NEW YORK CITY, New York — Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, who served for more than two years as the director of President Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), leveled explosive charges against the President and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an exclusive hour-long interview with Breitbart News Daily on Friday.

Specifically, during an exclusive interview about his book The Field of Fight, Flynn said that Obama and Clinton were not interested in hearing intelligence that did not fit their “happy talk” narrative about the Middle East. In fact, he alleged the administration actively scrubbed training manuals and purged from the military ranks any thinking about the concept of radical Islamism. Flynn argued that this effort by Obama, Clinton and others to reduce the intelligence community to gathering only facts that the senior administration officials wanted to hear—rather than what they needed to hear—helped the enemy fester and grow, while weakening the United States on the world stage.

“The administration has basically denied the fact that we have this problem with ‘Radical Islamists,’” Flynn said during the interview. “And this is a very vicious, barbaric enemy and I recognize in the book that there is an alliance of countries that are dedicated basically against our way of life and they support different groups in the Islamic movement, principally the Islamic State and formerly Al Qaeda—although Al Qaeda still exists. The administration denied the fact that this even existed and then told those of us in the government to basically excise the phrase ‘radical Islamism’ out of our entire culture, out of our training manuals, everything. That was a big argument I had internally and I talked a little bit about it in the Senate testimony that I gave two years back.”

Later in the interview, Flynn was even more specific, calling out Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for not wanting to hear all the facts about what was happening in the Middle East—only some of them.

“There’s a narrative that the President and his team, including Hillary Clinton, wanted to hear—instead of having the tough news or the bad news if you will that they needed to hear,” Flynn said. “Now, there’s a big difference. And the one thing about intelligence is we should stand for truth to power—meaning we should always say what we believe, and lay the facts out, lay the tough right facts out and then you let the policymakers make the decisions that they have to make. What has happened in the last 10 years, frankly in the last 8 years, is we have seen a level of dishonesty coming out of both the policy and the decision making structure with the American people.”

Because of the President’s and the Secretary of State’s—among other officials in the Obama administration—unwillingness to hear all the facts, including ones they needed to but didn’t want to hear, Flynn says the President has presented a narrative to the American people about the war on terrorism and radical Islamism that is simply inaccurate.

“The President has said they’re jayvee, they’re on the run, they’re not that strong, what difference does it make what we call—that’s being totally dishonest with the American public,” Flynn said. “There’s one thing that Americans are, and we’re tough, resilient people but we have to be told the truth. I think what a lot of this is, in fact what I know a lot of it is. It’s a lot of happy talk from a President who did not meet the narrative of his political ideology or his political decision-making process to take our country in a completely different direction and frankly that’s why I’m sitting here talking to you here today, Matt. The intelligence process starts really at the ground level, but the priorities—the priorities, Matt, for an intelligence system and the intelligence community in our country and that’s the President of the United States.” 

The Obama administration’s refusal to take these threats seriously and his, Flynn said, “has allowed an enemy that is using very smart, savvy means to impact our way of life.”

“That means infiltrating into refugee populations, that means conducting of smart information operations,” Flynn said. “Most people don’t know but these guys have very sophisticated information operations going on, with publications of magazines and websites. They have leaders in their groups that have thousands and thousands—I’m talking tens of thousands of followers on social media and Instagram and Twitter. So we are not even allowed to go after these kinds of things right now. This is the problem—it’s a big problem. In fact, if we don’t change this we’re going to see this strengthening in our homeland.”

Flynn also laid out how to defeat radical Islamism, a plan he has stated repeatedly that the Obama Administration has ignored.

“The very first thing is we have to clearly define the enemy and we have to get our own house in order, which this administration has not done,” Flynn said. “We have to figure out how are we going to organize ourselves. Then I call for in the book a new 21st century alliance. This is where we really come to how we take the Arab community to task on how they plan to fix this cancerous disease inside of their own body that has metastasized and grown exponentially over the last five or six years and certainly actually over the last eight to 10 years. So it’s one thing to go after the ideology, just like we went after Communism for 40 years, but I also say in the book we have to crush this enemy wherever they exist. We cannot allow them to have any safe haven. We are dancing around the sort of head of a pin, when we know these guys are in certain places around the world and our military is not allowed to go in there and get them. The ‘mother may I’ has to go all the way back up to the White House.”

