Flynn Pleads Guilty* In Trump-Russia “Witchhunt”

Ken AshfordL'Affaire Russe, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

* 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”:

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The White House spin? “Meh, everyone lies”

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

WHOA!  THIS IS HUGE!!!

Contact about what?  This could be the ballgame!

Fox tries to bury it:

11:44 am

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.

Bad news for Kushner.

Dow plummets at Flynn news:

Statement from Flynn now out:

This just might be the best press news today:

Comey weighs in:


The White House claimed the pool spray got on the schedule “by accident”.

Here is the Flynn plea agreement:

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12:25pm

More White House cancellations posed as “mistakes”

And this is fun

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.

Good analysis here:

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.

2:50 pm

Seems to be confirmation that Kushner is deep doodoo

3:10 pm

Trump’s first tweet since all this broke… (has he been told?)