On Nov. 25, 2020, President Donald J. Trump announced via Twitter that he was granting a full pardon to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the presidential transition, though he had later tried to withdraw the plea. A CNN report that evening reflected the conventional view in Washington that the pardon, arriving 18 days after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, was a near-final chapter of the Trump presidency, “a sign Trump understands his time in office is coming to a close.”
At the time Trump announced the pardon, Flynn was encamped at the historic Tomotley estate in South Carolina, a more-than-700-acre former plantation dating back to the 17th century, where enslaved people harvested rice until much of the property was destroyed by federal troops at the close of the Civil War. Tomotley now belonged to L. Lin Wood, the Trump-supporting defamation lawyer who sued Georgia election officials over the state’s 2020 election results showing a Biden victory and predicted that the state’s Republican governor and secretary of state “will soon be going to jail.” (One of his suits was later dismissed; another is pending.) Though the next day would be Thanksgiving, Flynn had not brought his family with him. He had flown to South Carolina on the private jet of the former Overstock chief executive Patrick Byrne and set up camp at Tomotley, where he threw himself into the project of reversing the results of the election Trump had just lost.
The president and his loyalists, together and independently, had been working toward this end in various ways since Election Day. Byrne told me that he and Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, met with Trump’s legal adviser Rudy Giuliani in Arlington, Va., shortly after the election to offer their assistance. Through Powell, Flynn soon became part of the group as well. Byrne said he had rented several rooms at the Trump Hotel for a few months — paying a full rack rate of about $800,000 — which he, Flynn, Powell and others would move in and out of. Byrne considered the hotel “the safest place in D.C. for a command bunker.” But Flynn suggested that they also establish a separate working area far from the Beltway. Powell contacted Wood, who agreed to host them at his secluded estate. As the group began to assemble in mid-November, Wood told me that he was surprised and “honored” to discover that Flynn, whom he had never met, was among his guests.
Powell had brought along two law associates. The other guests were there to gather and organize election information alongside her and Flynn. Among these was Seth Keshel, a 36-year-old former Army military intelligence captain who told me he got Flynn’s attention three weeks earlier by sending what he believed were suspicious election data to Flynn’s LinkedIn page. Another, Jim Penrose, was a cybersecurity specialist who had worked for the National Security Agency. A third, Doug Logan, was an associate of Byrne and the chief executive of a Florida-based software-security firm called Cyber Ninjas. (Powell, Penrose and Logan did not respond to requests for comment.) Wood and Byrne said the group had brought computers, printers and whiteboards. “It looked like Election Central,” Wood recalled.
Flynn and the other men slept and ate at an adjacent property, Cotton Hall, but otherwise toiled in the main residence at Tomotley. In a podcast interview, Keshel recalled that when he woke up in the mornings, usually around 5:45 a.m., Flynn typically had “been up for several hours,” juggling “a few different cellphones at any given time.” Keshel told me that while he spent his three weeks at Tomotley assembling data for Powell’s legal filings, Flynn came and went without notice and did not always volunteer what he was working on. “General Flynn is very adept at need-to-know,” he said.
Two days after Thanksgiving, Flynn spoke by phone with the Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network, a right-wing religious media outlet. Claiming that the 2020 election involved “probably the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” he asserted that China was “not going to allow 2020 to happen, and so now what we have is this theft with mail-in ballots.” A legitimate counting of the ballots would have resulted in a Trump landslide, he insisted. “I’m right in the middle of it right now,” Flynn said, “and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”
While Powell was pursuing legal options for reversing the election results, Flynn was beginning to envision a military role. “It’s not unprecedented,” Flynn, describing the nascent plan, insisted to the Newsmax host Greg Kelly on Dec. 17. “I mean, these people out there talking about martial law, like it’s something that we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times, Greg,” he said, then added, “I’m not calling for that.”
But by that point, Flynn was in fact calling for sending in the military to the contested states. Byrne told me that by Dec. 16, he had lined up a series of options for the president to consider, including using uniformed officials to confiscate voting machines and ballots in six states. Flynn suggested to Byrne that the National Guard and U.S. marshals in combination would be the most suited to the job.
