Flynn sought oversight of CIA reporting, former director says
WASHINGTON — Days after Donald Trump’s stunning election victory, Michael Flynn phoned former CIA Director James Woolsey about taking another stint as head of the spy agency in the new administration, but then added a condition, Woolsey said.
Flynn said the CIA director “would be expected to report to him,” not the president, Woolsey told McClatchy in a phone interview. Woolsey, who led the CIA in the first two years of the Clinton administration, said he promptly rejected the offer because there are times that he would need to “call on the president face to face.”
Washington attorney Robert Kelner, who is defending Flynn in the face of FBI, Pentagon and congressional investigations into his ties to Russia and Turkey, said Woolsey’s account is “false.” Kelner did not elaborate.
Spokespeople for the CIA and the White House declined to comment on whether Flynn sought to require CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who took the job in January, to report first to him. But Pompeo has been personally briefing Trump on a daily basis.
Flynn’s alleged maneuver with Woolsey, seemingly aimed at consolidating his control, could cause consternation now that more is known about the retired three-star Army general. At the time of his approach to Woolsey, Flynn’s Virginia-based consulting firm had been paid more than $500,000 to secretly represent a Dutch company led by a Turkish businessman with ties to the Ankara government.
Flynn was forced to resign his post just 24 days into the Trump administration amid disclosures he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with the Kremlin’s U.S. ambassador in December. It later was revealed that he had received $45,000 for appearing in late 2015 at a Moscow gala and giving an interview to RT, the global television news operation bankrolled by the Kremlin.
Now Flynn is a central figure in multiple investigations into Russia’s 2016 cyber and espionage offensive aimed at interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections, ultimately by helping tip the presidential race from Democrat Hillary Clinton to Trump.
Woolsey said Flynn began the Nov. 14 phone call, which occurred a couple of days before Flynn was formally named national security adviser, by saying the Trump administration would be “restructuring the intelligence community” and asked if he would “be willing to be director of the CIA.”
“I asked him a couple of questions about how things would work,” Woolsey said. “It was quite clear that he was going to be national security adviser, of course, and he expected the CIA director to report to him.”