House Oversight Committee Just Caught Their First Trump-Russia Criminal
The House Oversight Committee has determined that disgraced National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has broken the law by failing to disclose the foreign payments he received from the Russian Federation in exchange for a pro-Kremlin speech he delivered at a gala in December 2015, payments which he also did not receive permission to solicit in the first place.
“Personally I see no evidence or no data to support the notion that General Flynn complied with the law,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).
“As a former military officer, you simply cannot take money from Russia, Turkey or anybody else. And it appears as if he did take that money. It was inappropriate, and there are repercussions for a violation of law.”
“He was supposed to get permission, he was supposed to report it, and he didn’t,” added ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD).
On top of that, the Oversight Committee has revealed that the White House is going into full-on cover-up mode, and has refused to turn over the documents related to the hiring and subsequent firing of Flynn.
The White House has denied the House Oversight Committee's request for documents related to Mike Flynn's foreign contacts pic.twitter.com/HgR83PYArl
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) April 25, 2017
Or to put it another way: Donald Trump’s White House is actively obstructing a criminal investigation into the transactions between a man who had access to our nation’s most classified information and a hostile foreign power.
The refusal by the White House to release the documents is all but an admission that they knew he was operating as a foreign agent and in the pay of the Kremlin and made him National Security Advisor anyway.
Flynn retroactively registered himself as a foreign agent after his resignation, which means that he was both receiving payments from a foreign government and under suspicion of blackmail from a different foreign government while he was the National Security Advisor and privy to all our nation’s most classified information, all of which the Trump administration was aware of but did nothing to address.
The Trump administration’s decision to give our nation’s classified secrets to a man in the pay of foreign governments is an astonishing breach of our national security and a scandal ten thousand times more significant than Hillary Clinton’s “email server” – but somehow, we aren’t seeing the same reaction from Republicans, who are doing everything they can to obstruct the investigation into Trump and his cronies.
It’s clear now that Flynn will be the first member of the Trump administration to go to jail – and most likely will not be the last.
