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Why Flynn’s plea is a dead end for ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy
RT,
1
December, 2017
President
Donald Trump’s short-lived national security adviser, Michael
Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Most US media jumped on
the plea as proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia. Actual
documents, however, tell a different story.
A court
document signed
by special counsel Robert Mueller, dated Thursday, specifies two
instances of Flynn telling FBI investigators things that were not
true. They relate to two conversations he had with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak, in December 2016.
In
the Statement
of Offense signed
by Flynn at his court appearance on Friday, he admitted to acting on
instructions from a senior “Presidential Transition Team” (PTT)
official, prompting breathless speculation if that was Trump himself,
his son-in-law Jared Kushner, or someone else altogether. The one
question nobody seems to be asking is, “So what?”
Flynn's misleading of the FBI seems to stem from the Logan act. Well after the election, on Dec 29. Flynn tried to convince Russia to hold off expelling US diplomats & to not support a UN vote against Israel. His job--but also a potential Logan violation.justice.gov/file/1015026/d…
It
is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that Flynn’s
“crime” is a procedural one: he told FBI investigators he hadn’t
done a thing that he actually did. But was the thing he did - namely,
speak with the Russian ambassador to the US - against the law? Not
really.
Under
the 1799 Logan Act, it is technically against the law for a private
US citizen to engage in diplomacy. However, only two people have ever
been indicted under that law, and no one has ever been prosecuted.
Flynn was a member of the presidential transition team whose duties
involved contacts with foreign diplomats. So why would the FBI even
ask him about his contacts with Ambassador Kislyak?
“There
was nothing wrong with the incoming national security adviser’s
having meetings with foreign counterparts or discussing such matters
as the sanctions in those meetings,” Andrew
McCarthy of National Review wrote
on Friday.
Because
Flynn was “generally
despised by Obama administration officials,” McCarthy
added, “there
has always been cynical suspicion that the decision to interview him
was driven by the expectation that he would provide the FBI with an
account inconsistent with the recorded conversation - i.e., that
Flynn was being set up for prosecution on a process crime.”
Back
in May, former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates testified before
the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that she came to the White House on
January 26 - two days after Flynn’s FBI interview - to say that he
had lied about his conversations with Kislyak. How did she know?
That, she said, was “based
on classified information.”
Clearly,
Yates knew Flynn was lying about the conversations because US
intelligence had been listening in on them. An Obama administration
official leaked that information to the Washington Post’s David
Ignatius, who reported on
the Flynn-Kislyak conversation on January 12, eight days before
Trump’s inauguration.
Responding
to that report, Vice President Pence said that Flynn’s conversation
with Kislyak “had
nothing whatsoever to do” with
the Obama administration’s expulsion of Russian diplomats and
closure of two diplomatic properties, enacted on December 29, 2016.
After
the Post reported that
the two did in fact discuss Obama’s sanctions, citing anonymous
sources again, Flynn submitted his resignation.
So what "crime" was the FBI investigating? Violation of the absurd "Logan Act"? No one has been prosecuted under that in 200 years. Much more likely: The FBI was seeking to entrap Flynn into lying. The FBI itself triggered the "crime."
The
dark undertone of the Post’s reporting was that Flynn was somehow
“subverting” Obama’s sanctions, intended as punishment for -
alleged, and to this day unproven - Russian “meddling” in US
elections. What Flynn actually did, as documented by the special
counsel, was to ask Russia not to escalate in response to Obama’s
actions.
It
worked, too: Russian President Vladimir Putin
announced that
Moscow would not expel any US diplomats, but rather invite them to
the Kremlin for holiday celebrations. It wasn’t until July, after
the passage of an anti-Russian bill in Congress, that Putin ordered
the US to
downsize its diplomatic staff in Russia by 755.
So the country that influenced US policy through Michael Flynn is Israel, not Russia. But Flynn did try to influence Russia, not the other way around. Ha-ha. This is the smoking gun? What a farce. nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/…
So
what about the frantic insistence of “Russiagate” partisans that
Flynn’s plea practically portends the downfall of the president
they refuse to accept as legitimate? Their elation is unwarranted and
premature, warns McCarthy. If a prosecutor has a cooperating witness
who is an accomplice in a criminal scheme, the plea is structured so
it proves the existence of the scheme.
“That
is not happening in Flynn’s situation. Instead, like Papadopoulos,
he is being permitted to plead guilty to a mere process crime,” he
wrote, referring to a volunteer Trump campaign adviser who likewise
pleaded guilty to
lying to the FBI about seeking contacts with (a nonexistent) “Putin’s
niece.”
Flynn’s
plea did include an admission he failed to report activities
undertaken on behalf of a foreign government: Turkey, a key NATO ally
of the US.
Nebojsa
Malic for RT
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