House Dems question Flynn disclosures of Middle East travel

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two top House Democrats are questioning whether Michael Flynn failed to report a 2015 trip to the Middle East to federal security clearance investigators, a potential omission that could add to the legal jeopardy President Donald Trump's former national security adviser faces over the truthfulness of his statements to authorities and on government documents.

The letter from Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee, and Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House foreign affairs committee, is the latest to call attention to potential problems with what Flynn reported to the U.S. government about his foreign travel, contacts and business after he left the Defense Intelligence Agency in August 2014.

Among those payments was more than $33,000 he received from RT, the Russian state-sponsored television network that U.S. intelligence officials have branded as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.

X-Co Dynamics is a Virginia-based consulting firm headed by former U.S. Rear Admiral Michael Hewitt, whose board of retired military advisers included former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander and former Marine Corps General James "Hoss" Cartwright, who was prosecuted last year for lying to the FBI in a leak investigation.

Flynn did not detail his work with X-Co Dynamics in the disclosure, but the Newsweek report alleged that Flynn's trip to Israel and Egypt in summer 2015 was part of a private effort by the firm to advance the idea of a massive ring of atomic reactors that would be built by the U.S. nuclear industry and the Russian government and largely bankrolled by Saudi Arabia.

According to an internal memo obtained by Newsweek, the project was the brainchild of ACU Strategic Partners, a U.S. firm promoting the idea of a partnership between the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates to build and operate 40 nuclear power reactors across the Middle East.