Episode 10: What on Earth Happened to Lieutenant General Michael Flynn?

A storied Army general, a key intelligence figure in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a registered Democrat — and now, a full-blown right-wing conspiracy theorist. How did this all-American war hero disappear down the rabbit hole? We’ll retrace the unraveling of Michael Flynn’s legendary career and explain how a once-trusted general ended up lying to the FBI, denying the 2020 election results, and instigating one of the most bonkers meetings ever held at the White House.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Let's say you're an historian, and you get asked to make a list of the craziest things that've ever happened at The White House. For me, there's an obvious top three. Number one pretty clearly has to be the day, during the War of 1812, when British soldiers actually burned down the White House.

[SOUNDS OF FIGHTING, A WHOOSH]

Number two has gotta be the day in 1970 when Elvis Presley showed up uninvited to meet President Richard Nixon. Elvis turned up wearing this outlandish purple velvet suit and a giant gold belt buckle and he'd come to ask Nixon to issue him a badge. A real badge...from the forerunner of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

Now, Elvis at this time, let’s just charitably say, was an enthusiastic drug user. He believed a federal badge would make it easier for him to travel through airports with his stash. As a gift, Elvis brought Nixon a .45 caliber pistol. You can't make this stuff up.

[ELVIS-ESQUE MUSIC]

And Nixon gave Elvis the badge he was asking for. They even took a famous picture together in the Oval Office. It's one of those historical photos that looks like it's gotta be fake but somehow it isn't.

And number three on the list…is undoubtedly the most bonkers meeting held at the White House, maybe… ever.

[MUSIC]

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: the most unhinged meeting that we know of in the history of the American presidency,

The meeting's been described in legal depositions and a Congressional hearing.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Personal insults, accusations of disloyalty to the president, and even challenges to physically fight.

The meeting involved a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General named Michael Flynn. He showed up — uninvited — at the White House on December 18, 2020. This was just four days after the Electoral College had confirmed that Joe Biden had won the U.S. presidential election. Flynn arrived at the White House alongside a Texas lawyer named Sidney Powell. She was known for spouting conspiracy theories about election fraud, but she later claimed in court that no reasonable person should have believed that stuff was true For reasons passing understanding, they'd also brought along another guy. The ex-CEO of Overstock.com, a guy named Patrick Byrne. And — just FYI — he was EX-CEO because in 2019 he’d had to quit his online home goods business after disclosing he'd had a love affair with a winsome Russian spy.

But anyways… this unlikely trio somehow convinced a low-level White House aide to slip them past West Wing security. And then the three of them managed to wrangle their way into the Oval Office to meet with President Trump.

ARCHIVAL Lawyer: Did you believe that it was gonna work, that you were gonna be able to get to see the president, without an appointment?

ARCHIVAL Sidney Powell: I had no idea.

That's Sidney Powell, answering questions.

ARCHIVAL Lawyer: In fact, you did get to see the president without an appointment.

ARCHIVAL Sidney Powell: We did.

They told Trump he hadn't lost the election, which, of course, Trump was very happy to hear. They also claimed, with zero evidence, that hostile foreign nations had hacked into voting machines and messed up the count in key swing states. They had a modest proposal: that Trump declare a national emergency, send the military into swing states — to declare martial law, basically -- and confiscate voting machines and rerun the election.

Now some Trump staffers knew damn well that the election was indeed lost. And when they got wind of the visitors with their incendiary theories… they burst into the Oval Office and tried to get rid of them. But Trump wanted to hear the visitors out. So staffers started arguing with the visitors... and the visitors started arguing... and arguing. And the whole thing degenerated into a profanity-laced screaming match that lasted six hours. Witnesses in their testimony to congressional investigators said Flynn repeatedly shouted at members of Trump's staff.

ARCHIVAL Eric Herschmann: Flynn screamed at me that I was a quitter and everything, kept on standing up and turning around and screaming at me.

This was one of Trump's top lawyers — and he got totally fed up with Flynn yelling at him. And although he sounds narcolepticly subdued in this deposition, he actually challenged the general to either cross the room and fight him physically — or shut the hell up.

