Lazy Saturday Reads: Was Mike Flynn a Russian Agent?
Posted: May 6, 2017 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics 48 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Remember the days when people joked about the “Friday news dump?”
Releasing bad news or documents on a Friday afternoon in an attempt to avoid media scrutiny.
NPR: “Often, the White House sets the release of bad news and unflattering documents to late Friday afternoon. The Pentagon and other agencies also use the practice, a legacy of earlier administrations.”
With Trump as POTUS, Friday night has become a major breaking news night, and the news that breaks is usually bad for the White House, but doesn’t originate there. So what happened late last night? News that looks very bad for Michael Flynn and his former boss.
The Washington Post: Flynn was warned by Trump transition officials about contacts with Russian ambassador.
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was warned by senior members of President Trump’s transition team about the risks of his contacts with the Russian ambassador weeks before the December call that led to Flynn’s forced resignation, current and former U.S. officials said.
Flynn was told during a late November meeting that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s conversations were almost certainly being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said, a caution that came a month before Flynn was recorded discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak, suggesting that the Trump administration would reevaluate the issue.
Officials were so concerned that Flynn did not fully understand the motives of the Russian ambassador that the head of Trump’s national security council transition team asked Obama administration officials for a classified CIA profile of Kislyak, officials said. The document was delivered within days, officials said, but it is not clear that Flynn ever read it.
Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak
According to the WaPo, Obama officials released the document because of their growing concerns about Russian involvement in the U.S. election and the need to make sure the Trump campaign understood the gravity of what was happening. But what if Trump and the people close to him were hoping to help the Russians?
The request for the Kislyak document came from Marshall Billingslea, a former senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration who led Trump’s national security transition team from November until shortly before Trump’s inauguration.
Billingslea, who declined requests for comment, was nominated this week for a high-level position in the Treasury Department overseeing efforts to disrupt terrorist financing.
A former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, Billingslea was among a small group of experienced national security hands on the Trump transition whose entrenched skepticism toward Russia seemed at odds with the pro-Moscow impulses of Flynn and the incoming president, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump personnel and decision-making.
So the concern about Flynn’s Russia connections were not coming from Trump insiders, but from outside experts. What was Mike Pence, the ultimate head of the Trump transition doing about all this? He knew about Flynn’s foreign activities long before the inauguration. Please go read the rest of this important article if you haven’t already.
Associated Press: Trump transition raised flags about Flynn Russia contacts. AP reports that the Obama administration was “startled” by Billingslea’s request for background on Kislyak.
The request now stands out as a warning signal for Obama officials who would soon see Flynn’s contacts with the Russian spiral into a controversy that would cost him his job and lead to a series of shocking accusations hurled by Trump against his predecessor’s administration.
In the following weeks, the Obama White House would grow deeply distrustful of Trump’s dealing with the Kremlin and anxious about his team’s ties. The concern — compounded by surge of new intelligence, including evidence of multiple calls, texts and at least one in-person meeting between Flynn and Kislyak — would eventually grow so great Obama advisers delayed telling Trump’s team about plans to punish Russia for its election meddling. Obama officials worried the incoming administration might tip off Moscow, according to one Obama adviser….
Obama aides described Flynn as notably dismissive of the threat Russia posed to the United States when discussing policy in transition meetings with outgoing national security adviser Susan Rice and other top officials.
Officials also found it curious that Billingslea only ever asked Obama’s National Security Council for one classified leadership profile to give to Flynn: the internal document on Kislyak.
And check this out emphasis added:
The outgoing White House also became concerned about the Trump team’s handling of classified information. After learning that highly sensitive documents from a secure room at the transition’s Washington headquarters were being copied and removed from the facility, Obama’s national security team decided to only allow the transition officials to view some information at the White House, including documents on the government’s contingency plans for crises.
WTF?!
Some White House advisers now privately concede that the administration moved too slowly during the election to publicly blame Russia for the hack and explore possible ties to the Trump campaign. Others say it was only after the election, once Obama ordered a comprehensive review of the election interference, that the full scope of Russia’s interference and potential Trump ties become clearer.
Gee, no kidding. Here are a couple of interesting clips from AM Joy this morning.
I can hardly wait until Sally Yates testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday.
The LA Times: Former top Justice Dept. official Sally Yates to testify about Michael Flynn and Russia.
