How Michael Flynn went down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole

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The special counsel overseeing all Department of Justice investigations related to former President Donald Trump has seemed to focus in particular on an infamous Oval Office meeting after Trump lost the 2020 election and before the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. In that meeting, unofficial advisers presented Trump with unlikely ways to overturn the election.

No charges have been brought. From CNN’s exclusive report:

Some witnesses were asked about the meeting months ago, while several others have faced questions about it more recently, including Rudy Giuliani. … Prosecutors have specifically inquired about three outside Trump advisers who participated in the meeting: former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, sources said.

Representatives for Giuliani, Powell and Flynn either did not respond or declined to comment to CNN. Byrne offered on Twitter to talk to special counsel Jack Smith.

It just so happens that there is a new podcast built around that Oval Office meeting.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and host of the Audible podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Over two episodes, he focuses in particular on the story of Flynn.

I talked to Bergen about the new CNN report, the Oval Office meeting and Flynn’s journey from being a respected general who went down the rabbit hole to become a full-blown pusher of conspiracy theories. Our conversation, conducted by phone, is below.

Envisioning a conspiracy case

WOLF: As someone who’s reported extensively on the meeting and built a podcast around it, I just wanted to get your read on these new developments.

BERGEN: In a sense it’s not surprising, since it seems Jack Smith is trying to make some kind of conspiracy case around the attempts to overturn the election.

This meeting was central to the conspiracy, it seems. When you have General Flynn and Sidney Powell suggesting somehow the military should indeed seize voting machines. And of course that was the night that Trump tweeted about the January 6 gathering in Washington, DC.

It’s all part of a continuum of events that, if you’re trying to make some kind of conspiracy case, this would be an important meeting.

(Note: No one involved in the meeting has yet been charged by Smith. Trump has denied all wrongdoing.)

One of the most bizarre meetings ever at the White House

WOLF: Your podcast goes into great detail about what happened at the meeting, and it was an incredible scene.

BERGEN: This is one of the most bizarre meetings that has ever happened at the White House. You’re hard pressed to think of a wackier event in the Oval Office, where people are shouting expletives and screaming – and the meeting goes on for six hours and there’s talk of bringing the military in to overthrow the election in some shape or form.

Usually a meeting at the Oval Office would have a great deal of decorum. There was no decorum here. One of Trump’s lawyers almost challenged Flynn to a fight. It was pretty intense.

Why focus on Flynn?

WOLF: Flynn is kind of a bit player in Trump’s administration. He was only there for a few days in an official capacity, although he looms large in the final days in an unofficial capacity. He’s arguably on the fringe of the American political conversation. Why did you decide to focus on him?

BERGEN: He went from being a very well-regarded special operations officer to now somebody who’s one of the leaders of the Christian nationalist right – they refer to him as “America’s general.”

He’s embraced various kinds of conspiracy theories, not just that the election was somehow stolen, but also that some of the World Economic Forum has got a plan to change the world order.

He’s emblematic of a lot of people who have gone down a number of rabbit holes over the last few years, except that he was the national security adviser for President Trump.

In a second Trump administration, which is not out of the question, I think he would have an important role. As we say in the podcast, Trump called him publicly at a recent conference in May, where he vowed to bring back Mike Flynn again, implying that Flynn would be part of his national security team.

He was a perfectly normal officer until he was forced to retire early in 2014 from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he increasingly embraced some wacky conspiracy theories at that time, and he seems to have gone on.

I guess he may be on the fringes, but if you look at polling data about people’s beliefs about certain things, Christian nationalism is a view shared by around 20% of Americans according to survey data – meaning that (a person) would agree with the statement that the United States should declare itself a Christian nation.

People who don’t view themselves as alienated, but rather on a crusade

WOLF: My sense is that people who believe in these kinds of conspiracy theories are in a way alienated from the rest of American society, but they don’t necessarily view themselves that way. They think they are taking back American society.

BERGEN: The ReAwaken American Tour, that’s their idea – the need to reawaken America. It’s sort of a picture of Christian nationalism and conspiracy theories about people that have a plan to change the new world order.

It’s also very caught up in the Covid experience. The people who attend these kinds of meetings think that Covid was somehow part of a conspiracy to increase government control.

We live in a very polarized society, and there are plenty of people who believe these ideas. … Anybody who’s familiar with the World Economic Forum, it’s a fairly dull and serious gathering in Davos, Switzerland, every year. There is no conspiracy to take over the world and install the world socialist government.

