Trump White House: Flynn turns loose cannon on Russia links
The ex-security adviser has promised to be Robert Mueller’s star witness.
Michael Flynn had been national security adviser to Donald Trump for just four days when, on January 24 this year, he made a mistake that ended his career and now threatens to engulf the Trump White House.
In an interview with the FBI, Flynn took a reckless gamble and lied about the nature of conversations he had had with Russia’s then ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. He clearly believed he could get away with such a porkie, because Kislyak would never tell.
But a veteran soldier and a former director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Flynn should have known better than most that US intelligence routinely eavesdrops on the Russian ambassador’s phone calls.
So when Flynn told the FBI that he had not discussed the issue of Russian sanctions with the ambassador, the FBI had him cold — on tape having the exact conversation he had denied under oath ever having.
Since that day, the reputation of the 33-year army veteran has been progressively shredded. Now, in order to avoid a potentially hefty jail sentence, Flynn has pleaded guilty to a single charge of lying to the FBI while also promising to become the star witness in special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in US politics, including the links between Trump associates and Russia.
This is as dangerous a position as the Trump White House can be in. Flynn has nothing to lose now but to tell all about the dealings between Trump associates and Russia during last year’s election campaign and the transition period between the November election and Trump’s swearing-in on January 20.
Already the Flynn case has confirmed something that the White House denied for months — a co-ordinated campaign to influence Russia’s foreign policy and undermine that of the then president Barack Obama before the Trump team was even in power.
Precisely who was involved and to what degree is yet to fully emerge.
But Flynn has already told prosecutors that at least two senior officials in Trump’s transition team guided and were fully aware of his contacts with Russia.
One of these is reported to be Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, bringing this controversy perilously close to the President himself.
Kushner was interviewed by Mueller’s team early last month and it is now clear that they were armed with Flynn’s testimony before they did so, setting him up for a big fall if he chose to try to cover his tracks.
For Kushner, for other Trump associates and for Trump himself, it is the potential cover-ups rather than the crime that pose the greatest threat in this controversy.
What Flynn was trying to do with Russia was wrong, but it is not yet clear that it was illegal.
On December 28, the Trump team woke to the news that Obama had expelled 35 Russian diplomats in a sweeping response to Russia’s attempts to influence the US election in favour of Trump.
During the campaign, Trump had called for closer relations with Moscow and had praised President Vladimir Putin.
In this climate, prosecutors say that Flynn was directed by “a very senior member” of the Trump team to contact Kislyak in Washington to discuss the issue.
The Trump team did not want relations with Moscow to be further undermined before they took power so Flynn urged the ambassador to, in the words of the court documents, “refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed on Russia that same day”.
It worked. Putin surprised the international community with a relatively benign response to the Obama sanctions and Kislyak called Flynn to tell him that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to the sanctions at his request.
Trump called Putin’s decision “a great move ... I always knew he was smart”.
In other words, Trump’s team was not only seeking to influence Russian foreign policy before it actually took power but was succeeding in doing do.
A week earlier, on December 22, Kushner had also directed Flynn to reach out to Kislyak to lobby him about a UN resolution on Israeli settlements.
Mueller is likely to conclude that this behaviour was wrong. It is normal for incoming administrations to make contact with foreign governments ahead of assuming office, but it is quite another thing to start seeking to influence international policy.
The actions may have violated a 200-year-old law known as the Logan Act, which bars private US citizens from working with foreign governments against the US government. But the law has not been used since the American Civil War and would be open to legal challenge on the grounds that it unfairly restricts freedom of speech. Mueller would have to prove the Trump team had clearly crossed what is a very fuzzy legal line.
The bigger problem for the Trump team is whether the facts Mueller is now exposing undermines the public claims they made at the time.
At that time, Trump’s transition team was led by incoming vice-president Mike Pence and included Kushner, former chief of staff Reince Priebus, Flynn and Flynn’s deputy KT McFarland.
