[Aquidneck Island Productions
introductory theme]
[faint cawing of seagulls]
[Flynn] Water has always
been a big part of our--
of our lives
in the Flynn family.
We all grew up surfing,
we all grew up
around the ocean.
If you don't
respect the ocean,
if you don't have a respect
for this, this, this thing,
which is alive,
the ocean is alive.
[blowing bubbles]
I went into the service
because I love our country.
[choral music playing]
[Devin] He was one
of the most respected generals
in the m*llitary.
[Flynn] And I come home,
and I find out
that the worst enemy
that I'm going to face
in my life
is right here in America.
[somber music playing]
[reporter] President Obama said,
"But I do have one specific
recommendation.
Stay away from Michael Flynn.
He's bad news."
[somber music keeps playing]
They're calling me a traitor.
They're saying
I committed treason.
They're saying
I'm a Russian spy.
That Obama was involved
in the targeting of Flynn.
[reporter] He was,
by definition,
the most dangerous
possible person.
- I had to fire...
- [overlapping chatter]
[choral music playing]
There was a moment
where I just felt
like I was drowning.
And all of a sudden,
a whole series of things
started happening.
[choral music keeps playing]
[Flynn] I actually feel blessed
to be alive right now.
And I can tell my story.
[emotional music playing]
If we're going to w*r,
that means we failed.
That's the-- that's
the fascinating thing about w*r.
It is a absolute
failure of policy.
It's a failure of diplomacy.
It's a failure of leadership.
[bombs exploding]
[insidious sound playing]
[Flynn] Probably one
of the greatest sacrifices
is when one lays down
their life for this country
for reasons that they
don't even understand,
and they do it
trying to help people
that don't even care
if they're there.
And... and they're dead.
We are A-plus, gold star
for participating in w*r.
We are a failure
at winning wars.
[menacing music playing]
[Flynn] Peace is the aberration
and w*r is the norm.
No matter
how many times I've deployed
to different places
where there was
some aspect of danger,
you always feel
a sense of fear.
Your experiences
help you overcome that,
but you never are without it.
- [t*nk fires]
- [Flynn] You know,
coming off of a truck
or getting off of a helicopter
or getting off of a plane
in a place
where you can smell...
death.
You can smell fear.
w*r is
like this massive racket.
I mean, we are at w*r
constantly.
At the end of the day,
it's about making money.
[t*nk fires]
[music fades]
[lights clicking]
[soft music playing]
[director] Sound's rolling,
all three cameras. We're good.
[producer] I need speed.
Okay. We're ready when you are.
[Flynn] I had just taken
command of a battalion
of about between
and my operations NCO
comes in and says,
"Hey, sir, we just had
a helicopter go down."
This is where I really learned
about being steady.
Because when I think about that,
I mean, nine people. Poof.
So as I'm walking up the road,
I-- I see the smoke,
and I look,
and I walked right up to it.
I mean, I was standing
right next to it.
And... and it was just
one black patch
that was like the outline
of a helicopter.
Just a black patch in the--
on the ground,
all burnt up,
with a bunch of bumps. Okay?
Bumps that were probably
no more than,
like, two feet high, okay,
and those were the bodies.
And, you know, obviously,
the, the smell of the fuel
that was burning,
the bodies that had b*rned.
And so, there they are.
They're just...
you're standing right there,
you're standing there going,
"Holy crap."
On my orders, coalition forces
have begun striking
selected targets
of m*llitary importance
to undermine S*ddam Hussein's
ability to wage w*r.
[dramatic music playing]
[man] When w*r
broke out in Iraq,
I was sort of like, well,
I guess we have to do this.
But hold on a second.
I didn't see,
I didn't connect the dots
as to the reason why we didn't--
we would inv*de
a sovereign nation like Iraq.
I always questioned
the necessity of that w*r.
I thought it was crazy,
and I thought
the Bush administration
managed it very poorly.
The amount of money
that we spent
in Afghanistan
for a losing cause
is more money,
is more than was spent
on the Marshall Plan
to rebuild Europe,
all of Europe,
after World w*r II.
[dramatic music playing]
[Flynn] Let me show you...
I gave you a little bit
of explanation.
- [laughs] This is wild.
- So Tucker...
Tucker, I brought--
I'm brought in here
like about, I don't know,
it was over a year,
a year and a half ago.
I'm brought into this room,
and I meet these two moms.
And I-- I was like,
"What caused you,
what possessed you
to do something like this?"
And it was basically,
"We believed so much
in what was happening to you
that-- that it was wrong."
And they said
on their spare time,
they put this together.
[Tucker] I personally
grew up in a completely
different world,
where I didn't question
a lot of the big lies
because I didn't realize
that they were lies.
I was complicit in the lying
without knowing it.
I supported the w*r in Iraq
and argued on behalf of it
before it started.
And it wasn't until
I went to Iraq myself
in the winter of 2003
that I realized
how wrong I had been,
the degree to which
I had been lied to.
- [Flynn] That was a big
turning point for you.
- It changed my life completely.
And I realized I'd been
complicit in this lie.
[piano music playing]
[Flynn] I don't care
what party you're in.
They're in Washington, DC,
that's the party.
They have
their black-tie affairs,
their little clubs,
their little cliques,
and they got their little
business enterprise that--
that floats around
in these events.
I would, I would be
sick to my stomach
in some of those things
because you're
looking around going,
"You know, these are
the son of a b*tches
that are just, you know."
I mean, we're still at w*r.
There's people overseas
being k*lled.
And I'm thinking to myself,
this is just not right.
If you have the same people
in charge of a series
of counterproductive wars
from which the United States
derives nothing,
only, you know, loss of life,
draining of the Treasury,
evaporation of our prestige
and power abroad.
The U.S. is much weaker
because of the last
four wars we fought.
Beginning in Vietnam in 1964,
from Tonkin Gulf to here.
Fifty-nine years.
We have not fought a w*r
that made the U.S. stronger.
[Colin Powell]
When we confront a regime
that harbors ambitions
for regional domination,
hides weapons
of mass destruction,
and provides haven
and active support
for t*rrorists,
we're not confronting the past.
We are confronting the present.
And unless we act,
we are confronting
an even more frightening
future.
[Flynn] Powell will be
remembered for a lot of things;
you know, they make him out
to be a saint.
That's what he'll be
remembered for in history.
As a junior officer,
I couldn't really articulate it.
But there was something there
that I felt, you know,
it seemed as though
it's just a perpetual
fraud, waste, and abuse...
life cycle.
Yeah, we're gonna go
after t*rrorists,
but you don't need
an entire machine,
conventional machine,
to be in place constantly
at all times in Afghanistan
or in Iraq, for that matter,
and-- or really any other place
because we have
strategic capability
to go in and out surgically
to address certain issues,
literally within a few hours,
maximum one day, globally.
So, why not use that methodology
rather than constantly
pumping in
billions of dollars a month?
They want the problem
to exist, so that--
that money flow
and the constant defense budget
can go ahead and fund
the m*llitary-industrial
complex.
[soft music playing]
[Jack Flynn] He became very
close to Stanley McChrystal.
From what I read,
McChrystal told Michael,
"You need to come in; I need--
we need to clean this up;
we need to fix this thing."
For whatever reason
we were there,
we were able to get Iraq
under control
because of the efforts
of Joint Special Operations
Command,
and specifically,
Michael's acumen
in what he had been trained for
throughout his career in Intel.
[Ivan] There are
according to the United Nations.
The most premier unit
within the world
to fight against terror,
General Flynn was
the senior-ranking intelligence
officer in that unit.
You literally have to be
the number one intel officer
for that year's cohort,
impeccable background,
not like a single blemish
in your entire m*llitary file,
to be selected
for that position.
[Joe] Mike's, you know,
pretty senior in rank
at that point.
He's maybe a two-star general,
one-or two-star general.
And Charlie's there as well.
And what they're seeing is,
the information
that they're getting
about who the Taliban were,
how they were fighting,
where they were getting their,
their amm*nit*on and so forth,
that they were getting
from the intel community
was a bunch of bullshit.
It was-- it was
poorly served up,
and there was no
interagency coordination.
I think Mike knew,
and I think
a lot of those guys knew
that if something drastic
wasn't done,
they were going to be there
for a long time.
[Devin] I actually met
General Flynn
for the first time,
uh, around 2005 or 2006,
in Iraq.
We would go to areas
where they'd train
m*llitary and m*llitary
intelligence.
And General Flynn was,
oftentimes,
they'll put up on the screen,
as someone who had done
a superior job.
I mean, he was treated
as the greatest
intelligence general
for his generation.
Everybody respected his ability
to really perfect intelligence.
The objectives, the overall,
our overarching objectives,
we got so far astray.
The Bush administration,
the Obama administration,
I mean, we just lost sight,
and you're like,
you're in this constant w*r,
you know,
and we would be having
these conversations going,
"Jesus, you know,
when is this going to end?"
When, you know,
I mean, it can end.
It can actually end,
and it can end on our terms.
[producer] The report
you wrote in 2010...
- [Flynn] Right. Mm-hm.
- [producer] "Fixing Intel."
- [Flynn]
In fact, it's right here.
- [producer] Let's see it.
[Flynn] The full title:
"A Blueprint for Making
Intelligence Relevant
in Afghanistan."
I was a senior intel officer
out in Afghanistan.
I mean, I went around
Afghanistan to,
to damn near every
little town and village and--
and I did my own assessment.
And there was a lot of people
that didn't like that
back in Washington, DC,
because--
but I'm on the b*ttlefield.
This is an indictment
of the intelligence community.
And, and to a degree--
and I'm a part of it,
so it wasn't like,
I'm not indicting them.
I'm indicting something
that I'm a part of.
What's in here are solutions,
and in a way, you know,
I'm hoping
that it's not too late.
[soft music playing]
[Lee Smith]
What General Michael Flynn
found out ,
all sorts of intelligence
that was necessary for soldiers
as they were fighting
in Afghanistan,
it was all getting lost
because it was being
collected in Afghanistan
and having to go
through Washington
before it could come back
to Afghanistan.
I mean, there were lives
being lost.
You know, there were missions
that were botched,
and lives lost.
There's an example
in our family of this in Iraq.
Charlie was deployed in Iraq.
And Charlie was taking care
of the highways out of Baghdad
down into the gulf
through Kuwait.
Charlie had a bunch of guys
that were fighting
as an infantryman,
and Mike's running intel
over there.
So they're brothers.
There's a chain of command.
But they're brothers.
So Charlie's able to tell Mike,
"Hey, this is
what I'm seeing down here."
Not having it filtered to Mike.
If Charlie told him what was
going on down the street,
okay, south of him,
and what they were seeing
down there,
that he was going to get
accurate information
and be able to use that
and act on it.
[Flynn] This gets published,
huge outcry in Washington, DC,
the heads of the,
of all this just giant monolith
called
the intelligence community,
all the agency heads were like,
they wanted my head.
Ten years of w*r.
I stick my name
on that assessment.
And I'm saying
to the intelligence community,
we're still not
able to do our job,
we're not doing our job.
There's so many things
that are--
that are addressed in here
from the perspective
of understanding your enemy,
and understanding
the environment,
and understanding yourself.
It's a very basic statement
about warfare.
For the officers,
the last promotion
is to major general.
Everything after that
is an appointment
by the president
of the United States.
Jim Clapper wanted me,
he went to the president
and the president appointed me.
