It’s no secret that Donald Trump tapped Michael Flynn as a top campaign adviser, and later as his National Security Adviser, despite Flynn’s reputation for being incredibly reckless. This was a man who had an illicit Internet connection installed in his Pentagon office, and also funneled classified information to NATO allies without permission. Seen in this light, his suggestion that he’d be in an orange jumpsuit if he did “even a tenth” of what Hillary Clinton supposedly did sounds like classic projection.
Well, tomorrow’s edition of The Washington Post will reveal just how reckless Flynn was, even before officially taking office. According to a number of current and former government officials, Flynn made his now-infamous call to Russian’s ambassador to the United States despite being warned that the ambassador was in the crosshairs of American intelligence.
The Post reports that the chain of events that ultimately led to Flynn’s forced resignation after only 24 days began in November, when Trump’s national security “landing team”–a group that was helping smooth over the transition–held a coordination meeting in Washington. Flynn was on hand for that meeting, and mentioned that he was already being bombarded with requests from foreign dignitaries to meet with him once the Tump administration was formally sworn in. One of those meetings sent eyebrows into hairlines–a planned discussion with Sergey Kislyak, the Kremilin’s ambassador to Washington.
That came as a surprise to many of the people in the room. The great majority of them had spent their careers keeping Russian officials at arm’s length. Even without that to consider, any contacts between officials in the incoming administration and Russian officials would only cause more whispers about potential coziness with the Kremlin.
Among the people who raised concerns about the planned Flynn-Kislyak chat was Marshall Billingslea, a former Bush 43 Pentagon official who was now leading the national security landing team. He told Flynn that Kislyak was almost certainly being monitored by the FBI and National Security Agency.
That information should have made an impression on Flynn, a career intelligence officer. But apparently it didn’t. According to several of the people on hand at the meeting, Flynn’s reaction was “noncommittal.” To further drive the point home, Billingslea and others asked the Obama administration for the CIA’s dossier on Kislyak.
It’s not known whether Flynn read that document, which by itself contained few red flags. However, the fact that a man who spent his entire three-decade Army career working in intelligence didn’t take a warning that a Russian ambassador was being monitored by American intelligence seriously is simply mind-boggling. It makes this scene at the Republican National Convention sound downright hypocritical.
There were already a lot of questions about whether Flynn was adequately vetted. This new development is only going to add to them.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
