reSee.it - Tweets Saved By @GenFlynn

Posted - April 23, 2026 at 11:58 AM

Saved - April 24, 2026 at 3:59 AM

reSee.it AI Summary

I reveal that FLYNN exposes how the justice system and an unchecked intelligence apparatus pursued a sitting National Security Advisor to silence dissent and the people. They came after me and my family to send a message to you. The goal wasn’t my defeat but the opening move to erase accountability and sustain perpetual war. Yet the story ends in awakening: Americans are rising, reclaiming our voice, our schools, our elections, and our future.

@GenFlynn - General Mike Flynn

For the first time ever, the full FLYNN movie is free to watch, and only on X. Deliver the truth, whatever the cost. That was the mission when we first made this film, and it still remains the mission today. What you are about to watch is not just the story of one general, one family, or one administration. It is the story of an organized movement that weaponized the full machinery of the American justice system and the full weight of an out of control U. S. intelligence apparatus against a sitting National Security Advisor, and by extension, against every single American citizen who still believed they had a voice in their own country. They came after me because I got in the way. They came after my family because they wanted to send a message to yours. What happened to me was never the end goal. It was the opening move in a coordinated campaign to silence the American people, dismantle every layer of accountability, and protect the machine of perpetual war from the very citizens it was built to serve. Folks, this is far bigger than me. This is about you, your family, your children, and the country we all love. FLYNN pulls back the curtain on how it happened, who was behind it, and why they remain terrified of the truth reaching the American people. But remember this. The story does not end in darkness. It ends in awakening. Millions of Americans are standing up, stepping up, and speaking out. Faith is rising across this land. Families are fighting back. Communities are reclaiming their voice, their schools, their elections, and their future. What the enemies of this Republic meant for destruction, Almighty God and the American people are turning into a movement that no force on earth, and no force in hell, can stop. We are not a defeated nation. We are a nation being reborn. The local action of everyday Americans is driving national impact, and the best chapter of the American story is the one we are writing together, right now.

Video Transcript AI Summary

General Michael Flynn, a highly respected former general and intelligence officer, recounts a lifelong connection to the ocean and service to the country, describing his career as a path that led him to become the deputy and later national security adviser to President Trump. He frames his experience as a stark contrast between his duty and a perceived betrayal by the U.S. government and its institutions. Key points and sequence of events: - Early career and worldview - Flynn describes growing up near the ocean, surfing, and a commitment to service. He says he loves the country and entered the service to defend it. - He recalls facing what he calls the “worst enemy” in America after returning from service and becoming a target of accusations of treason and being called a Russian spy. - War, policy, and intelligence critique - Flynn discusses the costs and consequences of war, praising sacrifice but arguing that war is a failure of policy, diplomacy, and leadership. - He portrays war as a constant state driven by money within the military-industrial complex and questions the necessity and management of ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. - He recounts the moment of taking command of a battalion and witnessing a helicopter crash, describing the grim realities of war and the reaction of coalition forces. - Intelligence reform and career advancement - Flynn emphasizes reforms to intelligence in Afghanistan, referencing a 2010 report titled a blueprint for making intelligence relevant in Afghanistan, which he authored as a senior intel officer. - He explains his appointment to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Senate confirmation process, highlighting the opposition from the existing intelligence establishment (SES) and the resistance within Washington. - He notes how his leadership and intelligence work were both celebrated by some allies and targeted by others who wanted to push him out. - Personal and family impact - Flynn’s wife, Laurie, is described as a stabilizing force; the couple recounts decades of marriage, raising a family, and the toll of public life on their private lives. - He discusses the stress and trauma inflicted on his family during investigations, including the impact on his son and grandchildren, and describes the emotional and financial burdens of legal battles. - Transition to politics and Trump - Flynn relates how his experience and reputation led him to work with Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, where he became a trusted adviser and ally. - He recounts meeting with Trump in 2015, the several-month collaboration, and his view of Trump as someone who could fundamentally change U.S. policy away from endless wars. - He describes the 2016 presidential transition, his offer to be national security adviser, and the initial endorsement by Trump, followed by a White House shake-up. - National security adviser role and the Russia narrative - Flynn explains the circumstances around his appointment as national security adviser and the opposing views within the White House about Russia and sanctions. - He recounts briefing the president and key figures in foreign policy, and the subsequent disputes and accusations that led to his resignation beneath a cloud of controversy, including claims that he had lied about sanctions. - Investigations, FARA, and prosecutorial conduct - Flynn details the scrutiny around his contacts with Russian officials and later the Flynn Intel Group’s work in Turkey, explaining that he was accused of violating FARA for actions tied to a private businessman rather than government-directed activity. - He discusses the narrative of being accused of being a Russian or Turkish spy, the portrayal of his son as a target, and the role of Covington & Burling in his legal defense. - He charges that the government used off-the-books deals and pressured plea agreements to pressure him into pleading guilty, including allegations of a “deal” that would protect his son from prosecution. - The courtroom and legal process - Flynn describes the high-profile court hearings led by Judge Emmet Sullivan, who publicly accused him of treason, stirred dramatic tensions, and threatened prison time for lying to the FBI. - He recalls the shock of the judge’s behavior, the break in proceedings, and the eventual decision to delay sentencing as he faced immense legal and financial strain. - Sidney Powell, exculpatory evidence, and defense strategy - Flynn’s legal team changes: Covington & Burling is replaced by Sidney Powell, who uncovers conflicts of interest and unveils Brady material and exculpatory evidence that had not been disclosed. - Powell’s involvement is described as a turning point that allowed Flynn to challenge government misconduct and pursue the truth rather than simply accepting a guilty plea. - Public support, family resilience, and the pardon - Flynn and family describe a groundswell of support from ordinary Americans through letters, gifts, and fundraising, including a legal defense fund that helped sustain them through financial hardship. - They describe the eventual decision by President Trump to issue a pardon of innocence in November 2020 after the government moved to dismiss the case, noting that Flynn did not seek the pardon initially and that Sidney Powell advised against accepting a plea in order to secure full vindication. - Flynn reflects on how the pardon, while welcome, carried mixed feelings given the years of damage and public misunderstanding. - Reflections on power, governance, and the future - The narrative frames a broader critique of entrenched agencies, media influence, and political storytelling, alleging the intelligence and justice systems have been weaponized and corrupted by political agendas. - The speakers emphasize the importance of truth, resilience, faith in family, and public accountability, arguing that Flynn’s story should illuminate issues of governance, the integrity of institutions, and the need for reform to restore trust in the republic. - The closing messages stress ongoing commitment to fight for reconciliation and reform, with Flynn characterized as a persistent presence who, despite wounds, remains engaged in public life and the defense of the republic. Throughout, the speakers present Flynn as a figure who faced relentless pressure from political and bureaucratic forces, endured personal and family hardship, and ultimately sought redress and vindication through a combination of legal advocacy, public support, and a historic presidential pardon. The narrative centers on themes of duty, betrayal, reform, and perseverance in the face of systemic challenges.