So in this case,
it's President Obama.
[somber music playing]
So President Obama
appoints me into that job
as the assistant director
of National Intelligence,
and then I have to go through
a full Senate confirmation.
So I'm coming back
to Washington, DC,
we're going to be able to keep
our family there, you know,
this is good,
I'm going to get promoted.
[soft music playing]
[click]
Many recall the famous article
Mike Flynn wrote,
called "A Blueprint for Making
Intelligence Relevant,"
which is one of the reasons
why I brought Mike to ODNI ,
to fix
all the intelligence issues
- that he'd been
complaining about.
- [audience laughing]
There's a phrase
in the m*llitary,
and I don't use my Irish
too often, but,
you know, they say, "f*ck up
and move up." Right?
And, you know, and I'm thinking,
"Oh, maybe, maybe
I f*cked up so bad
that they're just going
to move me up to shut me up."
It may very well be a case
of bringing your enemies
as close as you can
so you can control them.
[Joe] Big title, and a big job.
Big job, huge job.
I mean, the pinnacle
of someone's career
as an intelligence officer
in the United States Army,
it's like almost
the number one--
it is the number one job,
in fact,
unless you're the National
Security Advisor,
which he ended up
becoming as well.
[Flynn] I've had a lot
of time in combat,
probably more--
more time in combat
than most people, you know,
that were
in my sort of category.
And I've had a lot of time,
you know, in the field, in--
in operational assignments.
And, and I'm also a Democrat.
[Jack]
So we're Kennedy Democrats,
never Republicans.
Your blue-collar
Kennedy Democrats.
[Joe] And the media
loved Mike at that time,
interestingly enough,
because again,
the Obama administration's
saying, "Hey, this is our guy.
He's a Democrat. He comes
from a Democrat family.
This guy has been in combat
for six, seven years,"
all this stuff, but,
you know what,
kid from a small town,
who grew up in a huge
poor family, you know,
something like that,
you know, it's a big deal.
So there was a lot of problems
when he took over DIA.
The establishment,
especially the,
what they call the SES,
the senior executive staff,
in the Department of Defense,
was like, "Oh, this guy.
This is, you know, we've seen
these types before.
We're going
to railroad him out of here."
I've kept every--
I'm like a pack rat
with stuff, you know:
awards, decorations, gifts
that were given to me.
And I've kept binders of them,
you know, different things.
[Adam Lovinger] And so,
what really drew me
to General Flynn,
even though we had not
started working together
formally at that point,
is that in all
the meetings we had,
he, his moral compass
was very clear,
and that was that,
as an American
government official,
one must put the interests
of the United States first.
It's the mission which matters,
not the individual,
not lining your pockets
for your career
after you retire
from government,
not building your empire
to get to the next,
you know, rung
within the federal government.
That this is what matters,
and it was wonderful to see
that someone could rise
to such heights
while keeping so true
to these values
that made America great.
He was one
of the most respected generals
in the m*llitary,
plain and simple.
And so, you know,
what more can we ask for
than to have one
of our most successful generals
be at the top
of the intelligence apparatus
for our m*llitary?
And that's why
he had strong support.
But in January,
President Obama told
the New Yorker magazine's
David Remnick that !sis,
which was then still considered
a part of Al-Qaeda
fighting in Syria,
was like a JV basketball team.
These guys are--
they want him to say
that the !sis is the JV team,
and-- and he's like,
that's not what--
that's not going to happen.
They wanted
that narrative to show
that we were being tough
on the enemy overseas
that we were fighting,
and that we were winning.
We weren't winning.
And in fact,
the enemy is growing.
They're expanding.
Now, the way
I remember it is...
we're getting ready
to go testify
to Congress
in an open hearing,
and I get my statement
that had been vetted
through the National
Intelligence Community,
and through the DNI and also
over to the White House.
It's basically got red lines
to change my testimony there, right?
Everybody wants to hear
all the different perspectives
from these different
organizations.
So mine was changed.
And I told my Congressional
Affairs officer,
I said, "I'm not
going to change it.
That's not...
that's not right."
A lot of people on the inside
that were the underperformers
had a lot of institutional clout
that pushed for that as well.
It was literally
a, an organization
that had rot in it,
that wanted to keep
that rot in place.
I know what the CIA's reporting,
I know what the National
Geospatial Agency, you know,
National Security Agency, FBI,
all these different
organizations are reporting.
But I'm responsible
for my agency,
and I'm responsible
to tell the truth
for what my agency,
you know, believes.
This, this organization
called !sis
was expanding rapidly
and they were in like
- four or -five nations
around the greater region from,
from literally
from West Africa,
all the way over to,
in some cases, Indonesia
and the Philippines.
I'm called into a,
an office call with Jim Clapper.
So he goes, "We're gonna
ask you to step down,"
and immediately,
immediately, I said,
"Is it because
of my leadership?"
He says, "Oh, no,
it's not your leadership.
If it was, I'd cut you off
at the knees right now
and you wouldn't go back
into the job."
That was my interpretation.
He said, "It's because of--"
and he used the word "attitude."
That's how I remember it.
And I walked out of that room.
And I called my wife,
and I said, you know,
"Honey, things are gonna
change again," you know.
And, and, you know,
in a funny way,
even got a story about it,
you know,
if she even remembers
that, that part,
'cause there was so many.
But she was probably relieved,
I was, you know,
finally gonna retire.
I never changed.
I never changed.
People that know me
from the time I was a kid,
to the people that worked
with me as a young officer
and all throughout my career,
I never changed.
So what changed in Jim Clapper,
who brought me in and hired me?
What changed, Jim?
What changed?
Was it because
I wasn't toeing the line
for the administration?
I wasn't toeing the line
for the,
the "intelligence community's",
you know,
incorrect, false narrative.
And, and, sadly,
you know, tragically,
you know,
when I think about, God,
like, f*ck, that was 2014.
When I think
about six more years of fighting
and dying and the bullshit.
You know? I mean, my--
my responsibility as a--
as a senior officer
in the m*llitary,
and definitely as a senior
intelligence officer,
is to protect, save,
and, and win.
These assholes are toeing
a political narrative
that was total bullshit.
Something
didn't smell right for me.
And the very next day,
I sent a direct message
and it said, "Sir, I think
I know what happened to you.
Unacceptable.
You have a loyal soldier
for the rest of your life.
Let me know if you ever need to,
like utilize me to help out."
Because I thought
that that was, uh,
him being resigned
was totally unacceptable.
[sad music playing]
I loved DC. I loved Virginia.
We loved being there,
we loved living there,
we had happy times there
until this all happened
when he retired
and then decided to go
and work on his own.
In your career,
I have always found,
whether it's in your service,
or if you spent a lot of time
in a joint community,
you will
run across individuals,
and you will say to yourself,
"That guy is amazing."
And early on, when I met Mike,
I thought to myself,
"That guy is amazing."
Today, as we would say
in the Navy,
we watch pass over the side,
probably the most visible
intelligence professional
that we have generated
within this department
in the last ten or 20 years.
So Mike, we all want to say
thank you for a great job.
We want to thank you for making
a great, great difference.
Lori, we wish you
only the best.
We know there's a lot
of opportunities ahead of you.
I can't wait to see where
the journey is gonna take you.
I don't think we've heard
the last of the Flynns.
That was, without a doubt,
a real test of the relationship
and, um, and she was patient.
And I saw her get mad.
But she knew he was right.
And I knew, we all knew
he was right.
Lori was a stabilizing force
in his life.
She's a special gal.
She's strong,
unwavering commitment.
I think Lori saved his life
actually, as a teenager,
if you ask me.
I think that if Michael
hadn't really, you know,
been kind of swept up
in that relationship
as a teenager--
you're talking 14,
that's a young person--
I think that Michael
could have gone
a completely different
direction.
Probably God at work there,
honestly,
whith that relationship
blooming.
And who would have thought
that at 14 and 15 years old,
you know,
they'd be married today,
through, I don't know,
almost going on 50 years.
But that relationship
at that time in Michael's life
gave him a reason
to get focused on something.
He did better in school.
He did better in sports.
He got really into really
playing sports in school.
Of course,
then when he went into,
when he went
to University of Rhode Island,
the army and the ROTC program
was another godsend for him,
you know, for a rambunctious guy
like Mike Flynn. [laughs]
[laughing]
[Lori] I went to kindergarten
through eighth grade
in one Catholic school,
and then didn't go
to a public school
till I was in the ninth grade.
That was a big eye-opener
for me, for sure.
And that's when
I first met Mike, too,
that summer
going into the ninth grade.
You know, we didn't date
in ninth grade or anything.
We just kind of
went steady for two weeks,
and then we went
our separate ways.
I mean, I always saw him
in the halls in high school,
but we kind of had our own life
the next two years,
and then our senior year,
we got back together again.
We both said that night
that if we go out
with each other again,
this is it.
You're not, you know,
no, no straying.
[Flynn] So when Lori and I
were married,
during the wedding ceremony,
the priest,
who was also a cousin of ours,
Philip, Father Philip.
There's a part of the beach
and we call it the Rock.
We would go spend
a lot of time surfing there.
He described Lori
as that rock, unmovable.
He described me as the tide.
I think my husband
is the rock, really.
I think we're a great team
together.
I can't say that I never lost it
during this whole thing.
There were times
that I was pretty rock-bottom.
And he always was the strength
that I needed to go on.
I mean, he always had
the best-case scenarios
that we would, you know,
he would always put it
in a better light than I could.
And there could have been
no better description
in our marriage.
You know, we're getting ready
to go into 42 years
of marriage.
You know,
we've known each other
since we were 13 years old.
A steady rock
in this ebb and flow of life.
And I knew
that I could depend on her
to do a lot of things that--
that I was not
going to be able to do.
And many of the times
'cause I'm deployed.
[Lori] Uh, prayer and God
came back into my life,
into both of our lives,
because we were
at wit's end sometimes.
And that was
one of the only things
that we knew we had.
[Flynn] May the rain
fall soft upon your fields,
and until we meet again--
[all] May God hold
you in the palm of his hand.
- Amen. Amen.
- Sláinte. Sláinte. Sláinte.
The house that we ended up
growing up in,
in Rhode Island,
belonged to my grandfather.
We came back to this house
that had one bedroom,
one little tiny bathroom,
a little tiny kitchen.
All the boys were in, uh,
were in bunk beds,
and my parents slept
in the living room--
there was a pullout couch--
for a while.
There were three oldest,
three middle,
and three youngest.
And I was part
of the three youngest,
so I would be in the bathroom,
and I would never
get like it alone.
I would be scrubbing my teeth
and so the boys would come in,
you know, "I gotta go,"
because it was one bathroom.
But that bathroom door,
it got knocked down a few times.
[laughs]
[soft music playing]
[Clare] Here's, you know,
nine kids, 11 people
in a 1,200-square-foot house.
So our backyard,
our playground,
was the ocean,
was the Atlantic Ocean.
My parents were great.
They just let us go.
[Flynn] The beach was there.
The water was an outlet for us.
[Jack] I mean, I'm paddling out
when I was seven
or eight years old,
in the lineup in big waves
off Ruggles Avenue.
It was literally, you could
run out in our backyard,
pick up a, you know,
a throwin' rock,
and you could throw it
into the ocean.
It was that close.
[Joe] And we started to realize,
"Hey, there's guys
out there surfing."
