Does Michael Flynn's interview with Alex Jones include only factual statements about the 2020 election? No, that's not true: The interview repeats disproven allegations of foreign interference, that thousands of dead people voted in Pennsylvania and that Donald Trump won up to 400 Electoral College votes. All are demonstrably false.
Flynn's interview (archived here) with Jones -- a well-known conspiracy theorist whose divorce lawyer defended falsehoods on his show as a form of performance art -- was published on January 5, 2021. The post, titled "ALEX JONES AND MICHAEL FLYNN: AMERICANS' DNA IS 1776," opened:
In this world changing event, Alex Jones interviews the one and only General Michael Flynn to discuss the attempts to bring him down, bring the president down, and what we will do to fight for our future!
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ALEX JONES AND MICHAEL FLYNN: AMERICANS' DNA IS 1776
In this world changing event, Alex Jones interviews the one and only General Michael Flynn to discuss the attempts to bring him down, bring the president down, and what we will do to fight for our future!
During the roughly 30-minute video, Flynn, (a former national security adviser pardoned November 25, 2020 by Trump after pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators) railed against the election and asserted -- falsely and repeatedly -- that Trump won. Flynn said:
Everybody in this country, everybody in the world, knows that this election on the third of November was a total rip-off. It was a fraudulent election ... Donald Trump was the clear winner.
That's not true. Joe Biden is president-elect, certified by state election officials of both parties and by the U.S. House of Representatives. He won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote. He is set to take office on January 20, 2021.
Besides making general claims about the election and its outcome, Flynn made several specific allegations. We address five of them below.
Claim #1: "What we know is that the election was won by Donald Trump that night ... And then all of a sudden we had this very very uncertain, you know, everything stops. We've never had that in our country, in our presidential election. Five states shut down."
Flynn does not say what states he is referring to, nor does he clearly state what he means by "shut down." After tallies showed Biden winning, a common accusation by those who prefer Trump has been that swing states stopped counting votes the night of November, 3, 2020. That's false. There's no evidence to support that claim and, in fact, there's evidence to the contrary. Election officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin reported that the counting process did not stop and have provided video and other evidence. See previous reporting by Lead Stories here.
Claim #2: "The Chinese Communist Party paid $200 million in 2014 to Dominion and they paid in October, I believe it was October of 2020, another $400 million put into this company. So we have clear evidence of a foreign interference."
Flynn offered no evidence to support his statement. A company spokesperson for Dominion Voting Systems told Lead Stories it's not true.
Dominion addresses a number of false claims on its website, including the allegation that it is owned by or affiliated with the Chinese government. Here's a direct quote:
Dominion Voting Systems is a non-partisan American company that makes electronic voting systems. No foreign national directly or indirectly owns or controls the company.
Flynn furthermore alleged that Serbia, Italy, Spain, Germany and Iran interfered in the 2020 election. He didn't say how exactly, but Lead Stories has covered election claims related to most of those countries before. See here, here and here for our previous debunks of those claims.
Claim #3: "Trump probably got somewhere between 350 and 400 Electoral College votes."
Early in the morning of January 7, 2021, Congress certified the results of the election, a final step in affirming Biden's victory. The Electoral College count was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump.
Claim #4: "The number of dead voters that voted in Pennsylvania are more people than are buried in the Gettysburg National Battleground."
Flynn was likely referring to Gettysburg National Cemetery, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where more than 6,000 veterans are buried.
There is no evidence that anywhere close to 6,000 dead people voted in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election. On November 6, 2020, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro tweeted that there was "no proof" of such fraud.
Would like to see the evidence. A similar complaint was brought before a PA court -- and soundly rejected. The court found no deficiency in how PA maintains its voter rolls, and there is currently no proof provided that any deceased person has voted in the 2020 election. https://t.co/6P1IiG0Dgv
-- AG Josh Shapiro (@PAAttorneyGen) November 6, 2020
Since there, there has been one confirmed case of a vote cast using the ballot of a deceased person, a man using that of his mother. Charges were filed. The accused reportedly told investigators that he cast the fraudulent vote for Trump.
Lead Stories reached out to Shapiro's office to ask if there are additional cases of misuse of dead persons' ballots. We will update this story if we receive a response.
Claim #5: "Wisconsin, according to a member of Congress from that state, they have 242,000 fraudulent votes."
Flynn did not specify what member of Congress he was talking about. But Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican, has made somewhat similar claims.
In a statement announcing his intention to oppose the Electoral College certification process, Tiffany claimed that violations affected some 200,000 ballots in Wisconsin, where Biden beat Trump by a more than 20,000-vote margin. He cited several alleged irregularities in Milwaukee and Dane counties involving absentee or mail-in ballots.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) addresses these and other claims on its website, which can be seen here. In short, 200,000 people did not vote without a voter ID, clerks did not issue 70,000 absentee ballots to voters without an application and WEC gave guidance to clerks about fixing problems with witness addresses on absentee ballot certificates that was the same as previous years' guidance.
