CIVIL WAR: QAnon leaders brawl in the public square
The seeds of this internecine QAnon battle were sewed in April and reported here first in June.
Behind the scenes tension between four of the top leaders in the QAnon movement just spilled into the public square.
Gen. Michael T. Flynn and his vocal ally Patrick Byrne are at deep odds with attorney Lin Wood, and estranged lawyer Sidney Powell looks destined to be drawn into the budding fight.
The heart of the matter: Gen. Flynn told Wood that QAnon is “total nonsense” and a CIA disinformation campaign "created by people on the left" and the latter taped and released the conversation.
Flynn is the former General who served 24 days as former President Trump’s first National Security Advisor before being fired, then pleading guilty to federal crimes and eventually getting a presidential pardon. Since then, he has become a top QAnon figure, even pledging allegiance to the group on July 4th, 2020, and suggesting an American civil war should start at a QAnon event this year. Patrick Byrne is a major funder of the 2020 election audit movement, and particularly the audit in Arizona, which auditors eventually admitted the results showed Joe Biden won Maricopa County. Lin Wood is a high-profile defamation lawyer who successfully represented the falsely accused Richard Jewel who did not bomb the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but last year was fired as the killer teenager Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyer, who accused the attorney of malpractice after his recent acquittal. Wood is a leader in the QAnon affiliated movements to deny the 2020 election results. Sidney Powell is the self-dubbed “Kraken Releaser” and former lawyer to Flynn who promoted Trump’s biggest election lies only to lose every court case, but turn into a fundraising juggernaut.
As this newsletter first reported in June via an interview with Byrne, the Defending the Republic team broke up in April. He said:
“On April 9, Joe Flynn, Patrick Byrne, and any previously listed officers of the company Defending the Republic, Inc. of Florida and of Texas other than Sidney Powell resigned in writing. All records for the corporate handoff to Sidney were carefully organized and turned over in the office for her. Sidney communicated her understanding of our departure,” says Patrick Byrne, former CEO of the company. “If Sidney is not updating her corporate filings promptly and professionally.... it does not surprise me.”
A month later, Michigan lawyer Matt DiPerno started public attacking Byrne on the Steve Bannon podcast, accusing him of many of the things that the latter said Sidney Powell had done. DiPerno promoted a group linked to Powell which is under scrutiny by Florida’s charity regulators for failure to register its activities. Nevertheless, that fight simmered down quickly.
Then last month, Flynn who continues to work with Byrne, got embroiled in a scandal of his own making.
QAnon followers believe he's on Team Satan because of his unusual remarks at a church that echoed deceased cult-leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
Flynn denies being a Satanist.
The fight turned into a hot war after Lin Wood released his surreptitiously taped conversation with Flynn.
In response, Byrne released a video fighting back on his ally’s behalf, and also disclaiming the Satanism rumors.
Then yesterday, Wood took to his Telegram channel to tell his 764,000+ followers to invite the Flynn Brothers (Mike and Joe), Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne for a cup of coffee in South Carolina.
Needless to say, this invitation did not go over well with Patrick Byrne who told his over 120,000 Telegram followers that he's "not interested" because Wood is "riff-raff" who betrayed him.
Byrne proceeded to say until Wood disproves Kyle Rittenhouse's allegations against him, he'd never meet.
Naturally, Wood replied by telling his Telegram followers that Gen. Michael Flynn is a "master of deceit" (true) and linked to George Soros because of an SEC filing (probably not true) including someone else with his same name.
This did not sit well with Byrne, who replied with this extended allocation of the merits (or mostly lack thereof) of Lin Wood as a person and as a lawyer, including an apparently serious allegation that he violated the attorney-client privilege.
Flynn has not commented on Telegram.
Neither has Sidney Powell, though she did throw some not-very-subtle shade to her 483,000 subscribers by posting this Rudyard Kipling poem which pointedly begins:
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you"