And we could swim like fish.
[Mary] And the kids would
be swarming all over the beach.
I mean, there'd be like
five or six of them.
That, that was a lot of fun.
It really was a lot of fun.
[Clare] You know,
we would go surf all winter,
surf in hurricanes.
And so, it taught us a lot
about endurance,
being in the ocean for hours.
[Flynn] There's
a lot of people that surf,
but those of us that find it
as a spiritual thing...
In our family,
it's a spiritual thing.
It's very, very powerful.
You have to respect the power.
What is it telling you
at times?
If you're out in big surf,
that, you know,
your life could turn
in a second.
Taking off on a wave,
wiped out...
been dragged down
and felt like,
I'm out here all alone.
That is a respect
that I learned,
and I still have it
to this day.
[Joe] You got to remember,
your entire adult life
is in the m*llitary.
All you know is a command
structure like the m*llitary.
You don't have a lot
of experience in business.
You're getting things set up.
[Clare] You know,
he wants to work.
He still wants to have,
you know,
service to country again.
Michael Jr. was actually
working for a company
that I was running at the time,
and he came to me and said,
"I'm going to go work
for my dad,
we're going to start
a consulting group."
Companies were hiring him
for advisory work.
I think he was on some boards
of some private equity groups.
Normal stuff that generals do
when they get out of service.
We essentially formed
a business together.
He was just like, "You want
to go into business together?"
I said, "Absolutely."
I mean, this was a guy
that I had grown up
idolizing my entire life,
and this was a chance for me to,
to get to know my father,
you know? And...
No, it was-- it was...
It was, uh...
it was an opportunity
I knew I had to take,
that I wanted to take.
I love the idea
of being able to work with him
because for many, many years
of his life, I wasn't around,
with m*llitary and deployments
and moves and, and,
and schools and high schools
and baseball games and--
and birthdays and hell,
I almost didn't make it
to his wedding.
I flew in from Afghanistan
the night before his wedding.
And I was lucky that I made it.
I was so happy that I was going
to be able to do that with him
to be closer to him,
work with him on a daily basis.
People started
to reach out to him
to ask him for his advice
on a lot of the foreign, um,
you know, what was happening
in foreign countries.
And so, he was
advising everybody.
[Flynn] When I looked
at what the country needed,
the country didn't need
another Clinton or another Bush.
That was clear.
[Michael Jr.] I am pretty
sure that he knew then
that Donald Tr*mp
was going to be the nominee.
We did meet
with other candidates.
I mean, I remember sitting down
with Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina,
Ted Cruz.
Probably why I wasn't
asked to help those,
Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton.
But also I never said no,
I was just never asked.
You know, I was--
I was praying that there was
going to be somebody
that rose out of the ashes
who wasn't a typical politician.
And I looked at him
and I go, "Donald Tr*mp?
Are you out of your mind?"
And he goes,
"I'm telling you right now,
Donald Tr*mp
can b*at Hillary Clinton."
I said, "Why?"
He goes,
"Because the country is--
the country's ready
for something different."
[triumphant music playing]
[Michael Jr.] He met Tr*mp
for the first time in 2015.
He expected it to only be like
maybe a 20-to 30-minute meeting.
It turned into like
a two-and-a-half-hour-long
meeting.
If we can end these,
these wars that we are in,
we're-- where we're pouring
trillions and trillions
of dollars,
and we're not winning.
And Tr*mp was the one
that had that, that's,
that was the conversation
that I initially had with him.
I was happy
to support Tr*mp as well
because I just wanted to see,
I wanted--
I didn't see all the hope
and change as much as I wanted,
you know, with Obama.
And I wanted to see
what would happen with Tr*mp.
My first bombshell.
My first, [inhales deeply]
"Uh-oh," was,
and I was proud of him.
I was, it's true, but was
at that Republican convention.
But I was concerned
about that with him
because he was now in a--
in another world with politics.
- [audience cheering]
- Elect Donald Tr*mp
as the next president
of the United States
of America.
Thank you very much,
and God bless America.
[Flynn] From that moment on,
I really,
I started to ride with,
with, with Donald Tr*mp,
literally ride with him.
And we'd fly
all over the country
and go to these different
campaign rallies.
We'd do three or four cities
in a day.
And every place that we went to
would have no less than
10,000 people,
and in most cases,
they had 20-, 30,000 people.
- Unbelievable.
- [crowd cheering and applauding]
[crowd chanting] USA!
[Tr*mp] We are going
to win back the White House.
[Flynn] It reinforced
for me the sentiment
that I felt about the direction
of the country.
These big institutions,
these complexes, right?
I call it the security
state complex,
the m*llitary-industrial complex,
where they were leading us.
And they're leading us
down a path that,
that nobody wants to go down.
You know, it's like
they say, right,
Flynn knows where
the bodies are buried.
That's a metaphor
for understanding how dangerous
our system of government
has, has become.
And now I'm advising a guy
who looks to be, you know, a,
he's the front runner
for one of the major parties.
And he's gonna, you know,
he has a sh*t at being
president of the United States
of America.
Big deal, right?
It's huge. It's a start.
And so you fast forward into,
into June of 2016.
And now I get a phone call
from Corey Lewandowski saying,
"Hey, we're going to vet you
for vice president
of the United States."
I says, "Wow."
That's-- that was like--
I didn't expect that.
I'm saying it. I don't-- I think
Pence envied
Mike's relationship
with Donald Tr*mp.
Tr*mp respects people
that know how to work.
Pence was
a lifetime politician.
Priebus was
a lifetime politician .
They're GOP party hacks.
Mike was
a dyed-in-the-wool soldier.
Tr*mp traveled
with Michael for months
before he was elected.
Pence was pulled in politically.
Mike became close to Tr*mp
as a friend and trusted...
I don't know, advisor,
ally in the trenches through--
through the election process.
[Flynn] Mike Pence,
Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie,
and Mike Flynn.
You know, and it's humbling.
It's a humbling,
humbling experience,
to even be considered, to be
thought about like that.
The fascinating thing
about that is
that, of those four people,
three of them were,
I would call,
hardcore Republicans.
One, Mike Flynn,
is a registered Democrat.
I went into the White House
as a-- as a Democrat, right,
because I didn't give
a sh*t about the politics.
What I cared about
was our country.
So I get a phone call, you know,
from Tr*mp, you know,
"How you doing, Donald,
what's going on?"
He goes, "Well, you know,
you've seen everything."
He goes, "I'm not gonna
go with you as,
as the vice president,"
and he, and he kind of,
you know,
flippantly jokes, says,
"In another time, you know,
maybe being a Democrat
would be a good thing, but,"
he goes, "but it's, you know,
it's not going
to work out this time."
And I said, "No problem.
I'm, I'm, you know,
I'm here to help.
However I can,
you know, help out."
And, and he told me
he was going to Indiana
and Mike Pence was
going to be his-- his choice.
The next vice president
of the United States,
Governor Mike Pence.
- Thank you, everybody,
thank you.
- [cheering]
[Flynn] All these
other sycophants
and all these people
that are consultants
and, and part of the campaign,
they're, like, getting paid.
They're on a payroll,
big payroll.
I never took a dime, not a dime.
I didn't get paid a cent.
I did that because that's what
I felt like was my--
my, like, responsibility.
[Tr*mp on TV] They spied
on my campaign.
[Leslie on TV] There's
no evidence of that.
- [Tr*mp] Of course there is.
- [Leslie] No.
- Leslie,
they spied on my campaign--
- [Leslie] Sir...
And then they got caught.
The government,
the federal government,
the United States
intelligence community,
elements within it,
the most senior
law enforcement organization
in the country, the FBI,
was spying
on a presidential campaign.
We didn't know it.
We can't put on things
we can't verify.
Leslie,
they spied on my campaign.
- Well, we can't verify that.
- It's been totally verified.
No.
[reporter] Donald J. Tr*mp
will become
the 45th president
of the United States,
defeating Hillary Clinton
in a campaign
unlike anything we've seen
in our lifetime.
And I'd be lying if I--
if I didn't admit that,
like, you know,
I, I didn't really think
Tr*mp was gonna win either.
But then he got elected.
[Obama] As I said last night,
my number one priority
in the coming two months
is to try to facilitate
a transition
that ensures our president-
elect is successful.
[Flynn] Obama talks
to Tr*mp about two people.
Threats, apparently,
to him, certainly to,
at least one
to the United States,
and one of them was Kim Jong Un,
the dictator
over in North Korea,
and the other was
General Mike Flynn.
You know, the one thing
Obama tells Tr*mp is,
don't hire,
don't hire General Flynn.
I mean, you can't
make this stuff up.
[Flynn] So I go
upstairs to Tr*mp's office,
and he started telling me
about this conversation
that he had had with--
with Barack Obama.
And I said, "Really?"
And he goes,
"What do you think about that?"
And I said, "You know something?
I've never met the guy."
Never met him.
Never met Barack Obama.
Although he picked me twice
for two key jobs.
I said, "I never had
the opportunity to meet the guy,
so why-- why he would say
something like that,
I have no idea."
And he goes,
"Yeah, neither do I."
And he goes,
"I don't trust the guy."
[somber music playing]
[Flynn] I stood up for him,
I stood up with him.
We won.
And he turns around and goes,
"Want you to come in and be
my National Security Adviser."
That's a really difficult
question to say no to.
So I said yes.
We shook hands, we took a--
took some photos,
we put out a press release
about it,
and it just seemed like
all hell broke loose.
I mean, it just really seemed
like all hell broke loose.
There's going to be
a complete cleansing
of the fraud, waste, and abuse,
because there was indications
that he was going to do
a look and audit into
the National Security System
to root out the rot,
but not just
in one little agency.
The National Security Advisor
is essentially above
the Intelligence Community,
the Department of Defense,
and the Foreign Policy
Community,
the State Department.
So they have purview over
all those three kind of areas
within our entire
national security,
foreign policy-making community.
That's big.
I didn't run the Defense
Intelligence Agency.
But if a guy stands up
who did, and says,
"Well, actually, I sort of--
I sort of know a lot about this
because I ran the Defense
Intelligence Agency,"
that's a voice
with weight and authority.
That is a massive thr*at
to them.
[Flynn] Probably one of
the most powerful positions
in the entirety
of the government.
Because you are a close personal
advisor on a daily basis.
You continue to travel
with the president, you know,
you are there in all of
the critical meetings,
all the critical decisions
for the country.
You know,
I was incredibly honored.
I felt, I felt
very well prepared.
Um, and I was brutally,
brutally att*cked.
The bureaucracy
targeted those of us
who supported
the president's mission
of making
the federal bureaucracy
accountable
to the American people.
From the outcome of the election
until the Inauguration Day,
there is a,
there is an entire
operation ongoing
that the government
actually plans for.
But-- but now,
it was a bit different.
The-- the transition
that we had,
it was like we were at w*r,
and it was being made so hard
by elements
within our own government.
So this is now
the Christmas holidays.
My wife Lori and I said,
before I go back
into the White House,
let's go take one last vacation.
And so we decided we're gonna go
down to the Dominican Republic.
We went down there
for basically a short week,
and I ended up having to
shorten it because of
all of the craziness
that was happening up in DC.
[reporter]
It's an unprecedented strike;
the White House
punishing Russia,
in part for interfering
in the US election.
[reporter] The US is ordering
35 Russian intelligence
operatives
and their families
in California
and Washington D.C.
out of the country.