ARCHIVAL Eric Herschmann: And at a certain point I had it with him, so I yelled back, ‘either come over or sit your effin ass back down.’

This meeting, if you can even really call it a meeting… makes my top three craziest White House moments partly because I kind of know the retired Lieutenant General, Michael Flynn. At least I used to. I’d met him well before Trump made him a national figure in 2016:

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Just moments ago, Fox News confirming that President-Elect Trump has picked former Obama administration military intelligence chief Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, to be his National Security Advisor. This is a critical post.

I'd crossed paths with Flynn before. I didn’t know him well, but I'd interviewed him for books and documentaries. And I'd understood him to be one of the more admired Special Operations officers from America's recent wars And to this day, I’m still perplexed: how did this guy — a registered Democrat who ran intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan — end up becoming this other guy: a Republican firebrand who tried to sell Trump on deploying soldiers inside the United States to overturn the 2020 election? If you're curious about the answer, stick around.

I'm Peter Bergen, and this is In The Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Donald Trump and Michael Flynn made an unlikely pair. Trump had famously dodged service in Vietnam with a doctor's note about supposed bone spurs. And Trump’s knowledge about the military and national security was basically zero.

Flynn, by contrast, had served a storied career in the Army — serving in combat with the 82nd Airborne Division and eventually running intelligence for Joint Special Operations Command, known as JSOC, which oversees the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six and the Army’s Delta Force.

Trump was the son of a multimillionaire real estate developer from New York City, who was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but maybe an entire platinum dinnerware set; while Flynn was one of nine children… who'd grown up in a one-bathroom house in Rhode Island. Flynn framed this hardscrabble upbringing like this:

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: [NARRATING] …It was good training for living in military barracks… Finding a place to lay your head for a night’s sleep was a never-ending revolving search to nab one of a few fold-up cots or a bunk bed that was open. And breakfast could easily turn into a negotiation or fight for the last glass of powdered milk and a piece of toast.

That's the voice of Flynn himself, reading from a book he co-wrote called The Field of Fight, which outlines his military career and foreign policy views. Those views may help explain how he ended up working for Trump. Both men shared an abiding worry that what they termed “radical Islam” was on the rise And they also shared a deep contempt for the Obama administration. And a lot of Flynn's book makes that contempt quite clear:

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: [NARRATING] Obama has striven mightily to cut deals with the enemy alliance. … the many mistakes of the Obama presidency, … the dangerous foolishness of Obama’s foreign policy … This president wants to be remembered as the man who embraced the Islamic Republic…

You’ll hear more about the possible roots of Flynn’s Obama-hating later on. But you have to give it to him; the stuff in his book about Flynn's Army career lays out a remarkable story of a guy rising from humble beginnings… to end up doing some pretty extraordinary stuff in service of his country.

One of the more legendary moments in early Flynn lore came when he was serving in his first combat deployment. Flynn was a young platoon commander in 1983 when the United States invaded Grenada to oust a radical Marxist faction that had seized power there. Positioned at a radio listening post on a cliff above the ocean, Flynn spotted two U.S. servicemen in the water below who were being dragged out to sea by strong currents.

[SOUNDS OF A BEACH]

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: [NARRATING] I jumped off the cliff — about a forty-foot jump into swirling waters off the southern tip of the airfield — and swam to the two soldiers. … There was no way that either of these guys could have made it back to shore on their own; … both were very tired, and the currents were powerfully churning around the back side of the island. … I stayed in the water the whole time and treaded water until more help came, while darkness was closing in. At about sunset, a helicopter arrived to rescue the three of us.

Flynn was promoted quickly after Grenada. In 1994, he deployed as a major during a U.S. military intervention in Haiti. By the time he deployed to Iraq in 2004, he was now a colonel, in charge of intelligence for JSOC, a counterterrorism command composed of some of the most elite fighters in the U.S. military. And that organization was growing as the wars dragged on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ioannis Koskinas: So this wasn't the 1990s JSOC, you know, of a small headquarters. No, this is a behemoth and it got bigger over the years that even Flynn was there.

