RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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Woolsey: Flynn sought personal control over CIA reporting
By Greg Gordon and Peter Stone
ggordon@mcclatchydc.com
WASHINGTON
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn, shown here at a Feb. 10, 2017 White House event with President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Carolyn Kaster AP
Days after Donald Trump’s stunning election victory, Michael Flynn phoned former CIA Director James Woolsey about taking another stint as head of the spy agency in the new administration, but then added a condition, Woolsey said.
Flynn said the CIA director “would be expected to report to him,” not the president, Woolsey told McClatchy in a phone interview. Woolsey, who led the CIA in the first two years of the Clinton administration, said he promptly rejected the offer because there are times that he would need to “call on the president face to face.”
Washington attorney Robert Kelner, who is defending Flynn in the face of FBI, Pentagon and congressional investigations into his ties to Russia and Turkey, said Woolsey’s account is “false.” Kelner did not elaborate.
Spokespeople for the CIA and the White House declined to comment on whether Flynn sought to require CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who took the job in January, to report first to him. But Pompeo has been personally briefing Trump on a daily basis.
Flynn’s alleged maneuver with Woolsey, seemingly aimed at consolidating his control, could cause consternation now that more is known about the retired three-star Army general. At the time of his approach to Woolsey, Flynn’s Virginia-based consulting firm had been paid over $500,000 to secretly represent a Dutch company led by a Turkish businessman with ties to the Ankara government.
Flynn was forced to resign his post just 24 days into the Trump administration amid disclosures he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with the Kremlin’s U.S. ambassador in December. It later was revealed that he had received $45,000 for appearing in late 2015 at a Moscow gala and giving an interview to RT, the global television news operation bankrolled by the Kremlin.
Now Flynn is a central figure in multiple investigations into Russia’s 2016 cyber and espionage offensive aimed at interfering in the 2016 U.S. elections, ultimately by helping tip the presidential race from Democrat Hillary Clinton to Trump..
Flynn’s Turkey connection was not revealed publicly until March 7, nearly a month after he left the White House. Then he retroactively registered as a foreign agent because, his lawyer wrote, his actions may have benefited the government of Turkish President Recep Erdogan.
McClatchy reported May 17 that in the final days of the Obama administration, and without divulging the identity of his Turkish client, Flynn took a step directly benefiting Turkey. He asked the Obama administration to hold off plans to arm Syrian Kurds, a plan to which Turkey objected, for an invasion of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the terrorist group ISIS, short for the Islamic State.
Flynn’s resignation stemmed from misleading comments about whether he discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia during phone conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016.
On that day, three weeks before Trump took office, President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats and toughened other sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s government as punishment for a Kremlin cyber offensive aimed at interfering with last year’s U.S. elections and helping Trump win the Oval Office.
It’s not clear whether Trump okayed Flynn’s rerouting of the president’s longtime line of authority over the CIA, which provides daily intelligence updates on matters around the globe.
Flynn had listed Woolsey as a member of an advisory board to his company, Flynn Intel Group, but Woolsey said he never received any compensation and had no contract or official role. He did attend one meeting, in September, and said he left deeply troubled.
Woolsey said he arrived late to the meeting and found Flynn and some Turkish government officials brainstorming a plan to kidnap and fly to Turkey one of the country’s leading dissidents – Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara has accused of assisting in a failed military coup attempt last summer. Gulen is living in a heavily secured compound in Pennsylvania.
"They were working on the assumption that they could take Gulen," said Woolsey, who told the Wall Street Journal in March that such a scheme would be illegal.
Woolsey said Flynn began the Nov. 14 phone call, which occurred a couple of days before Flynn was formally named national security adviser, by saying the Trump administration would be “restructuring the intelligence community” and asked if he would “be willing to be director of the CIA.”
“I asked him a couple of questions about how things would work,” Woolsey said. “It was quite clear that he was going to be national security adviser, of course, and he expected the CIA director to report to him.”
Woolsey said he worked under that kind of arrangement during the Clinton administration, reporting to National Security Adviser Tony Lake, and while they got to be “very good friends,” he thought the structure only could work if the CIA director could go directly to the president when needed.
“He basically made it clear that I would report to him,” Woolsey said. “I said, ‘I don’t really want to do it that way.’ So we hung up and said, ‘Thanks a lot, good to talk to you. Goodbye.’”
Peter Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent
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Perfidy!!!!!!
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
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It reminds me of antisemitism: the Jews are guilty of everything.”
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@Ill
cosign?
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cosign?
ill
Superstar
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cosign?
100% though I don't think he should use that analogy as his government isn't the nicest to Jews either.
Russians didn't give us Trump. Americans did.
politico aint been the same since the axios split.
