Sell the Steal: How Michael Flynn built a business and MAGA following out of election denialism

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn has spent much of the last three years claiming the 2020 election was stolen, turning baseless conspiracy theories into a cottage industry centered around live events, a documentary and political fundraising through dark money groups.

But under oath in a court deposition earlier this year, Flynn for the first time on record acknowledged there was no evidence to support a key part of some election fraud claims — that an executive at Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the 2020 election through the company’s voting machines.

Flynn was deposed in a yearslong defamation lawsuit that former Dominion executive Eric Coomer brought against ReAwaken America, the speaking tour Flynn co-founded in 2021 that travels the country promoting election denialism and other right-wing conspiracy theories.

“Have you seen any evidence that you would consider credible, Mr. Flynn, that Eric Coomer played a role in rigging the 2020 presidential election?” Attorneys for Coomer asked Flynn at one point in the April deposition.

“I have not, no,” Flynn responded. “I don’t really know.” When pressed about the more general claims about Dominion-related election fraud, Flynn added that he’s “seen a lot of evidence” and “read a lot of reports,” but could not say for certain that he believed that evidence to be credible: “Credibility is in the eye of the legal system to determine.”

A month later, Flynn was back on TV, telling Chris Cuomo on NewsNation that the 2020 election was “filled with fraud” and that there is “clear evidence” to back it up. Pressed for details, Flynn declined to elaborate.

Last month, Flynn was on Alex Jones’ InfoWars talking about a Marxist plot to steal the election from Trump. At a recent Christian nationalist festival in Pennsylvania held by Rod of Iron Ministries, Flynn spoke about unleashing vengeance if Trump wins.

“There’s a way to get after this, but we have to win first,” said Flynn. “These people are already up to no good, so we gotta win first. We win, and then Katy, bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell, my hell will be unleashed.”

Flynn – a retired Army lieutenant general who once led the Defense Intelligence Agency, and someone Trump has indicated he would include in a second administration – has been one of the biggest promoters of the same baseless voter fraud allegations that have spawned criminal investigations, a congressional inquiry and, in the case of Dominion, a $787 million defamation settlement from Fox News.

Yet Flynn has so far skirted any legal jeopardy himself, maintaining a unique place within the MAGA movement thanks to his relentless promotion of baseless election lies, and his continued loyalty to Trump.

‘Profiting off of conspiracy theories’

As millions of voters begin making their choice for president, the lies of the last election still permeate the airwaves. The fallout is real for what used to be mundane portions of America’s elections system. There has been an exodus of election workers who have quit or retired instead of putting up with the abuse for another cycle. Elections offices are buying wearable panic buttons for workers worried about violence who want a way to quickly alert the police.

Trump and his allies have gone from claiming the 2020 election was rigged to casting doubt on the integrity of this one. At its heart is an informal confederation of Trump allies who have spent the past four years spreading the lie of voter fraud. Not only have they managed to convince large swaths of the country that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, they’ve made a business out of it.

No one has cashed in quite like Flynn. Along with the ReAwaken America Tour, Flynn also co-founded The America Project, a nonprofit group which has raised at least $21 million from unknown donors since 2021, according to tax filings, while peddling baseless claims about the 2020 election.

Some of that money has helped bankroll dubious attempts to undermine public faith in the security of voting systems, pay a salary to Flynn’s brother Joseph, boost the political campaigns of known election deniers, and underwrite various legal efforts to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results.

“What Mike Flynn has done is that he’s turned his once respected military career into dangerous grift, profiting off of conspiracy theories, undermining the very democracy that he once swore to protect,” said Olivia Troye, a former national security official who worked under then-Vice President Mike Pence. Troye has known Flynn for years, dating back to his time as a high-ranking military official serving in Afghanistan.

“The concern about people like Mike Flynn is that he was once a very well-respected military officer,” Troye, who is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, told CNN. “The issue is that he, someone like that, is fully capable of radicalizing others in the military, and others, like our former military, because he brings that stature.”

Coomer’s series of civil defamation lawsuits, aimed at some of the organizations and people that have propagated the claim that Dominion rigged the election, have put into the public record new details about how Flynn used his position in Trump’s inner circle and his contacts in the national security community to try to weaponize the federal government against Dominion — and convince millions of voters that the fraud was real.

