“FLYNN: Deliver the Truth. No Matter the Cost.” will cause viewers to question whether President Abraham Lincoln’s iconic words from the gravesites of Gettysburg remain true. Do we still have a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”?
Or is it now one “of the government, by the government, and for the government” because, as retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn states, “peace is the aberration; war is the norm”?
Although the movie will raise that question, it can’t answer it. That’s because this is not an unbiased news documentary. “FLYNN,” which portrays Mr. Flynn as standing against an oppressive military-industrial-intelligence complex, is directed by Mr. Flynn himself, who was also an executive producer. So the story is Mr. Flynn’s alone, without a counter-narrative. Viewers should be circumspect.
That caveat aside, FLYNN tells Mr. Flynn and his family’s side of the story as he and they endured the relentless onslaught from the unlimited resources of their government prosecutors.
Mr. Flynn had served in various capacities in his 33-year military career. But his most significant post in the Army had been as the most senior intelligence officer under Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the hard-charging leader of allied forces in Afghanistan. Gen. McChrystal’s “find, fix, and finish” strategy captured and killed the leadership of al-Qaeda networks in Afghanistan. It used small unit Joint Special Operations Command “pipe hitters” and paid huge dividends to reverse what had been a failed, meandering, feckless, “Regular Army” deployment.
Thereafter, according to Mr. Flynn’s LinkedIn profile, in November 2010, he had been ordered from the Afghanistan combat zone to serve as assistant chief of staff to G2, the Army’s chief intelligence officer. By September 2010, he had been named assistant director of National Intelligence for Partner Engagement under Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper. From there, he was promoted again to serve what ended up being an abbreviated term as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency before superiors forced him out. Both positions had been presidential appointments under former President Barack Obama, although Mr. Flynn says he never actually met the former president.
Mr. Flynn appears to be one of those guys who “bucks the system” by speaking truth to power. In his case, as in many others, it appears that “power” didn’t take it well, or at least that’s what Mr. Flynn thinks.
It is a searing critique of intelligence operations in Afghanistan. “Blueprint” advocated a more holistic, more diffuse gathering and analysis of Afghanistan intelligence operations. Among other things, the brief “recommends sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself—from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan.” But then-Lt. Gen. Flynn might have crossed the Rubicon of bureaucratic politics by saying in the opening paragraphs: “Our senior leaders—the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States—are not getting the right information to make decisions ... The media is driving the issues.”
While Mr. Flynn contends that he was forced back to Washington to work in “G2” because his report had offended the higher-ups in the morass known as the U.S. “intelligence community,” I’m not convinced. His boss, Gen. McChrystal, had been fired in June 2010, six months before the “Blueprint” article was released. Perhaps, counter to Mr. Flynn’s narrative, his Langley and Pentagon higher-ups recognized his talent for thinking “outside the box” and wanted it at a higher level? And if, as Mr. Flynn contends, the intelligence community was somehow conspiring to bring him down because of “Blueprint,” why first promote him to lieutenant general and assistant DNI? And then give him the helm of the Defense Intelligence Agency for three years? It doesn’t make sense. He could have been ticketed out of Afghanistan with the onerous “has lost the confidence” Army exit visa. Nobody in the general public would have noticed.
Ultimately, though, then-Lt. Gen. Flynn was forced out after serving an abbreviated two-year term at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) amid reported allegations of “poor management skills.” Others report that then-Lt. Gen. Flynn tended to report spurious intelligence, what his critics called “Flynn Facts.” After his firing from the DIA, then-Lt. Gen. Flynn retired as a “3-Star” lieutenant general and started a consulting business with his son. As the film relates in more detail, it was one of those clients that resulted in his prosecutorial tsunami.
The heart of “FLYNN”—what Mr. Flynn contends were spurious prosecutions by “Big Government, D.C.” and its “all war, all the time” military-industrial complex—started shortly after he joined the Trump administration as a national security adviser.
Mr. Flynn had been drawn to President Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 campaign. His embrace of the former president and his populist, nationalist, “MAGA” agenda made sense for Mr. Flynn even as its prospect terrorized the rest of Washington officialdom. Mr. Flynn, a successful, Irish American, Roman Catholic Democrat, says he grew up as one of nine children in a 1,200 sq. ft. house and took his commission as an Army second lieutenant after graduating college on an ROTC scholarship. In that respect, he wasn’t terribly different from Trump campaign impresario Steve Bannon, himself a successful financier who also grew up in a blue-collar, Irish German, Roman Catholic household of “Kennedy Democrats” who took a commission as a U.S. Navy ensign upon graduating Virginia Tech.
But the general escaped that fate and, most likely, should never have faced it. (The Justice Department had effectively dropped charges against him, but a recalcitrant federal judge would have none of it. A presidential pardon from President Trump made whatever remained of Mr. Flynn’s prosecution moot.)
FLYNN is, of course, a biased telling of the events, coming as it does only from the source himself, his family, and assorted other select friends and supporters. It’s unfortunate that a more independent filmmaker—and a more strident film editor (the movie is about 20 or 30 minutes too long)—has not taken up Mr. Flynn’s case to offer an unbiased narrative of his story.
But if you want to hear Mr. Flynn’s—and only Mr. Flynn’s—side of things, it’s worth your time. You may want to counterbalance it with another biased source, “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” a Frontline documentary produced by PBS and The Associated Press. It’s next on my list.
As usual, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.
