Inside Trump lawyer Lin Wood’s 2020 election fraud spiral

Lawyer L. Lin Wood was so invested in proving that now former President Donald Trump was the winner of the 2020 election that he and ‘Kraken’ lawyer Sidney Powell chartered a private jet to Washington to deliver ‘the holy grail of evidence’ to the White House. 

It was a thumb drive that contained a videotaped deposition from Leamsy Salazar, a former security chief for the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who made wild claims about Smartmatic software and Dominion voting machines rigging elections. 

The assertions were easily debunked – discredited by Trump’s own campaign – but showed how Wood had gone from high-profile lawyer to paranoid QAnon adherent, whose enemies included Elon Musk, the FBI and Antifa and who feared his adversaries wanted to poison his breakfast. 

Those details are contained in the forthcoming book, Find Me the Votes, by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, which focuses on the efforts in Georgia to overturn the 2020 result. DailyMail.com obtained an early excerpt.  

Wood became a household name after representing Richard Jewell – falsely accused of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing – and later the family of JonBenét Ramsey and the late Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. 

But in more recent years, thanks to social media, he moved into the MAGA world.

Wood briefly represented Kyle Rittenhouse, the white 17-year-old who was charged and acquitted of shooting and killing a Black Lives Matter protester in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after demonstrators hit the streets after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in August 2020. 

The lawyer also represented Nicholas Sandmann, the MAGA-supporting teen who was in Washington for the March for Life anti-abortion protest and whose interaction with a native American man attending the Indigenous Peoples March went viral. 

‘There was a common thread running through Wood’s cases, one that hinted at his eventual susceptibility to Trump’s extreme politics of grievance, and ultimately to QAnon,’ Isikoff and Klaidman wrote.  

‘He was taking on clients who perceived themselves to be vilified and mocked by powerful elites – the government, liberals, the mainstream media, global corporations and more,’ they continued. ‘Wood saw himself in the vanguard of a struggle that was bigger than law and politics; it was about the survival of the country.’ 

Additionally, they wrote, by 2020 Wood’s ‘personal and professional life was in turmoil.’      

‘His erratic behavior and conspiracy-laden outbursts had estranged him from his adult kids and grandchild. His law partners had sued him, describing unhinged middle-of-the-night maniacal and abusive behavior,’ Isikoff and Klaidman said. 

Wood had ’embraced an apocalyptic strain of Christian nationalism’ and had emailed his law partners, at one point, a message that they better get on their ‘knees and pray’ and hope God ‘now asks me to show you mercy’ during a disagreement over attorney’s fees. 

‘If he does, I will show it, if he does not, I will deliver a fiery judgment against you on earth,’ the email said. ‘Who the f*** did you think you were dealing with?’ 

Some sources told the authors that they believed Wood’s ‘descent into the swamp of conspiracy theories and paranoia,’ as they put it, occurred after he lost a high-profile defamation trial to Musk in 2019.

Wood represented British cave diver Vernon Unsworth, who Musk referred to as ‘pedo guy’ after he criticized the Tesla owner’s efforts to build a mini-submarine to assist in the rescue of 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach who were trapped in a flooded cave in 2018. 

Not long after he lost the case, Wood is heard in an audio recording accusing his law partners and his son Matt of conspiring to ‘fix the jury and the whole Unsworth case in a special op.’ 

Wood also later doxxed Matt on his Instagram account, using Jesus Christ as a justification, the authors recounted. 

In March 2020, Wood hired Dave Hancock, a former Navy SEAL and security consultant, to harden his computer and phones against what he said were ‘deep state’ intrusions. 

Hancock told the authors that he observed a man in ‘deep distress’ who believed Musk and other tech billionaires, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg, were out to get him. 

The tech entrepreneurs, Wood told Hancock, ‘had conspired with the CIA and his children, using subliminal Facebook messaging, to convince him to go to a psychiatrist,’ Isikoff and Klaidman wrote. 

‘It was, he claimed, a “special op” meant to discredit him and keep him from being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court,’ the authors continued. 

Shortly after his initial meeting with Hancock, Wood also started tweeting about links between Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts – who was appointed by a Republican president – and serial sex abuser Jeffery Epstein. 

Despite making wild claims publicly, Wood was still able to ‘find a firm toehold in Trump World,’ the authors wrote, developing relationships with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. 

Wood had also done work for billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn, who’s being sued by the Justice Department over a plot to pressure Trump to cancel the visas of several Chinese businessmen. 

The lawyer also donated $375,000 to the Trump Victory Fund, in an effort to get a posthumous Medal of Freedom for Jewell. 

While that didn’t work, Trump invited Wood to the White House on March 11, 2020 and took a picture with him in the Oval Office. 

That May, Wood bought a plantation in South Carolina’s low country, called Tomotley, and had Hancock come and beef up security.  

‘Wood, according to a member of Hancock’s team, was convinced that the FBI or Antifa (the villains would change according to his moods) were lurking on the grounds outside Tomotley plotting to snatch him,’ the authors wrote. ‘He fretted that enemies might be poisoning his breakfast.’

