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Less than a week after receiving a presidential pardon for lying to the FBI, Mike Flynn calls for martial law – and sparks a harsh exposure from other senior retired officers.
Retired Lt. Gen. Flynn, who was Trump’s first national security adviser and before that his most important military validator, circulated a martial law petition on a Tuesday. Tweeter. “Freedom never kneels except for God,” Flynn commented.
The petition, from a Tea Party affiliate named Tom Zawistowski, implored Trump to proclaim “limited martial law” and order the military to re-run the presidential election to reflect what it is. claims to be “the true will of the people”. . “He was explicitly considering” temporarily suspending[ing] the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections. And it also reflects a recent surge in desperation on MAGA’s part now that Trump’s efforts to annul the election have collapsed in several courtrooms.
The petition even compared America’s bloodiest conflict to the Trumpists’ current inability to cope with electoral defeat. “Today, the current threat to our United States from the international and national socialist / communist left is far more serious than anything Lincoln or our nation has had to face in its history – including the Civil War,” reads. we.
But the petition suggested that unless Trump was installed for another term, his supporters would engage in violence. “Without a fair vote, we rightly fear that the threat of a fiery civil war is imminent,” he said.
One of Flynn’s colleagues in Army Special Ops, the retired Brigadier. General Donald Bolduc, who recently ran for the US Senate in New Hampshire as a Republican, said he had not seen the petition. But in principle, Bolduc called him irresponsible.
“I respect Mike Flynn, and a lot of people respect Mike Flynn, and with that respect comes a huge responsibility to be extremely careful with what you say,” said Bolduc, who until recently was the Special Operations Forces Commander. Americans in Africa, to the Daily Beast. . “We are far from suspending the Constitution and using the army to redo the elections. It would be a colossal mistake. Grant and Lincoln turn around in their graves to see what’s going on. “
Paul Yingling, a retired army colonel, put it more frankly. “Flynn’s anti-election propaganda is a critical precursor to violent terrorist attacks against legitimate election results,” Yingling told The Daily Beast. “When the bombs go off, the blood is on Mike Flynn’s hands.
There was no significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. This was established by the Department of Homeland Security’s head of election protection, Christopher Krebs, who lost his job for saying so publicly. Even Attorney General William Barr, who has promoted suggestions of voting irregularities, said on Tuesday that the Justice Department found no evidence of fraud that could impact the election outcome.
This left Trump and his most feverish and shocked supporters scrambling for increasingly untenable conspiracies to explain his loss. Thomas McInerney, a retired three-star Air Force general and Trump loyalist, has launched a complicated fiction about an Army Special Forces raid to capture a CIA server in Germany allegedly involved in modification of the number of votes. When Military time asked McInerney to explain the military saying the raid never happened, the general replied, “President Trump won in a landslide and the Democrats left so many footprints that this TREASON must be stopped !!! ”
Flynn, appearing in front of McInerney on a fringe internet show this weekend, said without evidence that China could have executed a cyberattack to alter the vote tally.
Lin Wood, a lawyer trying to overturn Trump’s election loss, shared the same petition as Flynn on Twitter. “Our country is heading towards civil war,” Wood wrote, mistakenly claiming that China was behind the impending conflict. “@RealDonaldTrump should declare martial law.”
Trumpworld attorney Sidney Powell, who represented Flynn in his criminal prosecutions, also joined in calls for the coup, retweeting various Twitter users who called on Trump to invoke the insurgency law and suspend the election and to establish “military courts. Powell, who is currently trying to overturn the presidential election in court, represented Trump until recently, when his campaign disowned him following a disastrous press conference.
At a Wednesday afternoon press conference in Georgia, Wood and Powell promoted several electoral fraud conspiracy theories, with Wood implying that Trump supporters should be part of a pro-Trump insurgency. Specifically, he called on supporters to “circle” the Georgia governor’s mansion until Republican Gov. Brian Kemp agrees to hold a special session on the state’s election results and then resign. “It’s 1776 again in America,” Wood told the crowd, some 24 hours after calling for martial law. “You are not going to take back our freedom.”
Calls for martial law have echoed through a wider network of right-wing media figures. Joey Saladino, a failed YouTuber turned Congressional candidate famous for wearing a Nazi costume as a ‘prank’ and peeing in his own mouth (separate incidents), took to the social media site Speaking to publicize the coup.
In responses to this post, Trump supporters called for “military courts, public executions” and so on. “I say to do whatever is necessary to stop this electoral fraud by Satan and his minons !!!” another replied.
Far-right conspiracy site Infowars reposted the petition in its entirety. The endorsement article came a week after Infowars ran a panicked headline that read: “Democrats declare martial law.”
Some Republicans have openly rejected these calls. “This announcement, while protected by the First Amendment, is utterly irresponsible, anhistorical and without precedent or legal justification,” said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost petition tweeted. (The document’s author, Zawistowski, is part of Ohio politics.)
Several retired officers who served with Flynn have chosen to remain silent over the past five years about his erratic, inflammatory and provocative behavior. This continued during the prosecution of Flynn by Special Advocate Robert Mueller’s team for lying to the FBI, an act Flynn pleaded guilty to before overthrowing himself. And it continues as Flynn has embraced the QAnon cult, which the FBI sees as potential food for terrorism, which describes him as a martyr.
But Paul Yingling, who was the deputy commander of Trump’s national security adviser HR McMaster’s future cavalry regiment in Iraq, said Flynn was now launching incitement to violence.
“The call for new illegal elections is an explicit call for violence to overturn legal elections. Worse yet, Flynn knows he’s calling for violence, ”Yingling said.
“Flynn has fought enough terrorist networks to understand this pattern: Before terrorists detonate, plant, or build bombs, a propagandist radicalizes this bomb-making network,” he continued. “Flynn is that propagandist.”
Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.
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