In 2021, retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, former President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, became chair of a 75-year-old nonprofit organization — the kind of small charity where chairs typically work for free.

But Flynn received a salary of $40,000, for working two hours a week.

The next year, he got a raise: $60,000, for two hours.

Flynn’s charity also paid one of his brothers, two of his sisters, his niece and his sister-in-law. By the end of its second year, America’s Future Inc. was running in the red, burning through reserves — and still paying $518,000, or 29% of its budget, to Flynns.

Since leaving the Trump administration under an ethical cloud, Flynn has converted his Trump-world celebrity into a lucrative and sprawling family business. He and his relatives have marketed the retired general as a martyr, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a legal-defense fund and then pocketing leftover money. Through a network of nonprofit and for-profit ventures, they have sold far-right conspiracy theories, ranging from lies about the 2020 election to warnings, embraced by followers of QAnon, about cabals of pedophiles and child traffickers.

A New York Times investigation found that Flynn family members had made at least $2.2 million monetizing Flynn’s right-wing stardom in recent years, with more than half of that going to Flynn directly. That total includes several payments not previously reported, but it is still a low estimate because not all financial records are public. The Times’ reporting also raised questions about whether America’s Future had properly disclosed its payments to Flynn’s relatives.

Many of Trump’s closest allies have tried to turn political fame into private income, hawking everything from T-shirts to coffee beans to podcasts. Other than Trump himself, few have done it on the scale of Flynn.

Flynn’s reinvention could lead to a reinstatement: In the past year, Trump has alluded several times to his intention to bring the retired general back into his administration should Trump win the White House in November.

Flynn and his relatives did not respond directly to questions. A lawyer for Flynn, Jesse Binnall, said in an interview that the Flynns had earned their payments from America’s Future and other groups and that any errors in their filings were unintentional.

This spring, Flynn traveled across the country on a bus with one of his sons, Michael Flynn Jr., and a collection of right-wing influencers, stopping in churches and other venues where VIP ticket buyers paid as much as $200 to meet the retired general.

The occasion was the showing of a movie about the elder Flynn’s rise out of a large Irish American clan in Rhode Island to the pinnacle of power — and, in its telling, his unjust fall at the hands of enemies in the government.

One of the movie’s themes is Flynn’s financial strain after leaving the White House. He served less than a month on the job before resigning amid reports that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about phone calls with a Russian diplomat. He later twice pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about the communication but retracted the plea. The Justice Department ultimately dropped the case, and Flynn was pardoned by Trump in the final weeks of his term.

Paying for his legal morass took a financial toll. Flynn and his wife sold their northern Virginia home. Flynn’s sister, Barbara Redgate, organized a fund to help pay for lawyers.

While the fund had few legal limits on its use, the money would be used “solely to defray attorneys’ fees and other costs related to legal representation,” the fund said on its website.

After Flynn’s legal troubles largely ended in 2020, there were hundreds of thousands of dollars left in the fund, unused. Redgate said in a deposition last year that she had received about $265,000 of that money for “all the time I put into running the account.” Another sister, Clare Eckert, got an undisclosed amount for “writing and analyzing.”

Flynn got the remainder — between $250,000 and $1 million, she said.

The legal fund was just part of a stable of interconnected committees, nonprofit groups and companies — all trading on Flynn’s popularity in far-right circles and several of them earning income for his relatives.

Flynn kept a schedule of appearances, charging Republican groups and candidates up to $9,000 a speech and more for consulting, according to state and federal campaign records. He headlined the ReAwaken tour, a roadshow of Christian nationalist figures. He and son Michael, with whom he had once started a consulting firm, began promoting T-shirts and other branded gear online.

And Flynn and his brother Joseph teamed up with Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com and a major backer of efforts to contest the 2020 election, to create a nonprofit group called the America Project.

But no venture has become a family affair quite like America’s Future.

The group was started as an anti-Communist effort in the 1940s and has cycled through conservative causes since. In the 1980s, its leading figure was Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist crusader.

But the group was largely dormant when, in 2021, its entire board resigned, and its $3 million in leftover assets passed to the control of Flynn. The group’s previous leaders did not respond to requests for comment.