When NBC News reported on Sunday that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had enough evidence to indict Michael Flynn, few could have been especially surprised. Flynn’s indiscretions were well known long before he assumed the role of national security adviser in the Trump administration. Flynn is just one of the holdovers from an accidentally successful campaign who now find themselves in Mueller’s crosshairs. Most of Trump’s old guard should never have found themselves in the positions they occupied in the campaign, much less in the White House. The decision to hire them in the first place may yet prove Trump’s undoing.
Flynn was forced to resign his role as Trump’s first NSA after allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his contacts with Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., Sergei Kislyak. Given the extent of Flynn’s reckless conduct that was uncovered after his resignation, the Kislyak story soon began to feel like a pretext.
Flynn was dismissed as the head of Barack Obama’s Defense Intelligence Agency over managerial and temperamental issues. In December of 2015, Flynn traveled to Moscow to attend a celebration for RT (formerly “Russia Today”), a network for which he frequently served as an on-air commentator. Flynn refused to comment on whether he was paid for attending that event, where he was seated next to Vladimir Putin. We now know he was paid nearly $34,000 by the Russian state-owned media outlet, which he did not disclose when the DIA renewed his security clearance.
Following his departure from the Trump administration, Flynn retroactively registered as an agent working on behalf of the government of Turkey—a role he maintained, ostensibly, while serving as the president’s national security adviser and for which he was paid over $500,000. The New York Times learned that the Trump transition team was fully aware that Flynn was facing a federal investigation when he was appointed to lead the National Security Council.
Flynn did not disclose his relationship with Ankara when he wrote an op-ed in November of 2016 calling for the extradition of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s adversary, Fethullah Gülen, who Flynn called a “shady Islamic mullah.” Former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed to the Wall Street Journal that Flynn had discussed the prospect of forcibly extraditing Gülen with his Turkish counterparts in the autumn of 2016, but that remains hearsay. What has been confirmed, however, is the fact that Flynn told his Obama administration counterparts in December of 2016 to hold off on a proposal to lay siege to the de facto ISIS capital of Raqqa, which delayed the operation for months. Flynn’s decision coincided with Turkey’s desire to postpone that siege, which Ankara feared would leave Kurdish militias in control of vast swaths of formerly ISIS-held territory in Northern Syria.
Whether all this has a criminal-conduct dimension remains to be seen. What’s undeniable is that this is scandalous. It could have—and should have—prevented Flynn from assuming any role in the White House, much less one related to the maintenance of American national security. But Trump struggled with a dearth of talented Republican foreign-policy professionals—at least, talented Republican foreign-policy professionals who hadn’t already denounced him.
In March of 2016, 122 members of the GOP national-security community affixed their signatures to an open letter accusing Trump of being not just unsuited to the presidency but a “risk” to American national security. “Everybody who has signed a never-Trump letter or indicated an anti-Trump attitude is not going to get a job. And that’s most of the Republican foreign policy, national security, intelligence, homeland security, and Department of Justice experience,” said former George W. Bush administration official Paul Rosenzweig. That might explain why so many positions in the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security remain unfilled even now. Even Republican national-security professionals who never signed that letter but who criticized Trump in other venues have allegedly been frozen out of roles in the administration.
It wasn’t just the foreign-policy establishment that gave Trump the cold shoulder early on in the campaign. The GOP’s experienced political professionals, too, turned their back on the reality television star’s presidential vehicle, so Trump had to turn to those who would serve despite the risks. For example, it was clear even at the time of his ascension to serve as Trump campaign’s chairman that Paul Manafort was a scandal in the making.
When he assumed the helm of the Trump campaign, Manafort hadn’t worked at that level in American politics in 20 years. He had spent his time abroad, working for Putin’s puppet in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and the Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He made a fortune working for Bahamian Lynden Pindling who was suspected by the Bush-era Justice Department of taking bribes from drug cartels. In the 1990s Manafort was alleged to have received a payment in response to his work for French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who was implicated in an illegal sale of French submarine designs that Pakistan dubbed the Karachi Affair.
Manafort was also a scandalous figure at home. As Eli Lake has observed, Manafort was hauled before Congress in 1989 to answer for the charge that he bilked the system out of a subsidy that is supposed to be available only to low-income Americans. “When a Republican congressman remarked that the whole deal was sleazy,” Lake wrote, “Manafort replied: ‘We worked the system as it existed. I don’t think we did anything illegal or improper.’” Manafort is now facing down a federal indictment alleging a conspiracy to launder money and his making false statements to investigators.
Manafort is joined in the dock by Rick Gates, a Trump associate and Manafort aide who advised the Trump campaign and inaugural committee. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign-affairs advisor with no credits to his name, already pleaded guilty to a Mueller-related charge and is working with investigators. Other fame-starved denizens of Trump’s B Team, like Carter Page, may also soon find themselves in Mueller’s crosshairs.
You go to war with the army you’ve got, and the pool of talent from which candidate Trump could draw was decidedly shallow. Most of the president’s “originals” have been purged from the administration, but some of that contingent’s more exasperating members cannot be so easily jettisoned. Bad judgment is no crime, but it’s not a preferred quality in an American president. The closer Mueller gets to Flynn, however, the closer he gets to the administration and the president. Trump’s B Team may yet prove his undoing.
