From David Edwards' 3-26-24 RAW STORY article entitled "Michael Flynn Responds to Bridge Collapse by Pushing Kremlin Propaganda":
Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn suggested that a bridge collapse in Baltimore was connected to a terrorist attack in Russia.Flynn joined conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on his Tuesday broadcast to talk about the tragedy that was caused by a ship hitting the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
"I've read the reports that, statistically, we're seeing about triple the number of these that we normally see," Jones began. "So obviously, that means some of this is just normal accidents, but a lot of it is some type of sabotage."
"You're saying this appears to be a Black Swan event," he told Flynn.
"So everything that I see here and, you know, I mean, the jury is going to be out for a while," Flynn responded. "This is not, you know, I was asked earlier today, Alex, can we take the idea that this was a terrorist attack off the table? And absolutely, we cannot do that."
The former national security adviser repeated Russian government talking points while connecting the bridge collapse to a terrorist attack in Moscow.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Joanna Slater's 2-17-24 WASHINGTON POST article entitled "How the Decision to Honor a Trump Ally Tore Apart a Hall of Fame":
For nearly 60 years, the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame has inducted notables into its ranks, providing this tiny state with a boost of pride [...].Then came the matter of Michael Flynn.
In December, it emerged that Flynn — a Rhode Island native, retired lieutenant general and former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was later pardoned by Donald Trump — would be inducted into the Hall of Fame at its annual banquet this spring.
At least nine members of the organization’s board resigned in response. Some of this year’s other inductees said they would decline the honor. The husband of one of the board members who had resigned reported the group’s former longtime president to the Internal Revenue Service [...].
John Parrillo teaches history at a local university and served on the Hall of Fame’s board for seven years before stepping down in late December, saying he disagreed with Flynn’s “far-right, militaristic” vision for America.
“It tears my heart out that I had to leave it,” Parrillo said. “We’ve never talked politics.”
Inductees are celebrated at an annual ceremony opened by bagpipes and studded with local dignitaries. Each receives a statuette, a replica of the “Independent Man” atop Rhode Island’s State House. Parrillo already had his nominee for 2025 picked out: novelist Cormac McCarthy, who was born in Providence and died last year [...].
The controversy around Flynn goes beyond pleading guilty to a felony, a plea he later sought to withdraw before receiving a presidential pardon. He is also a high-profile proponent of conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, which he baselessly claims was stolen.
In December 2020, he was part of a group that urged Trump to direct the military to seize voting machines, witnesses told a congressional committee. When Flynn was questioned by legislators investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He has toured the country telling audiences that America is in the middle of a “spiritual war” and called for the nation to embrace “one religion” during an appearance at an evangelical megachurch.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
From Derek Barichello's 1-20-24 SHAW LOCAL NEWS NETWORK article entitled "Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s Book Reading to Take Place at Sheridan Church":
Former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn will hold a children’s book reading, initially set to take place at the Somonauk Public Library, next week at the Fox River Lutheran Church in Sheridan.
The Somonauk library will not be able to accommodate the number of people expected to attend, said Kiara Tyrrell of the Children’s Department at the library.
Flynn’s expected visit garnered attention Tuesday as about 75 people showed up to the Somonauk library board meeting to voice their displeasure with the library’s previous decision to cancel the book reading with Flynn.
Trump pardoned the retired general in November 2020 after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Flynn had been scheduled to read from his children’s book, “The Night the Snow Monster Attacked,” but the event was canceled hastily after library officials received some complaints, board President Roberta Mickelson said.
At the beginning of Tuesday’s meeting, before taking public comments, the library board said it would do what it could to reschedule the event.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
General Michael Flynn's The Night The Snow Monster Attacked
From Tom Nichols' 12-8-23 ATLANTIC article entitled "A Military Loyal to Trump":
If Donald Trump wins the next election, he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities. It will not be easy: The overwhelming majority of America’s service people are professionals and patriots. I know this from teaching senior officers for 25 years at the Naval War College. As president, Trump came to understand it too, when he found that “his generals” were not, in fact, mere employees of a Trump property.But the former president and the people around him have learned from that experience. The last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control [...].
Trump [...] prizes military people who serve his ego and support his antidemocratic instincts. He thinks highly of Flynn, for example, who had to resign after 22 days as national security adviser and is now the marquee attraction at various gatherings of Christian nationalists and conspiracy theorists around the country. In late 2020, angered by his election loss and what he saw as the disloyalty within the national-security community, Trump fired or forced out top Defense Department leaders and tried to replace them with people more like Flynn. The brazen actions that the 45th president took in his final, desperate weeks in office—however haphazard—illustrate the magnitude of the threat he may pose to the military if he is reelected.
From Paul Squire and Erin Snodgrass's 11-13-23 BUSINESS INSIDER article entitled "Michael Flynn and His Family Kept Leftover Donations Sent in by QAnon Supporters, Sister Says According to Court Filing":
Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's family fundraised for his legal defense fund from QAnon supporters and then kept the extra money once his lawyers were paid off, according to new court filings unsealed in a defamation case.The court documents — filed by CNN as part of a defamation lawsuit brought by Flynn's wife, Lori, and sister-in-law, Valerie, against the network — cite deposition by Flynn's sister, Barbara Flynn Redgate, who was a trustee of Flynn's legal fund.
Semafor first reported on the unsealed documents.
Lori and Valerie Flynn allege that in 2021 CNN defamed them by airing a clip it said was of Flynn taking an "oath" connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory while his family members stand beside him with their right hands raised.
The unsealed court documents were part of CNN's attempt to have the defamation case tossed.
Flynn Redgate, who oversaw donations to Flynn's legal fund, agreed in testimony that she "didn't mind taking money from people who [used QAnon] hashtags" as long as they were "directing [people] to the legal defense fund," the court documents state.
"Barbara testified that, once legal fees were paid, the Flynns themselves received the remainder of the funds," the filing from CNN says.
Flynn is a retired US Army lieutenant general and Donald Trump ally who briefly served as the president's national security adviser and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
THE YOUNG TURKS: QAnon Poster-Boy Calls The Group “Total Nonsense” (11-29-21)
From Jackie Flynn Mogensen's 4-5-20 MOTHER JONES article entitled "To Celebrate the Fourth, Michael Flynn Posts a Pledge to Conspiracy Group QAnon":
Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, posted a video on Independence Day in which he recites an oath for QAnon conspiracy theorists along with five others.Flynn had been circling the QAnon world for months, but this takes his flirtation with the group a step further. As the QAnon conspiracy theory goes, powerful liberal politicos are running an underground child sex trafficking operation but will ultimately be exposed and charged for their crimes after “The Storm.” There is, of course, no evidence that such a scheme exists. The oath, which includes the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” refers to “an oath to become ‘digital soldiers’ to defend the Constitution,” explains the Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer. In the last month, following other cryptic messages of support for the QAnon conspiracy, Flynn added #TakeTheOath to his Twitter bio.
What follow are some relevant excerpts from Nicholas Schmidle's 2-18-17 NEW YORKER article entitled "Michael Flynn, General Chaos":
Now, after months of unrelenting scrutiny, [Michael] Flynn seemed to believe that he could find a measure of obscurity in the West Wing, steps away from Trump and the Oval Office. “I want to go back to having an out-of-sight role,” he told me [...].
On August 7, 2014, at a ceremony in the atrium of the D.I.A.’s
headquarters, Flynn retired from the military, after thirty-three years.
His wife and two sons attended, as did Michael Ledeen. The senior
military intelligence official, who was present, told me that Flynn was
obviously bitter: “He was loading up, and he was not going to go
quietly.”
Flynn, who was fifty-five, began fashioning a
post-military life. He started his own business, the Flynn Intel Group,
which offered clients a range of private intelligence and security
services. He did some freelance consulting and also worked with SBD
Advisors, a strategic consulting firm whose roster included the former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen; former
chief of the Special Operations Command Admiral Eric Olson; and other
retired military officers. In January, 2015, Flynn signed with Leading
Authorities, a speakers’ bureau, which promoted his expertise in
leadership, cybersecurity, and terrorism [...].
But, even before Flynn’s rapid fall, his closest military colleagues had been struggling to make sense of what had happened to the talented and grounded general they once knew. “Mike is inarguably one of the finest leaders the Army has ever produced,” James (Spider) Marks, a retired major general, told me. And yet, watching the first night of the Republican National Convention, last July, Marks was taken aback when his old friend appeared onscreen.
“Wake up, America!” Flynn said, his jaw set and his hands gripping the sides of the lectern. The United States was in peril: “Our very existence is threatened.” The moment demanded a President with “guts,” he declared, not a “weak, spineless” one who “believes she is above the law.”
In the early two-thousands, Marks was Flynn’s commanding officer at the Army’s intelligence academy, in Fort Huachuca, Arizona; one of his daughters went to school with one of Flynn’s sons. Marks regarded Flynn as “smart, humble, and funny.” What he saw on TV was something else: “That’s a vitriolic side of Mike that I never knew.”
