Michael Flynn Resigns as National Security Adviser: Officials

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NBC News:

Michael Flynn abruptly resigned as President Donald Trump's national security adviser Monday night, hours after it was learned that the Justice Department informed the White House that it believed he could be subject to blackmail, two senior Trump administration sources told NBC News.

 

Flynn's status was considered perilous after it was disclosed that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and other senior officials about his communications with Russia's ambassador to the United States, a senior U.S. official told NBC News.

 

The U.S. official confirmed part of a report in The Washington Post, which quoted current and former U.S. officials Monday as saying Sally Yates, then the acting attorney general, delivered the message to White House counsel Donald McGahn.

 

The Post reported that Yates was privy to FBI monitoring showing that Flynn discussed sanctions on Russia with Ambassador Sergei Kislyak — even though Flynn told administration officials that he hadn't. Pence repeated the misinformation in national television appearances.

 

Trump fired Yates as acting attorney general late last month after she directed Justice Department lawyers not to defend his executive order on immigration.

________

 

Flynn flew. Putin knew?

[Valin]

What Flynn’s Resignation Really Means

Flynn was the wrong man for the job, but his resignation tells us less about insidious Russian schemes than the Trump Administration’s flawed assumptions about Russia.

Walter Russell Mead

Feb 14 2017

 

The resignation last night of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, following a controversy over his disputed pre-inauguration contacts with the Russian ambassador, has sent an already anxious national media into overdrive. As insinuations of Russian blackmail, deliberate misleading of the public and Logan Act violations fill the airwaves, it is important to take stock of what we do and don’t know about Flynn’s resignation—and what it might tell us about the Trump Administration’s policy toward Russia.

 

(Snip)

 

That was the wrong job for General Flynn. He is a passionate advocate, not a cold-blooded calculator. He’s a bureaucratic street fighter, not a dispassionate traffic cop. Something was going to blow, as an emotional and hard-charging square peg struggled to fit within the confines of a round hole. Everyone, including General Flynn, should be happy that the struggle ended sooner rather than later. No happiness was going to come from this mismatch—not to the President, not to the country, not to General Flynn or those around him.

 

(Snip)

 

It seems likely that some of the people around Trump have conflated the idea of opening to Russia with their more general sense of how stupid establishment American policy has been since 1990—or, perhaps, for some of them, since 1948. In other words, they thought the inability of past administrations to get a good relationship with Putin was part of a generalized pattern of failure, arising from mistakes on the U.S. side rather than from the intractable nature of U.S.-Russian dynamics. Trump’s advisors seem to believe they have the “secret sauce” to make a good relationship with Putin work, just as they have the secret sauce to make Middle East peace where all others failed. In this regard, Trump actually aligns with his predecessors, all of whom took office believing they alone had the special diplomatic skills necessary to do what no one before them could.

 

Some on Trump’s team may have thought that an ideological affinity between Putin’s anti-cosmopolitan, nationalist stance and their own would make cooperation possible. This reflects a misunderstanding about the uses of ideology under Putin. Vladimir Putin no doubt has private convictions and beliefs, and it is likely that both social conservatism and Russian nationalism are close to his heart. However, when one speaks of Putin the ruler as opposed to Volodya the chelovek, ideology is an instrument of statecraft. Like his true forebear Napoleon III, Putin is a user of ideologies in the service of maintaining political power, not a zealot willing to stake power on truths in which he believes. If a shift toward a more liberal, accommodative stance would serve his political ends better, he would find a way to switch. For Putin, just as for Soviet leaders like Stalin and Brezhnev, an ideology is a horse to be ridden, not an ideal to be served. Given that, Putin’s goal is less to reach an accommodation with Trump (or with Obama or with Bush) than to use their own assumptions and aspirations to manipulate them.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

Just When You Think Kieth Can't Get Any Dumber.....

 

 

.............He Proves You Wrong.

[Draggingtree]

The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn

Feb 14, 2017

RUSH: Everybody just calm down, just calm down. All of this was predicted to you, every bit of this was predicted to you. I mean the media behavior. To show you just how lame the media is and how little they’ve got, they’re already asking what did Trump know and when did he know it, and that’s not the question. The question is, what did Barack Obama know and when did he know it and what has he engineered here?

 

This all happened with Flynn back in December. Trump had not even been inaugurated yet. And it’s still mysterious to me what really happened. Even if, even if Flynn, as the incoming national security director, had called the Russian ambassador to talk, so what? That’s not hard to imagine. That’s not a big deal. It really isn’t a big deal.

 

Now, if he lied to Mike Pence and said, “No, no, no, I didn’t talk to the guy. I didn’t talk to the guy about sanctions. I didn’t talk about maybe lifting the sanctions. No, no, no, I didn’t.”

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/02/14/the-political-assassination-of-michael-flynn/

[Geee]

Mattis on Flynn’s Resignation: ‘Frankly, This Has No Impact’

 

Secretary of Defense James Mattis on Tuesday dismissed the idea that the resignation of President Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, because of his contact with the Russian ambassador will negatively affect America's relationship with NATO allies.

 

Mattis was taking questions from the media on a flight to a NATO meeting in Brussels when Associated Press reporter Lolita Baldor asked the Pentagon chief if Flynn's sudden departure would hinder his efforts to reassure NATO of the U.S. commitment to the alliance.

 

"Here's the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen: I am brought in to be the secretary of defense," Mattis said. "Frankly, this has no impact. Obviously. I haven't changed what I am heading there [to the NATO meeting] for. It doesn't change my message at all."

 

http://freebeacon.com/politics/mattis-flynns-resignation-frankly-no-impact/

[Geee]

Report: Obama Loyalists, Led By Ben Rhodes, Orchestrated Flynn Ouster

 

Last month, PJ Media's David Steinberg noticed that media had been covering the nothingburger about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's phone calls with Russia's Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak like it was the story of the century. Meanwhile, media was ignoring truly explosive revelations about secret meetings between Obama administration officials and Iranian operatives concerning the Iranian nuclear deal.

 

It almost looked like Obama adviser Ben Rhodes' media echo chamber was still operational even after his boss had left office.

 

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/02/15/report-obama-loyalists-led-by-ben-rhodes-orchestrated-flynn-ouster/

[Draggingtree]

Moar Puzzled

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Bill Quick

 

Former Obama Officials, Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign to Oust Flynn

 

The abrupt resignation Monday evening of White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.

 

The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility, multiple sources revealed.

http://dailypundit.com/2017/02/15/moar-puzzled/

[Draggingtree]

Flynn: Not Suicide, but Political Assassination

 

 

As it turns out, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn didn't so much fall on his own sword as he had one plunged into his back. Former Bill Clinton adviser turned conservative pundit Dick Morris explained, "The Obama appointees still inhabiting the bowels of the State and Justice Departments orchestrated the coup that brought down General Michael Flynn." They did so by leaking to the press the transcripts of Flynn's December 29 phone conversation with a Russian official about Barack Obama's sanctions. This was followed by dire warnings of Flynn's susceptibility to potential blackmail by the Russians. (As if Hillary Clinton wasn't the biggest blackmail risk in the history of the United States.) "The leaks of the content of an intercepted communication are felonies," said former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova. "All of the disclosures to the Washington Post are federal crimes." That's not to excuse any deception on Flynn's part, but clearly the bigger story is the leaks. https://patriotpost.us/posts/47477