As the Washington Examiner‘s Kyle Feldscher reports this morning, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee isn’t just dropping the issue of whether Mike Flynn somehow compromised national security. In fact, he’s starting to ask whether President Trump knew about it from the beginning.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee believes President Trump had to have known former national security adviser Mike Flynn lied about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and was fine with that lie until it went public.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said on CNN that the White House was told last month about Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, including the fact that Flynn had lied about the content of those conversations. Originally, the call was supposedly genial and didn’t deal with matters of importance, according to the White House.
Even if Steve Bannon is more controversial, Flynn’s pick as national security adviser was Trump’s most disturbing so far, and for reasons that have nothing to do with his politics. Here is someone who, despite having a strong professional reputation as an intelligence officer, was so strangely credulous and unhinged as to share nutty InfoWars conspiracy theories online on a regular basis.
Given that Trump has disowned him, no one is going to miss Flynn now. The world is surely safer with him gone. But does this go further, and if so, how far will Congress take it? My guess is, probably not too far, for reasons both good and bad.
Here’s the understandable part: The reason for Flynn’s firing is the fact that he lied, not the fact that he violated the (drumroll, please!) Logan Act, which forbids freelance diplomacy. Not only is this law never enforced, but the “crime” of an incoming administration discussing policy with the Russian ambassador three weeks prematurely is just not really that interesting. Trump won the election, as regrettable as that may be with respect to America’s policy toward Putin. Just like Obama, he has every right to make that policy now — probably too much power — and it would not be a major scandal if one of his aides had started laying the groundwork around Christmas.
What is a major scandal is that Flynn is not only a demonstrated kook on social media, but also a liar. He told Mike Pence a self-serving lie, which the new vice president then repeated on national television. If Trump knew that Flynn had lied to him and was willing to keep him anyway, then it doesn’t reflect that well on Trump. But then we’re not talking about a second Watergate, we’re talking about Trump surrounding himself with liars.
So then there’s the less understandable reason why Congress won’t follow this up, even though it should. One of the weaknesses of the Founding Fathers’ vision was the failure to appreciate how political parties would evolve. Instead of performing oversight, Republican Congresses tend to cover for Republican administrations, and Democrats for Democratic administrations. House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., has already said his committee won’t be investigating, and House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, has remarked that the problem is “taking care of itself.”
This is not how Congress is supposed to operate. There are serious issues beyond Flynn’s personal dishonesty that need to be looked over, and perhaps in private sessions of the intelligence committees, if the information is sensitive. Was Flynn ever blackmailed by the Russians? Did he do anything in his brief tenure that compromised national security? Did he indeed receive money from the Russian government, as an Army investigation has been looking at?
Congress, as a co-equal branch of government with the power to subpoena administration officials, is the politically accountable body in the best position to conduct oversight of a presidential administration. If Republicans are going to argue that they serve as a check against Trump’s worst instincts, they need to conduct real oversight now that he’s president, and not circle the wagons. If they start holding the sort of irrelevant oversight hearings (example: “Ready to Eat or Not: Examining the Impact of Leafy Greens Marketing“) that Democrats held in 2009 and 2010 rather than do real oversight of the Obama administration, it will be a big disappointment, but also part of a larger pattern.
