Whatever one’s opinion of Flynn, his relations with Turkey, his “
Lock her up!” chants, his haircut, or anything, this case was never about much. There’s no longer pretense that prosecution would lead to the unspooling of a massive Trump-Russia conspiracy, as pundits once breathlessly expected. In fact, news that Flynn was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller inspired many of the “
Is this the beginning of the end for Trump?” stories that will someday fill whole chapters of
Journalism ****s Up 101 textbooks.
The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.
In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally
leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”
“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”
A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took
three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “
get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After
another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.
Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of
Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer.
All due respect, I think you are being obtuse for the sake of not wanting to truly address what the article says. You are not alone in that. So I am done with this thread.
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