So a couple of
different phone calls,
but one of whom was with
Ambassador Kislyak, right,
the very famous
Russian ambassador.
I probably made him more,
more famous, right?
Amba-- you know,
Ambassador Kislyak,
he's just like,
he looks like a grandfather
who smokes too many cigars
and probably,
you know, sniffs a little bit
too much whiskey, right?
Tonight, a Kremlin spokesman
is accusing President Obama
of trying to spoil
U.S.-Russian relations.
Look, Russia.
I know you're going to
have to do something.
I don't appreciate
what happened.
So I'm being honest with them.
Because it wasn't our call,
it was the current
administration's call.
I don't appreciate
what happened, but--
and I know that you're going to
have to take some measures,
but let's not have
a tit-for-tat,
because we don't want to--
we don't want to lose our minds
over this and-- and--
and cause some greater--
some greater outcome,
like going to w*r.
But I get a phone call
a couple of days later,
and he says, "Message received."
They're not going to take
any extreme action.
Talk about, you know,
being able to settle down
something that could have
gotten vastly worse.
Why do we have
a State Department?
Why do we have all these
intelligence agencies?
It's to, you know,
to protect America,
protect American interests,
and to keep dialogue open
between our adversaries,
our allies, anyone in between.
So the whole idea
that General Flynn
was doing something wrong
was ridiculous.
He was doing exactly what
he should have been doing
at the time.
He was the incoming
National Security Advisor.
His job, his role,
was to help to coordinate
that whole strategy
across all of government
to try to do what?
Prevent w*r.
January 20, 2017,
will be remembered as the day
the people became the rulers
of this nation again.
[Flynn]
We were ready for change
and we needed to
get things moving.
One of the things
I was looking to do was to
dig in and take a hard look
at some of the programs
that the U.S. intelligence
community was involved in
that I felt
were useless, costly,
and, uh, and corrupt.
And in fact, I sat through
a presentation with
the incoming
vice president, Mike Pence,
in the, in the transition
headquarters.
As we're being presented it,
I started asking questions like,
"Well, okay, this program
that's been going on
for a long time,
what has it accomplished?"
"Oh, we're gonna have to..."
I mean, then you get this.
Again, these are senior guys.
These are like the top,
top people in the CIA.
They're like this,
and they're like,
"Well, we're gonna
have to come back
and we're gonna have to give you
a separate briefing on that."
I ended up calling
to have that briefing again.
The next time
I called for it was--
it was in the first week
I was there, and it was me
as the National Security Advisor
now inside the White House.
I got the same briefing,
but this time they sent
a whole bunch more people, right?
Because like, they knew,
because now I'm starting to,
to dig in.
[slow music playing]
[Flynn] Thousands and thousands
of years ago,
guys like Sun Tzu,
famous m*llitary theoretician,
studied him.
Everybody that's ever served
in the m*llitary at some level,
stayed in long enough,
has-- has...
Hell, even a lot of
people in business
study Sun Tzu's Art of w*r.
Well, what did Sun Tzu
say about w*r?
w*r is deception.
A w*r can be a w*r
in the narratives,
in how information is deployed
in order to manipulate
the belief system of people.
And so now, instead of,
[imitates g*nsh*t] you know,
putting a b*llet
through somebody's head,
you assassinate them
by narrative.
And for a guy by the--
by the name of Sun Tzu,
who wrote about
all wars are deception
thousands of years ago, right?
Nothing's changed.
The intelligence agencies are
working with the legacy media
to shape public perception
of world events.
That is not speculation.
I'm not some outsider
who's guessing at this
because they read about it
on the internet.
I've spent my whole life
working,
my father worked at ABC News
before going to work
for the government;
you know, engaged
in the Cold w*r.
So I've seen both sides
of this my whole life,
for 53 years.
So I can say
with authority and certainty
that the intel agencies shape
news coverage of world events.
And the more significant
the world event,
the more meaningful it is,
the higher the consequences are,
the more aggressively
they shape it.
Because the CIA's,
they're masters at propaganda,
they're masters at,
at, at what's called
covert influence,
covert operations. Right?
Hollywood, the media.
You're not
a conspiracy theorist.
You're an observer
of verifiable reality
if you state factually,
the news,
organizations of record--
Washington Post
and New York Times--
are working with
the intel agencies
to lie to the public
and to hide relevant information
from the public. That is a fact.
Eisenhower
had his own imperfections,
JFK had his own imperfections,
but they, you know,
but they understood
that there was
something not right.
And Eisenhower
was really the first
in a very somber warning.
In the councils of government,
we must guard against
the acquisition
of unwarranted influence,
whether sought or unsought,
by the m*llitary-industrial
complex.
He used this term
"the m*llitary-industrial
complex."
And back then,
in Eisenhower's era,
it was not very well developed.
Uh, now we have a
services complex as well.
And it seems that there are
too many of our leaders
in the federal government,
in the Department of Defense,
that really put
the interests of themselves,
their crony contractor friends,
and, and their careers
over the national interest.
Why did a guy
like John F. Kennedy
get assassinated?
He got assassinated because
he called out something
that he knew to be a corrupt
component of the government
that was trying to usurp
his authority
as the duly elected
president of the United States
of America.
I-- I think the assassinations
of the 1960s
are worth reassessing
because they tell you
what the system is capable of.
Not just individuals,
but the system in which
they live, work, and thrive.
The imperative to preserve
that system is so overwhelming
that individual players
in the system
can be sacrificed
in the name of preserving it.
Like, you just need to
understand the stakes here.
So, if you're Flynn
and you're standing up
and saying, "Wait a second."
You know, in retrospect,
I think it's fair to,
to expect that they would
effectively try to k*ll you.
You know, maybe not sh**t you
in Dealey Plaza,
but put you in prison,
impoverish your family,
silence you, dismiss you in
the eyes of most as ridiculous.
I thought it was
an opportunity to, to take
a look, a hard look
at organizations,
one of which I ran.
And I knew a lot about other
aspects of the security state
because it's not just
the intelligence community.
It's the Department of Defense
and includes
the Department of State,
includes places like
the White House itself,
and includes
the Department of Justice,
includes the FBI.
And that revolving door
in the intelligence community,
with social media companies,
with big banks,
with big corporations,
has been going on
for years and years and years.
They recruit people
out of those agencies
to come work for them.
It's grotesque.
I mean, that's when you know,
when you turn on CNN or MSNBC,
and you see an endless parade
of former
federal law enforcement
or federal intelligence
officials paid,
coming on the air
to analyze politics,
then you know
that this organization
has been captured
by those agencies.
I mean, these are not just
former government employees;
these are people with
active security clearances.
Still, they retain
their security clearances.
So they are
in continuous communication
with their former colleagues
at these agencies,
because it's legal, because
they have the clearance.
And so, they are acting
effectively as spokesmen
for these federal agencies,
and they're on the air
as news analysts.
I cannot think of
a more perverse system.
I think, I think
there were conversations
and messages between
Peter Strzok and someone
inside of the office of
the Vice President
of the United States.
In retrospect,
it's pretty obvious to me
that Mike Pence was brought in
and presented to Donald Tr*mp,
who probably didn't know,
wouldn't know Mike Pence
if he got in the shower
with him.
He didn't really know
that Mike Pence
was the governor of Indiana.
Pence is a career politician,
Tr*mp is a casino promoter;
like, they haven't had
a lot of overlap in their lives.
How did he wind up
getting chosen vice president?
And I think it's
very obviously an effort
by Republicans in Washington,
permanent Washington,
to put some kind of moderating
force right next to Tr*mp.
"You know, you need him
to win the evangelicals."
That's how they sold him.
"He's an evangelical."
Tr*mp has no idea
what an evangelical is.
And so, they tell him,
"You gotta have this guy.
You can't win without this guy."
And I'm not saying
Pence is a secret agent,
but clearly,
and I watched it firsthand,
Pence believed that his role
was to get Tr*mp,
to the extent he could,
to go along with
the conventions of,
of Washington as it existed
before Tr*mp got there.
Obviously.
Again, I'm not calling him
a secret agent.
But I am saying from day one,
Pence saw his job
as influencing Tr*mp
to kind of let things
continue to go
roughly the way
they were going before.
That's true.
I think Pence played an
enormously destructive role.
I know that the-- I know
that there were people
in Pence's office
who hated Tr*mp,
because they told me.
And if we look at RussiaGate,
we see different people
operating out of Pence's office
who are part of RussiaGate.
But just going by the timeline
and going by
what we knew happened,
I'm like, Pence
is making this up.
[reporter on TV] Good morning.
Retired General Michael Flynn
was during the campaign
and is now one of
the president's top advisors,
and he has acknowledged
having contacts with
top Russian officials.
But over the last several
weeks, investigators led
by the FBI
have been taking a closer look
at his calls
to the Russian ambassador.
[Flynn] We had
the Japanese delegation
down at Mar-a-Lago
for very serious meetings.
And-- and while, all while
that was going on that weekend,
Kim Jong Un, over in Korea,
starts f*ring some missiles.
This is the first time
that the Tr*mp administration
is going to be tested on,
on how we respond to that.
And by the way,
Rocket Man should have been
handled a long time ago.
[audience applauding wildly]
[Flynn] They were doing it
because Abe of Japan
is visiting President Tr*mp
that weekend.
I-- I took Abe and Tr*mp
into a, a skiff,
a secure facility
that we set up at Mar-a-Lago.
I took those two in there
and briefed them
on what was happening,
and I showed them,
I showed them all the,
all the intelligence
that we had,
some photographs of
the missiles, all this stuff.
I went-- took them through
the whole thing like I,
like I'd briefed millions
of other intelligence briefings
in the past.
I laid it out in front of them.
The next day, we st--
we had more, more talks
with the Japanese
and we're still,
you know, reeling,
and the media is going crazy
about all this stuff.
I took like 30 minutes
to go back over to my room
because we're going to get back
on Air Force One.
Packing my bags,
and I get a phone call
and it's Reince Priebus.
I said, "What can I do?
You know, how can I help?"
And Reince Priebus tells me that
I'm in the Situation Room
with Vice President Pence,
Deputy Director of the FBI
McCabe,
and Deputy Attorney General
of the Department of Justice,
Sally Yates.
And they just briefed us.
They just showed us a document
that you clearly talked
about sanctions.
This is one of
the surreal moments,
it's like things
you never forget,
because it was such a seminal
and significant
emotional event for me.
I said, "So what are you,
what are you telling me?"
"Well, you know,
the vice president is upset,
and we're gonna, you know,
we're, we're gonna have to,
you know, we're gonna be
talking to you
when you get back."
Like I'm a,
I'm a f*cking schoolchild.
I show up to the White House
the next day.
All kinds of--
now there's all kinds of rumors
about Flynn's, you know, going
to be fired, resign, you know.
It's all flying
all over the place.
So it's all leaked.
The Situation Room
is a very secure facility.
We're talking about people
that should know better.
I mean,
if it just those four people
that were in that room,
and me on that conversation.
That day, Reince comes
into my office and says,
"The president wants you to--
he's gonna want you to resign."
And I looked at him
and I was like, "Really?"
I said, "Did he say that?
Is that coming from you
or is that coming from him?"
And he said, "Well,
that's coming from him."
And I said, "Okay."
I go, "Well, here's what
I want you to do, Reince.