On the evening of Dec. 18, Flynn, Byrne, Powell and a legal associate took an S.U.V. limousine to the White House. The group found their way into the Oval Office with the help of several eager-to-please White House staff members, including Garrett Ziegler, an aide to the Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro. (Navarro had released his own extensive, and swiftly debunked, report on election fraud the day before and was in the midst of lobbying Republican members of Congress to overturn the 2020 results.) Byrne, Flynn and Powell then made their case directly to the president about the options he had at his disposal, including Flynn’s suggested use of the National Guard and U.S. marshals. According to Byrne, Powell handed Trump a packet that included previous executive orders issued by President Barack Obama and by Trump that the group believed established a precedent for a new executive order, one that would use supposed foreign interference in the election as a justification for deploying the military. In this operation, Byrne added, Flynn could serve as Trump’s “field marshal.”
White House lawyers present at the meeting vehemently denounced the plan. According to Byrne, Flynn calmly replied: “May I ask what it is you think happened on Nov. 3? Do you think there was anything strange about the election?” According to another account of the meeting published by Axios, Flynn became livid. “You’re quitting!” he yelled at Eric Herschmann, a senior adviser to Trump. “You’re a quitter! You’re not fighting!” (Byrne denies that Flynn said this.)
Trump was amenable to the idea of civilian authorities’ seizing voting machines; in November, he reportedly proposed the idea of the Justice Department’s doing so to his attorney general, William Barr, though Barr rejected it. But either by his own judgment or on the advice of others, he seemed to draw the line at using the military. Byrne told me that Giuliani recently explained to him that he had counseled the president to reject such a plan because “we would all end up in prison.” (A lawyer for Giuliani did not respond to a request for comment.) After Flynn and Powell’s proposal was rejected, Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who served with Flynn and was now working with Powell’s legal team, later offered his own revised draft executive order, in which the Department of Homeland Security would be ordered to seize the machines. But Ken Cuccinelli, the department’s acting deputy secretary, resisted. (Waldron had presented his own martial-law plan to both Flynn and Trump’s legal team; it is unclear whether the plan that Flynn’s group presented originated with him or Waldron.)
Flynn, meanwhile, continued to agitate for military intervention. Through an intermediary, he contacted Ezra Cohen, the Defense Department acting under secretary for intelligence, who served under Flynn both at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Flynn had been director, and on the National Security Council. Cohen (identified in other reports as Ezra Cohen-Watnick) was traveling in the Middle East at the time; the intermediary told him that Flynn wanted him to return to Washington right away.
The call, Cohen told me, was out of the blue. Although it has been reported that he and Flynn were close, he insisted that this was not true: They overlapped at the D.I.A., but Cohen said they met for the first time in the spring of 2016, well after Flynn left the agency, when Cohen wanted to solicit career advice from a veteran intelligence officer. Months later, Flynn recruited him to serve on the N.S.C., but Cohen said they had spoken only briefly a couple of times since Flynn’s departure from the White House.
Cohen said he demurred, but Flynn called him a second time, shortly before Christmas, catching Cohen on his cellphone as he was driving home from a Whole Foods in Maryland. He explained that he needed Cohen to direct the military to seize ballots and voting machines and rerun the election.
Cohen said he was too stupefied to ask his former boss how he thought Cohen had the authority to do such a thing. “Sir, the election is over,” he said, according to the ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.” “It’s time to move on.” Cohen told me that Flynn yelled so loudly that Cohen’s wife could clearly hear it from the passenger seat. “You’re a quitter!” Flynn berated him, as he had berated Herschmann. “This is not over! Don’t be a quitter!”
With Flynn’s fleeting window of direct access to the president closed, he and Powell urged Representative Devin Nunes, a Trump ally, to pursue a particularly hallucinatory rumor that the election results had been manipulated by an Italian defense contractor. But a Nunes staff member found the lead to be meritless, according to someone with knowledge of the discussions. Flynn’s attempts to reach the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, were blocked by the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a government official who was privy to these efforts.
