The political assassination of Michael Flynn

If we are to believe the Trump White House, former national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned because he lied about his conversations with Russia’s Ambassador to the US Vice-President.

As White House Senior Counsellor Kellyanne Conway told NBC’s Today Show on Tuesday: “Misleading the Vice-President really was the key here.”

That sounds about as credible as when US President Donald Trump told CIA employees that the media had invented the story about his enmity towards the spy agency, not even two weeks after he had taken to Twitter to compare the CIA to Nazis.

It is about as credible as Mr Trump’s insistence that it did not rain during his inauguration. Or that millions had voted illegally in the election he won.

The point here is that for a White House that has such a casual and opportunistic relationship with the truth, it is strange that Mr Flynn’s “lie” to US Vice-President Mike Pence would get him fired. It does not add up.

It is not even clear that Mr Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Mr Pence.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian Ambassador raised the sanctions to Mr Flynn and that Mr Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia’s policy and sanctions. That is neither illegal nor improper.

What is more, The Washington Post reported on Monday night that last month Ms Sally Yates, then the Acting Attorney-General, had informed the White House that Mr Flynn discussed sanctions with Mr Kislyak and that he could be susceptible to blackmail because he misled Mr Pence about it.

So if it was the lie to Mr Pence that sunk Mr Flynn, why was he not fired at the end of January?

A better explanation here is that Mr Flynn was just thrown under the bus. His tenure as National Security Adviser, the briefest in US history, was rocky from the start.

When Mr Flynn was attacked in the media for his ties to Russia, he was not allowed by the White House to defend himself. Over the weekend, he was instructed not to speak to the press when he was in the fight for his political life.

His staff members were not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian Ambassador.

There is another component to this story as well — as Mr Trump himself just tweeted on Tuesday: “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?”.

It is very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of US citizens, let alone senior US officials. Normally, intercepts of US officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or National Security Agency (NSA) gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

In the past it was considered scandalous for senior US officials to even request the identities of US officials incidentally monitored by the government (normally they are redacted from intelligence reports).

Mr John Bolton’s nomination to be US ambassador to the United Nations was derailed in 2006 after the NSA confirmed he had made 10 such requests when he was Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control in George W. Bush’s first term. The fact that the intercepts of Mr Flynn’s conversations with Mr Kislyak appear to have been widely distributed inside the government is a red flag.

Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Mr Flynn’s conversations with Mr Kislyak as part of a pattern. “There does appear to be a well-orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the President and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.” The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a federal court which reviews applications for electronic surveillance, physical search and other forms of investigative actions for foreign intelligence purposes.

Mr Nunes said he was going to bring this up with the FBI, and ask the agency to investigate the leak and find out whether Mr Flynn himself is a target of a law enforcement investigation. The Washington Post reported last month that Flynn was not the target of an FBI probe.

The background here is important. Three people once affiliated with Mr Trump’s presidential campaign – Mr Carter Page, Mr Paul Manafort and Mr Roger Stone -- are being investigated by the FBI and the intelligence community for their contacts with the Russian government. This is part of a wider inquiry into Russia’s role in hacking and distributing emails of leading Democrats before the election.

Mr Flynn himself travelled in 2015 to Russia to attend a conference put on by the country’s propaganda network, RT. He has acknowledged he was paid through his speaker’s bureau for his appearance. That doesn’t look good, but it’s also not illegal in and of itself. All of this is to say there are many unanswered questions about Mr Trump’s and his administration’s ties to Russia.

But that’s all these allegations are at this point: unanswered questions. It’s possible that Mr Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues. It’s also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government. Mr Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Mr Flynn was working to reform the reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Mr Flynn’s breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed? In normal times, the idea that US officials entrusted with our most sensitive secrets would selectively disclose them to undermine the White House would alarm those worried about creeping authoritarianism. Imagine if intercepts of a call between Obama’s incoming national security adviser and Iran’s foreign minister leaked to the press before the nuclear negotiations began? The howls of indignation would be deafening.

In the end, it was Mr Trump’s decision to cut Mr Flynn loose. In doing this he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. Mr Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end well. “First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” he said. Put another way, Mr Flynn is only the appetizer. Mr Trump is the entree. - BLOOMBERG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Eli Lake is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.