When, twenty minutes into the speech, Flynn mentioned Hillary Clinton, the Convention audience responded with chants of “Lock her up!” Flynn nodded, leading the chant: “That’s right—lock her up.” He went on, “Damn right. . . . And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because, if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth—a tenth—of what she did, I would be in jail today.”
Marks’s thirty-five-year-old daughter, who was watching with him, turned to her father and said, “Dad, General Flynn is scaring me” [...].
During the summer of 2016, the Trump campaign floated Flynn, a lifelong Democrat, as a Vice-Presidential candidate. After the Republican Convention, Flynn became a regular presence at Trump campaign events, sometimes accompanied by his older son, Michael, Jr. Flynn had been absent for long stretches of Michael, Jr.,’s, teen-age years and early adulthood—he reportedly missed his wedding while deployed in Iraq. Flynn made Michael, Jr., his chief of staff.
In part through his son, Flynn began flirting with an online community of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists who referred to themselves as the “alt-right.” The neo-Nazis among them called Trump the “God Emperor.” On Twitter, Flynn frequently tagged Mike Cernovich, an alt-right activist, in tweets, and encouraged others to follow his feed. Michael, Jr., promoted stories from Alex Jones, the right-wing radio host who believes that the 9/11 attacks, and the 2012 school shooting in Sandy Hook, were inside jobs. A little more than a year ago, Michael, Jr., tweeted @billclinton, “You’re a Rapist.”
Flynn’s own views seemed to be tilting increasingly toward the fringe. He, as Trump has, publicly insinuated that Obama was a secret Muslim, and not a true American. “I’m not going to sit here and say he’s Islamic,” Flynn said of Obama, during remarks last year before the American Congress for Truth, an anti-Muslim group. But Obama “didn’t grow up an American kid,” Flynn said, adding that the President’s values were “totally different than mine.”
Flynn also stoked fear about Muslims and, in a tweet that used the hashtag #NeverHillary, shared an anti-Semitic comment that read, in part, “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” (He subsequently deleted the tweet, calling it “a mistake.”) “I’m not perfect. I’m not a very good social-media person,” he told me in one of our conversations. Stanley McChrystal and Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, both contacted Flynn and tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to tone it down.
Flynn predicted a Trump win, but he was making contingency plans. He began reorienting his firm, the Flynn Intel Group, so that it would be able to compete for lobbying clients after the election. The firm arranged to work with Sphere Consulting, a public-relations and lobbying business in Washington [...].
After the election, Flynn spent his days at Trump Tower, down the hall from Bannon and Reince Priebus. “My sched is so tight, literally from sunrise to well past sunset,” Flynn wrote me, in a text message. He was “consumed with reading.”
The team he assembled drew heavily from his former military colleagues, but the qualifications of others were less apparent. K. T. McFarland, until recently a Fox News analyst, became his deputy. Flynn’s son, Michael, Jr., did a brief stint on the transition, before he was dismissed, after continuing to push on Twitter the fake-news story about Hillary Clinton’s role in a child-sex-trafficking ring in a pizzeria in northwest Washington, D.C. [...].
The end for Flynn came rather abruptly. He had spent the weekend with the President and the Prime Minister of Japan at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where they had used a table in an open dining area as an impromptu—and unsecured—situation room after a ballistic missile test by North Korea. But, back in Washington on Monday afternoon, there was confusion about Flynn’s standing. During a television interview, Kellyanne Conway, a senior White House adviser, said that Flynn enjoyed Trump’s “full confidence.” Then, within the hour, Spicer said that Trump was “evaluating the situation.” Flynn went about his duties as usual that afternoon, participating in foreign-policy discussions in the Oval Office, an Administration official told me.
But, that evening, another Post article appeared online, this time about the Justice Department’s blackmail fears. Soon afterward, Trump asked for Flynn’s resignation. The news broke just before eleven.
Since the election, Flynn had been “read in” to dozens of “special access programs,” the country’s most highly classified intelligence operations. By protocol, he would have spent his final moments in the White House being “read out” of each program, a process that involves signing multiple confidentiality forms. At around 11:30 p.m., he walked out of the White House and called his wife.
At that hour, the roads were empty and Flynn drove, alone, to his home, in Old Town Alexandria. He barely slept that night. On Tuesday, a government representative came to his home to collect his phones, badges, and keys. He spent the next few days with his wife, taking long walks, “reflecting and capturing his thoughts,” the close associate told me. As Washington, just across the Potomac River, convulsed, Flynn was going through his own “range of emotional swings,” the associate said.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
To wrap it all up, here's a video of General Chaos channeling the wit and wisdom of Elizabeth Clare Prophet....
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