Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is using his post-pardon press tour to preview a new salvo against the Russia investigation.
In his most recent interview with Jeanine Pirro on Fox News Saturday night, the former White House national security adviser was asked why he can’t just “blow the lid off all of them” and tell the public what he knows.
She was focusing on a warning outgoing President Barack Obama reportedly gave to then-President-elect Donald Trump in an Oval Office meeting shortly after the 2016 election about North Korea and hiring Flynn.
“I must have put the fear of god into Barack Obama and probably still do because of this four-year long saga that they put me, my family through, President Donald J. Trump and his family and frankly the entire country,” Flynn said, referring to him being a target of the FBI’s Russia investigation.
Flynn said he hopes somebody would “pin” Obama down and ask him about it, adding, “One of these days I will lay it out.”
He gave a similar explanation all week across at least three other interviews, and suggested there needs to be “accountability” first, seemingly an allusion to now special counsel John Durham’s criminal inquiry into the Russia investigation.
Flynn, 61, ended up pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with a Russian envoy but later claimed he was innocent and set up by the bureau. The Justice Department moved to dismiss the case but with the presiding judge resisting such a move and a Biden administration incoming, Trump pardoned Flynn last month.
He didn’t get into specifics, but Flynn suggested Obama “knew” that as a top adviser to Trump, “their little plan of spying on Donald Trump would fall apart,” and would be a driving force in undoing foreign policy ventures that Flynn argued ran “this country right into the ground.”
Flynn was picked by Obama to serve as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, but he was pushed out of the position after clashing with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others. He retired from the Army in 2014, a year before his stint was supposed to end.
“Let’s face it. Barack Obama appointed me twice. I was Senate confirmed twice during the time I was in the military. So it’s amazing that that would be what he would focus on during the transition for the United States of America. It’s outrageous, actually,” Flynn said.
