Conservative podcast host Steve Bannon lashed out at MSNBC Tuesday after he was labeled as a "convicted felon."
During a segment on his War Room program, Bannon talked about his plan to replace up to 10 million government employees with supporters of Donald Trump.
"But don't forget, please, don't ever forget the 8 million, I think there's 18 million contractors overall, if you count every, you know, every person that they pay," he said. "But I think there's like 8 million executive or quasi-executive. Those contracts can all be canceled and should be canceled and will be canceled."
He then argued that Democrats — not Republicans — were violating political norms.
"You indicted a president, what, 10 times with 91 charges, 700 years in prison, and you're trying to put him in prison in the New York situation, on the situation with the woman from years ago, with taking his company away and the $500 million fine, and then what happened with the Alvin Bragg fiasco, disaster, embarrassment," Bannon complained. "That's your norm? Well, hey, it ain't America's norm, and it's not gonna be in America's norm."
Bannon complained that a TikTok post from MSNBC called him a "convicted felon," which could prevent him from consorting with Trump.
"And now the White House, it's reported, the White House is saying, hey, [Biden has] got to lean into the convicted felon," he opined. "And by the way, MSNBC producers, you've got to be better."
"When you put up a TikTok that's got me in there, I'm not a convicted felon," Bannon griped. "It's a misdemeanor."
"You ought to get a staff that can do some checking for accuracy."
A federal judge recently ordered Bannon to report to prison on July 1 after he was convicted of two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress.
Before leaving office, Trump pardoned Bannon after he was charged with felonies for allegedly defrauding donors with a charity scam.
Former President Donald Trump suffered a legal blow in his criminal hush money case Tuesday when an appeals court slapped down his gag order challenge, MSNBC reported.
Trump, convicted of falsifying business records to conceal hush money paid to an adult film star ahead of the 2016 presidential election, now remains under a gag order, according to the report.
"There was no substantial constitutional question directly involved," the appeals court ruled.
Trump's lawyers earlier this month argued the gag — which limits him from speaking publicly against witnesses, jurors or court staff — was being used as a "sword" by his political opponents ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The court was not convinced.
Democrat podcaster Andy Ostroy declared the ruling a "huge blow" for Trump.
Trump returns to Manhattan criminal court on July 11 for sentencing.
Donald Trump has effectively trapped his MAGA base into willful ignorance with increasingly “preposterous” and “malicious” lies, a former speechwriter for President W. Bush argued Tuesday.
Trump’s recent claim that the FBI’s search warrant of Mar-a-Lago contained proof of an assassination plot against him is just one of the lies political writer Peter Wehner argued Tuesday in The Atlantic that proves his case for “willful ignorance.”
To put it in simpler terms, Wehner argued Trump’s lies are too ridiculous to be truly believed.
“It’s choosing not to know,” Wehner wrote. “Doing so fends off the psychological distress of the realization that they’ve been lying to themselves and to others.”
MAGA supporters first stuck their psychological fingers in their ears as early as 2016, and just as parents across the globe have warned for centuries, they’ve gotten stuck that way, Wehner contends.
“Since 2016 there’s been a ratchet effect, each conspiracy theory getting more preposterous and more malicious,” Wehner writes. “Things that Trump supporters wouldn’t believe or accept in the past have since become loyalty tests. Election denialism is one example.” But the presidential speechwriter uses an economic metaphor rather than a comparison to a willful toddler.
Wehner admits to a struggle between his desire to respect political opinions that differ from his own and outrage at beliefs he finds fundamentally unethical.
He compares MAGA values to those of segregationists in the 1960s who argued the Old-Testament-held proof that Black people should not enjoy the same rights as white people.
“The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside,” he writes.
“Some movements are overt and malignant enough that to willingly be a part of them becomes ethically problematic.”
Wehner has kind words for MAGA supporters he says that, being human, are just as capable of kindness in their personal lives as any others.
But that doesn’t negate for Wehner the inherent immorality of a vote for Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
“They are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead,” he concludes.
“A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is rocketing toward the top of Donald Trump's shortlist for running mates, and a political insider explained why the freshman senator could be his choice.
"He’s easily the most gifted and most enthusiastic s--t-shoveler on the shortlist," Egger wrote.
"I am not kidding: This might be the most impressive piece of election bulls--tting I have ever seen," Egger added. "It’s a tour de force that does three things at once: It endorses the most aggressively abusive strategy for stealing the election Trump contemplated in 2020, it absolves Trump of the strategies that didn’t work, and it works in some sneering at libs who think that wielding naked political power to steal an election might qualify as a step toward dictatorship."