That's Gianni Koskinas. He’s an old friend of mine. A former U.S. Air Force Colonel who worked in Special Operations who crossed paths with Flynn at JSOC. He said Flynn was a well liked team leader, and an intensely hard-working officer, who was deploying constantly to Iraq and Afghanistan. Flynn used to joke that he lived at the JSOC base in Balad, Iraq and took his vacations at the JSOC base in Bagram, Afghanistan. Life at JSOC meant working insanely long days, every day of the week.

[SOUNDS OF A CLOCK]

Ioannis Koskinas: You wake up, you know, at, whatever it is, noon or one o'clock, you go to the gym, but you're basically coming to work for your 12, 14, 16, 18 hour shifts. I never really saw daylight except when I was going back to my room or when I was walking to the gym. That was the extent of my daylight. Everything was at night.

Peter Bergen: Because?

Ioannis Koskinas: The raids were happening at night.

One of the main enemies of the U.S. in Iraq was al-Qaeda. And it wasn’t a traditional military opponent, operating with a top-down bureaucratic hierarchy. It was a sprawling network of like-minded jihadists that required JSOC to evolve. Flynn worked under JSOC’s commander, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. And McChrystal’s mantra became “it takes a network to defeat a network.”

ARCHIVAL Stanley McChrystal: Our real strength was this network that moved information.

That's McChrystal talking about the strategy with CBS News when he was still in uniform back in 2009.He also described the strategy in some detail in a TED talk he did years later.

ARCHIVAL Stanley McChrystal: The force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries, and instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look 'em in the eye I've gotta use other techniques.

To become a network, JSOC became much flatter and more agile - those are not qualities you often find in the bureaucracy and hierarchy in the U.S. military. McChrystal and Flynn reconfigured JSOC so it communicated more seamlessly and more often with all the components of the U.S. intelligence community … all at once … and all over the globe. One of their most important innovations was convincing hundreds of intel folks — who normally keep to their own silos — to regularly talk to each other. Directly. Via super-secret military versions of Zoom calls.

Ioannis Koskinas: General McChrystal, he built a team that people wanted to be part of. The biggest ticket to the show was being on a, you know, the VTCs that he held, multiple times a week,

Peter Bergen: A VTC being a secure video conference…

Ioannis Koskinas: Yeah, a video conference. He had 50 out-stations basically, that were all keying in,

Peter Bergen: And at some point there were thousands of people?

Ioannis Koskinas: I don’t know the exact number but you had an enormous network of people.

This newly networked JSOC also processed the intelligence that U.S. Special Operators were picking up on raids much faster than it had in the past. This meant new raids could be immediately launched based on what was gleaned from an initial operation… sometimes even in real time. Because of this, the tempo of raids increased dramatically. And al-Qaeda in Iraq took a severe beating.

[MUSIC]

Ioannis Koskinas: You had two, three raids a night, and then it became two, three raids per task force, per night. You're rolling from one mission to another mission, or you grab some guy and then he tells you no, the stuff is going on over here, and then you move on to that target.

Peter Bergen: So it went from a handful of missions a month to like hundreds.

Ioannis Koskinas: Yes.

General McChrystal's professional star rose on these successes. And in 2009, President Barack Obama tapped McChrystal to run the war in Afghanistan. And when McChrystal stepped off the plane in that country, Mike Flynn, now a major general, was right behind him. Flynn was now top ‘intel’ officer for the Afghan War.

Ioannis Koskinas: Mike Flynn, was effectively part of the small group of advisors, and he was traveling with General McChrystal, you know, he was in the room with him all the time.

Peter Bergen: Without McChrystal, would Flynn have just, would we be having this conversation today about him?

Ioannis Koskinas: You wouldn't be having this conversation with me. A lot of us owe our acceleration of our careers to being at the right time, right place, under the right leader.

Peter Bergen: And that's true of Flynn as well?

Ioannis Koskinas: Yeah.

But then General McChrystal's star burned out. It happened because, of all things, a story that ran in Rolling Stone magazine. A reporter had spent months profiling McChrystal and his team in Afghanistan. The article finally appeared in 2010, under the headline “The Runaway General.” It was peppered with unflattering, anonymous quotes about Obama’s cabinet from members of McChrystal’s staff.

ARCHIVAL Stanley McChrystal: As soon as I read it, I said, all right, this is gonna cause a conflagration.

