‘They could have killed me’: Spycraft, ballots and a Trumped-up plot gone haywire

The scene is straight from a discount bin spy novel.

A black SUV arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to collect Sabrina Keliikoa, a QAnon adherent and supervisor at the facility’s FedEx air freight terminal.

Keliikoa was scared out of her wits.

She did not want to go.

But late on this Friday night in early December 2020, Keliikoa felt as if she had no choice: A retired Michigan State Police officer nicknamed “Yoda” had just warned that her life was in danger.

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Keliikoa called in another employee to finish her shift. She entered the vehicle driven by a Marine Corps veteran who had provided security for American diplomats in Iraq. They arrived at a hotel where the driver checked her in. There, Keliikoa stayed for the next two days. A rotating set of “guards” occupied the adjacent room in shifts.

What was possibly happening here?

As Keliikoa would later testify in legal deposition, a video of which Raw Story recently reviewed, a man entered her hotel room and asked her to write an affidavit about election ballots she’d seen — and considered suspicious — at the FedEx facility shortly after the 2020 election.

The man was part of a secretive team of Donald Trump supporters, operating without legal authority but under the leadership of former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, that aimed to obtain information they believed could be used in lawsuits to change the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor.

More generally, they hoped to undermine public confidence that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

Keliikoa described the experience as being “detained” and complained she became a “pawn” of people determined to use her.

“So, I got a phone call that said somebody is coming in from another state with illegal ballots, and they were going to be looking for me, and they were going to try to kill me,” Keliikoa testified. “And I started crying because this turned into the biggest s---show when it shouldn’t have been.”

The escapade showcases the absurd lengths Flynn and his team went to concoct evidence that Trump had the 2020 presidential election “stolen” from him.

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These and other baseless allegations of election fraud would instill fury in Trump’s supporters, who by the thousands attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while attempting to prevent Congress from certifying the election.

These new revelations about Keliikoa’s ordeal also come at a time when Trump, who is expected to again be the Republican nominee for president, relentlessly claims that the multiple criminal prosecutions against him constitute an effort “to rig the presidential election of 2024.”

Former President Donald Trump walks on to the stage to give the keynote address at Turning Point Action's "The People's Convention" on June 15, 2024 in Detroit, Mich. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

Trump’s script is familiar and predictable: He similarly made repeated claims well in advance of the 2020 election that the vote would be rigged. It’s an all-but-foregone conclusion that if Trump loses the 2024 election, he will exclaim, as he did then, that he actually won, and that Democrats, communists, the “deep state” and other perceived bogeymen stole it from him.

And if history is a guide, high-profile Trump surrogates can again be expected to again chase phantom evidence and spin wild tales in service of Trump’s I-can’t-lose approach to campaigning.

‘A plane full of ballots’

Until now, Keliikoa — the woman who held the information so feverishly sought by Trump’s supporters following the 2020 election — was known only as “the Seattle whistleblower.”

Keliikoa’s deposition, taken in March, fills in details about the “stop the steal” escapade and are being reported for the first time by Raw Story.

The seeds of Keliikoa's ordeal began germinating in November 2020. An array of high-profile Trump supporters had initiated a frenzied effort to collect affidavits that they hoped would bolster claims of election fraud, which pro-Trump attorney Sidney Powell detailed in a series of lawsuits.

The goal: overturn the presidential election results in tightly contested states such as Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, and more generally, to undermine confidence in the election.

With his charisma and the respect he commanded as a retired lieutenant general, Michael Flynn, who had briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, quickly emerged as a de facto leader among the group of “stop the steal” operatives surrounding Powell.

The 2020 election was “the greatest fraud that our country has ever experienced in our history,” Flynn told far-right broadcaster Brannon Howse during an interview aired on Nov. 28, 2020. “I’m right in the middle of it right now, and I will tell you that, first of all, the president has clear paths to victory.”

Flynn had reason to feel emboldened. Three days earlier, then-President Trump granted Flynn a full pardon, wiping away his guilty plea to charges of lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn began to speak at rallies and make media appearances on Trump’s behalf.

Flynn’s interview with Howse was his first interview of any sort since receiving Trump’s pardon. The key to exposing the election fraud, Flynn told the podcaster, was channeling the perceived power of hundreds of Trump supporters who believed they witnessed voting fraud or election irregularities.

