Michael Flynn Jr. issued an interesting tweet yesterday.
You’re all going down. You know who you are. Mark my word….
— 🇺🇸MFLYNNJR🇺🇸 (@mflynnJR) May 21, 2018
And of course that cryptic message started a conversation.
Do some research buddy. He’s a genius and patriot.
— Ken Hendricks (@KenHendricks5) May 21, 2018
And the FBI said he didnt lie. So there’s that.
— Ken Hendricks (@KenHendricks5) May 22, 2018
This Ken Hendricks guy only has eight followers and he’s only made a total of 73 tweets, so the chances are not bad that he’s some kind of troll or bot. It’s not really curious that he would post that Flynn is a genius and a patriot but the idea that the FBI said he had not lied to them is weird.
It’s an actual meme on the right that was generated fairly recently, and it is based on testimony that was provided to congressional committees. You can read a write-up of the controversy here. Basically, the agents who interviewed Michael Flynn on January 24, 2017 did not report that Flynn demonstrated any obvious signs of deception. In other words, he appeared to be honest in his responses.
The only problem with that is the FBI knew with certainty that he was lying because they had transcripts and an audio file of the conversations that Flynn had had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and what Flynn was telling them did not conform with what was in the records.
The majority report also quoted from a briefing given by Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe on Dec. 19, 2017, after Flynn pleaded guilty: The “conundrum that we faced on their return from the interview is that although [the agents] didn’t detect deception in the statements that he made in the interview … the statements were inconsistent with our understanding of the conversation that he had actually had with the ambassador.” McCabe added, “The two people who interviewed [Flynn] didn’t think he was lying, [which] was not [a] great beginning of a false statement case.”
Two days after the interview, Sally Yates contacted Don McGahn, the White House counsel and requested a meeting. She informed McGahn that Flynn had been lying and that it appeared that Vice President Mike Pence was relying on Flynn’s lies to mislead the public.
It’s easy to see how this got all discombobulated. The statement by FBI Director Christopher Wray makes it sound like the agents thought Flynn was being truthful, but they actually knew with a certainty that he was not. That’s why there was delay in informing Don McGahn about the fact that Flynn had been dishonest and was now subject to Russian blackmail.
As for actually charging Flynn with making false statements, it’s true that it would have been helpful if the interviewing agents could have testified that he seemed evasive or dishonest, but he was eventually charged and pled guilty because the tapes provided all the evidence that was really required.
In any case, it’s a total distortion to suggest that “the FBI” ever said that Flynn had not lied to them. What actually happened is that two agents reported that he appeared to be truthful. And then less than 48 hours later the Department of Justice was in the White House counsel’s office saying that Flynn had been lying and was compromised.
The right is going nuts with all the conspiracy theories
Roger Stone, veteran political strategist and longtime confidant of President Trump, said in an exclusive interview with SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily on Tuesday morning that former CIA Director John Brennan will “die in a federal penitentiary.”
Snip~~~
“John Brennan should pop the glass capsule and take the cyanide now,” Stone told host Amanda House, Breitbart News’s deputy political editor. “He’s the perp who started the entire Russian dossier matter. He’s lied about it under oath. He’s going to die in a federal penitentiary.”
Roger Stone is evil. There’s really no other explanation.
There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with wingnut mythology.
Right wing conspiracies are such a ritual and every time we all know going in that we’re going to waste our time debunking them.
Going into ’16 I’m going to assume that most on the Left gave a collective groan seeing HRC’s name on the ticket, knowing full well what kind of energy it would take to beat down all the conspiracies she’d bring to the campaign.
The bots may be Russian still and again, but there’s good reason to assume that Bannon learned well from CA and the impact a couple hundred bots can have on an influence campaign. This time round we’re going to have bots coming out of our ears.
I have grave concerns over America’s ability to pull out of the dive. Those on the right, Brietbart, Fox News other right wing crack pot radio/pod casters have reached existential damage level. I’m no longer convinced a regular political response will meet the test as the other side is not acting in good will.
mflynnjr hitting “send” …
I saw Wray’s statement and it annoyed me. The way I read it, he seemed to think FBI agents can tell if people are lying from their demeanor.
That’s false and he should know it. It’s been studied a million times. At one time, it was believed law enforcement could be trained to recognize lies. It’s now known such training does NOT increase an agent’s ability to detect lies: it only increases an agent’s confidence that he can detect lies.
That leads to innocent people getting convicted. The Innocence Project is full of cases in which falsely confident LE officers insisted innocent people were lying, convinced themselves of a suspect’s guilt and refused to look further or assess other evidence fairly.
Terrible technique. It’s just flat out wrong. FBI agents aren’t better at detecting lies than you are or I am–and none of us are good judges of natural-born liars and awkward truth tellers.
I recently watched the Netflix crime documentary “Evil Genius” and wrote this observation about it afterward which is tangentially related to you’re saying here:
I’m starting to think that policing is a contest among LEOs to prove that one officer’s particular brand of magical thinking is superior to that of his colleagues; My intuition and hunches get all the best results, my ability to read people and parse their body language and verbiage (mind reading) is superior to everyone else’s.
They all seem WAY more interested in doing this than in finding physical evidence that proves anything about the case they are investigating.
Ultimately, only serious reform of our awful 18th century, utterly corrupt electoral system will save what’s left of democracy in this country. What should have been done originally was to allow states to regulate their elections for local and state positions but not for Congress and the President. The only reform that has ever been done on that is direct election of Senators (aside from expanding the franchise, of course).