He wasn’t wrong about that. That's McChrystal, speaking publicly about the episode years later.

ARCHIVAL Stanley McChrystal: So I made the decision that I would go in and, and tell the president that I would stay if he wanted me to, or offer my resignation if he wanted that.

Obama summoned McChrystal back to Washington and used this opportunity to stake out his claim as commander-in-chief. The president strode out of the White House and into the Rose Garden to make an announcement.

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Good afternoon.

Flynn was watching it on TV in Kabul.

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Today, I accepted General Stanley McChrystal's resignation as commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general. It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system.

Flynn was stunned. He revered McChrystal. They'd fought together and buried soldiers together. Mike Flynn and his wife Lori had even recently celebrated Stan and Annie McChrystal’s thirty-third wedding anniversary on a rare night off in Paris. Flynn was a registered Democrat, but the dismissal of his close friend and mentor marked a turning point of increasing disenchantment with the Obama administration.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: [NARRATING] … his maltreatment is still hard for me to digest… Back in Afghanistan, the moment the decision was announced, many in the headquarters were literally crying. It was as though we had just lost the war,nevermind simply losing a commander.

But Flynn still continued to serve under Obama. Now promoted to lieutenant general, Flynn was appointed to run the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA.

Doug Wise: The CIA's mission is, really, to support the civilian leadership of the United States government so they can make informed decisions. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, its mission is to provide intelligence and analytic information to the defense leadership of the United States of America.

That's Doug Wise. He spent nearly three decades in the CIA before becoming a deputy director at the Defense Intelligence Agency during Flynn's time there. Wise says Flynn arrived at DIA looking to transform it into something more like JSOC. He wanted analysts deployed forward in war zones. And he wanted to make sure that DIA analysts who specialized in particular areas of the world worked more closely with the military commanders stationed in those parts of the world.

Doug Wise: That reorganization made a lot of sense. In the early days, there was much to admire about Mike Flynn.

Some of Flynn’s changes were a good idea. After all, if you're supposed to be providing intelligence on a war, it doesn't really help if you’re parked behind a desk in Washington, D.C. 6,000 miles away from the action. But Flynn had never overseen a giant bureaucracy like DIA . The first rule of bureaucratic politics in Washington — if you want to make big changes, you've gotta make friends. People inside DIA said Flynn didn't really do that.

Doug Wise: It's just kind of a genetic thing for general officers. They want to command everything they see, but Flynn took it to a fine art, he led through a small cadre of close sycophants. And he estranged himself from the senior civilian leadership at DIA.

Peter Bergen: Is part of the problem that he came out of the joint special operations world. It's a very small group of people that you can easily redirect. I mean, and the Defense Intelligence Agency is 20,000 people. Was he just promoted above his pay grade?

Doug Wise: Mike Flynn came into DIA, you know, carrying the cudgel of wanting to be the commanding general defense intelligence command. But you can't command an institution, you can direct it. You don't have UCMJ authority, you don't have all the tools of generalship.

UCMJ stands for the Uniform Code of Military Justice. It's one of the many things that make serving in the military different from say working at Applebee's. In the Army, disobeying your boss can land you in jail. That wasn't the case for civilians at DIA.

Doug Wise: If you look at the total workforce of DIA, and I'm sure the exact number's classified, but I would say less than 3,000 are actually uniformed officers and NCOs.

Peter Bergen: It is really, primarily, it's a group of civilians. Even though it's supporting the army, it's not like you can just go in and just order people to do X, Y, and Z.

Doug Wise: You're absolutely right. It's gotta be powerful, persuasive leadership. It's like a CEO of a private sector corporation.

But DIA desk jockeys didn't seem to like their new CEO. They pushed back against Flynn and his plans to deploy many of them to warzones. Most DIA employees were quite happy living in the Washington D.C. area, as opposed to, say, an airbase in the windswept deserts of Afghanistan. They also started to push back against some of the more eccentric ideas Flynn seemed to be developing. They came up with a somewhat ironic name for these ideas. "Flynn Facts."

