Since even before he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump has been dogged by allegations of being a Russian stooge. And its starting to turn into the story that never ends.
After all Russian's did try to recruit Carter Page as an agent
Paul Manafort, Trumps original campaign manager, was working for the Russians.
Trump asked Russia to hack into Hillary's emails on national TV
His sons have a long record of talking about Russian investments in Trumps properties.
Trump wont release his tax returns...so who knows if hes getting Russian payouts
Trump lies about his relationship to Russia with things we already know about.
And, oh yea, Trumps first National Security Advisory was a foreign agent for the Russian government.
But, to be fair, many of these dont really seems to matter, nor are they indicative of any wrongdoing.
Carter Page: Was not successfully recruited by all accounts. May have accidentally passed along some information but being suckered isnt a crime.
Manafort: At the time, the information was he was working for the Ukrainians (eventually revealed to be a group backed by the Russians)....and he was fired when that came out. No evidence that Im aware of suggests Team Trump knew about this ahead of time. So in all fairness they appear to have handled this properly.
Hillarys Emails: Trump says stupid shit ALL THE TIME. No evidence as of now to suggest this was anything more than one of his regularly scheduled brain malfunctions
Russian investments in his projects: These are all true. They are also all legal and known....no real scandal here.
His taxes: Given that we know Russia is invested in the Trump Organization, there are only three reasons Trump wont release his taxes: He's a Russian puppet taking direct payouts from the Russians. He's massively in debt to the Russians and is therefore a blackmail risk. He's no where near as rich as he claims and his razor thin ego cant handle it. Now given Russia keeps trying to buy off his advisers, I think its safe to assume Trump's not directly on the Russian payroll...but either of the other two options is a possibility, and Trump being at risk for Blackmail would be a major national security problem.
Trump lies about things we already know about: As a single example Trump only admits to a single business deal in FL as his only interaction with Russia. But Russia also hosted the Miss Universe Pageant (which Trump owns). Now to be fair...no evidence of anything illegal, but it really doesnt help Trumps credibility that he lies about things a 30 second search on google will call him out on.
Now note until now, we have a couple of circumstantially suspicious things...mostly his taxes and his lies, but nothing really rising to the level of the scandal that the left is desperately trying to find to bring him down.
But, there was one last thing on that list.....General Michael Flynn. Or as I think he's going to become known as "That scandal the left was desperately looking for to bring down Donald Trump"
That's right. It could for all the news attention and headlines over the last year, that the entire Russia Scandal boils down to nothing more than Michael Flynn.
The problem for Trump is that, its starting to look like "nothing more than Michael Flynn" is enough to remove him from office (at least if the Dems take control in 2018...which is looking more likely)
Ok, moving through the progression of the story:
Back when Trump first became president it came out his National Security Adviser had had a possibly inappropriate phone call with the Russian Ambassador. Flynn for his part claimed the phone call had only covered permissible subjects. As part of the Trump administration defense of him, Vice President Mike Pence went on TV and vouched for Flynn making only the single appropriate phoncall. Up to this point...not a big deal.
But as the story continued, over the next couple weeks it turned out that Flynn had made multiple phone calls to the Russian Ambassador, not just the one previously discovered. And oh yea, Flynn could no longer remember if it was possible the calls did cover inappropriate material after all. Which also meant that when VP Pence went on TV and said Flynn made one call and it was fine, VP Pence was lying.
Now luckily for Pence, it was not an intentional lie on his part....he was telling what he believed to be the truth. Flynn had lied to him. Which is a MAJOR problem.
A couple days after this part of the story came out, Flynn was fired by the Trump Administration for misleading the Vice President, which the entire administration claimed was news to them...even the President claimed to know nothing about it.
Now, normally this would be the end of the story....but it wasnt.
See the day after Flynn was fired it came out that President Trump had been told weeks before hand about the calls, and that Flynn had lied to Pence. Trump just chose not to do anything about it. Furthermore, Trump hadnt even bothered to notify Pence that he'd been lied to, Pence only discovering it by watching the story break on the evening news.
