Who Told Flynn to Call Russia?

[flamingdem]

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/who-told-flynn-to-call-russia-214782

Quote:
This: "If... he called 5 times in a single day, then he was on a mission, and probably not of his own devising."

Hours after national security adviser Michael Flynn resigned amid reports that he misled top officials about his pre-inauguration talks with the Russian ambassador, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to encourage everyone to move on. “The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington?” he tweeted out Tuesday morning.

In a sense, Trump is right: The real story is not Flynn. But it isn’t government leaks, either. No, the “real story here” is Trump himself—and the continuing mystery of his ties to Russia.

As official Washington and the press home in on the permanent disarray in the White House, whether the disgraced Flynn broke the law and who will succeed him after his three-week tenure, the key question is getting lost in the shuffle: Who told Flynn to call Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States? Because I’m convinced Flynn didn’t do it of his own accord. Flynn is a bit player in a much larger story regarding the president’s relationship with the Kremlin, and it’s this story the press needs to focus on.

There is little doubt that Trump elevated Flynn because of his loyalty and the optics of having a recently retired three-star general parroting his views, which few other generals of that rank would consider doing. But Flynn was no grand strategist. He would not have been capable of running a complex political realignment with Russia, and he was woefully ill-cast for the role of national security adviser. An army intelligence officer who had spent most of his career in the Middle East and Afghanistan, Flynn had no background in diplomacy, not to mention Asian or European affairs. And it strains credulity that someone with such limited experience was acting on his own initiative when he spoke with Kislyak on December 29, the day of the sanctions announcement. If, as reported, he called five times in a single day, then he was on a mission, and probably not of his own devising.

My view is informed by several years of knowing and following Flynn. After being fired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—where he was already behaving erratically—Flynn slid into ever stranger behavior.

During a weeklong visit that I arranged for Flynn here at Dartmouth College in April 2015, he repeatedly made oddball remarks. I had known Flynn as a capable and genial colleague from my time in government, and I was surprised by the change I saw. He was warm and engaging, especially with students, but his views on Islam and the terrorist threat seemed increasingly extreme—a line about Islam not being a religion but a political ideology, which he would use frequently in later months, struck me as a sign that he had moved beyond mainstream U.S. government thinking. But what stuck out most was his fixation on Iran. His visit coincided with the sprint to the end of the framework negotiations for the nuclear deal, and Flynn declared repeatedly in public events and private discussions that Iran’s perfidy was so diabolical, it “didn’t deserve a place at the negotiating table.” When asked who should negotiate on behalf of Iran, he had no answer but insisted it shouldn’t be Iran. (Full disclosure: Despite the troubling remarks, which left faculty and students bemused, Flynn was a fine guest, meeting with everyone and, remarkably, declining the negotiated honorarium for his weeklong stay.) MORE AT LINK

[still_one]

1. Obviously it was Obama