Unless his offer to provide evidence for immunity is all just some sort of pathetic Hail Mary to get his job back, Donald Trump should be pretty damn worried about this guy
* Nash Riggins
* @nashriggins
* Saturday 1 April 2017 14:15 BST
Donald Trump is lot like a cockroach – and not just because he’s generally chalk full of horse excrement. You can step on the guy all you want, but he always seems to scuttle away completely unscathed. And he’s survived more nuclear fallouts in the past 70 days than any other so-called politician would ever hope to see in ten lifetimes.
Cabinet resignations, court defeats, legislative setbacks, thousands of lawsuits, allegations of rape, mass protests and the lowest approval rating for a generation are just a “no, never mind” to him. Up until recently, it seemed like Trump’s ego, shameless ambitions and grip on power simply could not be killed.
But Michael Flynn might just be the industrial-grade pesticide the world has been desperately praying for.
Even if you’re unfamiliar with the name, you’ll have caught bits and pieces of his backstory. Flynn was a three-star army general turned ardent Trump warhawk. The two sparked quite a bromance over the course of 2016, and so it was hardly surprising when Trump named Flynn America’s top national security advisor after The Donald was sworn into office.
Within 24 hours of that appointment, Trump fed his friend to the crocodiles and kicked him out of the White House after it leaked Flynn had some alleged dodgy dealings with the Kremlin. Apparently Flynn met with a Russian ambassador to chat about the possibility of removing US sanctions after Trump came to power, and then lied to everybody about it.
Bad call. Critics scoffed at the early face plant, but everybody seemed to move on just fine.
But fast forward two months, and Russia has become Washington’s favourite buzzword. A few days ago, FBI Director James Comey announced that he was finally going to take action, and that he was formally investigating the Trump administration to see if the President’s team may have actually been working alongside Russia to cheat Hillary Clinton out of last year’s election.
And guess which disgraced former general with a huge chip on his shoulder immediately stepped out of the shadows offering to dish the dirt?
That’s right. Michael Flynn and his new, aggressively anti-Trump lawyer have volunteered to tell members of congress and the FBI everything there is to say about America’s greasy new president and his supposed links with Moscow – but only under the sole condition that Flynn is guaranteed total immunity from being prosecuted for what it is he has to say.
Senate insiders have already dismissed Flynn’s immunity offer as “wildly preliminary”, but members of the House Intelligence Committee sound quite keen. And unless this is all just some sort of pathetic Hail Mary to get his job back, Donald Trump should be pretty damn worried about this guy.
After all, as Michael Flynn himself so gingerly pointed out while campaigning for Trump in last year’s election: “When you are given immunity, that means you’ve probably committed a crime.”
We could speculate forever-and-a-day about what sort of crime that may have been, and where the big man with the little hands ultimately fits into all this. But the fact that wild speculation is even on the table speaks volumes as to just how far we as a society have fallen.
Donald Trump has completely and utterly desecrated the integrity of his office. He bathed the American people in snake oil in a desperate bid to reach what he perceived to be the top, and he stepped on a whole lot of friends along the way.
Well, Mr President, karma sure is a bitch – because it looks like Michael Flynn might have been the wrong friend to step on.
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