Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Go to the state capital and 'confront' lawmakers with 'evidence of the illegitimate steal'

In the weeks after the 2020 election, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser, was a key figure in efforts to subvert the election outcome. In recent interviews and speeches, he and an associate are warning that this year’s election will be stolen from Mr. Trump, advising supporters to take action to prevent a theft and vowing retribution once Mr. Trump is back in power, reported The New York Times.

At the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a far-right event in Pennsylvania this month, Mr. Flynn told the crowd that after a Trump victory: “Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”

At the same event, Ivan Raiklin, a close associate of Mr. Flynn’s who serves on the board of directors of Mr. Flynn’s organization America’s Future, urged Trump supporters in Pennsylvania to go to the state capital, Harrisburg, and “confront” their state representatives with “evidence of the illegitimate steal” after the election if Mr. Trump loses.

Mr. Raiklin also called on Republican-held state legislatures to withhold their electors in the event of a Trump loss that Republicans consider illegitimate.

“We run the elections,” he said. “We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate.”

The maneuver Mr. Raiklin laid out appears to defy the Electoral Count Reform Act, the bipartisan law passed in 2022. The law was meant to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s attempt to exploit the Electoral College vote to overturn his defeat in 2020. It states that only state executives, not state legislatures, can certify the slates of electors that determine the winner.

But the notion of withholding electors has been circulating in some corners of the right. Mr. Raiklin laid out similar plans days later in North Carolina and at a county Republican Party event in Maryland. He argued that North Carolina’s legislature should preemptively allocate its electoral votes to Mr. Trump, even before the state’s ballots were counted, on account of hurricane-related disruptions.

Appearing at the Maryland event with Mr. Raiklin, Representative Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, said the plan “makes a lot of sense,” before backtracking on Friday and saying in a statement that “every legal vote should be counted.”

Mr. Flynn and Mr. Raiklin, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, have been prominent exponents of false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election for years. But they have recently focused on specific tactics to avoid what they predict will be the theft of the 2024 election.

 In a September interview on a podcast dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Flynn applauded right-wing activists who are surveilling election infrastructure as the “modern-day Minutemen of this cold civil war that we are currently facing,” a reference to the Revolutionary War militia.

The extent of Mr. Flynn’s current relationship with Mr. Trump is unclear. The former president fired him less than a month into his presidency for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and to federal agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. But in his last months in office, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Flynn a full federal pardon.

On Dec. 18, 2020, Mr. Flynn and several associates met with Mr. Trump at the White House and tried to persuade him to use federal law enforcement and military personnel to seize voting machines in an effort to hold onto power, a meeting that has been a focus of investigations into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

To read more CLICK HERE

 

No comments:

Post a Comment