Michael Flynn Is Still at War

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/magazine/michael-flynn-2020-election.html

No paywall
https://archive.is/5KZ82

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.

*snip*

[Nevilledog]

1. Kick