Marjorie Taylor Greene
'Primal fears are awakened': Meet the team of ex-military officers working with Mike Flynn to discredit democracy
December 15, 2021 2:54PM ET
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A team of former military officers organized by retired general Mike Flynn is conducting a large-scale operation to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election.
Flynn and his former colleague Phil Waldron, an Army Reserve colonel who says he served under the former general at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, are working with at least two other retired and reserve officers to persuade Americans that last year's election was stolen from Donald Trump, reported Reuters.
"For the past year, Flynn, Waldron and other intelligence veterans have helped propagate some of the outlandish theories undercutting Americans’ faith in democracy," the news organization reported. "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."
Waldron -- whose specialty was PSYOPs, or psychological operations -- insisted to Reuters that "we’re doing a huge service," but a former Navy SEAL captain and recently retired ethics professor at the U.S. Naval Academy disagreed in the strongest possible terms.
“When retired members of the military, especially senior officers, broadcast wild conspiracies, America’s trust in its military is somewhat eroded,” said Roger Herbert, the former SEAL and ethics professor. “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.”
An active-duty Army Reserve officer working with Flynn, Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin, is currently facing an internal Army Reserve investigation over whether he violated service rules against partisan political activity, a military official told Reuters.
Raiklin told an election forum last month in New Hampshire that his experience as a Special Forces commander against the Taliban and the MS-13 gang gave him the intelligence experience to detect fraud, and he promoted the legally specious theory that then-vice president Mike Pence had the authority to block certification of Joe Biden's election win.
Seth Keshel, a former Army captain who worked in intelligence, claims to have built statistical models later touted by Trump -- and discredited by political scientists, election officials and other experts -- to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent, and his work helped inspire bogus election audits in various states.
"Though they haven’t worked together on every particular, the four have intersected in their efforts, with Flynn the common denominator," Reuters reported. "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."
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