The Daily 202: 10 unanswered questions after Michael Flynn's resignation
(emphasis exists in the original article)
By James Hohmann February 14 at 9:19 AM
THE BIG IDEA: President Trump should thank his lucky stars that Republicans control both chambers of Congress, because Democrats would be announcing a Benghazi-style inquest today if they could.
Michael Flynn lost his job as national security adviser after just 24 days less because he offered potentially-illegal secret assurances to Russia’s ambassador, an adversary of the United States, than because he gave a false accounting of those conversations to his colleagues in the White House, particularly Vice President Mike Pence.
This imbroglio will make it politically untenable for Trump to scale back sanctions on Moscow now. The blowback from hawkish Republicans in the Senate would be too intense, hobbling the rest of the president’s agenda. The episode will probably give added momentum to John McCain’s effort to codify existing sanctions into law so that the administration cannot unilaterally unwind them. But there is much we still do not know. Here are 10 questions that have become critical in the wake of last night’s news:
1. What, if anything, did Trump authorize Flynn to tell the Russians before his inauguration?
2. Why was Trump planning to stand by Flynn? “One senior White House official said that Trump did not fire Flynn; rather, Flynn made the decision to resign on his own late Monday evening because of what this official said was ‘the cumulative effect’ of damaging news coverage about his conversations with the Russian envoy,” Greg Miller and Philip Rucker report. “This official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the situation, said Trump does not relish firing people — despite his television persona on ‘The Apprentice’ — and had intended to wait several more days before deciding whether to seek Flynn’s resignation. ‘There obviously were a lot of issues, but the president was hanging in there,’ this official said.”
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