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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Former Trump national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn found himself at the center of a national firestorm when he was charged with lying to the FBI over a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

The DOJ would later drop the case, saying there was no “legitimate investigative basis” to have targeted him.

In his new book “Pardon of Innocence,” he details his story.

As new documents are released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we sat down with the 33-year military veteran to understand how he sees everything that happened to him, almost a decade later.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Michael Flynn, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

It’s great. I love it. And I watch American Thought Leaders all the time. I wouldn’t say that I watch every minute of every show, but I think the people that you have on are people that are out there doing the work that needs to be done. And it’s fascinating stories, fascinating people. And I think that’s what people are looking for these days. I know that’s why we’re here today to talk about a story that most people can’t believe.

I’ve been reading your book, Pardon of Innocence, and it really is astonishing. It’s been such a long time. Of course, we’ve been covering this story at The Epoch Times, various aspects of it, both from your perspective and then the whole Crossfire Hurricane perspective and everything that happened afterward. It’s hard to even know where to start. Why did you write this book?

Yes. I wanted to document for historical purposes something that happened to the United States of America. So I did it through my voice and through my lens, but it actually is not just a story about an individual, in this case, General Mike Flynn. It’s a story about what is happening and what does happen to America and all the people of this country.

There are so many people that have come to the realization that in order to maintain this beautiful experiment in democracy called the Constitutional Republic, we are going to have to constantly sacrifice for it. And some people end up being sacrificed in some cases, or certainly being in a position where you have to discover for yourself that there’s a lot more to it than just going and voting. It actually requires service and sacrifice. And as someone who has served in our military, I know what service means from that perspective.

But I think for others who are just now coming to the realization, the inspiring part of this book is how do you serve in this country? How does every person serve now? Because it’s not just about putting on a uniform and going to serve overseas. It’s not just about being a servant as a police officer or as a fireman. We call them first responders. But how do you serve as a citizen?

And we think about what the founders wanted out of this country. They wanted every citizen to have a voice and to have a role. And that was really the big argument at the beginning of the country. And I think we’ve lost sight of that. That’s what I want people to walk away from this book understanding. It’s not a story about one person.

It’s really a story about all of us. But it needed to be told, and it needed to be documented historically. Because if you don’t put it out there in a public way, then it just gets lost in history. And I think that this is a really critical point in history. And I think that the book adds to that, adds to that story.

Let’s just start at the beginning. As the national security advisor for newly elected President Trump, you were speaking with the Russian ambassador.

There’s been a lot of stories and a lot of reports on that, a lot of shows on that, a lot of discussion about that. And was it the right thing for me to be doing? Was it okay to be speaking to foreign counterparts? And the answer at the end of the day is, yes, I was doing my job, right? And even the president of the United States, President Trump, even said it after the fact, after I had departed the White House, the guy was just doing his job. And so I don’t know what the big deal was.

But then he said that I had misinformed or lied to the vice president, which we now know that that actually wasn’t true. That wasn’t a true statement. He said it as though it was true because that’s what he knew at the time. But it turns out that it actually wasn’t true. And we learned about that in evidence.

I think that it’s not just the conversation that I had with the Russian ambassador, it’s actually the result of that and then what we have experienced, because here it is, that was 2016. Here we are in 2025, and halfway through 2025, and it’s almost a decade later, and we’re still in the throes of a component of something that actually we just learned about is vastly different from what anybody believed or anybody knew at the time.

One of the things that wasn’t around at that time was now what we see as the alternative media. So there would be an alternative to the story. Somebody who would actually question it and say, well, what was going on here? Is this right? Is it wrong? Where you had one element of the media, because the media played a big role in what happened to me, a huge role. And how the media came in and worked hand in glove with the government at the time, with the White House at the time, and particularly the intelligence community.

And I think the bigger sort of strategic issue, Jan, is not so much the conversation and rehashing the conversation and what it meant or what I did. It’s actually how does the government weaponize itself against the American people? And in this case, they made a conscious decision to weaponize themselves not only against General Mike Flynn, but also the incoming National Security Advisor, which is a monumental role in our government, huge role, huge responsibilities. And they made a conscious decision to weaponize components of the government against the President of the United States himself.

