Reading that Carol Lee piece made me speculate about her sources – who had she spoken with? It’s easy to spot places where specific people had to have been behind the account being told, but it’s hard to separate if they are being accurate or spinning things in their descriptions of events that make themselves look good and their West Wing opponents look bad.

But this episode jumped out at me, in a “but her emails!” kind of way:

Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general who had accompanied Yates to her first meeting with McGahn, received an email sent from Flynn’s White House account requesting a secure phone call to follow up on the McGahn meeting. It was odd enough that Flynn was sending her an email. But what made this truly a mystery for McCord is that the email was signed by Eisenberg.

She decided not to reply and instead sent a new email directly to Eisenberg.

The following day, she and Eisenberg spoke. He told McCord that he had been in Flynn’s office the day before and an assistant had accidentally switched his and Flynn’s phones when giving them back. He then said that he and Flynn had the same password for their phones, and so he accidentally sent the email from the national security adviser’s account.

Let us recall: we’re talking about a retired general/retired DIA director/incoming NSA and a deputy White House counsel/NSC legal adviser here. It kind of makes the decision by the DOD/Obama to fire Flynn from the DIA post kind of a no-brainer. (Not in the story were the possible passwords involved: password or 12345678, perhaps?) McCord’s reaction, on the other hand, is just what one needs to do when faced with an oddity like the email she received. At least someone in the executive branch has an understanding of tech security.

The story also makes me think about the willingness of media outlets to grant anonymity when it seems to serve no journalistic purpose, like this:

When David Ignatius of the Washington Post first reported that Flynn had spoken with Kislyak the day the Obama administration’s sanctions were announced, Flynn directed his deputy, KT McFarland, to call the columnist and say that he and the Russian ambassador did not discuss sanctions during the call.

“I want to kill the story,” Flynn told McFarland.

After McFarland spoke with the columnist, the Post updated his article with an anonymous Trump official saying Flynn and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.

A not-for-attribution denial strikes me as the height of hypocricy, and the WaPo agreeing to print it is crazy.

All this goes to your comment about Pence having no part in this story, Marcy. I don’t think that’s what the item you quoted means at all. The fuller quote from Lee is:

In response to specific questions about this article, Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, referred NBC News to court filings posted on her website.

Flynn’s first lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to comment. The White House and Pence’s office had no comment.

I read that to say that Pence had no on-the-record comment to the specific questions raised by Lee, not that Pence had no role in Lee’s story. Indeed, some of the stuff *about* Pence either came from him or from a close advisor of his and likely with Pence’s approval.

But the end of the piece really has me wondering:

Yet for officials who worked with Flynn in the White House at the time — who asked him repeatedly for weeks if he’d talked about sanctions with Kislyak and were told no — the mystery still lingers: why wasn’t he honest with them?

“The biggest question that’s never been answered is why didn’t he tell everyone in the West Wing that he talked to him about sanctions?” one official said. “Because no one would have cared if he did.”

From where I sit, the answer is obvious: because there is more to Flynn’s relationship with senior Russians than just a conversation about sanctions.

And I’m right, and if Pence has even a whiff of what that might be, that makes his dilemma about what a pardon of Trump would mean for Pence’s own situation even harder to deal with.