New stink on ex-Don aide Flynn
EX-TRUMP campaign chairman Paul Manafort will voluntarily answer questions in the House Intelligence Committee probe of Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential race.
Manafort’s upcoming appearance was announced Friday by committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who set off his own fireworks this week by briefing President Trump about secret intelligence intercepts related to the probe.
The move by Manafort spares him from a subpoena to appear before the committee. It was unclear whether the questioning of the former Trump pal would be public or in private, when it might occur or whether he would speak under oath.
Manafort will “provide information voluntarily regarding recent allegations about Russian interference in the election,” said his spokesman Jason Maloni.
The strategist’s lawyer contacted the committee on Thursday to communicate Manafort’s willingness to appear.
Manafort served as Trump’s campaign head between March and August last year, and has come under increasing scrutiny about possible election-year collaboration between Moscow and Trump associates.
Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, ripped into Nunes for a decision to cancel a Tuesday public hearing with the Obama Administration’s directors of national intelligence and the former acting attorney general.
“I think this is a serious mistake,” Schiff said Friday.
Nunes also said the committee has asked FBI Director James Comey to return and answer more questions in a closed session.
Comey revealed at a previous session that there was an ongoing probe into alleged Russian influence on the presidential race — possibly with the aid of Trump associates.
“That, of course, is very significant information for the public,” Schiff said.
The Associated Press reported this week that Manafort had secretly worked for a Russian billionaire who is a close ally of Vladimir Putin prior to signing on with the Trump campaign. He proposed a campaign that he said could “greatly benefit the Putin government.”
The revelations were at odds with some of Manafort’s earlier statements.
In February, Manafort said he was never involved with “anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration.”
When asked if his committee might subpoena witnesses to testify, Nunes chafed.
“We’re not going to get into a neo-McCarthyism era here where we just start bringing in Americans just because they were mentioned in a press story,” he said.
Nunes, a former dairy farmer from California who was a member of the Trump transition team, on Wednesday told reporters that an undisclosed source had shown him intelligence reports revealing that the communications of Trump transition officials were scooped up through routine surveillance and improperly spread through intelligence agencies during the final days of the Obama administration.
After he briefed reporters, Nunes met with the President to tell him about what he’d learned without sharing any of that information with his committee.
Democrats said Nunes’ loyalties to Trump appeared to outweigh his commitment to an independent, bipartisan investigation.
Comey, meanwhile, was spotted at the White House on Friday. It was unclear what he was doing there. PRESIDENT TRUMP’s former national security adviser met with top Turkish officials during the campaign to discuss the removal of an exiled Muslim cleric from the U.S., according to reports Friday.
Retired Gen. Mike Flynn and Turkish government ministers talked about sneaking Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey blames for a failed coup last summer, out of the U.S. without going through the legal extradition process, former Central Intelligence Agency Director James Woolsey told the Wall Street Journal.
Gulen has lived in the Pocono region of Pennsylvania since 1999.
Woolsey, who attended the Sept. 19 meeting at the Essex House hotel, described the ideas discussed as “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away.” He said he was stunned by the conversation.
“It seemed to be naive,” Woolsey told The Journal. “I didn’t put a lot of credibility in it.
The Turkish officials in attendance included the son-in-law of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,Woolsey said.
A Flynn spokesman, Price Floyd, told the paper that “at no time did Gen. Flynn discuss any illegal actions, nonjudicial physical removal or any other such activities.”
Flynn (below) reportedly failed to disclose his ties to Turkey to Trump; he filed as a foreign agent with the Justice Department only after he was fired.
He reported being paid $530,000 for lobbying on behalf of a Turkish company from August through November.
The former Army general was reportedly receiving classified national security briefings last summer alongside Trump, even while running his private consulting firm.
Flynn was asked to resign as national security adviser for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about a conversation he had with a Russian diplomat regarding sanctions against country. the