Young voters look to play key role in Georgia runoffs, Senate control
“As a voter in Georgia, I never felt more like my vote counted than this past election,” one college student said.
By Caitlin Fichtel, Emma Diede, Allison Mina Park and Allan Smith. December 5, 2020.
Juliet Eden, the Communications Director for the University of Georgia’s “Fair Fight” chapter volunteered to be a poll worker on Election Day. Courtesy Juliet Eden.
Katarina Flicker, an Emory University junior, took the entire fall semester off to organize for Georgia Democrats, helping register other students to vote.
And even though November’s election is over — with President-elect Joe Biden flipping the state blue for the first time since 1992 — Flicker isn’t finished. She’s now working closely with the Young Democrats of Emory to register even more people ahead of Georgia’s two high-stakes Senate runoff races, the outcome of which will determine which party controls the Senate.
During the general election, voters 18-29 made up 20 percent of the Georgia electorate, according to NBC News exit polls. As the Jan. 5 runoffs draw closer, young Georgians on both sides of the aisle are working to mobilize their peers to vote again — or for the first time in their lives.
“I think that teenage complacency is something that has been trendy,” Flicker, 20, said. “But seeing the way that my generation, in particular, has stood up and fought for what we believe in … that is how you make change.”
Katarina Flicker took her fall semester off to work as a field organizer for the Democratic Party of Georgia aiding in both virtual and in-person events, such as the canvassing and merchandise give away event seen here. Courtesy Katarina Flicker
Georgia natives Grace Hall, 20, and Juliet Eden, 21, are students at the University of Georgia in Athens. They serve as president and communications director, respectively, for the college’s “Fair Fight” chapter, the political action committee founded by Stacey Abrams aimed at mitigating voter suppression.
The organization’s primary goal ahead of the runoffs, they said, is to educate voters about the steps they must take in order to ensure their votes are counted, such as checking to make sure they have not been purged from voter rolls.
“I think the entire country is looking at Georgia right now,” Hall, a junior, said.
In a tight general election contest, none of the candidates in Georgia’s two Senate races reached the 50 percent threshold to win outright, sending both elections to a runoff in accordance with state law. Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler face Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively.
Eden, a senior, said that she has “never felt more like my vote counted than this past election because of how close things were.”
Madison Potts, a 21-year-old senior at Kennesaw State University and president of the school’s chapter of the NAACP, said she’s been working on helping get fellow students registered and providing them with information on how to acquire their absentee ballots if they are away from home.
Potts said she’s been involved in activism since she was 14, attending protests and encouraging other students to become more politically active. She said she’s noticed that “the energy, amongst young people especially, is bigger and better than ever before.”
“I know young people in Georgia have really decided this past election, and encouraging them to participate in this runoff and be sure to show up in ways we never have, it’s been easier than what it has been in previous years,” she said. “So I’m grateful for the new wave of energy around elections, around voter participation and activism.”
Of Georgia voters who are ages 18-29 in 2020, 56 percent voted for Biden while 43 percent voted for Trump, according to NBC News exit polling. Black voters made up 28 percent of Georgia voters under 30, and they voted 76 percent for Biden and 23 percent for Trump.
The Democratic Senate candidates are making a concerted effort to turn out the youngest voters — those who were not old enough to vote in November but will be eligible come January. According to The Civics Center, an organization dedicated to youth civic engagement, this applies to 23,000 Georgians.
During a virtual rally on Friday, Ossoff said the election is “going to come down to youth turnout, so I am calling on young people to make a plan to vote.”
“Make sure that you vote and make sure that everybody in your circle votes,” Warnock added.
Ossoff held a get-out-the-vote rally aimed at young voters and students in Cobb County on Thursday, not far from Kennesaw State University’s campus. At that event, Jonathan Alvarez, a 20-year-old student at Georgia State University, said in an interview that he “wasn’t really interested in politics” ahead of the 2016 election.
“But over the course of the past four years, I’ve seen the real shift that’s happened in the presidency, obviously in the White House,” he said. “And with how active [President Donald] Trump is on social media and on Twitter and things like that, it brings out more people to see what he’s saying in real time, which made, I feel like, a lot of my generation more interested in politics. Because when you open the front page of Twitter and you see your president talking, you’re always pretty much in the loop.”
But Alvarez has also been intrigued by a changing Georgia, once an afterthought for Democrats that in recent years has become one of the most hotly contested battlegrounds.
“Seeing in 2018 finally with how close Stacey Abrams was to winning, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, things really are changing in Georgia,” he said. “And so, it was just like, I’ve seen the baby steps and I’ve seen the giant leaps we’ve made.”
Jon Ossoff appears at a Zoom phone bank organized by the College Democrats of America.Courtesy Carter Yost.
While some young people are not old enough to vote in the runoffs, they are still working to make a difference, such as co-leader of the “Students for Ossoff and Warnock” organization Ishani Peddi, 17, from Peachtree, Georgia.
“It’s very fulfilling to realize that young people, and me as a young person, I’m able to actually make change and make a difference, and fight for issues that I care about by helping to elect these representatives and these elected officials that are actually going to put forth effective legislation, and bring about change in America,” she said.
This dedication to political activism spans across party lines, with youth activists signing up to volunteer for the upcoming Senate runoffs for both the Republican and Democratic candidates.
Gurtej Narang, 20, a junior at Georgia State University and the treasurer of the Georgia Association of College Republicans, said he believes it is important that the Senate remains in Republican hands now that Democrats will control both the White House and the House of Representatives. His organization is launching “get out the vote” initiatives and encouraging members to help make calls, ring doorbells, and distribute important information about the candidates to voters across the state.
Jaylan Scott, 20, is the executive vice president of the Young Democrats of Georgia, an organization working to register even more young voters in the state ahead of the runoffs.
“We really have to magnify how major this race is to the United States Senate, the weight of balances, they really depend on if we can get young people out to vote in Georgia,” he said.
Georgia State University senior Alexis Lopez, 21, plans to continue to work with campus organizations to encourage young voters to make sure their voices are heard after interning with Congresswoman-elect Nikema Williams’ campaign.
“We feel very passionate about making sure that our justice system is actually just and is making sure that we’re getting rid of the systemic racism that affects that system, and also making sure that we are creating a country that works for us and represents who we are,” she said.
Georgia native Caroline Hakes, a senior at the George Washington University, is volunteering and voting in the upcoming runoff races. Her work with the GW College Republicans has increased her political passion.
“It’s really easy to feel like your voice doesn’t matter when you are so young, there are a lot of people who say to sit back and let the grownups do it … I really think that people need to understand just how important it is to have a say in their government,” she said.
Caitlin Fichtel is a New York-based reporter for NBC News’ Social Newsgathering team.
Emma Diede is an intern with NBC News’ Social Newsgathering team.
Allison Mina Park is an intern with NBC News’ Social Newsgathering team. She previously interned with “Meet the Press.”
Arctic Ocean: climate change is flooding the remote north with light – and new species
Authors
Jorgen Berge, Vice Dean for Research, Arctic and Marine Biology, University of Tromsø
Carlos Duarte, Adjunct Professor of Marine Ecology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Dorte Krause-Jensen, Professor, Marine Ecology, Aarhus University
Karen Filbee-Dexter, Research Fellow in Marine Ecology, Université Laval
Kimberly Howland, Research Scientist/Adjunct University Professor, Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR)
Philippe Archambault, Professor & Scientific Director of ArcticNet, Université Laval
Disclosure statement
Jørgen Berge receives funding from the Norwegian Research Council (300333).
Carlos Duarte receives funding from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and the Independent Research Fund of Denmark.
Dorte Krause-Jensen receives funding from various governmental research funds, such as the Independent Research Fund, Denmark, and private research funds, including the Velux Foundations.
Karen Filbee-Dexter receives funding from ArcticNet, the Norwegian Blue Forest Network, the Australian Research Council, and the Norwegian Research Council (BlueConnect).
Kimberly Howland receives funding from Fisheries and Ocean Canada; Natural Resources Canada and Polar Knowledge Canada.
Philippe Archambault receives funding from ArcticNet.
A boat navigates at night next to large icebergs in eastern Greenland. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
At just over 14 million square kilometers, the Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world’s oceans. It is also the coldest. An expansive raft of sea ice floats near its center, expanding in the long, cold, dark winter, and contracting in the summer, as the Sun climbs higher in the sky.
Every year, usually in September, the sea ice cover shrinks to its lowest level. The tally in 2020 was a meagre 3.74 million square kilometers, the second-smallest measurement in 42 years, and roughly half of what it was in 1980. Each year, as the climate warms, the Arctic is holding onto less and less ice.