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Full Transcript

Speaker 0: 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. I went into the service because I love our country. Speaker 1: He was one of the most respected generals in the military. Speaker 0: 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. Speaker 2: President Obama said, but I do have one specific recommendation. Stay away from Michael Flynn. He's bad news. Speaker 0: They're calling me a traitor. They're saying that I committed treason. They're saying I'm a Russian spy. That Obama was involved in the targeting of Flynn. Speaker 2: He was by definition the most dangerous possible person. Speaker 3: I had to fire Speaker 4: That's the Speaker 5: I made his contact Yeah. Speaker 6: And General Flynn General Mike Flynn. Speaker 0: There was a moment where I just felt like I was drowning, and all of a sudden, a whole series of things started happening. I actually feel blessed to be alive right now, and I can tell my story. If we're going to war, that means we failed. That's it. That's the the fascinating thing about war. It's it is a absolute failure of policy. It's a failure of diplomacy. It's a failure of leadership. Probably one of greatest sacrifices, it's 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 Speaker 4: they're Speaker 0: there, and and they're dead. We are a plus gold star for participating in war. We are a failure at winning wars. 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. 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. Speaker 7: Sounds rolling. All three cameras, we're good. Danny, your speed. Speaker 0: K. We're ready when you are. I had just taken command of a battalion of about between five and six hundred 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. 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 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. K? Bumps that were probably no more than like two feet high. K? And those were the bodies. And you, 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 staring right there. You're standing there going, oh, crap. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. Speaker 8: When the war broke out in Iraq, I I was sort of like, well, I guess we have to do this, but hold on a second. I 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 Speaker 0: 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 two. Let me show you. I gave you a little bit of explanation. Tucker This Speaker 2: is wild. Speaker 0: Tucker, I brought I'm brought in here like a body, I don't know, was over a year, a year and a half ago. I'm brought into this room and I meet these two moms. And 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. Speaker 2: 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 2003 that I realized how wrong I had been, the degree to which I had been lied to. Speaker 7: It was a big turning point Speaker 2: for It was it changed my life completely, and I realized I've been complicit in this lie. Speaker 0: I don't care what party they're in. Speaker 9: It it they're in Speaker 0: Washington DC. That's the party. They have their black tie affairs. They have their little clubs, little clicks, and they got their little business enterprise that that that floats around in these events. I I would I would be sick to my stomach in some of those things because you're looking around going, you know, these are Speaker 2: 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 US 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 US stronger. Speaker 10: 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. Speaker 0: Paul 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. Speaker 11: 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, 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. Speaker 3: 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 or 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. Speaker 11: There are a 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. Speaker 8: 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 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 gonna be there for a long time. Speaker 1: I actually met General Flynn for the first time around 2005 or 2006 in Iraq. We would go to areas where they train military and military intelligence, And General Flynn was oftentimes, you know, put up on the screen as someone who had done a a superior job. I mean, he was treated as the greatest intelligence general for his generation. Everybody respected his ability to really perfect intelligence. Speaker 0: The objectives, the overall our overarching objectives, we 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 gonna end? When when you know, I mean, it can end. It can actually end. And it can end on our terms. Speaker 7: The report you wrote in 2010 Right. Fixing intel. Speaker 0: Mhmm. In fact, it's right here. Speaker 7: Let's see it. Speaker 0: 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 do 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 Speaker 9: an Speaker 0: 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 I'm hoping that it's not too late. Speaker 5: When general Michael Flynn found out, all sorts of intelligence was that was necessary for soldiers as they were, you know, 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. Speaker 3: 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 is able to tell Mike, hey, this is what I'm seeing down here, without 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 gonna get accurate information and be able to use that and act on it. This gets published. Speaker 0: 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, you know, 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. 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 gonna be able to keep our family there. You know, this is good. I'm gonna get promoted. Speaker 12: 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. Speaker 0: There's a phrase in the military, and I don't I won't I don't, you know, use my Irish too often, but, you know, they say fuck up and move up. Right? And, you know, and I'm thinking, well, maybe maybe I fucked up so bad that they're they're just gonna move me up to to to shut me up. Speaker 2: It may very well be a case of bringing your enemies as close as you can so you control them. Speaker 0: Big title and a big job. Big job. Huge job. Speaker 8: 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 if I if I unless you're the national security adviser, which he ended up becoming as well. Speaker 0: I've had a lot of time in combat, probably more more time in combat than most people, you know, that that were in my cat sort of category, and I've had a lot of time, you know, in the field in in in operational assignments, and and I'm also a democrat. Speaker 3: We were Kennedy democrats, never Republicans. You're blue collar Kennedy Democrats. Speaker 8: And and the media loved Mike at that time, interestingly enough. The because, again, the the Obama administration say, hey. This is our guy. He's a democrat. He comes from a democrat family. This guy's 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 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 gonna railroad him out of here. Speaker 0: I've kept every I'm like a pack rat with stuff, know, awards, decorations, gifts that were given to me, and I've kept binders of them, you know, of different things, orders Speaker 13: for every 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, you know, get to the next, you know, rung within the federal government. This is what matters. And it was wonderful to see that someone could rise to such heights, while keeping so true to to these values that made America great. Speaker 1: 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. Speaker 14: 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. Speaker 6: 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 gonna happen. Speaker 0: 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 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 gonna change it. That's not that's not right. Speaker 11: 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. Speaker 0: I 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 a an office call with Jim Clapper because 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. He says, 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 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, you can ask Laurie about it, you know, if she even remembers that that part because there were so many. But she was probably relieved I was, you know, I finally got to retire. I never changed. I never changed. People that know me from the time I was a kid to the people that work with me as a young officer and all throughout my career, I never changed. So what changed? And 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. 