‘Your words did matter’: Insider calls on Lin Wood to take responsibility for provocative January 6th tweets

Lin Wood, a high-profile lawyer involved in the litigation seeking to overturn the 2020 election who unleashed a series of incendiary tweets leveling accusations of treason at Vice President Mike Pence, has vehemently insisted that his social media activity bears no connection with the attack on the US Capitol.

Wood received some pushback from Patrick Bergy, a former military contractor who is the primary source for the “ShadowGate” conspiracy theory, during Bergy’s podcast on Tuesday evening. Bergy was embedded with a group known as “Team America” in Washington, DC in late 2020 and early 2021 that worked to supply information geared towards overturning the election to the attorneys, including Wood, who were litigating the cases.

During his podcast on Tuesday evening, Bergy publicly responded to a statement by Wood to Raw Story, which was quoted in a recent story about his tweets.

Bergy read Wood’s statement aloud on his Twitch stream on Tuesday evening: “Please identify credible witnesses who state that they were inflamed by social media. You cannot.”

Then, Bergy responded: “I can.”

Bergy recalled being at the rally at the Ellipse that was headlined by President Trump and being greeted by Trump supporters who recognized him from the “ShadowGate” documentary, which was produced by former InfoWars correspondent Millie Weaver.

“These people who were coming up to and would recognize me were all of the people who have been deeply and did deeply follow — they were all the people who are entrenched in this,” Bergy said. “I can tell you without question, as someone who you could easily argue as a subject matter expert in social-media psychological warfare, that what he was doing was, in fact, whether intentional or unintentional being used by others in a tactical and coordinated fashion to help create what ended up being the riots on January 6th.

“Now, to what extent Lin Wood would have any knowledge of that I don’t know or can’t say,” Bergy added. “I’m kind of split on it the way he’s treated me. But I can say as a subject matter expert in this: ‘Yeah, Lin, your words did matter. Your words do matter.”

Wood insisted in an interview with Raw Story on Thursday that he “didn’t have anything to do with January 6th.”

“I’ve told you my tweets were patriotic,” he said. “I told you that I felt that Mike Pence — based on information given to me by Jon McGreevey, if it’s true — may have been involved in an act of treason in 2017. I have not made any comments about Mike Pence’s involvement in January 6th. So, I thought that on January 6th the election vote would not be certified and we would take our nation back. Because I feel like the election was illegal and had a multitude of irregularities in it. There’s nothing wrong with me feeling that way and expressing it. It’s First Amendment protected. I didn’t ask anyone to do anything.”

Bergy served as a signal support systems specialist in the US Army for seven months in 2007, including deployment to Afghanistan. Following his honorable discharge from the Army, Bergy worked on a classified operation in Iraq. In September 2008, he received a letter of recommendation from Maj. Bradford M. Burris, chief of the Interactive Internet Activities Branch in Baghdad, praising Bergy as someone who “possesses and exudes the highest levels of professionalism, technical competence, organizational management skills and critical thinking skills that I have seen in the twelve years that I have served as a member of the United States Army.” Bergy told Raw Story that one component of the project was utilizing information operations to unite Sunnis and Shias in opposition to al-Qaida in Iraq.

“Other people were working behind the scenes to amplify the things [Wood] was saying that did end up getting people ginned up and riled up to where they go into Congress and smash in the doors,” Bergy told Raw Story. “I’m saying that as a subject-matter expert in psychological warfare. That’s [Information Operations] 101. You’re targeting a specific group of individuals. You’re providing them with dubious information that instills fear that they’re about to lose the thing they love the most — our country, raising our hand and swearing the Pledge of Allegiance. These are patriots that would have given their lives, and some have fought overseas for our country. Lin Wood coming out and saying, ‘These people are trying to steal this country from you,’ that’s what contributed to the success of that operation.”

Wood noted in a phone interview with Raw Story that the Delaware Supreme Court issued an opinion in January that overturned a decision by a local judge to revoke an order allowing Wood to represent a client in defamation lawsuit in the state.

“The Delaware Supreme Court took the same — or some of the tweets you’re referring to — where a judge had ruled that I had somehow likely inspired January 6th — the Supreme Court of Delaware in a 5-0 decision said that the tweets don’t support the finding of the Delaware judge,” Wood told Raw Story. “So, a court has recognized that there’s no connection between my social media tweets and January the 6th.”