The effects of global warming are being felt around the world, but nowhere on Earth are they as dramatic as they are in the Arctic. The Arctic is warming two to three times faster than any other place on Earth, ushering in far-reaching changes to the Arctic Ocean, its ecosystems and the 4 million people who live in the Arctic.
We bring the expertise of academics to the public.
Some of them are unexpected. The warmer water is pulling some species further north, into higher latitudes. The thinner ice is carrying more people through the Arctic on cruise ships, cargo ships and research vessels. Ice and snow can almost entirely black out the water beneath it, but climate change is allowing more light to flood in.
Artificial light in the polar night
Light is very important in the Arctic. The algae which form the foundation of the Arctic Ocean’s food web convert sunlight into sugar and fat, feeding fish and, ultimately, whales, polar bears and humans.
At high latitudes in the Arctic during the depths of winter, the Sun stays below the horizon for 24 hours. This is called the polar night, and at the North Pole, the year is simply one day lasting six months, followed by one equally long night.
Researchers studying the effects of ice loss deployed moored observatories – anchored instruments with a buoy — in an Arctic fjord in the autumn of 2006, before the fjord froze. When sampling started in the spring of 2007, the moorings had been in place for almost six months, collecting data throughout the long and bitter polar night.
What they detected changed everything.
The polar night can last for weeks and even months in the high Arctic.Michael O. Snyder, Author provided
Life in the dark
At that time, scientists assumed the polar night was utterly uninteresting. A dead period in which life lies dormant and the ecosystem sinks into a dark and frigid standby mode. Not much was expected to come of these measurements, so researchers were surprised when the data showed that life doesn’t pause at all.
Arctic zooplankton — tiny microscopic animals that eat algae — take part in something called diel vertical migration beneath the ice and in the dead of the polar night. Sea creatures in all the oceans of the world do this, migrating to depth during the day to hide from potential predators in the dark, and surfacing at night to feed.
Organisms use light as a cue to do this, so they shouldn’t logically be able to during the polar night. We now understand the polar night to be a riot of ecological activity. The normal rhythms of daily life continue in the gloom. Clams open and close cyclically, seabirds hunt in almost total darkness, ghost shrimps and sea snails gather in kelp forests to reproduce, and deep-water species such as the helmet jellyfish surface when it’s dark enough to stay safe from predators.
For most of the organisms active during this period, the Moon, stars and aurora borealis likely give important cues that guide their behavior, especially in parts of the Arctic not covered by sea ice. But as the Arctic climate warms and human activities in the region ramp up, these natural light sources will in many places be invisible, crowded out by much stronger artificial light.
The northern lights dance in the sky over Tromsø, Norway. Muratart/Shutterstock
Artificial light
Almost a quarter of all land masses are exposed to scattered artificial light at night, as it’s reflected back to the ground from the atmosphere. Few truly dark places remain, and light from cities, coastlines, roads and ships is visible as far as outer space.
Even in sparsely populated areas of the Arctic, light pollution is noticeable. Shipping routes, oil and gas exploration and fisheries extend into the region as the sea ice retreats, drawing artificial light into the otherwise inky black polar night.
Creatures which have adapted to the polar night over millions of years are now suddenly exposed to artificial light.Michael O. Snyder, Author provided
No organisms have had the opportunity to properly adapt to these changes – evolution works on a much longer timescale. Meanwhile, the harmonic movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun have provided reliable cues to Arctic animals for millennia. Many biological events, such as migration, foraging and breeding are highly attuned to their gentle predictability.
In a recent study carried out in the high Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, between mainland Norway and the north pole, the onboard lights of a research vessel were found to affect fish and zooplankton at least 200 metres down. Disturbed by the sudden intrusion of light, the creatures swirling beneath the surface reacted dramatically, with some swimming towards the beam, and others swimming violently away.
It’s difficult to predict the effect artificial light from ships newly navigating the ice-free Arctic will have on polar night ecosystems that have known darkness for longer than modern humans have existed. How the rapidly growing human presence in the Arctic will affect the ecosystem is concerning, but there are also unpleasant questions for researchers. If much of the information we’ve gathered about the Arctic came from scientists stationed on brightly lit boats, how “natural” is the state of the ecosystem we have reported?
Research in the Arctic could change considerably over the coming years to reduce light pollution.Michael O. Snyder, Author provided
Arctic marine science is about to enter a new era with autonomous and remotely operated platforms, capable of operating without any light, making measurements in complete darkness.
Underwater forests
As sea ice retreats from the shores of Greenland, Norway, North America and Russia, periods with open water are getting longer, and more light is reaching the sea floor. Suddenly, coastal ecosystems that have been hidden under ice for 200,000 years are seeing the light of day. This could be very good news for marine plants like kelp – large brown seaweeds that thrive in cold water with enough light and nutrients.
Anchored to the sea floor and floating with the tide and currents, some species of kelp can grow up to 50 meters (175 feet) – about the same height as Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London. But kelp are typically excluded from the highest latitudes because of the shade cast by sea ice and its scouring effect on the seabed.
Badderlocks, or winged kelp, off the coast of Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic.Ignacio Garrido/ArcticKelp, Author provided
These lush underwater forests are set to grow and thrive as sea ice shrinks. Kelp are not a new arrival to the Arctic though. They were once part of the traditional Greenlandic diet, and polar researchers and explorers observed them along northern coasts more than a century ago.
Some species of kelp may have colonized Arctic coasts after the last ice age, or spread out from small pockets where they’d held on. But most kelp forests in the Arctic are smaller and more restricted to patches in deeper waters, compared to the vast swathes of seaweed that line coasts like California’s in the US.
A diver explores a four-metre-high sugar kelp forest off Southampton Island, Canada.Ignacio Garrido/ArcticKelp, Author provided
Recent evidence from Norway and Greenland shows kelp forests are already expanding and increasing their ranges poleward, and these ocean plants are expected to get bigger and grow faster as the Arctic warms, creating more nooks for species to live in and around. The full extent of Arctic kelp forests remains largely unseen and uncharted, but modelling can help determine how much they have shifted and grown in the Arctic since the 1950s.
Known locations of kelp forests and global trends in predicted average summer surface temperature increase over next two decades, according to IPCC models. Filbee-Dexter et al. (2018), Author provided
A new carbon sink
Although large seaweeds come in all shapes and sizes, many are remarkably similar to trees, with long, trunk-like but flexible bodies called stipes. The kelp forest canopy is filled with the flat blades like leaves, while holdfasts act like roots by anchoring the seaweed to rocks below.
Some types of Arctic kelp can grow over ten meters and form large and complex canopies suspended in the water column, with a shaded and protected understorey. Much like forests on land, these marine forests provide habitats, nursery areas and feeding grounds for many animals and fish, including cod, pollack, crabs, lobsters and sea urchins.
Kelp forests offer lots of nooks and crannies and surfaces to settle on, making them rich in wildlife.Ignacio Garrido/ArcticKelp, Author provided
Kelp are fast growers, storing carbon in their leathery tissue as they do. So what does their expansion in the Arctic mean for the global climate? Like restoring forests on land, growing underwater kelp forests can help to slow climate change by diverting carbon from the atmosphere.
Better yet, some kelp material breaks off and is swept out of shallow coastal waters and into the deep ocean where it’s effectively removed from the Earth’s carbon cycle. Expanding kelp forests along the Earth’s extensive Arctic coasts could become a growing carbon sink that captures the CO₂ humans emit and locks it away in the deep sea.
What’s happening with kelp in the Arctic is fairly unique – these ocean forests are embattled in most other parts of the world. Overall, the global extent of kelp forests is on a downward trend because of ocean heatwaves, pollution, warming temperatures, and outbreaks of grazers like sea urchins.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not all good news. Encroaching kelp forests could push out unique wildlife in the high Arctic. Algae living under the ice will have nowhere to go, and could disappear altogether. More temperate kelp species may replace endemic Arctic kelps such as Laminaria solidungula.
A crab finds refuge on Laminaria solidungula – the only kelp species endemic to the Arctic.Ignacio Garrido/ArcticKelp, Author provided
But kelp are just one set of species among many pushing further and deeper into the region as the ice melts.
Cruise ships, coast guard vessels, pleasure yachts, research icebreakers, cargo supply ships and rigid inflatable boats full of tourists also glide through the area. Unprecedented warming and declining sea ice has attracted new industries and other activities to the Arctic. Communities like Pond Inlet have seen marine traffic triple in the past two decades.
