Michael Flynn is begging conspiracy theorists to leave his family alone after they became the subject of some unhinged claims.
President Donald Trump's first national security adviser helped popularize the QAnon cult after leaving the White House barely a month into his tenure, but The Bulwark reported that right-wing conspiracists are now tormenting Flynn and his family members.
"After having spent years fanning political conspiracies, Flynn finds himself the victim of one: a yarn weaved by a group of Trump supporters that Flynn’s family and associates actually orchestrated the January 6th attacks on the Capitol," wrote correspondent Will Sommer. "It’s gotten bad enough that Flynn has urged them to stop, saying his family wants to be left alone."
The theory revolves around a Earl Matthews, a former lawyer for the D.C. National Guard who filed a whistleblower complaint against Flynn’s younger brother, then-Lt. Gen. Charles Flynn, claiming that he had lied to Congress about the military response to the Jan. 6 riot.
QAnon at first embraced Matthews' claims, especially the hosts of the "MG Show" podcast, saying the National Guard lawyer had proven the Flynn family had conspired with the Proud Boys and others to lead unwitting Trump supporters into a trap at the U.S. Capitol.
The conspiracy theory never explained why the former national security adviser wanted to trick Trump supporters into committing felonies, but the bizarre claims came as an abrupt shift in the movement's regard for the Flynn family, who they had affectionately dubbed the "Flynnstones."
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The 203 whistleblower complaint initially filed by Matthews, who’s since been nominated to be the Pentagon’s general counsel, essentially came down to an internal Pentagon dispute over who was to blame for a slow response to the riot and likely would have been forgotten without a recent boost by right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, who accused Matthews of disloyalty to Trump in an April 9 social media post, setting off a public feud between the two online.
Matthews, who's still awaiting confirmation to be the Defense Department's top lawyer, then reposted an “MG Show” episode claiming that Flynn and other alleged Jan. 6 schemers were panicked over his nomination, and then he reposted a bizarre rap song with AI-generated art showing what appears to be Matthews taking shots at various MAGA figures covering up the supposed "truth" about the insurrection.
"As you might imagine, Flynn himself has been less than thrilled to be accused of being an anti-Trump operative," Sommer wrote. "He responded, predictably enough, by posting a conspiracy theory of his own on social media, asking whether the rap’s creator made the hip-hop song as a distraction to somehow benefit China."
