Here are the big points I can see from Spicer’s remarks.
1. Spicer denied that Flynn or any other campaign officials were in touch with Russian government officials during the campaign. That is flatly contradicted in multiple press reports.
2. Spicer insists that President Trump instinctively knew that what Gen. Flynn did was not wrong and his White House Counsel confirmed this for him.
1:35 PM: Spicer just awkwardly denied, if I’m understanding this right, that Flynn or anyone else had conversations with Russian officials during the election. This has been reported as a fact in the Times, the Post and in other media outlets.
1:31 PM: Here’s a key passage from what Spicer said: “When the President heard the information presented by White House counsel, he instinctively thought that general Flynn did not do anything wrong and the White House Counsel’s review corroborated that.”
1:25 PM: Note that in Sean Spicer’s initial discussion of the Flynn matter, he clearly did not say that Flynn had misled the President. The consistent refrain is that he misled Vice President Pence “and others.” He also went to great lengths to say there was nothing substantively or legally wrong with what Flynn what Flynn did. The issue is entirely one of communication between Michael Flynn and the Vice President “and others.” Spicer said the President lost confidence because of Flynn’s lack of truthfulness with Pence. It is no accident that there is no mention of Flynn misleading the President.
With all the storm and drama over Flynn, remember: the legislative momentum on the Hill has ground to almost a standstill, despite the fact that a new president historically gets his most consequential legislation passed during his first year, even first months in office.
Why doesn’t Mike Flynn’s resignation letter say he misled the President?
Also worth noting: Flynn is the third member of the Trump campaign/administration to resign over issues related to Russia: Manafort and Page.
An important point to note. Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn just resigned amidst a counter-intelligence investigation into, among other things, his communications with the Russian Ambassador to the United States. But only three or four hours before Flynn resigned, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), Devin Nunes, said there was no problem and it was just the President’s enemies (“the swamp” in his words) making trouble. “It just seems like there’s a lot of nothing here,” Nunes told Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis.
I had wanted to end my work evening on the post I published just after 8 PM. Let me conclude on this note. Tonight’s revelations (by which I mean those which preceded Michael Flynn’s resignation) make it even more clear that there is much more going on out of view than we realize.
The Times has now published an article which covers similar ground to the one I noted below from the Post. But it adds this additional piece of information: “In addition, the Army has been investigating whether Mr. Flynn received money from the Russian government during a trip he took to Moscow in 2015, according to two defense officials.”
This sounds very bad. And it may be very bad. But there’s some important context here. Flynn has stated publicly that he was paid for his appearance at the RT banquet in Moscow in December 2015.
The Washington Post article published less than an hour ago is devastating, and much less for Michael Flynn than his boss, President Trump. The post I published below suggested that the most obvious explanation of the progression of the Flynn story is that President Trump knew about the Flynn/Russia back channel all along.
Now we have a big new piece of the puzzle. On Monday January 30th, President Trump fired Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his immigration executive order. Only days earlier, Yates and what the Post describes as a “senior career national security official” told White House Counsel Donald McGahn that Michael Flynn has lied about his communications with the Russian Ambassador and that he was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
If you accept the public storyline, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s job now hangs in the balance because a) he discussed sanctions against Russia with Russian Ambassador Kislyak on the day President Obama imposed them (Dec 29th) and b) because he lied to Vice President Pence and possibly also Chief Of Staff Priebus about the topics discussed on those December 29th calls. Pence later put his own credibility on the line when he passed on Flynn’s false assurances. But there are some pretty big problems with this account of events – and they all tie to whether President Trump knew about the Flynn/Russia back channel all along.
We certainly do not know for a fact that President Trump knew about Mike Flynn’s conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak before the election. But why is anyone assuming Trump is only learning about that back channel now? That seems like a highly questionable assumption, given how close Flynn and Trump were during the election and how much Russia came up during the campaign. Remember, according to multiple published reports, Flynn was not just in communication with Kislyak at the end of December, when Trump was President-Elect. He was in on-going communication with him before the 2016 election too.