At this point, this starts to appear like a cover-up. The President intentionally not acting when some one brings forward evidence of possible wrong doing by a member of his staff.
By the way, adding to the appearance of cover up, the person who brought the president this information was Sally Yates, the acting attorney general, who Trump would fire days later for refusing to defend his ban on Muslims.
Now as a legal matter it should be noting Yates is within her rights not to defend the ban, and Trump is legally allowed to fire her for doing so, so nothing as it relates to Yates directly is outright illegal....it does however play into a larger picture of illegallity around Flynn.
Now it doesnt help, when every court thats heard the case so far, sided with Yates that Trump's rder was unconstitutional. Though again, as it relates to Yates directly, this looks no worse than Yates and Trump disagreeing, Trump legally firing her, and then having her be right. Embarrassing maybe,.. not illegal on its own.
But again, it does allow for the appearance that the ban was a convenient excuse to fire her, and that she was really fired for exposing Flynn. But again, this is speculation, not evidence of a crime. In fact if it wasn't for the Trump administrations crusade to destroy their own credibility on all things, Russia, the Bowling Green massacre, who really had the larger inaugural crowd, ect, this likely wouldn't even come up.
Anyways, Yates is fired, Flynn is not...at least until the story goes public. And even then Trump sends mixed messages, having Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway go out and say both that the president has full confidence in Flynn and doesnt think anything happened, and that Trump is very disturbed by the situation and is investigating. And then after Flynn leaves we are told it was voluntary and the president didnt want to fire him, the president demanded his resignation, and the president outright fired him....take your pick.
Now, this could be just a horrible set of miscommunication's, or its evidence of a cover up of a cover up,...basically they had to fire Flynn when the story went public, but never intended too so didnt have a single story to go with and everyone had to spitball it.
Fast forward a couple more weeks to the end of March, Flynn's gone....but the story still isnt over, as news breaks that when servicing as the national security adviser, was taking payments from Turkey to advance their interests.....which is literally the LAST thing you want out of your national security adviser. Trumps White House claimed no prior knowledge of these payments.
Making matters worse, it came out a few hours later that during the campaign Flynns lawyer had contacted the Trump Team to ask them if Flynn needed to register as a foreign agent due to his work for the Turkish, to which the Trump campaign told them basically they didnt care either way. And there goes the no prior knowledge excuse......more problematically, legally there was only one correct answer. Yes Flynn needs to register.
So yea, NOW we have an actual legal problem, as it appears the Trump campaign was perfectly fine breaking the law if it made things easier. And while this news didnt come out until the end of march, chronologically, this conversation about Turkey happened before the election....meaning it happened before every thing weve covered.
So basically we now know Trumps team (at least) had evidence Flynn had a major issue BEFORE they even won the election, let along before they won, before Flynn called the Russians, before Flynn lied to the VP, before Trump was told about it by Sally Yates and did nothing, and before they were eventually forced to fire Flynn, and before they lied both about not having prior knowledge of the Flynn/Russia talks or the Flynn/Turkey connection.
Ironic side not by the way, the day the Flynn/Turkey story broke, VP Pence was being interviewed and was asked about this. It was the first he'd heard of it. So apparently not much has changed in the Trump Administration as far as not telling the VP anything
At this point we seem to have very strong evidence of a scandal and a cover up. (though we still cant totally rule out Trump's team being comprised of the least competent people in human history)
Now to be fair to the Trump team....we havnt linked him to Russia. In fact we just linked him to Turkey. Well except for the part where the Turkish organization that Flynn was working for is cofounded and funded by a Russian. AWKWARD. Oh and we also discovered Flynn was paid for an appearance by the Russian government....even though his own military chain of command forbid him from taking the payment...he just lied to them about it.
