Trump's pardoned MAGA general turns on Sean Duffy over 'quite disturbing' flight failure

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, is demanding answers from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy over a viral theory about who stands to profit from Friday’s nationwide flight grounding.

“This is quite disturbing,” Flynn posted on X. “@SecDuffy any comments?”

Flynn was quoting a lengthy post from AJ Signal, an account whose bio describes him as “former military” and a “Strategic Geopolitics Strategist” with a Substack newsletter. The account has about 44,000 followers. Flynn’s quote post has been viewed more than 420,000 times.

“Bro, they aren’t even trying to hide the corruption anymore!!” the post began. “The FAA airline stoppage story is a MUCH bigger one than the ground stop itself, and I only saw it once I started following the money and who gets paid.”

The FAA’s grounding canceled roughly 5,000 flights, according to AJ Signal’s newsletter, and wrecked weekend travel plans across the country. Duffy has said it was not a cyberattack, blaming overloaded routers and old, broken equipment.

AJ Signal said he was willing to take Duffy at his word. He argued the real story is what came next: the administration’s push for tens of billions of dollars to rebuild air traffic control, which Duffy “pushed the number EVEN higher on camera” as cancellations piled up.

“Whether the outage was engineered or was just the system rotting on schedule, the political result they are after is the SAME, the breakdown becomes the justification for MORE MONEY,” he wrote.

That money, he argued, flows to one place. In December 2025, the Transportation Department chose Peraton as the single prime contractor for its air traffic control overhaul, beating out Parsons and IBM. AJ Signal puts the full program at about $31.5 billion, with roughly $12.5 billion approved by Congress so far.

Peraton is owned by Veritas Capital, a New York private equity firm. In his newsletter, AJ Signal also pointed to a reported stake in one of Veritas’ funds from Israeli investors. But he acknowledged that thread “is easy to overstate,” since the money adds up to about 2 percent of the fund, and those investors have no say in how it’s run.

The full argument, including what he describes as a lobbyist tied to “the nonprofit that funded Duffy’s TV show,” sits behind his Substack paywall.

AJ Signal also posted a chart called “Who Gets the Air Traffic Control Money?” It maps out his claimed links among Trump, Duffy, Peraton and Veritas. At its center is Mark Bednar, a principal at the lobbying firm Monument Advocacy. According to the chart, Bednar once served as Duffy’s communications director in Congress, lobbied for Peraton in the past year, and sits on the board of Great American Road Trip, Inc., the nonprofit that funded the Duffy family’s travel show.

Flynn replied to the chart with a second reaction. “WTH!? This is disturbing,” he wrote. “Reposted too."

Flynn’s post puts him in an awkward spot with Trump’s Cabinet. Trump pardoned Flynn in 2020 after he twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation. Since then he has become a hero to the MAGA movement.

Duffy has not publicly responded to Flynn.