Retired general Michael Flynn said Thursday that President Donald Trump has options regarding the hotly contested presidential election, including seizing voting machines and using “military capabilities” to rerun the election in key battleground states.
Flynn, who is a supporter of Trump’s claims of election fraud, told Newsmax in an interview that while he doesn’t know if the president will pursue these options, he said Trump needs to “plan for every eventuality because we cannot allow this election and the integrity of our election to go the way it is.”
”He could immediately on his order seize every single one of these machines around the country on his order. He could also order, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically rerun an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented,” Flynn told the outlet.
He also clarified his position around the imposition of martial law, saying he isn’t calling for it, noting that “we have a constitutional process … that has to be followed.”
At the same time, he expressed concern about the U.S. Supreme Court, presumably in the context of its refusal to hear a contest-of-election lawsuit brought by Texas, which the high court dismissed on grounds of lack of standing.
“I’m a little concerned about Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court,” Flynn said. “We can’t fool around with the fabric of the Constitution of the United States.”
Flynn sparked controversy when he tweeted a press release from an Ohio-based conservative political organization called “We the People Convention,” which called for Trump to “invoke limited Martial law in order to allow the U.S. Military to oversee a new free and fair federal election if Legislators, Courts, and the Congress do not follow the Constitution.”
“Unfortunately, we are at the point where we can only trust our military to do this because our corrupt political class and courts have proven their inability to act fairly and within the law,” the group argued.
In remarks to Military Times, Bill Banks, a Syracuse University professor with expertise in constitutional and national security law, expressed his opposition to martial law under the current circumstances.
“Apart from the fact that state and now federal investigators have found no evidence of election fraud that would change the election outcome, martial law has no place in the United States absent a complete breakdown of civil governing mechanisms,” he told the outlet.
Yet evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election, including outright voter fraud, has been mounting. Peter Navarro, an adviser to Trump, on Thursday released a detailed report summarizing such allegations in six battleground states, concluding that they are serious enough to warrant an urgent probe and substantial enough to overturn the results.
“If these election irregularities are not fully investigated prior to Inauguration Day and thereby effectively allowed to stand, this nation runs the very real risk of never being able to have a fair presidential election again,” Navarro said in the report.
Flynn, in his remarks to Newsmax, said that while he’s not calling for martial law, he suggested it’s an option that should remain on the table.
”These people out there talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done,” Flynn said. ”Martial law has been instituted 64 times. I’m not calling for that.”
“President Trump won on the 3rd of November,” Flynn said. “The things that he needs to do right now is he needs to appoint a special counsel immediately. He needs to seize all these Dominion and other voting machines we have across the country. He needs to go ahead and prioritize by state and probably by county… if he looks at probably a couple of random sampling of some of these counties, he’s going to find exactly the same problem,” he added.
A recent forensics report based on an examination of Dominion products in Antrim County, Michigan, concluded on Dec. 14 that the software was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”
Russell Ramsland Jr., co-founder of Allied Security Operations Group, which conducted the audit, said in the report that Dominion’s system “intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors.”
“The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud,” he stated.
Dominion disputed the findings on Dec. 15, writing that there were “no software ‘glitches’ that ‘switched’ votes in Antrim County or anywhere else,” adding that the errors in Antrim County were “isolated human errors not involving Dominion,” referring to reports that the Dominion system flipped thousands of Trump votes to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Election Day.
On a Thursday call with reporters explaining his findings, Navarro said his top-line conclusion regarding allegations of voting irregularities, including ones relating to Dominion machines, is that “the emperor, in the election, has no clothes.”
Fielding questions about what, at this stage, can be done, given that numerous legal challenges brought by the Trump campaign have been dismissed and the Electoral College has already voted, giving Biden 306 electoral votes, Navarro said, “with every day that goes by, it becomes more complicated” and “options narrow.”
Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times, said there’s still time for state legislatures to convene in special sessions and authorize alternate slates of electors. This could pave the way for the joint session of Congress, when it convenes on Jan. 6 to count the electoral votes, to declare Trump president for a second term.
