Update to First Trump White House Documents Reveal A ‘Smoking Gun’ of Seditious Conspiracy (Updated) And Rolling Stone: New Emails Tie Fringe Conspiracy Theorist Phil Waldron To AZ Republican Legislators In Plot To Subvert The Election.
Politico reports, Bernard Kerik told Jan. 6 panel that former Army colonel came up with idea to seize voting machines:
A former member of President Donald Trump’s legal team told the Jan. 6 committee that former Army colonel Phil Waldron first came up with the idea of Trump issuing an executive order to seize voting machines, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Earlier this month, Bernie Kerik — who worked with Rudy Giuliani on Trump’s legal efforts to find evidence of voter fraud — told the select committee that Phil Waldron originated the scheme, which would almost certainly have been illegal. A person familiar with Kerik’s testimony, who was not authorized to discuss it publicly, described it in detail to POLITICO.
Last week, the select committee obtained a copy of a draft executive order written for Trump. The order, which Trump did not issue, would have directed the Defense secretary to seize voting machines. It also would have given the secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election — a timeline that would have expired a month after Biden’s inauguration day. POLITICO published the text of the draft order last week.
Waldron is best known for circulating a 38-page PowerPoint presentation that urged Trump to declare a state of emergency in the wake of the election, as The Washington Post has detailed. That presentation found its way into the inbox of Mark Meadows while he was White House chief of staff. Meadows passed the presentation to the select committee last year, and his lawyer has said Meadows did nothing with it. Waldron has said he briefed members of Congress on the findings detailed in the presentation, including claims about voter fraud.
Kerik and Waldron both worked with Giuliani on Trump’s post-election outside legal team. POLITICO could not independently confirm Kerik’s claim to the committee about Waldron and the voting machines, but Waldron is a key focus of the committee. On Dec. 16, the committee subpoenaed him for documents and testimony, citing the PowerPoint presentation. Kerik’s testimony to the committee came after investigators issued the subpoena.
Additionally, Kerik discussed friction regarding Trump attorney Sidney Powell, as well as financial frustrations. He noted that he struggled even to get reimbursement for his stays at the Willard hotel [Coup command center], and that he was paying for his lawyer out of his own pocket.
This has Trump-pardoned Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn written all over it. Remember that on December 17, 2020 Trump’s former national security advisor says the president should impose martial law to force new elections in battleground states:
Former national security advisor Michael Flynn said this week that President Donald Trump should impose martial law to force new elections in battleground states that he lost.
Speaking with the pro-Trump network Newsmax on Thursday night, Flynn said the president should deploy the military and “seize” voting machines to hold a new election.
“There is no way in the world we are going to be able to move forward as a nation,” said Flynn, who was recently pardoned by Trump after pleading guilty to a felony count of lying to the FBI. “He could immediately, on his order, seize every single one of these machines, on his order.”
“He could order the, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states,” Flynn told Newsmax. “I mean, it’s not unprecedented. These people are out there talking about martial law like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times.”
The former national security advisor’s remarks are not based in reality.
The draft executive order is dated Dec. 16, 2020, and is consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president. On Dec. 18, 2020, Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office.
In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios.
Reuters reports, The military-intelligence veterans who helped lead Trump’s campaign of disinformation:
Army General Michael Flynn and an Army Reserve colonel named Phil Waldron worked together on secret projects in [Afghanistan and Iraq], Waldron said. When Flynn was appointed to run the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, Waldron said he worked at the DIA’s clandestine service.
Flynn was an intel expert. Waldron’s specialty was psychological operations, or PSYOPs – targeting foreign adversaries, as an Army field manual describes, “to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately, the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.”
Now the two military veterans, along with at least two other retired and reserve officers, are engaged in a new mission, this time with a domestic target: They are central to the far-right effort to persuade Americans that the 2020 election was stolen from then-President Donald Trump.
For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy. They pitched false accusations to lawmakers and the public about how the election had been compromised, pushed spurious lawsuits to challenge its outcome, and bankrolled efforts to conduct partisan audits of the results. They provided briefings to members of Congress on methods for overturning the election, and worked aside some of the leading actors in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement.
