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Credit to Author: Garrett M. Graff| Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2017 18:21:52 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n Just 17 months <\/span>after leading chants of \u201cLock her up\u201d at the Republican National Convention<\/a>, protesting FBI Director James Comey\u2019s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation<\/a>, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn himself faced the inside of a Washington courtroom Friday morning.<\/p>\n Flynn pleaded guilty to a single charge of making false statements, stemming from a nearly year-long probe<\/a> into his dealings during the presidential transition with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, thus becoming the fourth Trump campaign official to face charges<\/a> in recent weeks. Based on how the Mueller investigation has progressed so far, he seems unlikely to be the last.<\/p>\n That same investigation into Flynn ultimately culminated earlier this year to Comey\u2019s firing by Donald Trump<\/a>, just weeks after Trump in a private conversation asked Comey to ease off Flynn, telling the FBI director<\/a>, \u201cI hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.\u201d<\/p>\n Friday\u2019s guilty plea\u2014and Flynn\u2019s run from a black SUV through a gauntlet of TV cameras in front of the DC court\u2014mark a stunning fall for a man that many once considered one of the great US intelligence officers of his generation.<\/p>\n \u201cMy guilty plea and agreement to cooperate with the Special Counsel\u2019s Office reflect a decision I made in the best interests of my family and of our country,\u201d Flynn said Friday in a statement. \u201cI accept full responsibility for my actions.\u201d<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s acceptance of Flynn\u2019s single charge, in fact, indicates that the former national security advisor has provided\u2014or plans to provide\u2014significant cooperation to Mueller\u2019s team.<\/p>\n Flynn\u2019s plea makes him one of the highest-ranking government officials to face charges since Iran-Contra in the 1980s, when Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Flynn\u2019s predecessor as national security advisor, Robert \u201cBud\u201d McFarlane, both faced indictment. However, the actions by Flynn\u2014and what they potentially point to\u2014make Watergate a better political analog, as Mueller\u2019s fast-moving investigation entered the White House itself for the first time.<\/p>\n The special counsel\u2019s office reported Friday that Flynn had misled FBI investigators about his contacts with the Russian government, and\u2014even more ominously for the president\u2014that Flynn said he had been directed to make the contacts by Trump\u2019s team at Mar-a-Lago. One of Mueller\u2019s prosecutors, Brandon L. Van Grack, a veteran national security investigator who specializes in espionage cases, said in court that \u201ca very senior member of the transition team directed\u201d Flynn to contact the Russian ambassador at one point.<\/p>\n The move by Mueller, to accept a guilty plea on a run-of-the-mill \u201c1001 violation,\u201d named after 18 USC \u00a7 1001, the criminal statute for making false statements, belies a year of troubling news reports about Flynn\u2019s dealings both with Russia and, particularly, Turkey, a country he retroactively admitted had been paying him even as he worked on Trump\u2019s campaign last year\u2014a violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. More recently, The Wall Street Journal<\/em> has reported<\/a> that Flynn and his son were allegedly involved in a conspiracy potentially aimed at the kidnapping of a Turkish dissident from US soil.<\/p>\n Mueller\u2019s acceptance of Flynn\u2019s single charge, in fact, indicates that the former national security advisor has provided\u2014or plans to provide\u2014significant cooperation to Mueller\u2019s team. That in and of itself is notable: Since defendants rarely receive much credit for \u201ccooperating down\u201d on lesser targets or their peers, Flynn\u2019s role on the campaign and at the White House means that there are only a narrow number of potential targets for which Mueller might be seeking Flynn\u2019s help\u2014almost all of whom are members of Trump\u2019s own family.<\/p>\n There\u2019s plenty of reason to believe, in fact, that Bob Mueller and his team of prosecutors in the special counsel\u2019s office are only getting started. Based on news reports, it appears that there are entire avenues of Mueller\u2019s investigation that still haven\u2019t seen the light of day<\/a>\u2014including a wide-ranging search warrant<\/a> to Facebook about the influence Russian advertising on the platform during the election, as well active investigations centering around Wikileaks, the Trump campaign\u2019s data company Cambridge Analytica<\/a>, and campaign advisors like Carter Page, among others.<\/p>\n Plus, both Flynn and foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who also pleaded guilty<\/a> to a 1001 violation earlier this fall, have evidently provided investigative information significant enough to merit reduced charges\u2014information that has not yet been made public.<\/p>\n Those still-hidden avenues and not-yet-public incriminating information are deeply significant because of one of Mueller's defining characteristics: He doesn\u2019t do fishing expeditions. Unlike Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr, whose years-long investigation sprawled far beyond its original mission to look at a failed Arkansas land deal, an examination of Mueller\u2019s career shows that, if anything, he more regularly errs on the side of narrowly interpreting his mission, doggedly and tirelessly pursuing his own assigned task while ignoring ancillary avenues, or unrelated troubling behavior.<\/p>\n There are only a narrow number of potential targets for which Mueller might be seeking Flynn\u2019s help\u2014almost all of whom are members of Trump\u2019s own family.<\/p>\n Even as the CIA torture program unfolded<\/a> post-9\/11, and troubling rumors and reports of the \u201cenhanced interrogations\u201d reached the upper levels of the FBI, then-FBI Director Mueller and his team turned them aside, saying that the CIA had a different mission, and it wasn\u2019t the FBI\u2019s place to second-guess the intelligence agency\u2019s procedures. And when Mueller was hired by the NFL after his FBI term ended in 2013 to investigate the league\u2019s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence incident, he hewed narrowly to his charge. Even as he conducted a deeply thorough investigation\u2014his final report on the incident contained five pages on how the NFL headquarters signs for and receives packages alone\u2014he never erred from his original mission, focusing strictly on how the league headquarters handled a videotape of the incident, and eschewed any broader questions about the Rice incident or the NFL\u2019s coddling of domestic abusers more generally.<\/p>\n If Mueller is actively pursuing other leads and investigations at this point, it likely means they tie tightly back to the Trump campaign and the increasingly small circle that\u2019s drawing around the White House itself.<\/p>\n President Trump, for his part, has loyally stood by Flynn, even after firing him as national security adviser after questions arose of Flynn\u2019s contact with Kislyak. In February, Trump said, \u201cI don\u2019t think he did anything wrong. If anything, he did something right.\u201d<\/p>\n In the DC courtroom today, Flynn admitted otherwise.<\/p>\n