Outrage as Michael Flynn says Trump could use ‘martial law’ to re-run the election

Michael Flynn went on Fox News on Thursday to talk about Trump potentially using ‘martial law’ to get states to re-do their November 2020 elections.

Flynn is a former Trump national security adviser who has been controversial in the past – he is well known for going on Fox News and making incendiary comments. He was pardoned by Donald Trump twice for lying on the record and to investigators from the FBI about his involvement with Russian politics.

In the comments on Newsmax, Fox’s news show, Flynn said,

“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.”

This is in reference to a conspiracy theory that voting machines around the US were programmed to flip votes from Trump to Biden during the presidential election in November. Trump supporters and hardline right-wing activists have been campaigning since the November election to overturn the results of the election, increasingly resorting to violence and complicated legal mechanisms to get the results of the election thrown out.

Flynn 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.”

“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.”

People were shocked at what Flynn said, although many of them weren’t surprised.

Flynn only worked for the White House for 23 days in February 2017, after it emerged that he had lied to Mike Pence about a conversation with Russian advisors about lifting US government sanctions.