma
QAnon influencer with ties to Michael Flynn says conspiracy theorists will become part of government under Trump
Ben Moore of Flynn's America's Future organization claimed that “Trump is going to make [Flynn] a special adviser, and then Flynn’s going to have his team,” which will bring “child traffickers to justice” with “nooses”
Written by Kayla Gogarty & Alex Kaplan
Published 10/18/24
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has suggested that his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, whom he pardoned at the end of his first term, will be involved in his potential second administration, telling Flynn at a May 2023 event: “We’re going to bring you back.”
During an October 14 social media discussion that included QAnon figures, Ben Moore — a QAnon influencer known online as “Sun Tzu” — predicted that Flynn would be appointed as a “special adviser” to Trump during a potential second Trump administration, and Flynn would lead a “special advisory board” that “brings child traffickers to justice.”
Flynn and his group, America’s Future, have been increasingly tied to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Several QAnon figures and conspiracy theorists have served as advisory board members for the group, including Moore.
Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon has also floated the idea of Flynn in a second Trump administration.
During the October 14 discussion, held on X (formerly Twitter), Moore specifically floated himself and other America’s Future members for Trump's “special advisory board” — including QAnon-affiliated figures Brian Gamble and Liz Crokin, conspiracy theorist Lara Logan, and election denier Ivan Raiklin.
Later in the discussion, Moore even suggested using “nooses” against people who “try to take over our republic.”
QAnon influencer with ties to Michael Flynn says conspiracy theorists will become part of government under Trump
October 14, 2024
Audio file
Audio
CitationFrom an October 14, 2024, X Space
BEN MOORE (QANON INFLUENCER AND AMERICA’S FUTURE ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER): I'm going to think big. I'm going to think proactively in this situation. Trump is going to get reelected one way or the other. OK? The people that have been on the forefront of this fight, exposing child trafficking, are going to be the forefront of the justice arm, the arm of justice. That's going to be people like Liz Crokin, Mike Smith, Brian Gamble. All right? Don't think for a moment that Gen. Flynn's not going to get appointed to a position to expose and to execute justice on these people. OK?
I know Ivan Raiklin. I love Ivan. Love Ivan. Had so many talks with him. And I know Liz has too, like, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] or someone — I literally talked to Ivan for four to five hours straight. Dude is one of the most brilliant guys I know. He's a green beret, and he's a lawyer. He's dangerous, he's deadly, he's effective. OK? But what I'm going to tell you guys is that people like Ivan Raiklin, Liz Crokin, Mike Smith, Brian Gamble, will be on the board of justice that brings child traffickers to justice. And Gen. Flynn will be leading the way. He'll be appoint to a position that does not need to be approved by Congress. Because if it's a position like national security director that needs to be approved by Congress, they're going to try to jam it up.
Trump is going to make him a special adviser, and then Flynn's going to have his team. And I'm going to tell you who's on his team. Everyone that's on the board of advisers for America's Future Project to Defend and Protect Children is going to be on Flynn's team. And they are the people that are awake, that know what the fuck's going on. Sorry for my language.
And there's — you guys have no clue. And I am being braggadocious right now. OK? I am predicting some things that are going to happen before it happens because I am confident. I know that God ultimately wins, and God is going to expose these people and people that have been laughed at, that have been just, you know, mocked, like Liz Crokin, Lara Logan, Mike Smith, they're going to be on this team that's going to be on this special advisory board that Trump has that's going to bring to justice these child traffickers.
And it's not going to be low-level child traffickers. It's going to be high-level. It's going to be the people that are in politics. It's going to be presidents of countries. It's going to be people that are in executive positions of countries around the world that are child traffickers. And people like Liz and Mike, who we can trust, because they've given it all, they've sacrificed everything for these children and for the republic, they're going to bring it to light. That's what's going to happen.
And so anyone that's listening, anyone with Media Matters, anyone with, you know, all these screwballs that are losers that are listening, that's going to happen. And there's nothing that can stop what is coming. So that's all I want to say. I know what's going to happen. I have it all mapped out, and I'll probably be on that team as well. So — and if I'm on the team, I'm doing it for free. I don't want to take any money from it. I just want to see justice. I want to see the children vindicated for fucking once, for fucking once. All these children that have been trafficked, I want to see them vindicated. I'm going to do it for free. If I get offered money, I'm going to decline any kind of payment. I just — I'm going to work for free. I'm going to work for free. So there it is.
X SPACE PARTICIPANT: I want to donate the ropes and the bullets. I'll donate the ropes and the bullets.
MOORE: No. Not the bullets, the nooses.
...
MOORE: The ropes and the nooses.
...
MOORE: I know what you're talking about, Stella, but it's the nooses. We're going old school on this. I am an advocate for everything that Ivan Raiklin says on this. And so just trust me. If you harm children and you try to take over our republic, there's going to be hell to pay.
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mma
Ohio GOP Senate nominee Bernie Moreno fundraises with influencer who pushed weather manipulation conspiracy theory
Written by Eric Hananoki
:{:{Published 10/17/24}:
Republican U.S. Senate nominee Bernie Moreno has recently been getting fundraising help from Grant Cardone, a controversial financial influencer who pushed the conspiracy theory that Hurricane Milton was the result of weather manipulation.
On October 6, Cardone wrote: “I grew up on the Gulf of Mexico. Been watching storms since I was a young boy. I have NEVER seen a storm start here and go east. Do you think Gov’t is using technology to manipulate weather patterns & storms?”
He also wrote on October 10: “For those who dismiss the idea our govt is experimenting with weather remember these are the same people who denied Wuhan, bio labs in Ukraine, promised vaccine was safe, authorized contamination of our food supply, exported our manufacturing & say elections can’t be rigged.”
Cardone’s conspiratorial rhetoric was noted in numerous articles, including in Newsweek, FactCheck.org, Miami New Times, and Gizmodo.
He has used conspiratorial rhetoric to speculate on other subjects. On September 30, discussing the now-suspended port strike, he wrote: “Where is Harris on the port strike? Quit pretending she’s not responsible for running this country the last four years. They will use the strike to create nationwide chaos to steal the election.” He also asserted that “they purposely opened the border” and “used Covid to steal 2020,” arguing, “They will do anything & Americans can’t believe this would be orchestrated because they can’t imagine that much evil.”
In 2023, Cardone posted an image of himself displaying his middle finger, writing: “To all those who thought we were just conspiracy theorist!”
In recent days, Cardone has been trying to rally monetary support for Moreno, posting a fundraising plea online for Moreno on October 11. The Ohio Republican candidate responded: “Thank you @GrantCardone for your support, your friendship, and for your support of entrepreneurs!”
Cardone also appeared in an online audio chat with Moreno on October 14. The chat served as a de facto fundraiser, with Cardone saying he’s “put some money in for him” and encouraging people to donate to his campaign. He also said that he’s known Moreno for 30 years.
The chat also featured former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn, who praised Moreno as “exactly the type of person that” the Senate needs. Flynn has also promoted weather conspiracy theories: He shared a video on October 7 which claimed that “Hurricane Helene was an ATTACK caused by Weather Manipulation!” He also suggested that “the mountains of N.C.” show that “the globalists are pulling out all the stops.” “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “the real storm is coming.”
vid] Cardone also at a rally for former President Donald Trump. Media Matters has documented several of Trump’s media allies similarly forwarding weather modification conspiracy theories.
Media Matters previously documented that Moreno fundraised on the show of Laura Loomer, a far-right extremist who has celebrated the deaths of migrants and mocked Vice President Kamala Harris’ Indian American heritage.
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an 10 24
Revealed: Bundy collaborator fueled FEMA conspiracy in Hurricane Helene aftermath
Clockwise from upper right: Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Brian Cavalier, Shawna Cox, Pete Santilli, Jon Ritzheimer, Ryan Payne, Joe O'Shaughnessy
Jordan GreenandRaw StoryOctober 14, 2024
Only 30 minutes after billionaire Elon Musk began publicly accusing the federal government of blocking his company from delivering the satellite internet components to the disaster zone in western North Carolina, another extraordinary claim popped up on X.
“NC State Police issue statement that they will start arresting any federal employees trying to hinder rescue operations,” an Arizona man named Joseph O’Shaughnessy wrote on X Oct. 4.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, quickly disputed the claim from Musk, who owns both SpaceX and the social media platform X and would speak at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pa. the following day. But O’Shaughnessy’s claim piggy-backing off Musk's post added a new layer to manufactured intrigue: a potential clash between state and federal authorities in a region traumatized by the staggering loss.
The statement is completely false, and it comes from someone with a history of armed confrontation with the FBI and other federal agencies. O’Shaughnessy served prison time for his role in the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016 and was also charged in the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in 2014.
Prior to his involvement in the Bundy ranch standoff, O’Shaughnessy had been arrested for disorderly conduct, domestic violence and drugs, according to federal prosecutors.
“If you tie back to this guy, you’ll see that nothing reliable comes from that guy,” First Sgt. Christopher Knox, a public information officer for the N.C. State Highway Patrol, told Raw Story. “That’s not a trusted source of information. That information is not true in any way, shape or form.”
Knox pointed out that North Carolina doesn’t even have an agency called “NC State Police.” The claim is even more dubious if one considers that State Highway Patrol in North Carolina is under the command of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, an ally of Vice President Kamala Harris. From a purely partisan standpoint, it is unlikely the two agencies would end up in an adversarial position with one another.
O'Shaughnessy responded to an inquiry from Raw Story by sending an AI-generated GIF of Trump dancing through a direct message on X.
While O’Shaughnessy’s post was quickly shot down by X users who pointed out that no such agency exists in North Carolina, it landed within a matrix of false claims by Trump allies that has created a mutually reinforced narrative, belied by the facts on the ground, that the federal government is abandoning the people of western North Carolina.
O’Shaughnessy’s post was reshared 18,000 times, including Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has a long history of promoting conspiracy theories despite a professional background that requires an ability to separate fact from fantasy astutely.
Before joining the Trump administration, Flynn held the highest military intelligence position as head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, re-shared O’Shaughnessy’s post, writing: “Finally, some good news!”
Flynn, who has persistently used his X account to push apocalyptic messages about the impending breakup of the United States, has also pushed misinformation related to the disaster. During an Oct. 4 interview with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Flynn said there were “reports” about “illegals” raping children, while describing the flood-ravaged region as a “warzone.”
Flynn also could not be reached for comment for this story.
Johnson, who interviewed Flynn on his show, was recently employed by a media company alleged by federal prosecutors to be a front for a Russian influence operation. Johnson and other conservative influencers linked to the company have said they were victims of the scheme. During his interview with Flynn on Oct. 4, Johnson echoed many of the same themes as his guest during his opening monologue for the segment, claiming that the federal government has “chosen” immigrants over Trump supporters.
“Our federal government has left you to die in whatever small, inconsequential town that you come from because you are a Trump voter, because you support MAGA, because you are America first,” he said.
Flynn wasn’t the only one who greeted O’Shaughnessy’s bogus claim about a state law enforcement agency challenging the federal government.
Gianna Miceli, who co-hosts a podcast that promotes sovereign citizen ideology, enthused: “Now we have a jurisdiction war happening! What a great time for people to learn some lessons about who is the government and who is not.”
“Exactly,” O’Shaughnessy responded.
In another reply to O’Shaughnessy’s thread, Miceli falsely claimed: “FEMA is a private for-profit corporation. It is not government.”
O’Shaughnessy’s false claim that a state agency in North Carolina is threatening to arrest federal agents in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election fits a pattern with not only his involvement in the 2014 Bundy ranch standoff and 2016 Malheur occupation, but also the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Bundy ranch, Malheur occupation and Stop the Steal 2020
O’Shaughnessy was described in a federal indictment in response to the Bundy ranch standoff as a “mid-level leader and organizer of the conspiracy who, among other things: organized gunmen and other followers; led gunmen and other followers in the assault and extortion of federal law enforcement at the impound site; organized protection for members of the criminal enterprise; and organized armed patrols and security checkpoints.”
Similarly, federal prosecutors would later describe O’Shaughnessy as a “mid-level organizer” of the Malheur occupation. In a video interview during the occupation, according to the criminal complaint, O’Shaughnessy said: “I’m right now in the process of trying to set up a constitutional security protection force to make sure these federal agents and these law enforcement don’t just come in here like cowboys.”
O’Shaughnessy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to impede federal officers for his conduct during the Malheur occupation, but the government dismissed charges in the Bundy ranch case. O’Shaughnessy was sentenced to time served, and reportedly spent one year and nine months in custody for the two cases.
O’Shaughnessy has described Roger Stone, a political consultant and longtime confidant of Trump, as a “hero and a mentor.” Like Flynn, Stone was pivotal in mobilizing a pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Immediately following the 2020 election, Stone privately strategized with Flynn, the Washington Post reported.
O’Shaughnessy’s Instagram account shows that he was with Stone during a dinner in Florida with Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander in November 2020. Another post shows dated Dec. 11, 2020, the eve of the pro-Trump Jericho March rally in Washington, D.C. includes a photo that shows Stone drinking with InfoWars conspiracy trafficker Alex Jones.
It is unclear what, if anything, O’Shaughnessy discussed with Stone, Jones and Alexander when they met on those two occasions.
A false claim that evolved out of Elon Musk’s dustup with FEMA
In his false post about state law enforcement threatening to arrest their counterparts last week, O’Shaughnessy appears to have taken a cue from Nick Sortor, a right-wing videographer who spent the past week in the Asheville area delivering Starlink terminals while producing media assailing the federal government response to the disaster.
In an Oct. 3 X post, Sortor thanked Musk and SpaceX “for bringing us another truckload of Starlinks. A photo in the post shows an officer wearing a North Carolina State Highway Patrol uniform holding a box labeled “Starlink,” while a video shows police vehicles that appear to be providing an escort for Sortor down a winding mountain road.
The following day, Sortor replied to Musk’s post accusing FEMA of preventing his engineers from allowing him to deliver supplies. In his reply, Sortor appears to reference the State Highway Patrol, while using the same misnomer that O’Shaughnessy would later use.
“Let me know where the blockades are and we’ll have the NC State Police move them out of the way,” Sortor wrote. “Already did it once, which is one reason why we have an escort now. FEMA has zero jurisdiction.
“Trust me,” he added. “They’re not going to win this one.”
Twenty-four minutes later, O’Shaughnessy made his post claiming that the “NC State Police” were prepared to start arresting federal agents.
Challenged to substantiate his claim, O’Shaughnessy responded to one detractor by writing, “Calm down stranger danger, my boys were one of the 1st on-scene to bring aid…. I am the source.”
O’Shaughnessy didn’t identify his “boys” on the ground in North Carolina, but on Sunday he praised Sortor for delivering the Starlink terminals, writing, “And everyone, please follow @nicksortor. He’s the one who made it happen.”
Manufacturing a fake turf war between FEMA and state law enforcement doesn’t help the residents of western North Carolina, Christopher Knox, the State Highway Patrol spokesperson, told Raw Story. Instead of relying on dubious accounts on X, Knox recommended that people seek information about the recovery effort from trusted sources such as the NC Department of Public Safety.
“There’s a lot of people hurting and a lot of people looking for resources,” Knox said. “We hate that there’s stuff out there slowing the response. Getting people to the right sources is a big goal of the state of North Carolina.”
NOW READ: The Purge is real: Inside the GOP's 2024 playbook to disenfranchise voters
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lesser magistrate calvinist BS trewhella
Former President Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has praised Trewhella’s book several times, extolling it as a “masterful blueprint showing Americans how to successfully resist tyranny.” And a member of Trump’s 2020 campaign legal team, Jenna Ellis, cited Trewhella’s work as a solution to government overreach in her 2015 book advocating for a biblical interpretation of the Constitution.
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rww July 31, 2024
- Michael Flynn’s America’s Future organization will be holding a “Champions for America Celebration Gala” at Mar-a-Lago in December at which Tucker Carlson and Kid Rock will be honored.
- Joshua Feuerstein issues a warning: “Dear Libtards, If you take out Trump, it’s over! We’re gonna start it popping.”
- Jackson Lahmeyer held an event for Tulsa mayoral candidate Brent VanNorman at his church last night during which Lahmeyer openly told his congregation to donate to VanNorman’s campaign because they need to have “someone in office who is on our team.”
- As long as Christian nationalists like Tim Barton are going to keep claiming that the Bible was “the top cited source” by the Founding Fathers, we are going to keep correcting the record.
- Ali Alexander offers some advice to the Trump campaign: “YOU HAVE TO GET NATIVIST, RACIST, NATIONALIST, AND CATHOLIC! TO WIN!”
- Finally, Glenn Beck, of all people, is insisting that it is the Democrats who are weird. What? The guy who once aired an hour-long special broadcast from the year 2054 thinks the Democrats are the weird ones?
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RWW 7 24
Michael Flynn and Ivan Raiklin (Image from video showed at June 2024 ReAwaken America event in Detroit)
WATER BOARDING INSTRUCTOR T SHIRT
Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Advisor, has welcomed self-described “secretary of retribution” and “deep state marauder” Ivan Raiklin to the board of directors of America’s Future, Inc., which Flynn chairs.
Raiklin, subject of a recent in-depth Raw Story investigation, has developed a far-right following online and at Flynn’s ReAwaken America tours with his calls for mass arrests of government officials, civil society advocates, and members of the media who he believes should be “criminalized for their treason.”
Flynn’s enthusiastic embrace of Raiklin is confirmation that Donald Trump’s stated plans to bring Flynn back into the White House are what Right Wing Watch called “a five alarm threat to democracy”—and affirms historian and authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s description of Flynn as “one of the most dangerous individuals in America today.” Raiklin has called on Trump to make Flynn his Vice President,
In a June 27 press release announcing that Raiklin has joined the America’s Future board, Flynn said Raiklin “will never back down or quit the fight to save our nation from the tyranny at our doorstep.” America’s Future executive director and Flynn’s sister Mary Flynn O’Neill called Raiklin “a fearless powerhouse in the fight for freedom and liberty worldwide.”
That doesn’t seem like a terribly accurate description for someone who has drawn up a list of 350 elected officials, intelligence agents, government employees, and journalists to be arrested when Trump is reelected. Raiklin responded to questions from Raw Story by posting that his “Deep State target list” is just “the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?”
In a disturbing video he posted on social media in May, an intense and hostile Raiklin told NPR reporter Zoe Chase that the mass arrests he was describing would take place no matter who wins the presidential election. “This is going to take place at the hands of the American people, with or without an election.”
Raiklin said he hopes to be deputized by a red-county sheriff to help carry out the mass detentions. NJ.com, drawing on the Raw Story report, wrote, “If Trump is re-elected, Raiklin wants to enlist so-called ‘constitutional’sheriffs in rural, conservative counties across the country to lock up Trump’s political enemies. He lusts for ‘live-streamed swatting raids’ against Trump’s political enemies on his ‘Deep State target list.’”
Like Flynn, Raiklin backed Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Raiklin helped devise and promote the Trump team’s bogus theory that Mike Pence had the power to reject state-certified electoral college votes. Flynn called on Trump to declare martial law after the 2020 election and told right-wing activists on the eve of the insurrection not to accept the outcome. Since then, he has teamed up with conspiracy theorist Clay Clark for the ReAwaken America tour, a road show of radicalizing extremism that combines right-wing conspiracy theories with aggressive Christian nationalism.
Raiklin spoke at a ReAwaken America event and held a press conference with right-wing media in Detroit in June, where he laid out his plan to have sheriffs deputize the 80,000 veterans he says are “clamoring” to help carry out live-streamed raids against people on his enemies list. He hopes some of them will be executed, saying, “Some states have something called capital punishment. It would be so glorious for capital punishment to go from the ‘o’ spelling to the ‘a’ spelling in Texas, in Louisiana, in Kansas, in Florida, and the list goes on, as we start the retribution cycle.”
Trump family members and surrogates have often spoken at ReAwaken America events. Eric Trump and Trump adviser Kash Patel are scheduled to speak at a ReAwaken America Tour stop in North Carolina in October.
Raw Story reported that Raiklin tried without success to recruit so-called “constitutional sheriffs” at an April gathering of Richard Mack’s Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Raiklin also met with Mack in June, though Mack has since distanced himself, saying he disagrees with Raiklin’s rhetoric. Raiklin told right-wing media that he would be speaking at a sheriffs event in Texas right after the Republican convention.
In his ReAwaken speech, Raiklin floated a couple of extremely implausible conspiracy theories. In one, establishment Republicans would try to somehow change RNC rules to deny Trump the nomination. In another, several establishment Republicans would retire from the House, allowing Democrats to name Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, thereby allowing Congress to pass and President Biden to sign legislation designating Trump as an insurrectionist to keep him off the ballot. Raiklin also urged attendees to demand that red-state legislators allocate their state’s Electoral College votes to Trump.
Responding to Raw Story’s report about Raiklin’s mass arrest plans, Rep. Jamie Raskin warned, “A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”
After the assassination attempt at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Patriot Takes unearthed footage from five months ago of Raiklin and Alex Jones talking about how a Trump assassination could unleash the forces of retribution. Raiklin said it would be “so much better for us and so much worse for them,” because it would provoke “the best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
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AN 6 24
no lnx
alternet-
‘They could have killed me’: Trump's 2020 'Seattle whistleblower' finally revealed
Michael Flynn (center) leaves a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., with Geoffrey Flohr aka "Yoda" (front) on Dec. 12, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Jordan GreenandRaw Story June 23, 2024
The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.
A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.
Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.
She did not want to go.
But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.
Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.
What was possibly happening here?
As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of which Raw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.
The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.
“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”
The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.
These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.
These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.
And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.
‘A plane full of ballots’
Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”
Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.
The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.
The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.
With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.
The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”
Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.
Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.
“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.
Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”
Enter Staci Burk.
Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.
A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.
But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.
Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.
“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”
“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”
Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)
“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”
What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.
Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.
Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.
Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’
On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”
Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.
“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.
“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.
“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.
As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.
Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.
Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.
Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.
“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”
At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.
At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.
Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.
Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.
The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.
“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”
As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.
In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.
And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.
‘He fabricated everything’
Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.
Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.
“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.
“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”
The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.
Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?
Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.
The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.
Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.
More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”
Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.
“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.
“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.
A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp
Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.
In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.
One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.
Except for the fact that it is real.
It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.
The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)
As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.
The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.
The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”
‘There was no goldmine’
Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.
She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”
Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.
“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.
But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.
“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”
This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”
No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.
“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.
“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”
The band breaks up
These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.
Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”
Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.
In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”
Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.
Some of the key players involved have also split up.
Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”
Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.
“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.
Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.
In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”
But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.
Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.
Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.
Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.
Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.
Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.
“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”
Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.
“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”
“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”
- * *
Key players
Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.
Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.
Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.
Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.
Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.
Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.
Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.
Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.
Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.
Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.
Shawn Wilson is the president of MSG Risk Management & Intelligence (formerly Mayhem Solutions Group). Jim Penrose told Staci Burk that he was initially concerned that Wilson, along with Kenneth Scott Koch, were “hostile actors” intent on harming Sabrina Keliikoa.
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rww 6 24
former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is promoting “Flynn,” a new film that portrays him as a heroic figure battling persecution by the deep state traitors he claims went after him as a way of bringing down Donald Trump. Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI, then withdrew his plea and was ultimately pardoned by Trump after the 2020 election, touted his movie in an appearance on the radio show of religious-right conspiracy theorist Eric Metaxas this week.
After Trump’s 2020 election defeat, Flynn backed Trump’s lies about the election and urged Trump to declare martial law. He has spent the post-Trump-administration years promoting conspiracy theories, Christian nationalism, and extremist figures as part of the ReAwaken America tour. In 2022, historian and authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat called Flynn “one of the most dangerous individuals in America today.” Last year, Right Wing Watch published “12 Reasons Donald Trump’s Pledge to Hire Michael Flynn is a Five-Alarm Threat to Democracy.”
Flynn told Metaxas and his listeners that what is happening to Trump in the courts is a continuation of a “coup” against Trump and the U.S. that was started by Barack Obama in a January 2017 White House meeting, where he said Obama and his advisers talked about how to get Flynn out of the way so they could go after Trump. It was all designed, he claimed, “to continue to control the levers of power within our government.”
That’s an interesting framing, because the thrust of Project 2025, a massive undertaking by Trump allies across the right-wing movement in the U.S., is to seize the levers of power in government and force civil servants and federal agencies to bend unquestioningly to Trump’s will if he returns to the presidency. Trump and his allies have made clear that he will use that power to seek revenge and retribution against his enemies, something Metaxas and Flynn are clearly looking forward to. Here’s Metaxas:
Trump has to win. The left will do literally anything. They would really love to put a bullet in his head. But they’re not going to be able to do that. But they might try. They’ll do anything. They’ll start World War III. They’ll do anything. Because they do not care whether people die, whether the country goes under, they just want power. That’s all they care about.
They can and will do anything to prevent him getting back in. But if he does get back in by the grace of God, that’s the starting line. We have a lot of work to do.
Metaxas said the “evil” deep state is “at war with we, the people,” and asked Flynn if Trump understands that he needs to put the right people in place to gut the deep state. Yes, Trump realizes it, said Flynn. “He knows what he’s got to do. And he’s fully prepared to do it.” More from Flynn:
I know that he realizes that the people he brings into his inner circle going back into the White House have to be really dedicated patriots who have not only his objectives and what he wants to accomplish, but also people who are prepared and ready to do the necessary functions of government and to hold people accountable. We have to have one standard of justice in this country, and people are going to need to be held accountable.
Flynn portrays Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence as part of the “uniparty establishment” plot against him, and portrays himself as the ultimate honest man, taken down by scheming insiders for being unwilling to lie in the service of power, a mythology that is likely to be swallowed whole by the MAGA faithful. Mother Jones magazine’s Stephanie Mencimer has called Flynn’s new movie “a triumph of revisionist history” and an “example of how good right-wing filmmakers have gotten at making these sorts of propaganda films.” In her review Mencimer wrote, “If Flynn the movie fails to shed much light on the unraveling of Flynn the man, it does succeed as a painful reminder of what the Trump years were like—with all the chaos and corruption—and a foreshadowing of what might happen should he be elected again.”
an 6 24
Trump supporters at the Missouri Republican Caucus on Saturday attacked fellow attendees who supported the former president's opponent, a prior member of the "grand old party" reported.
Former Lincoln Project veterans affairs adviser Fred Wellman, an ex-Republican and current Democratic campaign consultant, reportedthe aggressive development on social media. Wellman also recently hit retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, a Trump adviser who played a prominent role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election, with a sanctions bid in a defamation lawsuit.
On Saturday, Wellman conveyed information he said he received via text about the caucus in Missouri.
"I have a friend who attended the Missouri Republican Presidential Caucus today," he wrote Saturday. "They asked Nikki Haley supporters to line up in the middle of the auditorium and were booed and screamed at by the Trump supporters."
He continued: "They attacked fellow Republicans. Feel like democracy to you?"
...
Quoting a reported follow-up text from the source, Wellman then said, "The woman who spoke for Haley couldn’t stop shaking and crying. It was so scary.”
Someone in the comments wrote to Wellman, "Those Dale Carnegie courses didn't take..." He responded, "Nope. Do you think those folks will vote for Trump in November?"
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an 5 24
“Off Leash" is not only the name of a podcast started by Erik Prince, former CEO of Blackwater (now part of the security firm Constellis Holdings) and brother of ex-Trump Administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. It is also the name of a private far-right group chat Prince hosts via the instant messaging program WhatsApp.
The New Republic's Ken Silverstein describes the group chat in an article published on May 30, noting that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, GOP activist/organizer Kimberly Guilfoyle (Donald Trump Jr.'s fiancée), Michael Flynn (former national security for the Trump Administration) and House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green (R-Tennessee) are among the MAGA "cranks" who have been invited to participate.
"Collectively," Silverstein explains, "Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right…. Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well-known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly."
READ MORE: 'Back to square 1': Legal expert breaks down jury deliberations in Trump hush money trial
According to Silverstein, his investigation of Off Leash conversations via WhatsApp showed that some of the participants have "chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad."
Silverstein reports, "The group's overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting, would be considered ultra-conservatives but in the context of Off Leash, sound like hippie peaceniks…. Many other Off Leash participants have also stated that they don't view the group chat as merely a forum to exchange ideas but want it to become a vehicle to put their theories into action."
Silverstein observes that it isn't uncommon for Off Leash participants to advocate "violence."
"On the roster of Off Leash participants," Silverstein points out, "there was one — a poster with the handle of 'S,' whom it took me weeks to identify — who stood out as a particularly dark character. There were some in the group who expressed more unhinged views and others who more casually called for violence against their enemies; what made S distinctive was his dry, bloodless manner and businesslike espousal of a disciplined worldview that was unmistakably fascist."
READ MORE:['Mother Theresa could not beat these charges': Trump not confident about jury deliberations
*Read Ken Silverstein's full report for The New Republic at this link.
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board members of Michael Flynn’s organization are allegedly sending “leads” from QAnon conspiracy theorists to law enforcement
The former national security adviser's group, America's Future, has been increasingly tied to the conspiracy theory
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED 04/24/24
A QAnon influencer claimed on Sunday that he and other QAnon-connected figures are using their “connections” and “contacts with local police forces” to share “leads” from supporters of the conspiracy theory. The influencer, Ben Moore, is a member of America’s Future, an organization run by former national security adviser Michael Flynn that has become increasingly tied to QAnon.
During an X Space on April 21 seemingly dedicated to topics related to America’s Future, Moore, who sits on an advisory board for the organization, said that he and other board members “get a lot of messages” and have “people reaching out about potential trafficking operations,” and when QAnon supporters “give us leads, it turns into, a lot of times, something that’s real. And we’ll use our connections and our contacts with local police forces or nonprofits that are doing this stuff to make things happen.”
Specifically, Moore — a QAnon influencer known online as Sun Tzu — claimed that “there’s so much that happens behind the scenes, and it’s because of Anons,” referring to a term for QAnon supporters. The other board members he mentioned were Liz Crokin, another QAnon conspiracy theorist, and Tara Rodas, who has repeatedly appeared on QAnon-promoting shows.
Board members of Michael Flynn’s organization are allegedly sending “leads” from QAnon conspiracy theorists to law enforcement
APRIL 21, 2024
Audio
CitationFrom an April 21, 2024, Twitter/X Space
X SPACE PARTICIPANT: My wife was tonight, she was all upset because she has a lady that has been trafficked by presidents. And she’s gonna send it to Sun Tzu, and Sun Tzu is gonna look at it. Sun, that’s why I sent you that message. But it’ll all be good. We’ll dig into it. We’re diggers, right? And —
BEN MOORE (QANON INFLUENCER): Yeah. No. Listen, man. That’s one thing too. Everything like that, I always take it serious. I know Liz [Crokin] does. I know Tara [Rodas] does. I mean, we get a lot of messages. We get a lot of people reaching out about potential trafficking operations. We actually got a guy, we got a PD, a local PD, to investigate a particular person that was doing some crazy stuff. I can’t really go into it.
But there’s so much that happens behind the scenes, and it’s because of Anons. When they give us leads, it turns into, a lot of times, something that’s real. And we’ll use our connections and our contacts with local police forces or nonprofits that are doing this stuff to make things happen. And so I — I’m serious about it.
I mean, I know Tara has resources that are amazing, especially with stuff that’s happening with the children over the border. We haven’t even talked about that tonight. Totally different topic than what we’re discussing tonight, but there is so many — there’s so many different pans in the fire right now, but I know that people that have legitimate concerns of trafficking operations. We’ve seen trafficking rings broken up, legitimate arrests made, children being saved.
So there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes. Can’t always talk about it, but it does happen.
In 2022, the leaders of election denial organization True the Vote also indicated they had or would pass along material from the QAnon community to law enforcement.
09/15/22 2:04 PM EDT
03/29/24 3:07 PM EDT
04/08/
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an 4 24
former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has been the focus of two separate — and radically different — documentaries.
One of them is "Michael Flynn's Holy War," a PBS/Associated Press collaboration aired on "Frontline" in 2022. Another is Aquidneck Island Productions' "Flynn," a MAGA-friendly film that Religion News' Tess Owen is highly critical of in an article published on April 22.
"'Flynn,' the film, poses as a straight-laced documentary but is starkly silent about Flynn's current mission: spreading the gospel of Christian nationalism and preparing his followers to wage spiritual warfare, starting by taking over local politics," Owen explains. "The film's goal seems to be to rewrite history and bolster Flynn's credibility as a spiritual leader. After all, to Flynn's followers, the 'Deep State' isn't just a political enemy — it's a spiritual one, and the only way to serve God and save America is to destroy it."
READ MORE:'He's going to pop': Warning given about Trump's age and stress during hush money trial
No one has done more to bring together the Religious Right and the MAGA movement than the far-right QAnon supporter Flynn, who, in December 2022, called for then-President Donald Trump to invoke martial law in order to stay in the White House.
"Flynn," Owen notes, "might be considered a counter to" PBS and AP's "Michael Flynn's Holy War" — as it "mythologizes its subject as a renegade who perseveres against all odds, standing up to malevolent forces in defense of 'the truth.'"
According to Owen, "The film premiered April 5 at a community center in Sarasota County, Florida, and will screen at 32 other locations, mostly municipal buildings, barns and church halls, across 25 states in the next two months. Tickets start at $35, but for $200, you get a photo op with Flynn and a 'Flynn' film swag bag…. So far, the screenings seem to have attracted decent crowds and have featured prayer circles and drawn QAnon influencers as well as state senators, including Arizona State Sen. Wendy Rogers."
READ MORE:Putin, Trump and Netanyahu unveil the terrifying perils of strongman rule
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April 8, 2024 RWW
- David Gilbert @ Wired: Inside the Election Denial Groups Planning to Disrupt November
Groups like True the Vote and Michael Flynn’s America Project want to mobilize thousands of Trump supporters by pushing baseless claims about election fraud—and are rolling out new technology to fast-track their efforts.
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REF
:{:{WIRED}:
As the most consequential presidential election in a generation looms in the United States, get-out-the-vote efforts across the country are more important than ever. But multiple far-right activist groups with ties to former president Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are mobilizing their supporters in earnest, drawing on one baseline belief: Elections in the US are rigged, and citizens need to do something about it.}:
All the evidence states otherwise. But in recent weeks, these groups have held training sessions about how to organize on a hyperlocal level to monitor polling places and drop boxes, challenge voter registrations en masse, and intimidate and harass voters and election officials. And some are preparing to roll out new technology to fast-track all of these efforts: One of the groups claims they’re launching a new platform for checking voter rolls that contains billions of “data elements” on every single US citizen.
These groups could have a major impact on the 2024 election. In addition to disenfranchising voters and putting additional pressure on already overstretched election offices, they could convince more and more people that US elections are fraudulent.
Catherine Engelbrecht and her organization True the Vote have effectively tried to disenfranchise voters for more than a decade by claiming that voter rolls are filled with phony voter registrations. Engelbrecht’s rhetoric was given an unprecedented boost in the wake of 2020, when Trump and other elected officials mainstreamed conspiracies that the elections had been rigged in favor of Democrats. Hundreds of national and local election denial groups were formed, and many of them amassed huge followings on social media platforms like Telegram. As the 2024 presidential election looms, they are ramping up efforts to do it again.
“It could be exponentially worse than what we saw in 2020, but we're going to be awake, we're going to be engaged, we are going to understand the process, and we're going to have options to continue to hold to those truths,” Engelbrecht said during a March webinar titled “Election Integrity Team Building 101.” “We're not going to back down. There's too much to lose.”
The hour-long presentation was delivered from a hotel room in Denver, with Engelbrecht laying out what could sound like a relatively benign plan to monitor elections and check voter rolls. “Keep a soft heart, keep a kind word in your mouth, approach people irrespective of party with love. You will find that things will be much better if that is the approach that is taken,” Engelbrecht said. The session, she said, was overbooked.
Engelbrecht then began speaking about elections being “perilously close to cracking in half,” and her presentation became a highlight reel of election conspiracies, references to crystals, Christian nationalist rhetoric, and militaristic jargon. “If this republic’s to be saved, it's because [of] people like all of you that are on this webinar right now. There are some bad actors out there and we live in particularly chaotic and caustic times,” said Engelbrecht. “If we wait on somebody to do something, we will watch freedom slip away on our watch. That's how close we are.”
“These groups are trying to lay the groundwork to potentially make later claims about the election that very well may be false. But the more chaos that can be caused along the way will give more fodder to that disinformation,” Andrew Garber, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, tells WIRED. “It's not just bad if there's a mass voter challenge because people might get kicked off the rolls. It's also bad if people then take that challenge and say, ‘See, look at all these ineligible voters,’ when in fact that's not the case.”
:{:{Engelbrecht founded True the Vote in 2010, when she was an activist for the right-wing populist Tea Party movement. After the 2020 election, Engelbrecht and her collaborator Gregg Phillips became central figures in the Stop the Steal movement, and starred in the widely-debunked election conspiracy film *2000 Mules*.}:
They were also arrested for contempt of court after refusing to identify their source behind allegations that the Chinese government had accessed US election data. True the Vote also made wild allegations of widespread ballot stuffing in Georgia during the 2020 vote and a subsequent runoff in 2021. Earlier this year, True the Vote was forced to admit in court that the group had no evidence to back up its claims.}:
In 2022, the group rolled out a slick new software tool known as IV3, based on technology developed by Phillips, that compared names on voter rolls to a database maintained by the US Postal Service, allowing anyone to challenge voter registrations across the country if they spotted a discrepancy. A WIRED investigation, however, revealed that the information used to challenge the registration of hundreds of thousands of people was based on unreliable data.
:{:{Undeterred, True the Vote announced last week that it was relaunching IV3. Phillips claims that the software’s database now has close to “100 billion data elements about every single voter in the United States.” WIRED has not seen proof of this claim. The new IV3 system will soon be available in all 50 states, the organization said.}:
On Thursday, the group held a webinar to train local activists on how to use it. The new system also relies on data from the US Postal Service, but Engelbrecht claimed during the presentation that Phillips and his team had “normalized” the data from all 50 states to ensure the system would not produce inaccurate results. She also said that thousands of people across the country were already registered, and that they had a long waiting list.}:
*Additionally, she said that another software tool developed by Phillips’ team, called Ground Fusion, would be released soon; it is aimed at organizations and PACs looking to identify voting irregularities across larger geographic regions.
Engelbrecht declined to comment, claiming without evidence that WIRED had “written unfairly about True the Vote and IV3 in the past.”
True the Vote is not the only group seeking to leverage technology to supercharge the spread of election conspiracies. A secretive Georgia-based firm called EagleAI NETwork has developed a voter information database to fast-track the deletion of ineligible voters from the system. Voter rights groups have advised against its use, as insignificant errors—such as a missing comma before the suffix “Jr.”—have led to eligible names being removed. Still, at least one county in Georgia has agreed to use EagleAI to review voter challenges and conduct list maintenance activities.
One of EagleAI’s key backers is former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, who in the past two years has become central to the push to spread election conspiracies on a national level through her well-funded Election Integrity Network.
The group has held in-person training seminars in recent years, with session topics including how to protect “Vulnerable Voters from Leftist Activists” and “Monitoring Voting Equipment and Systems.” More recently, the group has made its training sessions available online, and is now once again ramping up its efforts ahead of the 2024 election with an initiative called Soles to the Rolls, aimed at boosting challenges to voter registration.
Mitchell, EagleAI, and the Election Integrity Network did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Another training webinar called “We the People” was also hosted last month by the America Project and its offshoot, Vote Your Vision. Broadcasted online to hundreds of attendees, the webinar featured a lineup of election conspiracists, Republican lawmakers, a guy who wrote a book about fifth-generation warfare, and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
The webinar, the group’s website said, was designed to give people “the secrets to reclaiming our power and reshaping history” by using “state-of-the-art election tools,” including those involving artificial intelligence technology. While the details of exactly what these tools will look like and how they will be used are unclear, the America Project has already scheduled more training sessions in the coming weeks to give supporters more information. The group also did not reply to requests for comment.
The America Project was cofounded by disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO and conspiracist Patrick Byrne, who also funds part of the organization. Both Flynn and Byrne reportedly attended a White House meeting in late 2020 to urge Trump to essentially declare martial law and seize voting machines.
While Flynn didn’t speak during last month’s webinar, he has arguably done more than anyone since 2020 to push the notion that America’s elections are fundamentally fraudulent, appearing at conferences, in podcasts, and on right-wing news shows on a near-daily basis. Trump has also indicated that Flynn will be brought back into his administration should he win.
:{:{These efforts have been given the seal of approval by the Republican National Committee, which was recently restructured by Trump to include election deniers and family members in top positions while cutting minority outreach efforts.}:
One of those election deniers is Christina Bobb, who will be running the “election integrity unit.” A former Trump lawyer and TV presenter on far-right channel One America News, Bobb is a major promoter of the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The RNC’s election-related priorities, according to an internal memo recently obtained by NPR, include “a broader effort over the coming months to [legally] challenge voter identification and signature verification rules which were put into place for the 2020 election.”}:
During the America Project webinar last month, one of the hosts apologized to listeners for being unable to get Bobb to join the call that day, but promised that she would join a future session—highlighting just how closely these conspiracy-focused groups work with the mainstream GOP apparatus.
“These groups have a playbook nationally that they tend to deploy locally,” says Garber. “Some of these playbooks that have an intended national reach are then deployed through local activists, and it's concerning because it's the voters at the local level who suffer the effects. It's the election officials at the local level trying to keep order at the polls, trying to make sure their voter rolls are up to date, who have to deal with this stuff.”
One of Flynn’s core messages over the past four years has been that “local action equals national impact” —an expression that revolves around a concept called “precinct strategy,” which aims to get people into key positions on local committees in order to push their narratives at the local level. In 2024, that strategy has been primed and polished.
“This concept of precinct strategy was actually endorsed by President Trump in the last election cycle,” Yehuda Miller, a Republican county committee member in New Jersey, said during the America Project seminar. “We want to take the strategy to the next level. We want to get more organized, we want to start organizing across multiple counties in a state, we want to start organizing across multiple states. We have the power to direct our elected officials.”
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TEXT MISSING not sure how much
The Post reports that, during the time Ramsland may have been receiving investments from the Saulsburys—in 2019 and beyond—everything he did “became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his plan to challenge elections Republicans had lost] had to get to Trump.” This doesn’t sound like a man who would have sat at the Willard on January 5 without making any attempt to get in touch with the president.
Indeed, the Post reports that “In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus”—possibly the same seven Freedom Caucus members who five months later would be in the Oval Office discussing an allegedly stolen election with Trump: Gosar, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Gaetz, Greene, and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). Certainly, Trump was well aware of Ramsland by mid-November of 2020, with the Post reporting that “late on November 15, Trump retweeted to his millions of followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from twenty-nine states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish election systems company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’”
But Ramsland’s connections to key insurrectionists go well beyond these, to include ex-Trump legal adviser Lin Wood and Giuliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. The Post writes that “Ramsland contributed material to [Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory”, and also that “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm…said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”
Even former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a participant in the unprecedentedly wild December 18 meeting at the White House, is tied to Ramsland. Per the Post, “By December [2020], Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former CEO of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani.”
So if Eastman was with Ramsland in the second Trump war room on Insurrection Eve, did Ramsland’s associates Ellis, Gohmert, Byrne, Bannon, Wood, Powell, Saulsbury, Sessions, Waldron, Giuliani, or Flynn join them there at any point on January 5 or 6?
(2) Eastman was in the Oval Office on January 4 in a previously unreported meeting.
According to the ex-law professor, on January 4 three people met in the Oval Office with him and Donald Trump: Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob. Per Eastman, prior to the meeting someone had advised Trump that “law review articles” written about the 2000 election indicated that “maybe the Vice President had unilateral authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.” Presumably it was not Eastman who provided such erroneous counsel to Trump, as Eastman says that during his meeting with Trump and Pence,
Pence asked Eastman if he believed vice presidents had the authority that Trump had been advised they had, and Eastman purportedly told Pence it was an “open question.” But per Eastman, he nevertheless told Pence it would be “foolish” to accept the alternate slates of electors the Trump campaign had had sent to D.C., as none had been certified by any state legislature. Eastman says he advised Pence to “delay the proceedings [in Congress]” in “response to the [GOP] state legislatures” that wanted time to “audit” their votes.
This meeting corroborates prior Proof reporting on Trump’s plan for January 6, which was not to win re-election—an impossibility—but simply to allow for so much chaos on Capitol Hill that Congress’ joint session would have to be postponed, giving GOP-led batlleground-state legislatures time to decertify their electors. As Eastman advised Pence and Trump on January 4, under such a scenario GOP-led state legislatures could try to certify new slates of Trump electors, arguably putting Pence in a novel situation the second time Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Many of the voter suppression bills the GOP is now pushing across America are “insurrectionist” in just this way; they aim to realize the vision of our democracy that Eastman shared with Trump and Pence on January 4—one in which state legislatures decide elections, not U.S. voters.
Conclusion
The Willard war room seems to have been focused on “coordinating communications” to ensure sufficient delay in the joint session of Congress that a coup of the incoming Biden administration would be possible through the creation of new slates of certified electors. While we know that the Willard war room hosted an advisory corps focused on the administrative components of this plot, the evidence also suggests that present in this second war room may have been individuals like Stone, Jones, Alexander, Flynn, Stockton, Lawrence, and Shroyer, who lacked the qualifications to have any role in any such administrative component—but would have been of great utility in orchestrating a paramilitary component to Trump’s plan to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.
At the nexus of these two parts of Trump’s apparent coup plan was Giuliani, whose ties to both of the two teams that appear to have used the Willard were considerable. Notably, it was Giuliani who said at the Ellipse, “Let’s have trial by combat!”—a line equally relevant to the administrative components of such a plot or paramilitary ones.
A robust investigation of the Willard Hotel “war room” has only just begun. Its size, technological capacities, traffic, purpose, and full roster of attendees remain an open question. This article therefore serves as only the first of a series of articles about this critical development in the story of the January 6 insurrection. More is forthcoming.
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revealed: Mike Flynn hid $200K payments for Middle East nuclear plan before joining White House
Travis Gettys Raw Story October 04, 2021
Michael Flynn received $200,000 in undisclosed payments for consulting work in the Middle East before joining Donald Trump's administration.
The retired U.S. Army general was paid for his work ...[nuclear?]
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Rebekah Mercer reportedly led a major reorganization of Trump's 2016 campaign, connecting him with Bannon and former Cruz adviser Kellyanne Conway, who would replace Paul Manafort at the helm of the team. Mercer, who also served on the Trump transition's executive committee, pushed for Trump to hire Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who was forced to resign less than a month into Trump's presidency amid a criminal investigation and now spreads QAnon conspiracy theories online.igor salon
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wendy s medium 2018? russia disinfo network:
Michael Flynn-related entities
Michael Flynn has barely been in the news recently, especially since he pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI at the end of 2017. However, as one of the earliest members of Trump’s campaign, and one of the most senior members of Trump’s administration for a short time, Flynn was involved with many people and companies that did social media and influence work on behalf of Trump.
In August 2017 Flynn amended his financial disclosure form to show he had agreed to work with SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, to help win new US government contracts. However, a source reported that Flynn did not receive compensation or perform any work.
In the US, Cambridge Analytica hired Josh Weerasinghe, who had worked at defense company BAE Systems and had previously worked with Flynn at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to focus on winning US government contracts.
In April 2018, Senator Bob Menendez on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent two letters to the State Department and SCL Group requesting information on the $490K State Department contract awarded to SCL “when Michael Flynn was serving as an advisor for the company and on President Trump’s transition team.” The letters requested a detailed description of the work that Michael Flynn performed as an advisor for SCL Group.
As reported earlier, Flynn allegedly had interactions with Joel Zamel, the founder of Psy-Group and Wikistrat, who wanted Flynn to join the advisory board of Wikistrat.
Flynn Intel Group
Flynn started his company, Flynn Intel Group, in 2014 and closed it at the end of 2016 before he joined the Trump administration. Flynn partnered with Bijan Kian and Philip Oakley, and according to company records, Flynn Intel Group was “a premier private intelligence and cybersecurity advisory firm.” Flynn received small payments from Russian firms Kaspersky Labs and Volga-Dnepr Airlines. And according to the NYT Flynn joined the advisory board of OSY Technologies, part of the NSO Group, a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials.
Bijan Kian introduced Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin to Flynn Intel Group to do PR and lobbying work against Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric and someone Erdogan considered an enemy, who was living in Pennsylvania. Alptekin paid Flynn Intel Group $530K through his Netherlands-based company Inovo BV and Alptekin said funding also came from Ratio Oil Exploration, an Israeli natural gas company — although the firm denied any connection to Alptekin.
FIG Cyber: Tim Newberry, who co-founded White Canvas and VizSense with Jon Iadonisis, listed on his LinkedIn profile that in August 2016 he was chief executive of FIG Cyber, a unit of Flynn Intel Group.
White Canvas and VizSense
White Canvas was founded by Jon Iadonisi, a former Navy SEAL, and Tim Newberry, and is described as a technology company with expertise in cyber operations, digital influence, social media, and other areas. Iadonisi was close to Michael Flynn and had served with him in Iraq, and reportedly Flynn Intel Group had rented office space from White Canvas. White Canvas received $150,000 in 2016 from the Navy for “deep and dark web capability and gap analysis.”
VizSense was created by Jon Iadonisi and Tim Newberry as a spinoff from White Canvas. Michael Flynn’s companies as well as those run by Iadonisi and Newberry overlap in many ways. For example, in Flynn’s contract with Inovo BV, it appeared that Tim Newberry worked for Flynn Intel group as the head of their “Special Operations Cyber Force.”
In May 2017 the Washington Post reported that Flynn’s friend and business associate Jon Iadonisi was doing work to help Flynn on behalf of the Turkish government and Ioadonisi was also doing social media work on behalf of Trump. FEC filings showed that the Trump campaign paid $200,000 for “data management services” to Colt Ventures, which was an investor in Iadonisi’s social media company VizSense. The payment was for “a social-media project that involved video-content creation and “millennial engagement” in the campaign’s final month.”
Colt Ventures
Colt Ventures was founded by Darren Blanton who served as an adviser to Trump’s transition. Blanton met frequently with Steve Bannon and reported to him on work done for the campaign, according to a source.
A May 2018 Bloomberg story described efforts to win Black voters for Trump, and how a Breitbart writer, along with Steve Bannon, recruited Bruce Carter to target three areas, Florida, Philadelphia, and North Carolina. Bannon introduced Carter to Darren Blanton and Jon Iadonisi to help provide funding and social media support for Carter’s efforts, although it’s not clear if funding was provided. In October 2016, during the final presidential debate in Las Vegas, Blanton introduced Carter to Erik Prince and Michael Flynn, and then later to Rebekah Mercer.
Based on the Bloomberg story, it appears that Darren Blanton, who ran Colt Ventures which was a part owner of Jon Iodonisi and Tim Newberry’s firm VizSense, also knew Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, and Rebekah Mercer. This raises a bigger question about whether or not the companies Flynn was indirectly connected to — VizSense, White Canvas, and Colt Ventures — had any business involvement with SCL or Cambridge Analytica?
Additional Entities Not Included in Chart
Data sources reportedly affiliated with campaign:
RNC
Palantir
Experian
Acxiom
InfoGroup
Others:...
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gop-doesnt-care-that-trump-planned-a-coup-do-democrats
no lnx
mich AG scheuette #2 got promoted? GA AG? quit b/c he got headsup he was about to tweet trumped?]
CAPITOL RIOTS
The GOP Doesn’t Care That Trump Planned a Coup. Do Democrats?
