Former executive linked to Michael Flynn is founder of company awarded $48 million Air Force contract in 2019

Wendy Siegelman
3 min readJul 11, 2020

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A former executive linked to Michael Flynn, who was CEO of a Flynn Intel Group subsidiary in 2016 when Flynn contracted with Ekim Alptekin’s Inovo to investigate Fethullah Gulen — is founder of a company that was awarded a $48,843,831 Air Force contract in September 2019.

Note: there is no indication Michael Flynn is linked to the $48 million contract or that there is anything unusual about the award. The company that won the contract had prior links to Flynn and the contract includes “development of electronic warfare/cyber network attack software and hardware systems,” and given the sensitive cyber responsibilities, is worthy of further research.

Tim Newberry was CEO of Flynn Intel Group (FIG) Cyber in 2016 when Flynn was hired by Inovo to investigate Gulen for Turkish interests. Tim Newberry and Jon Iadonisi co-founded White Canvas Group which shared office space with Flynn. There’s more background in this 2017 Washington Post article.

I wrote about White Canvas, Tim Newberry and Jon Iadonisi in this article that featured social media companies linked to the Trump campaign — and the subset connected to Michael Flynn.

On September 9, 2019 the Department of the Air Force awarded a contract for $48,843,831 to Blackhorse Solutions, Inc (global vendor name: White Canvas Group LLC) with an initial payment of $300,000 and an expected completion date of 2024.

The Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) Code for Blackhorse Solutions updated July 2019, shows the legal business name is White Canvas Group LLC, and the two principals are Tim Newberry and Jon Iadonisi, who both had significant links to Michael Flynn

The $48,843,831 contract for Blackhorse Solutions is described on the DoD website:

This contract will advance global vigilance, global reach, and global power in the information environment through the application, research, development, and transition of emerging technologies and next-gen solutions. This includes rapid tool development, development of electronic warfare/cyber network attack software and hardware systems, analytical processing, cyber threat avoidance and cyber threat defense, test and evaluation, and to manage the development to ensure projects move forward at a rapid pace, that technical and process innovations incorporated into successive rounds of development. Work will be performed at Herndon, Virginia, and is expected to be completed by Sept. 9, 2024. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition and two offers were received. Fiscal 2019 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $300,000 are being obligated at time of award. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, New York, is the contracting activity.

There’s another Sept 2019 contract for $12,433,616.35 for Blackhorse Solutions, with initial payment of $993,170.48 for “Custom Computer Programming Services…ADP Software, Equipment, and Telecommunications Training” with the location noted as Germany.

As noted earlier there’s no indication of anything unusual in contracts for Blackhorse Solutions and there are no known links to Flynn for these awards. But the same players keep re-appearing and profiting under the Trump administration and firms engaged in cyber operations should be looked at closely.

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Wendy Siegelman
Wendy Siegelman

Written by Wendy Siegelman

Freelance journalist. All new work is now published on my new site https://newstracs.com/ (you can subscribe there for email updates)