According to former Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, President Obama may have told then president-elect Trump not hire Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as national security adviser for fear of having his own administration exposed.
Lewandowski details the discussion in his new book, co-authored by David Bossie, Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency.
According to the authors, soon after the 2016 election, Obama and Trump sat down for a meeting, where it was common for presidents to offer advice to those about to take over as commander in chief.
The book–as reported by the UK Daily Mail–states that Obama told Trump not to hire Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, advice which was leaked to the media in May of 2017.
According to reports at the time, Obama made this suggestion because he thought “there were better people for (the position), and that Flynn wasn’t up for the job.”
However, Lewandowski and Bossie believe Obama may have had a “more sinister” reason for giving this advice.
“It’s not unreasonable to assume that Obama knew Flynn could expose some of the misconduct in which his intelligence agencies had engaged—particularly when it came to the abuse of surveillance practices,” they write.
The two point out that Obama had allowed his intelligence agencies to “spiral out of control…even going so far as to either implicitly or explicitly allow them to conduct surveillance on citizens of the United States on domestic soil—and not just any citizens, but members of the Trump campaign.”
‘”(President Obama) certainly knew that Flynn could do some damage to the permanent power structures of his intelligence agencies and shake up the bureaucracy he had helped to grow.”
They continue, “Obama probably figured that if he could convince Trump in a private meeting—the details of which were never supposed to leak—not to hire Flynn in the first place, the chances of his illegal spying on American citizens ever coming to light would decrease dramatically.”
The book, Trump’s Enemies, is on sale tomorrow.