[T]he military men’s false assertions are dangerous, said Roger Herbert, a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.
“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Herbert. “But when those conspiracies contend that the current government of the United States is illegitimate, those primal fears of a standing army ready to turn its guns inward and topple our government are justifiably awakened. In short, these people are doing great harm to the legitimacy and efficacy of our military.”
Flynn did not respond to requests for comment for this article. A Trump spokeswoman did not respond to an interview request about the role military figures have played in his quest to overturn the election.
One Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, is now facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated Reserve rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters.
[T]he veterans’ false claims shifted over time. They have pinned Trump’s loss on actions by the Chinese government and voting technology companies, alleged misconduct by U.S. state and local election officials and said hackers had used the internet to change votes after they were cast. They have blamed old-school ballot stuffing, perhaps involving dead voters or Venezuelan interests.
Though bogus, their claims and similar ones propagated by others have had major impact, inspiring Trump followers who participated in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and providing rhetorical fuel for continued efforts to discredit Joe Biden’s victory. Despite no evidence to support the claims, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans believe the election was stolen, a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October found.
The military-intelligence officers’ battle is part of a larger Republican movement that has led disgruntled Trump voters to endorse threats of violence as a means to regaining power. As Reuters has documented, Trump supporters are waging a campaign of intimidation against election workers around the country. In a review of more than 800 emails, calls and online posts made by backers of the ex-president, Reuters found that some of the military veterans’ theories have been referenced in hostile messages to local election officials and featured in public campaigns attacking the vote’s integrity.
A false claim pushed by Flynn and his cohorts that voting machines were hacked to steal votes from Trump is a common theme in many angry messages. The machines “are rigged to elect only those who care nothing for the people,” said an email accusing election officials in Yavapai County, Arizona, of complicity. Invoking General Flynn by name, the writer added, “every lie will be revealed, every traitor will be punished.”
Efforts by Flynn to help Trump overturn Biden’s victory have been the subject of extensive reporting by a number of U.S. media outlets. The Reuters examination of Flynn and his colleagues provides new details about the origins of the former intelligence officials’ collaboration and the extent to which they worked together in a bid to undo the 2020 election.
The reporting, based on interviews with participants, military ethicists and others, plus an examination of Reuters’ database of threats against election officials, reveals how Flynn drafted Waldron and others to actively contest the 2020 vote. Flynn and his small circle were distinctive because their military credentials provided a patina of respectability to even the most far-fetched claims.
Among the military veterans to play a role in “Stop the Steal” were:
Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor in 2017, who was involved in pushing the most dramatic of conspiracy claims. He urged the president to deploy the military to overturn the election in December 2020, then went on a public speaking campaign sowing doubts about the vote and urging states to conduct their own reviews.
Waldron, who insists Trump won. He gained attention last week when the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6 riot revealed it was in possession of a PowerPoint presentation he’d shown to U.S. lawmakers outlining methods for overturning the election. Earlier, he lobbied state officials and spoke on rightwing media about his stolen-election theories. Waldron said Flynn drafted him to go public, saying, “No one else can do it. It needs to be done, so go ahead and do it!”
Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.
Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence and who claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent. After the election, Keshel told Reuters he contacted Flynn on LinkedIn and they began collaborating. Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim, saying the report came from a “highly respected Army intelligence captain.”
Keshel told Reuters he stands by that assessment but never called for violence. “Personally, I believe the election was compromised,” he said, adding, “I can’t control anybody else.”
Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator. Raiklin has said he worked with Flynn. Keshel said he reached out to the general to share his concerns, and the two worked together in the weeks after the election. Waldron said Flynn pushed him to go public with his research.
Keshel’s work helped fuel calls by Trump followers in many states for audits of the election results. His analysis, which provided no documented evidence of fraud, was discredited by political scientists, statistical experts and Republican and Democratic election officials. In a post on Telegram, Keshel himself described his study as “lenient.”
* * *
In the days after Biden won the 2020 election, Flynn had set up camp at the sprawling South Carolina estate of lawyer L. Lin Wood, another supporter of Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
Wood told Reuters that Flynn and Powell arrived shortly after the election. So did Keshel, then working as a technology salesman. Flynn and Keshel stayed through Thanksgiving, where Flynn carved the turkey.
The group, operating from a sitting room on Wood’s estate, created something of a clearinghouse for election fraud claims. “They all appeared to be working together,” Wood said. [Seditious conspiracy.]
In an interview, Keshel said he spent his time “scanning the numbers and helping write affidavits” for lawsuits Powell was preparing. “There wasn’t a lot of sleep going on there,” Keshel said.
A clandestine operative goes public
Three weeks after the election, Giuliani and his associates pushed a new strategy: attempting to persuade conservative state legislatures to simply disregard the election results and declare Trump the winner of their states’ Electoral College votes. The Constitution, Trump’s team argued, granted this power.
With Pennsylvania a focus, Flynn dispatched Waldron to a state Senate hearing held by Republican lawmakers there.
For decades, Waldron had operated behind the scenes. So, he told Reuters, in November 2020 he initially resisted going public with his findings. But he said Flynn and Giuliani pressed him to testify about stolen votes. “Rudy’s team had asked me three times.”
On November 25, wearing a blue jacket, blue shirt, striped tie and blue COVID mask, Waldron appeared in person at the Pennsylvania Senate hearing to air his fraud claims. He cited his military credentials. “I’m a retired Army colonel, 30 years,” he said. Then he claimed all the voting machine technology in the United States could be hacked.
“Our experts and other academics,” Waldron continued, “believe that up to 1.2 million Pennsylvania votes could have been altered or fraudulent.” Only a “detailed forensic analysis of the actual machines and software will truly show how many Pennsylvania citizens have had their civil rights violated.”
At the end of the hearing, President Trump joined in on the speaker phone. “I’ve been watching the hearing on OAN,” the far-right television news channel, Trump said. “I’m in the Oval Office right now, and it’s very interesting to see what’s going on.”
Waldron said he visited the White House later that day with Giuliani and others. “That was great!” he said Trump told them.
The White House focus turned to pushing Republican-led legislatures in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia to replace Biden electors with those for Trump. “That whole strategy started from that Pennsylvania hearing,” Waldron said.
That same day, Trump pardoned Flynn in the Russia inquiry case.
In the end, no state legislatures swapped out their electors. Now Flynn helped pitch a new plan to Trump.
Election by military might [A Coup D’Etat]
On December 17, Flynn told the rightwing cable network Newsmax that the president could use the armed forces to conduct a do-over election in several swing states he lost. Trump, he said, “could take military capabilities and place them in those states and basically re-run an election in those states.”
A day later, Flynn, Powell and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump at the White House. They urged the president to deploy the U.S. government to make digital copies of the hard drives in some voting equipment to investigate the machines and conduct recounts in at least six counties, Byrne told Reuters. Trump was receptive to the idea, said Kleinhendler, the lawyer working with Powell, but the government never took those steps. It is unclear why.
At the same time, Army reserve officer Raiklin, a Flynn ally and former Green Beret, was pushing election fraud theories on social media and on rightwing websites. Raiklin describes himself as a constitutional lawyer, but he doesn’t appear to practice that area of law. A Reuters review found he has not argued such a case or written scholarly articles on the topic.
On a December 7 podcast and in tweets, Raiklin laid out a plan to reverse the vote, alleging conspiracies involving Pence, intelligence agencies, big tech, China and the postal service. He urged Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system” and used the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn. “We the people are going to force this plan on them,” he said.
Raiklin’s efforts drew attention on Twitter. On December 22, Raiklin tweeted a copy of a two-page open memo to Trump, detailing “Operation Pence Card.” The pitch: Pence, acting as “the Representative of the Federal Seat of Government,” would reject votes from states where Trump alleged fraud, flipping the election. The memo was retweeted 23,700 times.