Chief among them is a November 2020 email chain that Flynn forwarded to a member of Trump’s National Security Council. The email, which Flynn did not write, singles out Coomer, who was then Dominion’s director of product strategy and security, and calls for his immediate arrest.

“Eric Coomer may hold the key to the entire election theft by Dominion. Eric Coomer should be arrested immediately,” read the email that Flynn forwarded to Joshua Steinman, a former military officer and Trump’s top White House adviser on cyber policy.

The email, which has not been previously reported, was cited in court filings as evidence of how Flynn was among the earliest promoters of 2020 vote-rigging lies, and directly connects Flynn to efforts to use those false theories to convince federal officials that the election should be overturned.

Flynn passed along the email at the behest of Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who, along with Rudy Giuliani, brought dozens of fruitless lawsuits alleging voter fraud after the election.

“Get to Josh asap,” Powell wrote to Flynn on November 14, 11 days after the 2020 election, sharing an email she received from another right-wing election denier about Coomer’s alleged role in a conspiracy to rig the election for Joe Biden.

It’s unclear how Steinman responded to Flynn’s email. Steinman declined to comment for this story.

Coomer is also suing the Trump campaign,  “My Pillow Guy” CEO Michael Lindell,  and ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne.

As criminal prosecutions into the effort to overturn the 2020 election have stalled out, Coomer’s civil suit may be what goes before a jury first. His defamation case against Lindell is scheduled for a June 2025 trial.

Coomer is not suing Flynn directly. But he is suing the ReAwaken America Tour and The America Project as part of separate defamation lawsuits. Though Flynn was integral to founding both, he has sought to distance himself from their day-to-day operations.

Troye likened Flynn’s fundraising apparatus to an “offshore shell game” that makes it difficult to determine where the funding is coming from  and what that money is used for.

“Where is the funding for these entities coming from because as they kind of mask their involvement, and they’re grifting off of it, my question is, who’s the source of the funding for a lot of these entities?” she said.

A lawyer for The America Project declined to provide more context around the non-profit’s spending, while calling the defamation lawsuit against it “vexatious.”

“Put simply, Mr. Coomer’s lawsuit is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to utilize the court system to threaten and intimidate TAP and other organizations like it from exercising their First Amendment protected rights,” the lawyer, Christopher Demspey, told CNN in an email.

CNN asked Flynn how he aligns his statements under oath with the other statements he’s made about fraud in the 2020 election. His team didn’t answer those questions. Instead, Flynn’s attorney provided a statement that focused on the merits of using paper ballots.

Efforts to keep Trump in office

Michael Flynn lasted less than a month in the Trump administration. After it came out that he lied to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador, Flynn resigned as Trump’s National Security Advisor on February 13, 2017. By December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Flynn later withdrew his guilty plea and the Justice Department, under then-Attorney General William Barr, dropped the charges against him.

Over the next three years, Flynn stayed in Trump’s good graces, and after the 2020 election, he found himself in the then-president’s inner circle. As Trump fought to stay in office, Flynn was involved in a number of aggressive tactics, including a proposal he helped craft to have the military and Department of Homeland Security confiscate voting machines.

In December 2020, a draft executive order began circulating among Trump’s inner circle. It name-checked Coomer and referenced a since debunked forensic report that alleged Dominion was “intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results.”

The order directed the Secretary of Defense to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” voting machines around the country.

Emails reviewed by CNN show that Flynn oversaw the process to draft and edit the document. Both he and Powell were in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, during a notoriously unhinged meeting in which Trump was presented the draft order to seize voting machines. He never ended up signing it.

Asked about that meeting and the executive orders during his April deposition, Flynn invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to offer incriminating evidence against himself. When House investigators probing the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack deposed Flynn in 2022, he pleaded the Fifth hundreds of times.

That’s what makes what Flynn said in the Coomer deposition so stunning, said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and former member of the House committee that investigated January 6.

“He is essentially confessing that he considered all of that a useful prop for promoting an authoritarian political program and a takeover of our government,” Raskin told CNN.