Passengers from a cruise ship arrive in Pond Inlet, Nunavut.Kimberly Howland, Author provided
These ships come to the Arctic from all over the world, carrying a host of aquatic hitchhikers picked up in Rotterdam, Hamburg, Dunkirk and elsewhere. These species — some too small to see with the naked eye — are hidden in the ballast water pumped into on-board tanks to stabilize the ship. They also stick to the hull and other outer surfaces, called “biofouling.”
Some survive the voyage to the Arctic and are released into the environment when the ballast water is discharged and cargo loaded. Those that maintain their hold on the outer surface may release eggs, sperm or larvae.
Many of these organisms are innocuous, but some may be invasive newcomers that can cause harm. Research in Canada and Norway has already shown non-native invasive species like bay and acorn barnacles can survive ship transits to the Arctic. This raises a risk for Arctic ecosystems given that invasive species are one of the top causes for extinctions worldwide.
Expanded routes
Concern about invasive species extends far beyond the community of Pond Inlet. Around 4 million people live in the Arctic, many of them along the coasts that provide nutrients and critical habitat for a wide array of animals, from Arctic char and ringed seals to polar bear, bowhead whales and millions of migratory birds.
As the Arctic sea ice melts during the summer months, shipping routes are opening up along the Russian coast and through the Northwest Passage. Some say a trans-Arctic route might soon be navigable.Shutterstock
Prevention is the number one way to keep invasive species out of the Arctic. Most ships must treat their ballast water, using chemicals or other processes, and/or exchange it to limit the movement of harmful organisms to new locations. Guidelines also recommend ships use special coatings on the hulls and clean them regularly to prevent biofouling. But these prevention measures are not always reliable, and their efficacy in colder environments is poorly understood.
The next best approach is to detect invaders as soon as possible once they arrive, to improve chances for eradication or suppression. But early detection requires widespread monitoring, which can be challenging in the Arctic. Keeping an eye out for the arrival of a new species can be akin to searching for a needle in a haystack, but northern communities may offer a solution.
Researchers in Norway, Alaska and Canada have found a way to make that search easier by singling out species that have caused harm elsewhere and that could endure Arctic environmental conditions. Nearly two dozen potential invaders show a high chance for taking hold in Arctic Canada.
The red king crab was intentionally introduced to the Barents Sea in the 1960s, but is now spreading south along the Norwegian coast.Shutterstock
Among these is the cold-adapted red king crab, native to the Sea of Japan, Bering Sea and North Pacific. It was intentionally introduced to the Barents Sea in the 1960s to establish a fishery and is now spreading south along the Norwegian coast and in the White Sea. It is a large, voracious predator implicated in substantial declines of harvested shellfish, sea urchins and other larger, slow moving bottom species, with a high likelihood of surviving transport in ballast water.
Another is the common periwinkle, which ruthlessly grazes on lush aquatic plants in shoreline habitats, leaving behind bare or encrusted rock. It has also introduced a parasite on the east coast of North America that causes black spot disease in fishes, which stresses adult fishes and makes them unpalatable, kills juveniles and causes intestinal damage to birds and mammals that eat them.
Tracking genetic remnants
New species like these could affect the fish and mammals people hunt and eat, if they were to arrive in Pond Inlet. After just a few years of shipping, a handful of possibly non-native species have already been discovered, including the invasive red-gilled mudworm (Marenzellaria viridis), and a potentially invasive tube dwelling amphipod. Both are known to reach high densities, alter the characteristics of the seafloor sediment and compete with native species.
A cargo ship passes through Milne Inlet, Nunavut.Kimberly Howland, Author providedBaffinland, the company that runs the Mary River Mine, is seeking to double its annual output of iron ore. If the expansion proceeds, up to 176 ore carriers will pass through Milne Inlet during the open-water season.
Although the future of Arctic shipping remains uncertain, it’s an upward trend that needs to be watched. In Canada, researchers are working with Indigenous partners in communities with high shipping activity — including Churchill, Manitoba; Pond Inlet and Iqaluit in Nunavut; Salluit, Quebec and Nain, Newfoundland — to establish an invasive species monitoring network. One of the approaches includes collecting water and testing it for genetic remnants shed from scales, faeces, sperm and other biological material.
Members of the 2019 field team from Pond Inlet and Salluit filter eDNA from water samples collected from Milne Inlet.Christopher Mckindsey, Author provided
This environmental DNA (eDNA) is easy to collect and can help detect organisms that might otherwise be difficult to capture or are in low abundance. The technique has also improved baseline knowledge of coastal biodiversity in other areas of high shipping, a fundamental step in detecting future change.
Efforts are underway to expand the network across the Arctic as part of the Arctic Council’s Arctic Invasive Alien Species Strategy to reduce the spread of invasive species.
The Arctic is often called the frontline of the climate crisis, and because of its rapid rate of warming, the region is beset by invasions of all kinds, from new species to new shipping routes. These forces could entirely remake the ocean basin within the lifetimes of people alive today, from frozen, star-lit vistas, populated by unique communities of highly adapted organisms, to something quite different.
The Arctic is changing faster than scientists can document, yet there will be opportunities, such as growing carbon sinks, that could benefit the wildlife and people who live there. Not all changes to our warming world will be wholly negative. In the Arctic, as elsewhere, there are winners and losers.
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Michael Flynn’s firing:
A lie, a leak, and then a liability
Inside the 25 days that shook the Trump presidency.
By Carol E. Lee December 3, 2020
WASHINGTON — Michael Flynn was looking for a criminal defense attorney — on the internet.
The sun had set and much of the White House staff had cleared out for the night. Nearly alone, Flynn hovered over his assistant who was seated at her desk just outside his corner office, scanning attorney biographies on her computer screen.
He hadn’t told the president or his top advisers what prompted the Google search: Two FBI agents had interviewed him that afternoon about his contacts with Russia.
It was Flynn’s fifth day as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. On Feb. 13, 2017, the 25th day of the Trump presidency, Flynn would be gone, fired for lying to the vice president and the FBI.
Now, after twice pleading guilty to making false statements to federal agents, Flynn is a free man — thanks to a president who says his former national security adviser was targeted by an overzealous FBI in a set up orchestrated by political foes. On a balmy Thanksgiving eve in Washington, Trump short-circuited the judicial process to grant Flynn a full pardon. He wished the retired Army general and his family a warm holiday. And Flynn returned the favor by appealing to the president’s leading grievance, writing that his former boss has been “viciously targeted” as a victim of “a coup against our nation.”
The president’s Nov. 25 pardon abruptly capped nearly four years of legal and political drama that began when Trump fired a national security adviser he’d come to privately disparage and ended with the White House declaring Flynn “an innocent man.”
“The president has pardoned General Flynn because he should never have been prosecuted,” the White House statement read. Vice President Mike Pence has so far been silent about the pardon. After portraying himself as a victim of Flynn’s deception who unwittingly repeated his falsehoods publicly, Pence earlier this year said he believes Flynn unintentionally misled him about his clandestine talks with the Russians.
But a comprehensive examination of his time as Trump’s national security adviser, including interviews with more than 20 people who were directly involved in uncovering or covering up his actions, suggests that Flynn knowingly misled investigators and the president’s inner circle repeatedly. Once considered one of the country’s top intelligence officials and skilled in deception, Flynn not only concealed key details of his conversations with Vladimir Putin’s handpicked ambassador in Washington, but also an investigation he knew was closing in on him.
By the end of the first week of Trump’s presidency, as the new administration plunged itself into foreign and domestic turmoil, a small group of senior White House officials had been repeatedly confronted with the truth about Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s ambassador, Sergey Kislyak – that they had discussed newly-imposed U.S. sanctions against Moscow. They also learned that two FBI agents had questioned Flynn about those conversations in a secure conference room just a short walk from the Oval Office, and that he’d answered with a false account similar to the one he’d given Pence.
“Everyone’s forgetting that Flynn was fired because he was lying to everyone,” one senior White House official directly involved with the Flynn matter said recently. “After weeks of asking him, he was still saying he never talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.”
And as officials grappled with Flynn’s own cover-up, they too engaged in similar action. The president and his closest aides worked to keep the revelations, including warnings from senior Justice Department officials that Flynn could be blackmailed by the Russians, from the public and just about every senior official in the fledgling administration all the way up to the vice president.
White House officials who worked alongside Flynn when he was national security adviser described a perfect storm of secrecy, distrust, loyalty and confusion that enabled the retired three-star general to remain on the payroll of the American taxpayers, with access to the country’s most tightly held secrets and at the helm of life-and-death decisions — despite knowledge at the highest levels of government that he could be a liability.
Those who agreed to share details from that time spoke to NBC News over many months on the condition of anonymity.