“I mean hundreds and hundreds of Americans around the country, not just the swing states, but many, many other states that are coming forward with their stories and putting them down in affidavits,” he said at the time.

Four days later, Powell addressed a “Stop the Steal” rally in the Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. There, she angrily told the crowd that there had been “flagrant election fraud,” and said her team had “evidence” of all manner of ballot fraud, including “a plane full of ballots that came in.”

Enter Staci Burk.

Burk was a former school board member and law school student in Arizona who suffers from a medical condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension.

A man in Burk’s lung condition support group told her about a woman in Seattle who allegedly had information about illegal ballots. That woman was Keliikoa, and Burk’s lung condition buddy arranged to put the two women in touch.

But Burk first relayed information about this potentially useful Seattle woman to Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend, a leading figure in the pro-Trump stop-the-steal effort. The supposed intel eventually filtered up to Sidney Powell’s legal team.

Burk and Keliikoa kept in touch by phone for the next month, but Keliikoa would later say she wouldn’t characterize their relationship as a friendship. Keliikoa didn’t want to give up her anonymity. Burk felt caught in a bind; she didn’t want to associate her own name with information she didn’t know firsthand, but she was feeling pressure from Townsend and others to persuade Keliikoa to come forward.

Sabrina Keliikoa as seen during a legal deposition on March 22, 2024. (Source: Deposition video via Staci Burk)

“I’ve been working on her coming forward for over a month,” Burk told Carissa Keshel, Powell’s assistant, in a Dec. 1, 2020, text message reviewed by Raw Story. “I almost facilitated a call with you, but she just got to work. She will likely let me do a conference call with anyone. But she’s still afraid to come forward.”

“What can we do to make her feel more comfortable?” Keshel asked Burk. “We can facilitate security.”

Attempting to find a way to obtain the information while preserving Keliikoa’s desired anonymity, Keshel suggested that Keliikoa forward her ballot intel to Burk, who, in turn, could include it in her own legal declaration. (Burk never fulfilled the request to provide such a statement.)

“Ok I just spoke with General Flynn,” Keshel told Burk. “He says if nothing else, if she can get us as much evidence as possible: pictures, facts. If she can send that to us (or you) and if she can even just write an email. Then you can do another declaration to cover for that. I hope that makes sense.”

What happened next demonstrates the effort by Flynn, Powell and a gaggle of pro-Trump activists to obtain affidavits supporting claims of election fraud was carefully orchestrated. It stands in stark contrast to the picture painted by Flynn — one of ordinary citizens organically and voluntarily coming forward to tell their stories out of a sense of patriotic duty.

Like Keliikoa, Burk found herself in the middle of conspiratorial talk surrounding supposed illegal ballots transported on planes and various security concerns.

Also — not insignificantly — if Powell's team was going to get access to Keliikoa, they would have to go through Burk, who was the only one who knew Keliikoa’s name or how to get in touch with her.

Flynn’s security team finds the ‘Seattle whistleblower’

On the morning of Dec. 4, 2020, Keshel texted Burk to tell her that she thought they had Burk’s “security issue all ironed out.”

Keshel then texted a photo of a man she identified as “Yoda” and a link to the website for 1st Amendment Praetorian, a volunteer security group linked to Flynn.

“Yoda” was Geoffrey Flohr, the retired Michigan State Police officer.

“Gen Flynn and his brother arranged the security for you, so I trust them,” Keshel told Burk in a text message.

“Yoda” arrived at Burk’s home in Florence, Ariz., later that day.

As previously reported by Raw Story, Burk has said that “Yoda” woke her up in the middle of the night. He told her that he had reliable information that the “Seattle whistleblower” was about to be kidnapped and taken to South Korea. “Yoda” even claimed that Burk’s friend in Seattle could potentially be killed if they didn’t send a security team to protect her, Burk recalled.

Burk called Keliikoa and put her on speaker phone so “Yoda” could speak to her.

Keliikoa would later testify that she was terrified by “Yoda” telling her about threats to her safety because bad actors were supposedly attempting to prevent her from exposing massive election fraud.

Indeed, she was so terrified that she called in another employee to cover for her and complete her work for the shift.

“And then what ended up happening is continuous phone calls back and forth,” Keliikoa testified. “‘Okay, well, somebody’s gonna send somebody to pick you up and take you to a safe place.’ But my name should have never been out there, and that makes me mad.”

