Pre-Thanksgiving

 

Pessimists say Trump's "Full Pardon" is only Half Full, but I say it's Half Empty. See Emptywheel. https://t.co/vo4S59bhfo

— Rank Democracy (@Yastreblyansky) November 26, 2020

I had approximately the same idea as Emptywheel, though I obviously can't make it sound that technical: Trump didn't do this right. Flynn made a plea deal in his two guilty pleas of 2017 and 2018, in which he basically acknowledged a decent number of crimes that he wasn't being charged with, mainly involving the hundreds of thousands of dollars he earned working as an undeclared agent of a foreign government while being the president-elect's national security adviser and they agreed not to prosecute him for them as long as he stuck to the terms of the agreement, which he promptly violated, in particular by lying to Judge Emmett Sullivan, which is yet another serious federal crime, and: 

For the Record: Serious Leftists and Debate-Club Rightists

 

Illustration via Joan Wong from The Atlantic, December 2018.

This thing I keep saying, but I like the form in which I said it this time:

You're not alone.

— Mark😷Mucci (@MLMucci) August 15, 2020

It really goes back to Bill Buckley and the dictum that conservatives should support the rightmost candidate who can get elected. Of course conservatives were most vitally interested in governments not doing anything (other than policing the underclass), so that made some sense.

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 15, 2020

When the Democratic party was at its historical best (at least in North and West) in 1932, it hitched itself to a relatively conservative plutocrat (ancient rich family, campaigned on proposal to balance budget) with that famous FDR "temperament". It was a good move!

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 15, 2020

Huge News II

Where it all started, on a Dominican beach. Maybe not this one. Via CNN Travel.

The primary subject of the Yates hearing, of course, was dear old General Flynn, and his panicky series of phone calls when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic at the end of December 2016, after President Obama decreed a new set of Russia sanctions to punish Russian interference in that year's presidential campaign, in which he advised Ambassador Kislyak on how the Russian government should respond, or rather not respond, to facilitate the Trump decision to make sure the Russians wouldn't be punished after Trump entered office; and, as Yates said,

these were not conversations that were just off the top of his head. But rather, he had been coordinating all of this with his Deputy National Security Advisor [K.T. McFarland], who was at Mar-a-Lago with other transition team members. And it was a very deliberate planned set of conversations with the Russian Ambassador to essentially tell them, “Don’t worry about it. Things are going to change what’s... in place.”

Following which, whoever knew about the calls (and it's still not clear who that was, beyond Flynn and McFarland) decided to keep their content a secret from those who didn't (starting, perhaps, with Mike Pence and Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer and going on to everybody else), to the extent of lying about it to the general public and to the FBI, the latter of which is illegal.

I want to talk about how Republicans have tried to turn this story into the story of a crime committed by the FBI against General Flynn, as represented in the rhetorical gyrations of Lindsey Graham's questioning of Sally Yates last week, but first it's a good idea to work through the known facts, of which I keep getting a better idea.

Crossing of the Barr (Also, Jonathan Turley Is Still a Hack)

Don't know whose this is.

A couple of developments in the Justice Department investigation of the prehistory of the Justice Department investigation of Donald Trump: the apparent identification of Christopher Steele's Primary Sub-Source, which I'll get to in a moment, and another surfaced document, this one supplied to Senators Chuckles Grassley and Ron Johnson (same Sherlocks who unmasked the unmasking of General Flynn in the celebrated report of the calls with Ambassador Flynn that turned out not to have been masked in the first place).

The latter is another FBI internal report, which according to Jonathan Turley (guesting in John Solomon's old spot at The Hill),

shows the FBI used a security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

Namely, it's a report of the first Intelligence Community briefing received by candidate Trump, in the FBI's New York field office, accompanied by his national security adviser Mike Flynn (because, WaPo reported, Flynn was "somebody that I believe in") and his body man Governor Chris Christie on 17 August 2016, the day after the FBI opened its Crossfire Razor investigation of Flynn, as it happens,

Innocence of Presumption

Moving goalposts, via.