In this case, the incoming president at the time was Donald J. Trump. And from that moment in the latter part of 2016 and 2017, where we really didn’t know, I mean, there was, you know, and I would say I’m as naive as the next person. I mean, I know a lot more now, but I was naive to think that the FBI was this weaponized, that the CIA was this weaponized against a person who had been working with them, had run one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world.

But the discovery for all Americans and for anybody that listens to this show, this interview, is that the weaponization of the United States government against its own citizenry is very real. It happens on a daily basis. And it doesn’t just happen to high-profile political figures. It happens to everyday Americans where somebody does something that, in this case, the FBI or the Department of Justice doesn’t like.

And what they do is they put the full weight of their authorities against any American who can’t financially afford it, can’t emotionally sustain it, and really doesn’t have the wherewithal to be able to even understand what is happening. And the next thing that happens is they find themselves in a place where they have to plead guilty to something that they know they didn’t do because otherwise they’re going to be completely crushed and their families are going to be destroyed, which in many cases, those things already happen.

And so that’s the weaponization of just the Justice Department, the weaponization of the intelligence community. And when I say that we say the intelligence community, like it’s some, you know, esoteric thing, it’s the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s the National Security Agency. It’s the Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s elements within our governments.

The Department of State has its own intelligence component. The Department of Homeland Security has its own intelligence component. And the White House actually is weaponized as well. The White House can weaponize itself against an American citizen that they don’t like. Particularly the White House will go against people politically for a political advantage.

And so I became the fulcrum of what essentially is a color revolution that’s still ongoing in the United States of America. So people can look up color revolutions, you know, in history. I mean, there are a lot of color revolutions that have occurred, going back to almost the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, you know, we learned a lot of lessons, color revolutions in the Philippines, color revolutions in Poland, color revolutions certainly in other parts of Europe, Yugoslavia. At the time, most Americans don’t remember, but in 2014, there was a color revolution in Ukraine. Post the Sochi Olympics in February of 2014, that’s when the Russians attacked into Ukraine.

Now, this is just the Russian Federation, and they blame it on the encroachment of NATO. And I’m going back to this example because what happened in 2016 when, and now we know this for, you know, nearly factual basis now based on what the latest director of national intelligence has exposed from a meeting that I was not aware of, that is not written about in my book, on the 8th of December, which is all held in classified channels. So that’s another part of weaponization.

If you’re in government, you can have communications at the highest level between the president of the United States, between his national security team, maybe a dozen people. You can have communications, and you can protect those in classified systems. And unless somebody actually knows where to look and what they’re doing and has the authority to go and expose it like Tulsi Gabbard just did, we wouldn’t know any of these things. After Donald Trump won in 2016, which was a shock to everybody, except for those of us that were watching the sentiment closely, the sentiment of the American people, who are sick and tired of the normal politics. I knew that Trump was going to win before the election.

So when Trump won, it was a shock to everybody because the heir apparent was supposed to be Hillary Clinton. And that’s when there was a decision made. And they took the color revolution example of what they had just done, what the Obama administration had just done. So they weaponized our government, the State Department, the intelligence community, and elements of the Department of Defense against Russia at the time in 2014. And they overthrew the Ukrainian government.

So they took the color revolution and they basically ran a play. They ran a scenario right here in the United States of America. It’s Nancy Pelosi, create the smear and then attack, attack, attack, even if it’s false. Right. The wraparound, the wrap, the wrap-up smear, she calls it the wrap-up smear. Right. Which was, it’s crazy. But she got out and spoke about it. She actually went out and spoke about the wrap-up smear, how to destroy somebody. And that’s what they were doing to President Trump.

But a guy like me, you know, back to the question of the conversation I had with the Russian ambassador, what they had to do is they had to connect some dots. And they did. And when they connected those dots, they did it in a way that allowed them to have this story. They needed their minions in the media to be able to push it and promote it and to propagandize it and to get it to where, you know, some number of enough people needed to believe that Mike Flynn, you know, committed treason, was a traitor to the country. The number of names that I’ve been called, it’s like it’s gotten to the point where it doesn’t even bother me because, you know, I knew I know who I am and I know what happened and I knew it then, but I had to get through it.

