BREAKING NEWS: GOP Senate Candidate Tells FBI He Has Evidence Michael Flynn Is Working With Foreign Intelligence As Part of Treasonous Plot to Overthrow Federal Government
The stunning allegation is as yet uncorroborated, but holds indicia of reliability. Flynn's Texas-billionaire-funded Patriot Caucus may indeed be plotting to use extortion to reinstall Trump as POTUS.
Introduction
First, there was the video. Then an email and social media blitz aimed at journalists around the country. Then a Salon article. Then a Newsweek article.
No one knew what to make of it all, and perhaps we still don’t. A current Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Pennsylvania, Everett Stern, is claiming that he was approached by agents from Michael Flynn’s Patriot Caucus—funded by Texas billionaire Al Hartman—who told him they’re working with former intelligence agents from both domestic and foreign intelligence agencies to acquire dirt on state and federal politicians. Their goal? To extort those politicians into pushing to audit and decertify Joe Biden’s November 2020 election victory and reinstal Donald Trump as president. Stern says that he was given the impression that the Patriot Caucus did not care if illegal means were used to acquire or deploy the intelligence they sought.
Stern now says he has evidence of these contacts, and provided it to law enforcement.
If true, Stern’s allegations could well amount to treason—and not just in the lay sense, but the statutory one. Working with agents of a hostile nation to bring down the U.S. government would indeed be akin to an act of war against the United States, and so providing aid and comfort to a foreign hostile engaged in such an act of war (let alone directing the effort) might well be Treason. Given Flynn’s illicit activities since 2015—catalogued in detail in Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019), and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020)—one certainly can’t say it would be out of character for Flynn. Not only did former president Barack Obama go out of his way to tell Trump that he should not hire Flynn because of information the federal government had about Flynn’s activities abroad; not only did the former president thereafter fire Flynn following a scandal related to his contacts abroad; Flynn was then indicted by DOJ for lying to the FBI about his contacts with hostile foreign nationals involved in election interference.
The bestselling Proof Trilogy (link) exhaustively detailed Flynn’s clandestine contacts with Israeli intelligence, with these contacts being specifically on the subject of illegal election interference. More recently, Flynn and the rest of Team Kraken (including Sidney Powell, Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliani, Patrick Byrne, and others) claim to have worked with a Venezuelan defector who they could only have encountered through the auspices of their ally Eduardo Bolsonaro (son of fascist Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro) and Brazilian intelligence. The subject of their work with this supposed foreign-national Deep Throat? Yet again, illicit election interference.
In short, Stern’s allegations are not just plausible but fit a pattern. But are they true?
Other Indicia of Reliability
Certainly, by going public not only with his allegations but the fact that he is now in contact with the FBI, Stern has ended his career in the Republican Party. This itself is one indication of the accuracy of his allegations, as he’s destroying his political hopes along with risking his personal safety in making the allegation he has made. Indeed, one wonders if one of the reasons Stern decided to make a public announcement is to ensure his own safety by making Flynn’s plot public and assuring anyone who aims to harm him that he has already provided what information he has to federal authorities.
Stern also has a professional history that lends some credibility to his allegations. He has been a successful whistleblower combating international money laundering; when he announced his run for Senate, his primary opponent was now-retiring U.S. Senator Pat Toomey, a Trump enemy (Toomey voted to impeach Trump the second time) who Stern says was one of the main targets of the Patriot Caucus; and because Stern runs a domestic intelligence firm—and because he at first ran in opposition to Toomey—he does appear to be exactly the sort of Republican who Flynn and his team would have approached as part of an extortion-cum-treason plot against America.
Stern has a long history in intelligence, which began with an unsuccessful bid to join the CIA and continues on in his work with Tactical Rabbit, his business intelligence firm. Tactical Rabbit is precisely the sort of business intelligence firm that Michael Flynn himself tried to set up (The Flynn Group), and with which he has had contacts over election interference in the past (in the form of the now-defunct Israeli business intelligence firm Psy Group, at the time run by pro-Trump foreign national Joel Zamel, who shares an attorney with the Trump family and has since confessed to the now-incarcerated George Nader that he illegally interfered in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf). Flynn’s intelligence contacts are in many instances based in Texas—as the Proof books confirm at length—making the alleged involvement of a Texas billionaire in this supposed scheme unsurprising.
As for the details of the scheme itself, it basically matches everything we have heard from Flynn’s own mouth. The returned lieutenant general took, in 2020, a hard turn into the QAnon sphere—even swearing an oath to the QAnon “movement” publicly (see below)—which turn has as one of its core premises that the Biden administration is illegal and that Donald Trump remains the true President of the United States.