It was a stunning near miss for American democracy. But after more than a month of furious machinations, Flynn seemed to have at last exhausted his options. He would later lament to a right-wing podcaster, a fellow retired general and conspiracy theorist named Paul Vallely, that “in the final days of the administration, there was a lot of decisions that could have been made.” Flynn had been boxed out, he claimed, by “a team that wanted to kind of, ‘Let’s get past this; let’s get rid of this guy Trump.’”
A day after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, the conservative Washington Examiner published an article suggesting that the intelligence community had delayed the publication of a report outlining China’s attempts to influence the 2020 election (though the Office of the Director of National Intelligence categorically dismissed the claim that China played any role in altering the vote totals). Flynn texted a link to the article to an associate with a bitter accompanying note: “Ratcliffe should be ashamed of himself as well as Trump for not demanding this report be made public over a month ago.”
On a Friday evening this January, Flynn took the stage at Dream City Church in Phoenix, the latest stop of the ReAwaken America conference: a right-wing road show that combines elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention. Flynn, the featured speaker, was wearing a palm-tree-print blazer over a T-shirt and jeans. He began by leading a round of stretching exercises. “You’re the tough crowd, because you’re the ones who hung in there all day,” Flynn said to the audience of perhaps a thousand.
The crowd had thinned considerably from a peak of 3,500. Those who remained had listened for nine hours to a procession of speakers, including Eric Trump; Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive; the young conservative activist Charlie Kirk from Turning Point USA; and, just before Flynn, a New Jersey gym owner who was banned from American Airlines after refusing to wear a mask on a flight. After hours of apocalyptic pronouncements — coronavirus vaccines described by one speaker as “poison death shots,” the Biden administration by another as “worshipers of Satan” — his musings about the 2020 election seemed bland by comparison.
Flynn insisted that the election was rigged against Trump and that the failure to remedy it constituted “a moment of crisis” for America. He labeled the election system “totally broken,” Democrats “socialists” and establishment Republicans “RINOs” (Republicans in Name Only). But, Flynn said, “people at the county level have the ability to change this country.” Elected county commissioners could write more restrictive voting laws. Elected sheriffs could enforce those laws.
“Not everybody can be a Washington, D.C., superstar,” Flynn reminded the crowd. “Not everybody can be a Joan of Arc.”
Flynn did not explicitly compare himself to the canonized martyr of the Hundred Years’ War. He did not have to. At this gathering and across the right-wing ecosystem, the story of Flynn’s victimization by a diabolical “deep state” and the news media is practically a matter of scripture. “Look at what they did to the general,” Eric Trump told the crowd earlier that afternoon, with Flynn standing onstage beside him. Warning the audience that “they want to take you down criminally,” Trump then pointed to the human evidence standing to his left: “They did it to him.”
‘If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn.’
One year since Trump’s departure from office, his Make America Great Again movement has reconstituted itself as a kind of shape-shifting but increasingly robust parallel political universe, one that holds significant sway over the Republican Party but is also beyond its control. It includes MAGA-centric media outlets like One America News, Right Side Broadcasting and Real America’s Voice; well-attended events like the ReAwaken America Tour, which has also touched down in California, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Michigan and Florida; its own personalities and merchandise; and above all, its shared catechism — central to which is the false claim that Trump was the legitimate victor in 2020.
In this world, Flynn is probably the single greatest draw besides Trump himself. The ReAwaken America Tour organizer, Clay Clark, a 41-year-old Tulsa-based entrepreneur and anti-vaccine activist, has featured him in eight engagements across the United States over the past year. “I view it as an honor to pay him to speak at our events,” Clark told me, adding that a nondisclosure agreement prohibited him from revealing Flynn’s fee. At the Phoenix event, two nonprofit organizations Flynn helps lead, America’s Future and the America Project, had separate booths. America’s Future offered $99 annual memberships as well as T-shirts and other merchandise.
