On Inauguration Day 2017, business associate of former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn touted texts from Flynn promising to gut Russian sanctions that were hindering the nuclear project the associate was pushing, a whistleblower has told House Democrats. The texts were timestamped as being sent just as President Trump was delivering his Inaugural Address, the whistleblower said.
The whistleblower told Democrats that the associate had been informed by Flynn that the project was “good to go” and that the sanctions would be “ripped up.”
“This is going to make a lot of very wealthy people,” the associate, Alex Copson, told the whistleblower on inauguration day, according to the whistleblower’s account to the Democrats.
Copson is the managing partner of ACU, a company that had funded a 2015 trip Flynn took the Middle East that he failed to disclose on security clearance forms. ACU was pushing a nuclear project in the Middle East that Flynn is said to have lobbied for while in the White House. Flynn said on a federal filing that he served as an advisor to the company between April 2015 and June 2016.
Democrats revealed the whistleblower’s account in a letter sent by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) to House Oversight Chair Trey Gowdy (R-SC), which was released just as the New York Times published its own report on the claims.
An attorney for Copson rebutted the whistleblower’s claim in a statement to Business Insider that said “no member of ACU received any communication in any form” from Flynn during the campaign, the transition, when Flynn served as national security advisor or after he left the White House.
In his letter, Cummings, the ranking member of the committee, said that his staff had been in touch with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation about the whistleblower’s claim, and had been given the green light to move forward with their investigation of the account after Mueller indicated he’d “completed certain investigative steps” he had asked them to allow him to do.
The Democrats are now asking Gowdy to sign off on subpoenas for various White House officials, associates of Flynn’s and others involved in the nuclear project.
“If you choose to continue blocking our Committee’s investigation of General Flynn and allowing the White House to defy our bipartisan requests, the Oversight Committee will be faced with allegations of hypocrisy that are extremely difficult to defend,” Cummings said. “The integrity of this Committee’s work will be questioned, and the credibility of its investigations will be severely degraded.”
In the whistleblower’s account laid out by the Democrats, the whistleblower saw and greeted Copson at an event in Washington on Inauguration Day.
Copson then showed the whistleblower a text from Flynn that was timestamped at 12:11 that day — which is when Trump was giving his address — though the whistleblower did not read the text itself.
The project in question was a proposal to build dozens of nuclear reactors across the Middle East, which its proponents said would increase economic and energy security in the area, and would boost in particular Iran’s rivals. ACU was partnering with Russian interests in pushing the project. Another company, IP3/IronBridge had its own campaign to push the proposal.
The plan’s champions claimed that it would generate $250 billion in revenues for U.S. companies, according to the Wall Street Journal. Once in the White House, Flynn set up meetings between figures working on the project and key administration officials and Trump allies, the Journal reported. At one point, a memo about the plan circulated around the White House that appeared to be a draft memo Trump could send to cabinet heads, though it’s not clear that it ever made it in front of Trump himself, the Journal and the Washington Post reported.
On Friday, Flynn entered a guilty plea in Mueller’s investigation admitting to lying to FBI agents about discussing sanctions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. The related court filings also mentioned Flynn’s failure to disclose work he did for a lobbying campaign on behalf of Turkey. They did not however mention the Middle East nuclear project.
Update: This story has been updated to include a statement from Copson’s attorney.
Read the full Cummings letter below:
