Mike Flynn’s Hall of Fame induction halted after board resignations

Following a flurry of resignations and public outcry, the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame announced it will defer its 2024 induction of Michael Flynn.

In a guest column to the Providence Journal, Patrick Conley, the Hall of Fame’s past president, stated Flynn’s induction would be deferred “to a more peaceful and rational time and a more secure place.”

“Discretion is the better part of valor,” said Conley, who currently serves as the board’s volunteer general counsel.

In the guest column, Conley defended the board’s December 14 vote to induct Flynn, former President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser. However, he said “the Hall of Fame exhibited ‘poor timing’ by choosing to honor General Flynn in this turbulent and politically charged environment.”

According to The Journal, at least eight board members have resigned as a result of the vote to induct Flynn. Conley’s column said the Hall of Fame received 100 letters in protest of Flynn’s pending induction.

Newsweek reached out to Conley via email for additional comments.

Flynn, a retired three-star general who grew up in Rhode Island, was let go as Trump’s national security advisor after three weeks in office when it was revealed that he was not truthful about a conversation he had with then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak while speaking with former Vice President Mike Pence.

In 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the conversation with Kislyak. Trump pardoned him in November 2020.

Since then, Flynn has been associated with members of the QAnon conspiracy movement who have made baseless claims that a globalist cabal, made up of Democrats and wealthy businessmen, is involved in a worldwide child sex-trafficking ring.

He also falsely claimed COVID was invented in order to steal the 2020 election from Trump. Last year, Flynn suggested a Myanmar-like military coup “should happen” in the U.S.

“A majority of the board that voted to induct Flynn relied upon his 30-year record of public service and high attainments,” Conley wrote in his guest column. “It accepted as true the grant of clemency from the president of the United States asserting that no crime was actually committed and the fact that charges against Flynn were dropped by a weaponized Department of Justice.”

John Parrillo, a history professor, was among the recent board resignations.

In a resignation letter obtained by the Journal, Parrillo said he was “saddened to the core” by the vote to induct a man with Flynn’s “politics and far-right militaristic vision for America” and by the board’s unwillingness to reconsider his Hall of Fame merits.

“For the last seven years, it has been my [privilege] to nominate at least seven Rhode Islanders into our RI Hall of Fame. A fresco painter. A Naval historian. A Hollywood filmmaker. Two creators of a music festival. An early father of the American Industrial Revolution and the creator of at least 14 Black colleges,” Parrillo wrote in his letter.

“With a most heavy heart,” he said he must resign.

In another letter obtained by the Journal, former Rhode Island state Senator Bea Lanzi and lawyer John Tarantino wrote: “There is an overall right and wrong in the universe, and what has happened here, in our view, and according to our moral compasses, and consciences, compels us to resign.”