Retired General Michael Flynn — who recently received a pardon from President Donald Trump — appeared on the Fox program Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend, where he complained to host Maria Bartiromo about the supposed “political persecution” that he faced. In reality, he faced criminal proceedings over his lies to federal investigators about his contacts with a then-Russian ambassador to the United States. More acutely, at one point, Flynn also threateningly insisted that the “country will not allow” the “false inauguration” of Joe Biden as president, trumpeting the unequivocally false claims of election fraud that the president’s team has slung for weeks.
In a longer explanation, Flynn claimed that “foreign interference” plagued the recently concluded presidential election through the work of Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machines company that Trump’s allies have alleged has covert foreign ties. Top Trump allies have alleged that Dominion has connections to Venezuela and is secretly owned by a company that participated in questioned elections in that country — but there is simply no legitimate evidence for these claims.
Nevertheless, Flynn ranted as follows:
‘There’s a whole number of paths that the president has, and, like I say, asked on a scale of 1-10 who will be the next president, I say 10: Donald Trump. Sidney Powell right now has four lawsuits pending at the Supreme Court, and there are other Supreme Court suits that are pending today and will probably be played out this week. I would also add that we have conclusive evidence of foreign interference in our election, and it’s available to the public right now… One of the things that I would recommend if I were the [Director of National Intelligence] or certainly if I were the national security adviser is I think that the president of the United States has to trigger his executive order, I think of 2018, and probably appoint a special counsel to look into all this… We have serious, serious foreign influence problems with this Dominion voting machine.’
Flynn’s comments sound laughably unhinged. On November 12, top Trump ally Rudy Giuliani claimed that Dominion — which he incorrectly called Canadian — “is a company that’s owned by another company called Smartmatic through an intermediary company named Indra,” which is false — Dominion and Smartmatic “have no active partnership or ownership deal,” the Associated Press reported recently. Indra doesn’t have any relationship with either company or role in the 2020 presidential election at all, that company says.
Amazingly, Flynn also characterized the preparations for the Senate run-off elections in Georgia as a “falsehood that people shouldn’t even be considering right now.” The implication is that imaginary fraud is such a problem that the focus should be in the here-and-now. If Republicans lose those Georgia Senate elections, then they’ll lose control of the Senate.
Watch Flynn below:
There’s no meaningful evidence for the idea that Donald Trump will somehow secure a second term in office, and these claims otherwise are simply delusional. Late last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit that Trump supported in which plaintiffs sought the invalidation of the election outcome in swing states that Biden won, and the two justices who said that they’d have heard the case added that they would not have granted the invalidations that the plaintiffs were seeking.
