From NBC News comes surprising news:
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn told investigators that people linked to the Trump administration and Congress reached out to him in an effort to interfere in the Russia probe, according to newly unredacted court papers filed Thursday.
The court filing from special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to mark the first public acknowledgement that a person connected to Capitol Hill was suspected of engaging in an attempt to impede the investigation into Russian election interference.
“The defendant informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could’ve affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation,” says the newly revealed section of a sentencing memo originally filed in December. …
Prosecutors did not identify any of the people who reached out to Flynn, but said the special counsel’s office was in some instances “unaware of the outreach until being alerted to it by the defendant.”
No other details were provided in the filing, but the Mueller report noted that President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer left a voicemail message for Flynn in late November 2017 that addressed the possibility of him cooperating with the government.
A fascinating development, as this would be interference.
But who, in Congress, is involved?
All the smart money will be on one or more GOP members, and an extremist; it would be extremely outré for the malefactor (for that’s the best descriptor of such a person) to be a Democrat, or linked to that side.
But the really interesting point is how this is engendering a feel of an evil spider in Washington, where the legs are made up of various elected officials, or at least their staff, while the body is in the White House, frantically holding off the enemies. It’s really beginning to paint the GOP as a corrupt, power hungry, unprincipled party, a collection point for second-raters and brittle ideological zealots.
Not that the Democrats don’t have a few of them as well.
But for precisely that reason, that unflattering picture of a party uninterested in the rules of a democratic society, we can expect this to be a long, drawn out process. Removing pus from a wound often will be. And the strategies of those who’ve created this organization of those who have a will-to-power have been organized, varied, and effective – as evidenced by the situation we find ourselves in. We may find some of them are beyond the reach of the law.
And the deciders, to borrow President Bush’s unfortunate choice of word, is not a single person, or even a small group. It’s the citizens of the United States, an overly busy mob of people who, too often, know very little about the activities in Washington, who get their information from news services who have their own agendas, left or right, and are afflicted with sophisticated persuaders, as it were, to ensure they view the world in a way salubrious to the persuaders’ interests.
True, the judiciary still exists as a final backstop. Under attack from within and without, overworked and under-respected (at least by the right), it lurches along, and so far has proven to be a thorn in the paw of the spider[1] in our government.
And, for those of us who feel particularly desperate, there is the tendency of evil to rip itself to pieces as its constituents pursue their self-interested passions to the detriment of the goal of the leader. Will that be enough? I doubt it.
The people will need to put an end to this. They must continue to educate themselves.
1 A mixed metaphor is something that often follows a mixed cocktail.
