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….