In the weeks after the 2020 election, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Donald J. Trump’s former national security adviser, was a key figure in efforts to subvert the election outcome. In recent interviews and speeches, he and an associate are warning that this year’s election will be stolen from Mr. Trump, advising supporters to take action to prevent a theft and vowing retribution once Mr. Trump is back in power.
At the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a far-right event in Pennsylvania this month, Mr. Flynn told the crowd that after a Trump victory: “Katie, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell — my hell — will be unleashed.”
At the same event, Ivan Raiklin, a close associate of Mr. Flynn’s who serves on the board of directors of Mr. Flynn’s organization America’s Future, urged Trump supporters in Pennsylvania to go to the state capital, Harrisburg, and “confront” their state representatives with “evidence of the illegitimate steal” after the election if Mr. Trump loses.
Mr. Raiklin also called on Republican-held state legislatures to withhold their electors in the event of a Trump loss that Republicans consider illegitimate.
“We run the elections,” he said. “We try to play it fair. They steal it, our state legislatures are our final stop to guarantee a checkmate.”
The maneuver Mr. Raiklin laid out appears to defy the Electoral Count Reform Act, the bipartisan law passed in 2022. The law was meant to prevent a repeat of Mr. Trump’s attempt to exploit the Electoral College vote to overturn his defeat in 2020. It states that only state executives, not state legislatures, can certify the slates of electors that determine the winner.
But the notion of withholding electors has been circulating in some corners of the right. Mr. Raiklin laid out similar plans days later in North Carolina and at a county Republican Party event in Maryland. He argued that North Carolina’s legislature should preemptively allocate its electoral votes to Mr. Trump, even before the state’s ballots were counted, on account of hurricane-related disruptions.
Appearing at the Maryland event with Mr. Raiklin, Representative Andy Harris, the Maryland Republican who chairs the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, said the plan “makes a lot of sense,” before backtracking on Friday and saying in a statement that “every legal vote should be counted.”
Mr. Flynn and Mr. Raiklin, neither of whom responded to requests for comment, have been prominent exponents of false claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election for years. But they have recently focused on specific tactics to avoid what they predict will be the theft of the 2024 election.
In a September interview on a podcast dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, Mr. Flynn applauded right-wing activists who are surveilling election infrastructure as the “modern-day Minutemen of this cold civil war that we are currently facing,” a reference to the Revolutionary War militia.
The extent of Mr. Flynn’s current relationship with Mr. Trump is unclear. The former president fired him less than a month into his presidency for lying to Vice President Mike Pence and to federal agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. But in his last months in office, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Flynn a full federal pardon.
On Dec. 18, 2020, Mr. Flynn and several associates met with Mr. Trump at the White House and tried to persuade him to use federal law enforcement and military personnel to seize voting machines in an effort to hold onto power, a meeting that has been a focus of investigations into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In the years since Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Flynn has maintained a regular presence in far-right events and media where the former president is revered in near-theological terms, and where Mr. Flynn himself is considered a tragic hero of his presidency.
Mr. Trump has occasionally signaled his ongoing endorsement of Mr. Flynn’s activities and hinted at a place for him in a future administration, though only vaguely. Calling into a live event where Mr. Flynn appeared last year, he told him, “We’re going to bring you back,” to cheers from the crowd.
“There has been no discussion of who will serve in a second Trump administration,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Victor Mellor, a close associate of Mr. Flynn’s, said he believed that Mr. Flynn and Mr. Trump had not seen each other for eight months but still spoke occasionally.
It has been similarly difficult to assess the political significance of Mr. Raiklin, a lesser-known figure who has been ubiquitous in election-denial circles for years. A former Green Beret and a self-described constitutional lawyer, Mr. Raiklin gained attention after the 2020 election for drafting an early version of the claim that Vice President Pence could use suspicion of fraud as grounds for rejecting electors from states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won.
Mr. Trump retweeted a version of Mr. Raiklin’s claim in late December 2020. Jack Smith, the special counsel in the federal Jan. 6 case against the former president, recently cited the action in a court filing as part of Mr. Trump’s campaign of pressuring Mr. Pence to overturn the election.
In July, the website Raw Story reported that Mr. Raiklin — who has been seen sitting alongside right-wing Republican members of Congress at hearings on Capitol Hill recently — was maintaining a “target list” of hundreds of officials and other political enemies for “retribution.” The report led Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who served on the House Jan. 6 committee, to describe the list as “a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”
A man who was arrested this month after driving to a Trump rally in Coachella, Calif., with several firearms in his car was later identified as a frequent livestreaming partner of Mr. Raiklin’s on the right-wing video platform Rumble. (Federal law enforcement officials have since said that Mr. Trump was “not in any danger” from the man, who was released on bail.)
In June, America’s Future, an organization Mr. Flynn runs with his sister, announced that Mr. Raiklin was joining the board. In a statement, Mr. Flynn said that Mr. Raiklin was “among America’s most courageous patriots.”
Mr. Flynn, like Mr. Raiklin, has extolled the importance of state legislatures in the election. “We need people, you know, within the trenches, within the redoubts, the defensive lines that we have at the states’ legislatures now,” he said in a September podcast interview.
Mr. Mellor said that he didn’t believe Mr. Flynn had worked with Mr. Raiklin on his plans to try to pressure legislators to interfere in the election process on behalf of Mr. Trump. “The general doesn’t collaborate on Ivan’s message,” he said. “Do they talk about election integrity and other stuff? Of course they do.”
Mr. Flynn has continued to stay involved with the circle of people who are already laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen and try to overturn the result if Mr. Trump loses.
In September, Mr. Flynn appeared in a podcast interview alongside Gregg Phillips, a leader of True the Vote, a right-wing election-monitoring group.
Mr. Phillips has been sued over his involvement in “2,000 Mules,” a 2022 film that advanced false claims that mail ballots and drop boxes were used to steal the 2020 election from Mr. Trump. In the interview, Mr. Phillips encouraged listeners to monitor ballot drop boxes in the weeks before the election.
At the Rod of Iron event on Oct. 11, Mr. Raiklin told a small group of livestreamers that he was planning for a range of scenarios in the days after the election.
“I have a plan and strategy for every single component of it,” he said. “And then Jan. 6 is going to be pretty fun.”
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