Lt. General Michael Flynn celebrates his 59th birthday sometime this month. The trick is, nobody seems to know when.
(U.S. Government photo)
Oh, presumably his mother knows. But we looked pretty hard for the exact day while doing our new biography of Michael Flynn, and came up empty.
You know Flynn: the retired Lieutenant General, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, close advisor to Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign, National Security Advisor for 24 days, and now admitted felon who lied to the FBI about contacts with Russia.
Yet for all that time in public life, every resource we can find online lists Michael Flynn’s date of birth as “December 1958.” That includes venerable sources like Biography.com, U.S. News & World Report, ABC News and even the ever-present Wikipedia. Bloomberg doesn’t attempt to give his age. Even a terrific in-depth profile from his hometown paper, the Providence Journal, doesn’t have the day.
His date of birth isn’t even listed in the official federal charges he pled guilty to last week, filed by super-cop Robert Mueller. Gee, if you get a traffic ticket they list your birthday, don’t they?
The Who2 birthday desk pulled out some of its oldest research tricks, including a (fruitless) exact Boolean search for “Happy birthday, Michael Flynn.” (That trick is how we became one of the first sources to correctly list Malia Obama‘s birthday as 1998, not 1999 — as sources as far-flung as the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph had it.)
Yet this is a man who spent 33 years in public government service in the U.S. Army, held many key posts, and served as National Security Advisor. (Although he was not vetted by Congress for that post.) Surely Michael Flynn’s date of birth is all over government databases, and not just classified ones.
To be clear, we’re not suggesting a conspiracy here. Maybe as a former intelligence officer, he’s just verrrry good at hiding his birthdate. But this kind of opaqueness is quite unusual. The current National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, was born on July 24, 1962. Before Flynn it was Susan Rice, born November 17, 1964. Same goes for Tom Donilon, James L. Jones (another former general), Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and all the other NSAs of years past. Even President Trump, who won’t make his taxes public, has made his birthday public.
We are currently stumped, but will keep digging. We’re not into Freedom of Information Act territory just yet, but it would be nice to know Michael Flynn’s birthday.
One thing we did discover was Michael Flynn’s place of birth. Per the Providence Journal, Michael Flynn was born at Fort Meade, Maryland — not in Rhode Island, as most sources state. His father Charles served in World War II and then “remained in the Army, serving in Korea and rotating through military bases, where the Flynns brought into the world their early children, including Mike, born at Fort Meade, Maryland.” They moved to Rhode Island shortly afterwards, and Flynn grew up in Middletown, not far from Newport.
That’s something, anyway.
See our full Michael Flynn biography »