As in 2020, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is re-emerging as a tribune for false claims of election fraud and as a galvanizing figure for MAGA militants spoiling for violence.
Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, although the charges were dropped by the Trump Justice Department.
Later, Flynn led a hub of Trump allies, including lawyer Sidney Powell, who attempted to overturn the 2020 election through fruitless lawsuits that were based on baseless conspiracy theories.
After receiving a pardon from Trump, Flynn urged the president to use the National Guard to seize voting machines and re-run the election while leveraging his clout as a retired military leader to rally Trump supporters to protest the certification of the election.
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The messaging from Flynn this time around sounds strikingly familiar. If anything, his proclamations about purported election fraud and warnings that a Democratic victory equates to an attack by domestic and foreign enemies are coming ahead of schedule, compared to 2020.
“Don’t be surprised if we don’t have an election in NOV,” Flynn wrote in an ominous X post on Aug. 31.
That same day, he published a Substack article entitled “We Are Facing the Breakup of America as We Know It,” while characterizing the candidacy of Democrat Kamala Harris as “a totalitarian tyrannical oligarch running as a group of communists and managing our lives at the top of an overarching federal government.”
Sharing his article on X, Flynn claimed, “We are in the midst of the third version of an American Revolution.”
On Monday, the eve of Harris and Trump’s debate in Philadelphia, Flynn used his X account to re-post a false claim by the anonymous account “Wall Street Apes” that “You Can Actually See the 2024 Presidential Election Being Rigged in Real Time.”
Flynn praised the post as “exceptional work” while warning that “we could seriously lose the republic.”
Some of Flynn’s close associates have called on Trump supporters to resist the federal government violently or to carry out political violence against Democrats and other perceived enemies.
Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who worked closely with Flynn to overturn the 2020 election, wrote on X on Monday that “citizens must join local militias” so that “sheriffs can push back on criminals taking over our country and, if necessary, shoot them in the face.” The criminals, Byrne said, include “corrupt federal agents with badges.”
Byrne removed the post on Wednesday morning after receiving an inquiry about it from Raw Story.
Marshaling Trump supporters for Jan. 6
On the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Flynn gave an angry speech at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., that invoked the battlefields of Gettysburg and Normandy. He said that Americans “bleed freedom” and “will sacrifice for freedom,” and then called on members of Congress who are “feeling weak tonight” to get some “moral fiber” because the next day, “we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.”
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Flynn did not go to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Caroline Wren, who served as the national finance advisor for the joint fundraising committee for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2020, said she asked Flynn to march to the Capitol with conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, and he told her: “Hell, no. It’s freezing.”
But more than 1,500 of Trump’s supporters, many of whom fought with police, have been charged in connection with the attack that day. Testifying before the now-defunct House Select January 6 Committee, Flynn declined to answer questions about whether he believed the violence on Jan. 6 was justified while invoking his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination.
Over the past four years, Flynn has toured the country as a headline speaker for the ReAwaken tour, a gusher of conspiracy theories, election denialism and Christian nationalism. More recently, since the beginning of this year, Flynn has been traveling around the country to promote a fawning documentary film that portrays him as a martyr to the Deep State. The storyline meshes with Trump’s own legal troubles and Republican claims that federal law enforcement has been “weaponized.”
Thanks to Flynn’s stature as a retired general, his personal story and years of far-right organizing, he is uniquely poised to marshal the grievances of Trump supporters angry about the outcome of the election should he lose his bid to return to the White House this year.
During his debate with Joe Biden in September 2020, Trump refused to say whether he would concede the election and infamously instructed the Proud Boys (later to play a pivotal role in the attack on the Capitol) to “stand back and stand by.”
At that time, Trump claimed, falsely, that the election was being stolen through mail-in balloting.
Now, it’s false claims that election officials are allowing non-citizens to register to vote, which X owner Elon Musk has been promoting since April.
A new cycle of false election fraud claims
On Tuesday, before his debate with Harris in Philadelphia, Trump took to Truth Social to demand that Republican lawmakers shut down the federal government by not approving a budget if they’re unable to pass legislation on election security while falsely claiming that “the Democrats are trying to ‘stuff’ voter registrations with illegal aliens.”
Flynn applauded and shared the Trump’s Truth Social post.
He had already re-shared two X posts peddling false election information the previous day. One claimed that the number of mail-in ballots returned back to Pennsylvania election offices in 2020 exceeded the number sent out, but Reuters and other outlets debunked the claim four years ago by pointing out that the claim mixes numbers from the primary and general election.
The “Wall Street Apes” post that Flynn praised as “exceptional work” claimed that millions of people were registering to vote without ID in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Stephen Richer, the top election official in Maricopa County — the largest in Arizona — replied directly on X, writing that it should have struck Flynn as “facially absurd that Arizona, a state with 4.1 million registered voters, supposedly had 1.2 million fraudulent registrations in 2024 alone.” He added that all registrations, much less fraudulent ones, don’t even add up to 1.2 million.
Delegitimizing the government through conspiracy theories
Over the past six months, Flynn has been stoking fears that forces inside the U.S. government are plotting to assassinate Trump.
Investigators have uncovered no evidence that Thomas Crooks, Trump’s would-be assassin, was motivated by ideology, much less that he received assistance from inside the government.
“If our government is willing to assassinate the president of the United States — in this case, John F. Kennedy — then what are they willing to do now?” Flynn said during an interview with right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder in late May — more than a month before the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania.
The Warren Commission, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson, concluded that there was no evidence the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, “was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign,” while a subsequent commission found no credible evidence of CIA complicity.
During the debate on Tuesday night, Trump echoed Flynn’s conspiratorial beliefs about government complicity in U.S. presidential assassinations by baselessly suggesting that Harris bears some responsibility for the attempt on his life.