I want you to go
let the president know
that I want to
hear it from him."
And he was like,
he kind of like, and he goes,
"You probably should put
together a resignation letter."
When he called to tell me
that he was resigning, you know,
he told me that
"I'm going to resign tonight."
And I was like,
"Oh, my God, really?"
And it was just sort of surreal.
And he said, "Yeah."
He goes, "I'm going to go see
the president right now."
I was like, "Okay. I'll be here
when you get home."
[Flynn] Who was in
the meeting was Reince Priebus,
Vice President Pence,
Steve Bannon,
and Jared Kushner
and the president.
And president, you know,
reads the letter.
H-- he's like, I--
I could tell
that he was--
he was visibly upset,
like, but not in an angry way.
He was like, just upset
about the whole thing
because he knew how hard
that I had worked my ass off
for him to win the presidency.
And I had-- you know,
and I just wasn't
a guy that--
that comes across as, you know,
a bullshitter, you know,
or a liar. Right?
He said, "You know..."
He kind of looked
around the room, goes,
you know, "We okay with this?"
And looking back,
it could have been,
a couple of things
could have happened.
He could have said,
"You know what,
this is bullshit.
You two guys kiss and make up,"
because I had already apologized
to the vice president
about whatever it was
that he felt like
I had misled him on.
I had already apologized
to him.
There was no, you know, hey,
let's kiss and make up.
We got a country to run here.
Nope.
Vice President Pence
didn't stand there and say,
you know, you know what,
I-- I can live with this.
You know, Mike, got it.
I understand that, you know,
the all the dynamics
of what was happening
and everybody's busy.
You know,
we have a country to run.
Before I left that--
that meeting,
the president got up, and
I walked up to the side
because I was kind of
standing at the corner.
And I walked up,
gave him a hug,
give him like a,
you know, big man hug.
And I stepped back
and I said to him,
"I'm just gonna give you
one warning about one person.
I'm going to tell you
that the person
that you need to watch out for
is the deputy director
of the FBI,
and his name is Andrew McCabe."
And I looked the president
dead in the eye.
And he said, "Okay."
He didn't really know
who he was.
Now, obviously,
Reince Priebus knew him,
and Pence knew him.
They said nothing.
So whatever they had said
to the president
prior to me going
in that meeting, you know,
I could tell
that from my departure,
you know, my departing,
sort of, you know,
man-love moment with--
with, uh, with President Tr*mp,
where I could tell
that he was upset
that he had to do this
and accept my resignation.
And maybe he felt like
if I stepped away
from the White House,
the whole Russia thing
would go away.
And that's when it all began.
The information
was provided by,
who I don't know, Sally Yates.
And I was a little surprised
because I said,
"Doesn't sound like he did
anything wrong there."
But he did something wrong
with respect to
the vice president,
and I thought
that was not acceptable.
As far, as far as
the actual making the call,
he was just doing his job.
That was very normal.
You know, at first,
everybody got excited
because they thought
he did something wrong.
After they thought about it,
it turned out
he was just doing his job.
So, and I do-- and by the way,
with all of that being said,
I do think he's a fine man.
So, Reince Priebus told me
that they had just read
a document that Yates
and McCabe showed them
that said I talked about
sanctions.
And we now know that I never
talked about sanctions.
There's a transcript of it.
It's public information.
Okay, it was a,
it was a false document,
which is really bad
for two senior government
officials to create.
And that document
must exist somewhere. Okay?
Or, the only other
potential answer
is that Reince Priebus lied
about reading about sanctions.
I never talked about sanctions.
In fact, I, I told
the vice president that,
earlier on.
I said I didn't talk
about sanctions.
I told the FBI agents
that came to my office.
You look at
this White House now
and it's hard to imagine
two FBI agents ending up
in the same room.
How did that happen?
I sent them.
[audience laughing]
[Flynn]
Comey said in an interview,
the FBI wanted to send agents
over to the White House
to speak to me.
He admitted he did that
outside the proper channels
without any discussion
or approvals
from White House council.
[Adam]
This was clearly a setup.
The government will
frequently try to railroad
various individuals
by not having, um,
by just telling you, "This is
a friendly conversation.
No need to have your lawyer
in the office with us."
And so, what happens
in situations like that
is that the agents
who are corrupt
and, and have an agenda,
they're not,
it's not a genuine,
fair investigation.
They're free to make up
whatever they want
about what transpired
because there was no recording,
and there was no representative
of-- of their interviewee who,
you know, could make,
you know, a record of what,
what transpired.
[Tracy] A bunch of
the seventh-floor people,
they all got together
and had a meeting about this,
this interview they were going
to have with General Flynn,
the ambush interview.
And Bill Priestap in,
in handwritten notes
that looking back,
you have to wonder if
he wrote this down on purpose
as kind of like a flag,
because he knew
what they were doing was--
was wrong or if it was
just sheer happenstance
that he wrote down
a series of notes that said,
"What is the goal?
Is the goal to get him
to tell the truth,
or to get them to lie
so we can get him fired
or, you know, hold him
accountable for lying?"
So they knew, going in,
what their motive like was.
Do we want him to
just tell us the truth,
or do we want to try
and get him to lie to us?
This is yet another example
of weaponization
of federal investigations.
Both Peter Strzok
and Joseph Bianca wrote
that he wasn't lying,
he didn't seem like
he was lying,
he seemed like
he was being truthful.
I mean, they wrote this down.
Which is why
when the DOJ came back
and said there was
no predicate for this...
they referenced these things
because there-- there--
they didn't even believe
he was lying.
When you go in
to an interview like this,
you're supposed to
document everything;
it's something called the 302.
That's the FBI-speak for a form
that you write down
your thoughts.
They didn't fill those out
for weeks.
And then
when Peter Strzok did,
he had somebody who wasn't
even in the interview,
wasn't even involved,
Lisa Page,
editing it for him.
You know, I just told them
once they fire,
once you fire Flynn,
all you guys are gonna go.
And that's exactly
what happened;
within, I think,
within a year's time,
they were all gone.
All the kind of the
top advisors
around the president.
As soon as they did that,
there'd be blood in the water.
I'm pretty sure that's what
I told to Priebus and--
and others.
[Lori] I really think
that those guys
that were in that White House
before Mike walked in
that room told him,
"If you get rid of Flynn,
the Russia thing will go away."
I guarantee that they tried to
convince him of that.
And as we know, it only
exacerbated after that.
[woman] Michael Flynn,
President Donald Tr*mp's
National Security Advisor,
is under investigation by
U.S. counterintelligence agents
for communications he's had
with Russian officials.
[Adam] What Stefan Halper did
with the help of the leadership
of the Office of Net Assessment
between 2010 and 2016
was create the institutional
infrastructure
for what became known as
RussiaGate,
normalizing a known
Russian intelligence officer.
Okay, so here you have
Chris Steele
going around Washington saying,
"Oh yeah, this is
Russian intelligence
that says that Donald Tr*mp
did these things."
That, you know, people wouldn't,
you know, take it seriously.
But we know it was
taken very seriously.
The Steele dossier
was used as the predicate
to launch these FISA
investigations.
The stories about the peeing.
The stories about
the drunkenness, the drug use.
It's all fake news.
It's phony stuff.
It didn't happen.
The Steele dossier was
sent by special courier
from John Brennan at CIA
to the White House
to President Obama and marked,
you know, eyes only.
This was Russian disinformation.
This is Russian propaganda.
They had to make Tr*mp
look weird. Right?
Oh, he's freakish. He's bizarre.
He-- he, that's why he deserves
these extraordinary
punishments, right?
An indictment, an arraignment,
an FBI investigation.
Same with General Flynn, right?
This is all about normalizing
our enemies' propaganda
to stage political hit jobs on
American candidates for office,
for the highest office
in the country.
The Steele dossier, which,
of course by July of 2016,
Brennan knew was
Russian disinformation
that was generated by
Hillary Clinton
to smear Donald Tr*mp
in order to sort of
hide her own misconduct.
Hillary Clinton
on the stump this week.
We're joined now by her
campaign manager, Robby Mook.
[reporter] Thank you
for joining us this morning.
The hand of the Kremlin
has been at work
in this campaign for some time,
it's clear that they are
supporting Donald Tr*mp.
Brennan and Obama and Comey,
they inserted
the Steele dossier
into the 2017 Intelligence
Community Assessment
as a annex.
So, what they did is they took
Russian disinformation,
made it into a U.S.
intelligence product
for the purpose of being able
to cover themselves
if they were ever questioned
about this nonsense
in the Steele dossier.
Sourced the Russian
intelligence,
clear hit job
against candidate Tr*mp
and then President Tr*mp.
They could say, "Oh, look,
this is a U.S.
government document.
It's from the intelligence
community.
It is from
the 17 intelligence agencies
of the United States government.
Don't ask me about this.
It's been vetted."
It's this way of very cynically
covering up a horrendous crime
and normalizing it
retroactively.
It was an act of desperation
because the Obama administration
and the Biden administration
knew that if Michael Flynn
stayed there
as Tr*mp's National
Security Advisor,
they were f*cked.
Because he was
going to lash back
at all of what they did
in the Middle East,
what they did, or were doing
to compromise
the United States of America.
He was squeaky clean.
They couldn't find sh*t on him.
And they dug deep.
There was some story like,
oh, yeah, and then, and then
General Flynn left this event,
this dinner, with, um,
with this woman who is
half Russian, half British.
Well, of course,
nothing of the sort happened.
Nothing of the sort
could happen because here--
here is the director of the DIA,
a very important role,
and so he's not going anywhere
off on his own with anyone.
And she's just
this young woman who's married,
you know, I think at the time,
if I remember right,
she was pregnant
or getting ready to have a baby.
Her life was ruined.
All because of this guy named--
this-- the--
this guy they call Halper,
right?
His name is Halper,
Stefan Halper.
The Walrus, right?
Guy's a-- he's a--
he's a walking steam bath
because he sweats all the time.
And have to have your family
exposed to that kind of,
um, that kind of ugliness
because someone is determined
to destroy you,
these are very hard things.
But again, it comes back
to like why, you know,
why people are mad
about this story.
Why I'm mad about this story.
Why it hurt...
Why it was painful for
other families to watch too,
to imagine what it was like
for his family to, um,
to be targeted by
these animals like that.
They disparaged him
as much as they possibly could
in the media.
It was all bullshit.
It was all bullshit.
And we were sitting there
as family going,
"Michael f*cking
has a girlfriend,
and get to hear he had an affair
with some Russian girl?"
I called her up.
I called her up.
I said, "Hey, tell me
about your relationship
with my brother Mike.
You're in trouble here.
You name is all over the place."
We kind of
endeared ourselves to her.
I wanted to find out.
Lori needed to know.
They were saying stuff about
Michael that he had an affair.
She knew it wasn't true.
But how do you think she felt
when she had to go
see her mother
and they read it in the paper?
They didn't give a sh*t
about how he felt
or how that affected
his family.
Obama and Biden
did not want General Flynn
giving them a proctology exam
without any kind of anesthesia.
I've said that I'm surprised
that they haven't k*lled me,
surprised that they've
let me continue to live.
Um...
Maybe they feel like they've
done enough damage to where,
no matter whenever
I pop my head up,
wherever I'm at,
they can just kind of go,
"Oh, that's
the conspiracy theorist.
He's done this. He's done that."
