Michael Flynn, Anti-Islamist Ex-General, Offered Security Post, Trump Aide Says
Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Thursday.
Sam Hodgson for The New York Times
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and MAGGIE HABERMAN
November 17, 2016
WASHINGTON — President-elect
Donald J. Trump has offered the post of national security adviser to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, potentially putting a retired intelligence officer who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat in one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy, according to a top official on Mr. Trump’s transition team.
General Flynn, 57, a registered Democrat, was Mr. Trump’s main national security adviser during his campaign. If he accepts Mr. Trump’s offer, as expected, he will be a critical gatekeeper for a president with little experience in military or foreign policy issues.
Mr. Trump and General Flynn both see themselves as brash outsiders who hustled their way to the big time. They both post on Twitter often about their own successes, and they have both at times crossed the line into outright Islamophobia.
They also both exhibit a loose relationship with facts: General Flynn, for instance, has said that
Shariah, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”
As an adviser, General Flynn has already proved to be a powerful influence on Mr. Trump, convincing the president-elect that the United States is in a “world war” with Islamist militants and must work with any willing allies in the fight, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions...
https://t.co/NLIfKFD9lU
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General Flynn (@GenFlynn) February 27, 2016
During the transition, General Flynn has been present when Mr. Trump has received his daily intelligence briefing. As national security adviser, he would have the last word on how the president should respond to crises such as a showdown with China over the South China Sea or an international health crisis like the Ebola epidemic.
But, like Mr. Trump, he would enter the White House with significant baggage. The Flynn Intel Group, a consulting firm he founded after he was fired by President Obama as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has hazy business ties to Middle Eastern countries and has appeared to lobby for the Turkish government. General Flynn also took a paid speaking engagement last year with Russia Today, a television network funded by the Kremlin, and attended the network’s lavish anniversary party in Moscow, where he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow.
Those potential conflicts of interest had led Mr. Trump’s transition team to worry that General Flynn might have difficulty winning confirmation for any post that, unlike the national security adviser role, requires congressional approval, such as director of the C.I.A. But for Mr. Trump, he has one overriding virtue: He was an early and ardent supporter in a campaign during which most of the Washington national security establishment openly called Mr. Trump unfit to lead.
General Flynn did not respond to repeated interview requests. Yet in numerous speeches and interviews before the election, and in a book published in August, he laid out a view of the world that sees the United States as facing a singular, overarching threat that can be described in only one way: “radical Islamic terrorism.”
@FieldofFight -- Obama and Hillary's Refusal to Name Radical Islamic Terrorism: Aiming to 'Dumb Us Down' - Breitbart
https://t.co/ZitXKKoaRt
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General Flynn (@GenFlynn) September 24, 2016
All else is secondary for General Flynn, and any other description of the threat is “the worst kind of political correctness,” he said in an interview three weeks before the election.
Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem, he said, describing it as a political ideology, not a religion. He has even at times gone so far as to call it a cancer.
For General Flynn, the election of Mr. Trump represents an astounding career turnaround. Once counted among the most respected military officers of his generation, General Flynn was fired after serving only two years as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He then re-emerged as a vociferous critic of a Washington elite that he contended could not even properly identify the real enemy — radical Islam, that is — never mind figure out how to defeat it.
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In Mr. Trump, General Flynn found someone who was more than willing to listen. He readily signed on to the campaign, and quickly emerged as
the angry voice of the national security establishment, leading chants of “lock her up” against Hillary Clinton at rallies and the Republican convention. And now, after months of the two men talking to each other, it can be hard to tell where Mr. Trump’s views end and General Flynn’s begin.
They both believe that the United States needs to start working with Mr. Putin to defeat Islamist militants and stop worrying about his suppression of critics at home, his attempt to
dismember Ukraine or the Russian military’s
indiscriminate bombing of Syrian cities. The same goes for President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, who took power in a coup and who was the
first world leader to speak with Mr. Trump after the election.
Mr. Trump “looks at people and leaders of countries and says: ‘Can I work with this guy? Do we have a common threat that we can focus on?’” Mr. Flynn said in the interview before the election. “He knows that when it comes to Russia or any other country, the common enemy that we all have is radical Islam.”
General Flynn and Mr. Trump also agree that the United States needs to sharply curtail immigration from predominantly Muslim countries, and possibly even force American Muslims to register with the government.
We are facing violent, but very serious and cunning radical Islamists. We can be war weary when we win. If we lose, we have nothing.
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General Flynn (@GenFlynn) November 16, 2015
The similarities run beyond political views. Like the boy from Queens who made it in Manhattan, General Flynn came into the military without a West Point pedigree — he graduated from the Army’s Reserve Officer Training Program at the University of Rhode Island — and earned a reputation as outspoken and unconventional as he climbed the ranks to the top of military intelligence.
Yet General Flynn still nurses the grudge of an outsider, believing he never quite got the respect he deserves. For example, he has
attributed his dismissal from the Defense Intelligence Agency to a pair of consummate insiders: James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, and Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense intelligence.
His response, like that of his new boss, has been to buck the establishment. In his view, both the Republican and the Democratic luminaries who have shaped American defense and foreign policy through two presidencies have “gotten us into mess after mess for the wrong reasons.”
“I would argue with that crowd all day long,” he said before the election.
Among the hard-line Republicans who now dominate the party, General Flynn has become something of a cult figure for what they see as his brave stand against the Obama administration’s perfidy. General Flynn insists that he was fired from the intelligence agency because he refused to toe the administration’s line that Islamist militants were in retreat. (He was right, in all fairness.)
“He’s an analyst who can get deep into the weeds on the issues and a lot of this stuff and then is very good at playing three-dimensional chess,” said Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a close confidant to Mr. Flynn. “He was the one who called out the administration for being wrong on Al Qaeda.”
But many of those who worked with General Flynn attribute his firing to management problems, saying his attempts to overhaul the sprawling agency had left it a chaotic, backbiting mess. They also question whether his tactical acumen — he was especially good at unraveling militant networks in Afghanistan and Iraq — can translate into the kind of strategic thinking needed at the White House.
“He is a very talented information gatherer,” said Sarah Chayes of the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, who worked with General Flynn when he ran military intelligence in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011.
“But his thinking process is not sufficiently analytical to test some streams against others and make sense of it, or draw consistent conclusions,” she said. “If you listen to him, in 10 minutes you’ll hear him contradict himself two or three times.”
Take his views on Islam. In the interview before the election, he characterized Islam as intolerant.
Then he said that he had many Muslim friends, and that the United States needed to do a better job of understanding Islamic culture and fostering its tolerant side.
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