So we have seen almost a decade of evidence come out, evidence that you guys out of your great organization have been extracting from the government. Other organizations like Tom Fitton’s, lawyers, people who have been battling to get to the truth of what actually happened. And now we have even more revelations by a Democrat, who really is an American patriot, in somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, right? If you think about it, they’ve been after Tulsi Gabbard. I’ll tie it back to me and back to 2016 and the 2017 timeframe.

So Tulsi Gabbard is a former Democrat congresswoman, you know, and she ran for president on a Democrat ticket, right? And what did she do? She turned against her own kind. Right. And at the time, to kind of draw a little bit of an analogy, I was a Democrat. So I’m in the final four from the outside, I was not a political person. I was a military guy, but I just so happened to be a Democrat.

In fact, when I went into the White House as a national, as the national security advisor, I was a Democrat. And I was apolitical because I, you know, I really believed I served our country. I believed in America. I believed in what Donald Trump was espousing, which was America first and make America great again, which is his bumper sticker. And you kind of say to yourself, why? I mean, why were they going after me so hard? And we now have learned about this.

So one of the documents that came out very recently, Comey actually talks about from this eight, very famous now, now famous eight December 2016 meeting, Comey actually talks about targeting General Flynn. They knew that if they allowed me to go into the White House with Trump and they didn’t bother going after Trump the way they went after him, that this whole thing would have been exposed. It would have been exposed very early on. Obama had said to Trump, don’t hire General Flynn.

Where does that come from, right? Transitioning the entirety of the U.S. government from one president to another, and you talk about two people, one is a general that was appointed twice by Obama, right? Because they knew that I would have dug in and dug my heels in because that’s my way and that’s been my sort of background certainly in the military and in the intelligence community and five years of my life in direct combat operations. So they knew that I would have had access to all this information, right?

So one of the things that they talked about was something called the President’s Daily Briefing. They made a conscious decision to change the President’s Daily Briefing. I was actually reading the President’s Daily Briefing after I was designated as a National Security Advisor damn near every day during the transition. So they purposely and intentionally left out information or changed information in it.

There is an element of subversion inside of our government that’s very real. And a lot of Americans kind of go, it goes right over their heads. It’s just like saying to somebody, our debt is $35 trillion. I mean, for an American who’s worried about, you know, how much money they’re going to have to fill up their gas tank with it, you know, $35 trillion. And it’s the same thing.

It’s like America is going through a coup. America has people that are serving in the highest levels of our government who are anti-American, pro-communism. There are people that are serving in our government that are more aligned with the dictatorship of the CCP than they are with the constitutional republic of our government. And the answer is absolutely. And that’s exactly what we have, because there is a subversion of our government that started many, many years ago.

And I don’t go into all the background there, but I mean, it does go back as far as the era of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Now we’re at a place where there was an opportunity to actually overthrow the country. And when Donald Trump came down the very famous escalator, they were like, you know, it was a joke, right? Until it wasn’t a joke. And until he won in November of 2016. And when he won on, I think it was 8 November 2016, then all of a sudden they had to adjust their plans because their plans really were eight years of Obama, eight years of Hillary.

And your great media outlet, wonderful media outlet, would never, wouldn’t see the light of day. You would not exist. Nobody would know who you are as a great interviewer because they would have turned this country completely around. They would have eliminated major parts of the Constitution. And we find ourselves as principally a socialist country. There’s been such an effort to subvert this government. And one of the principal nation-states behind it are the Chinese. There’s no doubt.

So during the Clinton administration, one of the things that they allowed, particularly in the second term of Bill Clinton, was they allowed the Chinese government to begin to send a large number of students to colleges and universities. And they also had massive, massive spying operations. So this began in the second half of the 90s. And all it has done is it has grown and grown and grown in time.