Their recollections revealed angry confrontations between a deceptive Flynn and his colleagues in the West Wing, an indecisive president more worried about his public image than the potential national security implications of Flynn’s actions, and a White House counsel searching for a crime instead of confronting a potential threat. Key evidence that Flynn had lied was only shared with Pence when its existence became public — 15 days after Trump and a handful of senior White House officials were informed of it.
This period of time, which was the subject of intense examination by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, stood at the intersection of his investigations: how Russia interfered in the 2016 election, whether Trump associates conspired with Moscow in that endeavor, and if the president attempted to obstruct the FBI’s investigation into any such coordination.
Michael Flynn arrives for his sentencing hearing at federal court in Washington on Dec. 18, 2018. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images file)
Flynn was one of the first Trump associates to be ensnared in the Russia investigation – and on Nov. 25 of this year he became the first to be relieved of the legal consequences of being a convicted felon.
Trump’s use of the presidential pardon power circumvented a pending decision by a federal judge, Emmet Sullivan, on whether to move forward with sentencing Flynn after the Justice Department filed a motion on May 7 to dismiss the case. Leadership at the Justice Department wasn’t consulted about the pardon and had preferred to see through the request for dismissal, which argued there was no investigation to justify the FBI interview in which the former national security adviser made false statements.
Flynn admitted to making false statements in that interview not only about his Russia contacts but also his attempt during the Trump transition to scuttle an Obama administration effort to condemn Israeli settlements with a resolution at the United Nations. As part of his plea deal, Flynn further admitted to giving false statements to the Justice Department about being paid for lobbying on behalf of the government of Turkey.
Sullivan balked at the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss a case the president had relentlessly portrayed as unfair in his efforts to undermine the Mueller investigation. Sullivan brought in a retired federal judge — who, as an assistant U.S. attorney, had prosecuted the mafia boss John Gotti — to argue that the judicial branch can reject a Justice Department request to dismiss a case if it’s believed to be politically motivated.
This past summer, Flynn tried to force Sullivan to grant the Justice Department’s motion. But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately rejected the effort.
It was one of many dramatic twists and turns in the sentencing of Flynn since he first appeared in Sullivan’s court in December of 2018. At that time the judge angrily rejected Mueller’s recommendation that Flynn merely be put on probation because he was a model cooperating witness. Over the next year, Flynn made the surprise decision to hire new lawyers, broke from the federal prosecutors he’d cooperated with and requested to withdraw his guilty plea.
“In truth, I never lied,” Flynn wrote in a court filing this past January. “I will fight to restore my good name.”
In response to specific questions about this article, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, referred NBC News to court filings posted on her website.
Flynn’s first lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to comment. The White House and Pence’s office had no comment.
A pardon for Flynn was a long-sought outcome for the president who hired him, fired him and, until losing re-election, said he’d consider bringing him back into the White House.
From his earliest days in office Trump has sought to shield Flynn from federal investigation, reportedly asking his then-FBI director to let any inquiry go. And after distancing himself from Flynn when he cooperated with the Mueller investigation, Trump later latched onto his case as a political cudgel. Flynn became a cause célèbre for the president and his Republican base.
Had Sullivan sentenced Flynn, Trump made clear he would pardon him, and the president’s team had been prepared since at least June for an announcement. “There was no question internally whether he would pardon Flynn,” a senior White House official said. It was just a matter of when.
In September, Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, said during a court hearing that she had spoken with the president directly and asked him not to pardon her client. But with Trump leaving the White House on Jan. 20, time was running out. “That was the motivation,” the senior White House official said of the timing.
Still, the pardon changes nothing about why Trump has said he fired Flynn: because he lied. Neither does Flynn’s reversal on his guilty plea. Or Pence’s newly adopted view that he is now “more inclined to believe” Flynn didn’t intentionally lie to him.
That Flynn remains the leading personification of Trump’s grievances – namely that forces are out to get him – and a catalyst for additional presidential pardons based on similar motivations makes his time as national security adviser and the circumstances around his firing newly germane.
Despite the lies and warnings that Flynn could be compromised, the president and his closest aides didn’t seriously discuss firing Flynn until the controversy was made public by journalists. That delay allowed Flynn to play a leading role in every sensitive national security decision in the early days of the Trump presidency:
* Trump’s hastily executed order banning travel to the U.S. by individuals from some majority-Muslim countries.
* An ill-fated counterterrorism raid in Yemen that led to the death of a Navy SEAL.
* A North Korea missile launch that caught the new administration flat-footed at the president’s Florida resort.
* Flynn publicly put Iran “on notice” over its aggression in the Middle East, a move that foreshadowed sharply escalated tensions between Washington and Tehran.
* As head of the National Security Council, Flynn arranged for a permanent council seat for the president’s chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, an unusual move and an unwelcome surprise to Trump.
Sally Yates, former acting attorney general, testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where she was questioned about Flynn’s account of a phone call with Sergey Kislyak, a Russian ambassador, on May 8, 2017. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images file)
Jan. 26, 2017
Trump was unmoved.
White House counsel Don McGahn was sharing what he had just learned: Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI and may have lied. McGahn had just met with Acting Attorney General Sally Yates for about 15 minutes and chief among Yates’ concerns was that Flynn wasn’t truthful with Pence and other White House officials when he told them he had not discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador in Washington, during phone calls several weeks before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.
Flynn and Kislyak spoke on Dec. 29, 2016, the same day the Obama administration announced new sanctions against Russia in response to Moscow’s interference in the U.S. presidential election held the month before. They spoke again two days later, after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would not retaliate against the U.S. for the sanctions. Putin’s restraint had shocked American intelligence officials, who only later learned about Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak while analyzing Russia’s response to the sanctions.
Flynn’s Dec. 29 conversation with Kislyak became public in news reports on Jan. 12. Three days later, Pence said publicly that after talking to Flynn he could confirm that call “had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions.” That raised concerns at the Justice Department that Pence might also be in on the deception with Flynn.
The White House didn’t know it but the FBI had previously opened an investigation into Flynn because of concerns about his relationship with the Russian government. And Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak, as well as his false assurance to Pence that they didn’t discuss sanctions, had raised new alarms among investigators.
McGahn explained Flynn’s possible legal exposure: the perjury statute and the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for any American to negotiate with foreign governments in a dispute with the U.S. without authorization from the current U.S. government.
Trump, with his chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Stephen Bannon by his side, listened but seemed unphased. He asked McGahn to start again.
McGahn told the president he didn’t think the FBI clearly had Flynn on charges of giving false statements and, after meeting with Yates, McGahn wasn’t sure what the issue was: Is Flynn a security risk? Should the president get rid of him? Is the national security adviser under investigation?
That’s when Trump perked up: “Not again, this guy, this stuff.”
The president had already grown frustrated with Flynn, in what one senior White House official described as “a personality clash.” Trump had started complaining to aides about Flynn during the transition. He thought Flynn interrupted him too much during briefings and that his Kislyak contacts were generating a steady stream of negative press coverage. Just days into his presidency, Trump wouldn’t even look at Flynn during intelligence briefings. “He couldn’t stand Mike Flynn,” another senior White House official said. “He wanted to fire Flynn before he even got to the White House.”
Trump told McGahn, Priebus and Bannon not to discuss the issue with any other White House officials. Instead, he directed them to figure out the problem and come back with a plan.
“Then no one looked into it,” with any urgency, a senior White House official at the time said.
Bannon was the one official among them who seemed to possibly know for weeks that Flynn had been lying. He’d spoken with Flynn about the sanctions on Jan. 1 — the day after Flynn’s second discussion with Kislyak — and they agreed they had “stopped the train on Russia’s response,” according to Mueller’s report.
Sergey Kislyak spoke with Flynn several weeks before Trump’s inauguration – phone calls that then became part of an FBI investigation into Flynn’s relationship with the Russian government. (Mario Tama/Getty Images file)
Trump has insisted he had no knowledge of Flynn’s discussions about sanctions with Kislyak before the talks took place, though federal investigators later found it implausible that senior officials including Bannon and Flynn would have kept it from him.
The circle of people with knowledge of Flynn’s lies, his FBI interview, and the Justice Department’s warning, was tight. But McGahn made a decision to widen it slightly when he ignored Trump’s instructions and tapped John Eisenberg, a deputy White House counsel and legal adviser to the National Security Council, to figure out whether Flynn had given false statements to the FBI or violated the Logan Act.
McGahn also figured there must be a recording of Flynn’s phone call with Kislyak that they could listen to. The National Security Agency had wiretapped the phone of the Russian ambassador. It’s a standard U.S. intelligence operation that Flynn, a former military intelligence officer, later said he knew about when the FBI interviewed him on Jan. 24.
Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe had called Flynn on a secure phone line around lunch time that day to tell him the FBI wanted to come by the White House to talk to him about his contacts with Russians.
McCabe told Flynn he could have a lawyer present, though stressed that the matter would be handled more quickly if he didn’t. He also said if Flynn did bring along a lawyer, officials at the Justice Department would also have to get involved.
Flynn replied that he didn’t need a lawyer.
He agreed to meet without asking McCabe for any details.
Ahead of their arrival at the White House, FBI officials discussed how to approach Flynn. “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” one official wrote in a memo.
By 2:15 p.m. Flynn was alone in the White House with two FBI agents, including FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. Flynn appeared in a good mood. He talked about everything from hotels he’d stayed at during the presidential campaign to terrorism to Trump’s knack for interior design. He even offered the agents “a little tour” of the West Wing, walking them right past Trump and a couple of movers discussing where to place artwork.
When the conversation moved to his contacts with Kislyak, Flynn “was fully aware that federal officials routinely monitor, record, and transcribe such conversations with foreign officials,” he later wrote in a court filing, and knew the FBI probably had transcripts of his calls.
And yet there in the White House, with the two FBI agents, he denied asking Kislyak to hold back on moves that would escalate tensions. “It wasn’t, ‘don’t do anything,’” he said.
Flynn also said he didn’t remember a follow-up conversation with Kislyak, after Putin announced he would not escalate. That’s when the ambassador told Flynn his request had gone to the highest levels of the Russian government.
Despite the obvious discrepancies, the agents later noted that Flynn displayed no “indicators of deception” and didn’t leave them with the impression that he was lying or thought he was lying. Within hours of their departure, Flynn would be on the hunt for a lawyer.
White House counsel Don McGahn confronted Yates over her motivations in regards to Flynn. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images file)
Jan. 27, 2017
It’s possible the president’s national security adviser broke the law.
That’s what deputy White House counsel Eisenberg told his boss on a Friday morning, exactly one week after Trump’s inauguration.
After an initial look at Flynn’s conduct, Eisenberg suggested that Flynn might have given false statements to the FBI or violated the Logan Act. But, he noted, no one has ever been successfully charged under the Logan Act, and he downplayed the likelihood the Justice Department would pursue such charges.
McGahn told Eisenberg to ask Yates back to the White House for another meeting.
McGahn, Priebus and Bannon were already suspicious of Yates, a holdover from the Obama administration, and questioned her motives. Obama officials made clear they had no respect for Flynn. Obama had ousted Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. And after the 2016 election, Obama personally advised Trump against hiring Flynn.
McGahn’s second meeting with Yates was also 15 minutes long but more contentious. McGahn questioned why it would matter to the Justice Department if one White House official lied to another. Yates replied that this situation “was a whole lot more than that,” walking McGahn again through her concerns.
He asked if taking action against Flynn would interfere with an FBI investigation into his conduct. Yates said it would not. “It wouldn’t really be fair of us to tell you this and then expect you to sit on your hands,” she said.
That’s when McGahn asked for evidence. “Is this something we could see?” Yates said she couldn’t give him the recordings of Flynn’s conversation but said she’d look into getting him transcripts.
James Comey, director of the FBI, shakes hands with President Donald Trump at the White House on Jan. 22, 2017. Trump would meet with Comey and discuss Russia days later. (Andrew Harrer/Pool via Getty Images file)
A few paces away in the Oval Office, Trump called FBI Director James Comey, who was in charge of the Russia investigation, to invite him to the White House that night for dinner. The previous evening, Trump had asked several of his senior advisers during dinner what they thought of Comey.
Bannon and Priebus seemed nervous about the president dining alone with the FBI director. “Do you want someone to come with you?” Bannon asked Trump. Trump said he wanted to have dinner with Comey alone, that he was just meeting with him to decide whether to keep him in the job.
“Don’t talk about Russia, whatever you do,” Priebus told the president. Trump promised he wouldn’t.
But alone with Comey in the Green Room on the main floor of the White House, Trump did just that.
And he indicated he was souring on Flynn. To illustrate the point, he told Comey a story about Flynn waiting six days after Putin had reached out to Trump to schedule a return phone call with the Russian leader.
“The guy has serious judgment issues,” Trump said.
President Donald Trump speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office as chief of staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, strategist Steve Bannon, press secretary Sean Spicer, and Flynn listen on Jan. 28, 2017. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images file)
Jan. 28 to Feb. 2, 2017
“How’d it go?” Bannon asked the president the next after his dinner with Comey.
All the president revealed was that he had determined Comey was a good guy whom he intended to keep.
It was Saturday and Trump was about to hold his first phone call as president with Putin. Kislyak had tried multiple times for weeks to get Flynn to arrange for the two leaders to speak the day after Trump’s inauguration. The Russians had wanted it to be via secure video. But Flynn didn’t respond to those requests from Kislyak, who even left a voicemail for the incoming national security adviser the day before the inauguration asking for “an answer to the idea of our two president’s speaking.”
A week after the Russians had hoped that conversation would take place, Flynn, Pence, Priebus, Bannon and White House press secretary Sean Spicer had gathered around the Resolute Desk, while Trump was on the phone call with Putin.
Across the West Wing, a different phone call was about to be set up.
Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general who had accompanied Yates to her first meeting with McGahn, received an email sent from Flynn’s White House account requesting a secure phone call to follow up on the McGahn meeting. It was odd enough that Flynn was sending her an email. But what made this truly a mystery for McCord is that the email was signed by Eisenberg.
She decided not to reply and instead sent a new email directly to Eisenberg.
The following day, she and Eisenberg spoke. He told McCord that he had been in Flynn’s office the day before and an assistant had accidentally switched his and Flynn’s phones when giving them back. He then said that he and Flynn had the same password for their phones, and so he accidentally sent the email from the national security adviser’s account.
He also told McCord that from now on he would be handling the Flynn matter, not McGahn.
They spoke again the next day, Monday, about arranging for Eisenberg to review the transcripts of Flynn’s call with Kislyak. Yates also called McGahn to tell him the transcripts were ready for review.
Within hours of their discussion that morning of Jan. 30, Trump fired Yates, citing her refusal to enforce his travel ban.
McCord emailed Eisenberg Tuesday to say the transcripts were ready for him to review and she put him in touch with Peter Strzok, one of the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn and was involved with the case.
Eisenberg didn’t respond. She emailed him again the following day to ask if he’d accessed the transcripts. He didn’t respond until Feb. 2.
Within hours, two FBI agents arrived at the White House carrying a secure briefcase containing the highly classified transcripts.
McGahn told Eisenberg to look them over and report back on potential issues.
Flynn, meanwhile, held a meeting with National Security Council officials in the auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.
When one of them asked him what he thought about Yates refusing to defend Trump’s travel ban — and generally the idea of an administration official refusing to implement a president’s policies — Flynn was dismissive. “What she did was illegal,” he replied.
Eisenberg sat with the two FBI agents in McGahn’s West Wing office and read through the transcripts. It was clear Flynn had misled Pence.
But it wasn’t clear to Eisenberg what criminal charge deceiving the vice president would bring.
Eisenberg asked the FBI agents: Is this it? What am I missing? Is this a big deal?
The agents remained stone-faced and didn’t respond.
The agents packed up the documents in the briefcase and left the White House.
Eisenberg wrote a memo outlining the possible crimes Flynn could be accused of committing. But he wasn’t sure the White House had enough information to make a recommendation to the president. He discussed his findings with McGahn and they agreed that Flynn was unlikely to be charged with violating the Logan Act. However, they remained unsure if Flynn was vulnerable to a charge of giving false statements in his FBI interview.
The next day, Flynn had a private lunch with Trump in the presidential dining room.
Flynn and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, await the arrival of President Donald Trump aboard Air Force One in Florida on Feb. 6, 2017. (Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images file)
Feb. 6 to Feb. 8, 2017
Trump had barely begun settling into the White House and was already seething over the latest chyrons scrolling across cable news about his administration.
He was in the Oval Office with Flynn, complaining about negative media coverage that had been circulating for almost a month about the calls with Kislyak. The details of Trump and Flynn’s private conversation were disclosed by Flynn to investigators and included in the final report issued by the Special Counsel.
The president wanted specifics. So Flynn dutifully listed the dates on which he said he had spoken with Kislyak.
When Trump asked what he and Kislyak talked about — the question driving the controversy — Flynn said that they might have discussed the Obama administration’s sanctions against Russia. It was a stunning departure from his insistence to the vice president, other senior White House officials, and the FBI that the topic had not come up.
Trump didn’t seem particularly shocked, according to Flynn’s own retelling of the meeting. And, he told investigators, that the president actually corrected him on one of the dates on which he said he’d spoken with Kislyak.
At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 8, Comey arrived at the White House for a meeting with Priebus.
Trump had suggested that his chief of staff be the FBI director’s main point of contact in the White House, so Priebus had invited Comey over for what he described as a “meet and greet.” After some initial discussion of immigration issues, intelligence gathering and leaks, Priebus steered the conversation to Flynn.
“Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?” Priebus asked, referring to a top-secret warrant to wiretap an American citizen suspected of being a spy for a foreign government.
It was highly unusual for a White House chief of staff to ask the FBI director such a question. But Comey agreed to answer and said there wasn’t a FISA warrant on Flynn.
A few hours later Flynn had a meeting with a Washington Post reporter. At the end of their discussion on a variety of foreign policy issues, the reporter asked Flynn if he was sure he didn’t discuss sanctions with Kislyak during their Dec. 29 call.
Priebus was incensed over Flynn’s conduct with the Russian ambassador. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images file)
Despite denials, the Post had learned from multiple administration officials that Flynn had raised the topic on the call.
Although he had told Trump in the Oval Office that he might have, Flynn again repeated the answer he’d given multiple times: he was sure sanctions weren’t discussed. The reporter asked if that could be on the record, and Michael Anton, the NSC’s spokesperson, agreed.
Around 10 p.m., however, Flynn called Anton to ask the status of the Post’s story. Changing his story once again, Flynn told Anton he could no longer say with 100 percent confidence that he didn’t discuss sanctions with Kislyak. Anton called the Post reporter with a new statement — and unsuccessfully asked the paper not to report that Flynn had said just hours earlier that sanctions weren’t discussed.
The new statement that Flynn “couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up” was carefully worded but marked a sea change. Neither Flynn nor Anton told other senior officials about the new statement.
Vice President Mike Pence found out that Flynn lied to him about discussing sanctions with Kislyak when The Washington Post published their story. (Mario Tama/Getty Images file)
Feb. 9 to Feb. 10, 2017
At 9:30 p.m. on Feb. 9, the Post published its article. It immediately set off a firestorm inside and outside the White House. Nearly everyone in the West Wing was blindsided.
“We went bananas,” said a senior White House official who was there at the time.
Only then did McGahn, whom Trump had tasked with looking into Flynn’s conduct, decide to refocus on the issue.
Priebus was having dinner with the president in the White House residence when McGahn, who still had not read the transcripts of Flynn’s calls with Kislyak, urgently asked him to leave the dinner to discuss the Post article. Priebus was fuming. They summoned Flynn from the national security adviser’s suite, and a handful of senior White House officials, including White House counsel, deposed him in Priebus’ office.
“What the f— is going on?” Priebus asked Flynn.
Flynn responded that he now wasn’t completely sure if sanctions had come up in the Kislyak call.
“Well, you told me that didn’t happen, so which is it?” Priebus said to Flynn, who responded again that he was unsure.
Around 6:20 the following morning, Pence’s aide, Marc Lotter walked over to the West Wing to see Anton.
“We have a problem,” he said, adding that Flynn had “essentially made the Vice President of the United States a liar” by telling him he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak – a lie Pence then repeated in a nationally televised interview. Pence wanted to read the transcripts of Flynn’s Kislyak calls.
When David Ignatius of the Washington Post first reported that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak the day the Obama administration’s sanctions were announced, Flynn directed his deputy, KT McFarland, to call the columnist and say that he and the Russian ambassador did not discuss sanctions during the call.
After McFarland spoke with the columnist, the Post updated his article with an anonymous Trump official saying Flynn and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.
Pence knew he’d be asked about it during an interview the following Sunday on CBS, and he wanted to hear Flynn’s explanation directly. He called the incoming national security adviser, who told the vice president-elect that the topic of sanctions never came up. And that’s what Pence said on national television.
It was almost a month after Flynn told Pence he hadn’t discussed sanctions with Kislyak that Pence wanted to compare his conversation with Flynn to the ones Flynn had with Kislyak.
McCabe had been at the White House for an unrelated briefing that morning. When he got to his car outside the West Wing, his driver told him the White House had been frantically trying to reach him.
He connected by phone with Priebus who said the Vice President wanted to see the transcripts — now. McCabe said he’d have to get them.
“Where’s your office?” Priebus asked.
McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI, explained that he worked out of FBI headquarters.
The transcripts of Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak were brought to the White House in a secure briefcase, just as they were eight days earlier.
Pence, his chief of staff Nick Ayers, Priebus and McGahn huddled in a conference room in the Situation Room suite reading the transcripts. McCabe remained in the room and at one point was asked whether Flynn had violated the Logan Act. He told the group that was a possibility that the FBI was investigating.
Pence asked Ayers to get him a printed copy of his CBS interview. After Ayers returned with it, Pence compared the transcript of his interview with the transcripts of Flynn and Kislyak.
He barely spoke as he read through the documents line by line.
“Number one, what I would ask you guys to do – and make sure this, make sure that you convey this, okay?” the transcript showed Flynn said to Kislyak during their Dec. 29 call – the day the Obama administration announced the Russia sanctions – “do not uh, allow this administration to box us in, right now, okay?”
“I know you have to have some sort of action,” Flynn continued. “Make it reciprocal. … Don’t go any further than you have to. Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate.”
Kislyak explained that one of the problems Moscow had is in addition to expelling Russian diplomats from the U.S., the Obama administration just sanctioned key Russian intelligence entities.
“So that’s something that we have to deal with,” Kislyak said to Flynn. “But I’ve heard what you say, and I certainly will try to get the people in Moscow to understand it.”
Flynn made the case that “we need cool heads to prevail.”
Pence compared that to the transcript of his response on CBS, when asked about Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone call with Kislyak.
“I talked to General Flynn about that conversation,” Pence said in the interview. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia.”
“So did they ever have a conversation about sanctions ever on those days or any other day?” Pence was asked.
“They did not,” the vice-president elect replied.
Pence read the transcript of a follow-up call between Flynn and Kislyak on Dec. 31, after Russia announced it would not retaliate for the sanctions.
“I have a small message to pass to you from Moscow,” Kislyak told Flynn.
“I appreciate the steps your president has taken. I think that it was wise,” Flynn interjected.
“I just wanted to tell you that our conversation was also taken into account in Moscow,” Kislyak said.
“Good,” said Flynn.
“Your proposal that we need to act with cold heads, uh, is exactly what is uh invested in the decision,” Kislyak added.
“Good,” Flynn said again.
In Pence’s interview on CBS, the transcript showed, he had dismissed the idea of more than one conversation between Flynn and Kislyak. “I don’t believe there were more conversations,” he said.
“He was smoldering,” one person in the room described Pence as he read the transcripts.
Priebus got up in the middle of the meeting, said he’d seen enough, and left the room.
Afterward, Pence was clear: The transcripts revealed that Flynn hadn’t been truthful. But Pence wanted to think about whether he’d advise the president to fire Flynn.
More than two weeks after Yates’ first warning about Flynn, McGahn, Priebus and Bannon had the first serious conversation with Trump about whether to fire the national security adviser. They told Trump they had reviewed the transcripts of Flynn’s call with Kislyak, and that it was clear he had lied to Pence.
Priebus, who early on thought Flynn had to go, was even more certain. Flynn either knowingly lied to the vice president — which Priebus and McGahn believed he had done — or he was too incompetent to serve as national security adviser if he couldn’t remember details like the topics of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. Neither, from their perspective, was acceptable. All three advisers recommended Trump fire Flynn.
The drama unfolded behind the scenes as Trump welcomed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to the White House for official meetings, followed by a weekend at his sprawling South Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.
As national security adviser, Flynn had a high-profile role in Abe’s visit that day.
That afternoon Flynn joined Trump and senior White House officials on Air Force One for the flight to Florida and the weekend with Abe.
Trump wandered to the press cabin in the back of the plane while giving his wife a tour of the aircraft and told reporters he hadn’t seen the Post report on Flynn.
“I don’t know about that,” he said.
Feb. 11 to Feb. 12, 2017
“What’s he doing here?” Trump snapped to a friend when he saw Flynn that weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
The controversy over Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak showed no signs of waning. Yet Flynn felt confident he would weather the firestorm.
He played a role in the scramble that night on the outdoor terrace at Mar-a-Lago as the U.S. and Japanese delegations were dining, to craft a response to a North Korean missile test.
White House aide Stephen Miller was asked the following morning on the Sunday news shows whether Trump has confidence in Flynn, and he did not have an answer.