Funding a sham 2020 election audit

Flynn’s efforts to cast doubt on the 2020 election results were only getting started when Trump left office. In April 2021,  Flynn formed a non-profit group called The America Project  along with his brother Joseph Flynn and Patrick Byrne, the wealthy former CEO of Overstock.com who has bankrolled numerous efforts aimed at finding election fraud.

Byrne produced a 2021 documentary called “The Deep Rig,” laying out sensational theories about 2020 election fraud – including the bombastic claims about Coomer. Byrne and others involved in the documentary said the money it raised would go to The America Project.

Dempsey, the lawyer for The America Project, said the “film constitutes the expression of Constitutionally protected speech regarding a matter of public concern.” He did not answer CNN’s question about revenue from the film going to the non-profit, but noted that “Dr. Coomer’s lawsuit does not allege that TAP participated in making the film, that it had any input or authority over the film’s content, that it edited the film, or that it made any statement of its own about Dr. Coomer regarding his involvement in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Joseph Flynn was heavily involved in promoting the film and starred in it as well. In 2022, he earned a $263,077 salary from The America Project, according to tax filings. In 2021, The America Project paid $200,000 to Resilient Patriot, an LLC registered under Michael Flynn’s name, for “strategic consulting,” while a company linked to Joseph Flynn was paid nearly $159,000 for “election integrity investigations.”

Flynn and The America Project were also directly involved in helping fund the partisan “audit” of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory in Arizona that was conducted by a hand-picked group of outside investigators called the Cyber Ninjas, according to tax documents and text messages obtained by CNN.

The America Project funneled $2.75 million to the Cyber Ninjas throughout 2021, according to tax filings, in an effort to prop up what was ultimately exposed to be a sham audit of Arizona’s vote tally. The audit actually found more votes for Biden than previously had been awarded to him.

Flynn personally helped facilitate those payments and assured Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan on multiple occasions he could help secure additional funding from other pro-Trump groups – even when it became clear to Logan that his findings only reaffirmed the fact that Biden had won Arizona, according to text messages between the two men, which have not been previously reported.

Flynn’s objective, the texts show, was not only to upend the 2020 presidential election but to fundamentally change the way votes are counted at the state level – a message that is consistent with what Trump’s former national security adviser has continued to promote publicly in recent weeks.

“They are going to try and change voting forever now that they got away with stealing the 3nov election,” Flynn wrote to Logan on March 6, 2021, a view he repeated throughout nearly six months of text messages to Logan and reiterated on InfoWars on September 29.

“States really have to step up against the imposition of the federal government. States have rights too. The Dem controlled states won’t. The weak republicans won’t either (Georgia comes to mind!” Flynn added, according to text messages between the two men that were obtained by CNN.

“And citizens have to stop this by telling their elected officials it is not acceptable,” Flynn wrote to Logan.

Taking the message on the road

In the weeks after Biden’s inauguration, Flynn crossed paths with Clay Clark, a former wedding DJ in Oklahoma who spun out various businesses from his work in the bridal industry, including a radio show focused on entrepreneurship.

After meeting through Flynn’s appearance at a Tulsa political event in 2021, Clark and Flynn hatched the live event program that would become the ReAwaken America Tour, a traveling conference of prominent far-right speakers who opine on causes like the evil of Covid-related government mandates, the role Christian nationalism should be playing in society and election denialism.

Of the roughly two-dozen events the ReAwaken America Tour has hosted, Flynn has spoken at the vast majority of them and is featured prominently on its promotional materials. For a time, Flynn collected a $15,000 speaker’s fee for each appearance but, according to his deposition, the tour ran into financial difficulties and those payments ended. Clark claims the tour is a money-loser for him.

As the tour was getting up and running in 2021 Flynn was also collecting thousands of dollars in speaking fees for appearances at campaign events and for conservative political organizations, according to campaign finance records.

Flynn tends to play an emcee role at ReAwaken America Tour events, usually speaking for 20 minutes or so teeing up the general themes of the conference. Flynn sometimes makes oblique references to election fraud during his own comments, speaking to an audience that has already been primed to believe the 2020 election was stolen.