And I know that there's
an entire movement of people,
an organization, that they--
their sole purpose in life
is to make sure
no matter what I do,
to find a way to show it
in a dark light.
You know, we've gone from
the physical assassination
of a president
of the United States
to a character assassination
of a National Security Advisor.
[Tracy] General Flynn
had a private company
he formed with his son
and a business partner.
They were engaged by
a private citizen in Turkey
to do some work on behalf of
this private businessman.
So there was no need
to report this
because the private businessman
was not working
on behalf of
the Turkish government.
Did not receive any money
from the Turkish government,
wasn't working with
the Turkish government at all.
This was a private businessman
engaging the Flynn Intel Group
to do a job for him.
[Devin] All the talk was about
FARA violations,
Logan Act violations.
I mean, lots of crazy,
far-fetched laws
that had either
never been enforced,
or were rarely enforced,
and if enforced, they were like
a slap on the wrist
type of, type of thing,
not some multi-year,
multi-pronged investigation.
This Laufman guy
who's running this FARA office,
they send a letter to Mike
saying,
hey, you need to fill out
this FARA form.
So, he didn't have to fill out
a FARA form at all
because he wasn't working
for the Turkish government.
He was working for
a Turkish businessman.
He's got a lawyer at the time.
She says, "Well, the number one
FARA filing office
in the country
is this Covington & Burling."
You know, you figure,
"Ah, I really don't
need to do this,
but I'm going to
consult these attorneys
to see if
I really need to file."
And they say, "You know what,
just to be on the safe side,
file."
You're filling out
an application
and you know, Covington Burling,
the number one FARA filing
law firm in the country,
is filling it out.
Okay, we're in good shape, right?
So, um, but how did they
blitz him with this
FARA violation
because they come back
and they start adding that,
well, it wasn't a violation.
They just put the wording into
as many documents as they could.
They would have some fishy line
about FARA.
What that did was,
that let the media
take the term FARA,
which is Foreign Agent
Registration Act,
and just call him
a foreign agent.
So now he gets blitzed,
and he's a foreign spy.
He's another spy, you know,
he's a Russian spy,
he's a Turkish spy.
He's all, he's all kinds of
spies, you know?
There are so many people
who are collateral damage
that's-- whose stories
are so intricate,
that if you can't get people
to understand this big story
of General Flynn, how in--
how ever would you be able to
get them to understand
the intricacies?
So, again,
at the end of the day,
the Flynn Intel Group
was retained to do business
for someone who was not attached
to the Turkish government
at all.
And they lied and said he was.
They are smart again, right?
They're going to take out
the number-one
m*llitary intelligence
officer of our country,
the National Security Advisor
who's about to find out
everything.
What do we do now?
Let's go after his son.
[Michael Jr.] Was there anything
more significant
on this timeline to you, Dad,
than anything else, or...?
[Flynn] [exhales] You know.
[Michael Jr.] I mean, for me...
- it's that.
- [Flynn] Yeah.
That's the, if there's
one thing that I think about,
- you know, more than--
- [Flynn] Yeah.
That, that's the meeting
where they conspired to
basically undermine
the presidency
of the United States of America.
We live in a time right now
where more than any other time
in American history...
the government,
investigative agencies,
especially the FBI
and the Department of Justice,
have been weaponized
against the American people.
[producer]
When did it dawn on you
that Michael would be a target?
[Flynn] Probably
by the middle of the summer,
I started to feel that,
because the FBI
is knocking on his door.
This is when I--
I had a really difficult time
being able to communicate.
We had to communicate
through a lawyer,
so I can't even talk to my son.
- [producer]
Whose advice is that?
- My lawyers at the time.
Looking back, it was,
it was horrific.
And then, all of a sudden,
there was--
started to be newspaper
articles coming out
that the Department of Justice
is starting to look harder at,
at General Flynn's son, Michael.
My team of lawyers was, was,
was represented by
a gigantic law firm, one of,
they call them the white-shoe
law firms in Washington, DC,
Covington & Burling,
and you really do feel like
they have your best interests
at heart.
You know, they come across
as, as professionals.
And man, was I wrong.
A moment of,
of misjudgment on my part.
That's all part of that
Washington, DC, establishment.
You're looking at 25 years and
about a half a dozen felonies.
Okay. And they're gonna go
after your son.
And I'm like, "You gotta be
sh1tting me. For what?"
And I'm sitting there,
height of the,
of the Mueller investigation.
It's really just kicking in.
There's nobody around, okay;
who I had was my family.
I didn't have big media stars.
I didn't have
big political stars.
I didn't have the White House.
We're already into
our house being sold.
We're already into an ungodly
amount of money that was--
that it's costing,
and you're just
kind of like,
"I got to stop this.
You know, I got to
stop this bleeding."
It was mental and emotional
bleeding.
And it was happening to me,
my wife, my kids, my family.
I'll give my life for my family
because I would have given
my life for this country.
They're the reason why I fight.
What they did-- they knew
that nothing was there.
Michael Flynn Jr.
worked for Flynn Intel Group
with his dad
and the business partner.
So, they saw him
as a w*apon to wield because
they were going after
General Flynn's business partner
and Ekim Alptekin.
As sort of a pawn,
they looped in a thr*at
against Michael Flynn, Jr.
to get General Flynn
to plead guilty.
All right,
a lot of people, you know,
asked us that question:
"Why did you guys even go
with Covington & Burling?"
You know, they were
the DC FARA experts.
They never really
fought for anything.
You know, they-- if you had
something on Tr*mp,
that, you know,
it would help you.
They brought my son in,
knowing where he was
in his life,
and, and knowing how bad
the rule of law system
is in Washington, DC.
That was a major pain point.
Huge.
All the lawyers
then became involved
in something that is
absolutely prohibited
in federal court
in that they had
an off-the-books
part of the deal.
They had this deal
that was communicated
to General Flynn
where the government
wouldn't put it in writing,
but they would agree orally
that if he accepted this plea,
they wouldn't prosecute
his son.
What parent could ever
say no to that?
What parent could ever
fight back against that,
where they're threatening
to put your son in jail
right before that
son's oldest son is born,
right before their grandson's
about to be born?
We have rules in federal court
to stop that,
to make sure that these
off-the-book deals don't happen.
And those lawyers on both sides,
the Special Counsel's Office
and the Covington & Burling
lawyers,
walked into federal court
and they lied.
They lied when the judge
asked if there was any
off-the-books deals.
They said there wasn't.
There was.
And it was all
part of this effort
for Covington & Burling
to protect their own hide,
rather than to look out
for their client.
It was disgusting.
And then also, don't forget
that if you do plead
not guilty and go to trial,
you're going to have a DC jury,
you're going to have a DC judge,
and then you'll probably
be found guilty,
and, you know, you're--
you're looking at 20,
So, this is probably the best
deal for you to do this.
And then a lot of people say,
"Oh, even if that was my son,
I would have never done that."
No.
You don't know
what you would have done
unless you were in our shoes,
and having to have
your lawyers tell you
that people that you thought
were doing the best for you,
that this was
the best thing for you,
and this is the only way
you're going to get out of this
is if you sign this plea deal.
So that's what we did.
People plead guilty
to crimes they did not commit
every single day
in this country.
A lot of the times,
it's minorities
that are pleading guilty
to crimes they didn't commit,
because who has the resources
to fight the juggernaut that is
the American justice system?
And so, the government starts
leaning on Covington
and Covington starts leaning
on General Flynn
to accept a plea deal.
Single count of a violation
of 18 USC-1001,
which is providing a false
statement to the government.
[woman] But of course,
the unbelievable turn of events
in today's news
happened in federal court
in Washington, DC,
in the courtroom
of Judge Emmet Sullivan.
[Flynn]
And then the prosecution
is the Department of Justice.
And the Department of Justice
had probably
about 20 lawyers there.
One of them
was the Solicitor General
for the United States
of America.
And the prosecutor, in my case,
his name was Brandon Van Grack.
So we go into this courtroom,
one of the most packed
hearings that they ever had
in the federal courthouse
of Washington, DC.
Then, all of a sudden,
out of nowhere,
the judge goes
right off the rails,
and he started going down
this other path and...
well, he said, "You turned
your back on your country."
[Jake]
It sure sounded as though
Judge Sullivan was going to
send Flynn to the clink
for at least
some period of time.
[reporter] It did, Jake.
The judge stressed that prison
time was not off the table.
[Flynn] And my lawyers tell me,
going into this hearing,
"Don't worry, you're not
going to have to say much here.
The prosecution's going to do
most of the talking." Okay?
And just the opposite happened.
You know, I get questions
from the judge.
And I'm answering
all the questions
and then the judge
starts to accuse me.
And he does
this very famous turns,
he turns, and he grabs
the flag behind his,
where his seat behind his bench,
and he grabs the flag,
and he turns back and he says,
you know, basically accuses me
of committing treason.
"Could he have been--
could he have been tried
for treason?
Or could he have been
found guilty of treason?"
To the prosecutor.
And Grack is, he was
kind of taken by it too.
The DOJ lawyer.
And he essentially says,
you know, "No, Your Honor.
No, Your Honor."
But, but the, so the judge
is sitting there
accusing me of treason
in a court,
and I'm not even in there for
any of that.
He's hugging the American flag
and he's saying, you know,
"You turned your back
on this country."
We were shocked.
There had been no trial.
There had been
no exchange of evidence.
There had been
no cross-examinations.
I thought his ini-- his outburst
calling General Michael Flynn
a traitor...
I mean, it was-- he was the one
who brought dishonor
upon his courtroom
and upon himself, right,
to scream out those things.
I mean, what an ignoramus.
There's no doubt in my mind
he did it for the benefit
of the media
because the media was on
pins and needles that day.
You know, they call them
the talking heads
on these shows,
who are these former
intelligence community
officials, like Brennan,
like Clapper,
like Comey,
like McCabe.
[Michael Jr.] Peter Strzok,
Lisa Page, Sally Yates;
you can't control these people.
And they're accusing me
of spying
against the United States
of America for Russia.
Of course, the media takes off,
takes off with,
"Well, even, you know,
even Judge Sullivan, you know,
in the courtroom
called General Flynn traitor."
[Flynn] The judge,
I believe, realized
that what he just did
would probably lead to a,
to some type of mistrial
or probably lead to
something bad for him,
because he just accused me
of something publicly
that I wasn't even in there for.
You could feel
inside of that courtroom
the level of tension
was unbelievable.
And I'm looking at
the lineup of prosecutors
from the Department of Justice,
and they were all
like white-faced,
like "Holy crap,
what did this judge just do?"
And the judge says,
"You know, do we need to talk?
Do we need time
to take a break?"
And I do this--
I don't know if you caught that,
but I did this.
And my lawyer said,
"Yes, Your Honor."
Prosecution,
"Yes, Your Honor. We're okay."
So, we take a break.
The judge today
really rebukes Michael Flynn
and uses words like treason,
that you allegedly
sold out your country.
After the treason comment
and after the--
thank God they took that break,
Lori, I think, said,
"We gotta take a break here."
She looked at me and said,
"This is going off the rails.
This is a disaster.
He's gonna put him
in jail today."
I get back into the courtroom
and the judge knew
that he, he was wrong.
And he came back out
and he essentially,
in a shitty way, he apologized.
He gave a shitty apology.
But the damage was done.
Threatening jail time for
lying to the FBI.
