Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell banned from Twitter in QAnon purge

Flynn has called for Trump to declare martial law and hold a new election.

Timothy B. Lee – Jan 8, 2021 5:53 pm | 197

Twitter on Friday removed the accounts of several high-profile supporters of President Trump and the QAnon conspiracy theory. Targets included former Trump advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

The rioters who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday were of course supporters of Donald Trump. Many were inspired by QAnon as well. The QAnon conspiracy theory centers around a supposed government insider who goes by “Q.” Members of this community have baselessly accused liberal leaders like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros of running a sex trafficking ring and attempting to organize a coup against President Trump.

These paranoid beliefs evidently inspired some QAnon enthusiasts to stage an attempted coup of their own on Wednesday, as supporters broke into the Capitol to attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. Their actions led to the deaths of five people, including US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.

The incident apparently inspired Twitter’s leadership to take a harder line against prominent figures who have promoted these kinds of beliefs on Twitter.

Sidney Powell advocated bizarre conspiracy theories

Sidney Powell has spent the last two months promoting far-fetched claims about election fraud in the 2020 election. At one point, Powell claimed to have evidence that Democrats had used a computer program created by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and the Chinese Communist Party to steal votes in Georgia and other states.

Chavez has been dead since 2013 and Powell never produced evidence for these claims. Eventually, her claims got so outlandish that the Trump campaign dropped her from its legal team.

Election software vendor Dominion recently sued Powell for defamation after she repeatedly claimed that Dominion’s software had been used in this supposed vote-stealing scheme. In its lawsuit, Dominion said that Powell’s claims were based on “declarations from a motley crew of conspiracy theorists, con artists, armchair ‘experts,’ and anonymous sources who were judicially determined to be ‘wholly unreliable.’”

Flynn advocated a military takeover of the US

Michael Flynn advised Donald Trump on national security during the 2016 presidential election and briefly served as his National Security Advisor. However, he got into trouble for failing to disclose lobbying work for the Turkish government and for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election. Trump fired him in February 2017. He then came under investigation from special counsel Robert Mueller, who pressured him to plead guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI.

In 2019, Flynn fired his previous attorneys and hired Powell. Powell went on Fox News to make the case for her client. In 2020, the Trump administration requested the dismissal of Flynn’s case. The judge overseeing the case was skeptical of the government’s request, but before the judge issued a ruling, Trump pardoned Flynn.

As the Daily Beast reported last month, Flynn is a prominent figure in the QAnon world:

His legal fund received proceeds from the sale of some pro-QAnon books by the conspiracy theory’s promoters—perhaps appropriately, as many QAnon believers think Flynn is secretly the mysterious “Q” dispensing the clues that make up the conspiracy theory. In July, Flynn repaid the favor and recorded himself taking a “QAnon oath” with members of his family.

QAnon podcasts have been a key part of Flynn’s outreach after evading his federal charge. On Dec. 2, Flynn appeared on the QAnon-affiliated “Bards of War” podcast, which is run by a man who would issue cryptic QAnon-style about the deep state. Flynn declared that the United States was on the brink of a socialist takeover.

Also in December, Flynn promoted a press release from an organization called the “We The People Convention” that declared last November’s election fraudulent and called on President Trump to “immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a re-vote.”

In addition to Flynn and Powell, Twitter closed the account of Ron Watkins, the administrator of 8kun—formerly known as 8chan—and other QAnon-related accounts.

“The accounts have been suspended in line with our policy on Coordinated Harmful Activity,” Twitter said in a statement to NBC News. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behavior in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content.”