He said the fight has to be very similar to how the United States, over decades, thoroughly degraded Communism on the world stage.

“There’s no enemy that’s unbeatable,” Flynn said. “We can beat any enemy. We put our minds to it, we decide to do that, we can beat any enemy. And there’s no ideology in the world that’s better than the American ideology. We should not allow, because they mask themselves behind the religion of Islam, we should not allow our ideology, our way of life, our system of principles, our values that are based on a Judeo-Christian set that comes right out of our Constitution—we should not fear that. In fact, we should fight those that try to impose a different way of life on us. That’s what we did against the Nazis, that’s what we did against the Communists for the better part of a half a century—in fact, more than half a century. Now we are dealing with another Ism, and that’s radical Islamism, and we’re going to have to fight it—and we’re going to be fighting it for some time. But tactically we can defeat this enemy quickly. Then what we have to do is we have to fight the ideology, and we can do that diplomatically, politically, informationally and we can do that in very, very smart ways much greater than we’re doing right now.” 

Flynn is a lifelong Democrat, and again served in this senior Obama administration position for more than two years, but is now publicly supporting Republican nominee Donald Trump for president. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Trump, and has been publicly speaking out in favor of the GOP nominee for some time now.

“My role as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency—that’s almost a 20,000 person organization in 140 plus countries around the world,” Flynn said. “I was also the senior military and intelligence officer not only for the Defense Department but for the country. So I mean I was basically told ‘hey, you know what, what you’re saying we don’t like. So you’re out.’ To Donald Trump, though, and I haven’t known him that long but I met him a year ago—in fact a year ago this month. The conversation that we had, which was an amazing conversation, I found a guy that like I to say, ‘he gets it.’ He gets it. He is a street savvy strategic leader type person who has a vision for this country, and he’s turned it into this phrase of ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Flynn said Trump’s campaign theme of wanting to “Make America Great Again”—along with his detailed policy speeches on foreign policy, economic policy, immigration policy and more—means that Trump is a “guy who sees our country like I see it.”

“The elements of that, and the things that you hear him talking about—particularly recently with his foreign policy speech and his economic policy speech and his immigration policy speech,” Flynn said. “Some of the things he is saying, this is a guy who sees our country like I see it. I will tell you, and I lay this out in the book—you know, Matt, I can clearly see what it is that we are facing. It’s not just the rise of radical Islamism, it’s also the direction that China is going and it’s also the direction that I see Russia taking. We have an alliance of nations that are opposed to our way of life and we should not kid ourselves and think that we’re just going to be around forever because we’re the United States of America. Countries only last so long, and in order to last, you have to fight for that belief system that we have, and I like to say it’s American patriotism—that’s the Ism that I’m for—and that’s where Donald Trump steps in, because here’s a guy who when you look at what he did over the past year just slaying the Republican establishment and he’s facing a current adversary in Hillary Clinton whose criminal behavior and just dishonesty is just stunning. Yet there’s still people who are trying to, that are weighing in to bring her back into government? Oh my God, I mean, to me this is an easy choice. This is a choice about the direction of the United States of America going forward.”

Flynn noted that the impacts of the choices voters make in this upcoming presidential election will affect the United States for generations—perhaps centuries—to come.

“And Donald Trump is not doing this for Donald Trump,” Flynn said. “Donald Trump is not doing this for the next four years. Donald Trump is doing this for the next 40, or the next 400, years. I have children, I have grandchildren, I have a son who has served overseas in the combat zones three times. I have a couple of grandchildren. My God, I want those grandchildren to grow up in a country that is recognizable to those of us that are in this country today. Right now, it’s starting to become unrecognizable and if we continue down the path that this administration has set over the past eight years—and that includes the path that Hillary Clinton was part of setting—we are going to find ourselves waking up one day in America saying ‘this is not America anymore. This is not what we were founded upon.’ Frankly, in order to keep that belief system that we have, we have to sort of fight for it and we’re going to have to fight for it overseas, and we’re going to have to fight for it here in the homeland and the way we do it here in our country is we do it at the voting booth. People have got to get out and vote.”