Michael Flynn: ‘The American People Have Been Buddy Breathing With Me for 4 Years’ Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of national intelligence, said he feels indebted to the American people who have stood by him and his family amid the years-long political saga that ended with a pardon from President Donald Trump. “The American people have been buddy breathing with me for four years,” Flynn told The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders. “Another way to describe it was the deep state buried me six feet under the ground, wanted me to die. Somehow, somebody stuck a straw up through that, or a straw was allowed to be stuck up to the air.”