"Ex. Green Beret Ivan Raiklin said PA GOP better win the (election audit) or he would crush them."
“FBI agents and the House panel investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol have both learned of an alleged plan by allies of retired army Lt Gen Michael Flynn to gather “intelligence” on top Republicans to “move” them to back election audits in key states Trump lost, said ex-whistleblower Everett Stern who talked to the panel and the FBI.
Stern, who runs the intelligence firm Tactical Rabbit and is a Republican vying for a Senate seat in Pennsylvania, in multiple interviews with the Guardian said two Flynn associates with the rightwing Patriot Caucus group enlisted his help in April in a scheme to seek potentially damaging information on two Republican members of Congress to prod them to back an audit of the 2020 vote that Joe Biden won…
Stern provided text messages, emails and other documents revealing he had multiple contacts with one of the Patriot Caucus members, Velma Anne Ruth, and two other influential Flynn allies, Houston real estate mogul Al Hartman and former army Green Beret Ivan Raiklin, who were pushing audits in several key states…
The Patriot Caucus, a coalition of Patriot and other rightwing groups in some two dozen states with which Raiklin and Hartman have ties, according to Stern and documents, has worked with Trump loyalists like Flynn to push audits in key states Biden won, and backed Trump allies for governor, and other top posts in states like Pennsylvania and Arizona Trump lost.
Flynn himself on 7 January publicly endorsed another Trump ally and election audit promoter, Doug Mastriano for governor in Pennsylvania, at a campaign rally also attended by Raiklin.
Flynn has also endorsed two Trump backed candidates in Arizona: Kari Lake, an ex-Fox News figure, for governor, and Mark Finchem, a state representative who attended the January 6 Stop the Steal rally, for secretary of state…
To coordinate national efforts, Raiklin and Hartman on 3 July spearheaded one of a series of “Election Integrity” calls with Trump loyalists, lawyers and donors to discuss the status of audits efforts in several states and other plans to cast doubt on Biden’s win, according to an Arizona senate document shared by the watchdog group American Oversight.
A who’s who list of Trump loyalists and groups invited to join these calls included the America Project and America’s Future, both of which Flynn played key roles with as they poured some $2m into a discredited audit of Arizona’s largest county, plus the Patriot Caucus’ Velma Anne Ruth, Finchem and Byrne, the millionaire chief financier of the Arizona audit.
Hartman in emails with Stern obtained by the Guardian invited him in June to attend a religious far-right meeting known as Ziklag in Dallas where he could meet separately with Flynn. Stern said Hartman told him a “private meeting was going to be arranged with Flynn” who Stern was told wanted to meet him.
After indicating to Hartman he would attend, Stern opted to cancel at the last minute after his lawyer indicated there could be legal repercussions from a meeting with Flynn. “I thought it was extremely dangerous to meet with a three star general who I believed had broken the law.
“They planned to give my campaign funds to help me” develop damaging information on Toomey and Fitzpatrick, Stern claimed. “It was like a wink, wink. Hartman is the man behind the curtain. He’s an operative and financier,” promoting audits.
Hartman has long been a donor to the right. He is on the advisory council for the pro-Trump Turning Point USA and has been active in the conservative donor network led by oil billionaire Charles Koch.
Raiklin, an army reserve officer who reportedly has known Flynn since 2014, is facing an internal army reserve investigation into possible violations of rules barring partisan political activity, according to a military official who spoke to Reuters last month.
Raiklin in December 2020 outlined a wild scheme in tweets and a podcast to thwart Biden’s win, charging a vast conspiracy that included Pence, intelligence, China and Big Tech, as Reuters reported. Raiklin told Trump to “activate the emergency broadcast system” and deployed the hashtag #FightLikeAFlynn, stressing that “we the people are going to force this plan on them”.
Neither Hartman or Raiklin replied to multiple calls seeking comment.
A Flynn scheduler did not respond to questions for the story.
Velma Anne Ruth with the Patriot Caucus, who was photographed with Stern at a June event in Pennsylvania where she wore a tank top that said General Flynn, called Stern’s charges “delusional, fabricated and defamatory”, in a text message. Stern said he shared the photo and other documents involving exchanges he had with Ruth with the FBI.