So what the Chinese decided to do is they began to really work hard on taking over the United States of America in a very sort of subverted way, in a very quiet, covert way. It all ties into 2016 and 2017 and your question about this famous conversation I had with the Russian ambassador, which amounted to nothing, right? They knew, and you can go back and look at a lot of other things that I’ve said over time or I’ve written about and I’ve been writing about things for a long, long time about this issue, about the rise of communism in the United States of America, what drives me is this country. And that’s where Trump and I connected.

If there’s one thing that we both firmly believe in, it’s the greatness of America. Frankly, I would love to, I’d love, and maybe one of these days, maybe Tulsi will do it. Maybe she’ll give all the transcripts out of my conversations with not just him, but others to show that I was protecting the United States of America from enemies, foreign and domestic. And they knew it. So the Obama administration, Obama himself knew it because he was being briefed on it. And that more and more and more that’s going to come out.

And people in this country, people that listen to this broadcast, they need to understand that evil exists. We’re still in a tough spot. We’re not out of the woods yet. And that’s why people need to understand that this fight is still ensuing because this revolution is not over. This color revolution is not over because the players that are in charge of this color revolution, they are still out there on the streets of America. They’re still out there in the media. They’re still out there in the political realm of our system of government.

With the Federalist Paper 2 and 3, we wrote about this recently. John Jay, who was one of the authors of that, talked about, you know, the greatest threat to our country is never going to be a foreign foe. It’s always going to be somebody, it’s always going to be a subversion within, right, from within. So many have warned us about that.

Abraham Lincoln was another one. When he was 28 years old, talking about how no foreign foe would ever take a drink from the Ohio or step on the Blue Ridge, never, even with a Bonaparte as a commander. If we’re going to die, we’re going to die by our own suicide. He said that at the age of 28 years old. So many people that were prescient and visionaries and historic figures that were worldly and thought about these things, you know, and also were men or women of action would always talk about this kind of behavior and potential and possibility. And here we are.

We are now in a place where this is it. This is a moment of existentialism for the United States of America. And I think that people are going to have to come to grips with it. And it’s not that everybody’s got to get behind Donald J. Trump. People need to get behind this idea that we need to continue to be a constitutional republic based on ideas and based on the rights of citizens, right? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because all three of those things can be taken away.

So you yourself are deeply experienced in the realm of information warfare, which has been a centerpiece of all of these weaponization activities for the last decade plus, right? So how does it work?

Yes. Well, a couple of things. So first, an event has to occur. So you have to create something, create an event. And the event that occurs is, in most cases, staged. And there might be demonstrations on the street. It may be demonstrations in a square, you know, overseas. It might be the assassination of an individual. It might be a conflict between two warring parties, literally, a conflict overseas. Like in Africa, I saw a lot of this, and I saw it certainly in Central America in my early days in the military.

So you have to have an event. You create the event. Once you create the event, then you take the components of what, you know, part of your plan. And that’s the intelligence community. It’s members of Congress in this, in our country, as members of Congress, because they’re going to be part of it. Some of them are going to be witting, some will be unwitting, but you know what their behaviors will be once the event occurs, because you’ve studied them enough.

This is where your intelligence system kicks in. And the intelligence system is not 17 agencies and hundreds of thousands of people. It’s actually a small group. So you have to have a small group of people that are part of this event crisis moment, and they have to be ready to go to town, go to work, right? You also have to have your elements inside the media, and you have to have, in our case, you have to have staff over in certain parts of the government. So the bureaucrats, right? So there’s bureaucrats in Congress, there’s bureaucrats in the Department of Defense, there’s bureaucrats in the Department of State. So these are the elements of your plan, right?

So when you’re looking at the plan, you know, you have the event, you know, part of the strategy for the plan is you’ve got to have all of the different pieces in place. And once you’ve said, this is what we’re going to do, we’re going to overthrow this country. We’re going to assassinate this president. We’re going to destroy Donald Trump, and we’re going to get him to quit. Or we’re going to maybe do something worse. I mean, there’s been two assassination attempts on Trump, you know, just in the last year alone, year, year plus now. And there’s still, we still don’t know the results of those. We don’t know the outcomes of those.