Vance told Douthat that going to court to prove fraud was strategically unwise, because "you can’t litigate these things judicially," but instead argued that "you have to litigate them politically" and lamented there had been hardly any political debate about the outcome of that election.
"This might seem an odd claim, since all of us, including Ross Douthat and J.D. Vance, have spent insane amounts of time debating the 2020 election ever since it happened," Egger wrote. "But to Vance, 'political debate' isn’t just having a robust public discourse about what factually happened. 'Political debate,' in Vance’s telling, is something that couldn’t really happen in 2020 unless Mike Pence, rather than certifying Biden’s win, endorsed Republicans’ fraudulent 'effort to provide alternative slates of electors.'"
"In other words, Vance is being euphemistic," Egger added. "What he refers to as 'political debate' is what the rest of us would call a constitutional crisis."
Trump continues to insist that his loss was the result of widespread fraud in multiple states, although dozens of lawsuits alleging those claims failed – which Vance blames on disgraced attorney Jenna Ellis and not the former president – but the senator and would-be vice presidential hopeful says those legal challenges are irrelevant.
"It was a mistake, Vance maintains, to spend all that time trying to prove fraud," Egger wrote. "The fact that millions of Republicans believed there had been fraud was enough: Republicans should’ve jumped straight into trying to seize the presidency by political force. Otherwise, Vance argues, 'an entire section of our democratic republic would’ve had their concerns ignored.'"
Egger was astonished that Vance, when he described what might have happened had this "insane plan" actually worked and kept Trump in office despite losing the electoral vote, found a way to characterize Republicans as the victims.
"In this universe — where Trump has unshackled himself from the will of the voters and forced his way to another term without ever proving an ounce of fraud — here’s Vance, still whining that liberals would have the gall to call him an authoritarian! " Egger wrote. "After all, Trump would have just 'served four more years and retired' — why are you all getting so bent out of shape?"
Egger doesn't see how Trump could choose anyone else to join him at the top of the Republican ticket.
"If you’re Trump, what’s the point in keeping looking? " Egger wrote. "The perfectly pliable, highly intelligent, utterly morally bankrupt option is right in front of you, just waiting for the tap-in."
Former President Donald Trump is dragging the whole Republican Party off a cliff with his "bone-headed" proposal to replace income taxes with tariffs on imported goods, wrote Catherine Rampell for The Washington Post.
Economists have broadly panned the idea, warning that it would amount to a massive tax increase for everyone but the ultra-rich, by making everything more expensive, and would make maintaining government revenue for essential services impossible.
But the GOP has closed ranks around the idea, with RNC spokesperson Anna Kelly saying, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”
It's not a lie at all, said Rampell.
"Multiple careful studies found that the costs of those tariffs were either mostly or entirely passed on to Americans in the form of higher prices. A more recent analysis estimated that his new tariff proposals would cost the median U.S. household an additional $1,700 per year," wrote Rampell. "But the modern GOP being what it is, party apparatchiks must defend every bone-headed idea their presumptive presidential nominee utters. Thus, critics must be 'outsourcers' (which seems unlikely for most economists, who rarely own manufacturing plants) or, naturally, Marxists."
"The expected costs of Trump’s recent tariff proposals would be staggering," she continued. "For example, his plan for a universal 10 percent tariff coupled with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods would more than wipe out any savings most Americans would get from extending his 2017 income tax cuts, according to estimates from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
The bottom 80 percent of households would see a tax increase on net." Meanwhile, we would be losing $3 trillion in tax revenue per year, and there's no way to make that much from tariffs — $3 trillion is roughly the total value of all the goods we import annually.
The worst part of it all, wrote Rampell, is that while Trump at least had some sensible advisers last time pushing back on ideas like this, he is setting himself up now to have an army of loyalists at his disposal who will obey his every command.
" Project 2025, a Trump-aligned group, is already screening a more professionalized army of second-term loyalists, all of whom will obediently execute Trump’s orders, and dot their I’s and cross their T’s — on trade and everything else," she wrote. "Unless they’re also secret communists, of course."
Alt-right Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Bob Good took a surprising jab at former President Donald Trump ahead of a Virginia primary that has more resting on it than his own claim to power, according to a new report.
“I’m not talking about stupid topics," Good told Politico Tuesday. "That’s a stupid topic.”
Good's opinion stands in contrast to Trump's, who ordered his lawyers late last month to take action against the Virginia Republican he has declared is "bad."
At question was Good's usage of Trump's name on his campaign yard signs, despite the former president's endorsement of former Navy SEAL John McGuire.
"That is a fraud on the donors," lawyers told Good.