On January 15, Pence publicly denied that Flynn had ever discussed the issue of sanctions with Kislyak, a claim Priebus repeated.
Yet the court documents released at the weekend now make it clear that at least two senior members of the transition team, including Kushner, did have knowledge of the nature of the conversation Flynn had with Kislyak.
Why, then, did they allow Pence and Priebus to make a false public statement?
Two weeks later, Trump sacked Flynn for allegedly misleading the vice-president after intelligence sources leaked to The Washington Post the fact that Flynn had lied about the nature of his conversations with the ambassador.
Trump clearly had his own concerns at that time about the increasingly murky nature of the Flynn issue.
In February, Trump placed himself in peril by allegedly seeking to ask the then FBI chief James Comey to drop the FBI investigation into Flynn.
“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go,” Trump allegedly said to Comey in a private meeting at the White House a day after Flynn was sacked.
Comey said in his Senate testimony that he understood the President to be requesting that he drop the investigation into Flynn.
“It was very concerning, given the FBI’s role as an independent investigative agency,” he said.
This claim now sees Trump under investigation by Mueller for potential obstruction of justice.
The controversy was further compounded by Trump’s decision to sack Comey in May for reasons that he later admitted were related to Comey’s pursuit of the Russia issue.
This led to the appointment of Mueller as special counsel — a move that produced the all-encompassing investigation which is now moving progressively closer to the White House.
The White House has tried to play down Flynn’s guilty plea, describing it as an isolated issue that does not involved the President or the West Wing.
“The false statements involved mirror the false statements to White House officials that resulted in his resignation in February of this year,” chief White House lawyer Ty Cobb said. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr Flynn.”
This is only half correct. For the Trump administration, the best thing about Flynn’s plea is that there is no evidence yet that his interactions with Russia involved the far more dangerous issue of collusion prior to the election.
US intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia sought to influence the US election in favour of Donald Trump. Moscow’s attempts included the hacking of emails at the Democratic National Committee, some of which embarrassed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Russia then leaked the trove of hacked emails to WikiLeaks.
The most explosive finding Mueller could make is that members of the Trump team were involved in helping to facilitate Russia’s campaign against the Democrats.
But if Mueller has evidence of this, he is not showing it yet. Trump was adamant yesterday that no such evidence exists.
“There has been absolutely no collusion,” Trump said.
The downside for the White House is that Flynn’s testimony shows that he was no rogue operator. Others in the Trump transition team did play a role in his dealings with the Russians and this disclosure broadens Mueller’s investigation and brings it directly into the White House. Kushner’s role in the whole affair has now become central. Mueller will be wanting to know what Kushner knew and who he shared that information with. Did Trump truly know as little about this issue as he has claimed given the involvement of his son-in-law?
Mueller’s expanding investigation has previously led to charges against three Trump associates, including his former campaign director Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates for money- laundering and other crimes linked to consulting they did in Ukraine prior to joining Trump’s campaign.
George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, has also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians.
But Flynn is the first official to be charged who actually worked in the Trump White House.
For Flynn, who has also been investigated for questionable lobbying activities for foreign governments, including that of Turkey, it has been a painful and very public fall. The decorated general was once considered so close to Trump that he was a potential candidate for vice-president.
“After over 33 years of military service to our country, including nearly five years in combat away from my family, and then my decision to continue to serve the United States, it has been extraordinarily painful to endure these many months of false accusations of ‘treason’ and other outrageous acts,” Flynn said after pleading guilty.
“Such false accusations are contrary to everything I have ever done and stood for. But I recognise that the actions I acknowledged in court were wrong, and, through my faith in God, I am working to set things right.”
As the Flynn drama was unfolding, former FBI chief Comey added his own religious twist by tweeting the biblical words quoted by Martin Luther King in his 1963 ‘I have a dream speech.’
“Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
Cameron Stewart is The Australian’s Washington correspondent and US contributor for Sky News Australia
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