All of this is bewildering to some of those who knew Flynn in his former life, as a celebrated intelligence officer in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and watched his spectacular fall from grace with bafflement and regret. It is as if Flynn has managed to burrow his way from a Beltway graveyard into a subterranean afterlife, where he has been welcomed by a Trumpian demimonde that deified him at first sight.
Flynn possesses unique credibility among the ex-president’s followers, with his own compelling story line: that of a distinguished intelligence official who, he claims, experienced firsthand the nefariousness of the deep state. He is a MAGA martyr of such stature that the faithful have been willing to overlook some complicating elements of history. There is the fact that Trump fired Flynn from his post as national security adviser for the same lie that led to his indictment by the Justice Department, and the fact that Flynn, after pleading guilty, spent 2018 cooperating with the Justice Department investigation of other Trumpworld figures. In the right’s transfigured portrayal of Flynn, “America’s general” was at most guilty of being a conservative who dared to accuse Obama of being soft on Islamic extremists, who dared to chant “lock her up” about the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — and who dared to ally himself with Donald Trump at a moment when doing so, for a retired military figure of his stature, was still deeply taboo. That an American three-star general had faced such persecution — that, as Eric Trump said, “they did it to him” — meant, by extension, that no conservative patriot was safe.
In the year since Flynn sought to enlist the military in overturning the election, he has continued to fight the same battle by other means. He has been a key figure in spreading the gospel of the stolen election. Speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5 of last year, the night before the Trump faithful stormed the Capitol, he declared that “everybody in this country knows who won” on Election Day and claimed without evidence that more dead people had voted in the election in some states than were buried on famous Civil War battlefields.
In November, the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 committee issued a subpoena to Flynn ordering him to testify, noting his reported presence at the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting. In his speech the night before the Capitol riot, Flynn pledged: “Tomorrow, we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.” The same day, Flynn was photographed with the longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone at the Willard Hotel, where several of the president’s loyalists had assembled. Flynn was also seen that evening down the street from the Willard at the Trump International Hotel, where other Trump advisers and family members had gathered and where Byrne had paid for Flynn’s lodging.
Flynn has sued to block the subpoena; his attorney, David Warrington, said in a statement, “General Flynn did not organize or speak at any of the events on Jan. 6, and like most Americans, he watched the events at the Capitol unfold on television.”
But the committee’s interest has both reflected and fueled a suspicion that Flynn is something more than a MAGA circuit rider. In addition to his role in the Dec. 18 meeting, Flynn is set apart by the 33 years he spent in the military establishment and the intelligence community, and by his persistent connections to that world. His brother Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn was an Army deputy chief of staff when rioters overtook the Capitol and took part in a phone call that day about whether to bring in the National Guard to assist the overwhelmed Capitol Police force. (Charles Flynn later denied to reporters that his brother’s views influenced the military’s response to Jan. 6.) Flynn’s suggestion at a conference last May that a Myanmar-style military coup “should happen” in the United States led Representative Elaine Luria, a moderate Democrat from Virginia and former Navy commander, to argue that Flynn should be tried for sedition under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Flynn has denied calling for a coup. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this article. In Phoenix, he described his motive for his ongoing activities as the patriotic urge to “stand here and fight for this country” and alluded to the scandal and financial ruin that followed for his family. “What we experienced was unbelievable,” he said.
His war against the federal government is all the more dangerous because it’s personal. “If you think of the classic case studies in how radicalization occurs, it all happened with Mike Flynn,” a fellow military veteran who later did business with Flynn observed. “You’re vilified. Your family’s ostracized. You don’t see any hope economically. This is how to make an extremist.”
Long before his descent into election conspiracism, Flynn was known for his unorthodox information-gathering methods. Those who worked with him at the Joint Special Operations Command, where he arrived in 2004, and his later posting in Afghanistan, where he was the top intelligence officer for the coalition commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, recalled his approach as obsessive, omnivorous, high-velocity.
“He was incredibly rapid,” one of his colleagues in Afghanistan recalled. “He’d take in intelligence from unusual sources, from the grass roots” — coalition soldiers in far-flung units — “and from open-source, not relying on signals. And he ran things in a very horizontal fashion. When you sent in a report, his first instinct was, ‘Who needs to see this?’ And he’d put 30 people on the email chain. It was interesting to see someone function not according to the usual rules.”
