Trump's General MishaThe FBI doesn't have to give Flynn immunity. They have him on tape. He's going to prison. As Ryan Lizza reported in the New Yorker on Friday a a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee told him that he's seen the transcript and that Flynn had discussed easing the sanctions on Russia with Sergey Kislyak who serves simultaneously as Putin's ambassador to Washington and as Russia's chief spy-maters for North America. "Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak," wrote Lizza, "is now at the center of F.B.I. and congressional investigations into Russian interference in the Presidential election, which are seeking to determine whether there was coördination between Russia and the Trump campaign."
I asked the Republican congressman if he believed that Flynn did anything illegal in the phone call, in which Flynn discussed actions taken the same day by the Obama Administration. A rarely enforced eighteenth-century law known as the Logan Act makes it illegal to “influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government” or “defeat the measures of the United States” in disputes with an adversary. “That’s open to question,” the Republican congressman told me.If a former high-ranking official like Flynn is offered immunity, it generally means he can offer up a bigger fish. “The problem with being high up in government is that there are few people higher for the purposes of targeting,” the legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted today on his blog. “People get immunity to incriminate the Flynns of the world. With the exception of the President himself, it is hard to see who Flynn could offer as a possible target in exchange for his own immunity.”...Three of the four Trump campaign advisers whose names have surfaced in connection with the F.B.I. investigation-- Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman; Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser who officially worked on the campaign when it launched, in 2015; and Carter Page, who served as a foreign-policy adviser-- never made it to the White House. Flynn was different. After the election, Trump was slow to assemble a White House team and Cabinet, but one of the first personnel decisions he made was naming Flynn as his national-security adviser, on November 18th. On December 29th, Barack Obama announced that, in retaliation for Russia’s meddling in the election, the U.S. would expel thirty-five Russian diplomats, close down two Russian diplomatic facilities, and impose new economic sanctions. It was one of the most sensitive moments in U.S.-Russia relations in decades, and Kislyak texted Flynn asking if they could talk.The call, in which the two men discussed the new Obama sanctions, was monitored by American intelligence, and the transcript was circulated within the Obama Administration. On January 13th, the day after details of the call became public, the Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters that the call “never touched on the sanctions.” In preparing Vice-President-elect Mike Pence for TV interviews, Flynn apparently denied that he and Kislyak discussed sanctions, and Pence repeated that assertion on CBS’s Face the Nation, on January 15th.These denials apparently caught the attention of F.B.I. agents, who interviewed Flynn in late January. On January 26th, Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General, who was later fired by Trump, informed the White House that Flynn’s account of what he discussed with the Russian Ambassador was false and made him vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians. Despite the F.B.I. interview and the Justice Department’s warning, Trump took no actions against Flynn. (The White House later said that it conducted a review of the call and determined that there were no legal issues.) On January 28th, Flynn was on the line when Trump and Putin held an hour-long conversation.On February 8th, Flynn himself insisted to the Washington Post that he and Kislyak did not talk about sanctions, an assertion that the Post reported was false and which Flynn then clarified. With the issue public and creating a firestorm, Trump finally fired Flynn, five days later.
So why did Trump wait so long after knowing Flynn was breaking the law by talking with Kislyak about sanctions before firing him? And why did he defend his actions and then support an immunity deal? Is Nunes part of a scheme to grant Flynn immunity so that he becomes unprosecutable? When Nunes went home to his district Friday, he addressed a closed private event in Fresno with campaign donors from corporate AgriBusiness. No constituents and no media were allowed. But outside, several hundred of Nunes' angry constituents were waiting, yelling ("Come out and play, Nunes, you coward"), and waving homemade signs linking him to Trump and Putin-- "Congressman Nunes, we need a guard dog not a lap dog" and "Get out of bed with Trump." KQED reported that "Passing cars honked their approval and gave the crowd a thumbs up. A loudspeaker blared the Russian national anthem."
“Many people here, we haven’t been out since the ‘60s,” said Dave Derby, a former Clovis school principal turned community organizer. “I never thought we’d be back doing this again, but here we are. We’re in our 60s and 70s-- I think it’s amazing what’s happening.”Derby and his wife started the group Every Tuesday Vigil, which holds weekly demonstrations outside Nunes’ Clovis district office. He said the group was one of several that grew out of protests at the Fresno airport in the wake of President Trump’s travel ban announcement earlier this year.A few people drove in from out of town, like a group from Stockton that rejects Nunes’ stance on California water issues.But most were Central Valley constituents. One of them, a lifelong Republican named John Essex who voted for Nunes in 2004, said Nunes’ recent secret intelligence briefing with White House officials raises serious questions about the congressman’s ability to lead an investigation into that very administration.“I don’t think our congressman needs to be making midnight trips in Uber to the White House,” he said, referring to reports that’s how Nunes met up with officials for the intelligence briefing.While the recent controversy has shoved the little-known Republican from rural California into the national spotlight, Essex and others here say their beef with him goes way back.“If anything, Devin Nunes needs to come and talk to us. It’s been years and years since he’s held a public town hall. No one sees Nunes!”And that didn’t change today. Nunes slipped into the event through a back entrance and left without demonstrators getting a glimpse of him.
Meanwhile Pelosi was tweeting Saturday morning that Nunes had "not only lost all credibility-- he's tarnished the office that he holds." Pelosi, of course, only needs to make one phone call to Ben Ray Lujan, chair of the DCCC and Nunes will wind up with something he's never experienced before: a serious challenger to reelection. Its more likely CA-22 residents will have to wait until Pelosi retires before the DCCC ever takes on Nunes. She vehemently opposes the DCCC going after GOP leaders or committee chairs.