Senior ex-prosecutors and intelligence officials say Stern’s allegations merit law enforcement attention.
“Stern’s allegations suggest serious crimes,” said ex-prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig, who worked on Ken Starr’s team during the impeachment of Bill Clinton. “If his allegations were corroborated by extrinsic evidence they clearly would warrant investigation.”
Former CIA official Sipher, who has spoken with Stern before, said: “Everett is someone with a strong sense of right and wrong, and willing to suffer the consequences of doing the right thing. We would be better served to have more people like Everett in public life.”
MORE AT:
The Guardian
Michael Flynn allies allegedly plotted to lean on Republicans to back vote audits
How Flynn & Patriot Caucus tried to overturn the election & methodology.
U.S. Senate Candidate, HSBC Whistleblower, Intelligence Director. Featured Rolling Stone, Netflix, Guardian, NYT
Twitter @EverettStern1 http://everettstern.com http://tacticalrabbit.com
"The same month as the New Hampshire event, the Jan. 6 committee heard testimony from a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania named Everett Stern, who has said he was approached last April by two associates of Raiklin at a Republican gathering in Berks County. Stern, who owns a private intelligence firm, told me that the associates wanted to enlist his help in persuading high-ranking Republican officials in Pennsylvania to support an audit in that state. When Stern asked whom they were working with, one of them replied, “General Flynn.”
Later, Stern said, Raiklin communicated directly with him through text messages to find out more about his professional and personal life. After this vetting, Stern says that he was tasked with finding unflattering information about a particular Republican congressman so he could be “pushed” toward supporting an audit. Stern says he was also set up to meet personally with Flynn in Dallas in mid-June. By this time, however, Stern had reported his communications to the F.B.I. and was afraid of his legal exposure. He canceled at the last minute.
Joe Flynn told me: “We do not have anything to do with what Everett Stern is alleging,” adding, “He’s nuts.” Raiklin, too, denied to me that he helped recruit Stern to pressure elected officials into supporting a 2020 election audit. But I heard a similar story from J.D. Maddox, a former C.I.A. branch chief who ran unsuccessfully for the Virginia House of Delegates last year. Maddox, who has not previously spoken publicly about his experience, told me that he was at a candidate meet-and-greet in Arlington last May when he bumped into Raiklin. Raiklin again brought up the need for election audits — and suggested tactics far beyond lobbying legislators. “If the Democrats don’t give us that,” Maddox recalled him saying, “then violence is the next step.”
Raiklin proceeded into what Maddox described as “a wild, contortionist explanation of how they would reverse Biden’s election,” involving a succession of state audits. First Arizona, then Georgia, then Wisconsin and then other state legislatures would nullify the 2020 election results, he envisioned, until Biden’s victory margin would evaporate. Maddox told Raiklin he was skeptical. “But he said he was certain it was going to happen,” Maddox told me. “And he kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.”
“General Flynn is central to all this,” Raiklin had similarly claimed in New Hampshire when I spoke with him briefly after his talk. He refused to elaborate, so what that meant, exactly, was hard to say. In the feverish activity that now attends the 2020 election on the right, it can be difficult to distinguish conspiring from conspiracism — not least in Flynn’s own statements. In an interview in late January with the right-wing conspiracy website Infowars, Flynn accused George Soros, Bill Gates and others of creating the coronavirus so they could “steal an election” and “rule the world.” In another interview, he floated the rumor that “they” may be “putting the vaccine in salad dressing.”
But the Capitol riot demonstrated how quickly such conspiracism could be converted into action. The belief that the 2020 election was stolen holds sway in the Republican Party as much now as it did then: According to a YouGov poll in December, 71 percent of all Republicans believe that Biden was not elected legitimately. The stolen-election myth has fused with a host of other right-wing preoccupations — the coronavirus vaccines, critical race theory, border security — into a single crisis narrative, of which Flynn is both purveyor and protagonist: The deep state intends to break America as it tried to break Flynn and the man he had the audacity to serve, Donald Trump."
MORE AT:
New York Times Magazine
The general tried to persuade Donald Trump to use the military to overturn the 2020 election. A year later, he and his followers are fighting the same battle by other means.
Published Feb. 4, 2022
Updated Feb. 6, 2022
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