I refrained from jumping the gun this week on doing a "maybe Mike Flynn is cooperating with Special Counsel Mueller" post because that kind of thing is starting to aggravate, you know? Maybe the moon is a heretofore unknown species of green cheese that calcifies into a rocklike mass, huh? Maybe you've never seen Mother Theresa, allegedly deceased, and Lady Gaga in the same place for a reason, people. I don't want TrumpWorld Grab-bags to be about maybes, my babies. I want pleas, deals and indictments and promises of significant revelatory whatnot.
This is also why I refrained a bit from posting "Trump so mental" stuff in the past 36 hours, when Trump was basically being kind of extra, enough so that
"Is Trump losing control?" was a real concern. Trump, in a very short period of time, spread anti-Muslim propaganda from a small RW-UK party that basically amounted to a Fake News snuff film, propagated a somewhat defunct conspiracy theory that the host of an MSNBC morning show and former congressman, Joe Scarborough, was a potential murder suspect, and had leaks come out that he still believed in conspiracy bullshit--that he might have doubted that the Access Hollywood tape was really his voice, that he was still a Birther, etc. The idea of a
"duty to warn" re: Trump isn't new, and I have tried to refrain from taking fully seriously the idea that Trump's present behavior solely stems from some organic mental breakdown--he never was stable or well-behaved. I had a series of posts in 2016 titled :"The Trump Problem" where I detailed his basic unfitness for the job against a backdrop where the GOP base did not even have a metric for unfitness.
But it was not out of order to also suppose that the manic nature of Trump's behavior had to do with the knowledge that he had some bad news on his horizon. It is also the nature of a narcissist to deflect from bad news, but there are only so many ways to deflect from the news that the guy who Trump bruited as a
VP choice at one time and seriously did have as a foreign policy and national security advisor during his campaign and NSA for, like, a month, admitted to contacts with the Russian Ambassador, with the approval of a senior Trump transition personage (believed
to be Jared Kushner), to discuss something to do with Israeli settlements. And I don't know--on a different date? He was
on the horn with them about sanctions and possibly "Merry Christmas".
Flynn is maybe going to roll on all kinds of Trump transition folks. There is no reason to believe that Mike Pence (who, if he was not in the loop regarding Flynn's December phone calls in 2016 got told by Sally Yates that Flynn was a no-good) and Donald Trump had no idea that Flynn had foreign contacts with Russia and Turkey, and they probably knew he had lied about them,. And yet Pence publically said he knew of no one with Russian ties, and Trump called upon former FBI Director Comey to back off of Flynn.
It's one small guilty plea for Flynn about making false statements, but it's one giant leap in context about how the Trump circle's relationship with Russia is not at all kosher. These people have consistently lied about their relationships to Russia. As if there was a there "there" they preferred no one notice.