‘PURE INSANITY’
OPINION
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
New emails show Jan. 6 was just a preview. The GOP and its allies in Congress, law enforcement, and conservative media will attempt another coup when they lose another election.
Wajahat Ali
Updated Jun. 16, 2021 9:26AM ET / Published Jun. 15, 2021 10:58PM ET
Thanks to the bombshell documents the House Oversight and Reform Committee released just ahead of Tuesday’s hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection, Americans have a clear and unmistakable view of just how far former President Donald Trump went in trying to corrupt our democratic institutions, engage in a violent coup, and overturn our free and fair election.
“These documents show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Democratic committee chairwoman Carolyn Maloney. She’s absolutely correct. I would add one simple edit: It’s Trump and the GOP. He attempted a coup—and, yes, we should all use the word—and he’s still trying, with ample help from Republicans.
If you consider that hyperbole, I direct you to those bombshell documents revealing how the Trump administration, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, attempted to pressure the Department of Justice to advance dangerous conspiracy theories of election fraud and influence courts to nullify the election results so Trump could stay in power.
Trump Pushed Barr’s Successor to Probe Big Lie: New Emails
‘BRAZEN CORRUPTION’
Justin Rohrlich
An hour before announcing his Attorney General Bill Barr would be stepping down, no doubt because he refused to promote “the Big Lie,” Trump’s assistant sent an email to Jeffrey Rosen, his incoming attorney general, showing evidence of alleged “election fraud” in northern Michigan and “talking points” to advance the obvious lie. Two weeks later, Trump’s White House sent a draft brief to Rosen for the DOJ to submit to the Supreme Court intended to effectively nullify the 2020 election and help Trump usurp power. Transcribed interviews with former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reveal he directly pressured DOJ officials at least five times to investigate batshit conspiracy theories, including one suggesting that satellite technology from Europe was used to tamper with US voting equipment.
It appears Rosen, and other senior members of the DOJ, were not willing to pledge allegiance to Trump over the United States. “Pure insanity” is how Rosen and Richard Donoghue, who was the acting deputy attorney general, described Meadows’ emails. Trump then considered replacing Rosen with a sympathetic sycophant, Jeffrey Clark, who was then acting head of the civil division, to continue influencing the DOJ to help him succeed in his criminal, authoritarian coup.
These revelations, which are shocking and should be thoroughly investigated, come on the heels of the equally jaw-dropping but totally unsurprising news that the Justice Department, acting as Trump’s Luca Brasi, decided to retaliate against Democrats and the media. Specifically, prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for phone records of Democratic Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, their aides and family members, including a minor. The Justice Department also sought to retaliate against reporters and media outlets for “leaks” and attempted to seize thousands of emails and phone records of news outlets’ reporters.
If this sounds like the thuggish tactics used by strongmen and corrupt rulers in authoritarian regimes, well, it is. Let’s not forget Trump continues to praise Putin, and was friendly with Hungary’s Orban, who was “Trump before Trump,” Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Turkey’s Erdogan, Saudi Arabia’s Muhammad bin Salman, Israel’s Netanyahu, who is desperately copying Trump’s tactics to remain relevant, Egypt’s Sisi, and the Philippines’ Dutarte. None of them is particularly celebrated as champions of human rights, the free press, an independent judiciary or the small inconvenience known as a democracy by and for the people.
Thankfully, Trump lost and his efforts to erase his loss fell short, but his corrupting presence has contaminated not only the GOP but also the Department of Justice and law enforcement. We still don’t know the extent of how Trump and his allies pressured, corrupted and manipulated our democratic institutions from within to advance their perverse schemes for power and profit. What I do know after watching this hearing is that Jan. 6 was simply a sneak preview. The GOP and its right-wing allies in Congress, law enforcement, and conservative media are going to attempt another coup when they lose another election.
At Tuesday’s hearing, the committee wanted to investigate why it took the National Guard nearly four hours to respond to the U.S. Capitol breach even though top officials at the Defense Department received 12 urgent requests for help[said flynn bro gen'l not involved, then 180]
from the Capitol police chief and mayor. Meanwhile, Army leaders told the National Guard to “stand by” five times even as violence escalated, which eventually claimed five lives. Pipe bombs were also found near the U.S. Capitol and some of the protesters came with weapons, intending to assassinate Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We also know that officers are being investigated for their alleged role in the insurrection and that white supremacist groups, sympathetic to Trump and the GOP, have tried to infiltrate law enforcement agencies across the country.
The committee had the opportunity to question FBI director Christopher Wray, Gen. Charles Flynn—the brother of Michael Flynn, who was Trump’s disgraced national security adviser and is a prominent promoter of both the QAnon conspiracy and “the Big Lie”—and Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, director of the Army Staff. It was revealed that Gen. Charles Flynn and Gen. Piatt were both involved in a phone call in which Army leaders were worried about the “optics” of sending in the National Guard. That’s the same National Guard that quickly responded with massive force to peaceful BLM protesters and cleared others out of Lafayette Square with tear gas and violence last summer. No such concerns for “optics” were present then.
One would assume Republicans, who are allegedly so committed to law and order and national security that they held hearings on Benghazi and Clinton’s emails for years and have focused on antifa as a fake terrorist threat, would take the opportunity to dig deep into this massive failure of intelligence and law enforcement that allowed hundreds of armed, violent insurrections to take over the U.S. Capitol for the first time in 200 years. Or, they could ask FBI director Wray to do more to investigate and prosecute members of armed militias and white supremacist groups, some of whom participated in the violent insurrection, and are also the number one domestic terror threat in America.
Nope.
Instead, they used their time to whine, deflect and obstruct. They performed for their base and said the House should be spending its time and powers to investigate Dr. Fauci’s emails, the Wuhan lab theory, the border crisis, the threat of inflation and Biden’s economic policies. They also found time to whine about masking policies at the U.S. Capitol and to urge Americans to move on from the insurrection that Republican Rep. Clyde recently referred to as a “normal tourist visit.”
It’s time for them to behave like Republicans and finally bring a bazooka to this knife fight.
If you were the party that was actively aiding and abetting a violent insurrection, you’d want to “move on” as well. It was a grotesque spectacle seeing Rep. Paul Gosar grill Wray on who “executed Ashli Babbitt,” and suggesting, without evidence, that the officer who shot her was hiding and waiting to kill her. Gosar didn’t spend time worrying about Officer Sicknick, who died trying to protect his colleagues from Babbitt and the violent mob. Neither did 21 Republicans in the House who just opposed a bill to award congressional gold medals for Capitol Police officers who defended them against a violent mob during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Like some other House Republicans, Gosar actively supports white supremacist conspiracy theories, has ties to armed militia movements, and cheered on many of the events of Jan. 6. Wray said the FBI has arrested 500 people so far and is currently overseeing hundreds of investigations. They could start by talking to some Republicans like Gosar as members of his party have blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection and acquitted Trump twice, with a majority of them even voting to cancel the election. Their conservative media ecosystem is actively gaslighting America and their base with dangerous conspiracy theories, as a majority of Republicans believe “the Big Lie” that Biden lost the 2020 election.
Thankfully, Democrats are in power. However, they retain a slim majority before the 2022 midterms that are stacked against them due to GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression. The question is whether this latest revelation of Trump and the GOP’s attempt to subvert democracy will force enough Democrats to finally abandon the dangerous illusion of “bipartisanship” and flex their power to fight for accountability and justice. One piece of good news is that Pelosi said Tuesday that the House committees will continue their investigations after Republicans blocked the Senate commission. Also, the House Oversight Committee said it will request Rosen, Meadows, and top Trump officials to appear for interviews in light of the latest revelations. Judging from what we’ve seen, Republicans won’t be forthcoming.
If they don’t comply, will Democrats finally flex their subpoena power, do a media blitz, and unite on messaging that Republicans are actively aiding and abetting the destruction of our democracy? One can only hope. It’s time for Democrats to unleash hell, as I’ve discussed before both here and here.
Our democracy is worth it. It’s time for them to behave like Republicans and finally bring a bazooka to this knife fight. If they forfeit their power and principle for “bipartisanship” then they might as well acknowledge they are actively complicit with a counter-majoritarian, extremist GOP that is actively trying to subvert democracy in front of our eyes.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-flynn/qanon-supporters-and-far-right-message-boards-follow-michael-flynns-lead-endorsing coup
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an 621
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/mike-flynn-2649618737/
colin pwl cos ct martial
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an 621
the second-most revered figure in the QAnon conspiracy firmament called for a military coup in the United States. Again. Retired three-star general and former Trump campaign national security advisor Mike Flynn called for the end of democracy during a question-and-answer session last weekend at a QAnon conference in Dallas.
"I'm a simple Marine," a grizzled audience member said, "I wanna know why what happened in Minamar (sic) can't happen here." The room erupted. Flynn waited for the cheering to subside and said, "No reason. I mean, it should happen here."
Flynn reportedly called the conference organizers to backtrack. He's now denying that he said what we all saw him say, but let's get one thing straight: Mike Flynn is a liar.
Trump fired him for lying to Mike Pence about Russia. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, but he lied in his plea deal, so Trump had to pardon him. Now he's lying about how he called for a military coup in the United States. On video. This is nothing new for Flynn. After the 2020 election, Flynn privately urged then-president Donald Trump to send troops to "re-run" the election, an idea he'd previously floated in the media.
It's nothing new for QAnon either. QAnon supporters have been cheering on the coup in Myanmar since the military overthrew the democratically elected government in February. The junta has killed over 800 people, including more than 40 children, but QAnon supporters don't know anything about Myanmar's internal politics. They just like coups. After Trump's failed coup attempt on January 6, many of them found it comforting to know a military still could overthrow a democracy somewhere.
And why wouldn't they? The beating heart of QAnon's dark theology is The Storm, the military coup that is always right around the corner. The Storm is the day when Donald Trump and the armed forces liquidates QAnon's political enemies: Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, the media, and anyone who stands against them. The former president will retake his rightful place in the White House, democracy be damned.
According to a new poll, nearly a quarter of white evangelicals believe The Storm is coming to restore "rightful leaders." This mythology fits naturally with the Big Lie that Trump won the election. QAnon believers heard Donald Trump's call to come to Washington on January 6 as the coming of the storm. Many of them believed they were being summoned to take part in the long-awaited battle between good and evil.
Most normal people think of QAnon as the "pedo cabal" people. Indeed, QAnon talks a good game about saving the children from pedophiles. As disturbing as they sound, these child-abuse fantasies are good for recruiting unsuspecting converts. After all, everyone wants to prevent child abuse. QAnon has deep roots in evangelical Christianity and its most fervent proponents have thought long and hard—and written with uncharacteristic coherence—about how to best recruit. Attitude change begins with finding common ground. You can get almost anyone to agree that child abuse is a problem. That provides the common ground needed to begin a conversation in which the believer can plant seeds in the prospective convert's mind about other aspects of QAnon. This process is called "red-pilling," a reference to The Matrix, a movie during which the hero swallows the red pill to dissolve illusion and reveal ultimate reality.
The news media's focus on pedophilia obscures the core of QAnon's ideology, which is a longing for glorious, purifying and revelational violence. The pedophiles of QAnon mythology are the alter-egos of powerful Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, journalists and Jewish financiers George Soros and the Rothschilds. These are the villains who will be purged by the military when The Storm is finally upon us.
Unfortunately for QAnon, normal people love democracy as much as they hate pedophilia. So recruiters don't open with talk of a coup. The faithful avoid talking about it to journalists. That's why Flynn is taking pains to walk back his comment. While The Storm is normal in QAnon circles, it's still taboo in the outside world.
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// gaetz 2nd amend duty?
Donie O'Sullivan is a reporter for CNN. His beat appears to be American conspiracy theories. He was on Anderson Cooper's show last night with reporting on a QAnon conference last weekend during which former Donald Trump adviser and pardoned traitor Michael Flynn said a Myanmar-style military coup "should happen" in America.
That some people in this country long for purifying violence to "reinstate" Donald Trump to his "rightful place" is not what got my attention, though. What did was Donie O'Sullivan's editorial remark at the end of his report. This is what he said:
I spend a lot of time reading these pro-Trump forums, reading these QAnon forums online, and speaking to Trump supporters, and I will say of all the conspiracy theories we hear, this talk from Americans about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States is one of the most chilling things I hear.
Before I go on, I should say O'Sullivan appears to be an immigrant. (I think he's Irish, given his accent.) As such, I don't expect him to be as attuned to American political culture as I'd expect a native-born American to be. Indeed, as a non-native, I'd expect him to be more attuned to the American civic religion than native-born Americans generally are, because fealty to the civic religion is so often demanded of immigrants.
This civic religion believes military coups and their consequent dictatorships cannot happen in the United States. Ordinary Americans do not want them, moreover, because it would be against their civic religion. You can't quite tell from the written version of his remark, but when you watch the clip, you can hear O'Sullivan put a little more stress on "American" when he says he's chilled to hear Americans, of all people on this earth, talking "about a coup, cheering a coup, and hoping for a coup, in the United States." Implicit point: this is what Trump has done to the globe's oldest democracy.
I suspect some of O'Sullivan's remark was showmanship. (He does work for CNN, after all.) But I think some of it, maybe most of it, reflects the conventional wisdom in Washington—that it's shocking to hear Americans talk this way. It's not shocking, though. It's familiar and quite normal when you know where to look. Fact is, lots of Americans believe they are God's chosen people. They believe the end of the world is coming, according to God's divine plan. They believe the US Constitution is a covenant with them only, and that a genocidal purge will preface Christ's return.
This is the End Times I'm talking about, a story about global events culminating ic that "reinstates" the King of Kings to his rightful place. It's a story millions of Americans tell themselves and their children. It's a story in which the messy and hard-to-understand world around us is no such thing. Instead, it is polarized as conflict between God's friends and God's enemies. The only difficulty is decoding the signs and symbols God lays out. Reality isn't real. Reality is a sinful illusion. What's real is the trail of secrets leading the chosen safely to The End. Argument, language, reasoning—they don't matter. Only they can know The Truth.
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that religion is off-limits. Therefore, the conventional wisdom in Washington does not see, because it will not see, that tens of millions of Americans already believe democracy is getting in the way of God's plan, that democracy is—and I mean this seriously—desecrating the sacredness of the US Constitution. As one critic put it, the Venn diagram showing the overlap of QAnon believers and white evangelical Protestants (and related groups) is actually a circle. When you stand with God against His enemies, you have God's permission to hate.
That's their religion. No, it's not a cult. It's more than that. It's deeper than that. The hate felt by the former president's supporters during four years' worth of political rallies is the same hate for America as it stands, not as they desire it to stand, that right-wing religious radicals have felt since post-Civil War America. That's when Charles Darwin's theories and what they determined about humanity's place in God's divine scheme first gained traction in the United States. Every single intellectual development—from evolution then to Critical Race Theory now—has been met with such hate. I don't understand why the conventional wisdom looks away from history.
Because it's easier, I guess. It's easier to maintain the myth of the civic religion; to be shocked by Americans talking about a military coup; to blame the former president for imperiling the world's oldest democracy. It's easier to respect religion without scrutinizing it too much, and risk discovering it's steeped in hate, which might force the conventional wisdom in Washington to take responsibility. On this one-year anniversary since Trump gassed Americans out of the way for a photo-op of him holding a Bible in front of a church, we need the truth. And that's never been easy.
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/michael-flynn/
traitor mem day, reverse mirror or just fact?
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mirror of smartmatic kraken suits?
Flynn's family members file $75M lawsuit against CNN over QAnon video
321 an
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/oval-office-meeting/
President Donald Trump, weeks after losing the November 2020 election by more than 7 million votes and more than 70 electoral votes, discussed declaring national security emergency powers his White House attorneys told him he did not have.
That's according to a stunning report that details a December 18 meeting in the Oval Office and the White House Residence from Axios, "Inside the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency."
The meeting included White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, on the one side, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, former Trump administration official Emily Newman, and attorney Sidney Powell, who is now being sued for $1.3 billion by Dominion voting machines.
Powell "proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion's voting machines."
At one point Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani joined by phone, and was forced to tell everyone in the "heated" meeting to calm down. Axios reports at one point the "meeting had come entirely off the rails," and says "people were yelling and cursing" inside the Oval Office.
Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, "wearing jeans, a hoodie and a neck gaiter, piped up with his own conspiracy: 'I know how this works. I bribed Hillary Clinton $18 million on behalf of the FBI for a sting operation,' he said, according to Axios."
Herschmann stared at the eccentric millionaire. "What the hell are you talking about? Why would you say something like that?" Byrne brought up the bizarre Clinton bribery claim several more times during the meeting to the astonishment of White House lawyers.
Trump, for his part, also seemed perplexed by Byrne. But he was not entirely convinced the ideas Powell was presenting were insane.
He asked: You guys are offering me nothing. These guys are at least offering me a chance. They're saying they have the evidence. Why not try this? The president seemed truly to believe the election was stolen, and his overriding sentiment was, let's give this a shot.
The words "martial law" were never spoken during the meeting, despite Flynn having raised the idea in an appearance the previous day on Newsmax, a right-wing hive for election conspiracies.
But this was a distinction without much of a difference. What Flynn and Powell were proposing amounted to suspending normal laws and mobilizing the U.S. government to seize Dominion voting machines around the country.
Both Lyons and Morgan "expressed skepticism" about Flynn and Powell's idea of "invoking national security emergency powers."
"Trump expressed skepticism at various points about Powell's theories, but he said, 'At least she's out there fighting.'"
Axios adds the "handful of White House lawyers and advisers" were "determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy."
Read the entire report here.
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omfg
Trump, according to CNN's Kaitlin Collins, has chosen Rep. Devin Nunes of California to receive the Medal of Freedom — and Collins describes Trump's reasons for picking the far-right conspiracy theorist as a "doozy."
According to an official statement from the Trump White House, Nunes' "courageous actions helped thwart a plot to take down a sitting United States president. He also forced the disclosure of documents that proved that a corrupt senior FBI official pursued a vindictive persecution of Gen. Michael Flynn — even after rank and file FBI agents found no evidence of wrongdoing."
Here are some of the incredulous reactions that Twitter users have had to what Collins accurately described as a "doozy":...
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/devin-nunes/
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-qanon-general-tracing-the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-michael-flynn/
no lnx vid twt
The QAnon General: Tracing the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Michael Flynn
By Karim Zidan | December 18, 2020
RETIRED ARMY GEN. Michael Flynn was speaking to a crowd of unmasked Trump loyalists on the steps of the Supreme Court when Marine One flew overhead, soliciting cheers from the delighted audience. Flynn—a special guest speaker at the Dec. 12 rally—stopped mid-sentence and stood in awe of the helicopter while the crowd attempted to sing the national anthem.
“That’s pretty cool,” said Flynn, who served as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser for 22 days before resigning and eventually pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. “Imagine just being able to jump in a helicopter and just go for a joy ride around Washington.”
The retired Army lieutenant general continued where he left off, echoing unfounded allegations that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden because of widespread voter fraud. He called for “fair, transparent counts,” demanded that Americans get the “truth,” and called out the “media” for its supposed censorship of that truth.
“We’re waging a battle,” Flynn told the raucous crowd.
Flynn’s remarks came a day after the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from Texas that sought to overturn Biden’s wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Despite the judicial decision, Flynn encouraged the crowd to have faith in their president and to seek out “avenues” to challenge the results of the election, insisting that the “courts aren’t going to decide who the next president of the United States is going to be. We the people decide.”
“In this crucible moment of our time, we have to pray that truth triumphs over lies, justice triumphs over abuse and fraud, honesty triumphs over corruption,” Flynn said. “Our sacred honor triumphs over infamy.”
After concluding his speech, the disgraced general, who has since been pardoned by Trump, stopped to enjoy his growing fandom among Trump loyalists. He smiled as the crowd chanted “Fight like Flynn” and was even chased by ravenous fans who screamed “We love you, general!” before being stopped by his bodyguards.
Despite Flynn’s unceremonious exit from Trump’s administration in 2017, the retired general remained popular with fringe corners of Trump’s loyal fanbase, including adherents of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. For years, Flynn has been an important component of the QAnon community, a portion of whom believe he holds pivotal secrets about the so-called “deep state.” His recent presidential pardon reinvigorated their conspiracy theories and validated his status as a hero to their cause—a cause that the general appears to have embraced himself.
“Flynn Facts”
IN JULY 2016, Michael Flynn delivered a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention targeting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her handling of top secret information. After calling Clinton “weak,” “spineless,” and “reckless,” Flynn led chants of “Lock her up” with the crowd in attendance.
“Yeah, that’s right; lock her up,” Flynn said while clapping into the microphone.
Less than seven months later, Flynn was dismissed from his post as Trump’s national security adviser shortly after The Washington Post revealed that the general had spoken to the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, about sanctions between the two nations, and had later lied to the FBI about the conversation with Kislyak. Flynn continued to deny the accusations in the days leading up to his firing on Feb. 13, 2017.
Two months later, acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified to a Senate Judiciary panel that she believed “Gen. Flynn was compromised with respect to the Russians.”
“To state the obvious, you don’t want your national security adviser compromised by the Russians,” Yates, who was later fired for refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban, added.
By Nov. 30, 2017, Flynn had signed a plea agreement with special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, in which he acknowledged lying to the FBI about his sanctions conversation with Kislyak. Then, on Dec. 1, Flynn pleaded guilty and began cooperating with the special counsel’s investigation into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.
“I recognize that the actions I acknowledged in court today were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right,” Flynn said in a statement that day. “My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country. I accept full responsibility for my actions.”
Flynn’s plea agreement was a significant development in the Russia probe at the time. The retired lieutenant general was one of Trump’s top advisers during the 2016 presidential campaign. Though a registered Democrat, Flynn campaigned for Trump and attacked Clinton, even going so far as to accuse her and her aides of child-sex trafficking. Ironically, his son, Michael Flynn Jr., lost his job as one of Trump’s aides after posting similar tweets involving the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Flynn’s political tenure began long before Trump was campaigning for the U.S. presidency. In 2012, President Barack Obama promoted Flynn to director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, elevating him to one of the most powerful positions in U.S. military intelligence. During his time as head of the DIA, U.S. intelligence officials became concerned by Flynn’s contacts in Moscow. According to the New York Times, Flynn also made baseless assertions about Islam—he once incorrectly claimed that Islamic law, known as Shariah, is spreading in the United States—which his subordinates have labeled “Flynn Facts.” He was dismissed by Obama in 2014 and retired from the U.S. Army after 33 years of service later that year.
Michael Flynn seated two seats down from Vladimir Putin at RT gala in Moscow, Russia (Credit: Wikicommons)]
Following his retirement, Flynn founded the Flynn Intel Group Inc, a consulting agency that provided intelligence services for governments. In 2015, he attended a gala for the Russian state-owned RT media company in Moscow, Russia, where he was seated two seats down from Russian President Vladimir Putin and was paid $45,000 to give a talk during the event. Then, during the 2016 presidential campaign, it was revealed that Flynn was paid more than $500,000 to represent the interests of the Turkish government. While he did not work directly for the Turkish government, the firm that hired him is owned by a Turkish-American businessman with ties to Erdogan’s government. Flynn also failed to file paperwork registering as a foreign agent.
Despite his past role as a foreign agent and lobbyist for foreign interest in the U.S., when QAnon—a far-right, pro-Trump conspiracy theory that claims a cabal of elite pedophiles consisting of Hollywood actors, Democrats, and high-ranking officials are behind a global child sex-trafficking ring—was born was internet message boards in 2017, the retired general was seen as an ally to the cause. When he was being investigated by the FBI, many QAnon adherents expected him to be exonerated of all alleged crimes in the Russia probe. His delayed sentencing on several occasions only helped fuel the conspiracy theories regarding his innocence.
By July 2019, Flynn fired the attorneys who helped negotiate his plea agreement and hired Sidney Powell, a QAnon supporter who would later become known for filing the infamous “Kraken” lawsuit alleging widespread election fraud in the 2020 election. (Read Right Wing Watch’s in-depth reporting on Sidney Powell here). At Powell’s urging, Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea, citing a breach in the plea agreement, and further proclaiming his innocence. Then, following pressure from Trump who called for the charges against Flynn to be dropped, the Department of Justice filed motions to dismiss the case. The motion was then put on hold by the federal judge overseeing the case as he reviewed the request.
Despite the snag, Flynn would soon be a free man, ready to assume his figurative role as the QAnon general.
The Digital Soldiers [interesting grafix]
“IT IS MY Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 25, 2020. “I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”
The move had been expected. Trump had hinted back in March that he was “strongly considering” pardoning Flynn, despite the fact that the retired general had not yet been sentenced. The pardon was met with criticism from Democrats—Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “an act of grave corruption and a brazen abuse of power” in her official statement—while Trump loyalists celebrated the decision to save a man they viewed as a political casualty. Even the White House described Flynn as an “innocent man” and the “victim of partisan government officials engaged in a coordinated attempt to subvert the election of 2016.”
In the weeks that followed, Flynn underwent a strategic public relations campaign, which included appearances on Fox News and the right-wing Epoch Times, public speeches (as seen at the Jericho March on Dec. 12), and even a few radio hits on “The Dan Bongino Show,” among others. His aim was not only to rehabilitate his own public image, but to stand in vehement opposition to Biden’s imminent presidency.
During media appearances, Flynn repeated baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud and Dominion Voting Systems, citing his lawyer Sidney Powell’s “Kraken” lawsuits. He alleged that “thousands” of Americans have come forward with grievances and proof regarding voter fraud and that transparency is required to ensure the sanctity of the election process. During a recent appearance on Fox News (his third since being pardoned), Flynn suggested that Americans will “not allow” Biden’s inauguration to go ahead in January 2021.
Flynn also encouraged Americans to boycott the upcoming Georgia Senate runoffs, despite the fact that the winners will help determine which party will control the Senate. “We have to get the last election right before we start talking about any other runoff election like they are down in Georgia. That’s a falsehood that people shouldn’t even be considering right now,” he said.
