An overlooked line item in Michael Flynn’s financial disclosure form reveals why and how Flynn, Jeff Sessions, and Donald Trump seem to pine after Vladimir Putin like a love-sick-cellie. It seems Flynn after his retirement went on an ambition rampage and decided to get involved in a hare-brained scheme to a plan to build scores of U.S. nuclear power plants in the Middle East.
Flynn was an adviser to X-Co Dynamics Inc./Iron Bridge Group, which oversaw the Navy’s nuclear programs. According to sources at Newsweek: “Flynn flew to Egypt and Israel on behalf of X-Co/Iron Bridge. His mission: to gauge attitudes in Cairo and Jerusalem for a joint U.S.-Russian (and Saudi-financed) program to get control over the Arab world’s nuclear power.”
But the real sizzle in this plan was a plan to jump-start the moribund American nuclear industry, which was losing out to Russian and even South Korean contractors in the region.
As The Economist noted in 2015, “Demand for electricity is rising, along with pressure to lower carbon emissions; nuclear plants tick both boxes.” And some of the region’s major players, like Egypt and Jordan, don’t have oil and gas resources and “want nuclear power to shore up the security of their energy supplies,”
Flynn’s sensed like an opportunity to make major cash and advocated a U.S.-Russian partnership to build and operate plants.
The cost to Americans: nothing. It would be “funded entirely by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to the tune of a trillion dollars. A tune played by you guessed it: Alex Copson, former bass player for Iron Butterfly and now in his waning years a British -American “deal” maker like his soon- to-be-silent partner, Donald Trump.
With Flynn, Copson now had an inside man whose name he could dangle like a pinwheel in front of investor’s eyes. And one more insider was on his way: Senator Jeff Sessions.
It also answered the question: why did Jeff Sessions suddenly develop a crush on Putin when he lived and served as Senator from Huntsville, Alabama, a place that most likely has never had a Russian even drive through it. It seems Copson tried to convince the Tennessee Valley Authority to transfer an unfinished Alabama nuclear plant in exchange for shares in the consortium that would build reactors in the Middle East, telling a Huntsville reporter that “Alabama’s two senators”—both Republicans, and one, Jeff Sessions, then a top Trump campaign adviser—“can help the next administration move this project forward.”
Flynn tired of being a single-digit millionaire like Sessions seduced Trump who saw his chance to finally have the money of an oligarch and become a real billionaire rather than his measly $250 million dollar fortune which forces him to fly a 20-year-old private jet his peers make fun of.
Flynn in a January 2016 interview with Al Jazeera said: “An entirely new economy is what this region needs,” he said, especially for the millions of unemployed young men living under corrupt autocracies and tempted by extremism. “You’ve got to give them something else to do. If you don’t, they’re going to turn on their own governments.”
In Gadda-Da-Vida, is a slurred delivery of the words: In the Garden of Eden. Perhaps, Flynn is singing the same song but this time, the right place.