What Happened to Michael Flynn?
Michael Flynn faced the camera with brow creased and lips compressed. He hadn’t been born yesterday, his expression said. He was not going to fall for trick questions.
“General Flynn, do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified?” Representative Liz Cheney asked him in a video teleconference deposition for the January 6 committee.
Flynn’s lawyer pressed the mute button and switched off the camera. Ninety-six seconds passed. Flynn and the lawyer reappeared with a request for clarification. Did Cheney mean morally justified, or legally? Cheney obligingly asked each question in turn.
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?” she asked.
Flynn squinted, truculent.
“Take the Fifth,” he said.
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified legally?” Cheney asked.
“Fifth,” he replied.
Cheney moved on to the ultimate question.
“General Flynn, do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?” she asked.
“The Fifth,” he repeated.
It was a surreal moment: Here was a retired three-star general and former national security adviser refusing to opine on the foundational requirement of a constitutional democracy. Flynn had sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rule of law had been drilled into him for decades in the Army.
Now, by invoking the right against self-incrimination, he was asserting that his beliefs about lawful succession could expose him to criminal charges. That could not be literally true—beliefs have absolute protection under the First Amendment—but his lawyer might well have worried about where Cheney’s line of questioning would lead.
[Read: Making sense of Mike Flynn]
Flynn had said publicly that President Donald Trump could declare martial law and “re-run” the presidential election he had lost. He and Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, had turned up in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, with a draft executive order instructing the Defense Department to seize the voting machines that recorded Trump’s defeat. Flynn and Roger Stone, the self-described political dirty trickster, were the two men Trump made a point of asking his chief of staff to call on January 5, on the eve of insurrection, according to Cassidy Hutchinson’s recent testimony before the January 6 committee.
All of which raises a question: What happened to Michael Flynn?
He has baffled old comrades with his transformation since being fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. He led chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016. In designed for mind control.
