Let's hope this is fake news

On Monday night, Michael Flynn Jr. — son of and former chief of staff for President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — tweeted out a story published on Voltaire Network entitled, “General Flynn’s Proposals to Reform Intelligence.”

The story, published last month with a Damascus dateline and authored by Thierry Meyssan — a 9/11 truther who published a book in 2002 entitled, “The Big Lie” — previews how Flynn plans to rollback “the big reforms that took place during the Bush and Obama years.”

Perhaps most significantly, the story says the “radical overhaul” Flynn is planning involves the elimination of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, an office created by President Bush in 2004, with power centralized under Flynn instead.

“The 16 agencies should no longer be accountable to the National Intelligence Director but only to the National Security Adviser,” Meyssan writes. “In other words, they will be accountable to General Flynn personally.”

The story cites anonymous sources, which some informed observers believe include Flynn Jr. himself. Last month, CNN broke news that Flynn Jr. was working in an official capacity for the Trump transition team, but the Trump team quickly distanced themselves from him after Flynn Jr.’s social media posts amplifying unfounded conspiracy theories and racist memes came under scrutiny.

Flynn Sr. is an open Islamophobe who has close ties with Russia. In December 2015, he sat at the same table with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of Russia’s state-owned RT television network, an outlet described in the recently unclassified intelligence report about Russia’s manipulation of the presidential election as “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” Flynn gave remarks blasting President Obama and said he didn’t know whether the 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria widely thought to have been the responsibility of the Russia-backed Assad regime was a “false flag.”

Last week, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, citing an unnamed “senior U.S. government official,” reported that on December 29 — the same day the Obama administration announced retaliatory measures in response to the election meddling — Flynn “phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times.”

Subsequent reports indicate Flynn and Kislyak talked on the phone five times that day. By contrast, the Obama transition team didn’t talk to Kislyak a single time before Obama was sworn in.