Good has maintained his support for Trump notwithstanding and created what one political analyst described as a civil war within Trumpworld, pitting MAGA bigwigs such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon against each other.
Politico's Olivia Beavers argued the conclusion of Tuesday's primary could reverberate beyond Virginia and signal a dark future for the MAGA movement as a whole.
"If Rep. Bob Good were to lose, he would be the first sitting chair in the Freedom Caucus’ nearly decade-long history to be defeated — a loss that would embolden critics of the increasingly fractious bloc," she wrote.
"If he wins, he’ll have done it despite strong opposition from former (and possibly future) President Donald Trump and only mild backing from Republican leaders, including House Speaker Mike Johnson — signaling friction ahead."
Many critics have accused Donald Trump of being a "nepo baby" in the Trump Organization given how much he inherited from his father.
Yet, in a new book, Trump rails against the idea of children getting to where they are based on the success of their parents.
More than halfway into "Apprentice in Wonderland," writer and reporter Ramin Setoodeh recalls the 2009 blowup after Trump fired Melissa Rivers from the show. Stories have surfaced about Trump pretending Rivers' mother, Joan, was somehow a Republican and a supporter of his. Trump even went so far as to say that she voted for him in 2016 from beyond the grave. Joan Rivers died in 2014.
When Melissa was kicked off the show, Trump opted to keep a Playboy model and a professional poker player. Both individuals, her mother Joan felt, were below her daughter.
“Joan was so angry,” Trump recalls with excitement, the book says. “I mean, I got the biggest stars to go on that show,” he says of the Rivers' face-off against the model and poker players. “It was so easy. You know, Joan Rivers wouldn’t do a show like that normally, right?”
Setoodeh writes that "Rivers famously built her career on a willingness to appear anywhere there were cameras, including as a red-carpet host at awards ceremonies."
Trump remembered: “She went crazy when I fired the daughter.”
Setoodeh said that the drama on the show illustrated how much it had jumped the shark from its high-brow and aspirational intentions.
Trump recalled Melissa Rivers unleashing mayhem in the outer office. “She was so nasty. I hear Melissa yelling outside. She was yelling at everybody!”
At that point, Donald and Ivanka took cover in the boardroom. As he began to talk about Melissa again, he requested the reporter go off the record to "tell me what he really thinks of this volatile behavior."
"In general, Trump looks upon nepo babies—except for his own children—as entitled brats," wrote Setoodeh.
Trump crafts a more diplomatic portrayal of his thoughts when back on the record: “How about this? Joan loved Melissa more than anything she’s ever loved before. She thought Melissa was the end-all, and she went totally crazy in defense of her daughter. Oh, they were both yelling. It was great TV. But maybe Joan had more of a right to be yelling.”
Donald Trump falsely claims he was given just $10 million and built it into a billion-dollar empire. CNBC reported that it was closer to over $60 million. He was also recently found guilty of artificially inflating the size of his assets to appear richer to investors or banks.
Trump's eldest three heirs ultimately joined the company, with their father handing over projects they could run despite their lack of experience.
Upon taking the White House, Trump's daughter and son-in-law both worked there, side-stepping anti-nepotism laws that were preventing relatives from being hired. They claimed that it was all above board because they weren't being paid a salary, although the couple disclosed up to $640 million in outside income while they worked at the White House.
Maryland Democratic Governor Wes Moore on Monday explained why he doesn't trust his predecessor's claim to be an "Independent voice" as he vies to represent the state in the US Senate.
Former Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan will run against Democratic candidate Angela Alsobrooks in November.
After receiving an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, Politico reports that Hogan "released a new spot Monday that doesn’t name Trump at all but instead stresses his independence from the GOP."
The ex-governor said in the ad, "As President Kennedy said, 'Sometimes party loyalty demands too much.'"
However, as Moore pays close attention to the former GOP leader's actions, the governor told CNN's Kaitlan Collins that he remains unmoved by Hogan's words.
"After Trump was convicted in New York, your predecessor, Larry Hogan, who is now running for Senate, asked for all Americans to respect the verdict," Collins said. "It seems pretty simple, but he was widely criticized by Trump allies. He's not wavering though. He said in a new ad tonight that he'll be an Independent voice in the Senate. And I just wonder when you see how Larry Hogan responds to that kind of pressure from Republicans, do you believe that there should be more people like that, with that kind of view in Washington?"
Moore replied, "Well, I think the old governor is a nice guy. I also know this is going to be very difficult because I think some of the things that we've seen over these past months are the things that people just dislike like about politics. You know, you say you're not going to run for Senate, and you don't want to be a useless body and be one of 100 who does nothing, and then the day of the filing deadline, you announce your running for Senate. That you are recruited by Mitch McConnell. You were endorsed by Donald Trump."
