Michael Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the FBI, is Jared Kushner next?

  As you all know by now, Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty on one count of lying to the FBI about a meeting he had with a Russian ambassador in December. Here is more:

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to one felony count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador last year, bringing the special counsel’s investigation into the 2016 election deeper into President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Prosecutors said Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December 2016 came after input from at least two other top members of Trump’s presidential transition team.

  The one bright side to this story, if there is any, is that this occurred after the election and has nothing to do with the Trump campaign colluding with Russia to sway the election, even though you would not know this by listening to the mainstream media.

  This could be troublesome for the President because it is being reported that Michael Flynn was ordered to meet with the Russian ambassador by somebody in the Trump team and it appears as if it might have been Jared Kushner.

A Republican close to the White House indicated that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, was one of the transition officials named in the Flynn plea documents and that K.T. McFarland — who would go on to become deputy national security adviser and is now the president’s nominee for ambassador to Singapore — was the other.

  I wrote in a previous post when we learned Michael Flynn’s lawyers would no longer be communicating with Donald Trump’s lawyers that this could signal trouble for Jared Kushner and now it looks like this might be the case.

  I think Jared Kushner is in real trouble here but that is speculation on my part. But this is where the reporting get shady and starts to take on an agenda driven angle because all the news outlets are tying this story to Russia collusion during the election and it happened in the article I used as reference in this post as well:

The plea also represents a devastating moment for the Trump White House, which has at various times dismissed Russian interference in the election as “fake news” and predicted that the investigation would wrap up by the end of the year.

  This paragraph is intentionally deceptive and I believe it is shoddy journalism: this meeting occurred after the election so what does it have to do with Russian interference during the election? Politico would have us believe this meeting was part of the effort to influence an election which was already won and that is simply not the case. The one true statement in that paragraph is that this investigation will not be concluded by the end of the year.

     But having said that it appears as if the Trump transition team was trying to undermine the sitting President by assuring Russia there was a new boss in town, so do not worry about what Barack Obama is doing because it will be different after the inauguration. All President-elects receive congratulatory calls from foreign nations, and most likely discuss what the future will be under a new regime, so the question is did this cross the line?

 In my opinion this is not much different from Barack Obama telling Russian President Dmitri Medvedev he would have more flexibility to negotiate after the 2012 election with the one difference being that he was President at the time. But even that is a small distinction because at the time Barack Obama did not know he was going to be President when he made this statement because this was during the campaign while when this meeting occurred Michael Flynn knew Donald Trump was going to be the President in a matter of days.

  Still, if I were Jared Kushner I would be very worried and if I were Donald Trump I would be thinking that this is starting to hit a little too close to home to be comfortable.

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium