Everybody has one, that friend with the short temper who is usually a great time, but all it takes is for one thing to happen and that guy’s attitude turns on a dime and there’s no settling him down. He just has to yell or punch his way calm. Well, picture that friend as the president’s new National Security Advisor.

Lieutenant General Michael Flynn served a total of 33 years in the Army, most recently as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been primarily operating out of Fort Bragg, NC with the 82nd Airborne during his career, with additional stints at various military intelligence agencies during his career. He was an early advocate of collating any found scrap of evidence, looking for predictable patterns to help ascertain enemy behaviour. He has seen overseas duty in Grenada & Haiti and Iraq & Afghanistan. He was viewed as “a superb tactical commander both in Afghanistan and Iraq, with a very hard-edged view of Islam and a direct, straight-ahead style of leadership.”¹ He’s had, by all accounts, a distinguished career.

However, there have been signs of intellectual extremism. When working at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the GW Bush years, while he was pioneering evidence gathering on the ground in Afghanistan & Pakistan, his boss, Stanley McChrystal, felt he had to “box him in,” surrounding him with subordinates who would challenge the unsubstantiated theories he tended to indulge.² In addition, he made personal sacrifices in pursuit of duty, to the point of even skipping his son’s wedding. Eradication of the enemy evolved from military duty to personal obsession.

Things appear to go a tad off the rails when he transitioned into the civilian & political world. Appointed by President Obama in July 2012, Flynn became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in charge of all military attachés and defense-intelligence collection around the world. He began to tie actual intelligence data into his assumptions about Islam and America’s overseas alliances. Staff would keep lists of what they called “Flynn facts”, about things like like when he asserted that three-quarters of all new cell phones were bought by Africans or, later, that Iran had killed more Americans than Al Qaeda.³

What got him fired from his role at the DIA seems to be a conflict with the CIA over access to information. In 2015, Flynn made the statement that “they’ve (the CIA) have forgotten who they actually work for. They work for the American people. They don’t work for the President. Frankly, it’s become a very political organization.”⁴ In 2010, he attacked the CIA as “marginally relevant”⁴ in Afghanistan, because they relied on outdated techniques & stereotypes. He was dismissive of the CIA – as he saw it- downplaying the rise of ISIS & Al Qaeda in Syria’s civil war and in northern Iraq. And he blames the CIA for helping engineer his ouster, because he was saying things counter to the information he was collecting, threatening their position as the pre-eminent intelligence organization in government. In short, he sees little benefit to having a “civilian” intelligence agency direct America’s overseas intelligence gathering.

After leaving the strictures of bureaucracy and government employment, he continued pursuing his anti-Islamist agenda. He wrote a book with Michael Ledeen, a controversial neoconservative foreign-policy analyst, about defeating terrorism. Islam is not a religion, Flynn and Ledeen wrote, but a political ideology bent on destroying Judeo-Christian civilization. Flynn began saying that he had been fired because President Obama disagreed with his views on terrorism and wanted to hide the growth of ISIS.⁵ This drove him towards finding a presidential candidate who was willing to pursue

Flynn became a fervent campaigner for Trump and was given a high-profile role speaking before the GOP convention, an appearance in which he led the crowd in “lock her up” chants against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.⁶ When he was told by former colleagues to tone it down, he instead ramped up his rhetoric. His actual response – “When someone says, ‘You’re a general, so you have to shut up,’ ” he said, “I say, ‘Do I have to stop being an American?’ ”

In 2015, he travelled to Russia to dine with Vladimir Putin at a Russian television network dinner. He posed for photos with Putin _(source), and allowed his image to be used by the sponsoring network (Russia Today). He was paid for his attendance, although he says he used the opportunity to also try to coach Russian leaders to act more responsibly on the world stage. His defence of the trip was that it was no different than being a paid contributor for CNN.

Flynn’s most recent controversy involved his son, who promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter developed through fake news stories that made the baseless claim that a pedophilia ring involving high-level Democratic Party officials was operating out of a Washington pizzeria. Flynn himself has promoted fake news stories on his Twitter feed.⁷ His son has since been removed from the Trump transition team, but Flynn himself has refused to disavow any of the theories he has promoted. Based on observing his career & résumé, it appears unlikely, because he has built his career on taking scraps of information and collecting them until he has a concrete plan of action. He won’t disavow anything, no matter how trivial or outlandish.

He is already advising Trump on policy transitions to take once he gets the keys to the office after January 20th. His career path shows that if you aren’t with him, you’re against him. No wonder he appeals to Trump. They both refuse to take “no” for an answer, and take partial facts and use them to create personal narratives, things that have helped build both their careers.

The frightening part is, this position isn’t subject to Senate confirmation. So, like the Ronco Rotisserie Oven, Donald can set it and forget it.

1. _{http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-flynn-former-colleagues-arrogant-2016-12}
2. _{http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-disruptive-career-of-trumps-national-security-adviser}
3. _ibid
4. _{http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/us/politics/donald-trump-cia-michael-flynn.html?_r=1}
5. _ibid
6. _{https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trumps-pick-for-national-security-adviser-brings-experience-and-controversy/2016/11/17/0962eb88-ad08-11e6-8b45-f8e493f06fcd_story.html?utm_term=.dd221c7019dd}
7. _{http://www.businessinsider.com}