For those of you still capable of being amazed by the sheer mendacity of this administration*, The Wall Street Journal on Friday had an amazing story about where, exactly, Robert Mueller could be heading in his pursuit of Michael Flynn and Whoever Else comes after him. As is apparently the custom with this incredible claque of international men of mystery, while the president* was planning his transition, and not long before he would be named the president*’s National Security Adviser, Flynn was very much in business for himself.

Back in March, the Journal reported on a meeting that Flynn attended the previous December with officials of the government of Turkey. According to former CIA director James Woolsey, who was at the December meeting, Flynn and the Turkish officials discussed the possibility of kidnapping fugitive Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen – “in the dead of night,” according to Woolsey – and delivering him to the government of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has accused Gulen of being one of the ringleaders of a 2016 coup against the Erdogan regime. Friday’s story in the Journal advanced that previous story by revealing the price that Flynn – and his son, as it happens – would be paid for this act of international abduction.

$15 million.

The deal was apparently struck at 21, the famous New York restaurant not far from 666 Fifth Avenue, the building that has so…ah…bedeviled Jared Kushner, and also fairly close to Trump Tower, in which Flynn at the time also was planning the president’s transition. (As it happens, a publication for which I used to work was headquartered at 666 Fifth and, occasionally, when we all wanted to feel like New York swells, we’d go to 21 and drink martinis that cost more than my first car.) As with so many stories involving this administration*, let’s pause here for a moment and reassemble the basic facts.

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At the time of this meeting at 21, Michael Flynn was one of the incoming administration*’s foremost national security advisors. He was intimately involved with planning the transition to a new administration that, even more than most, was being assembled on the fly by people who really didn’t know what they were doing, including Flynn himself, God knows. Still, Flynn allegedly found the time to cut a deal with a foreign power to kidnap one of its enemies on American soil and transport him overseas, for which the Flynns pere et fils would be paid $15 million. Later, when as far as anyone knows, his deal with Turkey was still pending, Flynn would become the president*s National Security Advisor, with all the power and influence that office entails.

It is easy to end this with how this is Not Normal. But there are degrees of Not Normal. Ivanka Trump in important international conferences is Not Normal. The president* yielding to the Chinese regarding press availabilities is Not Normal. Scott Pruitt at EPA is Not Normal. But Flynn’s alleged escapades push the frontiers of Not Normal far beyond any limits we could have anticipated. This is dung-for-dinner Not Normal. This is Me Flying The Space Shuttle Not Normal. This is Snow In The Gobi Not Normal. Some day, one of these people is going to get up at a podium and bite the head off a live chicken.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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