Retired Gen. Michael Flynn discusses the Deep State
Former NSA Michael Flynn joins Fox Nation's 'Tucker Carlson Today'
Former National Security Adviser Gen. Michael Flynn [Ret.] joined Fox Nation's "Tucker Carlson Today" to discuss the power and autonomy of the Deep State, and how in the time since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the government's attempts to better secure the U.S. essentially led to a spike in resources for such an apparatus.
As host Tucker Carlson recounted, the three-star general spent more than 30 years in the armed services before President Obama named him to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which was followed by his brief and tumultuous time as national security adviser in the early days of the Trump administration.
Flynn told Carlson that President Ike Eisenhower warned future generations about the potential rise of the Deep State when he spoke of the Military Industrial Complex.
"If you fast forward to today, 2021, you can add a component to that," he said of the 21st Century national security apparatus.
"The security state of this country has grown probably by five times in the last 25 to 30 years."
Flynn told Carlson that the DIA had about 3,000 people working in it in the early 2000s. When Obama appointed Flynn to its lead post in 2012, there were 20,000 people there.
"So in a 10 year period of time, and it really was -- 9/11 probably was the impetus behind some of this. But I think what happened was, over time, this security state complex really joined with this military industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about," he said.
"And the danger now that we face is we have-- that security state complex are all of these intelligence community agencies and activities that we have, right, that we've heard so much about … who actually is in charge of them, and then what authorities or what things that they're able to do-- You've lived this, via them monitoring your phone calls, right?" Flynn told Carlson.
In June, Carlson reported that a whistleblower with knowledge or a connection to the NSA, shared information with him that would have only been recognizable to the host and an unidentified individual he had been corresponding with, about a pressing story that "Tucker Carlson Tonight" was working on.
After the individual came forward, Carlson said at the time his team tried repeatedly to get ahold of Gen. Paul Nakasone, the Trump-appointed head of the agency. The NSA later put out a statement denying that the host had ever been "an intelligence target".
Flynn added that the DIA, NSA, CIA and other agencies fall under the Director of National Intelligence's purview, noting that official is a political appointee – most recently former Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas and Sen. Daniel Coats, R-Ind., under Trump, Avril Haines under President Biden, and current CNN analyst James Clapper under President Obama.
"These are big structures. And they're unwieldy," he said, adding that their behavior can be influenced by the White House's or their own political views:
"When you're talking about the extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of money that flow through Congress and flow into these intelligence agencies and the activities that they do around the world – so the-- big picture, the CIA is supposed to be international, FBI is a big organization, is supposed to be domestic, and taking care of all of those things. And they're supposed to cooperate on different aspects of what's happening, you know, from overseas to domestic issues."
That proverbial line has now been "blurred" and more, Flynn said.
"[A subject] gets picked up by the National Security Agency. The CIA's tracking them. And then they're talking to somebody inside the United States, the FBI is supposed to be a nice clean handoff," he said of a hypothetical case. "So what has happened is that those lines no longer exist. They're not even blurred. They just don't exist."
In that realm, Flynn later asserted that when the Deep State appeared to come after him after Trump named him to the post, they allegedly decided to use him as a way to "get to" the new president.
"The American people, they saw through this from the very beginning, because it wasn't about Mike Flynn. It wasn't even about Donald Trump. It was about them. And when the left and the media started to attack the presidency of the United States of America, the American people saw that, hey, this is an attack on us," he later said.
"If people really, really wanted to dig into the case against Mike Flynn, and all of the filings, and all the things that have come out. Even now-- even, we still see stuff coming out now with this Sussman indictment, and some of the other things that I think that Durham is actually is going to probably start to look at… And I think what you learn is that we have two separate governments."
"We have the one that actually gets elected and goes into office. And then you have a government inside of Washington DC that operates under no rules, no authorities other than their own," Flynn said of the ‘second’ government – the Deep State.
"I would say that that, to a degree, is what we're operating with today. So when people talk about the Deep State… I don't really describe the Deep State as a group of [politicians] -- you know, of Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer, or some of the people that are elected. They become part of it, but they're not really the deep state."