May 20, 2022

PA State Senator Doug Mastriano - The Company He Keeps (Ivan Raiklin)

In a warning about the fascism represented by PA State Senator (and now GOP candidate for Pennsylvania Governor), I found this tantalizing tidbit in The Washington Post recently:

Mastriano’s backers appear well aware of the stakes. A video posted to Telegram by election denial activist Ivan Raiklin from Mastriano’s victory party on Tuesday showed the candidate smiling as Raiklin congratulated him on his win and added, with a thumb’s up, “20 electoral votes as well,” a reference to the state’s clout in the electoral college. [Emphasis added.]

You can see the video here:

Oh, but there's so much more to Ivan Raiklin, isn't there? 

Haven't we seen the name  before? 

Yes, we have.

He was there when Doug announced his candidacy. And from that post we snagged this:

Ivan Raiklin and the Patriot Caucus. Acts of political violence.

Oh, and discredited  QAnon supporter (isn't that a redundancy?) Mike Flynn was there at that announcement, too.

We've also blogged about Raiklin and Flynn here.

So who's this Ivan Raiklin? Take a look at this from Reuters:

[Ivan] Raiklin, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who has known Flynn since 2014, when he said they both worked on military intelligence matters. Raiklin is an attorney and a leading promoter of the “Pence card” theory – in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.

Going further back, there's this from my blogpost about Everett Stern. Stern describes meeting Raiklin the night he was introduced to the Patriot Caucus, when they asked him to dig up dirt to blackmail  prominent PA GOPers.

Will Bunch, over at the Philadelphia Inquirer has a bit more on Ivan Raiklin:

In December 2020, the Virginia-based Raiklin penned a memo, widely circulated on the far right, titled “Operation Pence Card,” urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden’s electoral votes from key states on Jan. 6. He warned, according to Reuters, “of conspiracies involving Pence, intelligence agencies, big tech, China, and the postal service,” and urged Trump to activate the emergency broadcast system. And Raiklin hasn’t let up since the failed coup attempt.

And Raw Story has even more on Ivan:

Before former President Donald Trump enlisted lawyer John Eastman to help him persuade Vice President Mike Pence to subvert the electoral outcome, an Army Reserves lieutenant colonel associated with retired Lt. General Michael Flynn promoted a fanciful legal theory that the vice president held the power to set aside Biden electors from states narrowly won by the Democratic nominee.

Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin tweeted out a memo with the subject line “Operation ‘PENCE’ CARD – Dec 23rd-” on Dec. 22, 2020. The memo claimed that Pence was prohibited “from ‘receiving’ electoral votes from six fraudulently certified States” — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and that the vice president “is also the sole plenary power that has the authority to make this determination.”

And:

The New York Times has reported that an aide to Trump reached out to Eastman “about writing a memo about the Jan. 6 certification on Dec. 24, and that Eastman wrote the memo while on vacation with his family in Texas. The Dec. 24 date cited for Eastman’s enlistment in the influence campaign came two days after Raiklin tweeted out his memo, and one day after President Trump retweeted Raiklin. The memo produced by Raiklin included the header “White House,” making it appear that it was on White House letterhead, although Raiklin did not hold an official position in the Trump administration.

A Dec. 22 story on the conservative website National File also promoted the idea that the memo originated in the White House, citing unnamed sources.

Ivan Raiklin: that's who GOP Candidate for Governor Doug Mastriano has in his orbit.

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