* Well, he’s about to plead guilty… 10:30 am today.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed court documents Friday indicating that he was bringing charges against former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn for lying to FBI agents about his Russian contacts.
The information charges Flynn with one count of making a false statement.
Here is the court filing – Seth Abramson is calling it “the most significant historic document in our lifetime”:
The White House spin? “Meh, everyone lies”
Good Lord. Trumpers roll out what I guess you’d call the I.F. Stone defense abt Flynn. “Everyone lies!” https://t.co/ksLozUPzIl pic.twitter.com/ysfCKcVJQM
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 1, 2017
Yeah, that’s not going to fly.
This timeline is so damning for Trump:
January 24 – Flynn lies to the FBI.
January 26 – Sally Yates warns the White House about Flynn.
January 27 – Trump responds not by firing Flynn, but asking Comey for a loyalty pledge.
January 30 – Sally Yates fired.
UPDATES: Things are moving fast…
11:25 am
Richard Blumenthal has sent a letter to Mike Pence (who ran the transition) seeking info on Michael Flynn’s lobbying efforts while on the transition team. pic.twitter.com/ppjNhZDt3Q
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 1, 2017
WHOA! THIS IS HUGE!!!
Just now: @BrianRoss on @ABC News Special Report: Flynn promised full cooperation to the Mueller team and is prepared to testify that candidate Trump “directed him to make contact with the Russians.” https://t.co/E0tA37GOo0 pic.twitter.com/PmNEO7eekt
— Dan Linden (@DanLinden) December 1, 2017
Contact about what? This could be the ballgame!
Fox tries to bury it:
11:44 am
Prosecutors say Flynn on Dec. 29 called senior Trump transition team at Mar-A-Lago to discuss conversations with Kislyak; multiple conversations with the transition while he was having conversations with Kisyak about Russia sanctions and Russian response
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 1, 2017
As show below, WH lawyers are downplaying this:
Yeah, that’s not how this works. The false statements involved have nothing to do with what Flynn is telling the Mueller team right now.
65/ Kushner was working with the Israelis on the Security Council resolution and—in early December—with multiple Kremlin agents on (it now appears) the sanctions issue. And Kushner was the one who brought Flynn onto the transition—so he’d have been Flynn’s critical contact there.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) December 1, 2017
Bad news for Kushner.
Dow plummets at Flynn news:
Statement from Flynn now out:
67/ Here’s former NSA Michael Flynn’s statement: pic.twitter.com/GyZUh4GK0H
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) December 1, 2017
This just might be the best press news today:
#BREAKING White House plays down Flynn’s role, describes him as ‘Obama official’
— AFP news agency (@AFP) December 1, 2017
Notable that Obama gave Trump some very good and very generous advice not to bring Mike Flynn into the White House. All secret. One to one advice.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) December 1, 2017
Comey weighs in:
“But justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” Amos 5:24 https://t.co/o89PSY1YBd
— James Comey (@Comey) December 1, 2017
Today at the White House pic.twitter.com/GMy0V2hKEG
— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) December 1, 2017
The White House claimed the pool spray got on the schedule “by accident”.
Here is the Flynn plea agreement:
I mashed up Michael Flynn’s perp walk with audio of him leading a “lock her up” chant. pic.twitter.com/L1o5CjJXrQ
— Adam Smith (@asmith83) December 1, 2017
12:25pm
More White House cancellations posed as “mistakes”
WH now says there was never intended to be an Oval Office photo op today – even thought it was on the printed press schedule. WH says the schedule was wrong. pic.twitter.com/Yodf5J2Yot
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) December 1, 2017
Trump was at Mar a Lago on Dec 29. https://t.co/FW9YQKYoUC
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) December 1, 2017
And this is fun
joy behar getting handed the flynn news is the definition of, well, joy pic.twitter.com/Ush7sH5K3r
— David Mack (@davidmackau) December 1, 2017
That’s it. And it’s not like we didn’t already know it. Here is Trump confessing it on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/QYYGM30KMa
— Elliott Lusztig (@ezlusztig) December 1, 2017
I read an analysis by Andrew McCarthy at The National Review. He wrote:
McCarthy does not understand how this works. You don’t plead guilty to serious offenses if you are cooperating. You plead guilty to lesser offenses (or none at all). The Sword of Damocles goes OVER the head.
BIG UPDATE:
Bloomburg is reporting “Kushner Is Said to Have Ordered Flynn to Contact Russia”:
This was the context of Kushner’s instruction to Flynn last December. One transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the U.N. Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution. Much of this appeared to be coordinated also with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration’s lobbying efforts to get member stats to support the resolution with the Trump transition team.
I’m not sure I like this article (in the “Opinion” section). It is written in the passive tense. And doesn’t seem well-sourced.
Former federal prosecutors told TPM that this Special Counsel Robert Mueller made a calculated move to keep Flynn’s charge limited, and that, given what is known about Flynn’s myriad inappropriate foreign dealings, they wouldn’t have done so unless the former intelligence official had divulged some very juicy secrets.
“What’s interesting to me is what he’s not charged with,” said Steven Miller, a former anti-corruption federal prosecutor. “This is a very narrowly drawn structural plea bargain. By virtue of a single count he can’t get more than a five-year sentence. You don’t get that unless you’re giving something serious to the government. And the number of players left are relatively small: it’s [Jared] Kushner, it’s [Donald] Trump Jr., it’s the Trump campaign, and it’s the President. So I think this is something that would cause all of them to be extraordinarily worried.”
“It’s a neon sign that there’s massive cooperation underway by Flynn,” Miller added.Jens Ohlin, an expert in criminal law at Cornell Law School, concurred, saying what essentially amounts to a “sweetheart deal” would not be offered unless Flynn could incriminate a bigger fish.
“The government would not agree to this deal if Flynn was merely providing information on someone who is in a peripheral place in the criminality,” Ohlin said. “So if he’s providing information in exchange to this deal its because it’s someone who is even more centrally located than Flynn.”
Yup.
If you like Watergate analogies, this is comparable to when John Dean flipped.
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 1, 2017
2:50 pm
Seems to be confirmation that Kushner is deep doodoo
BREAKING: Jared Kushner is the “very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team” mentioned in the statement of offense against Michael Flynn, two people familiar with the matter tell @NBCNews https://t.co/4ZLASVAX9b
— NBC News (@NBCNews) December 1, 2017
3:10 pm
Trump’s first tweet since all this broke… (has he been told?)
The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon – FAKE NEWS! He’s not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!https://t.co/FrqiPLFJ1E
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 1, 2017