Donald Trump’s attempt at pinning a scandal on Michael Flynn backfires spectacularly – again

| 3:45 pm EDT March 14, 2017
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When Donald Trump nudged his National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to into resigning last month, he wanted us to believe Flynn had been conspiring with Russia all by himself during the campaign. That backfired spectacularly as the controversy surrounding his ouster helped expose that he was just one of at least seven Trump campaign advisers who were in on it. And now Trump’s latest attempt at pinning his own scandal on Flynn is backfiring yet again.

Last week Michael Flynn tried to belatedly get himself on the right side of the law by retroactively registering as a paid foreign agent of Turkey. He essentially admitted his past crime, which had been public knowledge for months anyway, in the hope of finding a way out this mess. Naturally, the Trump administration tried to spin this as being unique to Flynn. Mike Pence even went so far as to lie about himself and Trump having known Flynn was on the take when they named National Security Adviser. But today that also backfired.

Monica Crowley, whom the Trump administration had announced as Michael Flynn’s deputy before she was forced to withdraw due to a plagiarism scandal, has no also registered as a foreign agent (source: U.S. government website). She’s not admitting to having been one during the campaign; for now at least, her claim is that her employment is just getting started. But that sounds flimsy. And she’s registering as a foreign agent of a pro-Kremlin political figure in Ukraine, which couldn’t possibly look worse for Trump in light of the specific nature of his Russia scandal.

Moreover, it’s likely that Crowley took the precaution of registering as a foreign agent after she saw that her counterpart Flynn had done the same. And considering that Flynn registered because he was trying to protect himself after having been hung out to dry, it’s fair to say that Trump’s new Crowley scandal is a result of Trump having tried to scapegoat Flynn for Russia in the first place.

Now that we know Michael Flynn isn’t the only Donald Trump adviser who is (or was) on the take from a foreign government, there are surely more than just the two of them within Trump’s ranks. At this point, each time Trump tries to further scapegoat Flynn by claiming he was the only bad apple, Flynn’s subsequent actions to protect himself merely help telegraph where the rest of the bodies are buried. So we keep digging. Contribute to Palmer Report