[Aquidneck Island Productions introductory theme]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[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 military.
[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 war, that means we failed.
That's the-- that's the fascinating thing about war.
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 war.
We are a failure at winning wars.
[menacing music playing]
[Flynn] Peace is the aberration and war 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.
- [tank 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.
War is like this massive racket.
I mean, we are at war constantly.
At the end of the day, it's about making money.
[tank 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 500 and 600 people,
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 burned.
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 military importance
to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war.
[dramatic music playing]
[man] When war 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 invade a sovereign nation like Iraq.
I always questioned the necessity of that war.
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 War 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 war 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 bitches
that are just, you know." I mean, we're still at war.
There's people overseas being killed.
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 war 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 terrorists,
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 terrorists,
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 military-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 193 countries on the planet,
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 military 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 ammunition 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
military and military 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 war, 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 battlefield.
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 war. 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 military,
and I don't use my Irish too often, but,
you know, they say, "Fuck up and move up." Right?
And, you know, and I'm thinking,
"Oh, maybe, maybe I fucked 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 military, 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 military?
And that's why he had strong support.
But in January, President Obama told
the New Yorker magazine's David Remnick that ISIS,
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 ISIS 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 ISIS
was expanding rapidly and they were in like
20-, you know, - 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, fuck, 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 military,
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, 15 years old, 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,
40-- after all they've been through, I don't know,
48 years, 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 military.
All you know is a command structure like the military.
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 military 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 Trump 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 Trump? Are you out of your mind?"
And he goes, "I'm telling you right now,
Donald Trump can beat 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 Trump 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 Trump was the one that had that, that's,
that was the conversation that I initially had with him.
I was happy to support Trump 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 Trump.
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 Trump
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 Trump,
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!
[Trump] 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 military-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 shot 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 Trump.
Trump 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.
Trump traveled with Michael for months before he was elected.
Pence was pulled in politically.
Mike became close to Trump 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 shit about the politics.
What I cared about was our country.
So I get a phone call, you know, from Trump, 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.
[Trump on TV] They spied on my campaign.
[Leslie on TV] There's no evidence of that.
- [Trump] 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. Trump 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 Trump 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 Trump 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 Trump is,
don't hire, don't hire General Flynn.
I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
[Flynn] So I go upstairs to Trump'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 threat 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 attacked.
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 war, 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 war.
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 war.
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 military theoretician,
studied him.
Everybody that's ever served in the military at some level,
stayed in long enough, has-- has...
Hell, even a lot of people in business
study Sun Tzu's Art of War.
Well, what did Sun Tzu say about war?
War is deception.
A war can be a war in the narratives,
in how information is deployed
in order to manipulate the belief system of people.
And so now, instead of, [imitates gunshot] you know,
putting a bullet 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 War.
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 military-industrial complex.
He used this term
"the military-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 kill you.
You know, maybe not shoot 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 Trump,
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, Trump 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 Trump.
"You know, you need him to win the evangelicals."
That's how they sold him. "He's an evangelical."
Trump 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 Trump,
to the extent he could,
to go along with the conventions of,
of Washington as it existed before Trump 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 Trump
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 Trump,
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 firing some missiles.
This is the first time that the Trump 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 Trump that weekend.
I-- I took Abe and Trump 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 fucking 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 Trump,
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 Trump'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 Trump 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 Trump 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 Trump
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 Trump.
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 Trump
and then President Trump.
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 Trump's National Security Advisor, they were fucked.
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 shit 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 fucking 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 shit 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 killed 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 military 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 shitting 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 weapon to wield because
they were going after General Flynn's business partner
and Ekim Alptekin.
As sort of a pawn,
they looped in a threat 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 Trump,
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,
25 years in prison.
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 90 days" or something.
"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 killing himself.
He's contemplating suicide.
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 shot
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--
700 dollars. All of a sudden, you know,
you go from having a 20,000-dollar bill
to a, you know, 350,000-dollar bill
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 300,000 dollars a month.
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 fuck? 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 Trump,
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.
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 99 cents store anymore.
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 shoot 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 shoot 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 Trump 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 Trump,
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 Trump 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 Trump?
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 beat 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]