Wood also made Hancock the president of his non-profit, the ‘Fight Back Foundation,’ which was supposed to raise money to help those fight for their constitutional rights, with Rittenhouse serving as the figurehead. 

Rittenhouse fired Wood calling him ‘insane’ adding ‘because he was, like going on with all this QAnon stuff.’ 

Rittenhouse’s mother said she also suspected Wood was keeping the money for himself. 

When Hancock pressed Wood about a $100,000 expenditure in late October and said the lawyer needed ‘accountability,’ Wood insinuated to the former Navy SEAL that he was the ‘son of God,’ the authors wrote. 

Hancock called Wood ‘ridiculous’ and a ‘clown’ to which Wood punched him and grabbed Hancock’s 9mm off the security official’s belt. 

Local sheriff’s deputies arrived to the scene. 

Hancock declined to press charges but stopped working for Wood after that. 

Wood would soon become an even bigger deal. 

In the aftermath of the 2020 general election he was fully brought into Trump World after his tweets – which doubled down on the president’s false election fraud claims – caught the eye of Donald Trump Jr.  

He was invited to join other Trump legal advisers in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, where he also had a residence.  

‘Wood could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “I just landed in Atlanta,” Wood wrote to an associate on Friday, November 6. “Trump campaign has summoned me to help,”‘ the authors wrote. 

The next day Wood received a call from Trump from the White House, according to a recounting he gave visitors at Tomotley in March 2023. 

At the top of the call, Trump insisted he had won. 

‘I did not lose and I will never concede,’ the president said, to which Wood replied, ‘Mr. President, don’t you ever concede. You won this election by a landslide.’  

Then Trump asked Wood to give an assessment of Georgia’s Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who had to run in a run-off of January 5 for Republicans to win control of the Senate. 

Both Republicans lost.

Wood said according to the book, ‘I think Kelly Loeffler’s a communist.’ 

She was the wife of the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. 

‘I think he’s wishy-washy and I wouldn’t trust him,’ Wood said of Perdue. 

Wood helped the Trump effort further by offering up his house. 

Meetings on efforts to overturn the election happened at Tomotely – and the authors obtained copies of the emails, text messages, audio recordings, videos, and memos from these meetings that had been provided to Fulton County investigators. 

In South Carolina, Wood was joined by Powell – who’s now one of the 19 people, including Trump, who’s been charged in the Georgia election interference case – as well as Flynn, Overstock founder Patrick Byrne, another well-known conspiracy theorist as well as Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, former NSA cryptographer Jim Penrose and veterans of the CIA’s directorate of operations Sam and Gina Faddis.

At one point Ron Watkins – who some believe is the mysterious ‘Q’ that QAnon adherents follow – did a call with the group. 

The group looked at a number of dubious election fraud claims but the ‘piece de resistance,’ as the authors called it, was Salazar’s bizarre claim that he had attended a ‘secret meeting’ in Caracas a decade before, in which Chavez entered a ‘pact’ with executives for the voting technology company Smartmatic. 

Salazar said Smartmatic’s machines flipped votes in Chavez’s favor and they later shared that information with Dominion, the company that provided Georgia’s machines. 

‘The claims were instantly debunked – by no less than the Trump campaign itself,’ the authors wrote. ‘Within a day, the campaign’s research department produced an 18-page document pointing out that, while it had once shared common machines years earlier in an election in the Philippines, Dominion was not a “partner” of Smartmatic, had no corporate connection with the company whatsoever and there was “no evidence” that Dominion used Smartmatic’s software in the 2020 election in the United States.’

Powell, the authors wrote, was ‘pumped’ and she and Wood considered Salazar’s claims the ‘holy grail of evidence,’ calling the White House to share the news.

That night Trump called her back.  

‘Hey, the guys came through, they got the stuff, we need to send it to you, Powell told the president about the hot new videotape, according to a source at Tomotley who monitored the conversation,’ Isikoff and Klaidman wrote. ‘Good job, said Trump who “seemed excited,” according to the source.’

‘Powell instructed a tech consultant to put the Salazar video on a flash drive,’ they continued. ‘A jet was chartered – and the flash drive with the Venezuelan defector’s account was flown straight to Washington for delivery to the White House.’

There was an admission by Wood – in an email he sent to Powell on November 11 – that the bizarre claims that ended up making it into Powells’ infamous ‘Kraken’ lawsuit – were a diversion tactic as the fake electors scheme was put into action. 

That scheme was thwarted by Vice President Mike Pence during the January 6 joint session of Congress when he refused to use those electors, who backed Trump in swing states won by Biden, to delay the certification of the 2020 election. 

Wood told Powell in the email, ‘I have so much data for you, but we’re not going to need it.’

‘We just have to look like we’re pursuing litigation. Ha!’ the lawyer wrote.   

Wood’s law career started crumbling in January 2021 – the same month Biden took office – when the Georgia State Bar informed him that the organization had opened an inquiry into his mental health. 

He was asked to submit an evaluation by a state approved psychiatrist. 

Rather than doing that, in June 2023, Wood informed the state bar officials that he was officially ‘retired.’ 

A month later, he surrendered his law license to the state.