While much of Flynn’s arguments are rooted in references to QAnon-linked conspiracy theories, the former three-star general has also pandered to the group by appearing on podcasts hosted by QAnon influencers. During a Dec. 4 appearance on “The Matrixxx Groove Show,” a podcast that claims to have the “most red-pilled audience” and is popular within the QAnon community, Flynn revealed that the show’s “listeners have inspired us and allowed us to fight the deep, deep corruption that we face in our government.”
“The digital army that we have is unstoppable,” Flynn continued. “The digital soldiers that we have are committed, dedicated servants of our country.”
This is not the first time that Flynn has referenced the term “digital soldiers.” The general first used the term during a November 2016 speech to the Young America’s Foundation, where he bragged about being the general of an “army of digital soldiers” that waged an “insurgency” to “take over” information and the media. The term has since been adopted by QAnon adherents, many of whom view themselves as digital soldiers fighting against the forces of the so-called deep state.
Flynn has continued to reference digital soldiers during media appearances and on social media—it is one of the main hashtags on his Twitter bio, along with #TakeTheOath, which is also a reference to QAnon. During his interview with “The Matrixxx Groove Show,” he referred to digital soldiers as the “largest law firm in the world” because they would “enlighten the people of this country and also the tactical legal team that we have, eventually led by America’s guardian angel of justice, Sidney Powell.”
To close out his appearance on the show, Flynn hinted that he is on the run from the deep state, “I’m on the move. I gotta make sure I’m a moving target because these son-of-a-guns, they’re after me, in a literal and a figurative sense at some time.”
The general’s deepening ties to QAnon have been apparent for several months now, well before he was pardoned in November. On Independence Day, Flynn posted a video of himself alongside members of his family reciting the QAnon slogan “Where we go one we go all,” making Flynn the most prominent former U.S. official to publicly stoke QAnon.
Michael Flynn taking QAnon oath with family members (Credit: screenshot)]
Flynn’s overt show of support to the QAnon movement has only helped energize a community that has been struggling to stay on message in the wake of Trump’s election loss and Q’s limited drops. While QAnon adherents would have preferred to see Flynn exonerated instead of pardoned, as the latter suggests guilt, they have used the pardon as a sign that thing are going according to plan.
“Any anons apart from myself getting goosebumps now that Flynn is free?” an admin of a QAnon channel with thousands of subscribers asked on Nov. 28. (Anon refers to anonymous users.)“My whole body is in goosebumps.”
“I am anxious to see Gen. Flynn in action,” another replied.
The lionization of Flynn within the QAnon movement emphasizes his importance to the movement. For QAnon adherents, the idea that a three-star lieutenant general and former high-ranking U.S. official supporting their community validates their efforts and proves that the deep state exists. When he refers to them as digital soldiers, he is exciting the countless QAnon followers who feel compelled to take matters into their own hands and legitimizing their undertaking.
QAnon meme referencing digital soldiers (Credit: Telegram) band of bros]
The QAnon community was further electrified on Dec. 1 when Flynn retweeted a call for Trump to temporarily suspend constitutional order and declare martial law to have the U.S. military oversee a new presidential election—a topic that had been popular within QAnon circles in the weeks following the Nov. 3 election. One QAnon follower in a private QAnon channel called for martial law after stating that Americans have “no Supreme Court, no DOJ, no FBI to protect us from the Government,” while another suggested that worldwide martial law would “fix” the “fucking fake Media.”
Not only is Flynn an important figure within the QAnon conspiracy theory, he is also a key proponent of the movement. His willingness to pander to the dangerous far-right conspiracy theory, encourage its adherents to continue tumbling down their rabbit holes, and promote totalitarian militaristic policies such as martial law raises concerns about his potential to further radicalize Trump loyalists ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
After spending 33 years as a decorated combat veteran who retired from the military with three stars, Flynn has now assumed the role he seems to have long dreamed of: the star general leading a digital army in service to Q.
Tags: Barack Obama Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Lin Wood Michael Flynn Robert Muller Sidney Powell conspiracy theories Deep State Pizzagate QAnon
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-coup-2649538441
no lnx twt vid
Four chilling signs Trump's attempted coup is escalating
Bob Brigham December 18, 2020
President Donald Trump continues to refuse to concede that he lost the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden.
There were four major signs on Thursday evening that the Republican effort to overthrow the election is escalating.
The first sign was when former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn suggested on NewsMax Trump could use "military capabilities" to overturn the election in swing states hold do-over elections.[mart law used 64x]
The second sign occurred a short time later on Fox News when White House advisor Peter Navarro said President-elect Biden would be an "illegal and illegitimate president."
The third sign was when White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany argued on Fox News that Congress could use "alternate slates" of electors to steal the election.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1339758838535180288
The fourth sign was Trump's Twitter account.
Trump complimented Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for saying he would back Trump's efforts to overturn the election in Congress.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339758142381551629
Trump then falsely claimed he won Wisconsin and that the vote was rigged.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339759289234317312
And then Trump complained about the United States Supreme Court refusing to go along with his efforts to overturn the election.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1339759289234317312
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post scotus mult pathways to win 100%
do not vote runoff
nick fuentes destroy the gop
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/flynn/
==
see proud boy / violence
Flynn, who pushed for Trump martial law, says Americans will 'not allow' Biden inauguration
David Edwards Raw Story December 13, 2020
Disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Sunday insisted that Americans will "not allow" President-elect Joe Biden's "false inauguration" to go forward.
Flynn, who has previously s...
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an 1220
In his column for the Daily Beast, conservative commentator Matt Lewis expressed exasperation with evangelical leaders who are set to lead what has been dubbed the "Jericho March" in Washington D.C. on Saturday under the belief they can pray God into helping Donald Trump remain in the Oval Office for four more years.
Lewis, who wears his faith on his sleeve, has long condemned members of the Christian community who have attached them to the president who, by his actions and his deeds, has never exemplified any Christian values other than giving them occasional lip service.
As the Daily Beast columnist sees it, the group scheduled to appear are a motley crew who do not exemplify the best the evangelical community has to offer.
Writing that "some prominent members of the Christian church are undermining the church's witness," Lewis added, "For evidence, look no further than this Saturday, when former National Security Adviser Mike Flynn (who recently shared a message calling on Trump to declare 'limited martial law' and hold a new election) will give his first post-pardon speech at something called the Jericho March in Washington, D.C. Aside from Flynn, the roster includes other prominent MAGA names like Mike Lindell (the MyPillow guy), Eric Metaxas (a radio host who punched a protester and recently said, 'I'd be happy to die in this fight'), Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), and C.J. Pearson. Afterwards, the crowd will converge on the National Mall for the 'ROAR' prayer rally."
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note that they coopt abe and always threaten violence in response to enemy attack big media chicomm
wa exmr; lofly727 is proude wife of am hero Lori, justice scales gold logo, i spoze a plea /demand for justice for him
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.
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https://billmoyers.com/story/a-deadly-attack-on-our-democracy/
december 2, 2020
Yesterday evening, Trump’s disgraced former National Security Advisor, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn– whom Trump recently pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak before Trump took office– retweeted a news release from a right-wing Ohio group called “We the People Convention.” That release contained a petition asking Trump to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, silence the media, and have the military “oversee a national re-vote.”
The petition ends with a threat of violence, calling on Trump “to boldly act to save our nation…. We will also have no other choice but to take matters into our own hands, and defend our rights on our own, if you do not act within your powers to defend us.”
University of Texas School of Law Professor Steve Vladeck pointed out that “The Uniform Code of Military Justice defines as ‘sedition’ one who, ‘with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority.’…”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley today pointedly distanced the military from talk of a coup. “Our military is very very capable… we are determined to defend the US Constitution,” he said. “No one should doubt that.” A defense official told Military Times that the idea of Trump declaring martial law and having the military re-do the election is “insane in a year that we didn’t think could get anymore insane.”
He spoke too soon. This afternoon the president released a video of himself making a speech he said was “maybe the most important speech I’ve ever made.” It was a 46-minute rant insisting, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he won the 2020 election. While he has lost virtually every court challenge he has mounted and his own Attorney General, William Barr, has said there was no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election, Trump continues to insist that there was “massive” voter fraud, and called on the Supreme Court to “do what’s right for our country” including throwing out hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes so “I very easily win in all states.”
Joe Biden leads Trump in the popular vote with 80.9 million votes to Trump’s 74 million. Biden has won the Electoral College by 306 votes to Trump’s 232. These results are not close.
Let me take a step back here for a minute to emphasize that this is dangerous, unprecedented… and crazy. The president of the United States is trying to undermine an election for which there is no evidence there was any irregularity, in order to stay in power. He might be doing so for the money — he has raised $170 million so far on promises to challenge this election — or because he is worried about the lawsuits he can expect as soon as he is not protected by the presidential office.
Or, perhaps, he is simply escalating his rhetoric to continue to grab headlines as he feels the focus of the world slipping away from him and he cannot stand it. For the focus of the world is indeed slipping away from him.
The president has largely ceased to govern, nursing his grievances in the White House and emerging only to golf.
The coronavirus pandemic is burning out of control. A new estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) notes that deaths from Covid-19 are likely much higher than official numbers suggest. Deaths in the United States were 19% higher from March to November of this year than normal. More than 345,000 people than normal have died in that period. This number includes deaths from other causes—drug overdoses, for example—but suggests that the pandemic has exacerbated death rates aside from those caused by Covid-19.
Today we hit a grim milestone, with at least 2,760 new deaths today from Covid. This is the highest daily death toll in America so far, passing the spring high-water mark. Coronavirus hospitalizations also reached a new high with more than 100,000 people admitted.
Democrats made a huge concession in their efforts to combat the pandemic recession today, dropping their call for a $2 trillion coronavirus package and accepting the new bipartisan $908 billion package as the starting point for negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The new plan calls for $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits from December 1 to at least March; $240 billion in Paycheck Protection Program assistance for small businesses (this will be touchy because we learned today that most of the money from the original PPP went to big businesses, including a number of chains); $160 billion for state and local governments; $51 billion in money for vaccines and healthcare; and a temporary liability provision to shield businesses from lawsuits related to coronavirus.
McConnell has already rejected this bipartisan measure, but Senator John Thune (R-SD), part of the Republican leadership, called the Democrats’ willingness to come so far down “progress.” For his part, Biden today agreed with Americans talking about the recession in a virtual roundtable that Congress must “pass a robust package of relief to address your urgent needs now,” but reminded them: “my ability to get you help immediately does not exist. I’m not even in office for another 50 days. And then I have to get legislation passed through the United States Congress to get things done.”
Still, for all that Trump’s posturing seems like a sign that he sees power slipping away from him as the country confronts the pandemic and the recession without him, his words are a deadly assault on our democracy by the man who swore an oath to defend it. This attack cannot be dismissed as Trump being Trump. It strikes at the very heart of who we are.
For all that attacking the election might be reality television for Trump, his supporters take it very seriously indeed. At a rally in Georgia, Trump’s ally, lawyer Lin Wood, insisted he had seen the “real” results of the election, and that Trump won “over 410” electoral votes. “He damn near won every state including California!” The crowd blamed Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, for the fact that the state’s recount did not go to Trump. “Lock him up!” they chanted.
Today, the Supervisor of Elections in Pasco County, Florida, Republican Brian E. Corley, said he felt compelled to speak out against those attacking the election. “Facts are stubborn things,” he wrote in a statement. It is a lie to say the election was fraudulent, he said, and “[w]ith every deep state conspiracy and illegitimate claim of fraud our democracy sinks deeper and deeper into divisiveness. As the world looks on, the greatest democracy in the world dares to risk the peaceful and orderly transition of power in favor of propagating unfounded claims of ‘rigged elections.’” “The people have spoken, and… the election is over.”
Tonight, the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office tweeted that their elections team was “threatened with execution by firing squad.” It said, “This has to stop. The wild, unfounded accusations amplified by [Trump] need to stop.”
But much of Republican Party leadership is not denouncing Trump’s behavior. Leaders are staying silent, although they are sidling away from him. It is noticeable that Vice President Mike Pence has been silent about Trump’s reelection accusations — he was on the ticket, too, after all — and although Trump has made it clear he intends to run again in 2024, Trump’s hand-picked Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel has invited about a dozen potential 2024 candidates to a meeting in January, signaling that she is not wedded to another Trump candidacy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell illustrated the growing divide between Trump supporters and the Republican Party when, after insisting that Trump lost in Georgia because the voting machines there are not secure, she urged voters to boycott January’s runoff Senate elections in the state. Those elections will determine which party controls the US. Senate.
While today’s Republicans are looking the other way as their president undermines our democracy, it has not always been this way. On this date in 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn the behavior of Senator Joe McCarthy, who lied and bullied and blustered to stay in power until finally, in televised hearings, lawyer Joseph Nye Welsh shook his head at McCarthy’s recklessness and cruelty and asked: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
TOPICS: LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
TAGS: 2020 ELECTION, CORONAVIRUS, CORONAVIRUS RELIEF BILL, DONALD TRUMP, ELECTION MISINFORMATION, HC-RICHARDSON, JOE BIDEN, MARTIAL LAW, MICHAEL FLYNN, MITCH MCCONNELL, UNEMPLOYMENT
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON TEACHES AMERICAN HISTORY AT BOSTON COLLEGE. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF A NUMBER OF BOOKS, MOST RECENTLY, HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR: OLIGARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE CONTINUING FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA. SHE WRITES THE POPULAR NIGHTLY NEWSLETTER LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
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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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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-pentagon/
no lnx twt
Trump’s Pentagon nominee promoted calls for the president to declare martial law: report
Alex Henderson December 04, 2020
Scott O'Grady is a former fighter pilot who President Donald Trump has nominated for a senior position in the Pentagon. And according to CNN, he is also a Trump loyalist and far-right conspiracy theorist who has been echoing Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and shared tweets calling for martial law.
Trump supporters who have posted or forwarded tweets urging the president to declare martial law include attorney Lin Wood (who has been fighting President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Georgia) and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
According to CNN reporters Nathan McDermott, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, O'Grady "retweeted an account that shared an article that said former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had shared a petition that called for martial law. He then retweeted the same account which suggested that Trump should declare martial law."
That account said, "I don't know who needs to hear this, but calling for martial law is not a bad idea when there is an attempted coup against the president and this country happening right now."
O'Grady has a history of sharing unhinged tweets.
McDermott, Kaczynski and Steck report, "CNN's KFile reviewed O'Grady's tweets and media appearances and found that O'Grady shared other debunked election conspiracies and that he also degraded top military and intelligence officials. In a radio interview, he called former President Barack Obama and military generals 'sworn socialists' and advocated that the military justice system should bring back treason charges. He retweeted a tweet that called former Defense Secretary James Mattis a 'traitor.'"
On top of that, the CNN reporters note, O'Grady "tweeted that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a star witness during the Trump impeachment hearings, should be charged 'for insurrection because he is a biased liberal political operative' and said, on a radio show, that it was 'disgusting' for Vindman to testify against Trump. He also spread a baseless claim that the whistleblower in the impeachment saga dated the daughter of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff."
O'Grady has been nominated for assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. If he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he would only remain in the Pentagon until the end of Trump's presidency. Inauguration for Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is set for January 20.
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General Flynn
@GenFlynn
#WeThePeople
@SidneyPowell1
@LLinWood
@DanScavino
@LouDobbs
@MariaBartiromo
@marklevinshow
@lofly727
Freedom never kneels except for God ??????
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lin Wood
@LLinWood
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.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-dictator/
flynn dobbs oann
no lnx twt
Here's why Republicans who are calling for a Trump dictatorship should not be taken lightly — and aren’t going away
Trump condemned for White House 'dictator' statement to cast doubt on election results
The Conversation
Alex Henderson December 04, 2020
The United States dodged an authoritarian bullet when former Vice President Joe Biden, a centrist Democrat, became president-elect, winning 306 electoral votes and defeating defeated President Donald Trump by more than 6 million in the popular vote. But when Republican Lin Wood, a pro-Trump attorney who has been fighting the election results in Georgia, implores Trump to impose martial law and elections officials are receiving death threats for acknowledging Biden as president-elect, it is painfully obvious that there is a strong appetite for fascism in parts of the United States. And journalist Sasha Abramsky, in an article published by The Nation on December 4, warns that Republicans who are openly calling for fascism should not be taken lightly.
"We are less than seven weeks away from the inauguration, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't counting down the seconds," Abramsky writes. "For the last spasms of Trumpist rule are truly a sight and sound to behold. Trumpism is, at this point, nothing more than a blend of cultism and fascism — a violent, nihilistic howl against the pillars of American democracy unparalleled in presidential history."
Abramsky adds, however, that when "people surrounding Trump are calling for dictatorship," it "ought to send a chill up all Americans' spines." And Abramsky cites some specific examples of Trumpistas who haven't been shy about showing their authoritarianism.
"Trump campaign attorney Joe DiGenova said that Chris Krebs, the election security official whom Trump fired by tweet last month after he defended the integrity of the election, should be 'drawn and quartered' and 'taken out at dawn and shot,'" Abramsky observes. "Stalin couldn't have said it better himself when talking about his perceived enemies in the Soviet bureaucracy.
Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell…. retweeted a call to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend the meeting of the Electoral College and set up military tribunals to deal with Trump's enemies. The following day, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, coming off a recent presidential pardon from Trump, urged his erstwhile boss to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and order new presidential elections under the supervision of the military."
Abramsky adds, "Far-right media personalities have joined the fascist clamor. Lou Dobbs of Fox Business recently called for Trump to take unspecified 'drastic action' against his enemies. The One America News Network has also suggested that Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act as a way to remain in office."
The journalist stresses that "when a fanatical movement's hold on power starts to diminish, the extremists have a tendency to eat their own." And Abramsky points to the recent attacks on Attorney General William Barr from the far right as a disturbing example.
Barr has been one of Trump's most aggressive defenders, often inspiring unflattering comparisons to the late Republican attorney Roy Cohn (who was an ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s and represented Trump during the 1970s). But Barr, during an interview with the Associated Press, essentially acknowledged Biden as president-elect and said there was no evidence that widespread voter fraud swung the election in Biden's favor — and Trumpistas like Dobbs are furious with Barr for it.
It should be noted that far-right fascists don't necessarily come to power through a violent coup d'état or golpe de estado; sometimes, they are voted into office and try to gradually undermine a democracy's system of checks and balances. That has happened in Turkey with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and in Hungary with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and hopefully, Brazil's checks and balances will withstand the far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Meanwhile, in France, far-right white nationalist Marine Le Pen (leader of the National Front) lost the country's 2017 presidential race but is likely to run for president again.
Most Americans rejected fascism in the United States' 2020 presidential election. But Abramsky warns that the appetite for fascism in the U.S. hasn't gone away.
"Trump's fascist yammering and the GOP Senate's collaborationist behavior isn't just a footnote to the 2020 election campaign," Abramsky warns. "Rather, it's a prologue to what could come next…. The GOP as an institution has entirely abandoned its commitment to the democratic process…. It's a hell of a warning shot as to how the Grand Old Party intends to conduct itself in the months and years ahead."
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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:
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angling for pardon? // stone?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/mike-flynns-lawyer-just-admitted-to-a-federal-judge-shes-discussed-his-case-with-trump/
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an 1020
....
Undermining the Convictions
Finally, beyond using the power of his office to pursue Trump's perceived enemies, Barr has deployed the Justice Department to help Trump's convicted friends. It was the final step in wiping the Russia investigation from the history books altogether. But Barr's manipulations also have profound implications for the rule of law.
When Mueller closed up shop in 2019, then-U.S. Attorney Liu (whose office supervised the McCabe investigation) assumed control of several special counsel prosecutions and earlier referrals, including cases against Roger Stone and Mike Flynn. But after Liu failed to get McCabe indicted, Barr replaced her with his old friend and confidant, Timothy Shea (JD, Georgetown '91) — just as the Justice Department was finalizing its sentencing recommendation in Stone's case.
In 2017, Stone had lied to the House Intelligence Committee about his role concerning Trump campaign contacts with Russia. Then he threatened a witness who was going to expose him. A jury deliberated for about seven hours before convicting Stone on all seven counts of lying to Congress and witness tampering.
As Shea replaced Liu in the District of Columbia U.S. attorney's office, career prosecutors handling Stone's case filed a brief that followed federal sentencing guidelines recommending seven to nine years in prison. Immediately, Trump tweeted that Stone's plight was "horrible," "unfair," and a "miscarriage of justice." Hours later, an official at Justice Department headquarters said that the DC office's recommendation was "extreme" and "excessive" and that a new memorandum would outline the government's revised position.
Defending the rule of law, four of the federal prosecutors who signed the sentencing memorandum resigned immediately from the case. Jonathan Kravis (Yale, JD, '04) — one of Stone's prosecutors at trial — resigned from the Justice Department altogether. That left Shea and his assistant who was newly assigned to the Stone case to file a revised memorandum asserting that the government's previously recommended sentence "could be considered excessive and unwarranted."
The following day, Trump congratulated Barr for "taking charge" of the Stone case, "which perhaps should not even been brought."
Defenders of the rule of law fought back. Appearing on national television, the former chief of the criminal fraud section of the Justice Department, Andrew Weissmann (JD, Columbia, '84) — an appointee of President George H. W. Bush — said he could think of no instance where he had even heard of the attorney general reaching into a single criminal case to weigh in on a sentencing submission. Former Attorney General Eric Holder (JD, Columbia, '76) called Barr's direct intervention "unprecedented, wrong, and ultimately dangerous."
"Public confusion was the objective, because it led to public indifference"
The most damning criticism came from Donald Ayer (JD, Harvard, '75), who had served as President George H. W. Bush's deputy attorney general and Barr's boss at one point. On Feb. 17, 2020, Ayer wrote in The Atlantic:
"All of this conduct — including Barr's personal interventions to influence or negate independent investigations or the pursuit of criminal cases, and his use of the department's resources to frustrate the checks and balances provided by other branches — is incompatible with the rule of law as we know it…"
Ayer concluded: "Bill Barr's America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen. To prevent that, we need a public uprising demanding that Bill Barr resign immediately, or failing that, be impeached."
Trump and Barr were undeterred. Trump attacked Stone's judge, Amy Berman Jackson (JD, Harvard, JD '79), calling her "the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure." That was another Trump lie. Prison officials had made the decision about Manafort's federal housing. But Barr did not defend Jackson against Trump's attack, and the Judicial Code of Conduct prevented her from defending herself.
Instead, Barr gave an interview during which he sent Trump a message — the tweets were making it "impossible" for him to do his job. Since then, Barr's view of his job has become even clearer: obliterate all trace of the Russia investigation. Mike Flynn became a stunning example of Barr's methods.
Moving to Drop Charges After a Guilty Plea
On Dec. 1, 2017, Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. On Dec. 18, 2018, he again acknowledged his crimes in open court. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan (JD, Howard Univ., '71) did not hide his disgust.
"[Y]ou lied to the FBI about three different topics, and you made those false statements while you were serving as the national security advisor, the President of the United States' most senior national security aid. I can't minimize that," the judge said. "Two months later you again made false statements in multiple documents filed pursuant to the Foreign Agents Registration Act. So, all along you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country, while serving as the national security advisor to the President of the United States. I mean, arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for. Arguably, you sold your country out."
But after Barr became attorney general two months later, he appointed the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen (JD, St. Louis Univ., '98), to review Flynn's case. In June 2019, Flynn retained new a lawyer — Sidney Powell (JD, North Carolina, '78), a far-right conspiracy theorist. Powell wrote directly to Barr, urging him to conduct an internal review and throw out Flynn's conviction. A week later, Trump congratulated Flynn for retaining Powell, tweeting that she was a "GREAT LAWYER."
Shortly before the July 2019 trial at which Flynn was supposed to be a cooperating witness against his former business associate, he suddenly became uncooperative and prosecutors did not call him to testify. Powell then asked Judge Sullivan to nullify Flynn's conviction on the grounds that prosecutors had engaged in misconduct — claims that the judge rejected. As Flynn's sentencing approached in early January 2020, prosecutors withdrew their earlier recommendation of probation and urged Flynn's incarceration for as long as six months.
As with Roger Stone, things then changed abruptly and mysteriously in Flynn's favor. And as with Stone, Barr and his confidant, interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Timothy Shea, made it happen. On May 7, Shea's office took the unprecedented step of moving to drop all charges against Flynn. Shea alone signed the motion with no line prosecutors joining. It included no affidavits or declarations supporting its many new factual allegations. No motion to vacate the government's prior, contrary filings and representations accompanied the filing.
The defenders of the rule of law stepped forward again. One of Flynn's prosecutors withdrew from the case and Judge Sullivan invited amicus briefs on the unusual motion. Then he assigned a former federal judge to oppose the Justice Department's move and to determine whether Flynn should be found in criminal contempt for lying to the court when he had pled guilty — twice.
Flynn's attorney sought a writ of mandamus in the District of Columbia circuit court of appeals. That, in turn, forced Judge Sullivan to hire an attorney, Beth Wilkinson (JD, Virginia, '87), to answer the mandamus petition. The circle was complete: A judge defending the rule of law now needed his own lawyer to defend himself.
In her brief on Judge Sullivan's behalf, Wilkinson wrote, "It is unprecedented for an Acting U.S. Attorney to contradict the solemn representations that career prosecutors made time and again, and undermine the district court's legal and factual findings, in moving on his own to dismiss the charge years after two different federal judges accepted the defendant's plea."
What began in March 2019 with Barr's false spin and outright lies to assuage a president's obsession with the Russia investigation had exploded into a multidimensionalassault on the rule of law itself. No limiting principle has guided Barr's abuses, but he has encountered resistance. Individually and together, attorneys — especially litigators — have stepped forward:
More than 1,000 former federal prosecutors from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that, but for the fact that Trump was a sitting president, Mueller's proof would have led to Trump's indictment for obstruction of justice.
