Last edited Sat May 6, 2017, 11:08 AM - Edit history (1)
The Trump team, knowing some of what Yates will say (in testimony they tried to prevent), is now making the remaining White House officials look good, and providing a somewhat plausible explanation for obtaining just the Kislyak dossier. But AP’s revelation that Trump’s people were copying documents from the SCIF that held the dossier raise questions about whether the reason it was obtained was to share the dossier. Neither story mentions what Adam Schiff has, which is that one really interesting detail will be the delay in ousting Flynn after Yates first told the White House of her concerns.
Both the stories leave out a detail the NYT previously reported that seems important, however:
that Kislyak meeting, which the spook-savvy Flynn and the young Kushner attended, led to a second and a third, ultimately leading Kushner to meet the FSB-trained head of a sanctioned bank.
Until now, the White House had acknowledged only an early December meeting between Mr. Kislyak and Mr. Kushner, which occurred at Trump Tower and was also attended by Michael T. Flynn, who would briefly serve as the national security adviser.
Later that month, though, Mr. Kislyak requested a second meeting, which Mr. Kushner asked a deputy to attend in his stead, officials said. At Mr. Kislyak’s request, Mr. Kushner later met with Sergey N. Gorkov, the chief of Vnesheconombank, which drew sanctions from the Obama administration after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia annexed Crimea and began meddling in Ukraine.
The subtext of taking the two Billingslea stories and the Sergey Gorkov one together is that Flynn — or even the President’s son-in-law — may have provided intelligence to the Russians, in events that led up to the closest thing we’ve seen to a possible quid pro quo.
In any case, the dossier seems either better suited to warning Kushner, not Flynn, of the dangers he was navigating, or a document that, if copied and handed to its subject, would be interesting though not devastating intelligence to share.
One final point: this story helps to explain why both the December 28 sanctions and the early January hack report were so awful; remember, too, when first announced, the press had the wrong location of the Long Island compound in question. At the time, I thought both were designed to be a document, any document, ones that didn’t reveal what the intelligence community actually knew (aside from the identities of the 35 expelled diplomats), particularly regarding who actually conducted the DNC hack. The AP story reveals Obama’s team was particularly worried Trump’s team would warn the Russians in time to dismantle some of the communications equipment at the two compounds. The crummy documents, plus the delay in informing Congress of the scope of the investigation until Flynn had been ousted, are both best explained by a concern that the National Security Advisor would share the information directly with Russia.
So will we learn that Flynn — or Kushner — did share such information?
MORE plus links:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/05/06/the-implications-of-the-competing-flynn-billingslea-stories/
ALSO Malcolm Nance on Joy's Show:
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