Hey there, welcome. Please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. It’s just $9.95 a month or even better, $99 a year. PS: Follow us also on Twitter @talk_spy. Flynn Secretly Paid $200,000 in Middle East Nuclear Scheme—ReportDutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad dug up internal audit documents revealing more unreported payments in wild scheme for Arab power plants
Disgraced former Donald Trump National Security Adviser and Army general Michael Flynn was paid a previously unreported $200,000 for work on a controversial plan to bring nuclear power to the Middle East involving Russian and other foreign business interests, according to a report this weekend by the respected Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
The payment to Flynn was uncovered during an audit by one of the project’s major players, the Dutch transport company Mammoet, which envisioned shipping major parts of the nuclear plants to Saudi Arabia and other destinations in the Middle East, the paper reported. The wildly ambitious scheme imagined a consortium of U.S., Russian, Canadian and French partners building nuclear power plants in a half dozen Arab states and managing them independent of local regimes. The project never jelled for numerous reasons, just one of them being the involvement of Flynn, whose willingness to take an exorbitant speaking fee from the Russians and under-the-table lobbying fees from the Turks made him toxic. He was fired from his position as Trump’s national security adviser only weeks into his tenure for lying to FBI agents and Vice President Mike Pence about a back-channel phone call to the Russian ambassador. Trump pardoned him after his guilty plea last November. In June 2017, SpyTalk, then at Newsweek, revealed Flynn’s connection to the nuclear project, which he had initially failed to list in his first, and later an amended, financial disclosure form. Flynn was an unpaid adviser to ACU Strategic Partners, the key U.S. company involved in the project, officials told Newsweek, but he had accepted reimbursement worth $10,000 to $15,000 for his Middle East travel costs. Prompted by that report, the chairmen of two House committees launched an investigation that turned up details on Flynn’’s undisclosed meetings with Arab and Israel officials. Now, it turns out, Flynn was paid a further undisclosed $200,000 by ACU, according to internal Dutch and U.S. corporate documents obtained by NRC Handelsblad. The figure popped up in an audit of ACU’s books launched by its Dutch partners. It’s unclear whether any of that was paid to Flynn after candidate Trump hired him as his national security adviser in 2016 or while he was briefly in office in 2017. ACU had also hired former NSA Director Keith Alexander as a political consultant. What he did beyond adding a four-star gloss to the project remains shrouded in mystery. Flynn never responded to Newsweek’s requests for comment, nor did he answer calls for comment from NRC Handelsblad, reporter Carola Houtekamer told SpyTalk. Congressional investigators also had no comment. An English-language version of the paper’s story can be read here, thanks to Google Translate. |
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