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 then definitely as a senior intelligence officer is to protect, save, and and win. These assholes are towing a political narrative that was total bullshit. Speaker 11: 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 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 a him being resigned was totally unacceptable. Speaker 15: 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 work on his own. Speaker 9: In your career, I have always found, whether it's in your service or if you spend a lot of time in the 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 twenty years. So, Mike, we all wanna say thank you for a great job. We wanna thank you for making a great, great difference. Laurie, we wish you only the best. We know that 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 Flynn's. Speaker 3: That was without a doubt a real test of a of a relationship, and and she was patient. They saw her get mad, but she knew he was right, and I know we all knew he was right. Laurie was a stabilizing force in his life. She's a special gal. She's strong, unwavering commitment. Speaker 8: I think Laurie saved his life actually as a teenager, if you ask me. I think that if Michael hadn't really, you know, been kinda swept up in that relationship, as a teenager, you're talking 14, 15 years old, as a young person, I think that Michael could have gone a completely different direction. Probably God at work there, honestly, when that relationship bloomed. And and and who would have thought that at 14 and 15 years old, you know, they'd be married, you know, today, 40 after all they've been through, I don't know, forty eight years, almost going on fifty 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 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, the ROTC program was another godsend for him, you know, for a rambunctious guy like Mike Flynn. Speaker 15: 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, didn't date in ninth grade or anything. We just kinda went steady for two weeks, and then we went our separate ways. I mean, always saw him in the halls in high school, but we kinda had our own life for 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. Speaker 0: So when Laurie and I were married, during the wedding ceremony, the priest who was also a cousin of ours, Philip, father Philip, is a part of the beach and we call it the rock. We would go spend a lot of time surfing there. He described Laurie as that rock, unmovable. He described me as the tide. Speaker 15: I think my husband is the rock really. I think we are 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 always put it in a better light than I could. Speaker 0: And there could have been no better description in our marriage. You know, we're getting ready to go into forty two 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 gonna be able to do. And many of Speaker 15: the times because I'm deployed. Prayer and God came back into my life, into both of our lives because we were at wits end sometimes and that was Speaker 0: belonged to my grandfather. We came back to this house that had one bedroom, one little tiny bathroom, a Speaker 16: little tiny kitchen. All the boys were in a were in bunk beds and my parents slept in the living room. It was a pull out couch. Speaker 17: 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. Know, I gotta go because it was one bathroom, but that bathroom door, they got knocked down a few times. Speaker 6: 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. Speaker 3: And the beach was there. The water was an outlet for us. Speaker 8: I mean, I'm in paddling out when I was seven or eight years old in the lineup in big waves, Harder Ruggles Avenue. Speaker 0: It was literally, you could run out in our backyard, pick up a, you know, a throwing rock and you could throw it into the ocean. It was that close. Speaker 3: We started to realize, hey, there's guys out there surfing and we could swim like fish. Speaker 6: And the kids would be swarming all over the beach. Speaker 16: 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. Speaker 6: You know, we would go surf all winter, surfing hurricanes, so it taught us a lot about endurance, being in the ocean for hours. There's a lot of Speaker 0: 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, taken 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 to this day. Speaker 8: You gotta 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. You know, he wants Speaker 6: to work. He still wants to have, service to the country again, service again. Speaker 8: Michael Jr. Was actually working for a company that I was running at the time and he came to me and said, I'm gonna go work for my dad. We're gonna 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 Speaker 18: get out of service. We essentially formed a business together. He was just like, wanna go to business again? I said, absolutely. I mean, this was a guy that I'd grown up, you know, 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 was it an opportunity I knew I had to take, that I wanted to take. I Speaker 0: love the idea of being able to work with him because for many, years of his life, I wasn't around with military and deployments and moves and 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 that I made I was so happy that I was gonna be able to do that with him to be closer to him, work with him on a daily basis. Speaker 6: People started to reach out to him to ask him for his advice on a lot of the foreign you know, what was happening in foreign countries. And so he was advising everybody. When I look at what the country needed, the country didn't need another Clinton or another Bush. That was clear. Speaker 18: I am pretty sure that he knew then that Donald Trump was going to be the 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 to help those Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, Speaker 0: but also but I I never said no. I I was just never asked. You know, I was I was praying that there was gonna be somebody that rose out of the ashes who wasn't a typical politician. Speaker 8: And I looked at him and go, Donald Trump, are you out of your mind? 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 is ready for something different. Speaker 18: He met Trump for the first time in 2015. He expected it to only be like maybe a twenty or thirty minute meeting. It turned into like a two and a half hour long meeting. Speaker 0: If we can end these these wars that we are in where 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. Speaker 15: I was happy to support Trump as well because I just wanted to see I want I didn't see all the hope and change as much as I'd want, you know, with Obama, and I wanted to see what would happen with Trump. My first bombshell, my first Speaker 17: 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 Speaker 18: politics. Speaker 0: Elect Donald Trump as the next president of The United States Of America. Thank you very much and God bless America. 