Otherwise, we will quickly pass into a Putin-like Congress and court system that serves only a small white conservative wealthy oligarchy with bread and circuses for the masses.
“Christopher Wray makes it sound like the agents thought Flynn was being truthful, but they actually knew with a certainty that he was not.”
I read it that the agents really did think Flynn was being truthful, but WRAY (and of course others working on the investigation on a higher level) knew with a certainty he was not.
. . . (or maybe “skepticism”‘s better, since I’m not claiming to actually know) to booman’s (seeming, though I think not his main point) interpretation of the quotes in his piece, and then Moll Flanders’ similar take (this thread). Been bugging me since I read them, but didn’t find time/motivation to raise it ’til now.
Instead, when I read it, it seemed to me to describe something like the interrogation equivalent of a blind taste test. I.e., “the FBI” knew from documentary evidence that Flynn was lying during the interrogation (I picture those with that knowledge behind the one-way mirror observing the interrogation, as in a gazillion cop/spy teevee/movie dramas). But this does not mean the agents actually doing the interrogation had that knowledge. In fact, it would be a ridiculous thing — pretty close to humanly impossible — to ask the interrogators to form an impression of Flynn’s truthfulness if they went into the interview with prior knowledge of the documentary evidence. The bias against a “truthful” conclusion when he lied in that scenario would be overwhelming, and the “test” utterly invalid and useless. The fact that they nevertheless did form a “truthful” impression very strongly suggests to me that those agents doing the interrogating did NOT have that prior knowledge of the documentary evidence that proved Flynn was lying. (My training/background/experience in science probably predisposed me to this latter interpretation, since OF COURSE that’s how you’d do it! Makes no sense to ask agents with prior knowledge of the facts to form a “truthfulness” impression. And even less sense that when he lied, their impression was “truthful” if they had prior knowledge of the evidence that demonstrated he was lying.)
I think the muddiness of the sentence you quote enabled these conflicting interpretations:
The first problem is that the antecedent of “they” is not completely clear, though it seems to refer to “the agents” who conducted the interview (alternatively, could mean “the FBI” or “those agents’ superiors”, etc.). But then the sentence is for all practical purposes self-contradictory since, as already noted, it would be virtually humanly impossible for those agents to simultaneously think Flynn was being truthful and know “with a certainty” that he was not.
Booman’s final graf seems to get around to making this point (i.e., emphasis on “appeared”), though without directly addressing this crucial point of whether the agents doing the interview and forming an impression of truthfulness from Flynn’s responses had knowledge of the evidence that showed Flynn was lying while they were forming that impression.
I think booman’s point was the ridiculousness of the rightwing meme, and the distortion/misinterpretation of the Wray/McCabe statements that’s required to keep that meme on life-support. Certainly, prime responsibility for all this muddiness falls on Wray and/or McCabe for not keeping clear this precise point — which muddiness then enables the rightwingnut idiocy. Though I think one must assume that rightwing distortion is mostly-to-entirely done knowingly and in (very) bad faith.
There’s so much smoke & mirrors surrounding the Trump Admin anymore that it’s hard to keep up, which I guess is at least one goal.
Also there appears to be a cottage industry working overtime to crank out a buncha lies and excuses to feed to conservatives to ‘splain why what they just saw, heard and read was clearly some nasty traitorous stuff, but hey really: here’s why you can hand wave it away bc REASONS and anyway the LIEbrul media and Libtards are angry about it and Trump so ha ha ha.
Or something.
I think the only way your can really tell if someone is lying is if you catch them doing it.
These days so many people convince themselves that they are not lying – when clearly they are – that they get mad and resistent when you point it out to them, even when presented with incontrovertible facts.
It’s a sign of our times. As the saying goes: the fish rots from the head. This pretender to the “throne” has made lying acceptable, as well as advantageous to the point where “you’d be stupid not to lie.” So everyone does it and expects to get away with it. Why would anyone be bothered by the US President lying constantly? Whose side are YOU on?
Ergo, why be concerned about Flynn lying?
Guaranteed that conservatives are reconstructing Flynn into this generation’s True American Patriot, ala Ollie North. And look at how well North has done, in spite of his crimes against humanity and clearly proven criminal activity.
Lies? Traitorous actions? Crimes? Who cares?
I’ll just add the obligatory:
IOKIYAR
great insight. Flynn is the new Ollie North, haha.
I think even “conservatives” would agree it was about time for a retread!
As an aside, I have always found it interesting how for all the money and influence our country’s right wing oligarchs have; how thick the carefully constructed and maintained the self-segregated bubble 63 million reprogrammable fascist meatbags wrap themselves in; and how much the media collaborates with them all…
They can’t buy, litigate, equivocate, etc. around the question of the legitimacy.
If there is anything that keeps a conservative up at night, it is that what they do, believe, and achieve may lacks legitimacy. Anything that makes them look less than legitimate must not only be contested, but the complete OPPOSITE must be argued until the media makes its realty.
Presumably some Coach of Team Conservative is the one who passed on the “FBI said he was truthful” meme to some paid rightwing pundit stooge who then blatted it into the conserva-sphere, as it’s doubtful that nobody tweetster Ken Hendricks came up with this distorted claptrap himself.
It is, of course, shocking that a “conservative” white male’s head is stuffed full of Approved Conserva-shit(tm). Also shocking that a conservative white male Trumpite like Gen. Flynn Sr is a practiced liar and con-man.
Also, it appears from the post that McCabe made the (somewhat stupid) comment, not Wray.