Now that the Justice Department is moving to dismiss the criminal case against Michael Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency director may be eligible to recover his access to the nation’s top defense secrets.
Flynn, who headed the DIA from 2012 to 2014 under President Barack Obama, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States during the transition to the Trump administration, in which he was briefly national security adviser. But Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, later declared his innocence and argued he was set up by the FBI.
The Justice Department filed to dismiss criminal charges against Flynn on Thursday, leaving it up to a federal judge overseeing the case to make the final determination.
“It’s been our practice to maintain a clearance, continued access, to classified defense information for former directors,” DIA spokesman Jim Kudla told the Washington Examiner. “The DIA maintains a clearance for former directors so that the current director can contact them on pertinent matters if he or she needs to do that.”
Flynn’s security clearance was suspended in February 2017 when a federal case against him was opened.
“Lt. Gen. Flynn’s access to national security information remains suspended until there is a final resolution in the case,” Kudla said. “Once there’s a final decision, following established processes mandated by applicable federal guidance, we will then adjudicate his continued eligibility for such access.”
Flynn’s military intelligence career is storied, beginning with his commission as second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence in 1981. He rose to serve as director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command and for United States Central Command with duties in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In former Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s book Inside the Five-Sided Box, Flynn is not the disgraced former Trump national security adviser. Rather, he’s a key intelligence link between Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s soldiers operating in post-9/11 Afghanistan and the Pentagon.
“At that time, Flynn was a skilled and effective intelligence officer,” Carter wrote. “I knew that he could help me figure out more precisely what Stan and his people needed.”
Former DIA officer and current Heritage Foundation analyst Bruce Klingner told the Washington Examiner that a DIA director would have formed an intricate part of intelligence collection in the post-9/11 era.
“After 9/11, the entire intelligence community shifted to place a greater emphasis on anti-terrorism, counterterrorism,” said Klingner, who did not personally know Flynn.
“You’re identifying intelligence gaps. You’re trying to initiate collection from any appropriate intelligence source to fill in the intelligence gaps, conducting analysis to discern the pertinent information from a wealth of information,” he added. “You’re not collecting intelligence because it’s cool to collect it. It’s to provide information that is required by senior political or military leaders in the U.S. government.”
And Flynn rose to a position to oversee all the nation’s defense intelligence.
Obama appointed Flynn as director of the DIA in July 2012, where Flynn became the intelligence adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense.
“They are responding to those two customers’ standing and ad hoc requirements,” Klingner said. “So it’s to enable policymakers to make the best-informed decision on behalf of the United States as possible.”
Klingner, who worked for DIA from 1983 to 1990, described the DIA as “the CIA of the Pentagon.” DIA’s role is to coordinate and integrate the intelligence gathered by each of the services, he said.
“Their focus is predominantly on military analysis,” he said of the agency. “The focus not only is on the secretary and the chairman but on the field and the fleet, answering requirements for the folks in the military where the CIA would be focusing more on the principles within the Beltway, assistant secretary and above.”
In Afghanistan and Iraq, Flynn would have been coordinating the intelligence required to win the wars and save the lives of troops.
“Certainly, when you’re in a war zone, the focus is very much on the enemy,” Klingner said. “What their capabilities are, what the deployments of their weapons are. What weapons do they have? What weapons they have in development. What are the intentions of the military and political leaders? What is it that can hurt you — either them attacking you or if you were to attack them? What’s going to hurt you when they attack them?”
Reporting about Flynn’s two-year tenure as DIA chief reveals a tumultuous time that former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell criticized in leaked private emails in 2016, when Flynn was a close adviser to then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“Flynn got fired as head of DIA,” Powell wrote to his son in the emails acquired by BuzzFeed. “I asked why Flynn got fired. Abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy, bad management, etc. He has been and was right-wing nutty.”
Flynn, now 61, announced his retirement from the DIA and the military after 33 years and two months following a February 2014 encounter with a Russian woman at a London intelligence conference that led some to believe he might have been compromised.
At the highest level of the DIA, Flynn would have had a top-secret, sensitive compartmented information access, and he would have had some level of intelligence clearance throughout his military intelligence career, explained Klingner.
Flynn could regain that access following a DIA review.
“There’s a process for determining whether a person can continue having access to classified information,” Kudla said. “There are people that make a decision based upon facts.”
