Former national security adviser and Russian gadfly Michael Flynn raised quite a few eyebrows when he announced that he was seeking an immunity deal from the F.B.I. and the House and Senate intelligence committees in exchange for testifying before Congress about the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin. His attorney claims any “reasonable person” would have asked for such a deal, but it has nevertheless raised the question: what kind of information does Flynn have? As the Hive has noted, Flynn's decision may indeed be a tactical maneuver to mask an actual paucity of meaningful intelligence on the matter. (He and his lawyers appear to have outside the customary "proffer session.") On Friday, investigators rebuffed his request, saying that it’s too early in the investigation for them to start handing out immunity grants.

On Friday, the Associated Press reported that Flynn’s attorney and a congressional aide present at the meetings said that immunity was discussed, but it was too early in the proceedings for any terms to be set. The top Democrat of the House intelligence committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, said that it was somewhat significant that Flynn had even asked for immunity in the first place. “We should first acknowledge what a grave and momentous step it is for a former national security adviser to the president of the United States to ask for immunity from prosecution,” he said in a statement on Friday.

It's unclear whether the Flynn affair may materialize into something truly consequential for the nascent administration of Donald J. Trump. But Flynn's ubiquity will simply continue to prevent the Trump White House from moving on from the Russia question, which is likely to persist into next week, perhaps preventing the president from taking a victory lap after the anticipated confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Indeed, the slow drip of Flynn news has suggested a miasma of incompetence within the West Wing. On Saturday, for instance, The Washington Post reported that Flynn did not at first reveal that part of his income had come from “Russia-related entities” when he filed a personal financial disclosure form upon his departure from office in February. He had received money from Russian government-backed T.V. network RT, a U.S. air cargo company affiliated with the Volga-Dnepr Group (which is based in Ulyanovsk, Russia), and the U.S. subsidiary of Russian cyber-security and antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab. On his initial filing, Flynn had listed these funds as payment for speeches made, but at first didn’t say to whom he had made them. The Post also notes that, just weeks before the election, Flynn was paid for a speech given to BlackDuck Software in which he spoke about the government’s vulnerability to hackers.