Flynn has been aggressively supportive of the ongoing battleground-state “audit” movement that Stern says Flynn’s treasonous plot was intended to advance, and Flynn himself has already freely acknowledged working with a hostile domestic intelligent agent—the aforementioned (alleged) Venezuelan “defector”—to overturn the election that put Biden in office. So it’s difficult to imagine, as to Stern’s claims, any allegation this extraordinary that is also, simultaneously, not just plausible but in line with all of the public, major-media-published evidence we have.
What Happens Now
The FBI has been unbearably slow in holding anyone in Trumpworld to account—this is so well documented and publicly complained of that little more need be said about it except to note that after impeccably credentialed former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele supplied the FBI with potentially damning information about Trump from highly placed Russian sources in mid-2016, the FBI’s response was to lie to the New York Times in an October 2016 pre-election report and say that it had no evidence of illicit ties between Trump and Russian agents. It turned out that such ties were legion and that this information could’ve been critical to voters in October 2016.
More recently, anonymous FBI agents told Reuters that the FBI had no evidence of connections between Trump and the January 6 insurrectionists; that report too has now been determined to be false and has been rejected by the DOJ, though as with the October 2016 Times report it in the meantime provided much comfort and aid to the current crop of pro-Trump loyalists both inside and outside of Washington, DC.
So what can we expect the FBI to do with information that a top Trump adviser—in the past and still—is in contact with foreign intelligence agents in a bid to do exactly what the Russians tried to do in 2016 and domestic insurrectionists tried to do in 2020 and 2021: determine the outcome of a national election whose winner many federal law enforcement agents would like to be Donald Trump? Just as Steele ultimately went to the media due to inaction by the FBI, now Stern appears to feel as though just going to the FBI is insufficient to warn the country of what’s happening right now.
Proof notes that a DOJ IG report from Michael Horowitz confirmed the presence of virulently pro-Trump pockets within the FBI—the sort of rogue FBI agents (i.e., the very sort of domestic intelligence agents Flynn now says he is working with) who the former DIA chief aided in October 2016, alongside the aforementioned Rudy Giuliani and Joe diGenova, to try to interfere in the 2016 presidential election by blackmailing Jim Comey into reopening the Hillary Clinton email case (which Comey, partly due to this illicit pressure, ultimately did, costing Clinton the election).
In short, we’ve seen this story before: Flynn working with domestic and foreign intel operatives to try to artificially ensure a specific election result, and using extortion as a means to his treacherous end. And we’ve also seen before a very well-credentialed whistleblower convinced that the FBI is unwilling to act against Flynn—or Trump.
And why shouldn’t the FBI believe, once again, that Flynn and Trump are impossible to stop, after DOJ dropped a slam-dunk Making False Statements case against Flynn post-conviction and then watched as Trump pardoned him?
Conclusion
It’s not clear what will come of this. It’s likely that once again journalists—particularly independent journalists—will have to do the work of uncovering a plot by Flynn that the FBI and DOJ are unable or unwilling to pursue to its conclusion. While Proof may or may not be the independent media outlet for the job, as it’s currently focused on the January 6 investigation rather than benighted efforts by Trump loyalists to undo a presidential election that under no circumstances can be undone, the coverage of the Stern press conference by Salon and Newsweek is at least one sign that we will be hearing far more about all this in the media in the days, weeks, and months to come.
This is brilliant reporting, as always, Seth. And of course, we get to read it here first and do a slow burn over these facts for months and months while the establishment media chase the "story du jour". It's thrilling to see the big outlets finally give you (and others) credit for the work you are doing, but at the same time it is incredibly frustrating to hear people discuss "breaking news" that I read in a Seth Abramson mega-thread or chapter in Proof *months and months ago*. It's maddening.
By the way, hope you had a lovely birthday, good man!
Once again you’ve shown that Flynn will not go away until he is put away, and the question is whether the FBI will do this, or like previously with Comey and its 2016 silence about Trump’s long criminal history and Russia ties, instead pave the way for Trump’s return to power. Time and again your posts reveal the Trump, Flynn, ET al are clear and present dangers to the US and after 1/6 we are seeing low level Capitol attackers get suspended sentences and probation. Five years after the Trump attack on the US began. The FBI you describe reminds me of the cheating scandals at West Point and AFA. You end the scandal by getting rid of those involved. But the FBI? Who is running the show? The cheaters?