Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn quickly deleted a tweet on Friday with a photo of Harvey Weinstein and Hillary Clinton posted the morning the disgraced mogul was arrested on three felony counts of rape and criminal sex act.
His son, Michael Flynn Jr., said his father’s Twitter account “was hacked this morning” and that the family was “currently addressing the issue.
https://twitter.com/mflynnJR/status/1000016394870804482
The younger Flynn added that his father had been attending a veterans event and that “he doesn’t have time to worry (let alone tweet about) those 3 criminals.. Weinstein, Huma, and Hillary” — including a dig at Huma Abedin, a former Clinton aide who appears in the photo that was posted from Gen. Flynn’s account after a six-month Twitter hiatus.
https://twitter.com/aidnmclaughlin/status/1000015618018566144
Reps for Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment from TheWrap.
The claim of hacking is unusual given that Flynn, a longtime Trump partisan, was ferociously critical of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
Though he has avoided posting since releasing a December 2017 statement explaining his decision to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller and plead guilty to charges of lying to the FBI, Flynn has been something of a creeper on the platform.
The general has “liked” several posts since the December statement, most recently this photo of Donald Trump posing with New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman in the Oval Office. There is so far no suggestion that any of these “likes” were the result of hacking.
While Twitter has been plagued with a hacking epidemic in recent months which has ensnared many high-profile accounts on the platform, there has been a equally virulent epidemic of stars using the excuse in an attempt to brush away past poor judgement.
Last month, MSNBC anchor Joy Reid asserted that various disparaging remarks about LGBT people that appeared on her old blog were the result of a hack. Experts — including some hired by Reid — were unable to produce any evidence of a hack and she was forced to (sort of) walk back the claims on her show.