“Everybody saw the 2020 election and all the shenanigans that went on,” Flynn said during a tour event  in Manheim, Pennsylvania, in October 2022. “A lot of it right here, a lot of it right here in this state.”

“They like to call you election denier,” Flynn went on to say. “I don’t deny that elections occurred. I do deny that we have a fair election system in our country. We do not. You can’t tell me that we do.”

Among the regular speakers on the ReAwaken America Tour was Joe Oltmann, a far-right activist and Colorado podcaster who was a source of election rigging smears against Coomer.

In the wake of the 2020 election, Oltmann claimed on his podcast that he had infiltrated an Antifa teleconference call, during which an “Eric” supposedly bragged about rigging the election for Biden. Oltmann pointed to anti-Trump posts on Coomer’s private Facebook page in asserting that the “Eric” he claims to have heard on the call was the Dominion executive, Coomer.

The allegations were picked up across Trump-world and were repeated by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani at the infamous November 19, 2020, press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters.

Appearing on stage at ReAwaken America Tour events in 2021 and 2022, Oltmann repeated his unfounded claims about Coomer’s election rigging scheme, in remarks that often took aggressive and even violent undertones.

Oltmann, whom Coomer is also suing for defamation, has never put forward evidence that would prove his allegations. He has refused to sit for testimony or produce subpoenaed documents, and even managed to escape a courthouse mid-way through a June deposition.

A judge recently hit Oltmann with a $1,000-a-day fine – with a threat of potential incarceration. The fine is on pause while he appeals that judgment.

Under oath in the deposition, Flynn said he couldn’t recall the details of Oltmann’s allegations about Coomer and claimed he would not recognize Oltmann if he walked into his office. Coomer’s attorneys have noted that elsewhere in the deposition Flynn said that he tries to watch as many speakers as possible when he attends tour events.

Clark has claimed that the litigation has cost him between $2,000 and $3,000 a day in legal fees, while Oltmann pleaded to his podcast listeners for contributions for his legal fights.

Lawyers for Clark and his businesses declined to comment for this story.

‘Don’t just finish on Election Day’

Consequences have mounted for others who echoed Trump election lies during and after the election.

Several of them, including Flynn’s one-time attorney Powell, were charged criminally by state prosecutors probing election subversion. Powell – who sources say has had a falling out with Flynn, her former client, and appears to be keeping a lower public profile of late – entered a guilty plea in the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecution, and quietly settled this summer the defamation lawsuit Coomer brought against her.

Ex-Trump attorney Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty in the Georgia case and has apologized for her role in peddling election lies. Giuliani is subject to a $148 million defamation judgement – currently being appealed – for his smearing of two Georgia election workers and has also been disbarred in New York and DC.

Meanwhile, Flynn has navigated around much of this fallout while positioning himself as an increasingly prominent voice on purported election fraud while the 2024 election gets underway.

As the international community prepares for a possible second Trump term, multiple foreign diplomats tell CNN they see Flynn as someone who will have influence if the former president retakes the White House and have privately speculated that he could be tapped for another high-level position if that comes to pass.

During the recent event hosted by the far-right group Rod of Iron Ministries, Flynn’s son told the crowd that his father would likely join forces with Elon Musk to head a government efficiency task force.

Flynn himself, meanwhile has started to publicly suggest he would help Trump round-up political opponents should he win in 2024.

At the Rod of Iron Ministries event, an audience member asked if Flynn would be reinstated with his full rank to “sit at the head of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp and on a few occasions, execute the swamp” if Trump is elected.

“I definitely believe we need accountability” Flynn said. “You know, your question went into some other areas that I think a lot of, a lot of people actually think like you do. And I think that that’s, your right, and your, and our privilege. … I mean, there is a way to get after this, but we have to win first.”

During the ReAwaken America Tour’s most recent gathering, held last weekend in Selma, North Carolina, Flynn sang along to Twisted Sister’s 1980s anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and earlier that weekend made remarks to the attendees stressing that this election was only the beginning of their movement.

“Now, there’s all kinds of things that you can go out there and do. We’ve been talking about voting all day. Yes, do that,” Flynn said Friday. “But don’t just finish on Election Day. Take this idea of what this country was designed to be and take it forward in your lives for the rest of your lives. Make every single day count.”