The head of the CIA continued to brief Michael Flynn on the nation’s most sensitive intelligence information until he was ousted as national security adviser, despite concerns from top government agencies, including the CIA itself, that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail, according to a New York Times report out Tuesday.
Trump administration officials were warned days after inauguration that Flynn was under federal investigation and had mislead White House officials about his contacts with Russian operatives. Yet Flynn still sat in on near-daily presidential briefings from CIA Director Mike Pompeo throughout his tenure in the White House, according to the Times.
While career officials at the CIA, Justice Department, FBI, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence reportedly expressed grave concerns about Flynn, Pompeo declined under oath to say if he was aware of those concerns.
“I can’t answer yes or no,” he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last month. “I regret that I’m unable to do so.”
One administration official who spoke to the Times said that if Pompeo was aware of Flynn’s compromised situation, he never shared any concerns about it with the President.
I’m in a bad mood today after last night’s loss…so Flynn gets an upgrade
String him up! String Him up! String him up!
The amount of incompetence wrapped in hubris by this administration never ceases to astonish me.
This. Is. Not. Normal.
1 / Lock. Him. Up.
2 / All of these stupid actions were taken by people who swore allegiance to the US Constitution. Amazing. Misfeasance, malfeasance, or espionage?
3 / Nobody could have predicted…
This, folks, is why responsible administrations pull clearances when something starts to go wrong rather than long after it’s hit the fan. You can always reinstate a clearance, but you can’t make someone un-know the information they shouldn’t have been told. (And, under the law, as long as Flynn had his clearance and a need-to-know, briefers were legally required to give him that information.)
One thing this shows is that it’s pretty much impossible to separate the russia investigation from the general corruption and incompetence of this administration.
Read this in the Times. Not that I didn’t think the Ruskies had the tRump crew by the balls before but I’m throughly convinced now. Rump used Flynn as a conduit to Putin to inform about the elimination of sanctions etc.
What is amazing is Flynn’s failure to know he would be monitored. He came out of intelligence FFS. Oops, forgot military intelligence is an oxymoron.