In connection with Roger Stone's sentencing, more than 2,600 former prosecutors and other DOJ attorneys from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter condemning Barr for "interference in the fair administration of justice," "openly and repeatedly flouting" the fundamental principle of "equal justice under law," and calling on Barr to resign. They wrote, "Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies."
The president of the New York State Bar Ass'n issued a statement saying, "The intervention by senior Department of Justice officials in the sentencing of Roger Stone is an assault on a bedrock principle of the rule of law — the apolitical administration of justice. Our nation was founded on the principle that everyone must be treated equally in the eyes of the law…"
More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials from Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that Barr had "once again assaulted the rule of law" in seeking the dismissal of Flynn's case. "Attorney General Barr's repeated actions to use the Department as a tool to further President Trump's personal and political interests have undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the Department's decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case," they wrote.
Judge Sullivan and the appeals court received numerous amicus briefs supporting the district court's exercise of judgment when deciding whether to accept the government's motion to dismiss the federal criminal charges against Flynn. Filings in support of the judge came from former federal judges, former Watergate prosecutors, legal scholars, and the New York City Bar Ass'n.
ABA President Judy Perry Martinez issued a statement declaring, "Public officials who personally attack judges or prosecutors can create a perception that the system is serving a political or other purpose rather than the fair administration of justice. It is incumbent upon public officials and members of the legal profession, whose sworn duty it is to uphold the law, to do everything in their power to preserve the integrity of the justice system."
What's next? Federal judges enjoy lifetime tenure that prevents Trump from purging the bench of his perceived judicial enemies. But Trump and his key Senate enabler with a law degree, Sen. Mitch McConnell (JD, Kentucky, '67), have boasted about filling federal judgeships at a brisk pace. Those judges must demonstrate their independence. With their actions, they have a unique opportunity to reaffirm that "equal justice under law" and "no one is above the law" are not empty platitudes, but guiding principles of our democracy.
Pundits often understate Barr's conduct as violating "norms." It is more accurate to say that he and Trump are at war with the rule of law. Federal judges and litigators throughout the country have become first-responders in the fight. The front lines have formed in courtrooms throughout the country, but lawyers away from the immediate field of battle are also making a difference.
So which side are you on?
In this war, there are no bystanders.
This article appears in the Fall 2020 issue of Litigation – The Journal of the Section of Litigation of the American Bar Association.
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medium.com Jim Watkins
...WikileaksInfowars
QANON #Q Exposed Q Anon IDENTITY - 100% SOLVED - Patriots SoapBox 24/7 by UNIRocK
www.bitchute.com
Apparently, OANN was already waiting in the wings to TAKE OVER for InfoWars as the media mouthpiece for Q in 2018.
MICHAEL FLYNN
Michael Flynn is a racist lunatic whose deep, long-lasting connections to Russia are extremely well reported. Despite CONFESSING to participating in Russian interference, he is being protected AT ALL COSTS by Trump.
Government lawyer suggests Attorney General Barr had secret reasons for dropping Michael Flynn…
Attorney General William Barr may have had secret information that led the Justice Department to seek to drop its…
www.cnbc.com
Michael Flynn has deeply permeated the Qanon cult. Any casual stroll through Qwitter reveals a very large percentage of bios and handles with THREE STARS. This represents loyalty to Michael Flynn, a retired 3-star General. He is regarded as a hero and a demi-god, second only to Trump.
Michael Flynn has jumped into his role with both feet. He appears in numerous Drops, taken the Qanon “Oath” on VIDEO.
To celebrate the Fourth, Michael Flynn posts a pledge to conspiracy group QAnon.
[For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis and more, subscribe to Mother Jones' newsletters. Donald Trump's…
www.motherjones.com]
More recently, has written a truly batshit screed that is deeply connected to both his theocratic fascist beliefs and Qanon. The letter includes this call to his followers:
“We do not and should not ever allow anarchy and the evil forces behind it to operate on any street in our nation.”?—?Michael Flynn
Exclusive from Gen. Flynn: Prayer Alone Won't Do It This Time; It's Time To Act
We are witnessing a vicious assault by enemies of all that is good, and our president is having to act in ways…
www.westernjournal.com]
This raises the frightening possibility that Flynn is going to ascend, either AS Q, or associated with him, and INSTRUCT HIS FOLLOWERS to do god-knows-what.
Given that this twisted belief system incorporates guns, extreme religious views, obsession with pedophiles, and every other call to intense emotion imaginable, this is a powder keg. At a minimum, I expect Flynn will instruct his followers to interfere with voting on Election Day.
TRUMP
Donald Trump is not only aware of Qanon but has winked, nodded and ACTIVELY PROMOTED Qanon on Twitter.
On 8/14/20, he was asked whether he denounces Qanon, AND HE POINTEDLY AND REPEATEDLY REFUSED TO DO SO which was celebrated in the Qniverse despite the prior prediction that he would confirm their beliefs.
Trump refuses to answer question about QAnon while backing candidate who promotes its baseless…
President Donald Trump on Friday declined to answer whether he believes in the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, instead…
www.cnn.com
He has retweeted HUNDREDS of Q-related accounts. He is the ultimate God-King of Qanon and Qwitter may be the one place in the world other than a Cabinet meeting where he receives the adoration he requires in order to stay psychologically functional. This is in no way an exaggeration.
As he gets more desperate, Trump will make more direct calls to the Qanon cult, which is increasingly BECOMING HIS BASE. Pause here, and take that in.
Analysis | Nearly 600,000 people have voted for candidates who support QAnon
The Republican Party's candidate for the House in Colorado's 3rd District will be Lauren Boebert, who won Tuesday's…
www.washingtonpost.com]
Trump’s connections to Russia… well, you already know about those.
ANTIFA.COM HACK SHOWS THE PIPELINE IN ACTION
At 12:47PST on 8/12/20 @PrayingActress posted that the antifa.com website shows joebiden.com, with a declaration that this proves that “Joe Biden is using enemy combatants”.
To my knowledge, this is the first time that this crude DNS hack hosted FROM RUSSIAN SERVERS was seen on the internet.
@PrayingActress is almost certainly an alt of @PrayingMedic, a huge and notorious Qwitter account. In addition, this account appears to be on the inner circle of Q retweeters, a well coordinated network whose topology can be seen using public Twitter data collection and network visualizations.
This article clearly shows that this was a Russian intel operation.
'Antifa' website cited in conservative media attack on Biden is linked to - wait for it - Russia
WASHINGTON - At his press briefing Wednesday, President Trump, as he usually does, called for a question from Chanel…
news.yahoo.com
THREE HOURS LATER, Chanel Rion, the Russia-employed “reporter” from OANN in the WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING ROOM asked a leading question about the hack, including asking whether Biden should “renounce Antifa”. This was the second day in a row Rion was granted a question.
Here is a Q account celebrating the OANN question with a clip to the video. Chanel Rion has always been a promoter of Q, but this has elevated her to elite status in the Qommunity:
CONCLUSION
The above is a SMALL SUBSET of the available publicly available evidence that there is a serious and ongoing link between Jim Watkins, Russian intelligence, Michael Flynn, OANN, and the president of the United States.
This pipeline of disinformation will continue and may soon lead to escalating physical confrontation and violence.
Please pay attention and do your part.
ACTION REQUIRED
----MUST BE EXPOSED widely and loudly enough to take him and his website down by law enforcement.
Michael Flynn MUST BE EXPOSED. There is currently critical litigation happening regarding his case.
OANN MUST BE EXPOSED as a front for Russian propaganda.
The American public and the people brainwashed by this cult MUST BE INFORMED.
Those responsible for election security MUST TAKE THIS THREAT SERIOUSLY....
==
mojo
Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, posted a video on Independence Day in which he recites an oath for QAnon conspiracy theorists along with five others[vid]
flynn had been circling the QAnon world for months, but this takes his flirtation with the group a step further. As the QAnon conspiracy theory goes, powerful liberal politicos are running an underground child sex trafficking operation but will ultimately be exposed and charged for their crimes after “The Storm.” There is, of course, no evidence that such a scheme exists. The oath, which includes the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” refers to “an oath to become ‘digital soldiers’ to defend the Constitution,” explains the Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer. In the last month, following other cryptic messages of support for the QAnon conspiracy, Flynn added #TakeTheOath to his Twitter bio. As Sommer reports:
Flynn plays a large role in QAnon mythos, where his guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his discussions with Russian officials has been spun to make him a persecuted victim of the deep state—or even, in some cases, as the mysterious “Q” himself. Many QAnon fans have added three star-emojis to their Twitter handles, in a nod to Flynn’s status as a retired three-star general. Pictures of books supposedly signed by Flynn with the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all” are seen in the QAnon community as powerful “proof” that QAnon is real, although their authenticity hasn’t been proven.
Through it all, Flynn had publicly stayed silent on QAnon and his role in the conspiracy theory, while his son told QAnon believers to stop claiming his father was involved in their worldview. But sometime in the last month, Flynn edited his Twitter bio to add a QAnon hashtag: #TakeTheOath.
…Flynn himself actually coined the term “digital soldiers” years ago, in reference to United States cyberwar capabilities. But QAnon believers have recently become fixated on it, convincing themselves that Flynn was actually referring to them. The oath craze has gone so far that, on Saturday, QAnon believer and Republican Senate nominee Jo Rae Perkins posted a video of herself taking the oath to become a “digital soldier.”
Flynn’s message, though alarming, falls into a larger trend: QAnon online activity has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. As my colleagues Ali Breland and Sinduja Rangarajan reported last month, Google Trends shows that QAnon search terms like “WWG1WGA” (where we go one, we go all) spiked in March as US businesses started to close. Wikipedia’s QAnon page saw a surge in pageviews in March and April. Mentions of QAnon on Twitter have also increased:
A Mother Jones analysis of nearly 500,000 tweets posted across one week in April found that the average number of tweets per day using the hashtag #QAnon increased by 160 percent as compared to the averages compiled over six months of 2019 by the Twitter user @conspirator0 (Twitter later limited searches of posts on its platform, making other comparisons difficult.) The highest daily number of QAnon tweets documented by the account in 2019 was 75,349. After the onset of the US’s coronavirus crisis, that figure nearly doubled, reaching a high of 147, 748 tweets on April 4, 2020.
Anecdotal examples bolster what the data shows. Internet communities that hadn’t previously done so are now associating with far-right conspiracies like QAnon, impending mass arrests of elites for running pedophile rings, and liberal megadonor George Soros’s supposed plots. Across Instagram, pseudoscience wellness influencers, lifestyle influencers, anti-vaxxers, at least one contributor to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop site, and other seemingly unrelated groups have all pivoted to spreading versions of these conspiracies that emerged on the far right.
==
new
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/11/michael-flynn-case-appeals-court-hears-arguments-over-trump-aide.html
attorney General William Barr may have had secret information that led the Justice Department to seek to drop its criminal case against Michael Flynn, a government lawyer said Tuesday.
Jeffrey Wall, the acting U.S. solicitor general, revealed the possible existence of that nonpublic information during a full appeals court hearing over whether Flynn’s case in federal court should be dismissed, as the Department of Justice has requested.
Several judges among the 10 who heard the oral arguments signaled they would likely allow a lower court to rule on whether to drop the criminal charge against Flynn.
The DOJ had provided multiple reasons for U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan to throw out its own case against Flynn, who had previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
But Wall, who was representing the DOJ, told a full panel of judges on the appeals court in Washington, D.C., that Barr’s judgment on Flynn’s case came “in the context of nonpublic information from other investigations.”
“I just wanted to make clear that it may be possible that the attorney general had before him information that he was not able to share with the court,” Wall said, “and so what we put in front of the court were the reasons that we could, but it may not be the whole picture available to the executive branch.”
Rather than promptly grant the DOJ’s request to drop the charge against Flynn, Sullivan had appointed a former judge to make arguments for the position that the case should not be tossed. Sullivan also allowed other outside parties to weigh in on the question.
[vid]
in response, Flynn’s lawyers asked the appeals court to force Sullivan to grant the request to dismiss the case. A three-judge panel had ruled in favor of Flynn, but the full court later agreed to rehear the case in response to a request from Sullivan’s lawyers.
In the hearing Tuesday, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, said that Sullivan has “discarded any semblance of the unbiased impartial adjudicator” he is expected to be.
Powell also said that Sullivan has the “now-glaring appearance of bias” for millions of Americans.
But Powell faced a highly skeptical-sounding group of appeals judges that aggressively questioned her argument that Sullivan had little power to do anything other than grant the Justice Department’s request to drop its prosecution of Flynn.
“The judge has to do some thinking about it, right? The judge is not simply a rubber stamp,” one of the judges asked Powell.
Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer for Sullivan, argued that he would follow the law as he pursued answers to his lingering questions before ruling on the request to dismiss Flynn’s case. She also noted that if Sullivan had been allowed to proceed with Flynn’s case as he intended, the proceedings may have ended much earlier.
“This matter could have been over on July 16, ironically, if the judge had been able to have his hearing,” Wilkinson said.
---
wapo
november 4, 2019
The fact that the two biggest controversies of the Trump presidency have revolved around Russia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics in a state of perpetual conflict — might have seemed like a strange coincidence.
More and more, we’re learning it's not.
A trove of documents from Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation released over the weekend show that Trump’s Ukraine conspiracy theory appears to have been propagated by two top aides who were central figures in the special counsel’s investigation: Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. The conspiracy theory also was apparently fertilized by Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik.
The three of them appear to have played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani have since set about trying to get Ukraine to investigate the allegations, including by allegedly leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and a much-sought Oval Office meeting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The alleged corrupt quid pro quos are now at the center of the House’s impeachment inquiry of Trump.
To recap, that’s three people with controversial ties to Russia, two of whom are convicted criminals (Manafort and Flynn) and another who has been indicted (Kilimnik). Trump is apparently trying to prove their theory, to this day.
Rick Gates, a former Manafort deputy and Trump campaign aide, told investigators that the three of them were pushing the theory to Trump. According to the newly released Mueller documents, Gates told investigators that “Flynn was adamant the Russians did not carry out the hack” and that Flynn told Trump that U.S. intelligence “was not capable of figuring it out.” He also said that Manafort said the hack of Democratic emails “was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians.” And Gates said Manafort’s theory was “parroted” from Kilimnik, who “also opined the hack could have been perpetrated by Russian operatives in Ukraine.”
Gates pleaded guilty to lying to investigators before he began cooperating with Mueller’s team.
mueller’s investigators concluded that Kilimnik, Manafort’s associate in Ukraine, had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence during this whole period. They have indicted him for witness tampering, although he is unlikely to ever face the charges, given that he is overseas.
But he is hardly the only one with a controversial relationship with Russia.
Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, has ties to Russia and Russian interests dating back more than a decade, as Philip Bump has documented. He was indicted after documents revealed nearly $13 million in undisclosed payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. The New York Times reported in July 2017 that Manafort was $17 million in debt to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. He and Gates were also in business with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who sued them in 2018 for allegedly defrauding him to the tune of $19 million. There is evidence that Manafort signed a $10 million a year contract with Deripaska in 2006 to push a proposal that was pitched as something that “can greatly benefit the Putin Government,” and there is also evidence that Manafort took out a $10 million loan from Deripaska at one point.
flynn’s ties to Russia are more tenuous, but he has made a series of curious decisions involving himself with it. In 2013, as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, he became the first U.S. official to visit Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency. Flynn then reportedly sought to invite GRU officers to the United States, even after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. After leaving the Obama administration, Flynn sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala in 2015 for the English-language Russian propaganda channel RT and was paid $45,000 for his trip. He was paid another $23,000 by Russia-tied entities that year, according to documents released in 2017.
When serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser in early 2017, Flynn lied to Vice President Pence and investigators about his talks with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, claiming they had not discussed sanctions during the transition period even though they had. It was enough to cause Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, to warn the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the investigators.
So we have two men who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years. Flynn’s alleged effort to push Trump to be skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community in which Flynn served seems to have proven particularly long-lasting, despite Flynn’s conviction and his predilection for conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate.
And now Trump has pushed the theory so far, despite its baselessness, that it has put him on course for impeachment. Given that Russia’s goal has always been more about destabilizing the West rather than necessarily supporting Trump, it’s about the best that the Kremlin could have hoped.
==
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Letter sent in ‘utmost confidentiality’ to Bill Barr set in motion intervention for Michael Flynn: report
an 720
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https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/richard-grenells-flynn-unmasking-noninformation-campaign
Right-wing media froth over “Obamagate” and bully press to play along
WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ
PUBLISHED 05/15/20 2:15 PM EDT
Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, a former Fox News contributor and Republican Party stalwart who was appointed to lead the U.S. intelligence community because of his loyalty to President Donald Trump, provided a document of his own devising to Congress on Wednesday. It promptly leaked to the press. Republicans, including Trump himself, immediately seized on the content in the document as evidence of vast Obama administration malfeasance. Fox hosts spent the next two days incessantly declaring that it vindicated their conspiracy theories, turning their attention away from the coronavirus pandemic. And more credible media outlets, buffeted by the partisan claims, responded with a flurry of stories, at times failing to properly contextualize the story.
Trumpists have declared Grenell’s document a smoking gun showing that disgraced former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, was a victim of an Obama administration conspiracy, and Fox is hyping that narrative with wall-to-wall coverage. In reality, the document provides almost no information whatsoever. It is simply a list of senior Obama administration officials who received Flynn’s name after they followed the National Security Agency’s standard process and asked the agency to unmask the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report they were authorized to read. It does nothing to establish that any of the individuals named acted improperly in any way -- or even how many unmaskings were related to the Kislyak calls.
We’ve seen misinformation campaigns, where false or deceptive information is distributed, and disinformation campaigns, when that distribution is done with the full knowledge of its inaccuracy. Grenell is engaged in a noninformation campaign. He deliberately crafted and propagated a data point so vague that it is virtually meaningless on its own. But pro-Trump partisans -- particularly at Fox -- have easily picked up, misread (deliberately or not), and promoted the point, aligining it with their wild assumptions. Those furious misinterpretations have in turn spurred attention from the mainstream press, driving the conspiratorial thinking into the broader public.
This is an intentional plan that corresponds with what the president wants from his director of national intelligence. “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking,” The New York Times reported Thursday. As the president struggles in reelection polling, Trump and his Fox propagandists are using the Flynn story to try to damage the credibility of former President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s 2020 opponent.
Grenell’s noninformation campaign is the latest salvo in a years-long campaign by Trump and his Fox propagandists to turn the Russia investigation inside out, presenting the Trump associates who pleaded or were found guilty under its auspices as victims and those involved in carrying out the probe as criminals.
With vast swathes of the federal bureaucracy in the hands of partisans selected for their loyalty to the president, including the DNI and Justice Department, we should expect more of these releases -- and perhaps more dangerous actions -- in the coming months, as Trump’s supporters try to push the political debate away from the ongoing pandemic that has killed more than 80,000 Americans so far in order to secure his reelection.
The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn
Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.
On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.
The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.”
Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was an illegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.
William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn, citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.
“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)
In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.
The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.
That’s it.
Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.
Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.
Grenell’s noninformation plot
Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.
Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.
If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them. In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:
If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.
What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.
Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.
Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that information for a political purpose.
Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson described Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.” His prime-time colleague Hannity opened his Monday show by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it? Tonight, we will unravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story, with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.
It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 election and flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.
==
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https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/after-barrs-doj-drops-flynn-charges-right-wing-media-set-sights-sally-yates-and-barack
many lnx vids
After the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr filed a motion to drop charges against former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, right-wing media voices are stepping up a new campaign: to incriminate former President Barack Obama, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and others for supposedly launching the Flynn investigation — and the wider Trump-Russia investigation in the first place.
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators aboutmultiple phone calls he had in late December 2016 with Russia’s then-Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the 2016 election and President Donald Trump’s inauguration. During the call, Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions that Obama had just placed on Russia. (Flynn was fired by the White House when it was revealed that he also lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the conversation.)
The newest angle on the case from right-wing media hinges upon Yates’ recollection that Obama had “learned information about Flynn,” as he discussed in a White House meeting on January 5, 2017. Flynn’s pivotal interview with the FBI later occurred on January 24, 2017. (This element also ties into the search by both the Justice Department and right-wing media to find the government sources who leaked the details of Flynn’sphone calls to the media.)
Right-wing voices have claimed that Flynn was “set up” by the FBI agents who interviewed him, exposing him to perjury charges. Obama’s possible knowledge of the wiretapped calls, and his telling Yates that something was going on with Flynn, become a new hook for conservatives to accuse investigators of pursuing an illegitimate investigation against Trump and his aides. But the fact remains that he was interviewed as part of a legitimate inquiry, and he was caught telling lies to multiple people.
And with the Barr Justice Department now moving to throw out Flynn’s guilty plea, the hunt is on against Obama, Yates, and other officials — including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
On May 7, the same day that Barr’s DOJ filed to drop the case against Flynn, Tom Fitton, head of the right-wing legal organization Judicial Watch, appeared on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight and pointed the finger at Yates as well as Obama: “Now, Yates was obviously involved too, because she was pushing the Logan Act fraud on the White House as well to get Flynn fired. No clean hands here, Lou. No clean hands.”
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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fob Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight
Fox News anchor Ed Henry appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss how Yates found out that Obama was aware of the Flynn probe. “Remember, she was at the Obama Justice Department at the end,” Henry said, “and she is having a hard time processing this from Barack Obama. Why did he know that information about Flynn?”
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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight
Sean Hannity also called Thursday on his radio show for Barr to “investigate Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Department of Justice.” Later on his Fox News show, he interviewed Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell. “Who would have told Barack Obama? And I'd like to know what he knew and when he knew it,” Hannity said. “I want to know what Biden knew and when he knew it.”
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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Hannity
On the Friday morning edition of Fox & Friends, former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman further said that “Sally Yates may be key to” proving that Obama had directed the Flynn investigation. He also said that the Obama administration's “questionable sanctions” against Russia had been a “Trojan horse,” apparently setting up Flynn in order to go after Trump and stop his policies.
“It’s so true,” co-host Brian Kilmeade responded. “By the way, if you want to continue your policies, Hillary Clinton had to win the election. When she didn’t, they had to come up with a Plan B. This looks like their Plan B.”
Video file
CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
And on the May 8 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy — a staunch defender of presidential prerogatives for Trump — claimed new documents show that “the top officials of the Obama Justice Department and the Obama intelligence community were here pushing against what the FBI wanted to do in terms of handling the Flynn case.” Bartiromo responded by asking if “this goes all the way up to the Obama administration in terms of the coup to take Donald Trump down?”
Video file
CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo
Trump himself appeared later on in the Friday episode of Fox & Friends for a phone interview, during which co-host Steve Doocy asked about Yates’ recollections of the meeting with Obama: “Have you thought about calling him up and finding out what he knew or calling Joe Biden up and asking him what he knew?”
“No I'd rather have it come out in papers,” Trump said — also seeming to allude to details of the wider Trump-Russia investigation, both before and after the election itself. “Why would I call them up? They tried to take down the president of the United States — a sitting, duly-elected president of the United States — before I even won, and this was going on — this was the fake dossier that was totally fake.”
Video file
CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
Trump also later added: “If this were a Republican, and if this were — 25 people would be in jail for 50 years already. They’d be in jail for 50 years, and it would’ve happened two years ago.”
Video file
CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends
However, in the recent impeachment saga over Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s son, Fox News and other right-wing media voices actually defended the idea that a president could personally order investigations of his opponents. In fact, it was Trump’s own impeachment attorney Alan Dershowitz who argued to the Senate that the president could pressure another party into investigating a political opponent, because that president’s election (or by implication, the defeating of the opponent) would be “in the public interest.”
But even by this right-wing media argument, this comparison would be incorrect. The Justice Department’s own inspector general report on the Trump-Russia investigation busted a number of right-wing media conspiracy theories, affirming for example that the entire probe resulting in Flynn’s charges had a legitimate beginning: The FBI received a tip that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos said that “the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to [Hillary] Clinton (and President Obama).”
By contrast, Trump actually attempted to launch baseless investigations of his political rival — the same thing right-wing media are now twisting the Flynn saga to accuse Obama of doing.
---
==
he was in a deal that req elimination of sanctions? trms?
flipped? coop witness?
subpoena for his Biz records, fight over corp personhood
prolly neglected
---
---
post impeach purge 220; he has still not been sentneced (right after roger sent rollback by barr]
Barr installs outside prosecutor to scrutinize Michael Flynn case
Jake Johnson / Common Dreams
Attorney General William Barr has reportedly installed an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
==
---
trumpista?!
https://www.salon.com/2019/10/29/former-trump-aide-who-now-works-for-devin-nunes-reportedly-leaked-ukraine-whistleblowers-name/
former Trump aide who now works for Devin Nunes reportedly leaked Ukraine whistleblower’s name
Derek Harvey, a former Trump adviser who now works for Nunes, outed the whistleblower who reported Trump's call
IGOR DERYSH
OCTOBER 29, 2019
Atop aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., leaked documents identifying the Ukraine whistleblower’s name in an attempt to out him, The Daily Beast has reported.
Derek Harvey, a former adviser to President Trump who now works for Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, handed notes to House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of closed-door depositions in the Trump impeachment inquiry in hopes of getting the name in the record of the proceedings, which Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff vowed to release, sources told The Daily Beast.
The allegation follows a Saturday Washington Post report that Republican lawmakers and aides have “repeatedly” used the whistleblower’s purported name during the secret depositions. The Post reported that Harvey was “passing notes the entire time” one former Trump official was being questioned, suggesting that he was feeding Republicans questions.
Mark Zaid, an attorney for the whistleblower, warned that exposing his client’s identity would put him and his family at risk.
“Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations,” Zaid told The Daily Beast. “What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican.”
