How did Flynn think he could get away with lying about Russia conversations?

National Security Advisor Mike Flynn

Here’s an excellent (and scary) point about how brazen the lies coming from the Trump regime, and specifically from National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, are. Remember how Flynn first flatly denied discussing sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then—right around the time reports came out that the two men had indeed discussed sanctions—walked it back to saying he couldn’t remember? About that:

In pretty much every capital worldwide, embassies that provide sanctuary to hostile intelligence services are subject to counterintelligence surveillance, including monitoring phone calls. Our spy services conduct signals intelligence—SIGINT for short—against the Russian embassy in Washington, just as the Russians do against our embassy in Moscow. Ambassadors’ calls are always monitored: that’s how the SpyWar works, everywhere.

Ambassador Kislyak surely knew his conversations with Flynn were being intercepted, and it’s incomprehensible that a career military intelligence officer who once headed a major intelligence agency didn’t realize the same. Whether Flynn is monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant is the big question that hangs over this increasingly strange affair.

Monumentally stupid and monumentally arrogant aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, as so many people associated with Trump appear determined to remind us on a daily basis.

That observation, by the way, comes from the Observer. And while Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is no longer the publisher of the news site, the current publisher is Kushner’s brother-in-law, and the editor-in-chief is a Kushner family friend hired by Jared.