Tony D'Amato
It's all about the inches
Where is the Friday breaking news
Where is the Friday breaking news
BTW, Louise Mensch and Claude Taylor called this...yet again
Special counsel’s Trump investigation includes Manafort case
WASHINGTON (AP) — The special counsel investigating possible ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia’s government has taken over a separate criminal probe involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and may expand his inquiry to investigate the roles of the attorney general and deputy attorney general in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, The Associated Press has learned.
The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Manafort, who was forced to resign as Trump campaign chairman in August amid questions over his business dealings years ago in Ukraine, predated the 2016 election and the counterintelligence probe that in July began investigating possible collusion between Moscow and associates of Trump.
The move to consolidate the matters, involving allegations of kleptocracy of Ukrainian government funds, indicates that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is assuming a broad mandate in his new role running the sensational investigation. The expansiveness of Mueller’s investigation was described to the AP. No one familiar with the matter has been willing to discuss the scope of his investigation on the record because it is just getting underway and because revealing details could complicate its progress.
In an interview separately Friday with the AP, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein acknowledged that Mueller could expand his inquiry to include Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ and Rosenstein’s own roles in the decision to fire Comey, who was investigating the Trump campaign. Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller as special counsel to take over the investigation, wrote the memorandum intended to justify Trump’s decision to fire Comey. Sessions met with Trump and Rosenstein to discuss Trump’s decision to fire him despite Sessions’ pledge not to become involved in the Russia case.
Rosenstein told the AP that if he were to become a subject of Mueller’s investigation, he would recuse himself from any oversight of Mueller. Under Justice Department rules, Mueller is required to seek permission from Rosenstein to investigate additional matters other than ones already specified in the paperwork formally appointing Mueller.
“I’ve talked with Director Mueller about this,” Rosenstein said. “He’s going to make the appropriate decisions, and if anything that I did winds up being relevant to his investigation then, as Director Mueller and I discussed, if there’s a need from me to recuse I will.”
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment on the scope of the investigation.
Mueller, who spent 12 years as FBI director and served under Republican and Democratic presidents, was appointed as special counsel following the May 9 firing of Comey, who is expected to testify for the first time next week before the Senate.
Mueller’s assignment, detailed in a one-page order signed by Rosenstein, covers the federal investigation into possible links or coordination between Russia and associates of the Trump campaign but also “any matters that arose or may arise directly” from the probe. It would also extend to any allegations of perjury, witness intimidation or obstruction of justice uncovered during the course of the investigation.
As Mueller’s investigation begins, members of Congress are intensely interested in its direction and scope.
The Justice Department began looking at Manafort’s work in Ukraine around the beginning of 2014, as Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, was toppled amid protests of alleged corruption and Russian influence. Business records obtained by the AP show Manafort’s political consulting firm began working as early as 2004 for clients that variously included a political boss in Yanukovych’s party, a Ukrainian oligarch and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian businessman and longtime ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
A special counsel, by design, is constrained by the terms of his appointment to avoid boundless and perpetually open-ended investigations. In this case, though, Mueller’s mandate appears fairly broad, said Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and criminal law professor at Duke University.
“That investigation that’s named in the appointment is already one that has, as far as we can tell, a number of tentacles and offshoots that involves conduct over a fairly lengthy period of time involving a lot of people,” Buell said.
He said he did not expect Mueller to seek Rosenstein’s approval each time he wants to subpoena another new witness or pursue a new Russia-related investigative thread. The more difficult question would involve any allegations separate and apart from Russia, he said.
“This gives him the authority to pull on all kinds of string and see where they lead him,” Buell said. “As long as you’re following a string that’s connected to the string of Russian influence on the election — however that may have occurred, whoever that may have involved — would seem to fall within that appointment.”
Manafort’s work in Ukraine continued at least through the beginning of 2014, when Yanukovych’s government was ousted amid protests of widespread corruption and his rejection of a European trade deal in favor of one with Moscow. As the AP reported last year, that work included covertly directing a lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions in Washington. Following the AP’s reporting on emails in which Manafort deputy Rick Gates was overseeing the work, two lobbying firms involved in the project registered as foreign agents. Manafort has not done so, and a spokesman for him has declined to say if he will.
___
Associated Press writers Chad Day and Stephen Braun contributed to this report.
RitchieRatchett
Pro
The fact that he actually thought he could pull all this shyt off w/o a hitch........
#teamnobrainsMight've had a snowball's chance in hell if he could control those emotions/impulses & not aim n shoot @ his own feet erryday (see firing FBI director, openly admitting his reasons for doing so while throwing his whole staff under the bus etc., etc.)
that was excellent
