If no calls or contacts were made with Russian intelligence activists there would be NO leaks.
Experience teaches that leaks do not live by calls or contacts with Russian intelligence activists alone.
From the article cited by the
Reason writer:
[L]ast month Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general, had informed the White
House that Flynn discussed sanctions with Kislyak and that he could be susceptible to blackmail
because he misled Pence about it. If it was the lie to Pence that sunk Flynn, why was he not
fired at the end of January?
A better explanation here is that Flynn was just thrown under the bus. His tenure as national
security adviser, the briefest in U.S. history, was rocky from the start. When 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 was not even allowed to review the transcripts of his call to the Russian
ambassador.
I suspect something deeper and more disturbing happening. And it may only begin with Flynn
being thrown under the proverbial bus instead of just a cut-and-dried firing for wrongdoing,
since the Lake article points out he could have (should have?) been canned at once when it
came to light inside the White House, not almost a month later. There seems more to this
than meets the eye. Hopefully we learn soon enough.
Ponder this, too, from an essay by John Podhoretz being discussed on another thread:
Flynn’s ouster after three weeks is proof positive he should never have been
given the national security adviser job in the first place. Flynn’s deceits about his
conversations with a Russian official cannot be viewed in isolation from the overly
close relationship with the Russian government he forged following his firing by the
Obama administration in 2013.
Still, unelected bureaucrats with access to career-destroying materials clearly made
the decision that what Flynn did or who Flynn was merited their intervention — and
took their concerns to the press.
In one sense, the larger system of American checks and balances worked: The Trump
White House couldn’t ignore the Flynn problems because they went public. On the other
hand, the officials who made the problems public did so using raw information that was
in their possession for reasons we don’t yet know and may not have any right whatsoever
to know.
This information might have come because the US intelligence community has an active
interest in the Russian official to whom he talked.
Or it could have come because the FBI had been pursuing some sort of secret investigation
and had received authorization to monitor and track his calls and discussions.
If this was intelligence, the revelation of the Flynn meeting just revealed something to the
Russians we shouldn’t want revealed — which is that we were listening in on them and
doing so effectively.
And if it was an FBI investigation, then the iron principle of law enforcement — that evidence
gathered in the course of an investigation must be kept secret to protect the rights of the
American being investigated — was just put through a shredder . . .
we also know that Flynn had an antagonistic relationship with America’s intelligence agencies.
If these leaks came about not out of high principle but because officials at those agencies were
taking out a potential adversary, that is nothing more or less than a monstrous abuse of power.
And that’s true even if Flynn is guilty of something. But we can’t know if he’s guilty of something
unless he’s charged with a crime and tried in the courts. That’s how law works.
If those who fear Trump embrace antinomianism because they think he’s going to destroy our
democracy, they should stop and consider whether their zeal to stop him might be blinding them
to a different threat from the federal government that will erode our rights as citizens.
