AP Photo Opinion Congress Needs to Investigate the Flynn Case

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review and a contributing editor with Politico Magazine.

In an environment where every day has felt like a month and almost every news cycle has something that the media considers a potentially administration-shaking disaster, we finally have something worthy of the perpetually screaming headlines and breaking-news alerts—a national security adviser getting fired under a haze of suspicion about his dealings with Russia.

This is gobsmacking by any standard. Michael Flynn, a Trump loyalist constantly at the candidate’s side over the past year, couldn’t even last four weeks. His ouster coincides with reports in The New York Times and on CNN about contacts between Trump aides and Russian officials during the campaign that play into the darkest suspicions about the administration.


Although Trump’s critics are already vested in the most dire scenario—Dan Rather has it all pegged as the next Watergate—the spectrum of possibilities here is still quite broad.

Flynn may have flatly lied about a crystal-clear conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions out of his own cognizance of guilt, or he may have inadvertently relayed incomplete information about an ambiguous conversation and watched the situation spin out of control. Which is it?

The Times story about communications between Trump advisers and Russians stipulates that it’s unclear that the conversations had anything to do with Trump. That means the explanations range all the way from the Trump campaign coordinating with the Russians about their campaign-related hacking to, say, Paul Manafort engaging in his own sideline business calls. Which is it?

More broadly, the people around Trump have been complicit in an unprecedented assault on the integrity of our election process by the Russians, or malicious bureaucrats who want to destroy the Trump administration before it begins are piling unwarranted insinuations atop fragmentary information, or something in between or all of the above. Which is it?

All of this obviously demands serious investigation on Capitol Hill. Not a pretending-to-investigate-so-we-can-say-we’re-investigating probe, but an honest-to-goodness attempt to get to the bottom of the whole fetid matter, from the Russian hacking, to the reported contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, to the sophisticated campaign of leaks from within the intelligence community that has been driving this story.

Such an investigation is in the public interest, although not necessarily in the interest of the GOP. The party has wanted relations with the Trump administration to stay as normal and even-keeled as possible in the hopes of moving major legislation through Congress this year with the president’s assistance. The last thing it wants is a probe that will generate more distracting headlines and possibly strain relations with the White House.

But there isn’t any alternative. The public deserves to know the facts, and even if Republicans wanted to look the other way, the trial by leak will continue, media story by media story.

It is not to excuse Flynn’s ineptitude or what appears to have been his deception to note the disturbing nature of the campaign against him. It made use of what is supposed to be the very most sensitive and carefully guarded information gathered in our surveillance of foreign officials to destroy his public career.

There is much about his rapid downfall that still doesn’t add up. According to The New York Times, the FBI talked to Flynn about a potential violation of the Logan Act arising from his conversations with Kislyak. This is a little like federal investigators talking to you about pulling the tag off your mattress. The Logan Act forbidding private interference in U.S. foreign policy is literally never prosecuted. It is seemingly left on the books solely to give op-ed writers and cable-TV talkers an excuse to suggest people they don’t like might have broken the law.

Flynn’s attitude should have been, “If you think you’re going to prosecute me under a 1799 statute rusty from two centuries of desuetude based on conversations I had when I was the incoming national security adviser—well, come and get me, copper.”

It’s time to get what happened in all these events on the record in a full, reliable manner. Let’s see the transcripts of Flynn’s call with Kislyak, now that the entire world knows that they exist. Let’s hear from Flynn, and Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone, and anyone else in the Trump orbit who might have been talking to the Russians. Let’s get a detailed accounting of how the Russians went about their hacking, and why we know it was them. While we’re at it, let’s hear from ex-CIA director John Brennan, who clearly has cultivated a burning hatred of Trump, and do whatever is possible to identify the source of leaks and the motives of the leakers.

Let’s air it all out. It’s unlikely that anyone will agree on all the facts or what they mean, but litigating it publicly beats the shadow game currently being played by anonymous sources. The leaks may make for fascinating reading, but they aren’t how a great republic should conduct its business or pursue the truth.