President-elect Donald Trump has decided to bar Mike Flynn Jr – the son of his national security advisor – from working with his transition team, for propagating wild conspiracy theories about “pizzagate” on social media.
Flynn Jr has accompanied his father to presidential transition meetings inside Trump Tower and lists the presidential transition website as part of his Twitter bio. According to Trump’s team he was helping his father with scheduling and administrative items. However, they revealed it was “no longer the case."
This move came after he made controversial statements about an armed man's weekend attack at a popular pizza restaurant in Washington.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Mike Flynn Jr had said: “Until Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story.”
Reacting to this, Vice President-elect Mike Pence said the conspiracy-minded son of a key adviser to Donald Trump, retired General Mike Flynn, has no role in the president-elect's transition team.
He has no involvement in the transition whatsoever.Mike Pence, Vice President-elect, United States of America
The statement comes after Mike Flynn Jr sent numerous Tweets about the conspiracy theories of Pizzagate, a fake news story suggesting a Washington, DC, pizza shop, Comet Ping Pong, plays a key role in a child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton.
Police say the conspiracy theory led to violence on Sunday when a North Carolina man fired a rifle in the restaurant as he sought to investigate the accusations. No one was injured, and the man was arrested.
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Earlier in the day, Edgar Maddison Welch, who is charged with firing an assault rifle in the packed Washington pizzeria on Sunday, told police he had read online that children were being held as sex slaves there and he wanted to rescue them, police said on Monday.
The Comet Ping Pong restaurant for weeks had been the subject of fake news stories claiming falsely that it was the hub of a child sex ring organised by 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The stories were an example of a proliferation of fake news reports during the election year, often disseminated through websites purporting to be news outlets and quoting bogus sources.
Welch has been charged with four criminal counts, including assault with a dangerous weapon for firing his AR-15-style weapon three times while searching Comet Ping Pong for the child sex slaves that he told police he believed were being held there.
(With AP inputs.)
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