A top general who once supported the choice of retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as President-elect Trump’s national security adviser is now saying his appointment should be re-examined because of his “demented” tweets.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served for 30 years in the Army and was in charge of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Clinton, said Thursday he’s changed his mind on Flynn.
“I said he was, correctly, probably the best intelligence officer of his generation,” McCaffrey told MSNBC. “But, I must admit, I’m now extremely uneasy about some of these tweets which don’t sound as if they are political skullduggery but instead border on being demented.”
The tweets McCaffrey was referring to were Flynn’s musings on fake news stories about Hillary Clinton during the election. Some of those stories alleged Clinton was involved in pedophilia with her husband and other top Democrats.
Flynn’s son, Michael G. Flynn, also spread stories related to Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory that the Clintons and other top Democrats run a child sex ring out of pizzerias around the country. That conspiracy led a man from North Carolina to drive to a Washington, D.C., pizzeria and fire two shots with a shotgun while planning to rescue children he believed were trapped there.
McCaffrey said the national security adviser is a tremendously important position and can’t be left to someone who buys into these kinds of conspiracy theories.
“It’s an extraordinarily important position in government. There’s a tremendous opportunity to shape foreign policy and defense policy,” he said. “We need to aggressively examine what was going on with Gen. Flynn and his son dealing with these transparent, nearly demented, tweets that were going out. I think it needs closer scrutiny.”
