Michael Flynn said to be appointed Trump national security adviser

Michael Flynn said to be appointed Trump national security adviser President-elect Donald Trump has offered the job of national securi...

Michael Flynn said to be appointed Trump national security adviser

President-elect Donald Trump has offered the job of national security adviser to Michael Flynn, a former military intelligence chief who has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration, according to a senior Trump official.

Flynn, 57, who served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has advised Trump on national security issues for months. As national security adviser, he would work in the White House shaping foreign and military policy and have frequent access to a president with no national security experience.

The Trump official, who was not authorized to discuss the offer publicly, would not say whether Flynn had accepted the job.

According to photographs released by the Japanese government, he was however present at a meeting on Thursday in New York between Trump and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, at which the US president-elect’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner were also present.

Flynn broke from other national security experts during the US election campaign who denounced Trump, joining the then-candidate at rallies and leading chants against Hillary Clinton, including those that called for her to be locked up. 

In a fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn emphasized his view that the threat posed by the Islamic State group required a more aggressive US military, as well as his belief that Washington should work more closely with Moscow.

A retired three-star army general, Flynn ran the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the highest positions a military intelligence officer can attain, between 2012 and 2014. But clashes with top Obama administration officials led to his departure. James Clapper, the CIA director who announced his resignation on Thursday, played a leading role in Flynn’s departure.



A controversial figure, Flynn has been criticized for regularly appearing on RT, the Russian state-owned television station, and once attended an RT gala, sitting two seats from Russian president Vladimir Putin. He later said his speaker’s bureau had arranged the trip and that he saw no distinction between RT and TV news organizations like CNN.



Flynn, who wrote in his 2016 book The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, that he was “not a devotee of so-called political correctness”.

In February, the general posted on Twitter: “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL”. Then, in July, he re tweeted an antisemitic post mocking the Clinton campaign’s blaming of Russian hackers for leaked emails: “CNN implicated. ‘The USSR is to blame!’ Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” Flynn later deleted his retweet and apologized, saying it was a mistake; the tweet about Muslims has not been deleted.