I know you're all sick of Mike Flynn by now but Mr. Bret Stephens ("Michael Flynn and the Presumption of Guilt") piping up to put his imprimatur on the worst version of the "Flynn is innocent" canard in his most offensively bland "just asking questions" manner really has to be fisked.

“Damn right, exactly right,” the fired, retired three-star general said in answer to audience chants of “lock her up.” “And you know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what [Hillary Clinton] did, I would be in jail today.” This was said by a man who, as a former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and top foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump, had already taken $45,000 from the K.G.B. regime in Moscow and would later take $530,000 from the Islamist regime in Ankara as an unregistered foreign agent. If Flynn had been prosecuted, judged and sentenced according to his own moral arithmetic, he’d be behind bars today.

Fortunately he isn’t, because sleazy behavior isn’t the same as criminal conduct.

Way to sneak in the suggestion that Hillary Clinton probably is guilty of some moral equivalent to bagging over $5 million (i.e., ten times Flynn's acknowledged $530K)  as an unauthorized foreign agent without bothering to say what you think it might be. And the suggestion that what we agree Flynn did is just sleazy behavior, not criminal conduct.

Violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act is a crime. Rick Gates and Paul Manafort, for example, have pleaded guilty to it, among other crimes, and are doing time as we speak. And while Flynn's first legal team negotiated him down to more lying in that case—to an uncharged count of filing a false FARA declaration—it is clearly stipulated in the Statement of Offense:

Flynn Update Update

Via Reddit.

Re the White House meeting of 5 January 2017 following the intelligence community briefing on Russian election interference and what we now know as the Steele dossier, yesterday I wrote:

And it was also three days after the intelligence community first learned of the Flynn-Kislyak calls of 29-30 December, so that was also part of the discussion (though not apparently part of the discussion in Trump Tower).

Which is pretty interesting in itself, because in the Grenell list of unmasking requests there are no requests between 28 December and 5 January—IC seems to have learned about those calls by some other means. Or as I suspected Flynn's identity may have been obvious, to Clapper in particular. But chief of staff Denis McDonough did make an unmasking request the same day as the IC briefing.

Looks like I was onto something!

Ellen Nakashima/Washington Post explains,

It was the FBI, not the NSA, that wiretapped Kislyak’s calls and created the summary and transcript,... former officials said.

“When the FBI circulated [the report], they included Flynn’s name from the beginning” because it was essential to understanding its significance, said a former senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. “There were therefore no requests for the unmasking of that information.”

Because it wasn't masked in the first place. Emily Litella Award for the week goes to Lindsey Graham.

All those requests were for calls relating to other skullduggery Flynn was involved in, the majority of them (30 out of 48 requests) being on something we may have not heard of at all yet, clustered around 14-16 December and invoked by a ton of NATO personnel, the ambassador to Russia, the Department of Energy, the Treasury department, and something called the Syria Group as well as CIA and FBI.

Emptywheel guessed most of this long before Nakashima reported it, and wrote it up a week ago (shame on me for missing it). She considers, but doubts, the hypothesis that the remarkable flurry was over Flynn's nutty scheme for building nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East—and a hypothesis that interests me more, that it could have concerned Flynn's and Kushner's early December Trump Tower meeting with Kislyak, the proposal for a back channel of communications with the Kremlin, Syria cooperation, and sanctions (administered by Treasury), plus Kushner's follow-up meeting 13 December with Sergey Gorkov of Vnesheconombank (VEB), but it's not clear what the Energy department would have had to do with it (but the department does have responsibilities in administering sanctions related to nuclear materials, like those the Obama administration slapped on the state-owned Rosoboronexport firm in 2015 over exports to Iran or Syria).

Flynn Update

Illustration by Simon Landrain/The New Yorker.

