Early Sunday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted: “What would Bolton, one of the dumbest people in Washington, know? Wasn’t he the person who so stupidly said, on television, ‘Libyan solution', when describing what the U.S. was going to do for North Korea? I’ve got plenty of other Bolton ‘stupid stories'.” Two minutes later, at 12:06 AM, Trump added: “Martial law = Fake News. Just more knowingly bad reporting!”
Hours earlier, John Bolton had been called into CNN to smother Trump with the claim that he was calling for martial law. The actual concern was that Trump was reported to have met with Gen. Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell in the White House on Dec. 18, Friday evening. (It is reported that Trump is considering appointing Powell as a special prosecutor on the election fraud and providing her the requisite security clearances.) CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Bolton about the “talk of martial law being imposed to try to overturn a democratically held election….” Bolton went into action: “This is appalling … unbelievable … almost certainly without precedent.…” It’s a crazy idea to put “military capabilities into the swing states…. There’s a difference between incompetence and malevolence, and, in Trump’s case, this is incompetence. He is unfit for the job.” He claimed Trump has never read the Constitution, and saying Republicans on Capitol Hill should educate Trump on the Constitution and explain why he can’t invoke martial law.
Not only has Trump not called for martial law, Flynn has not either. Flynn had been asked, in an interview on Dec. 17 on Newsmax’s “Greg Kelly Reports,” what options a President had with such an election fraud. Flynn answered that he could seize voting machines, or he could deploy the military. “He could order, within the swing states if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities and basically rerun an election each in those states.” It is “not unprecedented” to use the military. “Martial law has been instituted 64 times. So I’m not calling for that. We have a constitutional process … and that has to be followed.” Flynn went on to express his concern that the Supreme Court had avoided looking at anything but “process” issues: “All they have to do is look at the evidence.… [T]hey haven’t looked at the content yet.… [It] lacks courage, lacks moral fiber….”
Media reports have generally ignored Flynn’s explicit statement that he is not calling for martial law, and only reported the first part of his statements with the intentional fallacy of composition.