Former colleagues recall Flynn reviewing reports at his desk late into the night, a half-eaten plate of tater tots beside him. His tenacity seemed to be exactly what the U.S. military effort needed. By 2004, it was clear to everyone on the ground in Iraq that one year after the invasion, U.S. troops remained at pains to understand who the enemy was, much less to defeat it. Flynn’s team closed the information gap in a hurry.
But Flynn’s intelligence-gathering operation was invariably chaotic, embodied by the general himself — who, the former Afghanistan colleague said, “would contradict himself three or four times over a 10-minute period.” His determination to get actionable intelligence into the right hands also led him to defy protocol on occasion, as when a colleague saw Flynn sharing classified information on his computer with a Dutch officer in 2009. Around the same time, according to a Washington Post account, Flynn also shared sensitive intelligence with Pakistani officials, for which he was reprimanded by the Pentagon’s top intelligence official at the time, James Clapper.
Flynn’s discernment as an intelligence analyst also left something to be desired, recalled one former military intelligence officer who worked with him: “During the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, you just couldn’t explain to him that ‘Look, a lot of these guys that were taken off the battlefield just don’t know anything. And they’re all not interconnected.’ And he’d be like, ‘There’s got to be some connection that we’re not making.’ And we’d be like, ‘No, it’s just not there.’” Still, Flynn’s teams provided intelligence on the whereabouts and capabilities of Iraqi and Afghan militants of such value to America’s war-fighting efforts in both countries that his problematic tendencies were largely overlooked at the time.
In his book, “The Field of Fight,” Flynn describes how, after the Sept. 11 attacks, he came to believe that radical Islam was an organized global project to destroy the West, akin to the Soviet Union’s designs on the developing world during the Cold War (which Flynn experienced firsthand as a young Army lieutenant participating in the U.S. invasion of Communist-controlled Grenada in 1983). By family tradition, Flynn, the working-class son of an Army sergeant from Rhode Island, was a registered Democrat. But he also regarded the left as useful idiots in the radical Islamists’ plans, if not outright accomplices. While in Afghanistan, he disdainfully opined to a colleague that Obama wanted to “remake American society.”
His misgivings about the president became personal in June 2010, when Obama fired McChrystal, Flynn’s mentor, after a Rolling Stone article quoted McChrystal’s team mocking members of the Obama administration. Six years later, Flynn would say in “The Field of Fight” that McChrystal’s “maltreatment is still hard for me to digest.”
Still, Flynn’s service under McChrystal had garnered significant admiration in Washington, and Clapper, who by this point was serving as the director of national intelligence, brought Flynn to work at the O.D.N.I. in 2011. A year later, Flynn became the new director of the D.I.A. On paper, bringing in the top intelligence officer in Iraq and Afghanistan made perfect sense. On the other hand, Flynn’s experience as the supervisor of a small operation would not readily scale to an organization of 17,000 employees within a top-heavy and doctrinaire intelligence bureaucracy.
One former senior intelligence official recalled trying to warn Flynn that running a large agency required different management techniques from those to which he was accustomed. Flynn, undeterred, wasted little time upending the D.I.A. He shuffled the responsibilities of the agency’s senior executives and made significant structural changes to the Defense Clandestine Service in defiance of the instruction of his Pentagon superiors. He often ignored his civilian chain of command, according to one of his subordinates.
Woven into the mythology of Flynn’s martyrdom is that his dire warnings about the growing threat of Islamic extremism were what ultimately cost him his job at the D.I.A. In “The Field of Fight,” he claimed to have been given his walking papers in February 2014 “after telling a congressional committee that we were not as safe as we had been a few years back.” In fact, the only evidence I could find of Flynn saying anything along these lines was his remarks to an audience at the Aspen Institute fully five months after being asked for his resignation by James Clapper and Michael Vickers, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, not Obama. “President Obama wouldn’t have known Flynn if he’d fallen over him,” Clapper told me. “We told Susan Rice” — Obama’s national security adviser — “what we’d done after the fact.” Their reasons for ending Flynn’s tenure, he added, included insubordination and erosion of morale at the agency. Clapper termed Flynn’s fired-for-telling-the-truth narrative “baloney.”
