Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare look into the recent allegations of a kidnapping plot with intent to deliver the victim, Fethullah Gulen, to his political enemy, President Erdogan of Turkey, to be implemented by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. They look with the hard eyes of experienced National Security lawyers, and so it looks a little grim for Flynn and his son, Michael Jr.
But that’s not all:
Flynn would be barred from continuing to act as a foreign agent after January 20, when he took office, and that offense (a felony) would not be able to be remedied—as Flynn has sought to do previously—with retroactive filings.
Finally, there’s the matter of what all of this means for President Trump, who famously asked then-FBI Director James Comey to back off of the Flynn investigation in the period before he then fired Comey. This request has always represented a grave matter, particularly in the context of President Trump’s larger set of interactions with law enforcement over time. It was, after all, a profound violation of the principle that the President does not direct law enforcement on investigative matters. It is, however, a far graver matter to the extent the investigation of Flynn involved potentially violent felonies. If Flynn is really suspected of involvement in a kidnapping plot, the question of what the President knew and when he knew it goes from being merely important to being acutely crucial.
The public needs to know what precisely President Trump was asking his FBI director when he said to him: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
It’s a little hard for me to understand what might be going through Flynn’s head at the time, although the simple love of money is well known to make men do stupidly dangerous things.
But it’s not yet clear why Trump was so deeply involved that he appealed to Comey to take the pressure off of Flynn. Perhaps here merely didn’t want a hint of mud on his administration, never mind that buckets of it were on the way.