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 and go to these different campaign rallies. We'd do three or four cities in in a day. And every place that we went to would have, you know, no less than 10,000 people. In most cases, they had twenty, thirty thousand people. Speaker 4: Unbelievable. Speaker 7: We are going to win back the White House. Speaker 0: 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 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 and, you know, he has a shot at being president of The United States Of America. Big deal. Right? It's huge. It's historic. And so you fast forward into into June 2016, and now I get a phone call Corey Lewandowski saying, hey, we're gonna vet you for vice president of The United States. I said, wow. You know, that's that was like I didn't expect that. I Speaker 3: I'm I'm saying it. I 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. Prebis 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, Speaker 0: I don't know, adviser, ally in the trenches through through the election process. Mike Pence, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie, and Mike Flynn. You know, and I and I 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. All 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 I'm not gonna go with you as as the vice president. And he and he kinda, you know, flippantly jokes. He says, another time, you know, maybe being a democrat would be a good thing. He goes, but it's just, you know, it's not gonna 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 gonna be his his choice. Speaker 4: The next vice president of The United States, governor Mike Pence. Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Speaker 10: Thank you. Speaker 0: 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 know it took a dime, not a dime. I didn't I didn't get paid a cent. I did that because that's what I felt like was my my, like, responsibility. Speaker 7: They spied on my Speaker 19: campaign there's no real evidence of that. Speaker 4: Of course, there is. No. It's all over the place. Leslie Speaker 7: Sir? Spied on my campaign and they Can I Speaker 0: 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. Speaker 19: Can't put on things we can't verify. Speaker 7: Leslie, they spied on my campaign. Speaker 19: Well, we can't verify. Speaker 4: That's been totally verified. Speaker 20: No. Donald j Trump will become the forty fifth president of The United States, defeating Hillary Clinton in a campaign unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime. Speaker 18: And I'd be lying if I if if I didn't admit that, like, you know, I I I didn't really think Trump was gonna win either. But then he got elected. Speaker 21: And 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. Speaker 0: 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 the dictator over in North Korea, and the other was General Mike Flynn. Speaker 1: You know, the one thing Obama told tells Trump is don't hire don't hire General Flynn. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Speaker 0: 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. He goes, yeah, neither do I. And he goes, I don't trust the guy. I stood up for him. I stood up with him. We won. And he turns around and goes, I 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. Shook hands. We took took some photos. We put out a a 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. Speaker 11: There's going to be a complete cleansing of the fraud, waste, and abuse because there was indications that he was gonna do a a look, an audit, into the national security system to root out the rot, but not just in one little agency. The national security adviser is essentially above 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 Speaker 2: 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, 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. Speaker 0: Probably one of the most powerful positions in the entirety of the government because you are a close personal adviser 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, and I was brutally brutally attacked. Speaker 13: The bureaucracy targeted those of us who supported the president's mission of making the federal bureaucracy accountable to the American people. Speaker 0: 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, Laurie, 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. Speaker 22: It's an unprecedented strike. The White House punishing Russia in part for interfering in the US election. Speaker 23: The US is ordering 35 Russian intelligence operatives and their families in California and Washington DC out of the country. Speaker 0: So 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? 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? Speaker 6: Tonight, a Kremlin spokesman is accusing president Obama of trying to spoil US Russian relations. Speaker 0: 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 the current administration's call. I don't appreciate what happened, but, and I know that you're gonna have to take some measures, but let's not have a tit for tat because we don't wanna we don't wanna 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 gonna take any extreme action. Talk about, you know, being able to settle down something that could have gotten vastly worse. Why do we have Speaker 1: a State Department? Why do we have all these intelligence agencies? It's to, you know, make 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 adviser. His job, his role was to help to coordinate that whole strategy across all of government to try to do what? Prevent war. Speaker 4: 01/20/2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. Speaker 0: We were ready for change and we needed to get things moving. One of the things that I was looking to do was to dig in and take a hard look at some of the programs that the US intelligence community was involved in that I felt were, useless, costly, and, 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, okay, this program that's been going on for a long time, what has it accomplished? Oh, we're gonna have to come I mean, and 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 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 there it was in the first week I was there, and it was me as the national security adviser now inside the White House. I got the same briefing, but this time they sent a whole bunch more people. Right? It was like they knew that because now I'm starting to to dig in. 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 as as hell, even a lot of people in business study Sun Tzu's art of war. Well, what does 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, 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. Speaker 2: The intelligence agencies are working with the legacy media to shape public perception of world events. That is speculation. I'm not some outsider who's guessing at this because I read about it on the Internet. I 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, you know, I've seen both sides of this my whole life for fifty three 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. Speaker 0: Because the CIAs, they're masters at propaganda. They're masters at at at what's called covert influence, covert operations. Hollywood, Speaker 2: 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. Speaker 0: Eisenhower had his own imperfections. JFK had his own imperfections, but they, you know, but they understood that there was something not right, and and Eisenhower was really the first in a very somber warning. Speaker 24: In the councils of government, we must car guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. Speaker 13: He used this term, the military industrial complex. And back then, in Eisenhower's era, it was not very well developed. 