Mike Flynn's 'demented behavior' dissected by former Army colleagues: 'I think he's having mental-health problems'

Michael Flynn's former associates are baffled by his behavior since around the time he linked up with Donald Trump.

The retired U.S. Army general was seen last week pleading the Fifth Amendment when asked by the House select committee whether he believed in the peaceful transfer of power, but former close associates watched in horror as he chanted, "lock her up," during the 2016 Republican National Convention, reported The Atlantic.

“He spent a lot of time deployed, maybe too much, as it turns out,” said James Clapper, former director of national intelligence. “He spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan chasing terrorists, and I think that, to some extent, that consumed him.”

A high-ranking officer who worked closely with Flynn in the field agreed with that assessment, saying his time in the war on terror seems to have set him off balance.

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“If you spend years hunting terrorists and honing this killing machine,” some people “get unhinged by all that."

Stanley McChrystal, the retired lieutenant general and Flynn's longtime commander and mentor, has been said by friends to be horrified by his statements at the RNC, but he declined to be interviewed, and so did Keith Kellogg, another retired lieutenant general and his colleague at the White House.

“Out of the respect for our service together," McChrystal said, "and years of closer friendship, I’m now just going to stay silent."

But the high-ranking officer told the magazine that Flynn may have always had a conspiratorial and extremist mindset that his uniform kept hidden.

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“The uniform constrains people’s political and emotional qualities,” that officer said. “You can misjudge a person because they are constrained by the job and the uniform," but when he's out of uniform "the personality that may have been constrained comes out.”

Clapper said his termination by former president Barack Obama humiliated Flynn.

“Getting terminated a year early ate at him,” Clapper said. “He had a grievance, and it just, it was corrosive with him, and he became a bitter, angry man and just latched on to anybody who was opposed to Obama and the Obama administration. That’s my armchair analysis of what happened.”

Numerous sources for the report speculated Flynn had experienced cognitive decline or a psychological disorder, but only one -- Gen. Barry McCaffrey -- agreed to go on record.

“I think he was having mental-health problems," McCaffrey said.

“As people get older, in particular, and as circumstances push in on them,” he added, “every year there’s some fairly small number who have mental-health problems … So yeah, some of them go bad. But Flynn went bad in one of the most spectacular manners we’ve ever witnessed. You know, it wasn’t just bad judgment. It was demented behavior.”