The biggest piece of evidence offered by rightwingers for the theory of Obama's conspiracy to do something dreadful to Trump's national security adviser Mike Flynn was the report of a meeting Obama called 5 January 2017, with FBI director Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, vice president Biden, and national security adviser Susan Rice, which Rice memorialized in an email to herself on Inauguration Day two weeks later, released in a redacted version by Chuckles Grassley and Lindsey Graham in February 2018.

Rice's memo said the meeting was "following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election," but Obama already knew something about that—Washington Post reported 9 December that Obama had ordered an investigation following CIA conclusions on the hacking—and it seems in particular to have been the meeting where the leadership (Comey, John O. Brennan for CIA, Mike Rogers for NSA, and DNI Clapper) told Obama about the allegations in the Steele dossier, as evidence of how the Russian active measures seemed intended to favor Trump over Clinton in the election, and which Comey briefed Trump about the next day at Trump Tower (the dossier was published by BuzzFeed on the 10th), by way of warning him that the allegations were circulating;

For the Record: Waltz of the Inspectors General

Carsington Water, Ashbourne, Derbyshire, with troll, via TripAdvisor.

Senator Grassley has built his reputation on protecting the integrity of the Inspector general process. He runs a committee that could do something about it. But he is strangely silent about these purges. I hope when I get to 86 I'm not afraid of anyone or anything like Trump

— Joe Lockhart (@joelockhart) May 16, 2020

https://t.co/Sm0ikVDWwS

— Obliged Friend (@ObligedFriend) May 16, 2020

worth recalling that Walpin firing followed a unanimous and bipartisan request from the board ( Corporation for National and Community Service) he was IG of? https://t.co/s8cBvniwM6

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 16, 2020

Unmask This

Opening of Grenell's list, via Adam L. Silverman/Balloon Juice.

"The fact that Vice President Biden and all of the president's inner circle, President Obama's inner circle, individually requested to unmask Gen. Flynn is very troubling," he said. "Unmasking involves revealing the identity of an American's private phone conversation without a constitutional warrant to eavesdrop on that conversation." (Senator Rand Paul, quoted on Fox News)

Q: Dad, what's unmasking?

A: I thought you'd never ask. I found out around the beginning of the Republican attempt to discredit the case against Michael Flynn, in April 2017, and first wrote about it then. Actually I sort of found out earlier than that, during the days of High Greenwaldianism following the Snowden leaks of 2013, but didn't pay the same kind of attention.

Out Like Flynn Revisited

OK now it's really getting crazy, as the Justice Department seems to think it's found a way to pardon Mike Flynn without giving Trump the trouble of doing it himself. I'm recapitulating some of the things I was thinking about at the time of Flynn's second guilty plea, in December 2018, in the light of what we've learned since then from the Mueller investigation, as a response to the Flynn news.

New York Post editorial page:

Flynn’s supposed crime was lying to FBI agents in a January 2017 interview at the White House. Yet the concealed evidence included 1) a top FBI official’s notes suggesting the entire purpose of the interview was to catch Flynn in a lie, or get him to admit to a technical violation of the Logan Act — all in order to force him from office. And 2) an internal Justice Department memo, from the day before that interview, calling on the FBI to close the Flynn investigation because agents had dug up absolutely no wrongdoing.

In fact, they already had the transcript of Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador that was the supposed reason for the interview — and knew he’d said nothing improper, just things an incoming national-security adviser should discuss.

Actually no. The calls Flynn exchanged with Ambassador Kislyak from where he was supposed to be on vacation in the Dominican Republic between 29 and 31 December 2016 were a response to what the Presidential Transition Team regarded as an emergency, after President Obama imposed new sanctions on the Russian state in return for Russia's well-established interference in the 2016 presidential election and Foreign Minister Lavrov announced that Russia would be retaliating with measures of its own. After getting briefed by the PTT, Flynn called Kislyak (whom he'd met for the first time with Jared Kushner on 30 November, at Trump Tower, for a conversation in which Kushner had talked about Trump's desire to "start afresh" with Russia and Flynn lamented the lack of a secure line for them to communicate—secure, that is, from observation by the US government) and urged him to stop President Putin from said retaliation because if he showed some restraint that would make it easier for the incoming Trump administration to end all the sanctions, including those related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seizure of Ukrainian territory, and its murder of the whistleblowing attorney Sergey Magnitsky; two days later Putin agreed.

