Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Donald Trump’s national security adviser, was the 18th chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s version of the Central Intelligence Agency. President Obama fired this noted Islamophobe two years ago over policy differences, if you take his word for it, and for ineffectiveness, butting heads with superiors and trying to end-run them if you accept how they see things.
Nobody seems to doubt Flynn’s military skills. But since Trump started officially taking his advice, there’s been considerable disapproving talk about the full nature of the retired general’s alleged connections to Vladimir Putin, with several of those critiques coming from rightist sources, including Politico and the hilariously named Accuracy in Media.
In part, the criticism emerges from Flynn’s views that the United States and Russia should be partners in fighting terrorism and his appearance December 10 last year at the gala 10th anniversary party for the Kremlin-funded news network once known as Russia Today, but rebranded as RT. Having given a foreign policy talk earlier in the day as part of the RT anniversary events, at the gala’s dinner party Flynn sat at the right hand of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As David Kocieniewski and Peter Robison at Bloomberg report today, Flynn also partnered in 2016 ...
with a controversial technology company co-run by a man once convicted of trying to sell stolen biotech material to the Russian KGB espionage agency.
Subu Kota, who pleaded guilty in 1996 to selling the material to an FBI agent posing as a Russian spy, is one of two board directors at the company, Boston-based Brainwave Science. During years of federal court proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed that between 1985 and 1990 Kota met repeatedly with a KGB agent and was part of a spy ring that made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling U.S. missile defense technology to Russian spies. Kota denied being part of a spy ring, reached a plea agreement in the biotech case and admitted to selling a sketch of a military helicopter to his co-defendant, who was later convicted of being a KGB operative.
The company’s product is “brain fingerprinting.” Its disputed claim is that it can accurately assess—via a brain scan—whether a subject of interrogation is telling the truth. Flynn reportedly put the Brainwave helmet on and was persuaded of its efficacy. His job is to help hawk it to law enforcement agencies. If it really works, perhaps he and everybody in his boss’s cabinet could wear one of the helmets for the next four years. But every lie detector ever invented has a shaky reputation for sussing out honesty. And besides, when it’s Donald Trump doing the talking, it doesn’t seem to matter to many Americans whether he is lying or not as long as what he says sounds good.
Kota swears he was never a spy and has been completely on the up-and-up since the plea deal. Well, okay. Maybe he was just an innocent pawn in the whole affair. And maybe Flynn’s partnership means nothing more than another of those lucrative private-sector gigs that so many retired generals sign on for.
But given last year’s hoopla about Bernie Sanders supposedly taking his honeymoon to the Soviet Union (an obnoxious and bogus red-baiting claim), imagine for a moment how loud the screams would be if the Vermont senator were partnering with a KGB-tainted guy or sitting next to Putin at functions for Kremlin-funded projects. Sean Hannity would be demanding he be shipped to Gitmo.