‘We’re Still in the Throes of That Coup’

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Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) appeared on the Trumpet Daily on August 21, giving a two-part interview during his two-day visit to the campus of the Philadelphia Trumpet and its publisher, the Philadelphia Church of God. The general made the most of his visit to what he called “this beautiful, beautiful location,” starting with attending our Irish dance production Celtic Throne and telling the young dancers afterward, “You are inspiring this nation and that’s something that we need right now.” He visited Imperial Academy elementary classrooms; gave a special lecture and question-and-answer to our middle-school, high-school and Herbert W. Armstrong College students; dined with staff members and their families; and delivered a Trumpet “America in Crisis” lecture at Armstrong Auditorium.

General Flynn is a 33-year United States Army intelligence officer who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and sounded the alarm on then President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy before being forced into retirement. President Donald Trump appointed him national security advisor, and Obama operatives quickly forced him out of that position (though he was later exonerated by the Department of Justice). This is the subject of Chapter 6 of my father’s book America Under Attack.

The interview started with a positive focus on young people, the examples being set by Imperial and Armstrong students, and learning how to live right.

Flynn I met with kindergartners, first graders, second graders, third graders. … When I look at the faces of these children—that’s why I do what I do. I always tell people I have four grandchildren, so I have four reasons to fight for our country. … So it’s just a real honor for me to be here. Seeing those children last night, it’s one big family, this Celtic Throne. … You’re watching these amazing, talented young people. It’s like they’re floating across the stage. … The strength, the ability—there’s an artistic performance, the way that they were synchronized on that stage. But it’s not only the strength of being an athlete, it’s the strength of being one of good character.

In talking about the young people and fighting for their future, General Flynn warned that America is now in such grave danger that it’s not about Democrats versus Republicans any more.

I spoke at the 2016 convention, and during that speech I made the statement that the sobering reality is that evil exists. I want people to understand that evil exists in mankind; it exists in humanity; it exists on Earth. We have to understand that there are components of that that are going to constantly attack the opposite of that: They’re going to attack the good. They’re going to attack the light. They’re going to attack the truth.

General Flynn said that this trend is visible in crime, the elimination of local police and their replacement by federal police, and the utilization of immigration not as a path to a better life but as a weapon to weaken America, including through huge numbers of Americans killed by drug addictions.

I’m not talking about nationalism. I’m talking about taking care of our home first. Then, once we’ve done that, then we can still be this shining city on the hill, this true north beacon for the rest of the world. … The ones attacking the America First movement hate the country. They hate that phrase … “Make America Great Again.”

Flynn decried America’s dying educational system. He praised American mothers who are taking action to teach their own children at home.

It’s my first visit here to this campus. I’m blown away by what these guys do and who they are and what they represent and how they do their education. And I can tell you from this visit: This is what fires me up. This is where I get my energy. Because trust me folks, this is exhausting. I want more people to stand up. But this visit here is a reminder and it re-energizes me to have the perspective that I need.

The Democrat Party, from back in the late ’60s all the way till now, intentionally went after the family unit. I’m using that word intentionally precisely. They went after the family unit to destroy it, to destroy the fabric of the family. … My greatest battle that I have faced personally is right here in my own country, and that’s a really scary thing. This battle is with elements inside of my own country who I believe are subversive. They’re subversive. And I don’t mind saying that. That’s the truth.

Obama’s targeting of General Flynn is what my father focused on in Chapter 6 of America Under Attack.

This is a beautiful book, written by Gerald Flurry. He’s really behind this beautiful campus that we’re on. … The title says it all: America Under Attack. I read it and I was compelled to reach out: I said, Send me as many as you can. … I handed them out to my family and handed them out to everybody. And I said, You’ve got to read this. Because it’s not just what it says in here about little Gen. Mike Flynn. It’s the theme of it and the idea behind it. This is for real. … You’re able to connect the Bible to the Constitution. What America Under Attack describes is the who, what, when, where, why and how about what we are facing. And he brings this biblical direction in … to make sure that we really do return to the strength of our nation, really the foundation of our nation, which is based on Judeo-Christian principles and values. This is why I reached out.

All you’ve got to do is read the Federalist Papers, read the Constitution, read the Declaration of Independence. For those that want to have a little bit more, go read some of the diaries, some of the letters written by the founders to their spouses or to their children. Read some of their own historical accounts of what happened. … One thing that’s very clear is that the Constitution was derived from the Bible. There’s no doubt about it. … Go read the Bill of Rights today—that takes you probably all of about 20 minutes. Then you take the next step and you dig into the Constitution and you dig into the Bible itself. … There’s the wisdom and the vision, and the meaning is so powerful. So to be alive today, we don’t have an excuse.

