Members-Only Article
With all we’ve learned over the last six or seven months, Michael Flynn almost seems like old news. But I wanted to take a moment to place today’s revelation about a December 2015 meeting with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak into a timeline context for the early months of the Trump presidential campaign.
This meeting came shortly before Flynn’s long-known visit to that Moscow banquet celebrating the 10th anniversary of Russia Today (RT). We don’t know specifically what this meeting was about. But it seems highly likely that it was tied to and in some way preparatory to Flynn’s attending the RT banquet with Vladimir Putin and others. That, of course, begs the question: what was the Moscow visit itself about? There’s no need to assume anything malign or conspiratorial about these early meetings. Foreign governments try to cultivate all sorts of U.S. government officials. Clearly, it was a relationship building effort. Flynn’s status as a three-star general, who had once run the Defense Intelligence Agency, would make him an attractive target. So would his building relationship with Donald Trump.