The Rise Of A Trump Era National Security Threat
Last week I saw a bizarre report from NBC News about more dysfunction in the Arizona Republican Party. That that state part is riven with conflict and malaise is hardly news but this was another level of MAGA-crazy. Apparently some of the delegates to the national convention were trying to replace Trump with a candidate further right— or at least force him to chose a running mate acceptable to the fringe, namely QAnon crackpot and national traitor Michael Flynn, who ws clearly on his way to a long prison term before Trump stopped the process by pardoning him… after he had plead guilty but before he could be sentenced.
Then another far right psychopath and active insurrectionist, former Overstock.com CEO, Patrick Byrne, posted this:
Just more nuttiness from the fringe that I basically ignored— until I saw a a major NY Times feature on Flynn Sunday by David Fahrenthold and Alexandra Berzon. A deranged Christian nationalist, Flynn served as Trump’s first National Security Advisor for 3 weeks before being fired for hiding the fact he was a foreign agent (lying to Vice President Pence and to the FBI about it)— which including accepting a substantial bribe from the Kremlin. During the attempted coup in early 2021, Flynn urged Trump to suspend the Constitution, impose martial law and hold a new election.
Fahrenthold’s and Berzon’s perspective is that Flynn is a hustler trying to get rich off his QAnon and MAGA connections. “Since leaving the Trump administration under an ethical cloud,” they wrote, “Michael Flynn has converted his Trump-world celebrity into a lucrative and sprawling family business. He and his relatives have marketed the retired general as a martyr, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a legal-defense fund and then pocketing leftover money. Through a network of nonprofit and for-profit ventures, they have sold far-right conspiracy theories, ranging from lies about the 2020 election to warnings, embraced by followers of QAnon, about cabals of pedophiles and child traffickers. ‘This is one that goes up to the highest levels of corporations, up to the highest levels of the government,’ Flynn said recently at a meeting hosted by America’s Future in Kent, Ohio. ‘People that you know and that you think you respect.’ A New York Times investigation found Flynn family members had made at least $2.2 million monetizing Michael Flynn’s right-wing stardom in recent years, with more than half of that going to Flynn directly. That total includes several payments not previously reported, but it is still a low estimate, since not all financial records are public. The Times’ reporting also raised questions about whether America’s Future had properly disclosed its payments to Flynn’s relatives.”
They report that of all the crooks Trump has surrounded himself with who have attempted to make fortunes by shearing the sheeple, only Trump himself has been as effective as Flynn, raking in even more than grifters like Bannon and Giuliani. Trump has even promised the beyond the pale extremist part of his coalition that if he wins in November, he’ll bring Flynn back to the White House.
Flynn and his brother Joseph teamed up with Patrick Byrne, the founder of Overstock.com and a major backer of efforts to contest the 2020 election, to create a nonprofit group called the America Project.
In 2021, that group paid a business controlled by Michael Flynn $200,000 for consulting and another controlled by Joseph Flynn around $150,000. (In 2022, Joseph Flynn’s earnings from the group rose to about $260,000. He is no longer associated with it.)
More recently, Michael Flynn has also gotten into the media business, joining the board of a penny stock company behind an online video and podcast venture that frequently features him in its content. He received compensation of $375,000 in restricted stock for consulting work, records show.
But no venture has become a family affair quite like America’s Future.
The group was started as an anti-Communist effort in the 1940s and has cycled through conservative causes since. In the 1980s, its leading figure was Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist crusader.
But the group was largely dormant when, in 2021, its entire board resigned and its $3 million in leftover assets passed to the control of Flynn.
Before Flynn took over, tax filings show, the group’s chairmen and board members had been unpaid volunteers. That was typical. The nonprofit industry group BoardSource found that fewer than 1 percent of charities like this one paid their board members.
Under Flynn, that changed.
Besides the salary the group paid Flynn as chairman, it also paid his brother Joseph— a health care executive— $50,000 to be the group’s treasurer in 2021. Like his brother, Joseph Flynn worked two hours per week, according to tax filings.
The group has also paid another Flynn sibling, Mary Flynn O’Neill, a former administrator at Catholic churches, $148,000 to be its executive director. A fourth Flynn— Valerie, Joseph’s wife— received $1,050 to work in a booth at a convention and to help with “decorating and office set-up,” according to court filings in a recent lawsuit.
The next year, the nonprofit group paid more Flynns. A company run by Michael Flynn’s sister, Eckert, was paid $128,000 for public relations work. And it paid $146,000 to a law firm run by Alicia Kutzer, Michael Flynn’s niece, according to tax filings.
…Tax law experts said they were struck by a disconnect in America’s Future’s finances: As its financial fortunes went down, payments to Flynns went up.
In 2022, donations to America’s Future dropped by 40 percent. Even its biggest fund-raiser was a bust: America’s Future spent so much to hold an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club that it lost $63,000 for the night.
The group ate into its savings, sold off assets and lost $637,000 for the year. But at the same time, it tripled the amount it paid to the Flynn family. And despite the financial problems, Flynn himself got his raise.
“For two hours a week, someone’s getting $60,000?” said Kelly Mathews, who advises charities as chief operating officer of the New York Council of Nonprofits. “At a time when you’re about to hit the wall financially, what is the rationale? They look to me like they’re not very sustainable over time, without a significant influx of cash.”
… [After failing to raise substantial money using the stolen election Big Lie] America’s Future then embraced a new cause: protecting children from sexual abuse and human trafficking.
In doing so, the group began to amplify a false conspiracy theory, similar to the one at the heart of the QAnon movement: that a global cabal of pedophiles controls the media and politics.
In a video on its website, members of the group’s board and advisory board echoed the false “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, a QAnon precursor alleging that prominent Democrats were trafficking children at a Washington pizza parlor. Flynn O’Neill warned of an organized effort to use children’s body parts.
“They have organ harvesting,” she says in a video. “They have also found a way to take the blood, and use the blood, to make themselves youthful.”
It was not the first time the Flynns had shown signs of support for the QAnon movement. Michael Flynn had once filmed himself and family members reciting its motto “Where we go one, we go all.” His slogan— “Digital Soldiers”— became a QAnon rallying cry.
Privately, Flynn has expressed disdain for the conspiracy theory. In a recorded conversation leaked in 2021, he said he believed QAnon to be “total nonsense” and a disinformation campaign created by the left and the C.I.A.
Yet, the nonprofit group’s new messaging opened up a new stream of revenue: a series of traveling seminars called “Get in the Fight,” where attendees pay $40 to hear Flynn offer tips about spotting victims and traffickers.
On a recent Friday evening, Flynn spoke to a few dozen people sitting in pews at the Portage Community Chapel near Kent, Ohio. He described what he said was a sudden outbreak of child exploitation and spoke of a “moral decay” eroding the nation.