Donald Trump is scapegoating lunatic Michael Flynn over Russia – how will Flynn retaliate?
Michael Flynn, an erratic disgraced former military leader with a history of illegal behavior, is precisely the kind of shady guy you use if you’re Donald Trump and you need a underhanded go-between with Russia. But then you’ve got to reward the guy, which is why the unstable Flynn is currently Trump’s National Security Advisor. But what happens when the eternally enraged Flynn sloppily gets caught on Russia, as he did today, and Trump tries to scapegoat him? We’re now finding out.
Flynn, by any measure, appears to be a complete lunatic. He was the guy who was screaming crazy lies about Hillary Clinton in such a ragingly unhinged manner at the Republican National Convention that one half expected him to keel over in the middle of his speech. Flynn has also willfully and illegally leaked classified information on multiple occasions, including one instance where his boss wouldn’t sign off on his plan to leak classified into to Pakistan, and he did it anyway.
According to insider reports, Donald Trump has already had enough of Michael Flynn’s endless rambling during high level meetings, and Flynn has been rapidly becoming irrelevant despite his fairly high level title of National Security Advisor. But Trump probably would never would have fired him, just to make sure the erratic Flynn didn’t leak the Russia secrets in retaliation. Except now it turns out the intel community has caught Flynn for having illegally discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador before Trump took office, which means he has to be scapegoated. And that’s already underway.
Not My President • Impeach Trump
The blame game has already begun within the Trump administration. When Michael Flynn originally claimed that he had not discussed sanctions with Russia, Mike Pence rather strangely backed him up on it. But now that Flynn has been caught, Pence is suddenly claiming that he was just taking Flynn’s word for it. That means the vice president of the United States is already hanging Flynn out to try. Flynn has to be expecting that Donald Trump will do the same eventually. And because Flynn appears to be both vindictive and nuts, this may be about to get really interesting.
If Flynn senses that he’s going down for Russia anyway, he can simply go public with everything he knows about Trump’s and Pence’s involvement with Russia, and destroy the entire administration. Flynn also has less drastic options, such as insisting that he be allowed to keep his current job in exchange for remaining quiet – but in this scenario, as Flynn’s criminal actions with regard to Russia become more apparent, Trump would have a hard time explaining why he’s keeping the guy.
And that may be what breaks the entire Russia scandal wide open. At some point Trump will have to officially make Flynn the fall guy to try to wall himself off from the scandal. And at that point Flynn will have little reason not to rat out everyone involved. Throw in Flynn’s seemingly unstable nature, and there are now limitless ways in which this can all go wrong for Donald Trump.