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. Speaker 0: 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. Speaker 2: I I think the assassinations of the nineteen sixties 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. Speaker 0: 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 the security state because it's not just the intelligence community, it's the Department of Defense. It includes the Department State. It includes places like the White House itself, and it includes the Department of Justice, includes the FBI. Speaker 8: 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. Speaker 2: It's grotesque. I mean, that's when you know when 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. Speaker 22: I I think there were conversations and messages between Peter Strzok and someone inside of the office of the vice president of The United States. Speaker 7: In Speaker 2: 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 me. Didn't really know Mike Pence. He's the governor of Indiana. Pence is a career politician. Trump is a casino promoter. Like, they haven't had a lot 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 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 kinda let things continue to go roughly the way they were going before. That's true. Speaker 5: I think Pence played an enormously destructive role. I know that I 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. Speaker 25: Good morning. Retired general Michael Flynn was during the campaign and is now one of the president's top advisers, 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. Speaker 0: We had the Japanese delegation down at Mar A Lago. She had 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 this. Speaker 4: And by the way, Rocketman should have been handled a long time ago. Speaker 0: And they were doing it because Abe of Japan is visiting president Trump that weekend. I I took Abe and Trump into a a SCIF, a secure facility that we set up at Mar A Lago. I took those two in there and briefed them on what was happening, 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 whole thing like I like I briefed millions of other intelligence briefings in the past. I laid it out in front of them. The next day, we we start we had more more talks with the Japanese, and we're we're still, you know, reeling, and the and the media is going crazy about all this stuff. I took, like, thirty minutes to go back over to my room because we're gonna 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 you? 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. Because this is one of these 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, gonna be fired, resigned. You know, it's all flying all over the place. So it's all leaked. The 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. I was like, really? I said, did 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, Rice. I want you to go let the president know that I wanna hear it from him. And he was like, he kinda like and he goes, you probably should put together a resignation letter. Speaker 15: When he called to tell me that he was resigning, you know, he told me that I'm gonna resign tonight, I was like, oh my god, really? And and I 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. Speaker 0: He 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. 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 I just wasn't a guy that that comes across as, you know, a a bullshitter, you know, or a liar. Right? He said, you know, he he kinda looked around the room and goes, you know, are we okay with this? You know, and 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 already apologized to him. So there's no, you know, hey, let's kiss and make up. We got a country to run here. Nope. Vice president didn't stand there and say, you know, you know what? I I can live with this. You know, Mike got it. I understand the that, you know, the the all the dynamics of what was happening. 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 kinda standing at the corner. And I walked up, gave him a hug, gave him like a, you know, a 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 gonna 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 and he said, okay. He didn't he didn't really know who he was. Now, obviously, Rice pre Rice Previous knew him and 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 sorta, you know, man love moment with with 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. Speaker 4: 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 as far as the actual making the call, he was just doing his job. That was very normal. You know, 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 I do. And by the way, with all of that being said, do think he's a fine man. Speaker 0: 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. K? 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. K? 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. Speaker 19: You look at this White House now, and it's hard to imagine two FBI agents ending up in the sit room. How did that happen? Speaker 0: I sent them. 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 counsel. Speaker 13: This was clearly a setup. The government will frequently try to railroad various individuals by not having by just telling them 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, you know, fair investigation, they're free to make up whatever they want about what what transpired because there was no recording and there was no representative of of their interviewee who, you know, could make, you know, a a record of what what transpired. Speaker 22: A bunch of the 7th Floor people, they all got together and had a meeting about this this interview they were gonna have with General Flynn, the ambush interview. And Bill Priestep 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 if it was just sheer happenstance that he 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 him to lie so we can get him fired or, you know, hold him accountable for for 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 wanna try and get him to lie to us? Speaker 13: This is yet another example of, you know, weaponization of, you know, federal investigations. Speaker 22: Both Peter Strzok and Joseph Pienka wrote 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 they referenced these things because there there were they didn't even believe he was lying. When you go into an interview like this, you're supposed to document everything in something called the three zero two. 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. Speaker 1: You know, I just told him 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 Prebis and and and others. Speaker 15: 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've tried to convince him of that, and as we know, it only exacerbated after that. Speaker 26: Michael Flynn, president Donald Trump's national security adviser, is under investigation by US counterintelligence agents for communications he's had with Russian officials. Speaker 13: What Stefan Halper did with the help of the leadership of the officer 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 Christel 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. Speaker 5: The stories about the peeing, the stories about the the drunkenness, the drug use Speaker 4: It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen. Speaker 13: 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. Speaker 5: 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 an arraignment, an FBI investigation. Same with General Flynn. Right? Speaker 13: 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 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. Speaker 5: Hillary Clinton on the stump this week. We're joined now by her campaign manager, Robbie Mook. Thank you for joining us this morning. Speaker 14: The hand of the Kremlin has been at work in this campaign for some time. It's clear that they are supporting Donald Trump. Speaker 13: Brennan and Obama and Comey, they inserted the Steele dossier into the 2017 intelligence community assessment as annex. So what they did is they took Russian disinformation, made it into a US intelligence product for the purpose of being able to cover themselves. If they were ever questioned about this nonsense in the Steele dossier, sourced