Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn suggested that President Donald Trump use the military to force a new election in swing states he lost.
Flynn, who was pardoned by Trump after the election, made the comment to Newsmax while pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that voting machines switched votes from Trump to President-elect Joe Biden.
"There is no way in the world we are going to be able to move forward as a nation. He could immediately, on his order, seize every single one of these [voting] machines, on his order," he said.
"He could order the, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states," he added.
"I mean, it's not unprecedented. These people are out there talking about martial law like it's something that we've never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times. So I'm not calling for that. We have a constitutional process."
Flynn keeps tiptoeing around martial law:
Flynn has tiptoed around calling for martial law even as he touts how often it has been used in the past (it has not been invoked since Pearl Harbor and the Supreme Court repudiated many earlier uses that were invoked before the Civil War).
After Trump’s lawsuits falsely claiming fraud in the election failed, Flynn declared that there are other “avenues” to challenge the result.
"Courts aren't going to decide who the next president of the United States is going to be,” he said. “We the people decide."
Flynn also shared a message from a tea party group calling for Trump to "temporarily suspend the Constitution" and impose martial law.
Dominion threatens lawsuit over voting machine claim:
The voting machine claim that was pushed by Flynn and his attorney Sidney Powell was repeatedly refuted by election officials and she has provided no evidence of her baseless claim.
Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the heart of the allegation, threatened to sue Powell for defamation.
“As a result of your false accusations, Dominion has suffered enormous harm, and its employees have been stalked, have been harassed, and have received death threats,” the company said in a letter to the attorney. “We demand that you immediately and publicly retract your false accusations and set the record straight. If you refuse to do so and instead choose to stand by your defamatory falsehoods, that will be viewed as additional evidence of actual malice.”
