If
we are to believe the Trump White House, National Security Adviser
Michael Flynn just resigned because he lied about his conversations with
Russia's ambassador to the vice president. As White House senior
counselor Kellyanne Conway told NBC's "Today Show" 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,
not even two weeks after he had taken to Twitter to compare 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 of people
had 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 Pence
would get him fired. It doesn't add up.
It's
not even clear that 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 Vice President Mike
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 with
knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian ambassador
raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump
team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia
policy and sanctions. That's neither illegal nor improper.
What's more, the Washington Post reported
Monday night 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 here
is that Flynn was just thrown under the bus. His tenure as national
security adviser, the briefest in U.S. history, was rocky from the
start. When Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, he
was not allowed by the White House to defend himself. Over the weekend,
he was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for
his political life. His staff was not even allowed to review the
transcripts of his call to the Russian ambassador.
There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted.
It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored
communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The
last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then
of CQ, reported
on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane
Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.
Normally
intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly
held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing
details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the
permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of
anonymity. This is what police states do.
In the past it was
considered scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the
identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government
(normally they are redacted from intelligence reports). John Bolton's
nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations was derailed
in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he
was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush's first
term. The fact that the intercepts of Flynn's conversations with Kislyak
appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red
flag.
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he
saw the leaks about Flynn's conversations with Kislyak 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."
Nunes
said he was going to bring this up with the FBI, and ask the agency to
investigate the leak and find out whether Flynn himself is a target of a
law enforcement investigation. The Washington Post reported last month that Flynn was not the target of an FBI probe.
The
background here is important. Three people once affiliated with Trump's
presidential campaign -- Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone --
are being investigated
by the FBI and the intelligence community for their contacts with the
Russian government. This is part of a wider inquiry into Russia's role
in hacking and distributing emails of leading Democrats before the
election.
Flynn himself traveled 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 also not illegal in and of
itself. 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
that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and
his colleagues. 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 the elected
government.
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 President Barack
Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex,
something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.
He
was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn's breakout national
moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican
National Convention from the dais calling 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. Imagine if intercepts of a call between Obama's
incoming national security adviser and Iran's foreign minister leaked to
the press before the nuclear negotiations began? The howls of
indignation would be deafening.
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 told me Monday night that this will
not 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. Put
another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.
Flynn's Resignation Leaves Trump Security Team in Turmoil
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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