You mean we don’t know what happened?

No, we don’t know who’s behind it.

Right, okay, just clarifying that.

We don’t really know who’s behind it. In the case of President Trump, the event was an unexpected event, his victory in 2016. So when they failed to get Hillary Clinton over the hump and win the election in 2016, then it kicked in. And now we know the 8th of December, now it’s going to be a very famous meeting now, 8th December that Barack Obama led. So they had the event, a Trump victory. They now needed to organize quickly, and they needed to begin to select targets that they were going to go after.

The principal target was Donald Trump. The principal target was to get him out of the way. Like maybe we could figure out a way to get him out before he even took the, you know, assume the presidency in January of 2017. When that happened, then they had to figure out the next step, which was the 25th Amendment. People tend to forget these things, but these are all things that happened, and they wanted to do a 25th Amendment really before that noise was out there, before the Mueller investigation, before Mueller was even appointed. They were talking about the 25th Amendment, right?

And the Mueller investigation, of course, is the investigation into so-called Russian collusion.

Right. And with the Mueller investigation, he gets appointed and now he’s going to run an investigation that we now know is based on a complete, fabricated lie. It was a lie to the American people. But it was all based on an event. So once that event kicked in, they being the Obama administration and elements of his national security team, a very small group, and within each one of their organizations, they had to have people that were adherents to their way of thinking.

And we have learned about these small groups since Trump has come back into office, one of which was up at the National Security Agency, not too far from here, about another hour-and-a-half away. Recently, Tulsi Gabbard, for example, fired the director of the National Security Agency and the deputy director of the National Security Agency because they were doing things inside to undermine the current president of the United States. You know, in this case, Trump, because he won again.

So these are events that occurred. They had to scramble in the 2016 timeframe because it was unexpected. So now they had to figure out how to take their plan and put it into a different set of motions. One of the very famous lines by, you know, a person that was the deputy head of counterespionage for the FBI. His name was Peter Strzok, you know, and he basically talks about an insurance policy again prior to the election. If in case he wins, we have an insurance policy. So what did that mean?

And now we’re starting to see almost a decade later what that means, right? We now see the evidence in black and white of what they decided to do back in 2016 to not just subvert Donald Trump, okay, whatever people want to think about Donald Trump, but to subvert the will of the American people. That’s as weaponized a government as you can actually have in a system of government that is supposed to be based on the rule of law, right? And we’re only based on the rule of law if we follow them. And there is clear evidence now that laws were broken and violated.

And we’ll see how this plays out over the next couple of weeks because people in this country are demanding accountability. And I do think that a big component of this is trust. The American people don’t trust our government anymore. They don’t even trust the government that Trump now is in charge of. They’re having a really difficult time. You know, you mentioned China. You mentioned The Epoch Times and the creation of this. I’ll just add because we talked about this briefly prior, and I met these two guys. The unrestricted warfare doctrine was not put out publicly until the late 90s. And they actually wrote another appendix to it in, I think, 2003.

And just to clarify a couple of things. One, I commented earlier that it was in the 90s that the Epoch Times founders actually came to America, coming after the Tiananmen Square Massacre and after the student movement had collapsed and ultimately founded The Epoch Times in 2000, which I think to the great benefit of the American people and globally. That’s one part. The other part was simply the two colonels that wrote this famous treatise, Unrestricted Warfare, you’ve actually met them.

Yes. What I think people need to understand is that my military career was a big part of it during the days of the Cold War, Warsaw Pact, you know, Soviet Union and the West. And also was looking at and studying the rise of China and the greatest threat that we face and what they want in terms of how they see the world. I’ve read parts of their 100-year plan, right, which was classified until like 1997 timeframe. I think we declassified a big chunk of it. Those are things that I have studied.

China saw the United States rise as it did in the last century and made a conscious decision that we’re going to be that. We’re going to be what the United States was in the 20th century. We’re going to be that in the 21st century. Their 100-year plan was going to really, you know, occur from 1949 to 2049. But with Xi in charge, Xi made the decision, no, we’re going to make it go faster. So we’re going to actually, I want to see it happen by 2030, 2035.

