Who is Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn?

Transition officials announced new teams that will interact with the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department and other national security agencies as part of the government transition before his January 20 inauguration.

The retired three-star general, a veteran of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has courted controversy with extreme statements that critics say border on Islamophobia.

ADAM SCHIFF: We have a president-elect who I think is a fairly impulsive person. That Pompeo is a three-term congressman, and Flynn is a former general and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, suggests intelligence issues will be primarily focused not in the CIA, or Office of the National Intelligence Director, but in the NSC.

“His strengths are that he is a very well-informed guy and a disruptive thinker”, said Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign affairs analyst at the Brookings Institution.

In his RNC speech, the retired general conflated Sunni extremist ideologies shared by Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida (and spread by close US allies like Saudi Arabia) with Iran, a Shia nation whose government violently opposes those groups.

Flynn’s warmth toward Russian Federation and antagonism toward what conservatives call “radical Islam” have anxious some national security experts.

In the House, the 52-year-old made his name as one of the leaders of the controversial Benghazi Committee, which targeted Trump’s presidential rival Hillary Clinton in its investigation of the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in the Libyan city which left four Americans, including the USA ambassador, dead. Our work will provide a strong foundation for the new transition team leadership as they move into the post-election phase, which naturally is incorporating the campaign team in NY who drove President-elect Trump to an incredible victory last Tuesday. That is not only untrue but extremely risky”, says Will McCants, director for the Brookings Project on USA relations with the Islamic world and the author of The ISIS Apocalypse: “The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.

Trump’s transition team has now made a few additional top appointments, which help to paint a picture of what a Trump presidency might entail.

Flynn’s Islamophobia lines up with Trump’s pledge to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. Presidents Obama and George W. Bush both stressed that terrorists acting under the guise of Islam are misinterpreting the faith.

He served as Trump’s leading adviser on national security issues during the campaign and was a highly visible surrogate, with a hardliner stance on radical Islam.

The statement confirmed earlier reports that Sessions, Flynn and Pompeo would be nominated for the positions. He’s made multiple appearances on Russia Today, the government-owned TV station that the U.S. State Department said is a mouthpiece for Putin; and also sat next to the president at a banquet in Russia past year. These ties explain why Flynn denied Russia’s role in hacks to influence the presidential election-despite the unanimous determination by US intelligence agencies that these were Russian attacks. Reed did not elaborate.

This past February, he posted a tweet in which he wrote that “fear of Muslim is rational”.

Mr Flynn’s army career was mainly in intelligence units. It’s another thing to say it when you are the director of the Central Intelligence Agency that controls executive operations throughout the world. McChrystal was another innovative commander who led efforts to uncover and attack terror networks in the Middle East more effectively. The Obama administration has denied the extradition requests due to a lack of evidence of Gulen’s supposed complicity presented by the Turkish government.

In 2010, Flynn co-authored a widely read paper that criticized the intelligence community for its parochialism and failure to take into account broader cultural and historical factors.

“Through this visit, we were able to promote the incoming government’s understanding of the key policies of our government, and the two sides shared an understanding that maintaining a solid alliance is more important than anything else”, Cho said. “He might hate the Islamic religion”, said one defense contractor who works closely with the Pentagon. The trend is toward a staunchly nationalist and less civil rights-oriented administration, particularly considering the Flynn and Sessions appointments.