Well, well, well, Hillary-crats all over America must be rubbing their hands in glee: Michael Flynn has been indicted and obviously is going to flip to get a lighter sentence!!!
Give me a fucking break.
I’m not particularly fond of Flynn’s policies, especially his moronic obsession with Iran, but frankly he sounds like a lot of fun. As I noted in this previous item — Who Would You Rather Have a Drink With, Michael Flynn or Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall? The choice is painfully clear — Trump’s former national security advisor “graduated in 1977 from Middletown High School Class, where he was known lovingly as Flynnie, was co-captain of the state championship football team and loved surfing and Roxy Music.” What’s not to like? (OK, that last two things are not so cool.)
More to the point, Flynn’s worst misconduct involves legally accepting $400,000 from Turkish interests — not Russian, please note — and registering late as a foreign lobbyist. Should he have registered promptly? Sure, but we are talking about $400,000, which is chump change in Washington.
Hardly anyone in Washington registers to lobby. Countries like Qatar and China have countless influence peddlers on retainer, but only a few are officially registered with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act office. They just pretend they’re doing PR or something else that somehow falls short of lobbying. Meanwhile, Qatar, among others, pours vast sums into crooked think tanks, who are unregistered lobbyists par excellence.
Über Sleaze Henry Kissinger has been peddling influence for decades and has never registered. And by the way, I’ll have a story about his unregistered activities for China next week. I can’r wait for RussiaGate special prosecutor Robert Mueller to haul him in.
Let me also point to Michael Tracey’s Twitter post, which says, “Grand irony: the underlying action that Flynn now admits he lied to the FBI about was urging de-escalation with a nuclear power, which is now no longer permissible.” (You should all be following Michael on Twitter, especially so you don’t miss his excellent work on the whole RussiaGate affair.)
Look, Washington is rotten to the core and I’m sure Flynn is no saint. (Check out this Washington Post story on his son’s activities, for example.) But today’s indictment merely confirms what has been apparent for ages, and which I’ll stick to until I see evidence to the contrary:
Trump, Flynn and Manafort are dirty as hell, but there is nothing so far that indicates they did anything out of the ordinary, in politics or business. That’s sad, but true.
Mueller’s whole strategy is to get Trump, and anyone else he can bag, on obstruction of justice or perjury or some other charge that was committed after the fact. There was no quid pro quo between Trump and Russia. He should be voted out of office, not railroaded by Mueller and his minions in the press.