At Burk’s insistence, late on that Friday night in early December 2020, “Yoda” provided Burk with a resume and photo of the driver who would pick up Keliikoa at the FedEx facility at the Seattle airport.

At 11:50 p.m., Burk texted the resume to Keliikoa.

Roland Hurrington — described on his resume as a Seattle-area Marine Corps veteran “responsible for the protection of classified material, equipment and U.S. mission personnel” — arrived at the FedEx facility in the black SUV to transport Keliikoa.

Keliikoa testified that Hurrington passed through a security checkpoint at the facility. How he was able to do that remains unclear, but Keliikoa speculated that the security personnel may have let him through based on the assumption that he was a chauffeur.

The pickup took place late at night — roughly 30 minutes after “Yoda” first spoke to her, according to Burk’s account.

“And then I get detained, taken,” Keliikoa recalled in her deposition. “And I don’t know who this person is. I don’t know where I was going. I can’t believe I actually agreed to go with this person, because they could have killed me and threw me on the side of the road, and nobody would have known.”

As it turned out, there never was a plot to kill Keliikoa.

In fact, while the pro-Trump stop-the-stealers involved didn’t know or admit it at the time, their entire ballot fraud enterprise was little more than a house of cards perched on pillars of sand.

And the ground beneath them was about to start quaking.

‘He fabricated everything’

Jim Penrose, a cyber-security expert who had previously worked at the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama, would later acknowledge to Burk that he was the man who showed up at Keliikoa’s hotel room and urged her to write an affidavit. After “Yoda” tracked Keliikoa down, Penrose went to her hotel room to meet her.

Penrose has been identified by the New York Times as being one of three men who joined Flynn and Powell at the South Carolina estate of defamation attorney Lin Wood to “gather and organize election information.” One of the others was Seth Keshel, a former Army military intelligence captain who was married to Carissa Keshel.

Jim Penrose as described on the website of the Institute for World Politics in Washington, D.C. (Institute for World Politics.)

“We had a security team dispatched in Seattle,” Penrose told Burk in a phone call that she recorded on Christmas Day of 2020.

“My worst fear was that the people were moving, you know, like a team of people that might want to, you know, even kidnap your friend in Seattle,” he said. “I didn’t want to let that happen, right, because I thought it was a situation that was dangerous. And we didn’t have enough info at the time to make a better decision.”

The reason why it was necessary for Flohr to wake up Burk involved grave concerns about an Arizona-based security company called Mayhem Solutions Group.

Why would Flohr care so much about this security firm?

Penrose had told Flohr a wild story about two Mayhem Solutions Group employees he believed were planning to fly an airplane to Phoenix to Seattle and potentially “kidnap” Keliikoa and take her to South Korea because of information she might have about election fraud.

The idea that Mayhem Solutions Group would be involved in a plot to harm Sabrina Keliikoa for the purpose of preventing her from exposing anti-Trump election fraud was not only bizarre. It was based on an utter fabrication.

Owner Shawn Wilson and his employee, Kenneth Scott Koch — both far-right operatives — were prone to conspiracy theories. Koch was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers and an anti-COVID lockdown crusader. Koch had presented himself to Burk as a shadowy agent for a rogue government operation involved in illegal ballot trafficking.

More than two weeks before the Flynn security team was dispatched to Seattle, Koch had come to Burk’s house in Arizona to advise her on home security. During a discussion about a similar theory concerning illegal ballots being unloaded from a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor, Koch told Burk that a group of men shown in a photo standing next to the plane were “my guys.”

Koch, who had organized an anti-lockdown group in Arizona in response to COVID-19 measures, went on to suggest to Burk that pro-Trump amateur sleuths attempting to uncover election fraud might learn about more than they bargained.

“A lot of these people want to be the center,” he said. “They wanna have the information. The problem is the information they don’t want.” For reasons that remain unclear, Penrose would hire an investigative team that included two former FBI agents to interview Koch about his claims, but not until after the madcap mission in Seattle to obtain the affidavit from Keliikoa.

“We interviewed Koch at length, and he said he fabricated everything,” Penrose told Burk during the Christmas Day phone call.

A one-time ‘hostile actor’ in Flynn’s camp

Patently ridiculous is the notion that a lie told by an anti-COVID lockdown advocate in Arizona, about illegal ballots on a plane, would trigger a weeks-long wild-goose that reached the highest levels of then-President Donald Trump’s inner sanctum, up to and including his former national security adviser.

