President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming national security adviser met with the leader of a far-right Austrian political party founded by ex-Nazis at Trump Tower a few weeks ago, the New York Times reported Monday.
Heinz-Christian Strache wrote on his Facebook page that he had met with retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in Trump Tower.
“Internationally, the Freedom Party continues to gain in influence,” he wrote in the post, as quoted by the Times.
Strache is the charismatic leader of Austria’s Freedom Party, whose candidate for the presidency, Nobert Hofer, lost in a run-off vote this month after earning the most votes of any candidate there in the first round of voting.
Strache also recently signed a so-called “cooperation agreement” with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political party, which outlined plans for regular meetings and established cooperation on joint projects over five years, according to the Times. Leaders of the Freedom Party have argued forcefully for lifting all sanctions against Russia.
Eighteen months after stepping down as leader of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn himself sat next to Putin at a 2015 gala in Moscow for RT, a Kremlin-backed television channel on which he continued to occasionally appear as a contributor. He told the network in October, during a discussion about Syria, that he believes “Russia and the United States working together and trying to work with the other partners that we all have in this region can come up with some other solutions.”
