Even a Moron Should Have Suspected Michael Flynn of Treason

Now that Donald Trump is trying to claim that no one told him that Michael Flynn was suspected of being a criminal if not a traitor, I need to dust off some of my old material. I think I’ll take this May 23, 2017 piece off the virtual book shelf and open it. Turning to page one, I see that the American intelligence community was not impressed when they saw Flynn at Vladimir Putin’s dinner table helping the Russian leader hold an anniversary gala for the RT cable news network.

“It was extremely odd that he showed up in a tuxedo to the Russian government propaganda arm’s party,” one former Pentagon official told me.

“It’s not usually to America’s benefit when our intelligence officers—current or former—seek refuge in Moscow,” said one senior Obama administration official.

Let’s stop for a moment and think about this. Michael Flynn had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. If we were to make a list of all the positions in the American government that the Russians would like to compromise, the one dealing with military secrets would be very, very near the top.  Even a recently retired chief of the DIA would have a fountain of important knowledge about what America knows and doesn’t know about Russia’s military capabilities. He would know precisely what America is most eager to keep secret from the Russians.  Michael Flynn was compromised by the Russians rather easily. He was invited to the RT dinner, yes, but he was also given paid work with the state-run RT news network, for which he did not receive permission from the Pentagon as all former officers must do when working for a foreign government. He also lied about this to the media during the campaign.

In truth, Flynn was compromised while he was still in the job.

One concern involved an encounter with a Russian-British graduate student, Svetlana Lokhova, whom Flynn met on a trip to Cambridge in February 2014.

At the time, Flynn was one of the top US spies and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provides information to the Pentagon about the military strengths and intentions of other states and terrorist groups.

A historian and a leading expert on Soviet espionage, Lokhova has claimed to have unique access to previously classified Soviet-era material in Moscow.

I won’t rehash this whole story again here, but his relationship with Lokhova may have played an underreported role in James Clapper’s decision to have Flynn terminated.  She was suspected of being a Russian operative and Flynn was showing a romantic interest and offering to use her as a translator.  Flynn didn’t report his contacts with her, even though he was required to do so.  He later defended himself by saying that she had dual Russian-British citizenship, as if a technicality should excuse his oversight. The woman was peddling historic GRU (Russian military intelligence) documents that no ordinary citizen would ever be able to access.  Flynn wanted to hire her. He wanted to take her to bed.

It didn’t help that Flynn was using his appearances on Russian television to criticize American foreign policy, including in some ways that parroted the Kremlin line.  If he wasn’t acting out of greed (and he claimed he wasn’t being paid), then he was possibly motivated by something more nefarious, like fear of exposure.  The American intelligence community had every reason to keep a very close eye on Flynn and to obsess over what kind of secrets he might be sharing with the Russians.

Officially, the FBI didn’t start monitoring Flynn’s activities until after the Russians hacked into the Democratic Party’s computer systems. Flynn was on that short list for obvious reasons. But I assume the Pentagon was looking at him from the time of his relationship with Lokhova. If they weren’t, then they weren’t doing their job of protecting American military secrets.

Most of the reporting you’re seeing today about Trump’s foreknowledge of problems with Flynn doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Flynn was potentially fired for having a relationship with a Russian spy. It has nothing to do with the Russians knowing all throughout the campaign that Flynn was lying about whether he had been paid to appear on the RT network.

Instead, it focuses on the fact that Barack Obama told him not to hire Flynn because he wasn’t up to the job. It focuses on Chris Christie telling him much the same thing. It focuses on what the Department of Justice did or did not tell Trump about their concerns with Flynn.  No one really considers the possibility that Trump was also compromised by the Russians. No one seems to think a candidate for president should be perceptive about people who present an unacceptable security risk.  Trump should have been curious about Flynn’s relationship with Russia. He should have seen it as suspicious and improper for a former high-ranking intelligence chief to be feting the leader of the Russian Federation and going on state-run Russian television to criticize American foreign policy.

You don’t read about these aspects of the case because our media are too lazy and timid to present all the unpleasant facts.