Meanwhile, Flynn was among those helping plan for Trump’s Monday meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the White House.
On the president’s flight back to Washington Sunday, Flynn was in the conference room on Air Force One leaning over an aide to go over some paperwork, his image splashed on a large flat-screen TV behind him showing news coverage about whether he’d be fired.
During the flight, Trump asked Flynn if he had lied to Pence. Flynn said he might have forgotten details of his conversations with Kislyak but he didn’t believe he had lied. “OK,” Trump said. “That’s fine. I got it.”
After landing at the military base in Maryland where Air Force One is kept, Flynn was among the handful of aides who joined the president on his helicopter for the flight back to White House.
Trump struggled over his decision to fire Flynn, vigorously debating his future with senior-most aides. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images file)
Feb. 13, 2017
Trump was still unsure about whether Flynn should go.
“He was torn,” said a White House official who was involved in the discussions.
The White House plan was for Flynn to do TV interviews that day criticizing North Korea’s test launch. And Flynn juggled national security meetings throughout the morning, ducking out of lunch with Trudeau to deal with a hiccup in the rollout of a major escalation in U.S. sanctions on a top government official in Venezuela that the administration was about to announce.
In a parallel set of Monday morning meetings, Trump’s most senior aides were vigorously debating Flynn’s future.
McGahn, Priebus and Bannon shuttled back and forth between the Oval Office and the chief of staff’s suite. All three had advised firing Flynn.
But Trump’s view was that firing his national security adviser after just a few weeks would play into the hands of his critics. And he worried about how it would reflect on him.
“It’s going to make me look bad,” he told his advisers. “We’re going to look like a bunch of clowns.”
Spicer told reporters Trump was “evaluating the situation” and speaking with Pence and others about the issue.
One of the president’s top aides thought Trump was trying to shift the burden of deciding whether to fire Flynn onto Pence when he said: “Mike, he disappointed you. He let you down.” Flynn had apologized privately to Pence who wasn’t happy with him. Still, Pence told Trump he’d support whatever decision he made.
By the afternoon, Trump had concluded that Flynn had to go. He tasked Priebus with delivering the news. A resignation letter was prepared and Priebus delivered the news.
“Flynn said he wanted to take a shot at drafting the letter,” one senior White House official who was there at the time said. “But there was a draft given to him.”
Flynn asked to say goodbye to Trump, so Priebus brought him to the Oval Office for his last meeting as Trump’s national security adviser. “He didn’t see this coming,” the official said of Flynn.
Trump hugged his national security adviser of just 24 days and shook his hand. “We’ll give you a good recommendation,” the president told him. “You’re a good guy. We’ll take care of you.”
Publicly, the White House had been sending a different message. Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor, said in an afternoon TV interview that Trump had full confidence in Flynn.
McGahn, meanwhile, worked with the White House press office on drafting talking points on Flynn’s resignation that said the president had been advised Flynn was unlikely to be prosecuted for any crime, but that Flynn had lost the president’s trust.
Before the White House announced Flynn’s resignation, The Washington Post published a detailed account of Yates’ Jan. 26 warning about him to McGahn.
Once again, the White House press office was caught off guard. McGahn hadn’t told officials about the meeting, even after the initial report about Flynn discussing sanctions with Kislyak.
“You didn’t need to know,” McGhan told Spicer.
Spicer told reporters that Flynn’s departure was “not based on a legal issue but based on a trust issue.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 28, 2019. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images file)
After Flynn
Trump seemed relieved during lunch at the White House with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a friend, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser.
“Now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over,” Trump told Christie. A former federal prosecutor, Christie laughed. “No way,” he said. “This thing is far from over.” And he warned Trump that Flynn would never go away, “like gum on the bottom of your shoe.”
Around 4 p.m., after a homeland security briefing, Trump asked Comey to stick around and kicked all the other officials out of the Oval Office, including the attorney general.
“I want to talk about Mike Flynn,” Trump said to Comey.
“He’s a good guy and has been through a lot,” Trump said, insisting Flynn didn’t do anything wrong in talking to the Russian ambassador but had to be fired for lying to Pence. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”
Trump never said publicly or privately that Flynn had lied to him. Just to Pence, and, in a tweet in December 2017, the FBI.
Comey interpreted the president’s words “letting this go” as a directive to stop investigating Flynn. At this point in the FBI’s investigation, no grand jury subpoenas had been issued.
Yet the president still seemed worried that Flynn’s legal troubles might ensnare him. Ten days after Flynn was fired, Trump ordered Priebus to have the deputy national security adviser write an internal email saying that Trump did not direct Flynn to call Kislyak to discuss sanctions.
The deputy, KT McFarland, was already uncertain about her own future. She had been asked to resign and told a possible ambassadorship to Singapore was on offer. But she wasn’t sure about the truthfulness of the claim the president wanted her to make.
She consulted the White House counsel’s office and Eisenberg advised her against writing the email. Priebus then later did the same, coming by her office to tell her not to write it and to forget he even mentioned it.
Trump then asked Priebus to call Flynn to check in and tell him the president still cared about him. Priebus did and added that Flynn is an American hero. And then the president asked McFarland to convey to Flynn he felt bad for him and he should stay strong.
On March 5, McGahn learned the FBI had asked the presidential transition team for documents relating to Flynn. The president told his aides he wanted Dana Boente, the acting attorney general in charge of the Russia investigation, to find out whether he or the White House was under investigation.
Concerned about what else might come out on Flynn and the Russia investigation generally, Priebus and Bannon set up a Russia “war room” inside the White House in May, in part to compile a thick file on Flynn that included detailed diagrams on whom he met with and what conflicts he might have had. The idea was to be prepared with responses before any damaging new stories emerged.
But the “war room” was disbanded soon after because, some officials believed, the White House response was increasingly handled by a very tight circle of aides as the Mueller investigation appeared to get closer to members of the president’s family.
Six months later, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s investigation. His lawyer informed the president’s legal team that he could no longer share information with him, a typical step for someone whose client has decided to cooperate with investigators.
Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, John Dowd, left a voicemail for Flynn’s lawyer on Nov. 22, 2017, saying if “any information that implicates the president” comes up, “we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all of our interests if we can.” He then added that Trump’s feelings about Flynn hadn’t changed.
Flynn’s lawyer returned the call to reiterate that he couldn’t share information anymore. Dowd said the decision indicated a hostility toward Trump and he’d be sure to relay that to the president. Flynn’s lawyer took Dowd’s comments as an attempt to get Flynn to reconsider cooperating.
Before Flynn’s plea agreement was publicly disclosed in December, Jared Kushner spoke with Mueller’s team about the two issues the former national security adviser pleaded guilty to lying about: the Kislyak calls and Trump transition officials’ efforts to derail an Obama administration policy on Israel.
Five days after Flynn pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to lying to the FBI, Trump called then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions into the Oval Office. Sessions had infuriated Trump by recusing himself because of his own contacts with Kislyak and his deep involvement in the Trump campaign. Trump suggested to Sessions that he “unrecuse” himself and take control of the Russia investigation.
“You’d be a hero,” the president said.
Mueller concluded that it would have been reasonable for Flynn to want Trump to know about his conversations with Kislyak, given that the ambassador had indicated to Flynn that his request for Moscow not to retaliate had been relayed went all the way to Putin.
The special counsel also noted that when Trump explained why he fired Flynn, he never said that Flynn had lied to him, just to Pence. Still, he wrote, “the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the president’s knowledge.”
Pence was asked in Dec. 2017 if he knew Flynn had lied to the FBI at the time he was fired. “”What I can tell you is that I knew that he had lied to me,” Pence told CBS. “And I know the president made the right decision with regard to him.”
Flynn reaffirmed his guilty plea at his first sentencing hearing in December 2018, when Judge Sullivan rejected the Mueller team’s recommendation of probation.
Trump communicated positive messages to Flynn during his trial. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images file)
Over the next 23 months, the alliance between Flynn and federal prosecutors frayed – and the Justice Department under the new leadership of Attorney General Barr intervened.
“There was a lot of pressure on the Justice Department,” one person close to the White House said.
Flynn requested to withdraw his guilty plea on Jan. 14, 2020 – almost three years to the day that Pence publicly assured the country that Flynn had not discussed sanctions with Kislyak. . In response, federal prosecutors revised their sentencing recommendation to include a short jail sentence.
Several weeks later the prosecutors reversed that position to again say probation is an “appropriate” sentence, fueling speculation that pressure from the top levels of the Justice Department was weighing in on cases in which the president had a keen interest.
