The special counsel’s investigation has ensnared Mr. Flynn—and his son, Michael Flynn Jr. —on a number of fronts. Mr. Mueller is probing the alleged role played by Mr. Flynn and his son in a plan to forcibly remove a Muslim cleric living in the U.S. and deliver him to Turkey in return for millions of dollars, the Journal previously reported. Under the alleged proposal, Mr. Flynn and his son were to be paid as much as $15 million for delivering Fethullah Gulen to the Turkish government.
.. Mr. Mueller is also investigating what role, if any, Mr. Flynn or his son may have played in a private effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s emails from Russian hackers
A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller
the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating.
.. A deal with Mr. Flynn would give Mr. Mueller a behind-the-scenes look at the Trump campaign and the early tumultuous weeks of the administration.
.. he was a point person on the transition team for dealing with Russia.
.. Among the interactions that Mr. Mueller is investigating is a private meeting that Mr. Flynn had with the Russian ambassador and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, during the presidential transition
.. Mr. Flynn is regarded as loyal to Mr. Trump, but he has in recent weeks expressed serious concerns to friends that prosecutors will bring charges against his son, Michael Flynn Jr., who served as his father’s chief of staff and was a part of several financial deals involving the elder Mr. Flynn that Mr. Mueller is scrutinizing.
.. American intelligence and law enforcement agencies became so concerned about Mr. Flynn’s conversations and false statements about them to Vice President Mike Pence that the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, warned the White House that Mr. Flynn might be compromised.
.. While Mr. Pence and White House press officers repeated the holiday-greetings claim publicly, Mr. Flynn and the ambassador had in fact discussed the sanctions... It was revealed that he failed to list payments from Russia-linked entities on financial disclosure forms. He did not mention a paid speech he gave in Moscow, as well as other payments from companies linked to Russia... And investigators working for Mr. Mueller have questioned witnesses about whether Mr. Flynn was secretly paid by the Turkish government during the presidential campaign. Mr. Flynn belatedly disclosed, after leaving the White House, that the Turkish government had paid him more than $500,000... Mr. Flynn’s firing was, in some ways, the first domino that set off a cascade of problems for Mr. Trump.
The Trump Collusion Case Is Not Getting the Clinton Emails Treatment
FBI director James Comey began drafting a statement exonerating Clinton months before the investigation ended — i.e., before over a dozen key witnesses, including Clinton herself, had been interviewed.
.. Note that the lawyer for Manafort and Gates was forced to testify against her clients based on the theory that she had participated — however unwittingly — in their scheme to cover up their lobbying efforts on behalf of a Ukrainian political party.
.. Aggressively, Mueller’s team contended that even if the lawyer had not intended to help her clients mislead the government, their use of her services was intended to dupe the government. That, Mueller argued, brought their communications with the lawyer under the crime-fraud exception to the attorney-client privilege.
.. Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers were her accomplices.
.. the Justice Department refused to invoke the crime-fraud exception to explore what advice Clinton lawyers gave her information technology contractor before he supposedly took it on himself to delete and destroy her emails.
.. subjects of the .. decided which emails to surrender to the State Department and which to withhold as “private” — were permitted to act as attorneys for the principal subject of the investigation, Clinton herself.
.. decided which emails to surrender to the State Department and which to withhold as “private” — were permitted to act as attorneys for the principal subject of the investigation, Clinton herself.
.. the FBI did not seize the servers of the Democratic National Committee, even though much of the collusion case hinges on the conclusion that these servers were hacked by Russian operatives. Instead, the FBI politely requested that the servers be surrendered so the Bureau’s own renowned forensic investigators could examine them. When the DNC refused, the Justice Department did not issue a subpoena or obtain a search warrant; to the contrary, the FBI and DOJ agreed to accept the findings of CrowdStrike, a private investigative firm retained by the DNC’s (and the Clinton campaign’s) attorneys.
.. George Papadopoulos is a low-level subject of the collusion investigation who did not commit any crimes in his many contacts with Russia-connected sources. Yet Mueller induced him to plead guilty to a felony count of lying to investigators about the timing of his first meeting with such a source
.. while a number of Clinton subordinates asserted their Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions on the ground that truthful answers could incriminate them, none of them was prosecuted. Instead, the Obama Justice Department gave them immunity.
.. Mrs. Clinton claimed not to know what the designation “[C]” means in classified documents. As a longtime consumer of classified information, Clinton obviously knew it means “confidential.”
.. Clinton ludicrously told interviewing agents she thought “[C]” might have something to do with putting information in alphabetical order.
.. Often, the Justice Department is so hell-bent on making the case, it will play an intimidating game of hardball if that’s what it takes. On rare occasions, though, it works just as hard to not make the case — to see no evil.
‘These Are Not The Actions of an Innocent Man’
Trump’s after-the-fact complicity in Russia’s election meddling is abundantly clear.
.. Earlier, it may have been suggested, sympathetically, that
- the case had not yet been proven. That
- Trump’s vanity blocked him from acknowledging embarrassing facts. Or—more hopefully—that
- he was inspired by some Kissingerian grand design for a diplomatic breakthrough.
- Or that he was lazy. Or stubborn. Or uninformed. Or something, anything, other than … complicit. Not anymore.
.. his willingness to smash the intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies in order to protect Putin, Russia
.. “Then you hear it’s 17 agencies [who agree that Russia meddled in the elections], whoa, it’s three. And one is [former CIA Director John] Brennan, and one is whatever. I mean give me a break, they’re political hacks. … So you look at that and you have President Putin very strongly, vehemently says he had nothing to do with that.”
.. A year after the 2016 election, the Trump administration has done nothing to harden U.S. election systems against future interference
- .. It refuses to implement the sanctions voted by Congress to punish Russia for election meddling.
- The president fired the director of the FBI,
- confessedly to halt an investigation into Russia’s actions—and
- his allies in Congress and the media malign the special counsel appointed to continue the investigation.
These are not the actions of an innocent man, however vain, stubborn, or uniformed.
.. In ways we cannot yet fully reckon—but can no longer safely deny—the man in the Oval Office has a guilty connection to the Russian government. That connection would bar him from literally any other job in national security except that of head of the executive branch and commander- in-chief of the armed forces of the United States.
.. It’s graver still at a time when this president seems determined to lead the United States into a preventive war in the Korean peninsula.