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.
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.
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