Sally Yates, deputy attorney general under President Obama, is expected to disclose details to a Senate Judiciary Committee panel about her warnings to White House officials in January that Trump’s national security advisor, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn was fired 18 days after Yates went to the White House, and only after news stories revealed the existence of a transcript of Flynn’s telephone conversation with Kislyak, which was recorded as part of routine U.S. intelligence monitoring of foreign officials’ communications….
Lawmakers from both parties are likely to press Yates for details about her warnings to the White House that Flynn’s misrepresentations to Pence, and to the public, about his conversations with Kislyak left him vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
The FBI director, James B. Comey, recently told a judiciary subcommittee that Yates had spoken to him about her “concerns that Gen. Flynn had been compromised.”
Flynn and Kislyak exchanged phone calls and text messages during the White House transition, and were in touch on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration levied a range of sanctions against Moscow for meddling in the 2016 election.
Of course it was the prospect of Yates testifying to the House Intelligence Committee that led to Chairman Devin Nunes committing political suicide by working with the White House to damage the investigation and then canceling the Yates hearing. He then had to recuse himself from his own committee’s investigation.
A couple more relevant links:
Raw Story: ‘Not coincidences’: Dem intel member directly connects Page and Flynn to collusion with Russia on election.
As a member of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA Subcommittee, Swalwell has been able to review the classified information about Flynn, Page and the rest of the Russian investigation. He’s certain there was collusion.
“I have seen the evidence on that, I think the best thing we can do on our committee is to follow that evidence and review all relevant documents and hear from all relevant witnesses and see if Carter Page is serious about coming in and answering the tough questions,” Swalwell told CNN Friday.
Stand-in host Brianna Keilar asked what makes him sure there is collusion, recognizing he couldn’t divulge the classified intelligence he’s seen.
“Evidence that I’ve reviewed on the classified side — you don’t have to be a lawyer and don’t have to have access to classified information to see behavior of people like Carter Page, also Roger Stone who told the world months before John Podesta’s e-mails were released that John Podesta was about to spend his time in the barrel,” he continued. “That’s information we now know he received while he was communicating with Guccifer2.0 that received the hacked Democratic Party e-mails.”
You can watch the interview at Raw Story.
Jon Iodonisi
Then there’s this story that the WaPo published on Thursday: The mystery behind a Flynn associate’s quiet work for the Trump campaign,
Jon Iadonisi, a friend and business associate of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, had two under-the-radar projects underway in the fall of 2016.
One of his companies was helping Flynn with an investigative effort for an ally of the Turkish government — details of which Flynn revealed only after he was forced to step down from his White House post.
At the same time, Iadonisi was also doing work for the Trump campaign, although his role was not publicly reported, according to people familiar with his involvement.
The project Iadonisi was engaged in for Trump’s campaign focused on social media, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement. What that work consisted of — and why his company was not disclosed as a vendor in campaign finance reports — remains a mystery.
The Trump campaign did not report any payments to Iadonisi or his firms. However, Federal Election Commission reports show that the Trump campaign paid $200,000 on Dec. 5 for “data management services” to Colt Ventures, a Dallas-based venture-capital firm that is an investor in VizSense, a social-media company co-founded by Iadonisi.
I have no idea what that was about, but at this point anything connected to Flynn needs a big red flag.
I know there’s lots more news, so I hope you’ll share your own links on any subject in the comment thread below. And have a great weekend!
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
This stuff is mind-boggling! Every night I’m afraid to go to bed for fear what news will break and every morning I wake up afraid to turn on the computer for the same reason.
That first link on the AM Joy doesn’t have any video…is this the one you’re referring to, with Malcolm Nance?
oh wow
Thanks! Sorry about that.
I can’t wait to see them put Flynn on trial. What makes a General betray his country? He’s he just terribly wrapped up in conspiracy theories? Greedy? WTF?
Stephan Bannon is all wrapped up in this data producing sharing crap too.
Great roundup, bb. It does make your head spin, doesn’t it? It’s so difficult to accept that our country is being led by people who staged a coup. There is no other way to look at it. Brilliant as the people who drafted our Constitution were, they didn’t include a provision for what to do about this.
I saw a tweet late last night (because this business wakes me up in the middle of the night) which pointed out that once the Trump transition team started receiving classified briefings and making off with copies, Putin started his purge and started killing off people in the Steele dossier. It can’t be a coincidence.
No, I don’t think it is. Otherwise, why did Mike Pence keep quiet about what he knew about Flynn?
This administration is so badly compromised they need to be gotten ridden of immediately. WTF is wrong with Republicans? They used to be the party of national Security?
Holy crap. That is the timeline.
