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At this moment, we are four days away from Trump’s inauguration. The FBI agents and analysts who monitored the calls, as well as some NSC officials in the Obama administration, along with a few senior Justice Department attorneys, all knew with certainty that the content of the calls contradicted Flynn’s account of them. The transcript of the Dec. 30 call proved as much.

For reasons unclear to us, Comey did not believe that Flynn’s misrepresentations amounted to a sufficient national security risk on January 16 to spring FBI investigators on the Trump team, or even on Flynn. Perhaps he felt that doing so right before the inauguration would have been too unseemly.

But he did want to know more. In an extraordinary turn, agents were sent to the White House to interview Flynn just a few days after Trump was sworn in, according to the New York Times. We don’t know what they learned. But by January 26, Comey had dropped his objections to notifying the White House. (In the interim, Sean Spicer was asked about the calls again, and repeated the Flynn untruth.)

Acting attorney general Sally Yates informed the White House counsel, Don McGahn, that their account of what Flynn said did not match what Flynn insisted he said.

McGahn had the clearance to see the transcript, but it’s fair to assume that many members of Trump’s team probably did not. But that does not explain why it took 11 days for Vice President Mike Pence, who certainly did have such clearance, to learn about the Justice Department warning. And it does not explain what the White House was doing as it mulled over this information for weeks.

Here we have to leave the realm of reasonable conjecture, but the best explanation might be the easiest: incompetence or ineffectiveness from the White House counsel, and an inability to foresee the real world consequences of their own decisions by White House principles. The country’s intelligence agencies, by contrast, were far-more clear-sighted in the use of their prerogatives and power.

Foreign Policy