Although it’s clear that Joe Biden won the November 3 election and is the President-Elect, outgoing President Trump continues to dispute the results, alleging widespread fraud that he and his legal representatives have been unable to provide any evidence of.
Insisting on seeing some proof before throwing out millions of ballots, the courts have dealt defeat after defeat to the Trump campaign. The states are well along the process of certifying their results, including all six swing states.
Trump’s more ardent supporters have not taken the repeated losses well, taking it out on election officials across the country, particularly in Georgia.
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, and others have been subject to disturbing threats of violence, as the state’s voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling — also a Republican — outlined in a furious press conference.
“This has to stop,” Sterling said, according to CBS News . “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. It’s too much.”
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But the next day, the temperature increased thanks to a bizarre rant shared on Twitter by just-pardoned Gen. Michael Flynn.
Flynn, who briefly served as President Trump’s National Security Advisor before being fired for lying to Vice-President Pence and the FBI — a crime to which he pleaded guilty — received a broad pardon from President Trump absolving him of “any and all possible offenses” relating to the Mueller investigation and any accompanying grand jury investigations, Politico reported.
The message shared by Flynn called for some rather extreme measures in the wake of President Trump’s election loss.
Among other things, the author of the message, an Ohio non-profit called We The People Convention, called for President Trump to “immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the [sole] purpose of having the military oversee a national re-vote.”
The We The People Convention would also like President Trump to “silence the destructive media” and “end the unlawful censorship of Big Tech.”
And it goes on to suggest there are “well-funded, armed and trained marxists in ANTIFA and BLM strategically positioned in our major cities acting openly with violence to silence opposition to their anti-American agenda,” and invokes President Lincoln’s suspension of Habeus Corpus during the Civil War, saying “Then, as now, a President with courage and determination was needed to preserve the Union.”
While such language isn’t hard to find online, seeing it endorsed by a former general and National Security Advisor is much more unusual.
And as he shared it, Flynn wrote “Freedom never kneels except for God.”
Again, there has been no evidence of any widespread voter fraud. Even Trump’s own Attorney General, William Barr, announced that the Department of Justice hasn’t found proof of enough fraud in the 2020 presidential election to sway the results in Trump’s favor.
And the military quickly quashed any suggestion that it might be willing to overturn the will of American voters as well.
General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made clear that the military won’t be involved in a coup, saying that “we are determined to defend US constitution, no one should doubt that,” according to The National’s Joyce Karam .
