'Bodyguard of Lies': The Flynn Affair

In the “country of Descartes” one is used to seeing a logical rundown of events, what the French call the “thread of events” (”le fil des evenements”}.

Such appeared in France’s newspaper of record, Le Monde, in an article on February 18, from which the following chronology is drawn.

On December 29, 2016, after the presidential election but before the arrival of the new Republican Administration at the White House, Lt. Gen (ret.) Michael Flynn. the putative National Security Council advisor, initiated a telephone call to the Russian Ambassador at the UN. The call took place on the same day but after the Obama Administration announced measures to be taken against Russia for interference in the American election, including the expulsion of 35 Russian officials on post in Washington.

The next day, 30 December, to surprise throughout the world, President Vladimir Putin announced that he would not reply with tit-for-tat expulsions, as Russia and its predecessor, the USSR, had traditionally carried out.

On February 8, in an interview with the Washington Post, Flynn maintained that his encounter with the Russian Ambassador did not touch on the sanctions against Russia announced by President Obama on December 29. Unfortunately for Mr. Flynn, electronic interceptions of the conversation by the American security services. demonstrated quite the opposite

Mr. Flynn, who had also told the Vice President and others what he had said to the Washington Post (and which VP Pence had repeated publicly) was now obliged to go to Mr. Pence, claiming that what he had told him was due to a lapse of memory! As a consequence, Flynn was fired from his job.

Questions remain: who told Mr. Flynn, whose contacts with Russia were well known, to contact the Ambassador? Or did he do it on his own? Either way it was highly irregular, Russia being a longtime adversary of the US.