Ivan Raiklin, a prominent election denier and Trump supporter, sits in the audience during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing.Graeme Sloan/Sipa/AP
I found the “Secretary of Retribution” on Tuesday, sitting on a couch on media row during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. As an associate filmed him with a phone camera, Ivan Raiklin was railing against enemies of former President Donald Trump. The self-styled Retribution Secretary had an ominous message: “Constitutional sheriffs,” he warned, were going to round up all the people on Raiklin’s “Deep State target list” in live-streamed “swatting raids” so they could be punished for treason.
Those who wanted to avoid such a fate, he said, had until September 3 to “come out as a whistleblower,” by reaching out to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) to help with their investigations into the “weaponization” of government. Then, he said, “We will spare you. Everyone else will be treated as a co-conspirator.”
It’s the kind of crazy talk that the Trump campaign has tried hard to dial back this week at the gathering of the Republican faithful. Many of MAGA world’s most controversial stars, such as conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Roger Stone, who featured prominently at the 2016 GOP convention, have been largely sidelined. This year, speakers have focused on unity, comity, and winning in November in the wake of the assassination attempt against Trump. But Raiklin doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
A former Green Beret and military intelligence officer, a lawyer, and a failed Virginia US Senate candidate, Raiklin also calls himself the “Deep State Marauder.” He’s a colleague of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and has been traveling the country with him this year as part of Flynn’s ReAwaken American tour. He’s also helped promote Flynn’s new movie, in which he has a cameo. When I saw the film at a screening in Charleston, West Virginia, Raiklin was on stage with Flynn, after playing the heavy and booting out all the media.
Raiklin was involved with Flynn’s efforts to help overturn the results of the 2020 election. He is the author of the “Operation Pence Card” memo, which proposed that Vice President Mike Pence could block certification of the election results on January 6. Raiklin’s name came up repeatedly during the House committee investigation of January 6, but he was never subpoenaed.
For the past six months or so, Raiklin has been circulating an enemies list of about 350 people whom he believes should be prosecuted for treason. The list, which has unnerved many democracy advocates, includes former Vice President Mike Pence, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, journalists, witnesses from Trump’s impeachment hearings, Capitol police officers, and more.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Raw Story, which recently published a long investigation about Raiklin’s list, “This is a deadly serious report. A retired U.S. military officer has drawn up a ‘Deep State target list’ of public officials he considers traitors, along with our family members and staff. His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Raiklin was speaking for the former president when he portrays himself as the future “secretary of retribution.”
I was not completely surprised to find Raiklin at the Republican convention, and not just because Trump himself has frequently threatened that his second term would focus on retribution against his alleged enemies. Raiklin has made himself a fixture on the right-wing media circuit. He tends to appear randomly at congressional hearings or court proceedings for January 6 defendants, including the first Oath Keepers trial and much of the Proud Boys’ trial.
My colleague Dan Friedman approached Raiklin in the cafeteria at the DC federal courthouse last year to ask him why he attended so many January 6-related proceedings and if he was concerned about facing criminal charges connected to January 6. “Most of our conversation was off the record,” Friedman says. “But I can say that he didn’t really answer the question about criminal charges. And he threatened to retaliate against me if I wrote anything he felt was unfair. It wasn’t clear exactly what he meant, but it may have been the most direct threat I’ve received in 20 years as a reporter.”
Later, Raiklin appeared in the media room at the federal courthouse, bothering some of the regular January 6 reporters. One of them told Friedman that Raiklin “does that all the time.”
Before ensconcing himself on media row at the Republican convention Tuesday, Raiklin had been on InfoWars talking with Alex Jones about how the Trump shooting was an inside job. (Jones was broadcasting from Racine, at least 30 minutes away from the actual convention site.) When I found Raiklin on the couch in the Panther Center, he was being filmed by a man who would say only that he was from Minnesota. After they finished, I attempted to ask Raiklin about the allegations that he was inciting political violence with his target list.
It did not go well.
“When you can showcase to me that you have gotten a story accurate, I will consider interacting with you as a human being in your individual capacity,” he said, launching into a long and impenetrable interrogation of my journalism. Here’s a sampling:
“I have full 100 percent disrespect for your news organization. One hundred percent. When you can lower that to below 99.9 percent, then I’ll consider communicating with you. Is that fair?…When you can show that level of repentance to start getting things right, then I’ll see you’re making a good faith effort to try to report accurately and truthfully. So you may want to go back to your employer and start to inform them that they need to start becoming an accurate purveyors of content. Until that happens, well, you can go and talk to other people, ‘cause I’m not moving.”
“What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity. What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.”
I pressed him about political violence, at which point he gave me a lecture about the sort of left-wing political violence he was opposed to. “What about the kidnapping of Steve Bannon? He’s still in captivity,” he said. “What about the kidnapping of Peter Navarro? He’s still in captivity until tomorrow.” (Bannon, a Trump adviser, is serving a four-month sentence in federal prison for defying a subpoena from Congress, and Navarro, who worked in the Trump White House, just finished his four-month sentence for the same crime on Wednesday.) Raiklin told me cryptically to “talk to Elon Musk” about the Deep State list.
Several months ago, during an appearance on InfoWars, Raiklin suggested that Trump getting assassinated might have some beneficial effects for the campaign to eradicate the Deep State by setting off the “best cleansing and the fastest cleansing that we’ve ever seen in my lifetime.”
Given his fondness for that sort of dangerous rhetoric, I was curious to know how Raiklin had been allowed inside the convention, where security was tight. I asked him what sort of credentials he had—was he media or a delegate?—which require vetting by the Secret Service. He turned on me and said, “We’re done.” (A convention press contact did not respond to questions about Raiklin’s credentials.) When I tried to ask his “videographer” where I might watch the interview he’d been conducting when I arrived, Raiklin got up in my face and said, “Are you deaf and dumb? I just answered the question three times. Can you focus and listen to the answer? I’ve answered it already.”
Raiklin became so hostile that a convention staffer came over to ask me if I was ok. He asked Raiklin what he was doing on media row. “I’m a guest,” he retorted, insisting that he’d been giving a half-dozen interviews to outlets like “FrankSpeech” TV, the media organ of MyPillow’s Mike Lindell. Raiklin told the convention staffer to throw me out. “I’m not going to do that,” the staffer said. He later told me that Raiklin had been causing some problems and wasn’t supposed to be setting up shop there with his guest pass.
Eventually, Raiklin walked away, and not long afterward he posted a video of this “epic takedown of a reporter” on his X account. But not before giving me a warning (which he left out of his video). “You’re gonna have a really fun 2024 with the way you’re interacting with me,” he said menacingly. “Expect a really fun 2024. At a personal level. Mark my words.” When I asked him if that was a threat, he said, “It’s going to be good times.”
