Michael Flynn, a national security advisor under then-President Donald Trump, ominously predicted election-related violence in a recent interview and urged Trump to declare victory before the full results of the presidential election are known.
Republicans in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have blocked efforts to allow for the counting of mail-in ballots before Election Day. As a result, election officials in those states don’t expect the final results to be available quickly.
Nonetheless, during an appearance on the right-wing podcast American Truth Project earlier this month, Flynn said that if the victor of the election isn’t known by Nov. 6, the day following Election Day, there could be “violence.”
“I actually think that’ll be a really bad spot, and I feel like people are going to go to those locations where there’s counting, and there could actually be violence, because people are so upset after 2020, and what is very clear, in terms of a fraudulent election in certain states, they’re just not going to put up with it anymore,” he said. Flynn said earlier that he was speaking about “hypothetical probabilities.”
The interview was flagged by USA Today Thursday. During the same interview, Flynn noted that Pennsylvania officials don’t expect to have full results available on election night — something he called “egregious behavior.” He compared the state to Florida, which is known for counting its ballots quickly.
Flynn — who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI in 2017, before later attempting to withdraw the plea, and who was eventually pardoned by Trump in late 2020 — has spent the last four years crisscrossing the country, spreading conspiracy theories about election administration and amplifying Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
He’s also frequently used violent rhetoric, such as when he told InfoWars host Alex Jones in December, “We’re moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks. And the sound of the guns is freedom. We are going to move towards freedom.” Recently, he told a right-wing Christian audience that if Trump wins, “the gates of hell, my hell, will be unleashed.
Separately, during the same interview, Flynn said he believed Trump will win a 50-state victory if the election is fair, but that he doesn’t believe Democrats “are going to allow a totally fair election to occur.”
He advised Trump to declare victory even before he knows the full results.
“If I were Trump, and he was way up, and the polls haven’t closed in Pennsylvania, the polls haven’t closed in Arizona, polls haven’t closed in Wisconsin — I would claim victory that night,” Flynn said. “When I look back in 2020, he should have claimed victory last night. And let everybody go to bed. Whatever they were going to come up with, just say that’s a bunch of B.S., those are all a bunch of lies.”
In fact, this is exactly what Trump did in 2020, announcing that he’d won late on election night and demanding that ballot-counting stop immediately, which would have disenfranchised thousands of voters. Days before that election, Trump advisor Steve Bannon revealed that this strategy was pre-planned.
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner,” Bannon said, according to a recording later obtained by Mother Jones. “He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Bannon recently advised Trump to do the same thing this year.
“I am urging President Trump: If the votes come in like it looks like they’re going to come in, he should step up and inform the American citizens of exactly what’s going on and not keep people in the dark like was done in 2020,” Bannon said at a press conference after being released from prison this week.
Flynn said that election officials in other states should be able to match Florida’s speed because, he asserted, election officials are able to count mail-in ballots “as they’re coming in.”
That’s not true, and it’s one of the main reasons election results in some states take longer to tally than others: In Pennsylvania, current law requires election workers to wait until Election Day to begin tabulating mail ballots, even if they arrive early. Wisconsin election officials are also barred from counting ballots before Election Day. In fact, election officials in both states aren’t even allowed to begin processing ballots — for example, verifying voters’ signatures and taking ballots out of their envelopes — until Election Day, let alone actually start tallying votes.
In both states, Republicans blocked efforts to change those rules. In Pennsylvania, state Senate Republicans insisted that any future reforms also require voters to present ID whenever they vote, which Democrats have rejected on the grounds that ID rules make it harder for marginalized groups to vote. Also, in North Carolina last year, Republicans instituted a new law requiring that early ballots only be counted once polls close on Election Day.
The vast majority of states have much more liberal rules for the early processing and counting of ballots.
Also, while it’s true that news outlets – not election officials – predicted Trump would carry Florida overnight after Election Day 2020, the margin in that state was nowhere near as close as in key swing states. Trump ultimately beat Biden by nearly 400,000 votes in the Sunshine State.
USA Today also flagged a recent comment from Ivan Raiklin, a Flynn associate known for saying he longs for “retribution” against a list of journalists and political figures in another Trump term.
Raiklin said Americans should plan to “descend” on election workers if results are not announced by midnight on Election Day, and to livestream “every movement and every breath of every single poll worker,” in order to “ensure they are motivated to guarantee a free fair and transparent election.”
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Neither Flynn nor Raiklin immediately responded to HuffPost’s request for comment Thursday.