The PTT was, as we now know, intensely involved with these calls, consulting with Flynn by email and phone before and after each one, through his deputy K.T. McFarland, who was at the Mar-a-Lago club with the president-elect's party:

For the Record: Out Like Flynn

Image by Trumped Up Flicks/Kos.

This kindhearted troll concerned for General Flynn's family was so daunted that he never responded at all, but I think there's some value in laying out something about his legal situation, apart from his 2015 work in support of RT television and violation of the retired officers' version of the emoluments provision, with a new and especially delusional lawyer, who may be advising him this year to break his annual customary guilty plea

IANAL but I don't think you can really do that after he's pleaded guilty and been convicted.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 26, 2019

Mueller: The Airport Paperback

Here's some drafting for the airport novel version. Superscript notes identify material that's exclusive to the Mueller Report. Material on Flynn in the previous sketch is not yet known to these characters, although I guess it will be. Sorry I can't seem to get rid of the links and blockquotes.

Justice League of America #1, October 1960, art by Murphy Anderson, via Wikipedia.

Sally Yates, the slender blonde with the soft Southern accent who'd become the acting attorney general three days earlier, as the new president was being inaugurated, swept her hair back with an impatient hand. "I'm really freaked out about it," ^{[M II:30 fn 134]} she told Andy McCabe, the FBI nerd, contemplating her from the other side of the desk, as Mary McCord, DOJ national security specialist, shook her head from side to side next to him.

"This" was General Mike Flynn, fired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the previous administration and now the new chief of the National Security Council. A craggy-faced fanatic from the paranoid wing of his Republican party, he'd become indispensable to his candidate, Donald J. Trump, a pudgy, pasty hotel-keeper and television schmoozer, lending him an air of austerity and toughness, one of the men the candidate called "my generals", but he'd been turning out to have more in his past than just his enmity with the outgoing president.

Dramatic Readings: Priebus

Screenshot from CNN broadcast of 20 February 2017

Another sketch in my project of dramatizing the Mueller Report, this one dealing with less boring characters than Mueller himself, and forcing me to invent the dialogue myself, since Mueller reports only the content, not in general the words.

As before, the aim is to clarify what the Report is and is not saying by letting the witnesses speak directly, like the participants' reminiscences in a TV documentary, mediated by some kind of voice-over (VO) narration where I'm allowed to speak a bit for myself, mostly through congressional-style pointed questioning. It also involves scrambling the Report's time sequence a bit, to bring together the individual threads that get stranded in Mueller's cop-report style.

I'm seriously trying to find a way of communicating the story somewhat concealed in the Report, to a broad public, ideally in a real documentary film or stage performance, but at any rate in readable form, at this point where the public doesn't seem to be catching on and the House committees are prevented by Trump's and Barr's continuing obstruction from doing it in the way Sam Dash and Sam Ervin did it in 1973. I have no idea if this approach works, I'm blinded in one of those trees-vs.-forest situations, and would appreciate being told one way or another.

PRIEBUS: Reince Priebus, sir, serving at the time as chairman of the Republican National Committee, and incoming chief of staff to President Trump, so I was spending a lot of time working with Trump headquarters in those first weeks of January, getting the system set up.

VO: And you got a call from the president, on January 12?

PRIEBUS: I did. He was upset.

VO: He was upset, on January 12? About what?