Raiklin’s conduct is now under government scrutiny. The Army Reserve’s chief spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Simon Flake, said Raiklin’s superiors are “aware of the situation and investigating,” but that privacy rules restrict him from providing details.
Flake added: “The U.S. Army Reserve follows the Department of Defense’s long standing policy in regards to forbidding service member involvement in partisan political campaigns to avoid the perception of DOD sponsorship, approval, or endorsement of any partisan political candidate, campaign, or cause.” Raiklin did not answer questions from Reuters about the inquiry.
On New Year’s Day, Keshel gave an interview carried on YouTube in which he said the election’s results were “definitely irregular” because they disrupted what he said were historical trends in U.S. elections. “I served one tour in Afghanistan … with a primary focus on understanding enemy activity,” he said. Now, he said, his focus is on unearthing the election’s “data irregularities.”
Conspiracy PowerPoint
In early January, Waldron said he flew to Washington bearing a 36-page PowerPoint presentation he said he helped prepare. Its goal was to convince Congress and the White House the election was stolen and Pence should stop the certification of Biden’s win. This month, the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, produced a copy of that PowerPoint in response to a subpoena.
Waldron’s presentation was called “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN.” He said he briefed legislators on Capitol Hill on January 5, explaining a document whose recommendations included, “Declare National Security Emergency” and “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”
Waldron’s pitch mirrored arguments being made by Trump, who at the time was publicly urging Pence to refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes from a handful of swing states and either declare Trump the winner or not declare a winner at all. Waldron proposed going further, such as deploying U.S. marshals and the military to seize ballots nationwide. “A Trusted Lead Counter will be appointed with authority from the POTUS” to recount all the votes, the PowerPoint said.
“US Marshals will immediately secure all ballots and provide a protective perimeter around the locations in all 50 states,” the PowerPoint said. “The federalized National Guard in each state will be supplied detailed processes and be responsible for counting each legitimate paper ballot.”
On January 5, Flynn told a pro-Trump crowd at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., “We will not stand for a lie!” The House committee investigating the January 6 riot has subpoenaed Flynn to testify about his efforts to overturn the election.
A week after the attack, Waldron told Reuters he blamed Pence for the chaos. Pence’s offense, he said, was to refuse to go along with the plans to block Biden’s certification. That was the riot’s primary cause, he said. “You could logically argue that he had more to do with inciting the riot than anyone else on that stage,” he said.
The Secret Service had to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol complex during the riot. Videos show some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol chanting, “hang Mike Pence.”
A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.
Congress’ votes in the early morning hours of January 7 to ratify Biden’s victory brought an end to nearly all of the Trump camp’s efforts in the courts to keep him in power.
“After that, it was pencils down,” said Powell colleague Kleinhendler. “There was just nothing else to do.”
The Flynn circle wasn’t ready to let go.
Arizona audit
Everett Stern, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania who runs a private intelligence firm, said he was approached in April by two Republican political operatives who urged him to gather information on elected officials to help prompt a state audit of the 2020 vote. They also helped connect him with Raiklin, said Stern, who said the operatives told him they were acting at Flynn’s direction. Stern said he declined to take part because he viewed the approach as an “extortion” attempt and alerted the FBI, which said it had no comment.
In Arizona, Republicans in the state Senate pushed for a “forensic audit” of the vote in the state’s largest county.
Arizona’s Senate president, Karen Fann, turned to Florida cybersecurity contractor Doug Logan to do the job. Logan’s firm, Cyber Ninjas, had no experience running audits or elections, though Logan said he had done previous work reviewing 2020 election disputes. Logan told Reuters he wasn’t sure how his company was picked for the task; he said he didn’t submit a proposal until Fann contacted him.
Logan did have connections, though. He confirmed to Reuters he was among those who huddled with Flynn at Wood’s estate after the election. And he received an endorsement from Waldron, who called him “very reputable” in a text message to Sen. Fann before she selected him to run the audit, records released in a public records lawsuit show.