Flynn was permitted to retire with the full benefits accorded a three-star general. His retirement ceremony on Aug. 7, 2014 was well attended. He bought a three-bedroom house in the Old Town neighborhood of Alexandria, Va., and set up a consulting shop, Flynn Intel Group, in an office overlooking the Potomac River. And he began venturing into politics. Six months after his retirement, he went on “Fox News Sunday” to criticize the Obama administration’s terrorist-fighting “passivity.” A string of further appearances on the network followed. Flynn also began consulting with Republican presidential contenders, including Carly Fiorina and Scott Walker.
But in the private sector, too, Flynn was reckless. His admirers were horrified to see him form a partnership with Bijan Kian, an Iranian American businessman who would later be indicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government (the case has not been resolved). Kian epitomized, in the words of a former colleague, “these guys in the D.C. swamp who prey on generals fresh out of the military with no understanding of how the business world works.”
Even more concerning was Flynn’s acceptance of more than $45,000 for a speaking appearance in Moscow, at the 10th anniversary gala of Russia’s state-run RT channel in December 2015, where he was photographed sitting next to President Vladimir Putin. Friends and at least one intelligence official advised Flynn against attending the party to celebrate a Russian propaganda organization that was at the time openly spreading misinformation about and within the United States and other NATO countries. Flynn assured them that he knew what he was doing.
Trump did not find Flynn’s views on Russia disqualifying in the least. By the time the candidate had wrapped up the Republican nomination, Flynn was his senior foreign-policy adviser — and, briefly, the only nonpolitician under consideration to be Trump’s running mate, according to a former Trump campaign adviser. Like most of those in Trump’s orbit, Flynn did not seem to be staking his career on a victory in November. Beginning in the final weeks of the campaign, Flynn’s consulting firm accepted over a half-million dollars from a Dutch group with ties to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. On Election Day in 2016, The Hill published an op-ed by Flynn (in which he failed to disclose his consulting relationship) titled “Our Ally Turkey Is in Crisis and Needs Our Support.”
Even for those conservatives who reject the most garish Trump-centric conspiracy theories, there is a tendency to view Flynn as a pawn in a chess match between Trump and federal officials who had reason to wonder if the new president sought help from the Russian government during his campaign. This is true to an extent, but Flynn had placed himself on the chessboard. He lied about discussing the Obama administration’s sanctions on Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the presidential transition — first to incoming Vice President Mike Pence, then to White House officials, then to the media and finally to two F.B.I. agents. One former senior intelligence official who reviewed the transcript of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak told me that he was struck by the “plain stupidity” of Flynn’s lies — knowing that Trump’s campaign was already drawing scrutiny for its contacts with Russia and knowing as well that any phone conversation with a Russian diplomat was likely to be recorded by U.S. intelligence agencies.
When Flynn resigned in February 2017, Trump did not pretend to be heartbroken by the loss. As one of Trump’s senior advisers told me, Flynn “had no chemistry with Trump and didn’t come across as a guy who had it together.” But according to another adviser, the firing of Flynn constituted an early show of weakness in the eyes of the president’s son-in-law and consigliere, Jared Kushner, who confided to this individual in 2020 that throwing Flynn to the wolves was “the biggest mistake we ever made.” (Kushner could not be reached for comment.)
The following December, Flynn struck a plea deal with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Over the course of a year, Flynn sat for about 20 interviews and acknowledged, in private and later in court, that he had willfully not told the truth about the nature of his conversations with Kislyak. Though the summaries of these interviews suggest Flynn was far from expansive and at times evasive, Mueller’s team was clearly hopeful that Flynn’s experience would encourage others in Trump’s circle to come forward. The prosecutors indicated that they would not object to Flynn’s receiving no jail time.