Otherwise Blameless Life: Postscript

Andrew "Chef" Glick, ex-president of the Cape May branch of the Pagan Outlaws Motorcycle Club, knew enough about the 2012 hired killing of April Kauffman, a local radio host and doctor's wife who had threatened to expose the illegal opioid prescription racket her husband was running with the Pagan Outlaws, that he could have been arrested as an accessory. Cops instead charged him with crimes unrelated to the murder plot, illegal possession of methamphetamines, cocaine, and weapons, for which he could have gotten up to 40 years, according to the Philly Voice, and he testified against the murderers and did no time in his own case. That's what Manafort was supposed to do. It's not that complicated.

Also on the Manafort subject, I hope this isn't too obvious, but the fact that none of the crimes with which Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been charged with  feature direct collaboration in a Russian conspiracy doesn't mean they never committed any crimes on those lines.

Indeed, we know at least two cases in which Manafort and Flynn absolutely did collaborate in a Russian conspiracy: Manafort in that cigar bar meeting with Kilimnik of August 2016 when he passed him the 75 pages of polling data, Flynn in those phone calls with the Russian ambassador in December 2016 when they spoke about sanctions. That seems like a clear violation of the 1799 Logan Act

Got Paranoia? Puppet Puppet

Via Truiceman.

We're hearing a lot about Andrew McCabe's story, as retailed on CBS Sixty Minutes, of Trump telling his intelligence briefers, "I believe Putin", which doesn't seem like news to me at all—he's been telling us all himself for at least a couple of years. But NPR's interview with McCabe helpfully laid out the context, from which I think we can learn something new, and possibly a whole lot: I think we can tell exactly when and where Putin could have told him this, on an extremely significant day, and in that way corroborate that the story is true and fill in some important details of the conspiracy hypothesis, if you'll follow along:

Exhibit A: an FBI briefing with Trump that had "gone completely off the rails from the very beginning."

McCabe said the topic was supposed to be how Russian intelligence officers were using diplomatic compounds inside the U.S. to gather intelligence on American spy agencies. Those compounds were closed as part of the long diplomatic chill between the two countries.

"Instead the president kind of went off on a diatribe," McCabe told NPR, explaining that Trump changed the subject to his belief that North Korea had not actually launched any missiles because Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that the U.S. intelligence assessment was wrong and that "it was all a hoax."

The diplomatic compounds, officially home-away-from-home dachas for Russian diplomats missing their own dachas, were closed on a very specific occasion, on 28 December 2016, as part of the new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retribution for Russia's interference in the presidential election, along with the expulsion of 35 personnel.

Out Like Flynn

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty via Paste.

A couple of things about old General Flynn that may perhaps not be getting said because a responsible journalist can't say them (late addition: Erin Branco/Daily Beast is going there, in fact):

I.

We irresponsibles can say pretty much precisely what he was doing on 29 December 2016—after the Obama administration announced a set of diplomatic measures to punish Russia for its interference in the presidential election (expulsion of Russian personnel, and sanctions on individuals and agencies suspected of involvement in hacking) and foreign minister Lavrov announced that Russia would retaliate—

#Peskov: There is no doubt that Russia's adequate and mirror response will make Washington officials feel very uncomfortable as well

— Russia in USA 🇷🇺 (@RusEmbUSA) December 29, 2016

—when he engaged in a series of phone calls from his vacation spot in the Dominican Republic with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that were intercepted by the FBI in its normal surveillance of Kislyak's phone and with an official from the presidential transition team (PTT).

Namely, when he advised Kislyak that the Russian government should not retaliate against these new sanctions and spoke about the possibility of lifting US sanctions after Trump's inauguration, he was working to tamp down a conflict that would interfere with the lifting of sanctions, which was an essential element of the Trump campaign's arrangement with the Russians.

Literary Corner: Rhyme

Great Liability

by Donald J. Trump

I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law.
He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know
the law. It is called “advice of counsel,” and
a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made.
      That is why they get paid.

Despite that many campaign finance lawyers have strongly
stated that I did nothing wrong with respect to
campaign finance laws, if they even apply, because
this was not campaign finance. Cohen was guilty
on many charges unrelated to me,
but he pled to two campaign charges
which were not criminal and of which he probably
was not guilty even on a civil basis.