The Arizona Senate audit cost $5.7 million. It was largely financed by Flynn’s team.
Nearly $1 million came from a nonprofit called America’s Future, which until then had been largely dormant, Internal Revenue Service filings show. Flynn now chairs its board. His brother Joe Flynn was a director. And his sister, Mary O’Neill, was executive director.
Joe Flynn declined to comment. O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.
Reminder: Army now acknowledges the brother of Michael Flynn was a part of Army response to Capitol riot: “The Army is now acknowledging that Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, the brother of President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was in the room for one of the key January 6 phone calls in which DC government and US Capitol Police were asking for National Guard troops to quell the unfolding violence at the US Capitol.” The Washington Post was the first to report Flynn’s participation in the call.
Michael and Joe Flynn also briefly served as directors of Powell’s nonprofit Defending The Republic, which kicked in $550,000 for the Arizona audit.
Another $3.5 million came from The America Project, whose website features a video from Flynn declaring, “Our great nation was under a new type of attack.” Joe Flynn is one of the nonprofit’s three board members, and Flynn its senior strategic advisor.
The America Project’s chief executive, former Overstock CEO Byrne, told Reuters Flynn “asked me to come down and set this up.” Flynn “is a driving force” to continue fighting the results of the 2020 election, said the group’s operations officer, Carl Johnson. The America Project told Florida regulators it expected to raise $50 million this year, records show. Byrne said the group raised closer to $10 million, mostly from him.
The resulting Arizona audit featured reviewers with little training who scrutinized ballots using procedures that were widely criticized by election experts; Logan defended the auditing work. The review confirmed Biden won.
This November 19, retired captain Keshel and current reserve lieutenant colonel Raiklin were featured speakers at an “election integrity” rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. Citing polls saying a growing number of rightwing Americans believe the election was rigged, Raiklin and Keshel told a crowd of about 75 that their movement is succeeding.
Noting his legal and military intelligence background, Raiklin laid out what he called a “deep state” conspiracy theory of a stolen election. “I connected these dots,” Raiklin told the crowd.
Keshel is now a paid consultant for The America Project.
If Putin-loving Michael Flynn is doing all of this on behalf of his pal Putin, now we are talking about foreign election interference and treason.
UPDATE: While Arizona’s partisan hack Attorney General Mark Brnovich aka “Nunchucks” (or is it numbnuts?) and his crack Election Integrity Unit (EIU) do not appear to be actively investigating this seditious conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election, the National Archives Inspector General is conducting an investigaion into the fake Republican electors from Arizona who forged official-looking documents and submitted them to the National Archives. Federal fraud case against Trump’s fake electors revealed in documents:
Politico researcher and reporter Nicholas Wu appeared on MSNBC Monday to reveal a detail buried in a recent report about the fake electors and the documents submitted to the U.S. National Archives from at least five states. Two other states provided the caveat that they would only be valid if the Democratic electors were struck down.
According to the documents obtained by Wu, due to a Freedom of Information Act request, the National Archives launched their own fraud investigation into the documents submitted to them claiming to be “elected” when they weren’t. Not only did this happen in multiple states, but they even attempted to use an official seal of the state in documents that a Watergate lawyer said fell under “forgery” violations.
Speaking to Rachel Maddow, Wu explained that these federal probes add to state investigations and two attorneys general referring the fake electors to the Justice Department. [But not Arizona’s Attorney General.]
“This actually came as part of the public records request that you mentioned earlier, that I had filed with all of these different state secretaries of state offices,” Wu explained. “And I came across emails from an official in the Inspector General’s Office in the National Archives, who was asking the state officials in Arizona about these sovereign citizen electors, and saying that they were pursuing the case of election fraud and other kinds of misconduct.“
He went on to say that when he asked the Archives about the matter that they declined to comment as it is an ongoing investigation.
Wu said that what stood out about the so-called sovereign citizens is that they used the official Arizona seal to make the documents look legitimate. That then prompted the state to send a cease and desist letter to their group.
Where the hell is the Arizona Attorney General’s Office in this investigation?
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