Michael Flynn spoke with Russian Ambassador Kislyak on December 29, 2016.
You will remember that the conversation Michael Flynn had with Kislyak was leaked to WaPo last January 12 :
According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A senior government official. In the obama administration. This was the beginning of the end for Flynn. At The Hill, it was argued that this leak was “illegal but utterly justified.”
Admiral Mike Rogers said that releasing transcripts were harmful to national security. Catherine Herridge said that getting the transcript from the NSA had to come from very high up.
In February 2017 Intelligence officials said that Flynn had done nothing wrong
A current U.S. intelligence official tells NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly that there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the transcripts of former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, although the official noted that doesn’t rule out the possibility of illegal actions.
The official also says that there are recordings as well as transcripts of the calls, and that the transcripts don’t suggest Flynn was acting under orders in his conversations.
Flynn resigned late Monday, after allegations that he discussed U.S. sanctions on Russia with Kislyak and then misled Vice President Pence about the nature of those conversations. Flynn initially denied discussing sanctions at all, but in his resignation Flynn said he “inadvertently” gave Pence “incomplete information” about the conversations.
NPR’s Phil Ewing previously reported that it is not in dispute that Flynn spoke with Kislyak in late December. “The issue is what he said,” Phil wrote.
Depending on the content of the conversations, Flynn could have violated a law called the Logan Act, which bars a private individual from conducting foreign policy without the permission of the U.S. government. For instance, if Flynn told the ambassador the Trump administration would drop the sanctions, that would have been illegal.
The intelligence official who has personally seen the transcripts told Mary Louise they contained “no evidence” of criminal wrongdoing, although the official said it can’t be definitively ruled out.
The official also said there was “absolutely nothing” in the transcripts that suggests Flynn was acting under instructions “or that the trail leads higher.”
Today Byron York reports that in March 2017 James Comey briefed Congress and told them that the agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe he had lied:
“The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy,” the Washington Post reportedin February. “Lying to the FBI is a felony offense.”
There was also a lot of concern in Congress, at least among Republicans, about the leak of the wiretapped Flynn-Kislyak conversation. Such intelligence is classified at the highest level of secrecy, yet someone — Republicans suspected Obama appointees in the Justice Department and intelligence community — revealed it to the press.
So in March, lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.
According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.
And then, boom
Nine months later, with Comey gone and special counsel Robert Mueller in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI in that Jan. 24 questioning.
What happened? With Flynn awaiting sentencing — that was recently delayed until at least May — some lawmakers are trying to figure out what occurred between the time Comey told Congress the FBI did not believe Flynn lied and the time, several months later, when Flynn pleaded guilty to just that.
Flynn was interviewed by the FBI on January 24. No one seemed to think Flynn had done anything wrong
Indeed, it appears the FBI did not think Flynn had done anything wrong in the calls. On Jan. 23, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had reviewed the Flynn-Kislyak calls and “has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government.” (The calls had been intercepted by U.S. intelligence because the U.S. monitored the Russian ambassador’s communications — something which Flynn, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, surely knew.)
Someone else was bugged about it. Someone who had the juice to go to the NSA and obtain a transcript of the surveillance.
January 20, 2017
On Jan. 20, Donald Trump became president. On Jan. 22, the Wall Street Journal reported that “U.S. counterintelligence agents have investigated communications” between Flynn and Kislyak. The investigation “aimed to determine the nature of Mr. Flynn’s contact with Russian officials and whether such contacts may have violated laws.”
Two top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are questioning former national security adviser Susan Rice about an “unusual” message she sent to herself on Jan 20, 2017 — President Trump‘s Inauguration Day.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) questioned Rice why she sent a note detailing a conversation she observed on Jan. 5 between then-FBI Director James Comey and then-President Barack Obama.