The “last true measure of devotion” is the soldier on the battlefield that gave their life up. … When we try to wrap ourselves in our flag and our freedom, keep the sense of humility to those that actually gave the last true measure of devotion, gave the greatest sacrifice that one can give. One of the greatest character traits, I think, in American soldiers is humility. The idea of humility is so powerful because when you’re on the battlefield, you’re engaged with an enemy in a life-or-death situation. When you witness something like a young soldier—I’m talking like an 18-, 19-year-old kid—and he goes to protect a child … and he takes the child to safety, all at the expense, potentially, of his own life—he’s turning his back on fire that’s coming at him and he saves the child—that’s not just an act of courage and an act of bravery; that’s an act of humility. That’s humbling yourself. We don’t train that in the Army. It’s such a deep-seated thing that I think only comes from experiencing and understanding who you are and having that humility as an American.

General Flynn expressed frustration at the lack of such action by many Americans—particularly state governors failing to use their powers to check federal corruption and instead focusing on their own political careers.

I wish people would be more humble and step toward the fire and take the incoming that’s going to come, as governors. If they want to be president of the United States or they want to be governor of a state, you hope they’d have that kind of humility and courage.

We’ve just taken it for granted. I hate to tell you folks, but we’ve been apathetic and lazy in many cases. I want people to understand that we’ve got to start being Americans and make the sacrifices here at home. I would tell you to repurpose your life: Everything that you’ve done in the past has been relevant and good and right, but maybe it wasn’t enough. One person says, Enough is enough. And I agree: Enough is enough. So now what are we going to do about it? …

I’ve been crushed by big waves, driven underneath and had to stay underneath for long periods of time. And you get a sense of fear. What I learned, particularly in the lifetime of surfing that I’ve done: You don’t lose fear, but you overcome it and you’re able to control it and you’re able to rise back above. That’s where America is at. I think America right now is in that ebb and flow of the big tides in this big ocean that is our beautiful country. I think a lot of people are fearful to a degree. … What I want to try to do is get people to understand how to control their fear and control that emotion.

General Flynn spoke plainly about the “coup” against President Trump. When the first reports came out about a meeting at the White House just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration in 2017, my father pinpointed it as crucial. That meeting has now become infamous. It included the nation’s very top spies, lawyers, bureaucrats and federal police: John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Susan Rice and Sally Yates, as well as Vice President Joe Biden. It was led directly by Barack Obama.

Jan. 5, 2017: The Obama administration was trying to do everything that they could to basically usurp the incoming Trump administration. That meeting in January was a meeting about me. 5 January 2017, is a sort of official start date of the coup led by Barack Obama against the United States of America to undermine a sitting president, a duly elected sitting president of the United States of America: Donald J. Trump. And here we are, August 2023, and we’re still in the throes of that coup.

Why did Obama target Mike Flynn? I asked him to tell us about the 2010 paper “Fixing Intel” that he helped write while he was in the field and Obama was in the White House.

I was the senior intelligence officer for the International Security Assistance Force operating in Afghanistan. That was my third assignment in Afghanistan. There are a couple other coauthors as well. And when we looked at the landscape of what was happening, the larger intelligence community was not answering what we needed on the battlefield. We have people at war in Afghanistan, and people are dying; soldiers are dying. … I always kept pushing and pushing and pushing on the higher intel community and got no response. So I said, You know what, let’s put this out there on the street and see what happens. Bob Gates, secretary of defense at the time, read it, and he said, This is brilliant. We got a war to fight. Let’s get back to fighting the war. It was a very powerful statement that basically shut up Washington, D.C., and the bigger intel community.

Because it’s not just fixing intel in Afghanistan. There are tactics, techniques and procedures inside that document for all kinds of things, for law enforcement activities, for warfare and for how we run our government. So I’m essentially calling out the fake news. Media was driving policy. You can say it wasn’t intel to a degree, and that’s true, but the intel community, particularly the cia, has such influence inside of the big mainstream media.

With Gates’s support, “Fixing Intel” led to reforms of intelligence procedures and systems in Joint Special Operations Command and elsewhere in the military. It is still widely read. Thanks in part to this effort, the capabilities of American and allied forces multiplied. One high-level U.S. operative said that Flynn helped to, in some cases, quintuple the number of raids. In 2012, Flynn became director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and America’s highest-ranking intelligence officer.

I was appointed to two really important positions by President Obama. Then both of those positions had to be confirmed by the United States Senate. Two years later, I think it was February of 2014 … I’m getting ready to go into a public hearing in front of the United States Senate to kind of give the worldwide intelligence assessment, and there’s a very famous picture of me, Clapper, Brennan and Comey. And during that hearing we were all asked about isis: The administration says isis is on the run, words to that effect. As they asked each one of them, essentially they said, isis is on the run; we’re beating them back. Director of the fbi, director of the cia, director of national intelligence. And then they get to little Mike Flynn as director of dia, which is a big organization. And I said, No, isis is not on the run. They’re actually growing, and they’re in more countries than they’ve ever been in. All this is what the intelligence community had, yet the administration now wanted a set of talking points. They wanted a narrative to be adhered to. And that’s just not me.

So you feel like it was your testimony that made you a target?

Oh yeah, there’s no doubt, because it was only a very short period of time after that, days actually, where I was called in with two individuals: One was the undersecretary of defense for intel, and one was Director Clapper. And Clapper said to me essentially, We are removing you from dia.

There was no doubt that we were facing an enemy that was actually migrating into something worse. And every bit of intelligence that was going in front of Barack Obama said that. But the message from the leadership was going to be, They’re on the run. … I mean here we are. This is August of 2023, two years almost to the date of our complete and total surrender in Afghanistan to al Qaeda and isis and to the Taliban. We surrendered under fire. We retreated under fire, and we left American citizens behind, and we had casualties at the very end that resulted in 13 killed in action.

What was the difference between the intel you were getting on Iran and the Obama policy toward Iran?

Night and day. It’s like evil versus good. Iran is designated the number one state sponsor of terrorism on the planet by our own State Department. … Iran at the time is killing Americans, principally in Iraq—to the tune of about 500 of our American soldiers—and the Iranian government is constantly spewing hatred not only of the United States of America, but of Israel. This is not me making this up; go look it up. Yet Obama is willing to cut a deal to give them uranium, to enrich uranium to make a nuclear weapon. The intent of the Iranian regime is to have a nuclear weapon to further its intent to destroy Israel. … So I was pushing back on that while I was in uniform, and I’m doing it through the right channels, and people knew it. Then when I got out, I went and testified to a hearing in summer of 2015. I’m an expert on a variety of subjects, and one of them is this. After I came out of the military, I took a stand against it because I’m still looking at this and saying, we’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in some cases, and we’re going to give uranium that can be enriched into a nuclear weapon, we’re going to give it to Iran. Even at the time that the administration was giving Iran money and giving them this capability, they were still listed by our State Department as the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Donald Trump shocked the world and won the 2016 presidential election. In a November 10 Oval Office meeting, Obama told President-elect Trump that the two most dangerous men in the world were North Korean nuclear-armed dictator Kim Jong-un—and Michael Flynn. The talking point “Obama warned against” Flynn was echoed across cable news.

Why? What were they so afraid of? They’re afraid of the things that I said in this blueprint. They’re afraid of the things that I warned against when I talked about Iran. They’re afraid of people that stand up and tell the truth. … It wasn’t just the Obama administration. There were people on both sides of the aisle, particularly the establishment, who benefit from having endless wars, which I am against. We have a purpose for our military, and it’s to fight and win our nation’s wars, not participate forever. So from that meeting, I went back and I saw Trump afterwards, and we were joking about it because he’s like, Can you believe this? … The transition of the United States of America from the outgoing president to the incoming president—so many massive things to talk about … and Obama focuses on those two points. And Trump ended up saying to me, You want to be the national security advisor? And I said, Yeah. And he said, You got the job.

The very famous meeting of 5 January of 2017—there were really two meetings, and they were up in the same place, Oval Office with Obama. One had a larger group, and then Obama sent some out and he kept the smaller group in. And the larger group was vice president, people like Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Susan Rice, Sally Yates. There were some other minions in the room, his chief of staff, and there was a couple of other key people in the room. We have notes of all this—we have the minutes—this all came out as evidence in my case. So the Obama administration was trying to do everything they could to undermine everything, basically to usurp the incoming Trump administration. That meeting in January was a meeting about me. … We have these notes that say, What’s our goal here? To get him to lie? To get him fired?

That day, to me—5 January 2017—is a sort of official start date of the coup led by Barack Obama against the United States of America to undermine a duly elected sitting president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. And here we are, August 2023, … and we’re still in the throes of that coup.

Now we have to be constitutional, we have to be lawful, we have to be peaceful. We have to be thoughtful about how we get out of this mess. Obama’s the one that said, I would love to have a third term. And he also used the phrase “fundamentally change America.” We’re going to fundamentally change America. Well, this is what it means.

After a second swim in the campus pool the next morning, General Flynn flew with us to his next destination in California. He remarked several times about “this beautiful community you guys have created here” and our young people and the education they are receiving. He expressed interest in reconnecting with us in the future, and I for one certainly hope he does.

note: Some quotes and their orders have been edited for clarity.