When a Christian nationalist group’s prayer session starring former President Donald Trump got derailed late last month, the official MAGA line was that leftist “trolls” had “hacked” the system.
But no one in the ex-president’s circle seemed to interrogate whether that was true. As it turns out, the chaos may have come from inside the house.
As The Daily Beast previously reported, the Pastors for Trump National Prayer Call on March 20, starring Trump, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn, turned into chaos after the twice-impeached ex-president’s line went dead moments after he joined the call.
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“I think what happened was that the radical left was working on the phone,” Trump claimed after rejoining the line. “There is no question about it.” Disconnected yet again, a frustrated Trump later reiterated, “I think probably it was the radical left that did something with [the phone lines].”
Pastors for Trump founder Jackson Lahmeyer told The Daily Beast at the time that the call’s private “backstage got flooded with people and trolls, just commenting all types of stuff.” The torrent of such “trolls” into the call’s back end—possibly the result of a “hack,” he said—may have caused the snafu. “Everything froze on our end. I think the system got overloaded with the number of viewers.”
In an era of deep political divisions, with many battles waged online, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if anti-Trump internet users somehow found a way to “hack” the event.
But while “Trump and everyone involved thought that the prayer call was hacked by the radical left,” a Trump insider with knowledge of the situation explained, there was actually no hack at all.
The Pastors for Trump event’s private back-end was infiltrated because Flynn publicly posted the link—a “dumb” mistake, this insider said, that has “never been publicly remedied.”
“Pray, pray, pray for America,” the former Trump national security adviser tweeted to his 1.1 million followers, two minutes after the event began, alongside a link granting users access to the private back-end of the call. As a result, “the private speakers’ area was flooded by hundreds of trolls, causing the whole system to crash. Those of us logged in using the link watched the whole thing happen in real time, and could see the faces of these trolls while they hurled insults and threats in the private backstage chatroom.”
Flynn’s tweet undoubtedly caused the breach, the insider said, because that private link “was generated by Pastors for Trump staff and given only to speakers. The backstage only holds 12 people. So using that link with hundreds of people crashed the entire system.”
As of this article’s publication, Flynn has still not deleted the tweet, which garnered more than 1,000 retweets and 121,000 views. Neither the retired lieutenant general nor Trump’s camp responded to requests for comment.
When reached for comment, Lahmeyer boasting that, “Our livestream prayer call with President Donald Trump was tremendous with over 155k people watching live and over 3k pastors.” But he avoided directly addressing Flynn’s alleged responsibility for the chaos, writing: “Unfortunately, Leftists Trolls invaded our backstage on the live stream because the link was shared publicly and that caused it to shut down. Thankfully, we were able to recover and record a phone call conversation with President Trump, where I had the opportunity to pray over him.”