Unknown publicly at the time was that Barr was seeking an internal review of Flynn’s case, specifically his FBI interview. In February, Barr tasked a U.S. attorney in Missouri with investigating the circumstances surrounding the interview. That led to the Justice Department’s determination that Flynn’s case should be thrown out because “evidence is insufficient to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The request followed a public shift by Flynn that aligned more closely with the president’s narrative.
“When FBI agents came to the White House on January 24, 2017, I did not lie to them,” Flynn wrote in a court filing. “I believed I was honest with them to the best of my recollection at the time.”
Yet for officials who worked with Flynn in the White House at the time — who asked him repeatedly for weeks if he’d talked about sanctions with Kislyak and were told no — the mystery still lingers: why wasn’t he honest with them?
“The biggest question that’s never been answered is why didn’t he tell everyone in the West Wing that he talked to him about sanctions?” one official said. “Because no one would have cared if he did.”
I saw Donald Trump’s presidency come crashing down at Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Richard Hall December 2, 2020
Trump and Biden supporters outside a press conference where Rudy Giuliani spoke to the media in the back parking lot of landscaping company on November 7, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images) (Getty Images)
It began, as all good 2020 capers do, with a tweet from the president of the United States. It ended with his personal lawyer in the parking lot of a landscaping company, struggling to be heard over a man in his underpants shouting about George Soros.
They say a star burns brightest just before it dies, and this was the Trump presidency in all its flaming glory.
For five straight days, the world had waited for news, any news, from Pennsylvania, which for all of that time had been expected to imminently decide the winner of a bitter election. The president had spent much of the intervening period making grave and entirely unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud, but even so he was unusually quiet.
“Lawyers Press Conference at Four Seasons, Philadelphia. 11:00 A.M,” he wrote to his 88 million followers on Saturday morning.
Journalists from around the world who had gathered in Philadelphia, most of whom had spent the last four days transfixed by moving maps on CNN, were eager for stimulation, and perhaps as a side note to see evidence of massive election fraud the president and his lawyers had alleged.
I sprang into action immediately, gathered my things, and was heading out of the door towards the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Philadelphia when the next tweet came.
“Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — 11:30am!”
Some mistake, I thought. A presidential typo? We’d seen worse over the last four years. Remember Covfefe?
I did a quick Google search. There was indeed a place called Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, but it was a small business in a drab industrial area on the edge of town. I struggled to think of any reason why the president’s lawyers would hold their press conference here, at this establishment, with its 3.1 star rating on Google reviews.
I decided to call the Four Seasons Hotel, from whom I was sure I would get confirmation that this press conference was indeed being held on their premises — perhaps in a grand ballroom or conference room.
A woman answered — she was primed: I was obviously not the first person to call.
“Yes there has been some confusion about this,” she said politely. “The press conference is not taking place here, it is taking place at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.”
It’s hard to explain the confusion I experienced as I sped along the highway out of downtown Philadelphia towards Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Was this one last act of revenge by the president against the lying fake news media while he still had our enrapt attention? Was it a ruse to get all the journalists out of town for when the results were announced?
Truth be told, it didn’t matter. However this turned out, Four Seasons Total Landscaping was the story now.
I arrived to see a media scrum around a chain link fence that led into the parking lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping. The building itself was one-story, with a neat lawn and a row of hedges at the front. It was in that part of town that every town has, where businesses which have no right being grouped together nonetheless gather due to one reason or another — usually the cheap rent. Across the street from Four Seasons Total Landscaping was a crematorium. Next door to it was an adult book store with a bright yellow sign that displayed its offerings: DVDs and lotions, novelty gifts, viewing booths. It was called Fantasy Island. In retrospect, it was an omen of what was to come.
The Fantasy Island adult bookstore, next door to the place where the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, held a press conference to allege voter fraud.Richard Hall / The Independent
The media was told to line up outside while the press conference was prepared. Journalists from Japan, Germany and Britain took their place as a crowd of Trump supporters gathered around them.
I approached a man named Ron, who held a sign that read: “Biden Laptop Matters.” Since we were about to hear from the president’s lawyers about how this election was stolen, I wanted to hear what he thought about the process.
“What they did is they got ‘em fearful with corona, and once they got them in a fearful state, they suppressed them, they funneled all the ballots through mail-in, where they controlled that process, they can manipulate better,” he said.
As we waited outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, we began to wonder what had led us to this point. Had a Trump campaign staffer booked the wrong Four Seasons and diverted to the landscaping company as a quick fix? Was the owner of the business a witness to this massive voter fraud the president had alleged?
One journalist remarked that the entire episode was beginning to acquire a Muammar Gaddafi flavor to it. When Nato powers bombed Tripoli in support of Libyan rebels during the country’s civil war, and it appeared the leader was on his last legs, he emerged briefly from hiding, riding a golf cart and holding an oversized umbrella. It was intended to project perseverance and strength — it had the opposite effect.
Private security guards hired by the president’s lawyers began to call media outlets into the parking lot. When the names were called, gathered Trump supporters booed those which they felt had been unfair to the president. “Washington Post”.. “Boooo.” “Fox News”…. “Boooooo!” “CNN” “BOOOOOOOO!”
This was an American pantomime.
Inside Four Seasons Total Landscaping, the cameras were assembled, the sound levels checked, the pens were poised and the gates were closed. The world’s press waited for the evidence that would blow this big scam wide open. The sun shone brightly.
Then, out of nowhere, a journalist with a European accent announced the news: “CNN called the presidency for Biden!”
The assembled journalists were paralyzed for a moment. Phones started to ring and calls were made. Some were given instructions to leave and started to do so.
Soon after, the sound of car horns honking and cheers in the street began to drift into the back-lot of Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Kelisha Carter and her daughters outside of four Seasons Total LandscapingRichard Hall / The Independent
A car with a young Black woman named Jada Carter stopped in front of the Trump supporters. She screamed at the top of her lungs: “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!” A flag with a picture of Donald Trump’s head superimposed onto the body of Rocky Balboa fluttered in the wind as she cried out.
Just a few minutes later, Rudy Giuliani appeared. This was the second press conference Mr. Giuliani had called in Philadelphia in a matter of days, both to make unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud. The first took place at an airport hangar.
The president’s personal lawyer was serious and solemn as he took his place at the podium, in front of a garage door covered with Trump campaign posters and a bright yellow hose pipe attached to the wall.
“I’m here to describe to you the first part of a situation that is very troubling,” he began. He went on to claim that dead people were still voting in Philadelphia.
“Joe Frazier is still voting here. Also, Will Smith’s father voted here twice since he died.”
He said he had brought with him a number of poll watchers who claimed they had been blocked from monitoring the vote count. When they spoke, however, their complaint appeared to center around how far they had been asked to stand away from the counting process. Not the evidence of massive fraud Mr. Giuliani or the president had promised.
Amid all the drama of the preceding 30 minutes, no one had told him that Joe Biden had been projected the winner of the presidential election. A member of the press asked Mr. Giuliani how his lawsuits could overturn the call for the former vice president.
“Who was it called by?”
“All of them,” came the response.
Mr. Giuliani took a moment before erupting in mock incredulity: “All the networks? Wow! All the networks!” He raised out his arms and looked to the sky, for a moment looking and sounding like Larry David doing a bit. But the wind had been sucked out of him. The smile had gone.
I walked out onto the street, where more Biden supporters had gathered across the road. A Trump supporter in his underwear and a Biden mask pulled up over his head (who appeared to be dressed as an embodiment of Trump’s insult “Sleepy Joe Biden”) shouted: “Who pays for all that? Who pays for it all. George Soros! George Soros! Tell your daughter who George Soros is hun! Give her a real education. Look it up!”
Next to him, a man wearing an American flag suit and hat, and a full Donald Trump mask, stood silently and still. Even the mask seemed to wear a dejected expression.
Across the road, Kelisha Carter was jubilant. She had come down with two of her daughters and a giant Biden flag to soak up the atmosphere.
“Relief! There’s some hope coming. God, I prayed for this,” she said, when asked how she felt about the victory.
“It’s not even that I don’t like that man, I just don’t like his tactics,” she said of Mr. Trump. “He just divides everybody. He brings the racists out of the closet. It’s scary for Black people, it’s scary for a lot of people. I have daughters and I have a husband that goes out every day and I want him to come home at night.”
Her daughter Jada, who had earlier argued with the Trump supporters from her car, was too excited to stand still. She performed a backflip in the middle of the road.
The owner of the Fantasy Island adult book store had come out onto his porch to watch the circus. He stood and stared in disbelief until a customer jolted him awake again.
A boat navigates at night next to large icebergs in eastern Greenland. 