[MUSIC]

Doug Wise: Flynn Facts were those, and I'm for your listenership I'm doing air quotes here, that were not facts generated through the intelligence collection and analytic process, but were more beliefs, by Mike Flynn, his personal beliefs, which seemed to have the weight of facts, And so more often than not actually collided with the real facts.

For example: you might remember a jihadist attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 that left four Americans dead. Flynn became convinced the attack was orchestrated by Iran. But that didn’t really make much sense, because Iran's Shia regime rarely cooperated with Sunni jihadists, and the militants in Libya were Sunni. There also wasn’t any actual evidence that Iran was involved at all. But Flynn pushed his analysts at DIA to find a link that didn’t exist.

Doug Wise: Flynn facts to me had the weight of Q-Anon facts.

Flynn had also pissed off his bosses at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community. They’d come to believe that Flynn's efforts to shake things up at DIA had in fact wrecked morale at the agency. And, according to Wise, Flynn didn't comply when they asked him to change course. DIA directors are normally appointed to 3-year terms. Flynn's bosses forced him to retire early, after 2 years.

Doug Wise: And so it was by any other definition being fired. Michael Flynn was denied a third year, because he had been insubordinate.

The U.S. Air Force officer you heard from earlier, Gianni Koskinas crossed paths with Flynn not long after this.

Ioannis Koskinas: I would see him for breakfast after he retired and he didn't like what happened. I think he thought it was unfair. I think he was, he was angry.

Koskinas believes the firing marked a major turning point for Flynn.

Ioannis Koskinas: Up until then he's on the ascent. Look, DIA for a U.S. military officer that's in the intelligence career field, I mean, there's the apex. When so many people tell you that you're brilliant and the military's told you you're the number one guy, you've made it. There can only be one and he's the one, and that one is told, ‘pack your bags, put 'em all in the box and leave.’ So for him to be summarily removed if I had to take a guess at what really turned him, I think that that was it. It has to be his DIA firing. And then he turned more and more and more into somebody that is, quite frankly, unrecognizable from his earlier past.

For his next act, Flynn began dipping his toe into politics. He became a vocal critic of what he said were Obama's weak policies on terrorist groups like ISIS. And he had a fateful 90-minute meeting of the minds with then presidential candidate Donald Trump. Flynn came away convinced that he and Trump were on the same page about the worrying direction the United States was heading in. The Trump campaign even began seriously considering Flynn as a potential running mate.

Like Trump, Flynn thought that the United States could work with Russian President Vladmir Putin and he sat next him at a black-tie dinner in Moscow in December 2015 that was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin-sponsored TV network, an appearance for which Flynn was handsomely paid.

Flynn later said that he wasn’t paid by the Russians for the speech. But this was true only in a super-technical sense because the Russians paid Flynn’s speaking agency, which then paid Flynn more than thirty thousand dollars. Flynn later told areporter that this wasn’t a big deal, as Russia Today was similar to CNN, a bizarre claim given the fact that this Russia Today network is effectively an arm of the Kremlin.

It was around this time that Doug Wise says that he and others at DIA suspended Flynn’s security clearances — a courtesy normally offered to senior intelligence officials even in retirement.

Doug Wise: They were suspended when we discovered that he had not declared that he had taken money from foreign sources, and more importantly, he didn't tell us about it. He wasn't honest.

If you had to choose the moment when Flynn truly became a public figure, it was probably July 2016, when he took the stage during the Republican National Convention.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF ANNOUNCEMENT MUSIC AT LIVE EVENT]

ARCHIVAL RNC Speaker:United States Lieutenant General and former director of the Defense Intelligence agency Michael Flynn!

[SOUNDS OF APPLAUSE FROM THE RNC CROWD]

Flynn accused Obama and Hillary Clinton of endangering the United States.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: Tonight, Americans stand as one with strength and confidence to overcome the last eight years of the Obama-Clinton failures such as bumbling indecisiveness, willful ignorance, and total incompetence.

[SOUNDS OF APPLAUSE FROM THE RNC CROWD]

Flynn led the crowd in chants.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: U-S-A! U-S-A!

He was really whipping them up.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: USA! Get fired up! Get fired up! This is about this country!

He played some of Trump's greatest hits.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she, she put our nation's security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.

