Trump Team Knew Flynn Was Under Investigation Before He Came to White House

Authored by nytimes.com and submitted by SallyYatesIsAHero

The White House declined to comment on whether officials there had known about Mr. Flynn’s legal troubles before the inauguration.

Mr. Flynn, a retired general, is one of a handful of Trump associates under scrutiny in intertwined federal investigations into their financial links to foreign governments and whether any of them helped Russia interfere in the presidential election.

In congressional testimony, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, has confirmed the existence of a “highly significant” investigation into possible collusion between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russian operatives to sway the presidential election. The pace of the investigations has intensified in recent weeks, with a veteran espionage prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, now leading a grand jury inquiry in Northern Virginia that is scrutinizing Mr. Flynn’s foreign lobbying and has begun issuing subpoenas to businesses that worked with Mr. Flynn and his associates.

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The New York Times has reviewed one of the subpoenas. It demands all “records, research, contracts, bank records, communications” and other documents related to work with Mr. Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group, the business he set up after he was forced out as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.

The subpoena also asks for similar records about Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman who is close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and is chairman of the Turkish-American Business Council. There is no indication that Mr. Alptekin is under investigation.

Signed by Dana J. Boente, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, the subpoena instructs the recipient to direct any questions about its contents to Mr. Van Grack.

Mr. Van Grack, a national security prosecutor based at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, has experience conducting espionage investigations. He prosecuted a businessman for illegally exporting thousands of sensitive electronics components to Iran and a suspected hacker in the Syrian Electronic Army. In 2015, he prosecuted a Virginia man for acting as an unregistered agent of Syria’s intelligence services.

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According to people who have talked to Mr. Flynn about the case, he sees the Justice Department’s investigation as part of an effort by the Obama administration and its holdovers in the government to keep him out of the White House. In his view, this effort began immediately after the election, when President Barack Obama, who had fired Mr. Flynn as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Mr. Trump that he would have profound concerns about Mr. Flynn’s becoming a top national security aide.

The people close to Mr. Flynn said he believed that when that warning did not dissuade Mr. Trump from making him national security adviser, the Justice Department opened its investigation into his lobbying work. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering Justice Department or White House officials.

The investigation stems from the work Mr. Flynn did for Inovo BV, a Dutch company owned by Mr. Alptekin, the Turkish businessman. On Aug. 9, Mr. Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group signed a contract with Inovo for $600,000 over 90 days to run an influence campaign aimed at discrediting Fethullah Gulen, an reclusive cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and whom Mr. Erdogan has accused of orchestrating a failed coup in Turkey last summer.

When he was hired by Mr. Alptekin, Mr. Flynn did not register as a foreign agent, as required by law when an American represents the interests of a foreign government. Only in March did he file a retroactive registration with the Justice Department because his lawyer, Robert K. Kelner, said that “the engagement could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.”

Trump campaign officials first became aware of a problem with Mr. Flynn’s business dealings in early November. On Nov. 8, the day of the election, Mr. Flynn wrote an op-ed in The Hill that advocated improved relations between Turkey and the United States and called Mr. Gulen “a shady Islamic mullah.”

“If he were in reality a moderate, he would not be in exile, nor would he excite the animus of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government,” the op-ed said.

Days later, after an article in The Daily Caller revealed that the Flynn Intel Group had a contract with Inovo, a Trump campaign lawyer held a conference call with members of the Flynn Intel Group, according to one person with knowledge of the call. The lawyer, William McGinley, was seeking more information about the nature of the group’s foreign work and wanted to know whether Mr. Flynn had been paid for the op-ed.

Mr. McGinley now works in the White House as cabinet secretary and deputy assistant to the president.

The Justice Department also took notice. The op-ed in The Hill raised suspicions that Mr. Flynn was working as a foreign agent, and in a letter dated Nov. 30, the Justice Department notified Mr. Flynn that it was scrutinizing his lobbying work.

Mr. Flynn hired a lawyer a few weeks later. By Jan. 4, the day Mr. Flynn informed Mr. McGahn of the inquiry, the Justice Department was investigating the matter.

Mr. Kelner then followed up with another call to the Trump transition’s legal team. He ended up leaving a message, identifying himself as Mr. Flynn’s lawyer. According to a person familiar with the case, Mr. Kelner did not get a call back until two days later, on Jan. 6.

Around the time of Mr. Flynn’s call with Mr. McGahn, the F.B.I. began investigating Mr. Flynn on a separate matter: phone conversations he had in late December with Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Current and former American officials said that, on the calls, Mr. Flynn discussed sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia for disrupting the November election.

After news of the calls became public, Mr. Flynn misled Mr. Pence about what he had discussed with Mr. Kislyak, telling him that the two had only exchanged holiday pleasantries.

Days after the inauguration, Ms. Yates, the acting attorney general, spoke with Mr. McGahn at the White House, telling him Justice Department lawyers believed that Mr. Flynn might be vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Since the Russians knew that Mr. Flynn had lied to the vice president, she said, they might have leverage over him.

LYL_Homer on May 18th, 2017 at 14:17 UTC »

Whenever Flynn's name comes up I think about an interview I heard on NPR when his name was out there as a possibility.

http://www.npr.org/2016/11/18/502568434/trump-offers-key-posts-to-sen-sessions-rep-pompeo-retired-lt-gen-flynn

(Audio exchange with Chayes starts at 6:20 on their player.)

CHAYES: He was. My assessment at the time was this guy was brilliant at bringing information in, you know. I mean, he was collecting information from all quarters. He had a bunch of people around him, some of whom would make some of us raise our eyebrows. My assessment at the time was, wow, he's an intel officer. He's got to be a dog catcher. The problem was he didn't seem to know which of his mutts could actually hunt, and that was - a really consistent feature was constant contradictions.

If you listened to him talking for 10 minutes, you'd hear him contradict himself two or three times. Again, as an intelligence officer, the way I rationalized it was, well, he's got to get this stuff inside his brain. The problem is that can lead to very contradictory both statements and, potentially, policies.

INSKEEP: Which is interesting because one of the jobs of a national security adviser, of course, is to keep things orderly and make sure that the president gets information in an orderly fashion. Any sense of what he was like as a manager?

CHAYES: Orderly, he was not.

(LAUGHTER)

and

INSKEEP: In just a few seconds, as someone who knows General Flynn, when you heard news of his selection, were you reassured, happy, disturbed, troubled, many questions - how would you phrase it?

CHAYES: My heart sank.

INSKEEP: Really? Why?

CHAYES: Everything I just said. The NSA is an institution that, first of all, has to keep the trains running. That's the first job of the national security adviser - is to make that National Security Council run.

INSKEEP: OK.

CHAYES: Flynn can't make anything run.

CodgerConsulting on May 18th, 2017 at 13:43 UTC »

Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” who he consults with. “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things. I know what I’m doing and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are," Trump said. “But my primary consultant is myself and I have a good instinct for this stuff."

Justtryme90 on May 18th, 2017 at 13:28 UTC »

Is Trump going to tweet about the failing New York times again? The only one failing is you Mr. "President." You're a disgrace to the office, a disgrace to the country, and worse a disgrace as a man.