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Amidst the fears that a MAGA Boycott could cost them control of the US Senate, Trump spoke privately by phone this week with Wood to tell him to “take down,” a source briefed on the discussion told POLITICO.
Axios was the first to report on the appeal to Wood and lawyer Sidney Powell, who Trump fired from his legal team after espousing broad conspiracy theories.
Former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who helped build the modern Republican Party in Georgia, speculated that lawyers were turning conservatives on because “they understand that if they say to more and more radical things, they will have more publicity.
“It’s one of the craziest things I’ve seen in politics for a long time,” Gingrich told POLITICO, adding that it’s only fitting that Trump wonders if the vote against him was rigged – as long as ‘he tells Republicans to vote for Perdue and Loeffler, and not to listen to Wood.
“Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are totally destructive,” Gingrich wrote on Twitter Thursday. “Every conservative in Georgia who cares about America MUST vote in the second round.”
Gingrich’s remarks came after Wood – who has a list of famous cases and a huge MAGA Twitter following – stuck to his script during an energetic “Stop the Steal” rally on Wednesday night.
“Why would you come back and vote in another rigged election?” Wood asked, eliciting cheers. Wood mentioned he spoke to the president, but did not say he was told to stop bashing Perdue and Loeffler before the second round.
Wood’s efforts generated attacks from conservatives, including Georgia-based commentator Erick Erickson, who criticized Wood for his voting record, prompting a rebuttal from Wood on Twitter Thursday. In his newsletter, Erickson joked that Wood was part of a democratic “deep state”.
Trump’s supportive website Breitbart, which criticized the Atlanta-based lawyer for his past contributions to Democrats, suggested he was doing their dirty work and hurting the GOP.
“Grift Wood: ‘MAGA’ Poseur launches sabotage in Georgia,” shouted a headline on the Breitbart homepage which included an article about his past contributions to Barack Obama in 2008 and the opponent of Perdue in 2008. 2014.
The Trump campaign Twitter account retweeted the message, leading Wood to qualify Breitbart as “dishonest” as he stressed everything the money he gave to Trump and other Republicans. This led the Trump-backed Gateway Pundit website to bemoan the criticism in an article with the headline: “WTH? Breitbart is waging war on lawyer Lin Wood – who defends President Trump against the evil Marxist horde.
The party’s divisions and fractures in the conservative media have highlighted the tensions and fear in the Republican Party of Georgia – fueled in large part by Trump’s loss in state and his repeated and unsubstantiated claims that the election was stolen.
Trump launched a barrage of attacks against Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who said there was no widespread fraud in the election. This claim was amplified this week by Trump’s U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, causing even more divisions in Trump’s orbit.
Trump is due to travel to Georgia on Saturday for a rally on behalf of Loeffler and Perdue. But this is happening in the midst of Republican anxiety, he will stray too far from the script and engage in so many conspiracy theories on the vote that it could lower the turnout.
Obama, meanwhile, plans to hold a virtual rally for Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock on Friday. Both campaigns and the Democratic Party have refrained from commenting publicly. Privately, Democratic officials are gloating that Trump has created a “Frankenstein monster” that he cannot control in Wood and other activists.
Wood’s pro-Trump good faith among MAGA die-hards on social media is what makes his boycott call so dangerous for GOP efforts. Wood, who did not return any messages seeking comment for this article, has become a darling of Trump loyalists for his prolific defense of the president on Twitter. He frequently pushes fierce claims to his 717,000 subscribers, reinforcing at one point the idea that he was not a coincidence when the president was infected with coronavirus.
Wood’s Twitter biography lists an acronym for the QAnon conspiracy theory slogan “Where We Go One We Go All” which postulates that Trump is waging war with a global cabal of satanic pedophiles who drink the blood of the children they kill . He also has advised QAnon’s first public adherent to Congress, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
An accomplished libel lawyer with a knack for finding high-profile cases and clients, Wood gained some notoriety for successfully representing Richard Jewell, the security guard who was falsely accused of being the Centennial Olympic Park bomber in 1996 in Atlanta. He also represented the brother of JonBenet Ramsey, the children’s beauty contest contestant whose 1996 murder is still unsolved.
In the Trump era, Wood’s clients have occupied central cultural warfare roles, such as Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old arrested in the shooting of three protesters earlier this year at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Wood also represented another teenager, Nicholas Sandmann, who sued the media for their portrayal of him in a dispute with activists at a 2019 March for Life rally in Washington. CNN and the Washington Post have made deals with Sandmann.
Two of Wood clients, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, spoke at the Republican National Convention in August after gaining notoriety for pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home in St. Louis.
Not all of Wood’s clients won. In 2019, for example, the lawyer failed to convince a jury to find Tesla CEO Elon Musk guilty of defaming Wood’s client in a tweet.
According to a lawsuit filed in August by three attorneys who worked with him, Wood began to act erratically in late 2019, making “abusive and inconsistent phone calls, voicemails, texts and emails … All of them … these erratic communications have a few things in common: most of these emails profess that God or the Almighty is in command of his actions; many declared his refusal to pay the applicants “a meager penny”; and virtually all of them were abusive.
The lawsuit alleges that Wood’s behavior “continued to deteriorate, including assault and battery” against two of them, although “there was virtually no reason for the attack, and the defendant Wood later admitted and apologized for the violence. “
Wood, however, denied the allegations, declaring on Twitter that it was a “shakedown effort”.
“These young lawyers have chosen to voluntarily engage in a shameful and unprofessional effort to attack me publicly by including irrelevant and out of context private messages that I sent to them in the midst of a difficult period in my personal life arising from mainly from my family. reaction to my faith in Jesus Christ, ”Wood wrote.
The three lawyers could not be reached for comment.
Both before and after the election, Wood’s Twitter feed became a clearinghouse for conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the The CIA has built “secret technology” to “steal elections surreptitiously.” This was ultimately disproved in Georgia when a manual counting of the ballots showed the machines were compiling the votes correctly.
Wood filed a lawsuit to block the certification of election results in Georgia, but that effort failed and an appeals court is unlikely to hear the case. While the case was active, according to the Associated Press, Trump falsely claimed signatures were not verified on postal ballots in Georgia.
Former GOP State Representative Allen Peake said Trump needs to be even clearer with Wood – and call him by name.
“He has to shut up these guys. This is sheer madness, ”Peake said. “It’s almost dishonorable for any Republican to say that. It is absolutely the dumbest thing I have ever heard. It is a very small fringe of Republicans. But it has to stop.
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