“It strikes us as odd that, among your activities in the final moments on the final day of the Obama administration, you would feel the need to send yourself such an unusual email purporting to document a conversation involving President Obama and his interactions with the FBI regarding the Trump/Russia investigation,” they wrote in a letter to Rice.
The Justice Department — the Obama holdover Yates had become the acting attorney general — sent two FBI agents to the White House to question Flynn, who talked to them without a lawyer present.
January 26, 2016:
Two days later, on Jan. 26, Yates and a high-ranking colleague went to the White House to tell counsel Don McGahn about the Flynn situation. “The first thing we did was to explain to Mr. McGahn that the underlying conduct that Gen. Flynn had engaged in was problematic in and of itself,” Yates testified in a May 2017 appearance before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee. That was an apparent reference to the Logan Act, although Yates never specifically said so. “We took him [McGahn] through in a fair amount of detail of the underlying conduct, what Gen. Flynn had done.”
January 26, 27, 2016:
Yates went to see McGahn twice, on Jan. 26 and Jan. 27. On Feb. 13, Flynn resigned. That same day, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had pursued Flynn on the grounds of a potential Logan Act violation.
No one has ever been prosecuted under the Logan Act.
Back to Byron York:
So Comey went to Capitol Hill in March to brief lawmakers privately. That is when he told them that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe Flynn had lied, or that any inaccuracies in Flynn’s answers were intentional. And that is when some lawmakers got the impression that Flynn would not be charged with any crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.
And yet, somehow Flynn was subsequently charged with lying to the FBI and he pleaded guilty in December 2017. It’s as if someone made the agents change their assessments:
Investigative journalist Sara Carter reported on Fox News last night that outgoing FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe may be in serious trouble if the information she had received from FBI sources proves to be true.
“I have been told tonight by a number of sources … that McCabe may have asked FBI agents to actually change their 302s,” Carter told host Sean Hannity.
The 302 form contains information from the notes an FBI agent takes during an interview of a subject. It is used by FBI agents to “report or summarize the interviews that they conduct.”
“So basically every time an FBI agent interviews a witness, they have to go back and file a report,” Carter explained.
We need to determine who had the juice to get the transcript from the NSA and leak it to the WaPo.
This all points right at Sally Yates, who was a senior government official. Let’s not forget that she had it in for Trump and grandstanded bigly:
Democrats are calling it the Monday Night Massacre. On Monday evening, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates announced that under her leadership, the Justice Department would not defend President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration. After acknowledging that the Office of Legal Counsel had reviewed the policy, and noting that the Civil Division could defend it in court, she personally rebuffed the president’s judgment, which she did not find “wise or just.” Yates, a career prosecutor appointed by Barack Obama, is now being hailed for standing up to a supposedly “tyrannical” president, according to a statement blasted out by the Democratic National Committee.
But this has it wrong. If Yates truly felt this way, she should have told the president her conclusions in confidence. If he disagreed, she had one option: resign. Instead, she made herself a political martyr and refused to comply. Trump obliged, and replaced her with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Dana Boente. While this late-night termination may bring to mind President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” the analogy is inapt. This is a textbook case of insubordination, and the president was well within his constitutional powers to fire her. Call it the Monday Night Layoff instead.
Someone else had the juice to order FBI agents to change their 302’s. (It might rhyme with homey or it might be an Acting Attorney General)
That identity we also need to learn. Soon.
UPDATE– and this is important
On January 12, 2017, obama issued new rules allowing the NSA to further violate the privacy of Americans.
Instead, in the last days of his presidency, “the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agenciesbefore applying privacy protections,” Charlie Savage reports in The New York Times. “The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with information gathered by its most powerful operations, which are largely unregulated by wiretapping laws … far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.”
On the very same day a “senior official in the government” leaked the Flynn transcript to the WaPo. So on that day, obama made it possible for almost anyone in government to get hold of the transcript of the conversation between Flynn and Kislyak and leak it.
Thanks for the reminder, Greg!
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
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Except for liberals being foolish.