Let's Revisit L'affaire General Mike Flynn

Flynn to Comey: "Jim, If you get this message, Get ready. You’re going jail -- Unless you give up someone bigger and deeper in this than even you.

Jim, you know exactly who I'm talking about..."

Holy crap! Nice job, @bennyjohnson pic.twitter.com/1OkGZl5Mgm

— L A R R Y (@LarryOConnor) February 27, 2025

General Mike Flynn, an early casualty of the Get Trump campaign, has briefly popped back up in the news lately. Most recently, it was in the dark warning to former FBI Directior James Comey that surfaced yesterday on X. He was also the subject of intriguing remarks by President Trump last week:

On Tuesday night [February 18], Trump made an appearance at his private Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago, which played host to a gala for America’s Future, a right wing organization chaired by retired Gen. Michael Flynn. TPM reviewed portions of Trump’s remarks, during which the President declared he was eager to see Flynn, who had a short and scandalous stint as White House national security adviser in 2017, make a return to government.

“Let me tell you, this guy, he’s the real deal,” Trump said with a beaming Flynn at his side. “He’s a real general and I told him — I offered him about ten jobs.”

. . . “I think he’s doing so well he doesn’t need them, but I offered,” Trump explained. “I said, any time you want to come in, you know that Mike, OK?”

So what was the context of Flynn's message to Comey on X that he's going to jail? Let's take a look at the Flynn saga, at least as we know it:

Michael Thomas Flynn (born 24 December 1958) is a retired United States Army lieutenant general and convicted felon who was the 24th U.S. national security advisor for the first 22 days of the first Trump administration. He resigned in light of reports that he had lied regarding conversations with Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak.

. . . In February 2016, Flynn became a national security advisor to Trump for his 2016 presidential campaign. . . . On 22 January 2017, Flynn was sworn in as the National Security Advisor. On 13 February 2017, he resigned after information surfaced that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about the nature and content of his communications with Kislyak. Flynn's tenure as the National Security Advisor is the shortest in the history of the position.

In December 2017, Flynn formalized a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to plead guilty to a felony count of "willfully and knowingly" making false statements to the FBI about the Kislyak communications, and agreed to cooperate with the Special Counsel's investigation. In June 2019, Flynn dismissed his attorneys and retained Sidney Powell, who on the same day wrote to attorney general Bill Barr seeking his assistance in exonerating Flynn. Powell had discussed the case on Fox News and spoken to President Trump about it on several occasions. Two weeks before his scheduled sentencing, in January 2020 Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming government vindictiveness and breach of the plea agreement. At Barr's direction, the Justice Department filed a court motion to drop all charges against Flynn on 7 May 2020. Presiding federal judge Emmet Sullivan ruled the matter to be placed on hold to solicit amicus curiae briefs from third parties. Powell then asked the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to compel Sullivan to drop the case, but her request was denied. On 25 November 2020, Flynn was issued a presidential pardon by Trump On 8 December 2020, Judge Sullivan dismissed the criminal case against Flynn, stating he probably would have denied the Justice Department motion to drop the case.

Exactly what happened with the FBI and Flynn has never been completely clear. According to this October 2020 Politico story, then-FBI agent Peter Strzok made notes summarizing a January 5, 2017, "Oval Office meeting at which President Barack Obama, FBI Director James Comey and other national security officials discussed Flynn’s contact with Russian officials." Based on the context of the story, then-Vice President Biden was also in the meeting.

Strzok’s notes indicate that Biden mentioned the Logan Act — a little-used 18th Century law that criminalizes efforts by private citizens to conduct U.S. foreign policy. The FBI internally discussed using the Logan Act as a basis for its decision to interview Flynn a few weeks later as it investigated his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Ultimately, FBI and DOJ officials say the interview was conducted as part of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Strzok’s notes provide no context about why Biden raised the Logan Act, if it was in response to anyone else or how any officials responded. Biden has previously acknowledged being present in the Oval Office during the discussion of the Flynn matter and indicated he was broadly aware of the FBI investigation.