Still, Flynn was racking up immense legal fees and could not find work. In the spring of 2019, he decided to fire his attorneys and replace them with the Dallas-based lawyer Sidney Powell, his future partner in the crusade to overturn the 2020 election. Powell withdrew Flynn’s guilty plea and claimed that the prosecutors were withholding what she called a crucial report that, as it turned out, did not exist. In May 2020, Attorney General William Barr intervened and moved that the case against Flynn be dismissed. A federal judge was still weighing whether to accept Barr’s recommendation when Trump rendered the matter moot by issuing his pardon on Nov. 25.
Less than a month after receiving his pardon, Flynn was face to face with the man who had given it to him, presenting what Byrne called the “beautiful operational plan” for deploying the military to six contested states. When both the White House and Ezra Cohen declined to enact this plan, Flynn continued to hype fraud conspiracy theories — and intended to do the same in a speech at Trump’s rally on the morning of Jan. 6, until he was informed at the last minute that his and Byrne’s slots had been canceled.
Byrne wrote that “Flynn and I sunk into our seats in despair” in the V.I.P. section throughout the program. They had hoped the president would make an evidentiary case for there having been an election-fraud conspiracy, but he had done nothing of the sort. According to Byrne’s account in his self-published book “The Deep Rig,” the two men repeatedly said to each other: “He does not get that it is not about him. He put on a [expletive] pep rally.” They returned to their hotel, hurriedly packed their bags and did not follow the throng to the Capitol, Byrne wrote.
Like several other Trump allies, Flynn refused to testify as scheduled before the Jan. 6 Committee in December and sued to block its subpoena of his phone records. Flynn’s defiance of the committee fuels suspicions in some corners that Flynn has something to hide — though his reticence would also be in keeping with someone who insists an election was stolen by the same deep-state operatives who engineered his dismissal from the White House five years ago. “They did a masterful job of getting rid of me early on, because they knew exactly what I was going to do,” Flynn told Paul Vallely on a podcast in November.
In September, I was attending a rally near the Capitol in support of those facing charges in the Jan. 6 riot when a short, muscular man with a shaved head approached me. He wore a T-shirt with Flynn’s face on it. Noticing my press badge, he held his iPhone up to my face and demanded to know: “Why aren’t you guys reporting on the 12th Amendment that’s going to potentially be triggered after Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin nullify their electors?”
I tried to explain that I was not writing about the election, but the man continued to talk. The next morning, I learned that a video of the encounter had been posted on the man’s Telegram account. His name was Ivan Raiklin, and he was a former Green Beret and lawyer.
Raiklin has often emphasized his dealings with Flynn. When he briefly tried to run for the U.S. Senate in Virginia in 2018, Raiklin was endorsed by Flynn’s son Michael Flynn Jr., and he sat in the federal courtroom next to Sidney Powell during the elder Flynn’s hearing that December; Flynn has been photographed with Raiklin elsewhere and once described him on Twitter as “a true American patriot.” Beyond that, Flynn has never confirmed their relationship, and Flynn’s brother Joe Flynn, in a brief statement on behalf of their family, said, “We do not have any association with Ivan Raiklin.”
‘He kept referring back to Mike Flynn as this linchpin and cog.’
Raiklin is one of a cohort of military-intelligence and law-enforcement veterans who have found or at least claimed places in Flynn’s general orbit since the 2020 election and are engaged in ongoing efforts to relitigate its results. Others include Seth Keshel and Jim Penrose from the group that gathered at Lin Wood’s estate that November; Phil Waldron; Thomas Speciale, the leader of the group Vets for Trump, who worked at the D.I.A. during Flynn’s directorship and has provided security for Flynn; and Robert Patrick Lewis and the former Michigan police officer Geoffrey Flohr of the First Amendment Praetorian, a right-wing paramilitary outfit that has provided security for Flynn and others more than once at Flynn’s behest.
Several of these men were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though in what capacity, and to what end, is still unclear. Flohr can be seen in video footage on the grounds near the west side of the Capitol talking on his cellphone just before the attack, though it is not known if he entered the building. Speciale was also on the west side of the building that afternoon, though he maintains that he never entered. Raiklin, too, was at the Capitol but insists he did not go inside the building.