to Russian intelligence, clear hit job against candidate Trump and then president Trump, they could say, oh, look. This is a US 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. Speaker 3: 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 adviser, they were fucked because he was gonna 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. Speaker 5: There was some story like, yeah. And then and then General Flynn left this event, this dinner with, with this woman who was 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. Speaker 0: 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 had getting ready to have a baby. Her life was ruined all because of this guy named this they they this guy they call Halper. Right? His name is Halper. Stefan Halper, the walrus. Right? The guy's a he's a he's a walking steam bath because he sweats all the time. Speaker 5: You know, to have your family exposed to that kind of that kind of ugliness because someone is determined to destroy you, these are very hard things. But again, comes back to like why, you know, why people are mad about this story, why I'm mad about the story, why it hurt, why it was painful for other families to watch too, to imagine what it was like for his family to to be targeted by these animals like that. Speaker 3: I mean, they they disparaged him as much as they possibly could in the media. It was all bullshit. It was all bullshit. They were sitting there as family going, Michael fucking has a girlfriend and great behavior in 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. Your name is all over the place. We kind of endeared ourselves to her. I wanna find out. Lori needed to know. They were saying stuff about Michael, and he had an affair she knew it wasn't true. But how does he think she felt when she had to go see her mother and they read it in the paper? 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. Speaker 0: I've said that I'm surprised that they haven't killed me, surprised that they've let me continue to live. 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 kinda go, oh, that's a conspiracy theorist. He's done this. He's done I mean, I I know that there's an entire movement of people or 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 adviser. Speaker 22: General Flynn had a 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 Turk 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 the Flynn Intel Group to do a job for him. Speaker 1: 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 multiyear, multi pronged investigation. Speaker 6: This Loftman guy who's running this FARA office, they send a letter to Mike saying, hey, you need to fill out this Farah form. So he didn't have to fill out a Farah form at all because he wasn't working for a Turkish government. He was working for a Turkish businessman. He's got a lawyer at the time. She says, well, the number one Farah filing office in the country is this Covington and Burling. Speaker 22: You know, you figure, I really don't need to do this, but I'm gonna consult these attorneys to see if I really need to file and they say you know what just to be Speaker 6: on the safe side file. And 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 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 Farah. What that did was that let the media take the term Farah, 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, know. He's a Russian spy. He's a Turkish spy. He's all he's all kinds of spies, you know. Speaker 22: 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 however 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. Speaker 6: They are smart again. Right? They're gonna take out the number one military intelligence officer of our country, the national security adviser who's about to find out everything. What do we do now? Let's go after his son. Speaker 18: Was there anything more significant on this timeline to you dad than than anything else or? You know? I mean, for me, it's that. Speaker 0: Yep. Speaker 18: That's it. If there's one thing that I think about Yep. More than Speaker 0: That's that's the meeting where they conspired to basically undermine the presidency of The United States Of America. Speaker 27: 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. Speaker 7: When did it dawn on you that Michael would be a target? Speaker 0: Probably by the middle of the summer, I started to feel that because they their FBI's knocking on his door. This is when I I had a really difficult time being able to communicate. We had to communicate through lawyers, so I can't even talk to my son. Speaker 7: Whose advice is that? Speaker 0: That's the advice of 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 the they call them the white shoe law firms in Washington, DC, Covington and Burling. And you really do feel like they have your best interests at heart. They, you they come across as as professionals. And man, was I wrong. A moment of of misjudgment on my part. That that's all part of that Washington DC establishment. You're looking at twenty five 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. K? Who 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 you. You're just kinda like, I gotta stop this, you know, I gotta stop this bleeding. It was mental and emotional bleeding. And it was happening to me, my wife, my kids, my family. I'll 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. Speaker 22: Michael Flynn Junior worked for Flynn Intel Group with his dad and the business partners. So they saw him as a weapon to wield because they were going after General Flynn's business partner and Akim Alptikan. As sort of a pawn, they looped in a threat against Michael Flynn junior to get general Flynn to plead guilty. Right. Speaker 18: A lot of people, you know, ask us that question, why did you guys even go with Covington and Burling? You know, they were the DC Fair experts. Speaker 0: They never really fought for anything. You know, they if you had something on Trump, you know, it would help you. They brought my son in knowing where he was in his life and and knowing how bad the the rule of law system is in Washington, DC, that was a major pain point. Huge. All the lawyers then became involved in Speaker 27: 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 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 And Burling lawyers, walked into federal court, and they lied. They lied when the judge asked if there was any off the books deals, and they said there wasn't. There was. And it was all part of this effort for Covington and Burling to protect their own hide rather than to look out for their client. It was disgusting. Speaker 15: And then also, don't forget that if you do plead not guilty and go to trial, you're gonna have a DC jury, you're gonna have a DC judge, and then you'll probably be found guilty, and, you know, you're looking at twenty, twenty five years in prison. So this is probably the best deal for you to do this. And I know 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 gonna get out of this is if you sign this plea deal. So that's what we did. Speaker 22: 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? Speaker 27: And so the government starts leaning on Covington and Covington starts leaning on General Flynn to to accept a plea deal. Single count of a violation of 18 u s c 1,001, which is providing a false statement to the government. Speaker 6: But of course, the unbelievable turn of events in today's news happened in federal court in Washington DC in the courtroom of judge Emmett Sullivan. Speaker 0: And then the prosecution is the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice had probably had 20 lawyers there. One of them was the Solicitor General for The United States Of America, and the the prosecutor, in my case, his name was Brandon Van Grecke. So we go into this courtroom, one of the most packed hearings that they ever had in the federal courthouse of Washington DC. Speaker 28: And 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, said, you