Trump's White House Has No Idea How to Handle This

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Trump's White House Has No Idea How to Handle This Mess

The Russia story does not end with Michael Flynn.



By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 14, 2017

Remember bombshells? Not the blonde WWII variety, or the actual explosive devices, but rather, the big newspaper stories that would explode, seemingly out of nowhere, initially sounding so preposterous that more than a few people wondered if the reporting was unsound or even fictitious.

As it happens these days, we're all living downrange from freaking artillery practice and one bombshell sounds pretty much like all the others when you're a civilian looking for some foxhole into which you can dive to get out of the relentless torrent of crazy that's detonating on top of us every news cycle.

This, for example, from The Washington Post, is a legitimate bombshell.

The acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail, current and former U.S. officials said.

The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, was prompted by concerns that ­Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice ­President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election, the officials said.

It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.

In the waning days of the Obama administration, James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, the CIA director at the time, shared Yates's concerns and concurred with her recommendation to inform the Trump White House.

They feared that "Flynn had put himself in a compromising position" and thought that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, according to one of the officials, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Incoming!

And, by 11 o'clock Monday night, Michael Flynn had resigned. What that means about his ongoing relationship with the president*, of course, is anybody's guess.

A couple of things. First, Sally Yates turns out to be an even bigger hero than we thought she was when she made the stand that got her fired on the immigration order. (And, one wonders what else was up with that now, too.)

Second, I know it's hard to believe either Clapper or Brennan as far as you can throw a federal courthouse, but they had absolutely no reason to align themselves with Yates' concerns except out of a legitimate concern for the national security.

Third, anyone fantasizing about what it would take to get the president* out of the White House and back on NBC where he belongs now has to factor in that Mike Pence is tainted by this dangerous nonsense, too.

At the very least, as people from Indiana warned us, the man is a dolt. Per the Post:

For Yates and other officials, concerns about the communications peaked in the days after the Obama administration on Dec. 29 announced measures to punish Russia for what it said was the Kremlin's interference in the election to help Trump.

After the sanctions were rolled out, the Obama administration braced itself for the Russian retaliation. To the surprise of many U.S. officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Dec. 30 that there would be no response.

Trump praised the decision on Twitter. Intelligence analysts began to search for clues that could help explain Putin's move. The search turned up Kislyak's communications, which the FBI routinely monitors, and the phone call in question with Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general with years of intelligence experience.

From that call and subsequent intercepts, FBI agents wrote a secret report summarizing ­Flynn's discussions with Kislyak. Yates, then the deputy attorney general, considered Flynn's comments in the intercepted call to be "highly significant" and "potentially illegal," according to an official familiar with her thinking.

OK, so nobody's ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act. Still, the idea that this walking hunk of kompromat was the National Security Advisor for as long as he was beggars belief.

(Maybe populist champion Jill Stein can shed some light on what they talked about at that gala dinner in Moscow?) There are still a number of huge, festering problems with this situation; Flynn's lack of credibility and obvious crackpottery were only the most glaring of them.

(By all accounts, Flynn was a good soldier until Radical Islamic Terrorism™ sent him off the deep end. I recall Sherlock Holmes' assessment of the career of Colonel Sebastian Moran, an honorable soldier who became Moriarty's second-in-command—that there are some trees "which grow to a certain height and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity."

Trump Team Loses It in Response to Russia Reports

There is the simple fact that nobody in this White House seemed to know fck-all about how to handle this situation. It is also a problem for democracy to have the unelected bureaucrats of the intelligence community at war with an elected president, no matter what you think of the president* or how he got elected. Sooner or later, I fear, the military's going to get dragged into this fiasco and that will make things immeasurably worse.

It was more than simply time for Flynn to go. It's time for the country to know everything about the involvement of Russia in the 2016 presidential election, if only to clear the air so somebody can govern the country . It's time for a halt to the bombardment so we can all get the lay of the land again, if and when the smoke ever clears.