“I probably took a bullet to the head,” Trump said, pointing at Harris, “because of the things that they say about me.”
Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who has spent the past nine months promoting a so-called “Deep State target list,” re-shared an X post in which Flynn warned that the U.S. intelligence community is “manipulating the outcome of what we are going to face over the next couple of months.”
Commenting on Flynn’s post, Raiklin appeared to advocate for Harris’ assassination in retaliation for the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pa.
“In a duel, each side get one shot [sic],” Raiklin wrote. “They missed 36 days ago. Now it’s out turn.” [sic]
Raiklin did not respond to an email from Raw Story. Instead, he posted a screengrab of the email on his X account. In a comment accompanying the post, Raiklin doubled down on the false claim that Harris is somehow responsible for the attempt on Trump's life, while saying he denounces political violence.
Raiklin, who previously worked under Flynn at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, has appeared at screenings of the Flynn documentary film over the past six months, most recently in Key West, Fla., on Labor Day. During the tour stops, Raiklin regularly presents a “General Flynn was Framed Evidence Wall,” described in an email newsletter for the film as “an exhaustive timeline and link analysis of all major political and government officials at the most senior levels who weaponized against General Flynn to prevent him from exposing their corruption.”
Flynn has amplified Raiklin’s threats against federal employees and other perceived enemies. In May, Flynn reposted a video of Raiklin saying, “Expect to see livestreamed swatting raids of every single individual on that Deep State target list.”
“This is so revealing, that I had to repost,” Flynn wrote.
‘Multifaceted attack from a foreign adversary’
On Sept. 4, agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation raided the Millersville Police Department, which is led by an assistant chief who espoused QAnon conspiracy theories. The agents were reportedly looking for files that Taylor and other officers may have compiled using sensitive law enforcement data to investigate political enemies.
Taylor claims that he is investigating a vast child sex trafficking network. That focus dovetails with the interests of America’s Future, a nonprofit led by Michael Flynn. The retired lieutenant general’s sister, Mary Flynn O’Neill, is the nonprofit’s executive director. In a video posted on the nonprofit’s website, O’Neill expresses a view that matches the QAnon claim about adrenochrome.
“They have organ harvesting,” O’Neill said. “They also have found a way to take the blood, and use the blood, to make themselves youthful.”
Following the raid, the embattled assistant chief in Tennessee issued a statement on video that sounded like classic Michael Flynn.
“We’ve identified major corruption that’s transnational,” Taylor said. “It involves BRICS nations and China and investment companies and fraudulent mortgages on homes here in the United States in very key counties in key states. It goes into the election integrity and fraud and is creating a geopolitical shift within our political system. This is a multifaceted attack from a foreign adversary who is paying off our local, municipal, county, state and federal politicians to keep from coming to light.”
Flynn reposted Taylor’s video on Tuesday, taking his claims at face value.
“This is really bad,” Flynn wrote. “There must be people way up the chain who must be seriously compromised for the TBI and other LE agencies to have taken this step.”
Byrne also shared the video, although he took it down, along with the post that advocated for sheriffs shooting federal agents in the face.
Byrne told Raw Story that he took the post not because he thought it was promoting violence but because he thought X’s moderators would penalize him for it. He also insisted that Raw Story publish the full quote, which groups “corrupt federal agents” with two other categories of criminals: “Venezuelan gangsters” and “Chinese saboteurs.”
Byrne’s recent efforts to promote conflict between local sheriffs and federal law enforcement come on the heels of comments in July threatening officials involved in the prosecution of Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo. who faces state charges of tampering with voting equipment.
‘We go scorched earth’
Expanding on the warning made by Flynn before Labor Day that there might not be an election in November, Byrne posted on X six hours before the presidential debate that Harris — along with President Joe Biden, and former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — “will do anything to avoid the election in 60 days, even start World War III.”
Twice during the debate on Tuesday, Trump warned that the Biden/Harris administration’s handling of the Ukraine war could lead to “World War III.”
Byrne and Flynn both paint a conspiratorial post-election scenario of chaos and strife, should Trump not be declared the winner.
On Tuesday, Flynn approvingly quoted from an essay by Canadian journalist Elizabeth Nickson on his X account.
Nickson predicted “chaos” in November and expressed doubt that the election would be decided before Christmas. Then she described an implausible scenario that mixed unfulfilled predictions of “antifa” violence after the last election with current right-wing hysteria over pro-Palestine protesters.
Between November and Christmas, Nickson wrote that people should expect “planned, orchestrated chaos, complete with Department of Defense-staged Antifa attacks, yet more genocidal kids on the street courtesy of Iran [and] women with pussy hats thronging Trump tower in Manhattan.” All of it, she charged, was designed “to distract us from the heist happening under our noses.”
Flynn recommended the essay, writing, “Long but worth the read.”
Flynn could not be reached for comment for this story.
Byrne was even more direct than Flynn in a post on Sept. 3.
If the election is “stolen,” he warned that the United States will “descend into Civil War” and “cartels & UN blue helmets get 3 years to rape, pillage, loot & burn.”
Flynn didn’t have to say it so explicitly because many of his followers on X are making the logical leap to violence based on his vaguely worded warnings.
After Flynn speculated that there might not be an election, the replies to his post abounded with predictions for civil war.
One wrote: “And that’s why we’re not giving up our arms. It’s going to be a fight — a big fight.”
Another user expressed hope for “a fair election and President Trump wins and we get to work getting rid of all the evil garbage.”
The response to “a ‘for show’ election” in which “they cheat claiming Scamala got 100+ mill votes and won,” the user said, would be to “go scorched earth on their evil assess and may God watch over all the ones fighting the good fight.
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