The crowd starts chanting.

ARCHIVAL RNC Crowd: “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

You can see Flynn nodding his head.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: Lock her up! Damn right, exactly right.

Officers who had served with Flynn were gobsmacked by this performance, which went against their code not to take such clearly partisan positions, even in retirement. The former Defense Intelligence Agency official, Doug Wise, was among them:

Doug Wise: As a former military officer, I found that behavior to be just outrageous, reckless, dangerous. Officers sign up for a code of conduct that is above reproach and Mike Flynn just tore that to shreds.

Flynn also seemed to become increasingly gripped by the most wacky conspiracy theories. In August 2016, Flynn claimed in a speech that Democratic lawmakers in Florida were trying to install Sharia law in their state:

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: We should fight this idea of this imposition of Sharia law into our system. And believe me folks, it is happening.

And believe me folks - it really wasn’t happening. Flynn also tweeted that fear of Muslims was “rational” and in another speech he said that Islam was really a “political ideology” rather than a religion. When he was in uniform Flynn had never made these kinds of assertions about Muslims and Islam. Wise thinks he’d just been keeping a lid on all this stuff.

Doug Wise: He wasn't any longer burdened by the cultural strictures of the United States Army. I think whatever anger, whatever seething belief sets that he had, that was very difficult for him to articulate in action in the culture and structure of the United States Army, all that was gone.

Flynn’s inability to distinguish between facts and fringe falsehoods seemed to worsen as the presidential campaign went on. Flynn claimed in a radio interview that there were Arabic signs along the U.S.–Mexico border to guide potential terrorists into the United States and that he had actually seen evidence of these signs.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: I have personally seen the photos of the signage along those paths that are in Arabic. They’re like waypoints along that path as you come in. The one that I saw was in Texas and it's literally, in Arabic, ‘this way, move to this point.’ I mean It's unbelievable.

It was unbelievable because it was total nonsense. No one, including Flynn, has ever presented evidence that such signs existed.

[MUSIC SHIFT]

Two days after Trump was elected president, Obama sat down with Trump in the Oval Office…

ARCHIVAL Barack Obama: Well, I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with president-elect Trump…

And warned him that the biggest national security problem he would face was the mercurial, nuclear-armed regime of North Korea.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half. We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties.

Obama also warned Trump against hiring Flynn in any kind of senior role. But only a week after that meeting Trump offered Flynn the key position of National Security Advisor. He would not be in that position for long.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: President Trump's embattled National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, stepping down Monday night in a firestorm of criticism after misleading Vice President Mike Pence and others about his conversations with the Russian Ambassador to the United States.

Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him that during the transition he hadn’t discussed lifting Obama-era sanctions against Russia… with the Russian ambassador to the United States… when in fact he had. Typically American national security advisors aren’t top-of-mind in pop culture, but the Flynn debacle became fodder for late-night comics:

ARCHIVAL Steven Colbert: Now at first, Flynn denied all of this, but he got caught because, turns out we listen in on every phone call to the Russian ambassador — who knew? Evidently not the National Security Advisor, you dummy!

ARCHIVAL Trevor Noah: That's the plot of every spy movie. America taps Russia's calls…

Flynn’s lying appears to have been an effort to cover up the fact that he was conducting substantive American foreign policy before he was ever in office. The United States operates on the principle that there is only one president at a time. Flynn repeated his lies about the Russian ambassador to the FBI and compounded his legal jeopardy.

ARCHIVAL Steven Colbert: Flynn leaves behind a distinguished legacy of the shortest tenure in history with only 24 days as National Security Advisor. Yeah…

After Flynn stepped down, he largely slipped from public view except to enter guilty pleas for lying to the FBI.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Once President Trump's national security advisor and key confidant. Now a convicted felon

Flynn later changed his mind.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Just as we got in the air tonight, General Flynn moved in court to withdraw his guilty plea.

Fast forward to late November, 2020. The U.S. presidential election was over. And Trump — battling Democrats and members of his own staff over his refusal to accept the results — decided to put Flynn's case to rest by giving him a full pardon.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: President Trump wiping out the conviction of his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: Several top Democrats are slamming President Trump for pardoning former National Security Advisor, Mike Flynn.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called this pardon an act of grave corruption.

