Another late afternoon blockbuster from the Washington Post: Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was not completely truthful with the FBI.
Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn denied to FBI agents in an interview last month that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States before President Trump took office, contradicting the contents of intercepted communications collected by intelligence agencies, current and former U.S. officials said.
The Jan. 24 interview potentially puts Flynn in legal jeopardy, as lying to the FBI is a felony, but any decision to prosecute would ultimately lie with the Justice Department. Some officials said bringing a case could prove difficult in part because Flynn may attempt to parse the definition of sanctions. […]
Two days after the interview, acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates informed Donald McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, about the contents of the intercepted phone call. Yates and other officials were concerned that Russia could use the mischaracterization of the call—which Pence had repeated on national television—to blackmail the national security adviser and did not think it was fair to keep Pence in the dark about the discrepancies, according to officials familiar with their thinking.
In his unhinged performance in a bizarre press conference Thursday, popular vote loser Trump reiterated that Flynn is a "fine person," and "a man who there was a certain amount of information given to Vice President Pence, who is with us today. And I was not happy with the way that information was given."
He didn't have to do that, because what he did wasn't wrong—what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That's the real problem.
Yeah, this is maybe a bigger problem. The lying to the FBI, which is a bigger deal than lying to the vice president. A bigly bigger deal. Of course, that depends on Trump's good friend and campaign booster Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. In a normal world, Sessions would recuse himself as Democrats are demanding. Because Justice Department guidelines demand it, saying "no DOJ employee may participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would be directly affected by the outcome."
Pressure is going to build, now that we know Flynn likely committed a felony, for both deeper independent investigations and, potentially, prosecutions. And at some point in the very near future, Republican leadership in Congress is going to have to decide as well whether they're going to put country or party first.