But I-- but I want to read you
some more of this judge.
This judge has become
a fascinating new figure
in this drama.
And he says, "Okay,
we'll come back in like
"We will-- we'll revisit
in 90 days."
And, you know,
pounds his gavel and,
and we all get up, he walks out.
And I mean, it was,
it was like total chaos.
By the grace of God,
Sullivan let him walk out
of that courtroom
without going to prison.
I think he probably regrets;
I think Sullivan regrets
that decision to this day.
We ended up going back over
to my son Michael's house
to just find some relief.
The baby's running around.
The baby, he's like,
crawling around.
We don't know that
they had threatened Mike.
I must have walked
around DC after that,
after that hearing,
for a good six, seven hours,
just walking around,
just looking at the sky,
like crying my eyes out.
There's-- there's no resolution,
you're two years into this now.
Okay. And you have no idea
how much longer this--
this is going to take.
I'm battling with terrible PTSD,
terrible PTSD from--
from this experience.
You know, I just, I describe it
as this constant drumbeat of,
of dot, you know, of subpoenas,
search warrants, you know,
emails, email requests
for information,
eventual media, you know,
parked outside of my house.
And I want to talk about
that "being alone" feeling.
There are very few things that
are worse than feeling alone
when you're going through
like incredible,
incredible trauma.
Um...
There was just so much
that was happening,
so much that was happening
that I...
I didn't understand
at the time, you know?
I didn't understand, I mean,
I didn't really understand
the concept of the deep state,
you know?
I didn't understand, you know,
that the Department of Justice
can indict
a ham sandwich concept.
You know, like I just,
all of a sudden, I'm--
I'm hearing that my father
could potentially
go away to prison for 15 years.
I remember the conversations
that I had with my mom about...
[exhales]
just about like,
"Which prison are we
gonna go visit him at?"
I can't even imagine like,
what my mom,
what my mom was thinking about.
It's been really hard
on him, I think,
harder on him, I think,
than on me, truthfully.
Because imagine
having a son feel like
he is the reason
your father had to plead guilty
to a crime he didn't commit.
I can't imagine the burden
that he had, I mean, the guilt.
And it's almost like
survivor's guilt, really.
He just felt like, you know,
his dad was willing
to go to prison for him.
You know, I mean,
I didn't believe it.
I just didn't believe it.
It took me years
to understand, like,
oh, he was doing this to,
to basically save, to save me.
You know, if I wasn't,
if I wasn't there,
he wouldn't have done it.
He would have kept--
he would have kept fighting,
but it's like, I understand.
I understand, like...
I understand as a father,
you know, like,
what you would do.
You know, you'd fall,
you'd fall on a sword
to protect your child, you know,
and I understand that.
I understand that more now
than ever.
Anytime I wanted to talk
to my father about this stuff,
it-- it just it--
the conversation always turned
into "Talk to your lawyer.
Talk to your lawyer.
Talk to your lawyer."
We subsequently,
subsequently had to talk
to each other
through our lawyers.
It was after that,
I mean, I went into,
I mean, I went into
a very deep depression,
very deep depression going
into 2018.
I mean, like
suicidal depression.
Okay, and I don't
say that lightly
because that is just not a topic
that is, is easy to discuss.
But, you know, the only thing,
the only thing
that kept me from...
[sniffles]
the only thing
that kept me alive was my--
was my son. [sniffles]
And thank God, thank God
I have him in my life.
Thank God I had him
in my life then. [sniffles]
...to my Flag and the Republic
for which it stands,
one nation under God,
indivisible,
with liberty and justice
for all.
Travis was a super important
part of my life.
I mean, and... yeah.
Little peanut just turned six.
But anyway.
When he, you know, it's like...
I mean, during this time
he's born, right,
I mean, he's a big baby.
And he like, poof, he like,
I would hold him,
and his innocence
reminded me about
just everything
that was good in life.
Everything. I mean,
the innocence of a child,
the innocence of my grandchild
just reminded me of how...
how important, you know,
what it is that we do
on a daily basis is.
And one of the ways
that you live your faith,
and I like to believe
that that's the way
I live my faith,
is through my family...
because I love my family.
And, and I'd do
anything for 'em.
And I want my family
to know that...
to know that. I want
my family to know that,
that I would do
anything for 'em.
And definitely my own kids.
And I think with, with Michael,
he feels the same way.
The, you know, Michael
looking at Travis...
and, and thinking about
what he was thinking about,
going through that emotion of,
of, of the, of the idea
that, you know, he's
contemplating k*lling himself.
He's contemplating su1c1de.
I always said, "Michael,
just know that
no matter what happens,
you know,
your dad and I are here.
Nothing should get
as low for you as that."
So, and he promised me,
"Mom, I would never
because I have Travis."
And I said "That's right.
You have Travis,
and Travis needs you.
He needs you
to be there for him.
Like your dad was for you."
Wow. I mean, you know.
So, for people...
and maybe this is how I,
you know, how I adjust myself,
for people, people
need to understand that,
that, that life is so fleeting,
so fleeting.
You know, what the, what you--
what you're looking for,
is you're looking for love.
You're looking for like,
is, is there love there?
And I know for me, and I--
and I know for Michael,
that we found it. We found it.
We found it in each other.
We found it in our families
and--
and I found it in my son,
and he found it in his son,
my grandson.
And I thank God that he did.
Because I don't know
where I'd be today if,
uh, if that--
if that had ever happened.
And I don't know what--
what I would have done.
That's--
that's just something that's,
I can't even contemplate it.
Can't-- that's just
unimaginable to me.
[man] That's why
one of the most important
things
that General Flynn did is
fired Covington & Burling
and hired Sidney Powell,
somebody who had the courage
to go toe to toe with them.
[Flynn] Lori and I
were going through
our own sort of
mental gymnastics
to figure out a way to dump them
and find, find somebody
who was going to
stand up courageously
and fight for us.
Mike gave his consent
as a client
to allow Sidney to read through
all of the documents.
And so, she started
uncovering the fact
that Covington Burling had
a conflict of interest
representing Mike
on this 1001 charge.
They were not in a position
where they should be involved
in the matter
before Judge Sullivan.
My first task was to
help with the transition
of the case
from Covington & Burling to
Sidney Powell as lead counsel.
There was a striking difference
at that point
about the way that we were
defending our client,
and his predecessors
were defending him.
We're not going to let
the government bully us
into having our client
provide false testimony.
And that was my first
real involvement in the case,
is to-- is to go forward
and dig our heels in and say,
"We're here to defend the truth,
not the government's
false narrative."
The decision then was
not to get this judge
to lessen my sentence;
the fight now was going to be
we're going to pull
my guilty plea.
Particularly in this case,
the amount of exculpatory
information that was coming in.
[Alicia] Yeah.
I mean, I saw all of it.
I was stunned with it all.
I mean,
it went on and on and on.
And you could see through
the time period of
Michael's case
and his dealings
with the attorneys,
you could see the case
literally unfold
as new information came out.
Brady material,
exculpatory evidence.
In the U.S. justice process,
it's designed to be
a full airing of the facts.
So not only
the incriminating evidence,
but the exculpatory evidence.
All of this
is supposed to come forth
into the judicial process,
so that there is a free and fair
airing of the facts.
Sidney Powell, you know,
she was aware
that the Department of Justice
was not bringing forth
the Brady material,
the exculpatory evidence
that they were required to do.
And it begs the question,
what have they not done?
You know, it's like,
could it be any more abusive?
The Department of Justice
Inspector General's report
on FISA abuse came out
like a couple of days
after
that 18th December hearing.
My briefing and debriefing
of DIA from my Russia trip
came out after that.
I knew about the briefing
and debriefing.
It was all classified.
So, I'm not, you know, I'm not--
you know, I'm like, protected.
I let my lawyers know, because
it's a lawyer-client privilege,
but it's classified,
the fact of what I was doing.
But now it's public.
[Michael Jr.] There were
more and more, you know,
answers to questions
that I had that--
that started to get
kind of produced
as Sidney started
digging into--
into my father's case.
You know, like, for example,
like the reaction
of the lawyers
from Covington & Burling,
after my father pled guilty.
I mean, they were like,
celebrating.
There's texts of them
talking about--
and emails talking about
how, like how great of a job
they all did,
that they were able
to get him to plea.
You know, it's like
you get one more sh*t
at staying above water.
Sidney convinced him, not only
can we stay above water,
we can start floating, and maybe
we can get out of this.
This is a lawless process.
[Joe] The bills
were mounting, okay,
because it was--
and a Special Counsel
had been appointed,
and so Mike's
now getting called in.
So, every time you get called in
for a proffer session
or whatever sessions you have to
have with the Special Counsel,
you're gonna have
at least one attorney,
if not several attorneys
available to you.
So, you're talking about
Washington, DC, attorneys--
All of a sudden, you know,
you go from having
a 20,000-dollar bill
to a, you know,
and, and I think Mike and Lori
knew that, you know,
if this continues,
they're gonna be bankrupt.
They're gonna just
destroy them financially.
[waves crashing]
[Barbara] They weren't
gonna get much money
because Mike had already--
selling his house
to pay the legal fees and,
you know, for that,
first, you know,
probably five or six months,
we're talking
And they don't care.
They just keep
sending you a bill.
They don't even care
if they send you an invoice.
[Flynn] So, there was
a moment that
where I just felt like
I was literally
deep down underwater,
and I felt like I was drowning.
[Jack] It was an
insurmountable, monumental task
to raise that money in the face
of having had Mike plead guilty.
And the rest of the country
going,
"What the f*ck?
How did he plead? Why?"
His son.
Young Mike. All right?
So, everybody gets it.
But the media doesn't
want to carry that message.
Instead, it's "disgraced
General Michael Flynn."
And the more
they pushed back on Tr*mp,
the more people
started to realize
General Flynn took a hit.
We ended up having to, um,
start a legal defense fund.
And, um...
that in itself was hard
because, you know,
you're asking people
to give you money
to defend yourself.
And we, we were asking
the American people to help us.
And they came out in droves.
[Flynn] The American people
started to come into,
into my life.
And, and there was a moment
where I just felt like
air was being breathed
into my lungs.
Over time,
instead of being pounded down
below the surface of the ocean,
I started to come up.
I started to come up.
In a way, it was like,
I'm now above the surface,
and I'm starting to
swim to shore.
I'm really just-- now I'm like,
"Okay, I got this.
Shore's still
a long distance off,
but I can see,
I can see the shoreline.
It's out there."
And I started to swim for it.
[Jack]
And these supportive people,
God knows where they came from,
these American people.
He calls it buddy breathing.
I've heard him say that.
Being able to come through
financially,
with this giant burden
of the federal government
on his shoulders,
and be able to support,
you know, the legal action
that was
incredibly financially
burdensome to any other person.
I don't know what you would do,
except end up in jail.
We had to outsmart
the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ.
We had to become our own--
the Flynn family
became investigators.
We had to read every document,
and we had to look deeper,
and we had so many great people
started helping us.
Once they saw that
we weren't going to stop,
that we were going to fight,
we were getting letters,
like hundreds of letters
every week.
Just when we were
getting like to a low,
Barbara would,
there would be a FedEx box
coming to the door with like,
hundreds of letters,
hundreds of cards,
rosary beads; you know,
little things
to just make our life
a little bit more pleasant.
We would take them out
and read them,
and we would say,
"This is what it's all about.