Less than a month later, Flynn returned to the White House uninvited in the hope of offering Trump a way to hang onto power. This was the totally bonkers meeting you heard about at the beginning of the show, where Flynn, his lawyer Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne, the Overstock.com guy, wrangled their way into the Oval Office to convince Trump that foreign powers — China, and maybe Venezuela — had stolen the election by hacking voting machines. Somehow the Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez was implicated in this plot. Chavez had staged his intervention in a somewhat miraculous manner since he had already been dead for almost a decade. But never mind the details. Like all good conspiracy theories, this one was multilayered and fundamentally theological, so you either believed it fervently, or you just didn’t.

ARCHIVAL Jamie Raskin: The meeting finally ended after midnight.

That’s Congressman Jamie Raskin of the House Select Committee, investigating January 6th.

ARCHIVAL Jamie Raskin: Here are text messages sent by Cassidy Hutchinson during and after the meeting. Ms. Hutchinson reported that the meeting in the West Wing was unhinged.

Unhinged or not, Trump was awake into the wee hours, and still mulling, it seems, ways to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. At 1:42 am on December 19, he sent out a tweet: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

The night before the protest, Flynn was in Washington. He met with a group of Trump supporters gathering for the rally the next day. He made a brief speech. And it was pretty wild.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: Those of you who are feeling weak tonight, those of you that don't have the moral fiber in your body, get some tonight because tomorrow we the people are gonna be here and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.

Since then Flynn has been questioned about the role he played in the riot on January 6th, and any action he took to subvert the peaceful transfer of power. He hasn’t said much, except this:

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: Take the fifth….The fifth…. Fifth. I said I, I said the fifth.

ARCHIVAL Liz Cheney: General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified?

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: I take the fifth

ARCHIVAL Liz Cheney: General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: The fifth.

Flynn may have kept his mouth shut in front of the January 6th committee. But since then, there’s been one venue where he’s had plenty to say.

ARCHIVAL “ReAwaken America” promotional video: General Flynn and Team America will be taking the Reawaken America Tour to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Since 2021, Flynn has become a wildly popular figure inside a traveling event called the “Reawaken America Tour.”

ARCHIVAL Speaker at Reawaken America Event: Let's hear it one more time for America's General! [APPLAUSE]

It’s a barnstorming, religious-political roadshow that’s equal parts tent revival and conspiratorial fever dream.

ARCHIVAL Michael Flynn: There is a global alliance that's forming against the United States of America. This is not us making this stuff up. This isn't a conspiracy theory. This is real. This is real and it's about our lives, and this is why we're up here fighting.

At the beginning of this show we asked a pretty simple question: what on earth happened to Michael Flynn? You heard how the guy I knew as an admired special operations officer… ended up becoming a very different guy. But his story didn’t end on Jan. 6th. And it certainly didn’t end when he called maybe the wildest Oval Office meeting ever held, trying to sell Trump on re-running the 2020 election with military help. And you can’t understand who this new Mike Flynn is… until you really understand what he’s been up to lately.

Next time… you’ll hear about the Mike Flynn who’s putting his faith on display.

ARCHIVALMichael Flynn: I always tell people that the most powerful weapons system known to man is prayer…It's like a rifle. It's like a missile, like a tank.

You’ll go with me inside the ReAwaken America Tour, where hating vaccines goes hand in hand with loving Jesus.

ARCHIVAL ReAwaken America promotional video: The Reawaken tour’s coming to our place. Hallelujah. It's going to be lit. It's going to be lit. Yeah.

And you’ll follow me as I finally cross paths with Flynn himself at one of these events. Where he gives me a piece of his mind about the direction America’s headed…

Michael Flynn: I think we're in deep, deep trouble.

And a taste of his very hot temper…

Michael Flynn: This is, that's, it's such bullshit and it irritates me.

That’s next time on In the Room.

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If you’d like to know more about some of the issues and stories discussed in this episode we recommend:

The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, by Michael Flynn and Michael Ledeen.

I also recommend the book Trump and his Generals: the Cost of Chaos, which is written by myself.

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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
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