Even While Pleading Guilty, Michael Flynn Invokes His Idea of Service

This article originally appeared on this site.

Last December 29th, Michael Flynn interrupted his Caribbean vacation to conduct a bit of diplomatic business. Earlier that day, Barack Obama, who was still President, had announced sanctions against Russia and the expulsion from the United States of nearly three dozen purported Russian spies—actions taken in response to Russia’s meddling in the 2016 Presidential election. Flynn and his boss, President-elect Donald Trump, who had appointed Flynn to be his national-security adviser, had made improving relations with Russia a campaign pledge. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump” during the race, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

Trump’s Inauguration was still a few weeks away, but, after Obama announced the sanctions, Flynn, who was in the Dominican Republic with his wife, apparently felt compelled to assure his contacts inside the Russian government not to worry. He spoke with Sergei Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, by phone. According to documents unsealed on Friday in federal court as part of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Flynn made a “request that Russia not escalate the situation.” Kislyak, presumably, carried that message to Putin, who subsequently announced that Russia would not retaliate; Kislyak later told Flynn that Putin’s decision was a result of Flynn’s request.

In 1799, President John Adams signed the Logan Act, prohibiting unauthorized citizens from conducting diplomacy on behalf of the United States. No one has ever been charged with violating the act. But Flynn, it seems, felt that his conversation with Kislyak was something he needed to lie to reporters and federal investigators about. On Friday, he pleaded guilty to “willfully and knowingly [making] materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements” to F.B.I. agents who asked him about his contacts with Kislyak. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

Almost immediately, Trump’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, sought to distance Trump and the White House from Flynn’s admission. In a statement, Cobb said that Flynn’s false statements to the F.B.I. “mirror” the ones he gave to White House officials. In other words, he implied, Flynn was bamboozling them all. “Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicate anyone other than Mr. Flynn,” Cobb added. Just after Cobb issued his statement, however, a more robust account of Flynn’s “statement of offense” was unsealed, detailing his contacts, before and after the Kislyak call, with “senior members” of Trump’s transition team, including a “very senior member.”

Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, released a statement of his own after news of his plea broke. Citing his thirty-three years in the Army, “including nearly five years in combat away from my family,” he asserted himself as, above all, a family man and a patriot. Of his criminal acts, he said, “I am working to set things right.” He added, “My guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel’s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country.”

In January, two days before Trump’s Inauguration, I met Flynn at a restaurant in Washington. I was working on a Profile of him for this magazine. I asked him then about his conversation with Kislyak. Dissembling, he started talking about the trip he took to Russia in 2015, which, he said, had been “so overblown” by the media. There, in Moscow, he said, he was entertained by a Russian military choir. It was unclear what any of this had to do with my question. (I later realized that members of that choir had died in a plane crash on Christmas Day, 2016, and Flynn told the Washington Post that he had called Kislyak to offer his condolences, though he made no such justification to me.)

“But when you called the ambassador?” I asked.

He replied, “I’ve had a relationship with him since my days at the D.I.A.”—the Defense Intelligence Agency, which Flynn directed from 2012 to 2014. Then, getting up, he said that he needed to run to another appointment. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

In another interview, on the phone, Flynn spoke to me at length about his commitment to serving his country. “Service was something our family was always encouraged to do,” he said. “I made some mistakes, sure. But it’s like being a priest, you know. I’ve been called to serve.” Washington is sometimes said to be a city of second chances. Flynn’s statement, saying that he is “working to set things right,” suggests that he hopes for one. Coöperating with Mueller’s team may well turn out to be his most significant act of public service yet.

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