==
no lnx
---
619 about to be sentenced
politico
Trump applauds Flynn's hiring of FBI critic as new lawyer
By CAITLIN OPRYSKO 06/13/2019 08:03 AM EDT
President Donald Trump on Thursday hailed Michael Flynn's move to hire a lawyer who has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s investigation into the former national security adviser.
“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”
The message from Trump is one of the strongest indicators Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, remains in the president’s good graces and hints that a pardon might still be within the realm of possibility.
Flynn continues to be a recipient of the president's public support despite having been fired for having lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
Last week, Flynn fired his legal team and hired Powell, a former Justice Department attorney who has publicly dinged the investigation into Flynn, accusing the FBI of spying on the retired Army general as part of a "setup," arguing he should withdraw his guilty plea and that his case should be dismissed.
Flynn's former legal team, which took a less hostile approach to his defense, attempted to advance such an argument late last year, earning his lawyers an admonishment from the judge handling his case.
Powell told POLITICO on Wednesday that Flynn would continue to cooperate with the government while he awaits sentencing.
Trump’s tweet comes less than a week after federal prosecutors released a voicemail left by former Trump lawyer John Dowd for one of Flynn’s attorneys just after Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the president in order to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. In the voicemail, Dowd appeals to Flynn lawyer Robert Kelner for a "heads up" on information that could implicate the president and compromise "national security."
"Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and ... that still remains," Dowd said.
Though a transcript of that voicemail was included in Mueller’s report, the audio release has renewed speculation that the Trump team was dangling a pardon. Trump has appeared to hint at possible pardons for several of his former associates who were wrapped up in Mueller’s investigation, repeatedly refusing to rule them out for Flynn or for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
---
scary dl? no lnx
op ed
The Western Journal
Exclusive from Gen. Flynn: This Is My Letter to America
By Michael Flynn
Published August 5, 2020
We are witnessing a vicious assault by enemies of all that is good, and our president is having to act in ways unprecedented in decades, maybe centuries.
The biblical nature of good versus evil cannot be discounted as we examine what is happening on the streets of America.
It’s Marxism in the form of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement versus our very capable and very underappreciated law enforcement professionals, the vast majority of whom are fighting to provide us safe and secure homes, streets and communities.
When the destiny of the United States is at stake, and it is, the very future of the entire world is threatened.
As Christians, shouldn’t we act? We recognize that divine Providence is the ultimate judge of our destiny. Achieving our destiny as a freedom-loving nation, Providence compels us to do our part in our communities.
[TRENDING: Skateboarder in Biden's Backyard Hits Nominee's 'You Ain't Black' Comment, Explains Why He's on the Trump Train]
It encourages us in this battle against the forces of evil to face our fears head-on. No enemy on earth is stronger than the united forces of God-fearing, freedom-loving people.
We can no longer pretend that these dark forces are going to go away by mere prayer alone. Prayers matter, but action is required.
This action is needed at the local, state and federal levels. Action is also required in the economic, media, clerical and ecclesiastical realms.
Decide how you can act within your abilities. Stand up and state your beliefs. Be proud of who you are and what you stand for. And face, head-on, those community “leaders” who are willing to allow dark forces to go beyond peaceful protests and destroy and violate your safety and security.
[poll: Do you think Christians in America need to stand up and act?
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Enter your email Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.]]
Churches and houses of worship must return to normal. We invite everyone of goodwill to not shirk their responsibilities and instead act in a fraternal fashion. If for no other reason or with no other ability, act in a spirit of charity.
We cannot disrespect or disregard natural law along with our own religious liberties and freedoms.
I am witnessing elderly people lose their connection to all that is good in their lives: connections to their faith, their families and their individual freedoms, especially the simple act of attending church, something they’ve been doing for decades.
Let us not be intimidated or fear those who cry out that we are in the minority; we are not.
Good is always more powerful and will prevail over evil.
[RELATED: Mary Beth Brown: COVID Gave Leftists the Perfect Opportunity To Steal Our Freedoms]
However, evil will succeed for a time when good people are divided from each other and their personal lives — children away from their teachers, preachers from their congregations, customers from their local businesses.
America will never give in to evil. Americans work together to solve problems.
We do not and should not ever allow anarchy and the evil forces behind it to operate on any street in our nation.
No one should have to fear for their very life because some dark, disturbed force is challenged by the very essence of what America stands for.
We are “one nation under God” and it is our individual liberties that make us strong, not liberties given to our government. Our government has no liberty unless and until “we the people” say so.
God bless America and let’s stand by everything that was and is good in our lives, in our communities and in our country.
Otherwise, America as the true North Star for humanity will cease to exist as we know it.
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website. If you are interested in contributing an Op-Ed to The Western Journal, you can learn about our submission guidelines and process here.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Michael Flynn
Summary Recent Posts Contact
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn served as national security advisor to President Donald Trump
Tags: American left, antifa, Black Lives Matter, Christianity, conservatives, Donald Trump, faith, God, prayer
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Do Not Sell My Info
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https://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/13/14559822/trump-islam-muslims-islamophobia-sharia
Last July, a sharply dressed man named Frank Gaffney walked onto the stage of a crowded convention center in downtown Denver and proceeded to calmly warn his audience that Muslims were working to conquer America from the inside.
Speaking without notes at a glass lectern, Gaffney — who worked, decades ago, as a Pentagon official in the Reagan administration — told the audience that political leaders from both parties had spent years covering up the true threat to the US. It didn’t come from terrorists acting in the name of Islam. It came from Islam itself.
Gaffney said that sharia, the Arabic term for Islamic law, was a “brutally repressive, totalitarian, political, military, and legal program” for gradually subverting Western governments and replacing them with ones that adhere to harsh Islamic dictates. And in the US, those efforts were already well underway.
“This program of subversive, stealthy penetration and takedown is operating. It’s, in fact, been at work for 50 years,” he said. “Our government has been subverted.”
Gaffney wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He accused “agents of Hillary Clinton” of shredding files about Muslim radicals living both inside and outside the US and said that then–Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was surrounded by “a small echo chamber which is filled by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.”
The notion of senior US officials intentionally weakening American national security or appointing advisers who were literal members of a Middle Eastern Islamist movement is preposterous. But it’s important to take Gaffney seriously: He isn’t some little-known crank pumping out Islamophobic literature on the internet, and the event wasn’t a fringe gathering outside the political mainstream.
It was instead the 2016 Western Conservative Summit, a major meeting of thousands of Republican activists in Denver billed as “the largest gathering of conservatives outside of Washington, D.C.” Other featured speakers included then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, major conservative media figures like Hugh Hewitt and Erick Erickson, and two sitting US senators.
Gaffney is an important cog in a vast and growing ecosystem that exists just out of sight of most Americans — one that has spent years pushing the notion that there is a creeping, quiet plot to take over America from within. It is a plan that springs from Islamic scripture itself, and is supported by most mainstream Muslim organizations, most mosques, and, in all likelihood, your Muslim neighbor.
The only way to be safe from the threat, according to Gaffney and other self-proclaimed "counter-jihadists," is to slash Muslim immigration, arrest key leaders of the Muslim American community, and shut down huge numbers of mosques. They have not gone so far as to propose outright ethnic cleansing; Gaffney, in his speech, says he has Muslim friends. Their dream, instead, is to destroy the Muslim American community without kicking out Muslims.
The dire warnings are spread through an influential lobby, slick documentaries, and best-selling books with titles like The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion. And now that fearful vision of Islam has found a home in the Trump White House.
[
The Truth About Muhammad - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Muhammad
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most intolerant Religion (2006) is a book by Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch ...
Author:
Robert Spencer Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Response · Reviews · References and notes
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant ...
https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Muhammad-Intolerant-Religion/.../159698528...
The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion [Robert Spencer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
]]
Senior strategist Steve Bannon is a devotee of Gaffney’s ideas, as are National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Trump’s political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has done polling for Gaffney designed to illustrate the scale of the threat Muslims pose to America. And Trump himself has said things that sound like they could have been ripped from counter-jihadist literature.
When the new president announced his ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations, it was widely seen as Trump moving to quickly carry out one of his most explicit — and most controversial — campaign promises. Yet it made no sense as a counterterrorism policy: No immigrant from one of the seven targeted countries has ever killed anyone in a terrorist attack on US soil.
That’s because the real motivation was rooted in counter-jihadist logic. The movement’s thinkers have, for years, advocated a similar ban on Muslim immigration. They look to Europe and see Muslim immigrants creating a continent
ridden with terrorism and nearly lost to Islamist subversion. The Muslim ban only makes sense when seen as part of their plan to prevent America from going down the same path — by keeping out as many Muslims as possible.
The counter-jihadist influence in the Trump administration appears far from exhausted. They have long wanted to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, because they see major American Muslim organizations as Brotherhood fronts — and now that’s reportedly a major priority inside the Trump White House.
Trump’s policies reflect an even scarier kind of prejudice than his own: one with a plan.
The theory: ISIS represents the soul of Islam
Gaffney is the president of the Center for Security Policy, or CSP, a right-wing think tank located just blocks from the White House. In 2010, it convened a panel to study the Islamic threat to America. The group — which included former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Edward Soyster — called itself “Team B II.”
The original Team B was a working group put together in the ’70s as a kind of devil’s advocate in the Gerald Ford administration. Its goal was to provide a hawkish counterpoint to the softer detente policy toward the Soviet Union favored by the White House. Team B argued that communism was an insatiably aggressive doctrine, one that could not be appeased — a conclusion that would influencing Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy ideology.
Team B II aimed to do something similar, but for radical Islamism and today’s Republican Party. They drew on the arguments of a loose intellectual movement that had coalesced on blogs in the years after 9/11, and had come to refer to itself as the “counter-jihad.”
Counter-jihadists believe that mainstream scholars of Islam, and counterterrorism experts in governments the world over, have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Islamist threat. Their basic mistake is that they overemphasize differences between Muslims, like the Sunni-Shia split, and assume that ISIS and al-Qaeda are aberrant distortions of Islam.
The truth, counter-jihadists believe, is more like the opposite. They argue that a correct reading of Islamic scripture shows that violence is intrinsic to Islam — that the religious doctrine itself, properly understood, commands Muslims to kill subjugate unbelievers. People who say otherwise — and CSP lumps both George W. Bush and Barack Obama into this category — are either willfully or unintentionally deceiving the American public.
In the years since its publication in 2010, the “Team B II” report — titled “Shariah: The Threat to America” — has become something of a counter-jihadist bible. It’s the clearest and most comprehensive summary of their ideas. To understand what they believe, and why they believe it, you have to understand this report.
The great enemy in the report is something called “sharia.” An Arabic word that literally translates as “law,” it’s the vast body of rules and regulations that guide daily life for believing Muslims — everything from not eating pork to who can lawfully be killed in a time of war to whether to charge interest on bank loans.
“UNDER ISLAMIC LAW, LYING IS NOT ONLY PERMISSIBLE, BUT OBLIGATORY”
But because there is no single authority in Islam (like, say, the pope in the Catholic Church), there is no single, official, agreed-upon interpretation of sharia. The thousands of rules and regulations that collectively make up the body of sharia have been deeply contested among Muslim scholars — and even individual Muslims — since the birth of Islam, with no agreement even on many vital issues.
Team B II argues that sharia is different from similar moral codes in other religions, like the Jewish law that governs the rules for keeping kosher. They argue that sharia is fundamentally political; that its aim is to govern the lives of all people, and not just Muslims, by seizing control of the world’s governments.
“There is ultimately but one sharia,” the report holds. “It is totalitarian in character, incompatible with our Constitution, and a threat to freedom here and around the world. Sharia’s adherents are making a determined, sustained, and well-financed effort to impose it on all Muslims and non-Muslims, alike.”
To make this argument, Team B II’s authors rely heavily on something called “abrogation.” This is a complex concept in Islamic legal theory, but it basically boils down to the idea that when trying to determine the “correct” answer to some legal question — say, whether it’s okay to drink alcohol, for instance — later verses in the Quran carry more weight than earlier ones. That is, the later verses abrogate, or override, the earlier ones.
This stems from the fact that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed not all at once, but rather over a period of 23 years. During that time, the circumstances in which Mohammed and the early Muslim community were living changed quite a bit. The earlier verses of the Quran came down while Mohammad was more of an itinerant preacher in Mecca, whereas the later verses came down during a time when Mohammed controlled the city of Medina and commanded a large Muslim army.
The result is that the later verses tend to be more concerned with real-world administrative rules and military doctrine — including verses about conquering unbelievers — while the earlier verses are more focused on broader, more universal concepts of spirituality.
As a result of the doctrine of abrogation, Team B II claims, all Muslims are obligated to conquer the West and replace its governments with an Islamic theocracy called a caliphate. But one would be hard-pressed to find a single credible Islamic scholar who interprets it this way.
For Islamic legal scholars, abrogation is but one tool used to interpret the Quran, and not an ultimate trump card. And the Quran, like the Bible, contains scriptures that both endorse and reject violence. In the full context of Islamic law, the injunctions to kill and conquer are often interpreted as being specific to that time and place in history, and do not necessarily overrule other, more peaceful verses in the Quran (e.g., “let there be no compulsion in religion”).
Team B II dismisses this as a form of tactical, sharia-sanctioned lying. There is an actual Arabic term for permissible lying in sharia, called taqiyya. It’s an obscure medieval ruling that basically permits Muslims to verbally blaspheme God or renounce their religion without incurring God’s wrath if they are under compulsion to do so.
So, for instance, if a Muslim were traveling in a land where being Muslim could get him killed and is captured by the authorities, he is allowed to say he isn’t Muslim — or even do things like praise pagan gods or slander the Prophet Mohammed — if his survival is on the line, without God getting mad. It’s a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s also a concept generally associated with Shia Islam, as nearly all Sunni Islamic legal scholars reject the concept outright.
But the counter-jihadists have taken this medieval concept and turned it into a devious trick that Muslims are using to hide their true violent intentions.
They assert that the peaceful interpretations of Islam offered by Muslim authorities are a form of taqiyya designed to obscure the true nature of Islam from gullible Westerners. They point to things like the 9/11 hijackers going to strip clubs and drinking alcohol as examples of terrorists using taqiyya to blend in. And while the 9/11 hijackers certainly did those things, and may even have tried to justify their actions by saying they were just trying to blend in, they were all Sunni Muslims and therefore never would’ve used the concept of taqiyya to justify their actions.
“Under Islamic law, lying is not only permissible, but obligatory for Muslims in some situations,” Team B II writes in its report. “What Muslim audiences are required to know about Islam is not the same thing as what non-Muslim Western audiences are allowed to know — or encouraged to think — by Islamic authorities.”
This quickly takes on the character of a conspiracy theory. Any attempt to cite an Islamic authority who takes a different view of the Quran is only proof, to the counter-jihadists, that you are taken in by sharia propaganda. In that sense, arguing with the counter-jihadists is something of an impossible task. It’s a bit like attempting a point-by-point rebuttal of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
How a conspiracy theory goes from the fringes to the White House
[vid act for am]
When you ask credentialed experts on Islam and terrorism about counter-jihadist theories today, they usually don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“It's hard to reply without sounding snooty,” Will McCants, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations with the Islamic World, tells me in response to a question about counter-jihadists. “[They] sell a lot of books and scare the hell out of Americans, but their policy recommendations range from vague to downright harmful.”
McCants is not wrong about the books. America Alone, a 2006 book alleging that ”a large majority of Western Muslims support the terrorists’ strategic goals,” cracked the top five of the New York Times’s best-seller list. Several other counter-jihadist books, including The Politically Correct Guide to Islam and Because They Hate, made the best-seller list around the same time.
What few reviews of these books could be found in mainstream publications were not kind. Yale lecturer Daniel Luban wrote that they “can justly be called the new McCarthyism” in a review of the genre published in the Jewish magazine Tablet.
Regardless, the success of counter-jihadist literature spawned a whole mini industry — what author Nathan Lean termed “the Islamophobia Industry.” In 2008, an organization called the Clarion Project distributed 28 million copies of a documentary titled Obsession, which alleged that more than 100 million Muslims were in thrall to “militant Islam.”
Another Clarion video, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, was blurbed by former New York City mayor and current White House cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Clarion’s 2015 mini documentary By the Numbers, starring a Muslim woman named Raheel Raza who alleges a majority of her co-religionists want sharia to set national law, has more than 4 million views on YouTube.
These works found a large audience, mostly among conservatives, largely as a result of America’s encounter with Islamic extremism over the course of the 2000s. The 9/11 attacks, interestingly, did not themselves spark an immediate turn against Muslims.
Part of this can be attributed to concerted efforts by the George W. Bush administration to discourage such sentiments. Indeed, just a little over a month after the 9/11 attacks took place, Bush issued a message to commemorate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, stating, "The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur'an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."
But as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and more and more American service members died in those countries at the hands of Muslims, and as terrorist attacks in the name of Islam continued to take place around the world, many Americans started to blame Islam in general for the continuing bloodshed.
[graf]
Under the Obama administration, this took on an overtly partisan flavor. When Bush defended Islam, few Republicans were interested in attacking him. Barack Hussein Obama got no such dispensation: Republicans attacked him as soft on ISIS and claimed he was more interested in protecting “the image of Islam” than in protecting America. Influential right-wing pundits suggested he was an Islamist sympathizer or even a secret Muslim himself.
All of this, combined with Trump’s much more overt anti-Islam rhetoric, has helped turn the Muslim religion into a partisan issue:
Right-wing media, recognizing the appeal of the counter-jihadist message among their audience, has embraced this extreme anti-Islam narrative the counter-jihadists are peddling. A study published by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that guests with extreme anti-Muslim views made up 11 percent of all guests on prominent conservative talk radio during a period they studied in 2010. Two prominent counter-jihadists appeared on Fox News 15 times between September 2015 and February 2016, according to a count by Media Matters. Prominent televangelists spread the anti-Islam gospel to yet another group of reliable conservatives. Pat Robertson, the host of the widely broadcast 700 Club, once said on air that “Islam is a political system that is bent on world domination.”
All of this is supplemented by a vast grassroots network, centering on a group called ACT for America. Billing itself as the “the NRA of National Security,” it claims to have a membership of 500,000 nationwide, clustered in 1,000 chapters around the country.
Its president, Brigitte Gabriel, is the author of one of those mid-2000s counter-jihadist bestsellers (Because They Hate). A Lebanese Christian immigrant who calls herself “one of the leading terrorism experts in the world,” Gabriel has no formal background in terrorism, either through working in government or academia. According to her book, the highest level of education she received was a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA. Her claim to authority stems, allegedly, from experiences of persecution at the hands of Muslims during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s — a historically dubious story that Lebanese-American journalist Michael Young once labeled a “con act.”
In a speech in May 2016 at the Oasis Church in Middletown, Ohio, Gabriel delivered an accessible and entertaining speech on the counter-jihadist view of Islam. In her telling, the history of Islam is a history of bloodshed. Between Islam’s founding in the seventh century and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, she says, “Islam was responsible for 270 million people across the globe — killed by the sword.”
This violence was not accidental, Gabriel told the rapt crowd. It was the core of Islam itself.
Gabriel believes that for 12 years, Mohammed attempted to peacefully proselytize — and failed, miserably. Only when he turned to violence, to conversion at the point of the sword, did he begin to win success.
“Islam went from being strictly a spiritual movement, after 12 years, to becoming a political movement cloaked in religion,” she says. “Jihad is mentioned in the Quran 40 times — 36 times out of 40 as a holy war against the infidels, to either kill them or subjugate them.”
These are all historically inaccurate claims. Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that they “play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples,” in order to put together a narrative of a uniformly aggressive Islam. Yet Gabriel’s group has been profoundly influential.
[twt mar lago sec breifing look who i ran into djt]
Her activists have worked tirelessly to pass legislation, based on a template constructed by Gaffney and CSP in-house counsel David Yerushalmi, that would ban state courts from considering sharia a valid source of law. By 2016, they had succeeded in nine states: Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, Arizona, and Tennessee.
“No court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code,” the South Dakota version reads, neutral language obscuring the clear intent.
More alarmingly, the ideas pushed by Gabriel and CSP have been embraced by the most important members of the Trump White House.
“Most people in the Middle East, or at least 50 percent, believe in being sharia-compliant,” Bannon said on the Breitbart Daily News radio show in 2015. “Sharia-compliant” is an innocuous phrase commonly used by Muslims to denote that something is in line with Islamic law: For instance, you can find sharia-compliant home mortgage companies in the US that cater primarily (but not exclusively) to Muslims, because Islamic law forbids Muslims from collecting or paying interest on loans.
The Team B II report’s authors sees things like sharia-compliant financial institutions as an insidious threat to the US Constitution (they never really explain how a home mortgage company that doesn’t charge interest threatens the Constitution).
It’s not just Bannon.But the Team B II report also frequently uses the term “sharia-compliant” to describe not institutions or practices, but people: specifically, Muslims with dangerous, anti-American beliefs, anti-constitutional beliefs. And this is exactly the way Bannon is using the term. “If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you,” Bannon proclaimed.
In his 2016 book The Field of Fight, Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, wrote that Islamic scholars are attempting to trick the West to obscure the true nature of sharia.
“These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control,” Flynn writes. “Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.”
Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said more or less the same thing — in an official Senate press release. “Once again we face a totalitarian threat to the free world. This time it’s from ideological and apocalyptic Islam,” Sessions said.
“Theologically-based sharia law,” Sessions argued, “fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order that separates church and state, and that considers free debate and dissent the way to a better world.”
That these individuals all espouse the same weirdly specific interpretation of sharia is not a coincidence. Each one of them is deeply connected to the counter-jihadist world.
Bannon hosted counter-jihadists on his Breitbart radio show 41 times, according to a count by Mother Jones’s Josh Harkinson. Flynn is an adviser to the board of Gabriel’s ACT for America, and local ACT chapters organized many of the stops on the speaking tour for Flynn’s book. In 2015, Sessions received CSP’s Keeper of the Flame award, in honor of “his leadership on issues of great importance to the national security.”
And it goes even deeper than just Trump’s cabinet. Walid Phares, a fringe Lebanese Christian academic who served as Trump’s Middle East policy adviser during the campaign, once said, “It is absolutely constitutional and moral that citizens reject Sharia as a legal system that takes away their rights.”
Sebastian and Katharine Gorka, a married couple who are staples of the counter-jihadist movement, have been given high-level positions on Trump’s staff: Sebastian is now his deputy assistant in the White House, and Katharine was on Trump’s Department of Homeland Security transition team.
Trump himself, at times, has sounded a lot like a counter-jihadist.
“Sharia authorizes such atrocities as murder of non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings, and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to American — especially women,” Trump said, reading off a prepared statement during a December 2015 televised rally defending his proposal for a Muslim ban. “These are people who believe only in jihad. They don’t want our system.”
Several months prior to the rally, Trump had met with staffers at CSP for an hour-long briefing. The subject was the threat from sharia.
Counter-jihadists see leading American Muslims as part of the problem
The fact that most Muslims are not killers is, for the counter-jihadists, a most inconvenient fact. Over time, counter-jihadists have put less emphasis on the threat from overtly violent groups, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and focused instead on a more insidious threat: the “stealth” or “civilization jihad.”
The foremost theorist of civilization jihad is a writer named Robert Spencer. “He’s author of so many books, and one of the top two or three experts in the world on this great war we’re fighting against fundamental Islam,” Bannon said, when hosting Spencer on Breitbart Daily News on August 9, 2016. “Trump is listening to people like you,” he told Spencer later in the interview.
Spencer, like Gabriel and Gaffney, has no formal training in Quranic scholarship. He received an MA in 1986 in religious studies from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and wrote his master’s thesis on Catholic history.
He’s run the blog Jihad Watch, a near-obsessive tracker of Islamist activity, since 2003. He is also the author of 16 books, with titles like The Complete Infidels' Guide to the Koran. Many of his books have been published by Regnery, the conservative publishing giant that also put out both Trump’s and Mitt Romney’s most recent books. Two of Spencer’s tomes made the New York Times best-seller list; there’s a decent chance you’ve seen him on Fox News in the wake of a terrorist attack.
In person, Spencer is short and portly, with a neatly trimmed black beard. He’s exceptionally confrontational, constantly trumpeting his willingness to debate all comers on Twitter and on Jihad Watch. When I contacted him for this story, his reply attacked the media — like most counter-jihadists, he sees journalists as some of jihad’s most powerful enablers.
“There you go again, Zack,” he wrote in response to one of my questions. “I know you’re a reporter, and a reporter for Vox, so I know where you stand.”
Spencer’s 2008 book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs, developed one of the most important ideas of the counter-jihad. Its arguments were cited repeatedly and amplified in the Team B II report and also appear, in a simplified form, in speeches delivered by people like Gabriel in towns around the country. Spencer also regularly gives “counterterrorism” seminars based on these arguments to law enforcement agencies.
The central idea is that terrorists aren’t America’s real Muslim problem.
“Distracted by foreign wars and the prospect of domestic terror attacks, Americans pay little heed to the true agents of intolerance in their midst,” Spencer writes. “The stealth jihad advances largely unopposed because it is largely unrecognized.”
The “agents of intolerance” at the heart of this stealth jihad, Spencer explains, are the Muslim Brotherhood.
It’s a group you’re probably at least passingly familiar with. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood is one of the oldest and most influential Islamist groups in history. The group’s goal has long been the toppling of the Egyptian government and its replacement with a Sunni theocracy.
Its tactics have varied over time, from promoting grassroots social change to fielding candidates for parliament, and some individuals and groups associated with the Brotherhood in the past have advocated violent revolution. The Brotherhood even managed to gain control over the Egyptian government briefly, when Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won in the country’s first democratic election following the Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Today, the group’s influence is relatively limited — Egypt’s military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, overthrew Morsi in 2013 and since then has viciously suppressed Brotherhood activity. According to Human Rights Watch, he has killed more than 1,000 individuals linked to the Brotherhood and arrested many, many more.
