Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and current national security adviser to Donald Trump, sat down with the Washington Examiner to discuss defeating the Islamic State, preventing homegrown terrorist attacks, thwarting North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, being dissed by Colin Powell and getting fired as DIA director.
Washington Examiner: I want to talk to you first about terrorism. We’ve just seen the threat to U.S. soil …
Flynn: Yes. Three attacks, three states, over 40 people injured. Thank God nobody was killed.
Examiner: And what does that say about our readiness to protect, defend and prevent these kinds of attacks?
Flynn: I think there are a lot of things we can be doing. I think one of the things we have to admit is that we have a problem internal to the homeland and it’s no longer just sort of quote/unquote “over there.” Over there being in the Middle East or in Europe. This most recent set of attacks, the one in Minnesota, the one in New York, the one in New Jersey, if you follow the enemy, and I follow this threat pretty closely, they recently published in their magazines and in their lessons learned exactly what we just saw.
Examiner: Is this kind of attack detectable? Is it preventable?
Flynn: I think that some of it is preventable, some of it. I mean, you know some of these are just going to be really hard to do. What we have to recognize is that we have a problem. We definitely have a problem in this country with radical Islamism inside of the homeland. There’s no doubt. I mean the director of the FBI has talked about it, the director of the CIA, all of our intelligence agencies have talked about the threat. What we have to do is we have to do different things here.
We have to allow our law enforcement professionals at the federal, state and local level to be able to do the kinds of things in the sort of neighborhood watch programs if you will that allow them to understand what’s going on in the various communities that do exist. And some of these communities where there are larger refugee populations that have not assimilated, we really don’t know what these people are doing on a given day.
Examiner: So my question to you is what would a President Donald Trump do differently from what we’re doing today?
Flynn: I think he’s actually been very clear about it, and he’s getting hammered in the media because organizations like CNN use the word “racial.” He never said he was going to racially profile, but I do think we need to profile in some of the neighborhoods. I mean in the area where I grew up, I was profiled. I’ve written about it in my book.
Italians were profiled. We have to profile groups that we know where there are potential problems coming from. It doesn’t mean that this is a racist thing, or that this is an Islamophobic issue, but we have to let the police do the police work that they know how to do.
Examiner: Are they not able to do that?
Flynn: No, they are not able to.
Examiner: Why?
Flynn: You find cities around the country where there’s a lot of withholding of this idea because people in the law enforcement professions are going to be held back from what they ned to be doing
Examiner: Do you think that was the case in this instance? [The New York/New Jersey bombings]
Flynn: I think if you really do the, if there is a detailed lessons learned, you sort of peal the onion back and you do the serious forensics of why and what was going on with this, I think that you are going to find out those kinds of things, so we just have to be very serious about this. Is it 100 percent preventable? Absolutely not.
The one thing that we can definitely prevent is just this sheer volume of refugees coming in from countries where we have already been told by our federal law enforcement and our federal political officials in many cases in the Department of Homeland Security that we can’t vet them properly.
Examiner: But isn’t it the case that these attacks that we’ve seen recently, whether it’s in New York or San Bernardino, Calif., or Orlando, Fla., were not done by refugees?
Flynn: Well, I don’t think that’s totally the case. If you look at each of the cases, even the Boston Marathon, you look at each one and really take a hard look at what are sort of the details of each case, and there are some commonalities there. It’s like what we were just talking about.
Is there evidence that’s going to come out about this particular guy, the individual up in New York, where the police knew something about this guy and then maybe they didn’t do something about him? What fell through the cracks that didn’t allow us to understand what were the motivations behind this guy?
Examiner: I want to ask you, specifically if you can, how a Trump presidency would be different from the Obama administration in confronting the threat from the Islamic State?
Flynn: What Donald Trump has talked about. He has sort of put this into four categories. We have to have military action. We have to have financial action, or economic action in a much different way. We have to have much more offensive cyberoperations. We do a lot of defensive cyberoperations, we do a lot of blocking and tackling. We need to be much more aggressive in the world of cyber. And then the fourth area is the ideological underpinning of this.
Examiner: Give me some specifics, some specific things that people can actually understand about what you would do differently.
Flynn: I mean, so, everybody wants to know, OK is it 10,000 soldiers on the ground, is it 50 tanks? So I mean honestly what we’re doing right now in just air operations alone, how we are conducting air operations, we are doing probably a tenth of what we could have been doing for so long.
Examiner: How much of your thinking on all of this is reflected in Donald Trump’s policies?
Flynn: He and I, I think, see clearly how we define this threat exactly the same. How do we deal with it? I think I’m probably a little bit more precise at this stage simply because I know how to beat this enemy.
Examiner: [On North Korea,] Donald Trump has said it’s China’s problem. They need to fix it. What do you do about North Korea? What do you advise Donald Trump about North Korea?
Flynn: He’s right about China. China has always maintained North Korea, they see North Korea as a buffer. The memory of World War II, which the United States of America pulled China’s rear end out of, and helped them. So China wouldn’t be what they are today, had the United States of America not gotten deeply involved in that war.
Examiner: I don’t see them writing us thank you notes.
Flynn: They are not.
Examiner: So China’s not getting it done, so what do we do?
Flynn: Well, China needs to get it done, and there’s ways to deal with China, and this is really where economic smarts come in, and how we leverage the strengths that we have remaining of our economy.
Examiner: I can’t let you go without asking about Colin Powell’s comments about you in his emails that were hacked, in which he referred to you as a …
Flynn: A righty-nutty, nutty guy, or something
Examiner: A right-wing nutty.
Flynn: And a jerk
Examiner: A jerk, and unchained, with an abusive management style.
Flynn: Yeah.
Examiner: Other than that he seemed to be a big fan. What do you make of that?
Flynn: I found it really unbelievable. I’ve never met Coin Powell. Never met him.
Examiner: You never worked with him?
Flynn: Never met him. I mean I know who he is. He would probably not recognize me if we were walking past each other in a hallway with nobody else in the hallway. So he’s listening to somebody, “What’s the deal with Flynn?” kind of thing. And actually it’s like I said when I first heard about it, I said, “I have nine brothers and sisters. My little sister has called me worse.”
Examiner: He seemed to be a little confused about whether you had left voluntarily, were pushed out or were fired.
Flynn: I would never have left voluntarily, I mean I loved serving, I loved what I was doing.
Examiner: So set the record straight. Were you fired?
Flynn: Yeah, Yeah. I was essentially told you’re going to leave a year early. So normally a normal rotation over in the DIA is normally about three years, but I was asked to leave early, and for a variety of reasons. Part of it was because I was challenging the narrative of White House. There’s no doubt about that.
To hear the full interview, go to www.podcastone.com/examining-politics.
