Donald Trump’s vice presidential selection committee is reportedly vetting retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn to be Trump’s running mate.
Flynn has been advising the presumptive Republican presidential nominee on national security and foreign affairs since February and has been reluctant to dismiss some of Trump’s most controversial proposals like barring non-American Muslims from entering the U.S.
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According to a Tuesday report by the New York Post, the Trump campaign has narrowed its list of potential running mates down to a handful of former and incumbent Republican lawmakers. But despite the candidate’s repeated claim that he intends to pick someone “political,” the Post claims Flynn has also made the list.
The former Defense Intelligence Agency director has been in frequent contact with Trump since earlier this year and would bring significant foreign policy knowledge to the Republican ticket if the billionaire were to choose him as his running mate.
Flynn, 57, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before he was nominated by President Obama to be director of the DIA in 2012. Like Trump, who claims to have long opposed the Iraq War despite previously saying he supported it, Flynn has called the 2003 invasion a “huge error” and a catalyst that helped create the Islamic State.
He also been a vocal critic of Trump’s leading Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year, Flynn called on the former secretary of state to drop out of the 2016 race because of the ongoing FBI investigation into her handling of classified information on a private email server.
“If it were me, I would have been out the door and probably in jail,” he told CNN, adding that Clinton’s email scandal demonstrates a “lack of accountability, frankly, in a person who should have been much more responsible in her actions as the secretary of state of the United States of America.”
Flynn did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
Others individuals whose names have been floated as potential vice presidential candidates include, but are not limited to: Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
