Michael Flynn cheered coup attempt in Turkey—until he was paid to oppose it

It’s not just Donald Trump who is willing to sell out his policies. He’s hired an entire team of kleptocrats, including a National Security Adviser who was on both sides of an attempted coup in a NATO ally country.

When a faction of the Turkish military attempted to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn celebrated the coup effort as something “worth clapping for.”  …

He warned that Erdogan was an Islamist and “very close to President [Barack] Obama,” who was leading his country toward disaster. However, that was before Flynn’s company was hired by an Erdogan ally. After that, Flynn began singing a slightly different tune.

Turkey is really our strongest ally against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as well as a source of stability in the region. It provides badly needed cooperation with U.S. military operations. But the Obama administration is keeping Erdoğan’s government at arm’s length — an unwise policy that threatens our long-standing alliance.

As unlikely as it seems, Flynn managed to weave both sides into his no-Muslim-is-above-suspicion narrative. At coup time, Erdogan was a scary ‘Islamist’ who was leading Turkey into the caliphate. But once under contract, the same authoritarian leader was actually fighting the good fight against a scary Muslim hiding right here in the United States—a Muslim who was, of course, tied to President Obama.