Michael Flynn pressed Pentagon official to seize ballots, new book reveals

‘We need you,’ Mr Flynn reportedly said before telling Cohen that he would need to obtain signed orders to seize ballots

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn pushed a former aide who’d been installed in a top Pentagon post to cut short a foreign trip so he could order the seizure of ballots and other “extraordinary measures” to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, a new book reveals.

In Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show, ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl reports that Mr Flynn, a retired three-star general who was ousted from his role as former president Donald Trump’s top national security aide after less than a month for lying to the FBI and then-Vice President Mike Pence, made the outlandish request just before Thanksgiving last year, weeks after it was clear that Mr Trump had lost the 2020 election.

Mr Flynn reportedly placed a frantic phone call to Ezra Cohen, a former National Security Council official who’d been appointed acting undersecretary of defence for intelligence just a few weeks before.

According to Mr Karl, Mr Cohen was on a plane to the Middle East when he got a call from Mr Flynn, who days before had been pardoned by Mr Trump, clearing of charges that he’d made false statements to FBI agents in 2017. The former general told his ex-aide to return to Washington immediately because big things were about to happen.

“We need you,” Mr Flynn reportedly said before telling Cohen that he would need to obtain signed orders to seize ballots and take “extraordinary measures…to stop Democrats from stealing the election”.

The Defence Department official replied: “Sir, the election is over. It’s time to move on”.

His former boss began screaming at him.

“You’re a quitter!” Mr Flynn shouted. “This is not over! Don’t be a quitter!”

Mr Cohen later received a second call from Trump attorney Sidney Powell (Flynn’s former criminal defence attorney) claiming that then-CIA Director Gina Haspel had “been hurt and taken into custody in Germany” while on some sort of secret mission that was rooted in one of the conspiracy theories Ms Powell was then spinning about voting machines having stolen the election from Mr Trump (she is currently being sued for defamation by multiple voting machine manufacturers).

“You need to launch a special operations mission to get her,” Ms Powell demanded.

According to Mr Karl, she would later email Mr Cohen to demand a “Letter of Marque”, which is a term used during the Age of Sail for a document once issued to private merchant ships giving them the authority to attack ships carrying the flag of a country with which the issuing country was at war.