In Spencer’s telling, though, the Brotherhood is not defined by its founding chapter in Egypt, or even its various open branches and offshoots (like the Palestinian militant group Hamas or the moderate Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia). The hidden history of the 20th century, according to Spencer, is a history of the Brotherhood’s stealth penetration of the West.
“Of course the MB still has the resources to act in the US and Europe,” Spencer tells me. “Its organizations here were well-established and handsomely funded before Sisi came along.”
In Stealth Jihad, Spencer rests this claim on a 1991 memo, written by a Muslim Brother named Mohamed Akram. The memo outlines a plan to establish a “global Islamic state,” starting in the United States. This begins, according to Akram, through a “shift from the collision mentality to the absorption mentality” — to move away from open conflict with Western authorities to suborning them from within.
This might seem like a pathetically impossible task, given the minuscule number of Muslim Brothers in the US. But — and this is the absolutely critical part — Akram thinks the Brotherhood has powerful allies who might successfully and quietly mainstream its radical agenda. In the memo, he writes out “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”
The Brotherhood, and its present-day allies and friends, [are] really working to forward the ‘grand jihad,’” Spencer writes. “When we scratch the ‘moderate’ surface of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), we find links to terrorist organizations and exhortations to Islamic supremacism.”It reads like a who’s who of Muslim civic organizations in the United States, including the Islamic Society of North America (the continent’s largest Muslim civic group) and the Muslim Students’ Association (the organization that represents Muslim students on virtually every college campus in the United States). This one memo, for Spencer and Gaffney, is solid proof that these organizations are Brotherhood fronts.
The Team B II report, two years later, put the point even more clearly.
“The majority of Islamic organizations in America are affiliates of or associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in some way,” its authors explain. “Any organization that does not embrace sharia and the MB line has not been able to gain broad recognition as a Muslim-American force.”
The evidentiary basis for this claim is extremely thin. For one thing, scholars of the Brotherhood have found no evidence that Akram’s memo was an accurate representation of the Brotherhood’s reach.
“Nobody has ever produced any evidence that the document was more than something produced by the daydream of one enthusiast,” Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor who studies the Brotherhood, told Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner in 2011. “Nothing in anything that I have heard has ever struck me as similar in tone or content to the ‘master plan.’”
Beyond that, the organizations themselves flatly deny being agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, as Spencer and his ilk would say, this could just be taqiyya. Except that the groups don’t just deny these affiliations — they openly advocate policies and interpretations of Islam that directly contradict this supposed grand Muslim Brotherhood plot against American values.
That does not stop Spencer, Team B II, and the rest of the counter-jihadists from citing Akram’s memo as gospel. Gaffney still tells audiences to download it (it’s available for free on CSP’s site).
The idea that the Brotherhood dominates Muslim American life serves a critical bridging point in counter-jihadist ideology. It is the only possible explanation for why, despite sharia’s supposed mandate to violence and domination, Muslim Americans are not all that violent. It’s not that they don’t believe in “Islamic supremacism” (a favored counter-jihadist term); it’s that they’re more strategic about it than the dummies in al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Militant groups can be bombed and killed. But stealth jihadists cannot: They wield Western commitments to free speech and political tolerance as a shield, allowing them to build up Muslim strength in the West without meaningful opposition.
Counter-jihadists latch onto any evidence of links between Muslim civic society and the Muslim Brotherhood to buttress this theory, wrenching quotes from Muslim leaders out of context and casting fringe figures as leading Muslim authorities.
Take their strongest and most commonly cited piece of evidence: a 2007 Justice Department case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity in the Dallas area that was diverting some of its donations to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
This is the most significant and largest case of a terror-funding operation using an American Muslim civic group as a front. The Akram memo was uncovered during the HLF investigation.
But in addition to the five leaders of the HLF who were actually convicted in the case, more than 246 individuals and Muslim groups, including ISNA and CAIR, were named as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment — meaning the prosecutors believed they were linked to HLF’s scheme but couldn’t prove it.
They couldn’t prove it because they had no real evidence for this claim. ISNA and CAIR later filed a suit alleging that the prosecutors had unjustifiably damaged their reputation by mentioning them in the indictment. Their evidence was that counter-jihadists were using it to smear them, and the court agreed.
“There is no real dispute that CAIR suffered injury to its reputational interest by being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in this terrorism case. Press accounts and blog entries have reported, based on this case, that CAIR is a criminal organization that supports terrorism,” the presiding judge ruled. “The government has not argued or established any legitimate government interest that warrants publicly identifying CAIR and 245 other individuals and entities as unindicted co-conspirators.”
Now a faction in the Trump administration, reportedly led by Flynn, is pushing to do the same thing by executive fiat — to add the Muslim Brotherhood to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.But, as with the Akram memo, the counter-jihadists have not stopped using the HLF case as proof that America’s largest Muslim organizations are part of a stealth jihad. Multiple Republican members of Congress have parroted these accusations, most notably when they accused Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Sen. Ted Cruz, a frequent speaker at CSP events, has repeatedly pushed legislation labeling the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group — a key recommendation in both Spencer’s book and the Team B II report.
The State Department reportedly opposes this move as illegal. A new CIA memo, reported by Politico, warns that it would boost ISIS and al-Qaeda recruiting. Virtually every expert on the Muslim Brotherhood thinks it would be unworkable and unwise.
Despite all this, the New York Times reports that the move has broad support in the White House. This should be no surprise: Both Attorney General Sessions and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, while in Congress, co-sponsored Cruz’s bill.
“There are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways,” Pompeo told Gaffney in a February 2015 interview on the latter’s radio program. “They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”
Bannon has long been warning of the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood and stealth jihad; in 2007, he wrote a documentary script proposal specifically calling CAIR and ISNA "cultural jihadists" secretly working to build “an Islamic Republic in the United States.” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, in a 2016 interview with Bannon, warned of “an explanatory memorandum” uncovered in the Holy Land Foundation trial telling Muslims “to infiltrate, to multiply, to gain positions of power, and to commit what they call ‘civilization jihad.’”
Officially labeling the Brotherhood a terrorist group, an odd step given that the Brotherhood has not been linked to a terrorist attack in decades, takes on much darker tones when viewed through a counter-jihadist light. Remember, counter-jihadists think the majority of Muslim American groups in the United States are Brotherhood fronts. It’s illegal for any American to provide assistance to a designated foreign terrorist organization.
This, then, could set the stage for a massive federal inquisition into America’s major Muslim organizations based on counter-jihadist conspiracy theories. The text of the Cruz-Sessions-Pompeo bill refers to CAIR and ISNA as “United States-Muslim Brotherhood affiliates,” citing the Holy Land case. Gaffney told Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake that "CAIR is one of the organizations [prosecutors] would have to look at” if the Brotherhood were designated a terrorist group.
Spencer told me that the solution to the stealth jihad was to “enforce existing laws regarding sedition and subversion,” adding that “Muslim organizations in the West should be called upon to back up their pro-forma condemnations of al-Qaeda and ISIS with transparent, inspectable, honest programs teaching young Muslims why they should reject the understanding of Islam offered by jihad terror groups.”
Investigations into, and perhaps prosecutions of, Muslim civic organizations. “Inspectable” programs ensuring that Muslim organizations toe a religious line that counter-jihadists find acceptable. That’s what the counter-jihadists really want from Trump.
Europe will soon be “Eurabia” — a fate America might share
In July of last year, I went to Cleveland to report on the Republican National Convention. It was a weird event by any metric, but the high point of strangeness had to be the evening I spent at a party for queer counter-jihadists.
The event, organized by Breitbart’s gay firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos, was called “Wake Up!” — as in, “wake up” to the threat of jihadism. Held in a dark ballroom adorned with pictures of mostly naked, extremely young-looking men posing in red “Make America Great Again” hats, the party attracted a fairly infamous crowd.
I bumped into Pamela Geller, who co-founded (alongside Spencer) a counter-jihadist group called Stop the Islamization of America, since renamed the American Freedom Defense Initiative, wearing a rainbow sequin shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Love Will Win.” Geller is a regular on Fox News and conservative talk radio; she’s one of the most widely known counter-jihadists due to her assuming a leadership role in the fight against the “ground zero mosque” in 2010. She also has a tendency to embrace the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, once publishing a piece on her website suggesting that Barack Obama is the secret love child of Malcolm X.
When I ran into her, she was warning a partygoer of the imminent threat from Syrian refugees.
“ISIS said they were going to send a jihad army into Europe via migration in 2015. Then two months later, the migration started,” Geller said. The implication — that the refugee crisis was an ISIS plot — wasn’t especially subtle.
The ostensibly perilous state of Europe was something of a motif at the party. The featured speaker was Geert Wilders, the virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). Wilders, an extremely tall man with slicked-back, Trumpesque hair, gave a fiery speech denouncing the influence of Islam in his homeland.
“There is only one Islam, and that Islam has no place in a free society,” Wilders told the crowd. “We should de-Islamize our societies. It’s a matter of our existence.”
One could not have hoped for a better summary of the counter-jihadist view of Europe. Proponents see the continent as a dark twin of America, a “there but for the grace of God” dystopia the Islamists are on the verge of conquering.
The key culprit, in their minds, is immigration. Prior to World War II, the Muslim population in Europe was negligible. After the war, a need to rebuild the continent led Europe to bring in a lot of people from the nearby Middle East and North Africa as guest workers. Many of these guest workers stayed, and eventually brought over their families. These people formed Muslim communities, which continue to be a draw for new Muslim immigrants today, at the same time that birthrates among white Europeans were slowing down.
The result was a rapidly growing Muslim minority in Western Europe. In 1950, 2 percent of Europeans were Muslim. That figure was 4 percent by 1990, and 6 percent by 2010.
In 2005, a Cairo-born woman named Gisèle Littman published a book warning of the dangers of this demographic shift, titled Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Littman, who publishes under the name Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile”), dropped out of a master’s program at the University of Geneva in the 1960s. Nevertheless, she spent much of her life publishing “academic” tomes on Islam and Europe, arguing that the history of Islam is an unbroken history of theologically driven conquest.
In Eurabia, Ye’or posited that Muslim immigration to Europe was not the benign economic migration it seemed. It was, instead, a dark plot — a plan, dating back to 1973, “superimposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies.” The goal was to Islamize Europe, to reduce European whites to “dhimmitude” — a term she uses for second-class citizenship granted to non-Muslims in an Islamic society.
In the pages of Jihad Watch and CSP publications, the notion that Muslim immigrants are imposing their rule on a hapless and clueless European majority is simply common sense. Every crime or terrorist attack committed by a Muslim, every law granting religious accommodations to Muslims, is cast as proof of the coming of Eurabia.Eurabia has gotten scant mention in the American press; mainstream historians have scorned it. Yet the book’s thesis has risen to the level of dogma among American counter-jihadists; Geller has called Ye’or “the world's leading scholar and historian on Islamic expansionism in Europe, the Middle East and the West.”
At the 2015 Values Voter Summit, the big annual gathering for right-wing evangelicals, Bannon sat down with ACT’s Gabriel to talk about the European refugee crisis. He referred to it as a Muslim “invasion,” and asked Gabriel if that was an overstatement.
“It is not,” she replied. “Europe will no longer be Europe by 2050. Europe has already become Eurabia. Europe is Eurabia right now.”
For this reason, immigration occupies a central role in the counter-jihadist imagination. If Muslim immigration turned Europe into a terror-ridden nightmare on the brink of sharia rule, then the first priority in the United States needs to be making sure the same thing can’t happen here. The Muslim Brotherhood is most easily defeated when you deny it foot soldiers.
One of the key recommendations of CSP’s Team B II report is that “immigration of those who adhere to sharia must be precluded.” More recently, CSP and ACT for America have been out front in opposing the resettlement of Syrian refugees. CSP has teamed up with longtime anti-refugee activist Ann Corcoran, who got her start in 2006 opposing the resettlement of African refugees in her area of rural Maryland. A CSP video starring her has racked up nearly 3 million views on YouTube.
“This process of Muslim colonization is called the hijra,” Corcoran says in the video, using the Arabic word for migration. “Mohammed told his followers to migrate and spread Islam, in order to dominate all the lands of the world ... and that’s exactly what they’re doing now.”
The “Muslim ban” and the counter-jihad
When Trump initially announced his plan for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” way back in December 2015, his campaign statement cited a poll conducted by CSP as the key piece of justification.
“A poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing ‘25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad,’” the statement read. “51% of those polled, ‘agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to sharia.’”
This poll was, unsurprisingly, shot full of methodological problems. It was an online opt-in poll, meaning that it was not a random sample of American Muslims, and several questions were written in such a way that the answers would end up sounding extremist no matter what.
More interestingly, though, is the person who conducted the poll on CSP’s behalf. It was none other than Kellyanne Conway, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign manager and chief press surrogate. According to Mother Jones’s Pema Levy, who first reported the link, Conway’s firm had a relationship with CSP that dated back to 1998.
"It's very alarming to me that such a high number of individuals, Muslims living in the US, would say, 'Well, we can have a choice' [to follow sharia]," Conway said during a June 2015 appearance on a CSP podcast. “The Muslims living in the US themselves — 27 percent of them, anyway — say that this is what the purpose of jihad is, to either punish nonbelievers (16 percent) or, the other 11 percent, to undermine non-Muslim states."
This is the way in which the “Muslim ban” makes sense. Not as something Trump dreamed up by accident, but as a direct product of the counter-jihad’s influence on the president of the United States. You can even see the counter-jihadist influence in the text of the executive order itself.
“In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles,” the order reads. “The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.”
When the Trump administration talked about the Muslim ban to press, they warned that unfettered Muslim entry into the country would bring about a constant drumbeat of low-level terrorism — a warning that sounded a lot like some counter-jihadists’ descriptions of contemporary Europe.
“We don't want a situation where 20, 30 years from now, it's just like a given thing that on a fairly regular basis that there's domestic terror strikes, that stores are shut up or that airports have explosive devices planted or people are mowed down in the street by cars and automobiles and things of that nature,” an unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson. “These are the realities that we're living in today.”
How counter-jihadists want to change America — if Trump will let them
There is a counter-jihadist master plan.
In 2015, CSP issued a follow-up report to the Team B II report. Titled “The Secure Freedom Strategy,” and authored by “the Tiger Team,” it fleshed out a broad slate of specific policy actions that could be taken to act on Team B’s diagnosis of the problem. Something like Trump’s ban on refugees entering the country is in there, as is the Flynn-Sessions-Pompeo plan for listing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.
Those aren’t the only two examples. The report spends a great deal of time lambasting the Obama administration for failing to openly name Islamism as our enemy.
“The Obama administration’s increasingly institutionalized secularist — if not actively pro-Islamic — policies have largely prevented the U.S. government from engaging in strategic information operations aimed at exposing and undermining the supremacist doctrine of shariah and the terrorism it commands,” its authors write. “Public clarity about that threat has also been compromised by the distortion of intelligence analysis and terminology used to describe Islam, jihad, and shariah.”
This has obvious resonances with the Republican attacks on Obama for failing to call terrorists “radical Islamists.” But it also targets, specifically, President Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism” initiative — a program that focuses on preventing Americans from being attracted to violent political movements, Islamist and non-Islamist alike. This, the Tiger Team argues, is a way of downplaying the threat from the more dangerous stealth jihad.
Now both Reuters and CNN have reported that the Trump team is planning to revamp the CVE program to focus solely on Islamism. Its new name? “Countering Islamic Extremism,” nomenclature that a) is focused exclusively on Islam, and b) deemphasizes the threat from violence specifically.
News of the Trump team’s plans delighted counter-jihadists, who have long attacked US government counterterrorism training for downplaying the threat from sharia. Spencer told me the revamp of the CVE program was the Trump initiative that he was most excited about.
Spencer is being a bit premature — as of right now, the reports about the program still aren’t confirmed. But his glee points to something important, something missed in taking these things in isolation.
The Trump team is incredibly disorganized: According to one New York Times account, Trump staffers still haven’t figured out how to turn on the lights in the White House Cabinet room. They also have an insurgent ideology, one that’s in many ways at odds with what you hear from mainstream Republicans — especially on foreign policy. There just isn’t a clear sense of what they want to do on a lot of issues, or what specific tools they could use to do it.
The counter-jihadists, by contrast, are extremely organized. They have a think tank that has put out detailed policy proposals, intellectuals with fairly large megaphones who can argue for the think tank’s ideas, and a large activist network that’s surprisingly well-connected inside the Republican Party.
And, of course, they have a lot of like-minded sympathizers in the White House. So if the Trump team needs policy ideas on national security and terrorism, it’s entirely likely that they’d turn to CSP for help. Indeed, the explicit point of the Tiger Team’s Secure Freedom Strategy was to provide a comprehensive blueprint for a “war” on sharia to a White House that’s willing to listen.
So what are their actual policy proposals?
The report advocates reorienting training for counterterrorism staff around “the threat doctrine — sharia,” essentially meaning that the US should teach its spies and law enforcement officials that Islam is their enemy. It proposes “rolling up and shutting down [Muslim Brotherhood] front groups in the United States,” by which it means the main Muslim organizations in America. It suggests ending university programs that promote “Muslim-Christian dialogue,” and replacing them with “corresponding educational activities exposing the true nature of sharia and the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations.”
Some recommendations are even more jarring. The report calls on the US government to use “sharia adherent advocacy and practices as legal premises for deportation and stripping of American citizenship” — in other words, kicking out Muslims who publicly announce that they live by Islamic moral codes. Former Speaker of the House and staunch Trump supporter Newt Gingrich has fervently embraced this idea, telling Sean Hannity in June 2016 that the US government should deport all Muslims who believe in sharia.
The CSP report further states that “over eighty percent of U.S. mosques have been shown to be sharia-adherent and promoting jihad,” and that “they are incubators of, at best, subversion and, at worst, violence and should be treated accordingly.” The clear implication is that the US government should shut down 80 percent of American mosques and arrest their imams on charges of promoting terrorism.
This isn’t just a blueprint for war on sharia — it’s a blueprint for war on the Muslim American community. For using the power of the state to shut down Muslim organizations, arrest believing Muslims, and close the vast majority of mosques.
Prominent politicians have endorsed this plan (though it’s not clear if they’ve read it all the way through). At a 2015 CSP conference, the entirety of which is uploaded to YouTube, both Gingrich and Cruz labeled the Secure Freedom plan a sound strategy for fighting jihadism — a move that garnered very little attention at the time. The document is too obscure, and too boring, for most people to root through it.
But these ideas in it cannot be seen as obscure anymore.
“I definitely see individuals with this [counter-jihadist] network having a huge influence within this administration,” Yasmine Taeb, a lobbyist at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who focuses on terrorism and civil liberties, tells me. “[Trump’s] policies are ones that they’ve been advocating for ... which is scary.”
According to McCants, the Brookings scholar on Islam, “national security professionals on both sides of the aisle are freaking out” about the influence of counter-jihadists on Trump.
Would Trump be able to implement all of the policies in the Secure Freedom Strategy by executive fiat? Almost certainly not. More to the point, it’s not clear that he’d want to: Shutting down 80 percent of America’s mosques is extreme even for him, well beyond anything he’s said publicly.
The point, rather, is that this is where the people who are advising the president are coming from. Their repeated public statements, and the administration’s policy alignment with some key counter-jihadist priorities, cannot be ignored. These ideas, ideas which when taken to their logical conclusion end in a mass campaign of persecution targeting Muslim Americans, are now the dominant approach to terrorism among the president’s closest advisers.
Watching the video of Gaffney’s speech at the Western Conservative Summit no longer feels like watching the ramblings of a coot. It feels like peering through a window into the way the Trump White House sees the world.
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hmmn
https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaLago/comments/9529qd/the_shadows_of_erik_prince_peter_thiel_and/
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punked? by twitterbots?!
28/50 General Michael Flynn, an advisor of the Trump campaign and then Mr. Trump’s national security advisor, called himself “General Misha” and followed and retweeted Russian material from five Russian accounts. He later confessed to a federal crime (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 241).
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https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/top-takeaways-from-bombshell-report-flynn-wanted-to-give-nuclear-tech-to-saudis-may-have-broken-law/
Fired National Security Advisor and admitted felon Michael Flynn reportedlypursued the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.Whistleblowers are saying that the National Security Council’s ethics lawyer found that Flynn may violated a conflict of interest statute.
Despite the lawyer’s recommendation that this should be abandoned, top Flynn aide Derek Harvey allegedly continued on, speaking to Flynn “every night” even after Flynn was fired for lying to the FBI. Flynn has since pleaded guilty to that crime and cooperated with investigators in multiple ongoing probes.
One of those investigations, we learned, had to do with Flynn’s ex-business partner Bijan Kian. Kian and Turkish-Dutch national Kamil Ekim Alptekin were allegedly involved “in a conspiracy to covertly influence U.S. politicians and public opinion against a Turkish citizen living in the United States whose extradition had been requested by the Government of Turkey.” That Turkish citizen has been identified as cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen was accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of orchestrating a failed coup.
Another one of these up-to-now redacted investigations Flynn may have flipped on was revealed on Tuesday. Here are the key takeaways.
Dealings with Saudis Raise Questions About Trump Administration Policy
The House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) already commented that the investigation is “crucial” for understanding the Trump Administration’s aims.
Flynn was allegedly involved in the following proposal, per NBC News:
The proposal, which involved enlisting the U.S. nuclear power industry to build nuclear plants across the Middle East, was backed by a group of retired generals who formed a firm called IP3. Flynn described himself in financial disclosure filings as an “advisor” to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 — at the same time he was serving as Trump’s national security adviser during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition, the report says.
Not only was Flynn told he might have violated the law, the Trump administration’s pursuit of this nuclear tech transfer, Cummings said, appears “ongoing.”
These goals may even raise new speculation about why President Donald Trump, for instance, responded the way he did in the aftermath of Saudi Arabian agents’ assassination of journalist and permanent U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
Rick Gates Knew About This, Too
Flynn’s aide Derek Harvey reportedly had a conference call with Trump friend Tom Barrack and former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates. Gates, it should be noted, was also deputy chair of the Trump Inaugural Committee, which is also under investigation by federal prosecutors. If Gates knew about it Special Counsel Robert Mueller likely knew about it.
What this means is that, in all likelihood, the reason Mueller keeps pushing back Gates’ sentencing status updates is that Gates has cooperated in the cases against Paul Manafort, Flynn, and perhaps the Trump Inauguration.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are reportedly looking into whether Trump‘s Inauguration Committee misspent some of the $107 million raised from contributors or accepted money in exchange for access and influence within the Trump administration.
Remember the Judge Who Wondered if Flynn Could Be Accused of “Treason”?
Back in December 2018, Law&Crime’s Ronn Blitzer aptly described U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan wondering aloud about Flynn and treason as a “crazy idea.” Sullivan knew it, too.
Sullivan blasted Flynn during his sentencing hearing, particularly for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey.
“You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the National Security Advisor to the president!” he said. “Arguably, this undermines everything this flag over here stands for! Arguably, you sold your country out!”
He asked prosecutors if Flynn’s conduct “rises to the level of treasonous activity?” and then asked again, “Could he have been charged with treason?” Mueller’s team said no, pointing out that Flynn had ceased his dealings with Turkey before he took office.
Sullivan called for a recess and when he came back, he said, “Don’t read too much into the questions I asked. I’m not suggesting he committed treason.”
The rest of the day went without much more ceremony and Sullivan declined to sentence Flynn then and there. He gave the parties until March 13 to file a status report with the court. It would be interesting to see how Sullivan might react to the revelation that Flynn may have knowingly and willfully violated or directed someone to violate the law for the purpose of pushing through a nuclear technology transfer involving a foreign power that has most recently been implicated in a murder and a cover-up that received global attention.
Bonus: All of This Makes the Narrative that Flynn Was Entrapped Look Pretty Bad
All of the days-on-end debate about whether the FBI did or didn’t entrap Flynn basically ended when Flynn was given multiple opportunities to challenge the circumstances of the FBI interview that got him busted in court, and he declined do so.
Remember when Mueller said this to silence the doubters? “When the defendant said he did not remember something they knew he said, they used the exact words the defendant had used in order to prompt a truthful response. But the defendant never corrected his false statements. The interview was voluntary, and lacked any indicia of coercion.”
The current investigation isn’t dealing with “mak[ing] false statements about his communications with the Russian ambassador (Kislyak) weeks before the FBI interview.” It’s about national security.
==
Bijan R. Kian, sometimes written Bijan Rafiekian, is an Iranian-American businessman. He has been an executive or board member of many businesses and organizations.[1]
Kian was a member of the Board of Directors of the Export–Import Bank of the United States from 2006 to 2011,[2][3] after being nominated by President George W. Bush and receiving Senate confirmation.[4]
Kian was a partner of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn in the Flynn Intel Group and worked with the incoming Trump administration's transition team on matters relating to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.[5][6]
The US Special Counsel's office opened an investigation into Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group, including Kian, in 2017.[7][8] On December 17, 2018, several months after Flynn entered into a cooperation agreement with the Special Counsel's office, and two weeks after Flynn pleaded guilty in Federal court for lying to the FBI, Kian and Kamil Ekim Alptekin were indicted in US Federal Court as well. At the time he was charged with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, and for conspiracy to unlawfully kidnap Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in the U.S., and bring him to Turkey.[9]
==
Michael Flynn's business associates charged with illegally lobbying for ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../michael-flynns...partner.../46fb3762-020a-11e9-91...
Dec 18, 2018 - Bijan Kian made his first appearance in court Monday; a second defendant ... prosecutors say he and business partner Bijan Kian took hundreds of ... In fact, Flynn had called a senior transition official at Trump's Florida resort, ...
