As part of Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy, the Republican made a variety of promises related to personnel, including a public vow to welcome former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn back into the fold. The lingering question, however, was in what capacity the retired general would return.
At a Mar-a-Lago event last month, the president said he’d offered Flynn “about 10 jobs.” Evidently, the two men settled on one. The New York Times reported:
Mr. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general and a national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, was named to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York. Mr. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during a wider investigation into contacts between the first Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials. Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Flynn.
The appointment comes just days after the president singled out Flynn for praise during an unhinged speech at the Justice Department.
To be sure, the oversight board at West Point has limited authority, so it’s not as if Trump is rewarding his longtime ally with a position of enormous power and influence.
But given his record, the fact that Flynn has been named to any position is rather extraordinary.
As the Times’ report noted, Flynn is perhaps best known for having been fired early in Trump’s first term after getting caught lying to the FBI about his covert communications with Russian officials. Years later, as regular readers might recall, Flynn allegedly plotted with the president in the Oval Office after Trump’s 2020 defeat, exploring ways to overturn the presidential election. According to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigations, the retired general reportedly raised the prospect of seizing voting machines, deploying U.S. troops, and declaring martial law as part of the anti-election scheme. In the months and years that followed, additional evidence of Flynn’s radicalism emerged. In 2021, for example, he appeared to endorse a military coup. Months later, the retired general suggested people may be exposed to Covid vaccines by way of salad dressing. He soon after made the case that the United States should have a single religion. Flynn has also talked up the bizarre “PizzaGate” conspiracy theory, suggested unnamed people were “putting components of robotics into us” by way of Covid shots, and similarly shared an odd idea related to “5G technology” and a “pathogen” that he said might be hidden in vaccines. In a normal administration, someone with a record like this would find that his phone calls go unreturned. In this administration, the president singles out Flynn for praise and rewards him with an appointment to the oversight board of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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