Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Telegram/Getty
The aftermath of the 2020 election launched lawyer Lin Wood to the top of Trumpworld. Wood, once a famed defamation lawyer, reinvented himself as a dogged investigator of election fraud, setting out to prove Donald Trump had been robbed.
Those efforts didn’t succeed, but Wood became a MAGA star anyway. He embraced QAnon, and brought down the house at a far-right convention with his conspiratorial ravings about the British royal family and the Rothschilds. Wood’s South Carolina plantation became a hub for Trump activists looking to invalidate the election. Wood amassed a following of his own, and infuriated Republican officials when he urged them not to vote in the Georgia special elections because of his fears of voter fraud.
Two years after the election, though, Wood has broken with nearly all of his one-time allies. He saw satanic symbols in their messages, and released secret audio tapes of their conversations. His former law partners are suing him, and he’s facing an investigation from the Georgia Bar. He flirted with the flat-Earth movement.