So they really got involved in this. It is the proverbial winning a war, you know, without ever firing a shot. It really, this idea of propaganda, of information, of using intelligence in a smart way, of subverting, learning about the weaknesses of our system of government.

Of using the COVID pandemic and fentanyl. You talk about biological warfare.

Yes, biological warfare. The methamphetamine was the earlier days, you know, not just cocaine and some of the other drugs that entered the streets of America. And then all of a sudden it turned into now fentanyl. So the Chinese were very smart. who they were going to work with. And they began to work with the drug cartels because, one, it’s a lot of money, but that’s less of it for them.

You know, the money is an element of it, but it’s about undermining and basically physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually killing the United States of America and doing it in such a damaging way. When you think about fentanyl, I mean, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of Americans that are killed in action on the battlefields, on the streets of America, you know, never mind the wounded in action, right, to use military terms.

And that’s the unrestricted battlefield from the Chinese perspective, which is everything.

One of the things that we do know, we do know, we know recently, but it doesn’t get a lot of coverage in the mainstream media, is the use of biological warfare against our farming industry, okay? Bringing in biological components to damage or destroy in some cases entire components of our agricultural industries, okay, of our farming capabilities. Never mind making sure that you have people in here that know how to do electronics, that know how to, you know, they come in and now they’re citizens.

Now they’re citizens of this country working directly for the Chinese government. Some of them are in our government. Some of them are actually in our government. So the Chinese were very smart, very shrewd, and it’s been going on for a generation, maybe more than a generation. And people have recognized it at times. But when you say it, what do those that are undermining our country do? What do they take us back to? They take us back to Russia. Why?

Why is it Russia and not China? Because for 40 years, and I know this for a fact, okay, because I’ve read all of the presidential findings up to 2017, okay, and presidential findings are very specific intelligence programs that the President of the United States has to sign off on, and they’re typically covert, which means only a few people are going to know about them, but they’re well-funded. And for the better part of 40 years, we had many findings that brought in billions and billions of dollars because Russia was the bad guy.

And when Russia collapsed, right, when the Warsaw Pact collapsed and Russia fell apart, instead of embracing them and bringing them into our sphere of influence, we needed to keep that flow of money going. OK, and it’s a lot of money. I mean, it’s tens of billions of dollars. OK. And it’s all in a very, it’s in a realm of classification and a realm of secrecy that the majority of Americans, you might be able to read about it in a few books. I’ve read them. I’ve seen them. I’ve been briefed on them. And I know that they exist. I won’t go into what they are or how long they’ve been going on specifically. But you’re talking about a lot of money.

So if you win the battle, in this case, we won the war against the Soviet Union, and now it’s the Russian Federation. And instead of embracing Russia, well, because if we did that, and we brought them into our sphere of influence, and then we now, you know, and tried to work with them, maybe bring them into NATO, right? I mean, which was some of the discussion in the early 90s, particularly even when the Clintons came in.

But then all of a sudden it changed because the money flow was going to stop. Why do you need all this money flowing in if you don’t have an enemy anymore? And China entered so smartly. This is the grand strategy, the grand geopolitics that’s at play constantly. And now we’re beginning to see the ugliness of the underbelly of what we’ve all referred to as the deep state.

I talk about faith in the book quite a bit. And I do believe that this was a period of history that the United States of America had to experience. And I think that God ordained this period of time. And he put people into a place where we are able to fight back. And Donald Trump is one of them.

A number of people including Lee Smith have written some of the most definitive work about Russiagate or what we used to call Spygate in multiple books and this whole weaponization of government picture. He described what Trump was trying to do with Russia today by trying to create this peace with Ukraine and Russia quickly as a reverse Kissinger, only trying to pull a reverse Kissinger.

But at the same time, it seems like Vladimir Putin is making it very difficult for him to do that. And with the language that you just used, some people might say, well, Michael Flynn is just a Russia backer, right? It’s this constant weaponization of information that we have to face. Any comments there?

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Michael Flynn on Declassified Russia Investigation Documents