turned your back on your country. Speaker 14: It sure sounded as though judge Sullivan was gonna send Flynn to the clinic for at least some period of time. Speaker 19: It did, Jake. The judge stressed that prison time was not off the table even though that's Speaker 0: And my lawyers tell me going into this hearing, don't worry, you're not gonna have to say much here. The prosecution's gonna 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 the flag behind his or his seat, the behind his bench. And he grabs the flag and he turns back and he, you know, he says, know, he 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, prosecutor, Ann Grakis, he was kinda taken by it too, the the DOJ lawyer. And he and he he 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, I'm not even in there for any of that. Speaker 6: He's hugging the American flag, and he's saying, you know, you turned your back on this country. We were shocked. There had Speaker 28: been no trial. There had been no exchange of evidence. There had been no cross examinations. Speaker 5: I thought his initial his outburst calling general Michael Flynn a traitor. I mean, it 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. Speaker 8: 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. Speaker 0: 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. Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Sally Yates can't control these people. And they're accusing me of spying against The United States Of America for Russia. Speaker 18: Of course, the media takes off it takes off. Well, even, you know, even judge Sullivan, you know, in the courtroom calls General Flynn traitor. The judge, Speaker 0: I believe, realized that what he just did would probably lead to a to some type of mistrial or 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 a time do we need time to take a break? And I do this, and 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. Speaker 13: The judge today really rebukes Michael Flynn and uses words like treason that you allegedly sold out your country. Speaker 8: After the treason comment and after the thank god they took that break, Laurie, 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. Speaker 0: He's gonna put him in jail today. He 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. Speaker 19: Threatening jail time for lying to the FBI. But but I wanna read you some more of this judge. This judge has become a fascinating new figure in this drama. Speaker 0: And he says, okay, we'll come back in like ninety days or something. We'll we'll revisit in ninety days. 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. Speaker 8: 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. Speaker 0: We we ended up going back over to my son Michael's house to to just find some relief. Speaker 6: The baby's running around. The baby, he's like crawling around. We don't know that they had threatened Mike. Speaker 18: 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 crying my eyes out. There's there's no resolution. You're two years into this now. Okay? And and you have no idea how much longer this this is gonna take. I'm battling with terrible PTSD, terrible PTSD from from from this experience. You know, I I just I describe it as this constant drumbeat of of of dot, you know, of of subpoenas, search warrants, you know, emails, email requests for information, eventual, you know, media, you know, parked outside of my house. Know, I wanna talk about that being alone feeling. There are very few things that are worse than than feeling alone when you're going through, like, incredible incredible trauma. 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 under 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 indite a ham sandwich concept, you know. Like, I I just all of a sudden, I'm I'm I'm hearing that my father could potentially go away to prison for fifteen years. I remember the conversations that I had with my mom about 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. Speaker 15: It's been really hard on him. 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. Speaker 18: You know, I mean, I didn't believe it. I just didn't believe it. Took me years to understand, like, oh, he was doing this to to to basically save this 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 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 to protect your child, you know. And I understand that. I understand that more now than than 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 subsequent subsequently had to talk to each other through our lawyers. It it was after that, I mean, I I went into I mean, I went into a a 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 that the only thing that kept me from the only thing that kept me alive was my was my son. And thank God thank God I have him in my life. Thank God I had him my life then. Speaker 0: Travis was a super important part of my life. I mean and and little peanut just turned six. I mean, 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's like he's 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. Is I love my family. And and I'd do anything for them. And I want my family to know that to know that. I want my family to know that, that I would do anything for them. 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 and going through that emotion of of of the of the idea that, you know, he's contemplating killing himself. He's contemplating suicide. Speaker 15: I always said, Michael, just know that no matter what happens, you know, your dad and I are here. You know, 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. Speaker 13: I mean, Speaker 0: you know, so for people, and maybe this is how I, you know, how I adjust myself, but 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 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 I this is just unimaginable to me. Speaker 27: That's why one of the most important things that General Flynn did is fired Covington and Burling and hired Sidney Powell, somebody who had the courage to go toe to toe with them. Speaker 0: Laurie 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. Speaker 28: Mike gave his consent as a client to allow Sydney 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 1,001 charge. They were not in a position where they should be involved in the matter before Judge Sullivan. Speaker 27: My first task was to help with the transition of the case from Covington and 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 in the case is to is to go forward and and dig our heels in and say, we're here to defend the truth, not the government's false narrative. Speaker 0: The decision then was not to get this judge to to lessen my sentence. The fight now was gonna be we're gonna pull my guilty plea. Speaker 16: Particularly in this case, the amount of exculpatory information that was coming in. Yeah. I mean, I saw all of it. I 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 the case literally unfold as new information came out. Speaker 13: Brady material exculpatory evidence In The US 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. Sydney Powell, you know, she was aware that Department of Justice was not bringing forth the Brady material, the exculpatory evidence that they were required to do. And I mean, it begs the question of, you know, what have they not done? You know, it's like, couldn't it be any more abusive? Speaker 0: The the Department of Justice inspector general's report on FISA abuse came out like a couple of days after that eighteenth December hearing. My briefing and debriefing of DIA for 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 I'm like protecting. 