![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
About this Flynn plea...
Dec. 2nd, 2017 06:22 amIt is, of course, immensely encouraging to know that Flynn's yarbles (along with Manafort's and Papadopoulos's) are in Mueller's hands until Mueller has extracted every bit of evidence he thinks he can get about higher-ups. But before anybody starts buying champagne, let me point out that yesterday's news was entirely about events that happened after Trump was elected.
We already knew that one of Trump's top priorities is to undo everything Obama did; whatever Obama's position on a particular policy, he would take the opposite position. Yesterday's news makes clear that the Trump transition team were so impatient to start erasing Obama's legacy that they couldn't wait until Trump was actually sworn in, and that "very senior members" of the transition team (i.e. one or more of Don Jr, Jared, Pence, and possibly Trump himself) knew this. But even if there's smoking-gun evidence that all of them knew about it and actively participated, it means they technically violated the Constitutionally-dubious Logan act because technically they weren't yet government officials. Republican members of Congress will excuse this on grounds that "of course the President-elect and his team wanted to start getting to know the foreign leaders he was about to be dealing with, and making his priorities known to them so they wouldn't be shocked and surprised a month later. They simply didn't realize some of the niceties they were expected to observe, and went with common sense. That's just the kind of ordinary, get-the-job-done guy Trump is." It notably does not mean the Trump campaign did anything illegal or treasonous in order to win the election.
That said, Flynn (as well as Manafort and, to a lesser extent, Papadopoulos) was deeply involved in the campaign, and is well placed to provide evidence of the latter, if it exists.
We already knew that one of Trump's top priorities is to undo everything Obama did; whatever Obama's position on a particular policy, he would take the opposite position. Yesterday's news makes clear that the Trump transition team were so impatient to start erasing Obama's legacy that they couldn't wait until Trump was actually sworn in, and that "very senior members" of the transition team (i.e. one or more of Don Jr, Jared, Pence, and possibly Trump himself) knew this. But even if there's smoking-gun evidence that all of them knew about it and actively participated, it means they technically violated the Constitutionally-dubious Logan act because technically they weren't yet government officials. Republican members of Congress will excuse this on grounds that "of course the President-elect and his team wanted to start getting to know the foreign leaders he was about to be dealing with, and making his priorities known to them so they wouldn't be shocked and surprised a month later. They simply didn't realize some of the niceties they were expected to observe, and went with common sense. That's just the kind of ordinary, get-the-job-done guy Trump is." It notably does not mean the Trump campaign did anything illegal or treasonous in order to win the election.
That said, Flynn (as well as Manafort and, to a lesser extent, Papadopoulos) was deeply involved in the campaign, and is well placed to provide evidence of the latter, if it exists.