What is less ambiguous is the role that some of these figures have played in the effort to reverse 2020’s outcome by other means. Since the election, Trump’s claims of thwarted victory have given rise to a wave of state-level organizing aimed at using legislatures and other levers of power to audit the 2020 election results, on the theory that they will void enough Electoral College votes to force a rerun of the election. Although the handful of state and local audits that activists and Republican lawmakers have managed to set in motion — most significantly in Arizona — have in no cases changed the election results, it remains an area of fervent activity, in which Flynn’s name is regularly invoked.
In November in New Hampshire, I attended an “election-security seminar,” presented by an organization called the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group. The conference room was standing room only. The speakers included a state representative, a Republican candidate for Congress and Seth Keshel, who argued that their foremost mission should be “the remediation of the 2020 election.”
The final speaker was Ivan Raiklin. In his hypercaffeinated cadence, Raiklin devoted his talk to enumerating the supposed conspirators whose ongoing presence helped explain “why we haven’t remedied 2020 yet.” Those forces, he said, included the F.B.I., the Bushes, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., former Vice President Mike Pence and former Vice President Dick Cheney. This was the deep state that Trump was up against, Raiklin said.
And, he added, “who’s the first person of any stature whatsoever who has any credibility, other than within his family and the Trump Organization, that comes in and bats for him? This is important. This is the most important thing. Say it louder: General Flynn.” Flynn and Trump’s independence was a threat to the deep state, Raiklin insisted, which led to Flynn’s indictment and Trump’s defeat. “The reason why a million people showed up on Jan. 6,” he said, was that “they know bits and pieces of the story. And they knew that something had to be called out publicly. ”
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.
At the ReAwaken America event in Phoenix, I visited a booth hawking art by a man named Michael Marrone. In addition to the usual hagiographic portraits of Trump in Revolutionary War garb, Marrone had several of Flynn and other hallowed figures in the original effort to overturn the election, like Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. One featured the general seated next to Powell, both in colonial attire, signing the Declaration of Independence. In another, Flynn stood jut-jawed and eagle-eyed, wielding a musket. A third, featuring him beside Trump on a battlefield, bore Flynn’s autograph, next to the QAnon slogan WWG1WGA (“where we go one, we go all”).
In real life, the bonds among this band had started to fray. Wood and Flynn endorsed different Republican candidates for governor of Georgia, a state that has become central to the right-wing efforts to overturn the 2020 results and assert partisan control over future elections. Their estrangement deepened and eventually became public when Wood posted text messages and snippets of a phone conversation on the social media app Telegram. In one of them, Flynn expressed his belief that Trump had “quit” on America.
When I spoke with Wood in December, he told me that he had begun to reappraise the general. For so long Flynn’s partner in conspiracism, he had lately begun to wonder if Flynn himself might not be what he seemed. He told me about attending a Bikers for Trump rally in South Carolina last May, where Flynn led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, only to fall silent momentarily during the line “and to the Republic for which it stands.” At the time, “I tried to defend him,” Wood said. “Now I don’t know. Who forgets the Pledge of Allegiance? Draw your own conclusions. It’s troublesome.”
It occurred to me that this, one way or another, was probably Flynn’s life for the foreseeable future: The prospect of a normal retirement long gone, he now belonged to a MAGA storybook world of heroes and villains and nothing in between. That world “is filled with strong personalities, which is a complication in any movement,” said J.D. Rucker, a conservative podcaster who is acquainted with and admires Flynn. “When you’re fighting for a cause, you’re also fighting for a spotlight within that cause. The left is less susceptible to this — whether because they have a more collectivist view or because they’re not as capitalistic, I don’t know.”
“It’s a challenge to call out a grifter,” Rucker mused, “because usually they have a very passionate, cultlike following. And sometimes we get this situation where we have these multiple grifters going after each other. It’s entertaining, but it’s also dangerous for everybody involved.”
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is the author of several books, most recently “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq,” which was excerpted in the magazine.