The governor continued, "You've said you're going to caucus with the Republicans as you get to the Senate. But then you turn around and call yourself an independent voice. That you are saying you're pro choice now. But the truth is, when you were the governor and when you actually had the authority to do something about Roe v. Wade, and when Roe v. Wade fell under his watch, he did things like vetoed bills that would enhance privacy. Vetoed bills that would enhance protection, while my first day is the governor, I had to release three-and-a-half million dollars, of previously unreleased funds because the because the old governor would not release them. And so I just think right now, the back-and-forth is actually the thing that really frustrates people about politics, about not knowing where you are."
"And I know he just received the endorsement of Donald Trump, but but my endorsement is going to Angela Alsobrooks, the person who he is running against — the county executive of Prince George's County — who has a track record of actually bringing crime down inside of the neighborhoods while she was the state's attorney." Moore emphasized, "She has a track record of building ten new schools while she was the county executive of Prince George's county. I trust her. I trust her vision. I trust her consistency. And that's why i'm supporting her to be to be Maryland next senator."
The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.
A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.
Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.
She did not want to go.
But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.
Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.
What was possibly happening here?
As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of whichRaw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.
The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.
More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.
“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”
The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.
These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.
These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”
Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.
And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.
‘A plane full of ballots’
Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”
Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.
The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.
The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.
With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.
The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”
Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.
Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.
“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.
Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”
Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.
A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.
But Burk first attempted to report Keliikoa's information to the FBI and then relayed it to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.
Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.
“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”
“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”
Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)
“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”
What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.
Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.
Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.
Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’
On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”
Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.
“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.
“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.
“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.
As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.
Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.
Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.
Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.
“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”
At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.
At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.
Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.
Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.
The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.
“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”
As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.
In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.
And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.
‘He fabricated everything’
Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.
Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.
“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.
“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”
The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.
Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?
Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.
The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.
Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.
More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”
Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.
“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.
“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.
A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp
Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.
In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.
One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.
Except for the fact that it is real.
It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.
The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)
As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.
The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.
The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”
‘There was no goldmine’
Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.
She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”
Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.
“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.
But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.
“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”
This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”
No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.
“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.
“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”
The band breaks up
These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.
Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”
Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.
In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”
Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.
Some of the key players involved have also split up.
Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”
Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.
“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.
Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.
In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”
But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.
Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.
Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.
Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.
Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.
Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.
“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”
Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.
“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”
“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”
* * * * *
Key players
Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.
Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.
Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.
Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.
Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.
Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.
Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.
Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.
Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.
Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.
Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.
Shawn Wilson is the president of MSG Risk Management & Intelligence (formerly Mayhem Solutions Group). Jim Penrose told Staci Burk that he was initially concerned that Wilson, along with Kenneth Scott Koch, were “hostile actors” intent on harming Sabrina Keliikoa.
Author Ramin Setoodeh's book "Apprentice in Wonderland," dropped Tuesday and it features some odd admissions from Donald Trump and his heirs about their lives starring in a reality TV show, on the campaign trail, and in the aftermath of a 2020 election loss.
Of particular interest are revelations about Eric Trump, who often remains out of the spotlight compared to his elder brother, Donald Trump Jr.
"On the day after we meet, Eric will fly back to Iowa for his father’s 2024 campaign," Setoodeh writes. "He reveals that in 2016 he had no idea what a caucus was until his plane landed in the state."
Most states hold vote-for-a-vote elections but Iowa requires people to come together and debate on behalf of their preferred campaign. It's like the "Survivor" version of the tribal council but on a much larger scale.
“I did stump speech after stump speech,” Eric remembers of those early days. “There were probably twenty thousand people at this school, and I felt at complete ease on a completely unknown topic."
Eric claimed that despite spending decades working on it, "reality TV was an unknown topic for us."
He felt more comfortable talking about real estate.
"And there’s no question a lot of comfort came from being in front of a camera. When those lights came on, and you know a couple weeks later you’re going to be speaking to fifteen million people," the younger Trump said.
When the Wall Street Journal published a report earlier this month claiming it had spoken with Democrats regarding President Joe Biden's mental decline, the paper faced backlash from The White House, veteran journalists like Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, and others.
According to Deadline, Biden representatives slammed the WSJ for including only "one on-the-record Republican source, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to claim that the president is slipping."
During the latest episode of MSNBC's Deadline: White House Monday, host Nicolle Wallace spoke with former FBI counsel and legal analyst Andrew Weissmann and discussed the conservative newspaper's clear bias towards former President Donald Trump.