In the end, the lead that sent Flynn’s associates to the Seattle airport under the pretext of a manufactured election crisis in December 2020 turned out to be little more than a photo of ballots and unexplained beeping from a package scanner that raised the suspicions of Keliikoa, a woman whose imagination was set alight by QAnon conspiracy theories.

One would not be faulted for thinking that nothing about this fake ballot-hunting story seems real.

Except for the fact that it is real.

It’s unclear whether Koch and his boss, Shawn Wilson, knew Flynn prior to the 2020 election. Regardless, Koch’s admitted deception hasn’t prevented Wilson from associating with the Flynn camp since that time.

The America Project, a nonprofit co-founded by Flynn, published a video in late 2023 that presented Wilson as someone who “knows more about what is going on at the border than probably anybody in America.” (Not mentioned in the interview was the fact that Wilson’s company had subcontracted with the state of Texas to operate buses transporting migrants to Democratic-run cities.)

As Election Day 2024 draws nearer, Wilson has only become more public and overt about his support for Trump.

The messaging in Wilson’s interview for Flynn’s nonprofit was a classic appeal to authoritarianism by invoking fear — part of Trump’s playbook since he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015. Wilson claimed that a military assault similar to the one launched against Israel by Hamas is imminent at the U.S southern border.

The remedy, Wilson suggested, is to ensure that Trump wins the 2024 election, adding, “I’ll be leading the charge with him right behind him.”

‘There was no goldmine’

Keliikoa confirmed her QAnon association, which inspired her ballot skepticism, during her deposition earlier this year.

She allowed that she sent Burk a link to a three-hour documentary video series Fall of the Cabal, which is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “a popular recruitment tool for QAnon followers.”

Keliikoa testified that following the November 2020 presidential election, she became suspicious because “we were moving ballots after places were called.” (That wouldn’t have been unusual, considering that the U.S. Postal Service was under a federal court order to locate and deliver mail-in ballots that hadn’t been received by Election Day.) One package that caused a scanner to triple beep — meaning “that it’s not recognized” — also concerned her.

“I believe that something looked wrong,” Keliikoa testified when asked under oath by Burk whether still believes that she witnessed election fraud at the FedEx facility in November 2020.

But Keliikoa admitted that she had nothing of value to share with the ad-hoc security team that sequestered her in a hotel in December 2020.

“They wanted to know if I knew about a plane coming in with these illegal ballots,” Keliikoa recalled. “I told them, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ That didn’t come from me. I don’t know what you’re saying.’ They were asking me if I knew about stuff that was going on outside of my workplace. I don’t. I was working. I don’t go out to other places.”

This didn’t stop Powell, who included a “Jane Doe” witness — Keliikoa presumably — on a witness list filed as part of an Arizona ballot lawsuit in support of Trump’s stop-the-steal effort. “Jane Doe,” Powell said at the time, would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona on or about before Nov. 3, 2020.”

No one was more disappointed by Keliikoa’s statement than Penrose.

“I thought when we exfil-ed her and we got her to write her affidavit, I thought we were going to have a goldmine of information,” he later told Burk, using the spy-craft term “exfiltrate” that means to furtively remove someone from a hostile area.

“There was no goldmine,” Penrose continued. “She had a picture of two ballot bags, and I asked her: ‘Would you know if ballots came across the tarmac from that Korea Air flight?’ And the answer was, ‘I just know what comes in this bay door from the USPS and what goes out these bay doors to get loaded on FedEx planes.’ So, the answer was there was no smoking gun per se with respect to that.”

The band breaks up

These days, few of the people involved want to discuss the Seattle ballot brouhaha, now revealed as a tangle of conspiracy theories, creative fantasies and outright lies — all in service to Trump’s goal of retaining presidential power that he was about to lose.

Reached by Raw Story earlier this month, Penrose’s lawyer John S. Irving said, “We don’t have anything to add.”

Keliikoa declined to comment to Raw Story for this story.

In an email to Raw Story last week, FedEx Media Relations said, “We do not have any comment at this time.”

Hurrington, the Marine Corps veteran who drove Keliikoa in the SUV, could not be reached for comment. Flohr also could not be reached for comment.

Some of the key players involved have also split up.

Keliikoa said in her deposition that one of the men who met her at the hotel told her it would “be in my best interest not to keep in contact” with Burk because she was a “troublemaker.”