Those charges were just agreed to by him in order
to embarrass the president and get a much reduced
prison sentence, which he did—including the fact
that his family was temporarily let off the hook.
As a lawyer, Michael has great liability to me!

They gave General Flynn a great deal
because they were embarrassed by the way
he was treated - the FBI said he didn’t lie
     and they overrode the FBI.

They want to scare everybody into
     making up stories that are not true.

Literary Corner: Rodolfo

CNN screenshot, July 2016, via Splinter.

From Politico, Rodolfo's free dimeter response to the Flynn sentencing memo:

Justifying Monkey

by Rudolph Giuliani

Wow big crime for a
SPECIAL WHATEVER.
maybe a group of
Angry Bitter
Hillary Supporters
who are justifying
themselves by the goal
justifies the means....
Over the top
In ethical behavior.

All the capital letters as in the original, line breaks my own. "In ethical" may be an error for "inethical" or a palimpsest on it.

I hear it as signifying, or slam poetry, wrapping each line around two stresses and spat defiantly into a mic. Like Steve Doocy (see below), he's hogtied between the fact that he doesn't know what the memo says, since 90% of it is redacted, and the fact that he can't acknowledge that there's anything he doesn't know. Doocy's so deeply stupid he just sails, serenely, over himself; Giuliani, too, escapes the tether of meaning, but all the tension remains in his furious howl.

Also all those black marks on the paper make it look longer than it really is and Mueller writes in incomplete sentences. It's a disgrace. https://t.co/YCyQTzyDiN

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) December 5, 2018

By the horns of his own chastity

Young virgin auto-sodomized by the horns of her own chastity, Salvador Dalí, via Wikipedia.

Young Ben Shapiro wants to know, over the news of Michael Flynn's guilty plea:

Is The Mueller Special Investigation Going To Result In A Massive Political Explosion...Over Nearly Nothing?

Because Flynn has only pleaded guilty to the one crime, and not much of a crime at that! Lying to the FBI about something he did that wasn't even illegal! Well, probably not. I mean, is that all they got?

Supposedly, Flynn spoke with Kislyak about backing off of retaliation against Obama administration sanctions, and also about delaying a late-Obama administration United Nations resolution designed to condemn Israeli settlements. It’s completely unclear why Flynn would lie about such conversations; they weren’t illegal. In fact, most Americans would want the transition team to talk to foreign governments about the policy to be implemented in mere weeks.

Jesus Christ on a graham cracker crust, Ben! I realize you became Internet-famous for proclaiming your preserved virginity at 21, but I can't believe anybody who's been brought up near a television set is that naive.

Haven't you ever heard of plea bargains given to a relative underling to elicit testimony against the relevant overling? Like John Dean?

You can't make this stuff up

Or if you can, there could be serious money in it.

François Truffaut, via Cinémathèque Française.

Narratology isn't admissible evidence in a criminal court, but there's something in the report of the Comey memo that really makes me believe, the psychological realism of what the Emperor is said to have said, and its tone:

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

It's the sound of a very wealthy father talking to the boarding-school principal after the entitled, psychopathic son has burned down his bedroom knocking over the bong, or assaulted the chambermaid. Or a mafia boss addressing a policeman on behalf of a dumb henchman picked up for cutting somebody with a broken margarita glass in a bar fight. "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go—he's a good kid." No, he's not, but that's not even the point.

And only a crude-minded screenwriter would have the father holding out an actual check; there's no need for that, the idea of bribery or extortion is already there. This is a world where Trump is perfectly comfortable and competent. He's done this before, "dealing". (His difficulty is just that he isn't in that world any more and he has no idea who's a crook and who isn't.) You don't say, "I could fire you," he knows that. And we know that, because when he didn't get his way with Comey he did fire him. This really happened.

Cross-posted in No More Mister Nice Blog.