Michael Flynn gives away that Donald Trump is hosed

Today we learned that sometime between the summer of 2017 and the start of December 2017, Donald Trump’s then-attorney John Dowd approached Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort with a discussion about pardons. Those pardons obviously never did happen. We still don’t know what’s going on in Manafort’s head. But we now know that, even after a pardon from Trump was dangled in Flynn’s face, he decided to cut a plea deal. Why? Because Flynn might be a traitor, but he’s not stupid. He knew back then what’s becoming more apparent to the public by the day: Trump is hosed.

We know Flynn was trying to shield his son from criminal prosecution. If Trump was willing to pardon Flynn to prevent him from flipping, he surely would have been willing to pardon Flynn’s son as well. But Flynn had to have concluded that a pardon from Trump either wouldn’t happen, or wouldn’t do him and his son any good. Maybe Flynn thought Trump, a disloyal pathological liar, was making false promises about a pardon. Maybe Flynn thought that a pardon of a co-conspirator would be struck down by the courts. Maybe Flynn simply knew that state level charges would take him and his son down even if they were pardoned.

Regardless of Flynn’s precise line of reasoning, he came to the conclusion that Trump wasn’t going to simply be able to pardon his way out of this. Trump’s only real shot at surviving this was to take all of Robert Mueller’s best witnesses off the table before they could spill their guts about Trump’s crimes. Flynn correctly gambled that Trump wasn’t going to be able to pull this off. We now know this, not only because Trump still hasn’t pardoned Manafort all these months later, but because Trump didn’t pardon Rick Gates before he cut a plea deal and spilled his guts.

With each passing day, Donald Trump is proving that he can’t pardon his way out of the Trump-Russia scandal. Maybe he’ll still try, as he does have a habit of taking belated desperate swings in frustration, long after they could have helped him. But it’s too late for such a strategy to work. Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and others have already spilled their guts about Trump’s crimes. Pardons won’t undo that. Trump is hosed. Flynn knew it last year, when he took one look at the pardon Trump was dangling, and decided to cut a deal with Mueller instead.