. . . other documents released by the DOJ indicate that the notion of pursuing a Logan Act charge against Flynn first emerged inside the FBI on Jan. 4, 2017, a day before the Oval Office meeting occurred. Messages exchanged between Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page on that day reveal a discussion of the obscure law. Strzok provided the text of the statute to Page, as well as an analysis by the Congressional Research Service that noted the Logan Act had been in relative disuse for more than 200 years and could be unconstitutional.

. . . Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia’s U.S. ambassador in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration. Though he cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller for a year, he has since moved to rescind his guilty plea and allege misconduct by the FBI and prosecutors, who he accuses of coercing his initial plea to pursue a case against Trump. Attorney General William Barr ordered a review of the case in January and ultimately agreed to drop in in May. But Sullivan has so far resisted acting quickly, instead appointing an outside adviser, who has accused Barr of acting overtly to shield an ally of the president.

Comey testified last month that he had no recollection of Biden raising the Logan Act during that Jan. 5, 2017 meeting and isn’t sure why Strzok’s notes included the notation.

“I would remember it because it would be highly inappropriate if a president or vice president suggested prosecution or investigation of anyone. And it did not happen,” Comey said.

The transcripts of the Flynn-Kislyak calls were released on May 29, 2020. Key passages involve an exchange over whether last-minute actions by the outgoing Obama administration could lock the Russians into responses that would damage relations with the incoming Trump administration:

Kislyak then requests that Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump have a video meeting on a “secure video line,” so that Putin can “congratulate” Trump and “discuss a small number, briefly, of issues that are on his agenda,” for Jan. 21, 2017.

Flynn says: “OK,” before telling Kislyak: .“What I would ask you guys to do — and make sure you, make sure that you convey this, okay? Do not, do not uh, allow this administration to box us in right now, okay?”

Flynn is referring to the Obama administration’s move to sanction Russia and expel dozens of Russian diplomats due to what he calls “cyber stuff,” and urges Kislyak not to escalate further.

“What I would ask Russia to do is to not—is—is—if anything—because I know you have to have some sort of action—to, to only make it reciprocal,” Flynn said. “Make it reciprocal. Don’t-don’t make it-don’t go any further than you have to. Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you know, on a tit for tat. You follow me ambassador?”

Certainly in hindsight, this comes off as an entirely appropriate discussion between the Russian ambassador and the US national security adviser-designate only weeks before his administration would come into office. It was intended to ease the transition. The Logan Act, seldom invoked and probably unconstitutional, would have been irrelevant, but it was used as a predicate for an FBI investigation in which flynn was accused of "lying" to agents.

L'affaire Flynn looks now as if it was part of an ongoing effort by Comey to undermine Trump, particularly in the context of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation:

Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the counterintelligence investigation undertaken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from July 31, 2016, to May 17, 2017, into links between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia and "whether individuals associated with [Trump's] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election". Trump was not personally under investigation until May 2017, when his firing of FBI director James Comey raised suspicions of obstruction of justice, which triggered the Mueller investigation.

The Mueller investigation then led to an investigation by the Justice Department Inspector General, who unsurprisingly found no political bias by the FBI. But this led then-Attorney General William Barr to assign John Durham to lead an investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, which Durham slow-walked into irrelevance.

The result up to now is that, although we have a pretty good record of Comey working closely with the outgoing Obama administration to continue bogus investigations of Trump after his first inauguration, so far, there hasn't been a good accounting of Comey's and the FBI's full conduct. Flynn's cryptic remarks, especially in the wake of the Comey "honey pot" allegations, make me wonder if this could change. Who's the one bigger than Comey that Flynn refers to on X? Well, both Obama and Biden were in the January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting, where Comey himself said "it would be highly inappropriate if a president or vice president suggested prosecution or investigation of anyone."

Right.