Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey has changed his opinion on the incoming national security adviser, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, after reading his tweets.
In an interview on NBC posted online Thursday, McCaffrey acknowledged that he had initially been supportive of Flynn after President-elect Trump announced that he would be his national security adviser, a position which does not require confirmation hearings.
“But I must admit,” McCaffrey said, “I’m now extremely uneasy about some of these tweets, which don’t sound so much as if they are political skullduggery, but instead border on being demented. So I think we need to look into this and sort our what’s going on here.”
“I think that 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,” he continued. “I think it needs closer scrutiny.”
Flynn and his son, Michael G. Flynn, have attracted attention in recent weeks for a pattern of posting conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated news articles on their social media accounts. In one incident, which anonymous sources within the Trump transition team say led to his firing, the younger Flynn posted multiple defenses of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which posits that a local Washington, D.C., pizza parlor secretly houses a Clinton-run child sex trafficking ring.
The elder Flynn seems to have a knack for sniffing out the incorrect, too: An analysis from Politico found he had posted 16 unfounded accusations on his Twitter account since Aug. 9, including one tweet that called President Obama a “jihadi,” which Flynn re-posted to his own account. Flynn also posted an article during that period which claimed without proof that new emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server proved she was involved in, in Flynn’s words, “Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc”.
After Flynn was announced as Trump’s pick for national security adviser, McCaffrey, who appears regularly as a paid analyst on NBC and MSNBC, said that while Flynn’s repeated call to lock Hillary Clinton up on the campaign trail “makes most of us in the military very uncomfortable,” he was a good choice for the job.
“Flynn is the best intelligence officer of his generation,” he said at the time. “He and Gen. Stan McCrystal and Dave Petraeus are the reason we haven’t had a dozen 9/11s since then.”
McCaffrey said Flynn had been “relentless” in combatting global Islamic jihadism.
Watch below via NBC:
