Flynn Drama Has All The Intrigue Of A Russian Spy Thriller - by Gene Lyons
Gene Lyons
February 15, 2017 7:15 am
If the late, great Donald Westlake had written spy thrillers instead of crime capers, they’d read a lot like the opening weeks of the Trump administration. My favorite Westlake novel is “Bank Shot,” in which a gang conspires to steal a temporary bank building by towing it off with a truck, only to confront the reality—oops!—that Long Island is indeed an island, and they can’t haul the thing to the upstate boondocks without encountering police road blocks. That’s when things get complicated.
Well, things have suddenly gotten complicated for the Trump White House and its timid enablers among congressional Republicans.
Let’s put it this way: the simplest explanation that fits the facts could be that President Trump encouraged national security adviser Michael Flynn to sweet-talk the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions imposed by President Obama for interfering in our presidential election, and then urged him to brazen it out when word of their improper conversations leaked to the press.
Trump, see, would likely have been ignorant of the fact—as he’s ignorant of so much—that NSA would monitor the calls and that their contents would alarm intelligence professionals. Assuming minimal competence, Gen. Flynn—the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—surely knew that the Russian ambassador’s phone conversations were intercepted. But he may have assumed that the president could protect him. Indeed, until the Washington Post put well-sourced accounts of those conversations on the front page, it appeared that the White House would brazen it out.
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http://www.nationalmemo.com/flynn-drama-mirrors-russian-spy-thriller/