"The situation that I find the most vexing is that the things that Trump is saying about how he's going to tell [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to release [WSJ journalist] Evan Gershkovich when he's president are so cruel and so sickening."
Wallace added, "The fact that Trump has weaponized what will now be a show trial for Putin — he's going to be tried on espionage charges — the fact that there are no breakers in the circuits for the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, that there's no pride in what that paper is and does, really is a stunning sort of mile marker in that paper's evolution."
Weissman replied, "I have two words for everyone: David Pecker. We just sat through a trial where the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt with no cross-examination of any import of David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump's to this day, the head of the National Enquirer, where he talked about — it wasn't just a catch and kill scheme."
The former FBI attorney emphasized, "There were two parts to this scheme: One part was to catch and kill bad stories about Donald Trump, and the other part was to create false stories for a political candidate. And those false stories were first run by the political candidate. That is David Pecker's testimony under oath about what he agreed to with Donald Trump."
Regarding the WSJ’s owner Rupert Murdoch, Weissmann continued, "That is just the new day David Pecker. And if you want to know that these are fake stories that are coming out and being propagated, we just went through a trial about that. Where the jury heard it and found — remember, that was why it's a felony, is that they believed David Pecker that there was this agreement. And so, you don't need to look very far and you don't need to sort of surmise what's going on with Donald Trump. He did this already."
A former federal prosecutor says a reported historic rise in threats — and violence — against federal agents directly stems from the judge's decisions regarding requests to gag former President Donald Trumpin his criminal classified documents case.
A collection of Republican states came to Judge Aileen Cannon demanding special counsel Jack Smith's request for the gag order be rejected so that Trump can take aim at FBI agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid. The request was made after Trump claimed FBI agents had been given permission to use deadly force against him.
The claim has been discredited by experts including Attorney General Merrick Garland who said Trump was exploiting routine language used in search warrants.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace claimed there has been a historic increase in threats and violence against FBI agents and Justice Department officials.
Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman said Cannon has contributed to that, saying Cannon should not have allowed it.
"If you're telling people when federal agents come in to search your house they're coming to shoot you, well, that's exactly what causes, you know, tragedies in searches," cautioned Litman. "But all that Jack Smith has asked for, in a way, this would be no story if it wasn't in front of Judge Cannon."
He said that what Smith and prosecutors had done in the search was "so routine, so cut and dried" that no other judge would allow Trump's lawyer to make such claims.
"This could result in significant, imminent and foreseeable danger," Litman cautioned."
See his full comments in the video below or at the link here.
Ex-prosecutor blames Judge Cannon for FBI becoming targets of the right-wing
www.youtube.com
A Fox News host who championed Donald Trump's political threats of retribution has been caught trying to claim reports of the former president's promised "revenge tour" are a hoax.
The watchdog group Media Matters on Monday issued a ruthless fact check on pro-Trump Jesse Watters and his conflicting commentary on the controversial presumptive Republican presidential nominee's rhetoric of revenge.
"Following the lead of his fellow pro-Trump media sycophants, Watters is currently downplaying the former president’s well-documented calls for political retribution in an apparent attempt to undermine the Biden campaign’s characterization of Trump as a would-be authoritarian," Media Matters reports.
Watters' message relies on the phrase "revenge through success" which he has oft repeated on air, as recently as June 12 in a segment that included the graphic caption “revenge hoax," Media Matters reports.
This message stands in stark contrast to the commentary Watters delivered on the heels of special counsel Jack Smith's election interference indictment against Trump in August 2023, when he took to the airwaves to make promises on Trump's behalf.
“Don't you think for a second he's not going to unleash hell on all of his political enemies,” Watters told Fox News viewers. “This is only the beginning of politicians putting other politicians and their families in prison."
Watters upped the ante on Aug. 2 with promises of Trump's “revenge tour” when he would be “out for blood” of political enemies (and their families) who would be "legally assaulted."
The Fox News host even suggested American laws would be changed to allow Trump to enact this campaign of revenge upon reclaiming the White House in 2025, Media Matters reports.
“Scream and holler all you want," Watters reportedly told viewers. "You better believe it’s open season.”
Media Matters found at least six examples of Watters celebrating Trump's promises of retribution against political foes and non-conservative news sources.
"Watters continuedtotease Trump’s inevitable retribution. He also celebrated Trump’s threats to execute Gen. Mark Milley and revoke news networks’ broadcast licenses, saying: 'The revenge tour is in full swing,'" Media Matters reports.
This leaves Watters with a problem, the watchdog report concludes: "If Trump continues to jockey for retribution in public – as he likely will – Watters will have to continue to cry 'hoax.'”
