Trump Officials Repeatedly Pushed Flynn's Bogus Story Of Russia Contacts
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND and SAM THIELMAN Published DECEMBER 5, 2017 6:00 AM
So many of them knew.
As court filings and emails emerge from the Mueller probe and dogged reporting, Trump officials who denied that Michael Flynn would stoop to renegotiating the outgoing administration’s sanctions on Russia turn out to have been privately informed of Flynn’s pre-inauguration diplomacy in real time.
The Trump camp’s public posture about Flynn’s proposal to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak not to retaliate for Obama’s new sanctions has been a rapidly moving target. The conversation didn’t take place at all, according to unnamed Trump administration sources in January. Or they did, but the two didn’t talk about sanctions. Or they were about sanctions, but only in the context of “outreach to foreign dignitaries,” as White House lawyer Ty Cobb put it.
“It would have been political malpractice not to discuss sanctions,” Cobb told the New York Times in a report published Saturday. There is “nothing to hide,” according to the President on Monday, which doesn’t go very far to explain why so many spent so long trying to hide it.
TIMELINE
Jan. 12: A column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius revealed for the first time that Flynn and Kislyak spoke to each other on Dec. 29, the day President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on the Kremlin for interfering in the 2016 election. Though the column did not report what Flynn and Kislyak discussed, Ignatius asked whether Flynn’s comments could have “undercut the U.S. sanctions” and if the spirit of the Logan Act was “violated.”
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/timeline-trump-associates-change-story-flynn-kislyak-sanctions-call
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