So all of this led to Flynn making an offer for immunity in exchange for testimony...usually a play that only works if you have a bigger fish above you to hand over to be fried....in this case only Trump would qualify.....though the immunity deal was rejected. (meaning to be fair it could have been nothing more than a ploy of desperation on flynns part....though he likely thought he had something on Trump....just other people disagreed or already had it)
So at this point, Team Trump went on the defensive, claiming basically that everything that happened with Flynn was Obama's fault because when Flynn was vetted Obama was President and his people should have totally caught all this shit.
Now on its face there were just a few problems
1) Security Clearance isnt granted by either the outgoing or incoming administrations, its a non partisan group that does it....so the same people that did it for Obama do it for Trump
2) the final clearance was never granted
3) While final clearance is up to the bipartisan group, it is the transition team that is supposed to handle initial vetting.
4) The Obama administration fired Flynn for being bad at running an intelligence agency...the thing Trump was hiring him for.
But things got even worse when stories broke more or less simultaneously that the Trump Transition team had warned Flynn not to make the phone call to the Russian Ambassador in the first place, and that President Obama had personally advised Trump against hiring Flynn.
In other words, Trump WAS TOLD directly not to hire Flynn....shooting holes in the "Obama should have warned me" excuse and his campaign team knew enough about Flynn to warn Flynn not to make the calls....meaning there is no way Trump didnt at least know a little a bit about this when Sally Yates told him about it, in one of what it turned out was 3 different meetings with members of the White House to warn them to fire the guy.
What I'm getting at is, if we just look at the available facts, it seems Trump had multiple warnings that Michael Flynn should not be anywhere near classified information/anything important and chose not only to ignore them but to publicly deny any wrong doings....wrong doings that he knew had actually happened. That by the way, is the definition of a cover up.
Now I admit we dont know why Trump would do this....it seems completely illogical, unless he had some kind of insane confidence in Flynns not getting caught or his own ability to control the media. One things for sure, Flynn clearly impressed Trump enough for Trump to go to bat for him.
Now, I was about to publish this with a very different ending than what your about to see....lots of speculation about what comes next, will this rise to the level of cover up ect....but it turns out the news actually beat me too it. So everything from here down refers to things that have happened just in the last 4 hours or so.
Ok, so the one thing Mike Flynn has had going for him is that, supposedly the FBI investigated his conversations into the Russian Ambassador and his failures to disclose the Turkish/Russian payments and found nothing wrong. Of course the person who told us this was FBI director James Comey....who was just fired tonight by the president for making repeated factually incorrect statements about on going investigations.
Now we had no direct proof he was lying about Flynn not done anything wrong....though innocent people dont usually ask for or qualify for immunity deals, so Flynn trying to make one suggests he's guilty of something.
But then, at 924PM this evening, CNN broke the story that a grand jury had not only been called but was handing out subpoenas in relationship to Mike Flynn and Russia. That is a thing that does not happen unless they have at least plausible evidence that something very wrong happened.
In otherwords, we can now say Flynn definitely looks guilty of something. We dont know what yet. He took payments from Turkey that he didnt disclose, he took payments from Russia directly that he wasnt legally allowed to take and we know he had possibly illegal calls with the Russian ambassador. So it could be any of those. It could also be something new.
The big problem for Trump is this: all evidence suggests they knew about at least 2 of the existing possibilities (the turkish payments and the calls) and ignored and/or helped cover them up. So it seems very very likely the path to the end of this investigation will pass right though the center of the White House...and its anyones guess who might be left standing by the end.
So yes, when the history books are written, the entire "Trump is a Russian stooge" theory liberals have been pressing for nearly a year could boil down to just Michael Flynn. But just Michael Flynn seems poised to take down the White House.
Oh and not only that...but now that a federal prosecutor seems likely to be involved, it may not take Democrats taking control of the legislators to remove Trump if it comes out he committed some crimes while trying to cover this up. Even the congressional republicans would feel pressure to remove him quickly in that case.