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. Speaker 18: There were more and more, you know, answers to questions that I had that that started to get kind of produced as Sydney started digging into, you know, into my father's case. You know, like, for example, like the reaction of the lawyers from Covington and 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 get him to plea. Speaker 8: You know, it's like you get one more shot at staying above water. Sydney convinced him, not only can we stay above water, we can start floating, and maybe we can get out of this. Speaker 13: This is a a lawless process. Speaker 8: The bills were mounting, okay, because it was and the special counsel had been appointed, and so Mike's now getting called in. So every time you get called in for a a proper session or whatever sessions you have to have with the special counsel, you better have at least one attorney, if not several attorneys available to you. So you're talking about Washington DC attorneys, 700. All of a sudden, you know, you go from having a $20,000 bill to a, you know, $350,000 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. Speaker 6: They weren't gonna get much money because Mike had was selling his to pay the legal fees and, you know, for that first, you know, probably five or six months. We're talking $300,000 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. Speaker 0: So there was a moment where I just felt like I was literally deep down underwater, and I felt like I was drowning. It was Speaker 3: 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. Right? So everybody gets it, but the media doesn't wanna carry that message. Instead, it's disgrace general Michael Flynn. And the more they push back on Trump, the more people started to realize general Flynn took a hit. Speaker 15: We ended up having to start a legal defense fund, and 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. Speaker 0: The American people started to come into into my life, and and there was a moment where I just felt like air was being breathed into my lungs. Over time, instead of being pounded down below the surface of the ocean, I started to come up. I started to come up. In a way, it was like I'm now above the surface and I'm starting to swim to shore. I'm really just I'm 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. Speaker 3: And these supportive people, God knows where they came from, these American people. He calls it buddy breathing. I've I've heard him say that. Being able to come through financially with this giant burden to 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. Speaker 6: 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 that once they saw that we weren't gonna stop, that we were gonna fight, we were getting letters like hundreds of letters every week. Speaker 15: 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, 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 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 might 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 them 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 gotta read this letter or I'd read that oh you gotta read this letter and they were just great great letters, tear jerkers, 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 it got us through a lot of the tough tough tough times. It really did. Is Speaker 7: it true he went to the 99¢ he loves? Tell me about that. Speaker 15: Well, it's not 99¢ store anymore. Now it's a dollar 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. Speaker 8: I think it says a lot about what the American people were wanting out of this. They were looking at this as as, you know, 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 empathize with that and saw they realized they weren't some wealthy family, West Point grads, and we were a bunch of street kids. Okay? And just happened to be in this situation happened to band together to fight against this to fight against this absolute evil. Speaker 27: First of you gotta 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 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 this investigation was on 05/07/2020 when the government moved to dismiss the Flynn case. Speaker 5: No. No. No. Not so quick. Time for Emmett 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. Speaker 3: 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 they targeted Flynn because they felt that that was gonna be a spot, especially with Russia because he had he sat at the table with Putin one time, which is 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 have done it. Speaker 27: 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 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 to pardon yet, I want to fight. I'm really proud to be on a legal team that supported him in that. Speaker 7: Had anybody heard that? Speaker 2: I don't think so. Speaker 27: I had to get permission from the client to to tell it. Speaker 15: 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 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 kinda one of those things where it's a little bit bittersweet. Speaker 8: Okay. Inside this little box is a the original pardon of innocence given, general Michael Flynn by Donald Trump in November 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. Speaker 7: And your brother has never opened that? Speaker 8: Apparently not. Speaker 0: 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 you a pardon. I just want you to know that, you know, this 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 this pardon, you know? So that was November 2020. So, you know, it took three years plus. Speaker 7: Did you harbor some resentment towards Trump? Speaker 0: I did. I did it. Initially, I did, because he was not kind to me. Even 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, is that he really didn't know he didn't know the ways of Washington, D. C. He really didn't. Speaker 22: To this day, nobody has ever gone on record and said what the DOJ was going to go after Michael Flynn Junior for. I would assume likely the same thing they went after the business partners for, Farrah 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. Speaker 0: Barack Obama. Right? July 14. Any extent, 2014, a year and a half later, these bastards got me under investigation. You know? I extend my sincere thanks. Speaker 27: You know? Speaker 22: 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. 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 it is the light switch. If you understand what happened to him, you start to peel back the the curtain on everything. Speaker 11: I think the general Flynn story is actually the foundational story that America needs to understand, the the truth of, to be able to understand what has occurred within our government and the mounting corruption since then. Speaker 3: 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. Speaker 6: My mother and father would be so proud because he's the only person that could have 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 have withstood this type of, you know, this this evil, this unfathomable domestic evil that we're facing and beat it too. Speaker 8: It's it's very hard not to get jaded and turned off and just say, I'm just gonna go away. Mike is not gonna do that. Mike Flynn is I think people need to understand, he's gonna 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 gonna 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, need warriors, and I think you're gonna get that from General Flynn. Speaker 5: Again, so the 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 Flins 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 in his family. He got through it. Speaker 17: The Flins pull 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. Speaker 2: I 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 Republican. He's 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. 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. Speaker 0: Is there any regrets that you have in life? Right? And and for what I've experienced, I I I should sit here and say, yeah, I got a lot of, you know, I got a lot of regrets. But when I look back on my life and I understand the lives that were lost, I mean, I'm sitting here with you. You know, I'm like, I'm like, you know, I'm here, and I can tell my story.