The state Supreme Court ruling faulted the local judge for linking Wood to “the traumatic events of January 6” without presenting any evidence or allowing Wood to respond. The Supreme Court ruled that the local judge’s finding that Wood’s tweets “incited the riots” was not justified considering the scope of the court action to determine whether Wood should be allowed to act as counsel in the case and considering the judicial record.

In a separate case, as previously reported by Raw Story, a federal judge in Michigan found that Wood and other attorneys listed as plaintiff’s co-counsel in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election “helped mold the predetermined narrative about election fraud by lodging this federal lawsuit based on evidence that they actively refused to investigate or question with the requisite level of professional skepticism — and this refusal was to ensure that the evidence conformed with the predetermined narrative (a narrative that has had dangerous and violent consequences).”

In his comments to Raw Story, Wood also denied responsibility for at least one of the tweets cited in previous reporting and suggested they might have come from a “fake” account. Wood’s Twitter account was suspended after Jan. 6, but his archived tweets under his username @LLinWood were retrieved by Raw Story from the Internet Archive.

Wood acknowledged that he has spoken to Bergy, but said he didn’t understand what he was saying.

“He’s been calling me, texting me for a period of time, and I’m just not interested in dealing with him,” Wood said. “People try to drag me into stuff sometimes, and I just have no desire sometimes to be drug into it.”

Bergy arrived in Washington, DC on Nov. 15, 2020, joining former InfoWars correspondent Millie Weaver and her partner Gavin Wince, along with Terpsehore Maras, who submitted a declaration that was used by Sidney Powell in twolawsuits filed by Sidney Powell that listed Wood as co-counsel for the plaintiffs.

Bergy described himself — along with Weaver and Wince — during his podcast on Tuesday as a “guest” of Patrick Byrne, who provided significant financing for the effort to overturn the election. Bergy has previously said that Byrne paid for his hotel for at least part of the time he was in Arlington, Va. working on election-related matters.

Bergy told Raw Story he sent an email to Powell to alert her to his concerns about “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander after Powell, Alexander and Wood appeared together at a Dec. 2, 2020 rally in Alpharetta, Ga. Powell, according to Bergy, responded succinctly: “Thank you for letting me know. Neither me nor Lin Wood were aware of that.”

Bergy said he also received a response from Wood when he raised a concern about his association with Alexander, and that Wood responded in writing that “the only time he had heard of or known” of Alexander was when Alexander introduced him to Nick Sandmann, the Kentucky teenager who is suing multiple media outlets for defamation related to their reporting on an interaction between him and a Native American man at the National Mall in 2019. Sandmann fired Wood from his legal team last year.

Last December, Wood wrote on his Telegram channel about having “received warnings tonight from several friends who tell me that a man named Patrick Bergy is posting threats of harm to me online. Apparently, this person Bergy has said that he is traveling to my home to harm me.” Wood mentioned in his message that his “security team is on heightened alert” and that he had three pit bulls on his property.

Shortly afterwards, he posted an update: “I spoke with Patrick Bergy. He struck me as a polite man who does not pose any threat to me. I apologize to him for inferences to the contrary that I received from third parties. Always better to be safe than sorry. My safety was not threatened by Patrick.”

Bergy has said that in the days leading up to Jan. 6, his primary objective was trying to get people to read his affidavit and a qui tam complaint he had filed in federal court arguing that psychological warfare weapons were being used to influence US elections.

“While all that was happening, I was in Washington, DC,” Bergy said on his podcast. “I was doing the fly-on-the-wall thing, and I was there as a guest of Patrick Byrne — Millie, Gavin. As all of this is going on, I’m watching, and you can ask anyone, I was not participating. In fact, many people — Millie, Gavin, Tore, everyone has openly claimed, ‘Oh, he didn’t do nothing, he wasn’t doing nothing.’ I’ve openly claimed that. I was there observing.”

Referencing Wood’s tweets on Jan. 6, Bergy said, “Science tells us in the psy-op community that doing and targeting exactly as I witnessed what happened on January 6th involving the people that you, with over a million followers were engaging with, legitimately was part of what resulted in the deaths of Ashli Babbitt and others. I’m not gonna sugar-coat that.

“I’m not necessarily going to say that that’s like a sin or — but, no, you gotta own these things Lin,” Bergy continued. “Your actions caused a lot of people a lot of pain. I’ve personally never witnessed Lin Wood honestly and with sincerity and humbleness acknowledge his responsibility.”