Right. The obvious question that now must be answered for the American People:
Mr. Flynn - Where did the idea that you expressed to the Russian Ambassador that the US would lift Obama’s Sanctions come from and were you directed to related this to the Ambassador?
Special investigator, NSA, FBI, whoever. We need to know. There must be consequences. Even if Obama was a lame duck with hours left in his term, it was treasonous to undermine the standing president’s sanctions by collaborating with a foreign government.
Whenever I hear that a government official under Trump has “resigned”, I remember the way I was once forced to ‘resign’ from a company. Shenanigans are shenanigans.
Beyond how silly it is to complain about US intelligence agencies actually doing their job properly instead of continuing their rampant abuses (and yes, I know it is self serving for the intelligence community), the current administration is using this as an excuse to target “disloyal” whistleblowers to the cheers of the right.
When the system needs pruning and reigning in, you don’t make blanket condemnations even when it works properly. Especially when Trump is reversing the paltry reigning in under Obama in the first weeks of his presidency.
Yeah, we don’t really have a “do-over” button coded into the Constitution. There really aren’t any provisions laid out for how to deal with more than just one problematic executive-branch official besides “ride it out until the next election”. Considering that they couldn’t foresee how bad of an idea “the VP is the guy who comes in second” would be in a nation with even nascent political parties, I don’t think anyone involved in drafting the Constitution could have even conceived of a situation where the majority of Congress would be willfully complicit in supporting a presidential administration committing impeachable offenses. Assuming we could even get to the point where Trump was impeached, I don’t know what it would even look like if you then tried to impeach Pence before he managed to appoint a new VP… would we start following the line of succession until we finally got to someone who was still held over from the previous administration? If so, we’d also have to impeach Paul Ryan, then, um… furious googling … Orrin Hatch, then Tillerson, then Mnuchin, then Mattis, then Sessions, before finally getting to the friggin’ Secretary of Agriculture.
In hindsight, this may not have been as perfectly-thought-out as it seemed in 1789.
As of just a few hours ago, Kellyanne Conway’s story to the press was that Flynn realized he had become a “lightning rod” and had offered his resignation, which the President accepted and “moved on”. If Ryan is saying that Trump asked for his resignation, they clearly don’t have their stories aligned, and someone’s lying.
This whole, “Who committed the worse crime? The person who committed the crime, or the person who found out they committed the crime?” thing is pretty bizarre.
