Flynn could be just the beginning

If we are to believe the White House, National Security Adviser Michael Flynn resigned Monday night because he lied to the vice president about a phone discussion with Russia’s ambassador. As White House senior counsellor Kellyanne Conway told NBC on Tuesday: “Misleading the vice president really was the key here.”

That sounds about as credible as when the president told CIA employees that the media had invented the story about his enmity toward the spy agency, barely a week after he’d publicly compared the CIA to Nazis. It’s about as credible as President Donald Trump’s insistence that it didn’t rain during his inauguration. Or that millions voted illegally in the election he just won.

The point here is that for a White House that has such a casual and opportunistic relationship with the truth, it’s strange that Flynn’s “lie” to Vice President Mike Pence got him fired. It doesn’t add up.

It’s not even clear Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Pence. The New York Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways.

One White House official reports that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office soon and would review Russia policy and sanctions.

That’s neither illegal nor improper.

What’s more, the Washington Post reported that last month Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general, had informed the White House that Flynn discussed sanctions with Kislyak and that he could be susceptible to blackmail because he misled Pence about it. If it was the lie to Pence that sunk Flynn, why was he not fired at the end of January?

A better explanation is that Flynn was thrown under the bus. His tenure as national security adviser was rocky from the start. When Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, the White House would not let him defend himself. Over the weekend, he was instructed not to speak to the press amid the fight for his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the transcripts of the call in question.

There is another component to this story as well: It’s very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior officials. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, says he sees the leaks as part of a pattern. “There does appear to be a well-orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”

The background here is important. Three people once affiliated with Trump’s presidential campaign — Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — are being investigated over their contacts with Russia. This is part of a wider inquiry into Moscow’s possible role in hacking and distributing Democratic emails before the election.

Flynn travelled in 2015 to Russia to attend a conference put on by the country’s propaganda network, RT. He has acknowledged he was paid through his speaker’s bureau for his appearance. That doesn’t look good, but it’s not illegal. All of this is to say there are many unanswered questions about Trump’s and his administration’s ties to Russia.

But that’s all these allegations are at this point: unanswered questions. It’s possible Flynn has more ties to Russia that he didn’t divulge. It’s also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine Trump’s administration.

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under former president Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, which threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Flynn’s breakout moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention, calling from the dais for Hillary Clinton to be jailed. In normal times, the idea that U.S. officials entrusted with our most sensitive secrets would selectively disclose them to undermine the White House would alarm those worried about creeping authoritarianism.

In the end, it was Trump’s decision to cut Flynn loose. In doing this he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. Nunes thinks this won’t end well. “First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” he said. Flynn is just the appetizer. Trump is the entree.