QAnon acolyte calls movement a ‘Deep State operation’
Lin Wood, the Atlanta lawyer who backed Donald Trump’s election-fraud claims, has a new conspiracy theory that questions the legitimacy of the QAnon movement that he’d previously embraced.
“I know that I agree with the principles of Q in its fight against child sex trafficking, pedophilia, and satanic rituals,” Wood said earlier this week in a Telegram post. “I think I can fairly be described as an Anon. I believe that QAnon is likely a Deep State operation constructed to discredit Q and the Anons.”
Wood said “Deep State Mockingbird propagandists” have tried to brand him as a leader of the QAnon movement, but he’s merely an “outside observer of Q.” ‘Q’ is claimed to be an anonymous online poster who purportedly has access to US government secrets.
“I put my faith and trust in God, not any other person or organization,” Wood added.
The statement came less than a week after Wood claimed that the “Stop the Steal” group, which has pushed election-fraud allegations and advocated for ‘restoring’ Trump to the presidency, is a “Deep State organization.” The lawyer also posted an audio recording that he claimed to be the voice of Lt. General Michael Flynn, a QAnon hero, telling Wood that the QAnon conspiracy theory is “total nonsense.”
The voice purported to be Flynn’s made essentially the same point that Wood argued this week. “I think it’s a disinformation campaign,” the person said of QAnon. “I think it’s a disinformation campaign that the CIA created.”
Wood rose to national prominence as a defamation lawyer representing Richard Jewell, the security guard who was falsely accused of setting off a bomb during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. More recently, he represented Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky teenager who sued CNN and other media outlets for defaming him over his role in a 2019 confrontation with a Native American activist in Washington.
Sandmann fired Wood last January. Reasons for the split weren’t disclosed, but it came shortly after Sandmann had clashed with Wood over a Twitter post suggesting that then-Vice President Mike Pence could be arrested for treason and executed by firing squad.
Wood met a similar fate in his representation of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who was charged with homicide and other crimes for shooting three rioters, two fatally, at an August 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse, who was acquitted last month, said his family fired Wood last December because they believed he was “insane” and they didn’t agree with his comments about election fraud and QAnon.
