Well, this is a sticky wicket.
Six days ago, Michael Flynn resigned as Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser after it was exposed that he had colluded with the Russian ambassador, both before and after election day. It was then revealed that Flynn had also colluded by phone with Russian intel officials while serving as a Donald Trump campaign advisor. Now comes the detail that may tie it all together: the Kremlin paid off Flynn shortly before he became a Trump campaign advisor.
Here’s the sequence of confirmed events as we now know them. In April of 2014, Michael Flynn was forced out of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency for erratic behavior, ending his career in the United States military and government. In June of 2015, Donald Trump entered the presidential race. In December of 2015, the Kremlin paid Michael Flynn the sum of $40,000 to travel to Moscow and sit at the same dinner table as Vladimir Putin during a Russia Today event. In February of 2016, Michael Flynn became a campaign adviser for Donald Trump, during which time he routinely colluded with Russian agents.
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That’s a bizarrely large amount of money for the Kremlin to have paid Flynn, who was a nobody and who at that point had already been run out of the U.S. government, just to attend a dinner event. Moreover, Russia Today is directly funded by the Kremlin itself, meaning the Kremlin paid Flynn the $40,000. It all comes together to suggest that the money was actually for a different purpose.
One wonders why exactly the Kremlin paid Michael Flynn $40k to have “dinner”, and what they expected in return for their investment particularly after he lied to both the Vice President and FBI about his talking to the Russian Ambassador about sanctions.
Here’s what Russia might have bought.
The New York Times reported this weekend that Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen met with Russian officials to draft a proposal to drop sanctions against Russia which were allegedly delivered to Michael Flynn for review a week before he was fired.
A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia.
Mr. Flynn is gone, having been caught lying about his own discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador. But the proposal, a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia, remains, along with those pushing it: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer, who delivered the document; Felix H. Sater, a business associate who helped Mr. Trump scout deals in Russia; and a Ukrainian lawmaker trying to rise in a political opposition movement shaped in part by Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
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But the proposal contains more than just a peace plan. Andrii V. Artemenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker, who sees himself as a Trump-style leader of a future Ukraine, claims to have evidence — “names of companies, wire transfers” — showing corruption by the Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko, that could help oust him. And Mr. Artemenko said he had received encouragement for his plans from top aides to Mr. Putin.
“A lot of people will call me a Russian agent, a U.S. agent, a C.I.A. agent,” Mr. Artemenko said. “But how can you find a good solution between our countries if we do not talk?”
Mr. Cohen and Mr. Sater said they had not spoken to Mr. Trump about the proposal, and have no experience in foreign policy. Mr. Cohen is one of several Trump associates under scrutiny in an F.B.I. counterintelligence examination of links with Russia, according to law enforcement officials; he has denied any illicit connections.
Yeah, that could be it.