On the Jared and Flynn Stories

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Amid reports that Mike Flynn is flipping like a pancake, CNN reported (in addition to a report that Mueller’s team canceled a grand jury appearance for former Flynn business associates) that Jared Kushner was asked a bunch of questions about Flynn in an interview earlier this month.

Before reading the details CNN provides, however, consider this line in the story:

It’s not clear that this is the only time that Kushner will meet with the special counsel’s team.

That is, the subtext here is that, even as Mueller’s team preps a plea deal with Flynn, he’s well aware that he remains a key target in conjunction with Flynn events, and may get hauled back before Mueller’s team for all the other stuff. Effectively, they were locking in Kushner’s testimony — including, presumably, about what kind of permission/instructions Flynn had to engage in the corrupt foreign deals he was pushing — from Kushner and his pop-in-law before flipping Flynn.

So here’s how CNN describes the Flynn questions:

Mueller’s team specifically asked Kushner about former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who is under investigation by the special counsel, two sources said. Flynn was the dominant topic of the conversation, one of the sources said.

[snip]

The conversation lasted less than 90 minutes, one person familiar with the meeting said, adding that Mueller’s team asked Kushner to clear up some questions he was asked by lawmakers and details that emerged through media reports. One source said the nature of this conversation was principally to make sure Kushner doesn’t have information that exonerates Flynn.

The meeting took place around the same time the special counsel asked witnesses about Kushner’s role in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his relationship with Flynn, these people said.

That means, as we speak, Flynn is providing his side of this story, and explaining why Jared was so intent on firing Mueller because Mueller was actively investigating Flynn.

As I’ve long said, you get to Jared through Flynn. It seems like Jared’s team is now hoping he gets a second chance at testimony before he gets busted himself.

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9 replies
  2. orionATL says:

    ew writes:

    “…As I’ve long said, you get to Jared through Flynn. It seems like Jared’s team is now hoping he gets a second chance at testimony before he gets busted himself….”

    busted for what?

    a lot of the questions of whether russians colluded (or traded big favors, if you prefer) with trumpsters to affect the 2016 election do not seem to involve illegal behavior. but some do.

    here is what emptywheel wrote way back in march:

    https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/03/29/the-flynn-and-kushner-interviews-with-ssci/

    “… In my post on the Kushner story, I noted that the Kushner story for the first time got into the quid pro quo the Russians were really interested in — not a change in policy towards Ukraine, but rather, an end to the sanctions targeting Russia for its annexation of Ukraine. I actually missed one of the most important parts of that story, however. On December 29, the FSB-trained head of a sanctioned who met with Kushner at the request of Sergey Kislyak, Sergey Gorkov, stated that he thought Ukrainian-related sanctions might “change for the better.”

    And in an interview on the state-owned Rossiya 24 TV channel on Dec. 29, the same month that he met with Mr. Kushner, Mr. Gorkov said he hoped that the situation caused by Ukraine sanctions imposed by the Americans against Russian banks like his “would change for the better.”

    As I noted in my post, the possibility that Gorkov had discussed Ukraine sanctions directly with Kushner would change the connotation of the discussions between Flynn and Kislyak.

    And those conversations were on December 29.

    In other words, on the very same day that Kislyak and Flynn were having multiple phone calls — and discussed sanctions in vague terms — Gorkov was publicly discussing the Ukraine, not the hacking related, sanctions… ”

    and then in may (highlighted above):

    https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/05/19/the-kushner-comey-connection/

    “… The WaPo is reporting that the FBI probe into ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign is looking at a person still in the White House, in addition to Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort.

    The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter…

    Still further down, the WaPo covers what first got me believing Jared Kushner is the ultimate target of this probe: his meeting with Sergey Gorkov, the FSB-trained head of the sanctioned Russian bank, Vnesheconombank.

    ‘… The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son-in-lawinitially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire, though his lawyer has said publicly he submitted the form prematurely and informed the FBI soon after that he would provide an update.

    Vnesheconombank handles development for the state, and in early 2015, a man purporting to be one of its New York-based employees was arrested and accused of being an unregistered spy.

    That man — Evgeny Buryakov — ultimately pleaded guilty and was eventually deported. He had been in contact with former Trump adviser Carter Page, though Page has said he shared only “basic immaterial information and publicly available research documents” with the Russian…’ ”

    i wonder what law(s) might be involved here other than incomplete reporting?

  6. SpaceLifeForm says:

    OT: AWS exposure yet again! (Lost count)

    These continued ‘mistakes to secure’ can not be true. There is something else happening.

    And there is a tool out there now to find these “public” AWS dumps. In fact there may be a dump from Google on AWS that is “public”. I can not fathom that such a thing would exist as Google has their own cloud.

    Note the exposure of:
    driver’s license and Social Security card images

    https://www.upguard.com/breaches/credit-crunch-national-credit-federation

    Coming only months after the revelation that the personal information of over 143 million Americans had been stolen from the systems of credit agency Equifax, the UpGuard Cyber Risk Team has discovered a new, damaging exposure from within a financial firm, which, beyond revealing critical internal data, also exposes customer information compiled by all three major credit agencies. This highly concentrated level of exposure, thoroughly revealing customer credit history several times over, serves to highlight the myriad dangers a single exposure can unleash.

    111 GB of internal customer information from National Credit Federation, a Tampa, Florida-based credit repair service, was left exposed in a publicly downloadable data repository, revealing to the public internet sensitive personal and financial information for tens of thousands of customers. Exposed among the leaked files were such sensitive documents and details as customer names, addresses, dates of birth, driver’s license and Social Security card images, credit reports from all three major agencies, personalized credit blueprints containing detailed financial histories, and full credit card and bank account numbers.

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