This is what real America is."
These people are, you know,
talking about things
that happened to them
with their families, you know,
my husband, or my son
or my brother, my--
this happened to them
when they did this.
And it was really cathartic
to read all those letters.
It was a great thing
to look forward to.
Like every other week,
we would get a big box.
And we amassed probably
seven or eight big
Rubbermaid bins of them,
and Mike would sit down
after every box we got
and wrote a thank-you note
to every single one
of those people.
And some of them
became pen pals.
They would write him back,
and he would have to
write them back.
And it was kind of
a neat thing, really,
but it was sort of his, I think,
way to get through it too,
you know?
He would read something,
and he'd say,
"You got to read this letter,"
and--
or I'd read it and,
"You got to read this letter."
And they were just
great, great letters.
Tearjerkers, a lot of them.
But it was--
it really did open
our eyes to what America
really knows about what's
going on with his case,
because they came
from everywhere.
Some of them overseas,
you know, so it was, um,
it got us through a lot of
the tough, tough times.
It really did.
[producer] Is it true he went to
the 99 cents store he loves?
[laughs]
[producer] Tell me about that.
Well, it's not
Now it's $1.25.
But yes, we would go in there,
he would get this
like cards for a dollar,
and you could get
like a pack of eight
or a pack of 12 for a buck.
So why not?
We just put about
as many as we could in the cart.
You know, we always got the ones
that had the American flag
on them.
But he'd go through them
so fast.
I ended up having to order them
from somewhere else
so we can get like a pack of 50.
I think it says a lot
about what the American people
were wanting out of this.
They were looking at this as,
as this is their fight.
What Flynn's going through,
what the Flynn family's
going through
is the fight of
the common American people
against a broken,
corrupt justice system.
Many families have
dealt with broken, corrupt
justice system situations.
And many people empathized
with that and saw--
they realized that we weren't
some wealthy family,
West Point grads.
We were a bunch
of street kids, okay,
and just happened to be
in this situation
and having to band together
to fight against this,
to fight against
this absolute evil.
[Jesse] First of all,
you got to understand
a little bit
about who Jeff Jensen is.
He's a former FBI agent,
who then became
a line prosecutor,
who then became
a United States attorney.
So, he's somebody
who fully understood
the workings of the FBI
and the workings of
the Department of Justice.
So, he's not someone
that the bureaucrats
could hide stuff from using
their bureaucratic tricks.
And the most important...
document that was written
as a result of his investigation
was on May 7, 2020,
when the government moved
to dismiss the Flynn case.
[Lee] Nah, nah, nah.
Not so quick.
Time for Emmet Sullivan
to go after Flynn.
Even if the prosecutors have
stopped prosecuting Flynn,
it's time for now the judge to
prosecute General Michael Flynn.
That's really weird.
That's really twisted.
There was no reason
for them to do what they did
in the first place.
It was political.
It was a hit job by the former
Obama administration
on the incoming administration,
and he targeted Flynn
because they felt that
that was going to be a spot,
especially with Russia,
because he had,
he sat at that table
with Putin one time,
which is in our family a joke.
Michael, if he was told
to sh**t Putin
in the head that day,
would have done it.
Because he's a soldier,
always first.
If his job was to get there
and sh**t Putin in the head,
he'd've done it.
There's something else
that's part of the story
that I don't know has been told
that I think needs to be told.
And that is, President Tr*mp
offered a pardon
in the spring of 2020,
before the government's
motion to dismiss,
and actually before most of the
exculpatory information
had come out.
General Flynn
had an opportunity then
to put all this behind him.
But he didn't want the pardon.
He wanted to be fully vindicated
through the government's
motion to dismiss.
And Sidney had the guts
to tell the president,
"Thank you very much,
but this time,
we're gonna keep fighting."
As a result of, of that,
the full exposure of
the government's misconduct
against General Flynn
came to light.
But everything that came out
probably wouldn't have unless
General Flynn
had the courage to say,
"I don't want a pardon yet,
I want to fight."
I'm really proud
to be on a legal team
that supported him in that.
[producer]
Had anybody heard that?
I don't think so.
I had to get permission
from the client to tell it.
We were praying to God that
we didn't have to use a pardon.
But I knew
that Sullivan was waiting
for the election to come,
and if Biden had won,
which he did,
and my husband hadn't gotten
pardoned from Tr*mp,
they would have somehow
figured out a way
to rescind any kind of dismissal
and take him back into court
and retry him or whatever.
I knew that was
what his plan was.
That's how vindictive
that judge was.
And I was grateful,
but I was also sad
because it should have
never came to that.
My husband didn't need a pardon.
He didn't do anything wrong.
And so, the pardon
is kind of one of those things
where it's a little bit
bittersweet.
Okay,
inside this little box is a--
the original pardon of innocence
given to General Michael Flynn
by Donald Tr*mp
in November of 2020.
Again, an unprecedented
event in American history
where someone has given--
been given a presidential
pardon
who is innocent of the charges
because the charges were
dropped by the Department of
Justice.
So, there was no reason
for the pardon anyway.
And that's why he called it
a pardon of innocence
because he had to
pardon an innocent man
because the system
would not let go.
It's extraordinary...
and unprecedented.
[producer] And your brother
has never opened that?
Apparently not.
[Flynn] He says, "You know,
the only person in--
in Washington, DC,
who's been screwed worse
than you is probably me."
And I said,
"No, Mister President, I-- "
you know, I said, "I'm not
so sure that's the case,
because I've--
you know, sitting here today,
I feel pretty screwed,"
you know.
And we were joking for a minute,
banter back and forth,
and, you know, just about that.
And he goes, "Well, I'm gonna,
I'm gonna issue a pardon.
I just want you to know
that, you know,
this should end anything."
He goes, he goes, "Now you're
the cleanest man in America."
He goes, "There's nobody
cleaner than you after this,
after this pardon," you know.
That was November 2020,
so, you know, three years plus.
[producer] Did you harbor
some resentment towards Tr*mp?
Uh, I did. I did it.
Initially, I did,
because he was not kind to me.
I mean, he said some
nasty things about me
after I left, you know,
called me a liar.
In fairness, because
it was something
that I did see in him,
was that he really didn't know,
he didn't know the ways
of Washington, DC.
He really didn't.
[Tracy] To this day,
nobody has ever gone on record
and said what the DOJ
was going to go
after Michael Flynn Jr. for.
I would assume likely
the same thing they went
after the business
partners for, FARA violations.
Just recently, the government
has dropped the case
against General Flynn's
business partner
at the Flynn Intel Group.
Once the jury in DC came back
with a guilty verdict,
Judge Trenga overturned
that verdict
due to lack of evidence
in the case
because there is none.
There is no evidence
that proves any of the things
that the DOJ was advancing.
[Flynn] Barack Obama, right?
[Michael Jr.] July 14th,
They extend-- so that's 2014.
A year and a half later,
these bastards
got me under investigation.
You know, "I extend
my sincere thanks,"
- you know?
- [chuckles]
[Tracy] I want more people,
even if they don't say,
"I like that guy.
I'm on his team now,"
I want them to, to understand
what happened,
to understand
what happened to him,
and to be able to
at least give him
the respect he deserves,
even if they don't
agree with him.
That is,
is the bare minimum, um,
and learning from him
and his story will go a long way
to getting through
all the other issues
that we have right now, because
it is the light switch.
If you understand
what happened to him,
you start to peel back
the curtain on everything.
I think the General Flynn story
is actually
the foundational story
that America needs to
understand the truth of
to be able to understand
what has occurred
within our government,
and the mounting corruption
since then.
[Jack] If they can learn
something
from what Michael went through,
to believe in this country
under, under extreme and
extraordinary circumstances
and still come through
the other side,
and not give up on America,
that's what they need to learn
from what this documentary
can portray him.
It is, in fact, the truth.
He will not stop fighting
for this republic.
For this, what he calls, experiment.
[Barbara] My mother
and father would be so proud
because he's the only person
that could've withstood.
They knew... they knew
that he was the only one.
He was-- he was
meant for this time.
He's the only person
that could've withstood
this type of,
you know, this evil,
this unfathomable
domestic evil
that we're facing--
and b*at it too.
It-- it's very hard
not to get jaded
and turned off and just say,
"I'm just gonna go away."
Mike Flynn is not
going to do that.
Mike Flynn is, I think
people need to understand,
he's going to be there
fighting for them.
Maybe not as
an elected official,
but certainly
as a public person,
as a, as a, as a veteran,
as a father, as a grandfather.
He's going to be out there
swinging at the fences
to try to bring sanity
back to this country.
Because... we are
going off the rails.
This country is going
off the rails
in many, in many
different directions.
Economically, militarily,
and socially,
we are in a bad place right now,
and I think people--
people want hope,
people need hope,
and more importantly,
people need warriors,
and I think you're gonna
get that from General Flynn.
Again, the most important
stories about this
are not the stories
about the bad things
that people have done, right,
about the evil
that these people have done,
the way these people have
tried to destroy family--
families, and the way that
they've corrupted the country.
No, the most important thing
is to go to the other side
and look at what happened.
I mean, look at
all these things.
I mean, look at how,
how it's made them,
how it's made them brighter,
and stronger, right.
People, I mean,
people look to their family,
look to that family,
as an example.
It's like, "Well, if the Flynns
went through this,
then we can certainly
get through it."
You know, "If, wow,
they did that to General Flynn,
I guess I can get
through this."
You know, and he's okay.
He got through it
with faith and his family.
He got through it.
The Flynns pulled together,
the American people
can pull together.
Because if we pull together,
and we drive this darkness out,
then we can touch
the whole world.
We can touch the whole world.
I think
that General Flynn's story
is an inspiring story
because he wasn't broken.
And as he will say readily,
he wasn't broken
because of the love
of his family
and because of his faith.
General Flynn found himself
in a circumstance
he did not anticipate at all.
This is not the life
he prepared for at all.
He's not a political figure,
he's not even a Republican.
Not politically active.
I don't think he ever
expected to find himself
in the fulcrum of history.
And I know
he never expected himself
to be persecuted
by his own government
that he had served for
the course of his entire life.
But all of that happened,
and these things do happen.
We can't know our future.
None of it is known.
I have some sense of what
I'm having for dinner tonight.
Beyond that, it's opaque.
And that's true for all of us.
And we all could wind up
in a situation like that,
and the only thing
that we can hope for
is the strength to continue
to tell the truth
in the face of adversity,
and to be surrounded by people
we love who support us,
and to come out
on the other end whole.
And he's achieved all of that.
And so, I see his story
as a great victory,
actually as a triumph.
He's still whole.
He's wounded
by what happened to him,
his family's wounded
by what happened to him,
but he's not broken.
He still has dignity.
And he still has an unwavering
commitment to tell the truth.
You may not agree with him,
but he's not lying to you.
He's saying what
he really thinks.
And if you come out
of a situation like the one
he lived through
with that intact, you've won.
Is there any regrets
that you have in life?
Right? [chuckles]
And-- and for what
I've experienced,
I-- I should sit here and say,
"I got a lot of f--
I got a lot of regrets."
Um, but when I look back
on my life,
and I understand the lives
that were lost...
I mean, I'm sitting here
with you, and I'm like--
[exhales] Phew!
I'm like, you know, I'm here,
and I can tell my story.
[uplifting music playing]
[music fades out]
Flynn (2024)
Moderator: Maskath3