The committee’s interest in Michael Flynn’s involvement was sparked by a Newsweek story on the national security adviser.
Top White House political appointees, including disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, “repeatedly” ignored warnings from legal and ethics advisers that pushing a private industry plan to sell nuclear power plants to Saudi Arabia was riven with conflicts of interest and lacked proper safety controls, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
The report also revealed a memo that said President Donald Trump had appointed his longtime friend Thomas Barrack, a major Republican donor, “as a special representative to implement the plan and direct[ed] agencies to support Mr. Barrack’s efforts.” Nearly a quarter of the $7 billion in investments raised by Barrack’s global real estate and investment management firm, Colony Capital, Inc., since Trump won the nomination “has come from the Persian Gulf—all from either the U. A. E. or Saudi Arabia,” the committee noted, citing a New York Times report.
A spokesman for Barrack told The Times on Tuesday that he had never taken a job in the administration.
The private nuclear power effort was being pushed by a consortium of private energy interests led by two former U. S. generals, an admiral, and former Reagan administration national security advisor Robert “Bud” McFarlane. The consortium had retained Flynn in 2015 to sound out Saudi and other Middle Eastern governments on the plan, which Flynn continued to push when he entered the White House. Although Flynn is long gone, Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and top adviser, are still pursuing the plan, the committee said.
The proposed deal surfaces amid worries that Saudi Arabia will pursue nuclear weapons to counter its arch-enemy Iran.
“The committee is now launching an investigation to determine whether the actions being pursued by the Trump Administration are in the national security interests of the United States or, rather, serve those who stand to gain financially as a result of this potential change in U. S. foreign policy,” the report said.
Flynn, who pleaded guilty in late 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak on lifting sanctions on Moscow, pushed the nuclear plan while hiding his prior employment by the private nuclear energy consortium behind the deal, the report says. Flynn, who was serving as an adviser to the nuclear consortium during the presidential transition period after the November 2016 elections, was aided in the scheme by another senior Trump national security council official, Derek Harvey, who was forced to resign in July 2017 over policy disagreements with Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster. An Arabic-speaking former Army intelligence officer, Harvey then joined the staff of Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time.
Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn leaves after the delay in his sentencing hearing at US District Court in Washington, DC, December 18,2018. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Representative Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, expressed worry that “strong private commercial interests have been pressing aggressively for the transfer of highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia—a potential risk to U.
