You can't just set up your own State Department until the President is in office. That's COMPLETELY against US diplomatic protocol. It's a bunch of buffoons playing spy. Embarrassing.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/the-push-for-a-trump-russia-back-channel-what-we-know.html
How stupid and naive these people are is shocking. Kushner somehow imagined that his secret channel wasn't being listened to by US Intelligence agencies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...0a14b4-422d-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html
Former Director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, called Kushner’s request for a communications back channel “off the map." “What manner of ignorance, chaos, hubris, suspicion, contempt, would you have to have to think that doing this with the Russian ambassador was a good or appropriate idea?”
Kislyak has been at the center of contacts between Trump administration officials and Russia. The ambassador's conversations with Flynn prior to Trump's
inauguration led to Flynn's firing in February after it was revealed that Flynn misled White House officials about the nature of their discussions.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/rep...-communications-backchannel/story?id=47672306
Flynn, while he was still a private citizen and Barack Obama was still President, had discussed American sanctions against Russia with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador in Washington. The conversations were possibly illegal. Flynn and Kislyak’s communications, by phone and text, occurred on the same day the Obama Administration announced the expulsion of thirty-five Russian diplomats in retaliation for Russia’s efforts to swing the election in Trump’s favor. Flynn had previously denied talking about sanctions with the Ambassador.
This New Yorker article is excellent:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/michael-flynn-general-chaos
(Flynn's) closest military colleagues had been struggling to make sense of what had happened to the talented and grounded general they once knew. “Mike is inarguably one of the finest leaders the Army has ever produced,” James (Spider) Marks, a retired major general, told me. And yet, watching the first night of the Republican National Convention, last July, Marks was taken aback when his old friend appeared onscreen.
“Wake up, America!” Flynn said, his jaw set and his hands gripping the sides of the lectern. The United States was in peril: “Our very existence is threatened.” The moment demanded a President with “guts,” he declared, not a “weak, spineless” one who “believes
she is above the law.”
In the early two-thousands, Marks was Flynn’s commanding officer at the Army’s intelligence academy, in Fort Huachuca, Arizona; one of his daughters went to school with one of Flynn’s sons. Marks regarded Flynn as “smart, humble, and funny.” What he saw on TV was something else: “That’s a vitriolic side of Mike that I never knew.”