The tsunami sirens on this have been blaring since July/Aug 2016. But one thing I just don’t get. If you’re up to your neck in a criminal, treasonous enterprise, you try to play it cool, right? You don’t stand up in front of a crowd of people and say, “Haha. I’d like my fellow thugs to hack away at Hillary.”
I, and probably most people, assumed that was his subnormal idea of a joke. For a while I thought that him saying stuff like that was the best evidence for a lack of collusion. Then the mindboggling truth just kept getting clearer.
But what kind of idiot points everybody at his crimes?
A narcissistic, psychopathic, trust-fund baby idiot.
I guess. Seems too stupid even for a trust fund baby.
Although maybe if the crap about “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Ave” wasn’t actually a joke either? Maybe he takes it so for granted that he can get away with anything, he can rub people’s noses in his treason and figures nothing will ever happen. Is that how real, mental-hospital-level-crazy narcissists work?
Yeah, a severe narcissistic psychopathic idiot.
Yep.
We have been referring to this so much I felt the need to look it up, and wiki is pretty good on the “Transition Team” and how complicated it really is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_transition_of_Donald_Trump#
And I didn’t even touch on what’s happening in the French election. Since Macron is so far ahead, I hope Russia won’t succeed this time.
I don’t think the French are as stupid as our backwards, redneck , backwater Americans.
Or our media.
well, our media is swimming in the privilege bubble right along with the republicans … very few of them come from humble backgrounds or parts of the country where people are very different from the NE Atlantic Seaboard area. Can you imagine any of them in farm country at all?
And they’ve been warned by what happened here.
Got two thumbs up.
Holy shit!
Trump suggests financing for historically black colleges may be unconstitutional
As the most massive beneficiary of affirmative action ever, that Cheeto Garnished Dogpile needs to tread very carefully, you’d think.
He’s trying out the ol’ reverse-racism ploy. Anything to distract from the rest of the shit he’s doing.
I think he just wants the adoration of those crowds. I don’t think he cares what he has to say to get it.
I think he’s a racist asshole.
But scooping shovels of taxpayer money to white evangelical madrassas, isn’t of ourse.
Totally a different matter. /s
He’s doing what the republicans hired him to do! They are not geared to social justice, or concerns regarding people of color or women. The biggest stick is to go after these unique college campuses for black students. Anything he can do to push back, and piss on academic concerns in this Country, and continue the white man systemized processes and institutions is basically the only supportive role he cares about is the white man’s finished product, Nazi sonvabitch.
Excellent post, BB! I so admire you for being able to do this. Also my thx to dak and JJ.
Many things summarized in that cogent AP article seem to be hitting me hard today. This part:
makes me want to yell WTF? You just let the transition continue in spite of all this evidence that Trump was in cahoots with Russia? You just let it happen???
Yup. Good old cautious Obama.
True in many cases BB.
Yep.
I forgot to note that Joy Reed referenced Claude Taylor’s reporting this morning.
whoa, that’s interesting
Yeah, I was surprised to see that but surprised in a good way.
This was in WaPo on Monday: Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-republican-right-found-allies-in-russia/2017/04/30/e2d83ff6-29d3-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_russiagop-735pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.3226d097e9eb
That has been my nightmare……….the Churches have been pen pals to promote Trump. The NRA, being promoted as the good guy, while Trump gives policy to God.
This is discouraging, and in this case I hope Peter Daou is overpessimistic:
Actually, I agree with Peter, at least until 2018. I don’t think it can change until we some of those knotheads out of Congress. The repugnants are having too much fun to do anything but drag out any investigational consequence as long as they can. Look at the practice they had with Benghazi.
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“Lots of business with Russia” and “No, none at all,” depending on what the date is.
Somehow I’m reminded of a grotesque version of Bilbo with the trolls: “Lots of dwa—, No, none at all!”
Good news, Macron has won in France.
Good to know that the French aren’t as stupid as Americans.
Whew! Applause to the citizens of France!
(and tears of rage for the citizens of USA)
Harborview in Seattle is a tertiary care hospital for a multi-state region, and our “safety net” hospital. It — and patients — are going to lose big under AHCA.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/harborview-could-lose-627m-under-new-health-care-law-executive-director-says/
I had to repost your link to FB. Harborview, being the only Level one in WA is vital.
Yes, for trauma, burns, and a few other things it’s the only place with the clinicians and equipment to handle high acuity. People get flown in from Alaska or Idaho for treatment. This is going to be awful if the Rep(tilians) get their selfish way.