Michael Flynn and the Conservative Spidey-Sense Trouble from minute one.
SOHRAB AHMARI / DEC. 1, 2017
Something was off about Michael Flynn, the retired Army lieutenant general whose brief tenure as Donald Trump’s first national security adviser has landed him in legal hot water. Flynn promoted the so-called alt-right. He dallied with Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin propaganda network RT (formerly “Russia Today”). And his anti-Islamism too often became indistinguishable from bigotry against Muslims. Yet Trumpian hard-liners adored Flynn, while the softer Trumpians in the GOP establishment suppressed their Spidey-sense and played down criticism of the general’s judgment.
Now the embrace of Flynn is looking like one more bad Trumpian bet.
On Friday, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation regarding his contacts with Russian officials during the presidential transition. ABC News reported that Flynn has offered to cooperate fully with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. According to ABC, the general is prepared to testify that he reached out to the Russian Embassy at the behest of candidate Trump.
It remains to be seen whether Flynn’s testimony will yield bigger charges against more senior members of the Trump administration. The conduct that resulted in Flynn’s plea does not amount to “collusion” with Moscow, but, as Eli Lake pointed out in Bloomberg View, if Flynn’s contacts with the Russians “involved the emails the U.S. intelligence community charges Russia stole from leading Democrats, then Mueller will have uncovered evidence of actual collusion between the president and a foreign adversary during the election.”
That is a big “if.” For now, it is worth dwelling on the record and qualities that raised alarms about Flynn long before “collusion” became something of a national mantra. Among the general’s more bizarre pre-election moves was his endorsement of the alt-right darling Mike Cernovich. In October 2016, for example, Flynn urged his followers on Twitter to buy Cernovich’s “terrific” book The Gorilla Mindset.
Having encountered some of Cernovich’s ideas, I took to Twitter to ask: Why is a three-star general and leading presidential adviser blurbing this fever-swamp creature’s book? Cernovich, after all, says things like: “Go a week without watching porn or spilling your seed. Eat clean. Train hard. That is how you make super serum. Girls become addicted.” Some of Cernovich’s other recommendations for making “super serum” aren’t fit to publish on COMMENTARY‘s website. (When Trump nominated Flynn as his first NSA, my colleague Noah Rothman cataloged, many of the general’s other questionable statements. They included comparing Russia’s state-run media with CNN and MSNBC, and replying favorably to a tweeter who wrote “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.”)
I remember the furious reaction to my Flynn criticisms. Several of my more Trump-friendly conservative friends emailed or called to say, in effect: Where’s your head at? Get with the program. Flynn is a serious man. Ignore his tweets and focus on policy, where Flynn shares many of your instincts.
I hate to tell these friends that I told you so, but I told you so. There were plenty of national security professionals in Washington who were hawkish on Iran and Islamism and grasped the link between ideology and terror, but who didn’t agree to be feted by Putin or think it wise to endorse nutsy figures like Cernovich. And yet, Trump chose Flynn.
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