Ex-associates of former Trump aide Michael Flynn indicted in Turkey ...
https://www.cnbc.com/.../ex-associates-of-former-trump-aide-michael-flynn-indicted-i...
and Kamil Alptekin were charged in U.S. District Court in Eastern ... A former business of President Donald first national ... Kian served on team, in the division related to the Office ...Dec 17, 2018 - Bijan KianpartnerTrump'sTrump's transition
Former Michael Flynn Business Associates Indicted in Turkey ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/flynn-turkey-bijan-kian.html
Dec 17, 2018 - Two former business associates of Michael T. Flynn, President Trump's ... Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, ... with the Russian ambassador during the transition after the 2016 election.
Bijan Kian - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijan_Kian
Bijan R. Kian, sometimes written , is an Iranian-American businessman. He has ... Kian was a of retired United States Army Lieutenant General ... the incoming administration's team on matters relating to the ... aide was key player in Turkish work.Bijan RafiekianpartnerMichael FlynnTrumptransitionTrump transitionFlynn's
Flynn's ex-business associates charged with illegal lobbying - AP News
https://www.apnews.com/6e4dfd935c4a408b8383402f4d9a54e9
Dec 17, 2018 - (AP) — Two business associates of Michael Flynn, President Donald ... Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin are accused in an indictment of conspiring to ... Rafiekian, a one-time business partnerof former National Security Adviser ... On Monday, Kian, a former Trump transition official whose full name is Bijan ...
This Trump-endorsed conspiracy theory about Michael Flynn just had ...
https://thinkprogress.org/michael-flynn-donald-trump-robert-mueller-turkey-erdogan-...
, a member of team, has been charged with ... It's been a year since , President Donald 's former ... when the former national security adviser's business was charged ...Dec 17, 2018 - Bijan KianTrump's transitionMichael FlynnTrumppartner
==
House Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of moving toward transferring highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of U.S. law. Critics say the deal could endanger national security while enriching close allies of President Trump. Saudi Arabia is considering building as many as 16 nuclear power plants by 2030, but many critics fear the kingdom could use the technology to develop nuclear weapons and trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California and Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter with ProPublica. Arnsdorf first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017. His reporting was cited in the House report.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: House Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of moving toward transferring highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of U.S. law. Critics say the deal could endanger national security while enriching close allies of President Trump. Saudi Arabia is considering building as many as 16 nuclear power plants by 2030, but many critics fear the kingdom could use the technology to develop nuclear weapons and trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. During an interview with 60 Minutes last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made clear that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would do the same.
CROWN PRINCE MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN: [translated] Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb. But without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee issued an interim report on the proposed Saudi deal, after multiple whistleblowers came forward accusing several top White House advisers and Trump allies of attempting to push through the transfer of the nuclear technology despite legal and ethical warnings. At the center of the controversy is the company IP3, which was formed to help U.S. companies build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, in what they dubbed a “Middle East Marshall Plan.” Former national security adviser Michael Flynn worked as an adviser for a subsidiary of the firm before entering the White House, and reportedly continued to advocate on behalf of the company once in office. IP3 was co-founded by former Reagan official Bud McFarlane, who pleaded guilty to participating in the Iran-Contra cover-up in 1988.
AMY GOODMAN: The House report also names several other high-ranking Trump officials and allies reportedly involved in the proposed Saudi deal, including Trump’s son-in-law, his adviser Jared Kushner; Energy Secretary Rick Perry; and Trump’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack, who served as chair of Trump’s inaugural committee. According to the report by the congressional committee, the White House may still be discussing the plan.
We’re joined now by two guests. In Washington, D.C., Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley in California joins us. He serves on the House Oversight Committee. And here in New York, Isaac Arnsdorf is with us, a reporter with ProPublica. He first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017. His reporting was cited in the House report.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Congressmember Ro Khanna, let’s begin with you. What are you doing on the House Oversight Committee? What is the leadership doing there?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, it’s a very serious matter. Here’s why people should care. The Saudis have been giving arms to al-Qaeda in Yemen. There’s reports of that. And the last thing we want to do as a country is to transfer nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, which could lead to proliferation and a threat to our security.
And as the journalist you have on has reported, there is a lot of financial conflict of interest here. Tom Barrack, who headed up the president’s inaugural committee to raise $100 million-plus, is also pushing for this deal and has financial interest in the deal. So the Oversight Committee is going to have an investigation to see what are the financial interests that are driving this administration to potentially sell nuclear secrets to the Saudis and what laws have been violated, because, as you know, they have to come to Congress, under the Atomic Energy Act, and offer certain guidelines, which they haven’t done.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Congressman, this attempt by the administration is still very much alive. There was a meeting February 12th, just last week, in the White House between President Trump and some nuclear power developers. What do you know about that meeting and what came out of there?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, we need to find out more facts. That’s why we need an investigation. We need to know who was in that meeting, what was discussed, whether they followed the law that the Atomic Energy Act requires. I mean, even when we transfer nuclear technology to allies, such as India, when George Bush did that, it requires years of process. It requires the consultation of Congress. Here you’re talking about the potential sale of nuclear secrets to the Saudis, who aren’t an ally, who have engaged in the proliferation of weapons that are being used against our own troops, and there is no process for notification of Congress. And you have extensive reporting of people who gain—stand to gain billions of dollars from these investments.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Isaac Arnsdorf, the report of the House Oversight Committee cites your reporting. You did a
piece yesterday. You did a piece last year. Explain first what the “Middle East Marshall Plan” is and then the financial interests of people like, well, Trump, a close confidant, spoke at the Republican National Convention, Tom Barrack, headed the inaugural committee, Michael Flynn and others.
ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, the “Middle East Marshall Plan” was this idea that bubbled up in this company that you mentioned, IP3, which was that they can strengthen economic and political ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia by having the U.S. companies export nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia. And they started lobbying the Trump administration, and initially the Trump transition, about how this would fit with Trump’s ideas about his approach to the Middle East and make America great, restoring American jobs in American industry.
And Tom Barrack was very receptive to this idea, because he was promoting a similar kind of economic outreach to the region. He had a lot of ties with the leaders there. And thanks to the support of Tom Barrack and also General Flynn, who was involved in the project before he was in the White House, the project, the idea, gained a lot of traction in the early days of the administration.
AMY GOODMAN: And take it through to now.
ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, initially, in the first three months, as detailed by the whistleblowers who spoke to the House Oversight Committee, this was really something that was happening in kind of a—kind of being rushed through the National Security Council, and that wasn’t complying with the requirements of the Atomic Energy Act, that requires all kinds of review, because, obviously, the U.S. very tightly controls this technology, because it can be misused to build nuclear weapons.
More recently, the administration has been taking steps to go through that formal process and have negotiations with the Saudis about reaching a formal agreement to share nuclear power technology. If that were to happen, Congress would not have to actually ratify the treaty, but it would have 90 days to pass a joint resolution that could block it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you would think, though, with all the stuff that’s happened in relationship to Saudi Arabia—the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the decision by Congress to cut off military aid to the war in Yemen—that there would be some reconsideration of the Trump administration of such a controversial move. What’s your sense of what the thinking is, going on here?
ISAAC ARNSDORF: Well, there was already a lot of bipartisan skepticism about the idea of sharing nuclear power technology, and calls to tell Congress more about what was happening in those negotiations, or even call off those negotiations. And you’ve certainly seen an escalation, since all the things that you mentioned, of members of both parties saying, “We need to put a pause on this. We need to get some more information.”
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaking last year at a meeting of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Energy Secretary Perry was asked to respond to concerns about nuclear proliferation in light of U.S. negotiations with Saudi Arabia on nuclear energy.
ENERGY SECRETARY RICK PERRY: That goes right to the point that we tried to make with the Saudi crown prince in our conversations with him and with his team, that not only will it send a powerful message if they go into an acceptable one, two, three, with additional protocols, but that we—that they do that, because if they don’t, the message that’s sent—if the Chinese or the Russians, which don’t require any of that, not only does it send the message—I think the wrong message—by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but it also sends the message to the United States that we’re no longer the leader in the world when it comes to civil nuclear power—Westinghouse, best reactor builder in the world. … The second point that we tried to really drive home to the crown prince was that if you want the best reactors in the world, you have to come to the United States, and you have to use Westinghouse.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ro Khanna, the significance of the testimony of Rick Perry, the energy secretary, and his involvement here?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I think it’s a worldview into how the Trump administration looks at the relationship with the Saudis. It’s all about money, whether it’s selling them arms sales or selling nuclear secrets. There’s no moral consideration. I mean, Tom Barrack, as recently as a week ago, was out there defending the Khashoggi murder and defending the Saudi regime’s murder of Khashoggi. He actually said, appallingly, that the United States has done worse, which I totally disagree with. But it gives you a sense of what’s driving this. It’s financial interests. It’s selling interests into the Saudis for money, and no concern for our security and no concern for the morality of the Saudis’ policies.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Isaac, in that clip, the energy secretary referred to the one, two, three. A lot of people are not familiar with that. Could you talk about the legal limitations on what the administration can do or can’t do in terms of transferring nuclear power technology?
ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, that refers to the section of the Atomic Energy Act that requires these negotiations and these agreements before sharing this technology. And what the secretary was describing there is really a very challenging policy problem, where the Saudis want nuclear power—maybe they have a legitimate interest in diversifying their economy from oil, but, as you heard the crown prince describe in the clip that you played, maybe they also want to keep up with their neighbor Iran, with potential military implications. So, the Saudis want nuclear power. They’re pursuing it. If the U.S. doesn’t help them get it, are they going to turn around and go to Russia or China? And then there are going to be even less security assurances than they would have with the U.S. So, that’s a very real policy problem that security experts struggle with.
But what you’re seeing with the Trump administration is that they are arriving at an answer to that policy problem that, based on what we’ve seen out of the House Oversight Committee, was, to a large extent, based on people with conflicts of interest promoting this for other reasons.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to talk about Jared Kushner’s connection to this. The House report states, “In January 2018, Brookfield Business Partners, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, announced its plans to acquire Westinghouse Electric for $4.6 billion. Westinghouse Electric is the bankrupt nuclear services company that is part of IP3’s proposed consortium to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia, and which stands to benefit from the Middle East Marshall Plan. In August 2018, Brookfield Asset Management purchased a partnership stake in 666 Fifth Avenue, a building owned by Jared Kushner’s family company.” Isaac?
ISAAC ARNSDORF: This is especially interesting given that Jared Kushner is on his way to the region very shortly. And there’s a lot of discussion in the House Oversight Committee’s report about materials being prepared for conversations between Kushner and the president, and obviously Jared Kushner has developed a very close relationship with MBS, the crown prince, and was reportedly described as “in his pocket.”
AMY GOODMAN: Ro Khanna, would you like to add to this?
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I would just say we need transparency. But here is one thing that the president and the administration could do to show some distance from the Saudi regime, and that is to sign the War Powers Resolution that will stop U.S. support for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen. As you know, we passed it through the House; next week, the Senate is going to take it up. And I hope that the president will sign it and at least put some distance between U.S. policy with the Saudis. But we need to understand all of the financial interests that administration officials and their friends have with the Saudis and what’s driving our policy.
AMY GOODMAN: One last thing, Congressmember Ro Khanna. You’re a leader in the Congress around the issue of Yemen. Talk about the legislation that was just passed and how getting nuclear power to Saudi Arabia, which could conceivably be turned into nuclear weapons, plays into this picture of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I appreciate your reporting on this. There are nearly 14 million Yemenis who face the potential of famine. That is because the Saudis have been bombing the port cities, and food and medicine isn’t being allowed in. It’s being inspected, and that’s leading to hyperinflation in Yemen. People don’t have food and medicine.
We passed in the House the War Powers Resolution that would stop the U.S. support for the Saudi bombing in Yemen. It’s expected to pass the Senate next week or in the next couple weeks. That will be the first time in the history of this country that the War Powers Resolution has ever passed, since 1973. And what that will do is make it unambiguously clear that the United States doesn’t support the Saudi bombing. As it is, since we passed the House resolution, we’ve seen a temporary ceasefire in the bombing campaign, and some hopeful signs that food and medicine will go in.
I think it would be the exact wrong message for us to be selling nuclear secrets to the Saudis, especially given the reporting that the Saudis are transferring some of these weapons to al-Qaeda in Yemen. And in terms of the point that Russia or China may supply the Saudis, the United States has prevented that type of action when we want to. We prevented it in Iran. We’re trying to prevent it in other countries. There’s no reason the United States should tolerate any sale of nuclear weapons to the Saudis.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there but continue to follow this issue. Ro Khanna, Democratic congressmember from California, member of the House Oversight Committee, that’s going to be investigating this Saudi nuclear issue. Also with us, in New York, Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter with ProPublica, who first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017, his reporting cited in the House report. And we’ll link to your latest report, “House Panel Probes Trump Advisers’ Push for Saudi Nuclear Deal.”
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll be joined by a man whose father possibly faces the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. He’s in prison
==
11/16 nyt
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has been much more outspoken about militant Islamists than he has about China and North Korea, the two main strategic concerns of the United States in Asia.
That has left scholars and analysts looking for clues about his views on Asia. A book published in July for which he was a co-author, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” offers some tea leaves. The half-dozen mentions of China and North Korea are couched in generalities, but there are glimpses into what the general thinks of the two nations.
General Flynn wrote that the United States needed to confront a global “alliance” between “radical Islamists” and the governments of China and North Korea, as well as Russia.
China and North Korea are officially secular Communist states, and China has blamed religious extremists for violence in Muslim areas of its Xinjiang region. In the book, General Flynn acknowledges that people may find the idea of an alliance between the Communist nations and jihadists to be strange, but asserts that it exists. He does not go into details on the alliance.
General Flynn is about to take on one of the most important foreign policy jobs in the United States government. He will be expected to coordinate policy-making agencies, manage competing voices and act as Mr. Trump’s main adviser, and perhaps arbiter, on foreign policy.
By appointing General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer, Mr. Trump has signaled that he intends to prioritize policy on the Middle East and jihadist groups, though the Obama administration seems to have stressed to Mr. Trump the urgency of dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program.
General Flynn is an outspoken critic of political Islam and has advocated a global campaign led by the United States against “radical Islam.” He once wrote in a Twitter post that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”
Based on his book, that campaign is the framework through which General Flynn sees China and North Korea. In the introduction, he wrote that radical Islamists “are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.”
The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”
The general expanded on his definition of the anti-Western alliance: “The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups.”
“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.
General Flynn mentioned reports that North Korea had cooperated with Syria and Iran on nuclear programs and trade. Iran is the “linchpin” of the global anti-Western network, he wrote.
The general also wrote that there was a common ideology that bound the nations and militant Islamists together. “There are many similarities between these dangerous and vicious radicals and the totalitarian movements of the last century,” he wrote. “No surprise that we are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told.”
....
==
==
11/16 nyt
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has been much more outspoken about militant Islamists than he has about China and North Korea, the two main strategic concerns of the United States in Asia.
That has left scholars and analysts looking for clues about his views on Asia. A book published in July for which he was a co-author, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” offers some tea leaves. The half-dozen mentions of China and North Korea are couched in generalities, but there are glimpses into what the general thinks of the two nations.
General Flynn wrote that the United States needed to confront a global “alliance” between “radical Islamists” and the governments of China and North Korea, as well as Russia.
China and North Korea are officially secular Communist states, and China has blamed religious extremists for violence in Muslim areas of its Xinjiang region. In the book, General Flynn acknowledges that people may find the idea of an alliance between the Communist nations and jihadists to be strange, but asserts that it exists. He does not go into details on the alliance.
General Flynn is about to take on one of the most important foreign policy jobs in the United States government. He will be expected to coordinate policy-making agencies, manage competing voices and act as Mr. Trump’s main adviser, and perhaps arbiter, on foreign policy.
By appointing General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer, Mr. Trump has signaled that he intends to prioritize policy on the Middle East and jihadist groups, though the Obama administration seems to have stressed to Mr. Trump the urgency of dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program.
General Flynn is an outspoken critic of political Islam and has advocated a global campaign led by the United States against “radical Islam.” He once wrote in a Twitter post that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”
Based on his book, that campaign is the framework through which General Flynn sees China and North Korea. In the introduction, he wrote that radical Islamists “are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.”
The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”
The general expanded on his definition of the anti-Western alliance: “The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups.”
“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.
General Flynn mentioned reports that North Korea had cooperated with Syria and Iran on nuclear programs and trade. Iran is the “linchpin” of the global anti-Western network, he wrote.
The general also wrote that there was a common ideology that bound the nations and militant Islamists together. “There are many similarities between these dangerous and vicious radicals and the totalitarian movements of the last century,” he wrote. “No surprise that we are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told.”
....
==
mma
Over the past year, Sean Hannity and the cast of Fox News figures have deployed numerous theories in an effort to discredit and lay groundwork for an authoritarian response to the Mueller investigation. From referring to the investigation as “witch hunt” to claiming collusion isn’t a crime, the extended Fox News universe has tried it all.
When it comes to Trump's former National Security Adviser, Fox figures have taken to accusing the FBI of duping Michael Flynn into lying. Pro-Trump media have spent most of 2018 floating conspiracy theories about Flynn's guilty plea.
Those conspiracy theories have now been debunked. A federal judge did not throw out Flynn's guilty plea on Tuesday. Flynn and his lawyers instead conceded on the record that he knowingly lied to the FBI and did not believe his rights had been violated. Fox News personalities were forced deploy new spins on the situation. Each propagandist took their turn trying out new theories, seemingly throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick.
Just before the hearing, Fox guest Matt Schlapp compared Flynn's actions to "pulling off mattress tags, jaywalking, parking tickets."
Things really picked up speed after the hearing. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett claimed that Judge Emmet Sullivan begged Flynn to throw out his guilty plea, and when he didn’t, the judge began to lash out at Flynn. As Matt Gertz explained, this makes no sense. Lou Dobbs took a simpler route, simply bashing the judge. And fittingly, Fox & Friends utilized the most convenient strategy: virtually ignore the issue entirely. Fox & Friends dedicated less than five minutes to the Flynn case during their Wednesday broadcast.
Gertz summed up Fox’s efforts: “If Fox propagandists had any standards or capacity for honesty, the Sullivan and Flynn saga might cause them to re-examine much of their unhinged Mueller coverage. They don't, so it won't -- and it's on to the next conspiracy theory.”
Where do we go from here? Fox is already floating a pardon for Flynn.
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/michael-flynn-associates-indicted-lobbying-turkey
Monday, The New York Times reported that two former business partners of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were indicted in federal court:
Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, were unsealed on Monday in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom. The two men were charged with a conspiracy to violate federal lobbying rules, and Mr. Alptekin also was charged with making false statements to F.B.I. investigators.
The indictment is further evidence of a broad crackdown on unregistered foreign lobbying growing from the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who has investigated foreign flows of money from Ukraine, Turkey and other countries designed to manipulate decision-making in Washington. Mr. Mueller referred the Turkey case to prosecutors in Northern Virginia earlier this year.
Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe last year, and who Mueller told a court has provided "substantial assistance" to the investigation, has been unsettlingly close to the Turkish government. In 2016, he wrote an editorial attacking Fethullah Gulen, a dissident cleric living in the United States who was accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of masterminding a failed coup attempt against him. Flynn and his son were even accused of plotting a conspiracy to kidnap Gulen and hand him over to Turkish authorities.
Prosecutors allege that Flynn and Kian sought to lobby members of Congress to extradite Gulen, and Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with ties to Erdoğan, helped finance the project.
It is unclear whether this scheme had any impact on U.S. policy. But the Turkish foreign minister claims Trump administration officials are now working on a plan to extradite Gulen, and reportedly even considered doing so as a bargaining chip to persuade Erdoğan to back down from his standoff with Saudi Arabia over the suspected political murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The idea of the U.S. handing over a dissident of an autocratic regime to ease international outcry against an atrocity committed by another autocratic regime would be horrifying on a number of levels.
If Flynn's associates illegally worked to influence any of this, they must be held to account — and the public deserves answers.
==
butina lavrov
---
kt mcf
McFarland’s interview with Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff members went ahead, as planned, on July 19th, even though she couldn’t review her e-mails or calendars beforehand. During the closed-door session, staffers asked McFarland if she took part in any phone calls with Russian officials during the transition. According to officials, McFarland answered that she served as a note-taker during transition phone calls with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian foreign minister,Sergey Lavrov. After the interview, committee staff members checked and found only one call, in November, between Trump and Putin, which was before McFarland joined the transition, and no call with Lavrov. Aides said that McFarland had botched her answers. She was forced to send a clarification letter to the committee, acknowledging that her recollections of the calls were mistaken.
On July 20th, McFarland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her confirmation hearing. That same month, Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, had given McFarland a series of written questions, including one about whether she had ever discussed “contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak directly with General Flynn?” McFarland’s curt written response read, “I am not aware of any of the issues or events as described above.”
==
long
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html
nyt
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Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.
In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”
They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”
But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.
To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.
Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.
Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.
Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.
In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations and passed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.
The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.
“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”
The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.
“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”
By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.
Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.
F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”
Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.
Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.
“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.
In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.
“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.
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The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]
“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.
Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.
It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.
More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.
“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.
As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.
A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”
Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.
At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.
Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.
And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.
See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.
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https://www.alternet.org/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-explains-how-we-finally-know-why-mike-flynn-lied
As the Mueller investigation has moved along, names like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen have moved to center stage.
On Friday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow went back to the start of the saga, when Donald Trump staffers like Michael Flynn and his aide K. T. McFarland were the focus of investigation and speculation.
"The big question about Flynn—and this has been raised over and over again by critics of the Mueller investigation—why did Mike Flynn lie about this?" Maddow asked. "There's always been something hard to figure out about the Flynn case... why did Mike Flynn lie about this stuff?"
Flynn was fired from his job as national security adviser after he apparently lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his communication with Russian officials. But this was far from his only lie, Maddow said.
"Mike Flynn also lied about those conversations he had with Russia talking about sanctions," she said. "He lied in public. He lied to reporters. He lied to the FBI. Why were they lying about it? I mean, on its face, they didn't need to. It would make sense that they'd be talking about sanctions to the Russian government conceivably. They're the top two security officials in the National Security Agency for the incoming administration. Obviously there is going to be a change on the policy. It's not that weird. But they lied about it."
Because Flynn and McFarland lied, Maddow said, "they were both compromised by Russia from the very beginning."
"Because, of course, Russia knew the truth, right?" she said. "Russia was on the other end of the phone. They knew that these guys had been having conversations about Russia, right? It wasn't secret from Russia. But it was being kept secret from the American public, the American press, the American Congress, and even the FBI."
At this point, Maddow circled back to the Trump Tower Moscow project, which Cohen and others lied about—and which came to an abrupt halt on the very same day that it was revealed Russian hackers were seeking to influence the election.
"The story about Russian government hackers being exposed for their role in trying to get into our elections—that was the reason they stopped working on the Trump Tower project that day. The secret project they'd been working on for many, many, many months including direct contact with the Kremlin and planned travel to Moscow stopped that day. Why? What was the connection between those two things?" Maddow asked.
"If the big picture Russian dream here is to have their very own president of the U.S.A., if their dream is to compromise an American presidential candidate so that candidate is beholden to them and then install that compromised candidate as president, then the Trump Tower Moscow project which compromises Trump and the election interference campaign [ruins it]," she said. "Install the candidate, and then leverage the candidate to lift sanctions and free Russia to do what it wants. Now, over this past week, we suddenly can see the full plan."
Watch the segments below.
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TRMS: artemko gave ukraine plan tio m cohen who said he gave it to flynn but also said not? 5/18
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https://www.alternet.org/bombshell-gop-report-says-mike-flynn-went-infamous-russian-spymasters-house-2015-very-productive
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s team said that Friday’s news does not show any wrongdoing.
“As the congressman has acknowledged before, the meeting was a dinner with two longtime acquaintances ― Manafort and Weber ― from back in his White House and early congressional days. The three reminisced and talked mostly about politics. The subject of Ukraine came up in passing,” Ken Grubbs, Rohrabacher’s spokesman, told HuffPost in an email. “It is no secret that Manafort represented [pro-Putin Ukrainian President] Viktor Yanukovych’s interests, but as chairman of the relevant European subcommittee, the congressman has listened to all points of view on Ukraine. We may only speculate that Manafort needed to report back to his client that Ukraine was discussed.”
Still, Rohrabacher has emerged as an important figure in the investigations into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to help President Donald Trump and hurt his rival Hillary Clinton.
One of a mere handful of well-known GOP figures in Washington who were enthusiastic about Trump before his election victory, Rohrabacher was once under consideration to be the new administration’s secretary of state. He has cast doubt on the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about the election and said voters benefited from the hacksof Clinton campaign messages. Last year, he met with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, the group that released the stolen Clinton materials, and said he wanted to give Trump information proving the hack was not committed by Russia. Soon afterward, top Republicans curtailed his powers on his influential subcommittee. And in 2016, Rohrabacher had meetings with Trump adviser Michael Flynn ― who is now cooperating with Mueller ― and with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya ― who is known for a Trump Tower meeting she had with Donald Trump Jr., Manafort and others hoping that Russia would share information damaging to Clinton.
The 15-term congressman is courting controversy even as he faces what observers describe as his toughest re-election race yet in a California district that seems to be turning more liberal. He appears unfazed.
“My constituents couldn’t care less about this,” Rohrabacher told The New York Times last year. “They are not concerned about Russia.”
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House Intelligence Committee issued seven subpoenas Wednesday, ramping up its investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and into whether names of President Trump’s associates were improperly revealed in classified intelligence reports.
Subpoenas went to Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and to the president’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen. The Senate Intelligence Committee and a federal grand jury in Virginia also have issued subpoenas for Flynn’s business records.
In a statement, the House committee said it had issued subpoenas seeking “testimony, personal documents and business records” from Flynn and Cohen. It also approved subpoenas for the Flynn Intel Group LLC and for Michael D. Cohen & Associates PC.
“We hope and expect that anyone called to testify or provide documents will comply with that request, so that we may gain all the information within the scope of our investigation. We will continue to pursue this investigation wherever the facts may lead,” Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas), the committee chairman, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), the ranking member, said in a statement.