The Washington Post reported Thursday night that Mike Flynn, President Trump’s national security adviser, did indeed speak in late December with Russia’s U.S. ambassador about lifting sanctions that President Barack Obama had just laid against certain Russian officials.
It matters, because Flynn had explicitly denied doing this.
The Post was able to glean this scoop from nine current and former U.S. intelligence officials, based on the intelligence services’ routine monitoring of the Russian ambassador’s calls.
According to two of those officials, Flynn specifically urged the Russians not to overreact to the sanctions (Putin ultimately chose not to retaliate) because they could be revisited later, under the new administration.
Why does this matter? Let’s not get into the Logan Act here, the law that Flynn may or may not have broken if he made promises about the sanctions. As bad an idea as it may be to kowtow to Moscow, a newly elected administration-in-waiting probably deserves some slack in discussing what will happen when it takes power.
The main reason it matters is that Flynn had told everyone he had not discussed the topic. And he appears to have lied. If he did lie — something Trump can check now that he’s president — he also made an unwitting liar of Vice President Mike Pence.
Here is CBS News’ characterization of Pence’s nationally televised interview on their network on Jan. 15:
“Actually [Flynn’s call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak] was initiated when on Christmas Day, he had sent a text to the Russian ambassador to express not only Christmas wishes but sympathy for the loss of life in the airline crash that took place,” Pence said, noting that he has discussed the issue with Flynn. “It was strictly coincidental that they had a conversation, they did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”
He added that Flynn has been in touch with diplomatic leaders in approximately 30 countries — “that’s exactly what the incoming national security adviser should do,” he said.
“But what I can confirm having spoken to him about it is those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions,” he said.
So when Pence talked to Flynn, he made it very clear that no conversation about sanctions had occurred, and Pence repeated what Flynn said on national television.
When you give the vice president of the United States false information, causing him to go on national television to say something that is untrue, that has to be a firing offense. In short, tonight’s Friday evening news dump would be a really good moment for Flynn to announce he wants to spend more time with his family tweeting fake news stories.
