Russia’s influence spreads
Last week, we discovered that former national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about the import of what he told it regarding his contacts with former Russian Ambassador Sergey
Kislyak. Yet Flynn once served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the presidency of Barack Obama. Why would he lie to the FBI about what passed between him and Kislyak? Had he forgotten that, for a certitude, the conversation of a Russian ambassador was being recorded secretly by American intelligence agencies? Moreover, when he was being interviewed by the FBI, why did he not bring with him a lawyer? When I was being interviewed by the FBI about my perfidious Arkansas Project, I most certainly brought a lawyer with me, and it helped that my lawyer looked like he once worked for Don Corleone. Thinking back on it, I should have brought two lawyers.
We are told Flynn is now cooperating with the government. Yet it appears that he has implicated President Donald Trump not at all, or at least in no criminal activity. So what is the fuss all about? Flynn presumably was acting on behalf of people high up in the Trump administration, but unless they were giving Kislyak state secrets or accepting bribes from him, there is nothing wrong with that. I have in my library the memoirs of Anatoly Dobrynin for recreational reading. Dobrynin was the ambassador representing the Soviet Union for 24 years in Washington, D.C., during the Cold War. In his memoirs, the ambassador writes of meeting with then-President Jimmy Carter’s representative Averell Harriman in September 1976 before the November election. He met with other Carter advisers before and after the election. Doubtless he did the same with other presidential emissaries during his long years in Washington. No one was prosecuted. In those happy years, diplomatic contacts were not adjudged criminal acts.
How did the Russians become such an ominous force in American elections, or at least in the tragic election of 2016? I would direct you to turn to page 395 of “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” the highly acclaimed chronicle of that epochal election written by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
On election night, Hillary Clinton may have been gently soused, but slowly even she saw the light. The authors tell us that in the days after the election, she “kept pointing her finger at Comey and Russia.” It was the beginning of her post-election “strategy.” The authors proceed to say, “That strategy had been set in motion within twenty-four hours of her concession speech.” Despite her Karamazovian hangover, she and her aides “went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public.” And “Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” From that point on, Clinton and her aides kept flogging it.
Today even the FBI has taken up Clinton’s strategy, but nothing has implicated Trump, and no White House grandee is implicated in a Russian-related crime. As of this weekend, we know that a Clinton supporter working high up in the FBI, Peter Strzok, shaped then-Director James Comey’s relatively lenient — if improper — judgment of her handling of emails. Additionally, before Strzok was demoted, he had a role in investigating the Trump campaign and Russia. The FBI has a lot to answer for, and it ought to be investigated itself.
As for the Russians, they now have more say in Washington than at any time I can remember. Those in Official Washington who have adopted Clinton’s strategy have made Kislyak a powerful force in the Trump investigation and his boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, quite possibly the most powerful man in the world. Together they have power over the Trump administration through their willing agents in the FBI and the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
All Kislyak has to do is dispute what Flynn told him, or for that matter, what some other personage in the administration told him. From Mueller’s public statements there is no hint that the FBI doubts Kislyak’s good word. It is the administration’s word that the FBI finds dubious. Kislyak could tell investigators that Flynn or some other administration aide had sent him a letter or expressed himself through “body language.” Off the FBI would go chasing after Kislyak’s lead. And, by the way, other Russians could insist that they had conspired with Trump’s people in private
conversations that no intelligence agency of the federal government apprehended. Flynn’s fate might well be just the beginning. This investigation ought to be shut
down somehow. Mueller is compromised, and the FBI appears complicitous in Hillary Clinton’s strategy. American campaign adviser or vice versa — whether the campaign, through Flynn, helped the Russians in their meddling or the Russians gave helpful information to the campaign in exchange for something of value — is at the heart of Mueller’s mission to prove or dispel allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
Three weeks after the FBI interviewed Flynn, Trump fired him. The publicly stated reason for the firing was a purported lie that Flynn had told to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Kislyak. Last weekend, on the day after Flynn pleaded guilty, the president issued a tweet claiming that he fired Flynn for lying to Pence and to the FBI.
If Flynn was fired in February for lying to the FBI in January, then Trump was aware of Flynn’s lies and his likely prosecution for them when he asked Comey to back off the FBI investigation of Flynn and then fired Comey for not backing off. This is dangerous territory for the president.
Obstruction of justice is the interference with a law enforcement or judicial proceeding for a corrupt purpose. Thus, if the president knew of Flynn’s lies to the FBI when he asked Comey to back off Flynn, the existence of a presidential crime and impeachable offense depends on the president’s state of mind.
If the “back off Flynn” request was given because the president felt sorry for the general or because he had concluded that the FBI’s limited resources would be better utilized finding terrorists or arresting bank robbers, there was no corrupt motive. But if the motive for the request to Comey was fear of what beans Flynn might spill — about the president himself or his son-inlaw, for example — that would be a corrupt motive, and the request would be a crime, as well as an impeachable offense.
Obstruction of justice is the rare federal crime that need not succeed to be criminal and prosecutable. It is also the rare federal crime that nearly all legal scholars agree is an impeachable offense. The president’s lawyers are not among them. They have argued that because the president is the chief federal law enforcement officer in the land, his decisions on whom to prosecute are final and always lawful. That sounds like former President Richard Nixon’s now fully discredited argument that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
In America, the president is a public servant, not a prince. Is the president in legal hot water? In a word: yes.