Burk told Raw Story this month that Keliikoa had previously told her that it was Penrose who called her a “troublemaker,” but during her deposition, she claimed that she didn’t remember the names of anyone at the hotel.

“That was clearly projection since he was overseeing and directing a group of heavily armed former law enforcement holding my family and me hostage using fear and deception, who then spent months continuing to use that group to manipulate and malign my character to cover for their bad behavior,” Burk told Raw Story.

Flynn and Powell are both defendants in Burk’s lawsuit, along with former Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend. Burk accuses the defendants of civil rights violations, false imprisonment, assault, infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.

In a filing seeking to dismiss the lawsuit, Flynn’s lawyers wrote that Burk’s claims are “baseless” and “frivolous,” while denying that their client sent the security team to her house or that he intended that they hold her “hostage.”

But Flynn’s efforts to distance himself from Burk are belied by the fact that Flohr — aka “Yoda,” the ex-law enforcement volunteer dispatched to her home in Arizona — flanked Flynn as part of his security detail when he spoke at a pro-Trump rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., less than a week after he was at Burk’s house in December 2020.

Flynn is currently promoting a documentary movie that portrays him as a victim of political persecution, and Trump has hinted that he may bring his former national security adviser back to public service — and the taxpayer-funded payroll — should he win election to a second term.

Flynn did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by Raw Story through his lawyers.

Last year, Powell pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties in Georgia.

Burk is suing Koch for fraudulent misrepresentation, invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress in the Arizona state courts, separate from her federal claim against Flynn, Powell and Townsend. Representing herself, Burk deposed Keliikoa for her lawsuit against Koch. Last week, Burk filed a motion to consolidate her case against Koch with her federal lawsuit against Powell and Flynn.

Under cross-examination by Koch’s lawyer in March, Keliikoa downplayed her role in giving life to the “ballots on planes” theory.

“The only relevance I have is a lot of people got involved and it turned into, like I said before, a big s---show where a lot of people were involved that should have never even been there, that should have never been involved,” she said. “And I got thrown into the mix like everybody else. I was used as a pawn. That’s what makes me mad.”

Knowing what she knows now, Keliikoa said, she would have never agreed to write the affidavit.

“I thought people really wanted to help,” she said in her deposition. “And now I know otherwise.”

“Nobody really cares,” she added, “because everybody has their own objective.”

* * * * *

Key players

Staci Burk is a former school board member from Arizona who found herself in the middle of a conspiracy theory concerning illegal ballots and airplanes after the 2020 election.

Roland Hurrington is a Marine Corps veteran enlisted to pick up Sabrina Keliikoa at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport FedEx air freight terminal in December 2020.

Geoffrey Flohr, also known as “Yoda,” is a retired Michigan State Police officer who volunteered for the 1st Amendment Praetorian security group in late 2020 and early 2021. He used Staci Burk to track down Sabrina Keliikoa.

Michael Flynn is a retired lieutenant general who served as national security advisor for President Donald Trump before pleading guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, and Flynn emerged alongside Sidney Powell as a key player in the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

Sabrina Keliikoa is a former FedEx supervisor and QAnon adherent who claims to have been detained by a security team linked to Michael Flynn that obtained an affidavit about election ballots observed at her facility shortly around the time of the 2020 election.

Carissa Keshel was a volunteer who served as attorney Sidney Powell’s assistant in late 2020, as Flynn worked with Powell to overturn the 2020 election.

Kenneth Scott Koch is a security contractor formerly employed by Mayhem Solutions Group (now MSG Risk Management & Intelligence) who “fabricated” a story about his involvement in illegal ballot trafficking. Koch organized anti-lockdown protests in Arizona and was a member of the far-right group the Oath Keepers.

Jim Penrose is a cyber-security expert who worked for the National Security Agency under President Barack Obama. He traveled to Washington state to obtain an affidavit from Sabrina Keliikoa.

Sidney Powell is a former federal prosecutor who filed lawsuits in Arizona and other states seeking to overturn the 2020 election based on outlandish claims of voting fraud.

Kelly Townsend is a former Arizona state House member who told Staci Burk it was imperative that the “Seattle whistleblower” (now revealed to be Sabrina Keliikoa) come forward and report her suspicions about illegal ballot trafficking after the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is the former president of the United States who is again running for the presidency in 2024. Many of the actions described in this story were done in Trump’s name.