at the RT gala, Flynn offers a plan for the Middle East consistent with the contours of the Red Sea Conspiracy that George Nader had (with the assistance of MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi) orchestrated just weeks earlier. In Flynn’s own words, “I basically told the audience that Russia should get Iran to back out of the proxy wars that Iran is running so we [can] stabilize the Middle East. That was my whole purpose for going.”138 The plan for “stabilizing the Middle East” Flynn presents in Moscow in December 2015 will mirror the so-called Middle East Marshall Plan Flynn supports a year later as Trump’s designated national security advisor (see chapter 7).139 The plan calls for “Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin … [to] cooperate on a project that would boost Middle East economies” by “ending Ukraine’s opposition to lifting sanctions on Russia by giving a Ukrainian company a $45 billion contract to provide turbine generators for [nuclear] reactors to be built in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations. The contract to state-owned Turboatom, and loans to Ukraine from Gulf Arab states, would ‘require Ukraine to support lifting United States and European Union sanctions on Russia.’”140
That Flynn in December 2015 would have wanted to relay to Sergey Kislyak in D.C. and Vladimir Putin in Moscow the same Middle East Marshall Plan that he was then supporting and would still be supporting in November 2016 is nearly certain. The reason: Flynn was working in secret for an American company called ACU Strategic Partners on a closely related plan from summer 2015 through at least June 2016—and indeed, other documents will suggest, until he was fired as Trump’s national security advisor in February 2017.141
In summer 2015, Flynn had taken a trip to Saudi Arabia to “talk about nuclear power plants”; shortly thereafter, “the Saudis made a $100 billion deal with the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, to build 16 nuclear power units.”142 Documents subsequently produced confirm, according to McClatchy DC, that Flynn made his trip to Saudi Arabia “on behalf of a U.S./Russia business plan to build nuclear reactors.”143 According to Newsweek and McClatchy, Flynn’s summer 2015 trip was part of a “joint venture … involv[ing] U.S. companies, a Russian state-sponsored company, and Saudi financing, and was geared towards providing nuclear power to the Arab world.”144 One indication that Flynn sees the complications inherent in attempting to broker such a transnational deal is that he fails to disclose this trip to Saudi Arabia when he seeks a new federal security clearance in late 2016.145 Moreover, he fails to properly disclose a second, October 2015 trip to Saudi Arabia that is part of the same joint venture. In hiding the details of this second trip from federal authorities, he makes up the name of the hotel he allegedly stayed at, and obscures his business interests in Saudi Arabia under the false claim that he was in the kingdom “for six days to speak at a conference.”146 He also fails to disclose the identity of the “friend” who traveled with him to Saudi Arabia and the company that paid for his trip.147 It is a federal crime punishable by up to five years in prison per offense to “knowingly falsify or conceal a material fact” on a federal security clearance application.148
Flynn makes at least two additional trips for ACU during the summer of 2015: one trip to Egypt and one to Israel, both in June.149 The Washington Post confirms that these trips are related to the same joint venture as Flynn’s trip to Saudi Arabia, that being ACU’s “hope[] to build more than two dozen nuclear plants in [the Middle East], in partnership with Russian interests.”150 As with his trip to Saudi Arabia, Flynn will fail to disclose these Middle Eastern business trips: federal law requires that all such trips be disclosed in security clearance paperwork.151 It is unclear why Flynn would want to hide his efforts to connect the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel just a matter of weeks before becoming an adviser to the Trump campaign in August 2015, though it is noteworthy that within a month of Flynn’s return from his trips to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel Trump publicly announces his opposition to sanctions on Russia—a prerequisite for broader cooperation between the very countries Flynn was at the time secretly working with.152 That Maria Butina (the Russian “journalist” whose question at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas in July 2015 allows Trump to express his opposition to