Why does this happen to certain people?

WOLF: Do you have any insight into how this kind of conspiracy theory fever afflicts a person? Why does it happen to Michael Flynn and not retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who I learned from your podcast was a mentor to Flynn in Afghanistan?

BERGEN: It’s an interesting question. Why do people believe in things that are actually not true? People are looking for explanations of the world to explain what they see.

When I spoke to Flynn at this conference in May, he said that the country was completely on the wrong track and that we’re all in deep trouble. He volunteered these ideas to me.

I think if people think that things are going really wrong, instead of examining why that might be the case, it’s easier to say, well, it’s part of a conspiracy led by the World Economic Forum, and put all the blame on whichever conspiracy view you have.

(Richard) Hofstadter, the American political scientist, wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There’s always been someone to blame for what’s going wrong.

It’s a very old American idea, which is choose your ethnic group, choose your bogeyman. It’s easier to explain everything that’s not going right by saying that there’s this hidden force that is making our lives worse, rather than saying, well, what are the real issues that we need to address. That takes more mental effort.

From intelligence work to conspiracy theories

WOLF: You talk in the podcast about encountering Flynn in his previous line of work – somebody involved in the intelligence community. You’ve written books in which intelligence features prominently. Is there something innately conspiratorial about that line of work? Is there a line we can draw between intelligence, which is based on trying to find truth in unverified claims, and the spread of conspiracy theories that’s afflicting the country right now?

BERGEN: I think that people who work in the intelligence field – there’s a similarity to journalism, which is you’re trying to gather facts and to come up with a theory of what’s going on. Obviously you have different outcomes, and it’s public with journalism.

But in the intelligence community they’re not conspiracy theorists, they’re trying to gather as much information as possible, organize it into some sort of digestible story and tell policymakers look, we think (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is trying to invade Ukraine. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a good example of the US intelligence community providing strategic warnings to policymakers that they then use.

I think in Flynn’s case, he retired early from running the Defense Intelligence Agency as a three-star general, and that was in 2014. It seemed to have caused some sort of snap in him.

His entire career, being in the military – when you’re in the military, there are norms, laws that prevent you from saying a bunch of stupid things publicly. I think the guardrails came off. He was very angered when he felt he was unfairly fired by the Obama administration.

He meets Trump in 2015. They have a meeting of the minds. He was very important to Trump in 2016. One of the big decisions voters make is can someone suddenly be commander in chief.

With Hillary Clinton, there wasn’t much doubt that she could be. She had years of experience running the State Department.

With Trump, he had no national security experience, no foreign policy experience. So the fact that a three-star retired general like Mike Flynn had attached himself to the campaign was incredibly important for Trump and his campaign at that time, because they didn’t have anybody like him.

Certainly, Flynn validated Trump early on and helped him a lot. But I don’t think the fact that he was in the intelligence community has any bearing on his sort of conspiracist view of the world.

A pivot from covering one kind of threat to covering another

WOLF: My knowledge of your background before this is largely based on your reporting about Islamic terrorism and Osama bin Laden. How do you view the pivot between the threats you have covered so much in the past posed by terrorists outside the country to covering the threat to American democracy from within?

BERGEN: One thing I’ve been tracking for a long time is right-wing terrorism, which obviously is on the rise.

The New America website has specific data, but the last time I checked there were 130 deaths caused by right-wing terrorists and 107 by jihadist terrorists (in the US since 9/11).

Right-wing terrorism has always been – I first got interested in that with the Oklahoma City bombing. I was working at CNN at the time and covered the bombings.

It’s been around for a long time. It’s not something that’s new. I think after the Oklahoma City bombing there was a lot of law enforcement effort against the right-wing militia movements, and they went underground for a while, but it’s back.

One thing coming out at the January 6 insurrection … is that a lot of arrests have been made. I think they have a deterrent effect if you look at the lack of violent protests when Trump was indicted in New York or in Miami. When people see that something around a thousand people have been arrested and many of them have been convicted, some of them sentenced to have long sentences, I think that does have a deterrent effect.

Terrorism can come in all sorts of ideological flavors. And violence can come out of all sorts of different ideologies. …

American politics has always been pretty violent. Look back to the ’70s. There was the Weather Underground. There were the Black Panthers. There were Puerto Rican nationalists. Because of 9/11, terrorism was bundled with Islamist terrorism, but there are other types. They wane and they rise depending on the politics of the time.

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