WASHINGTON
(AP) — Transcripts of phone calls that played a pivotal role in the
Russia investigation were declassified and released Friday, showing that
Michael Flynn, as an adviser to then-President-elect Donald Trump,
urged Russia’s ambassador to be “even-keeled” in response to punitive
Obama administration measures, and assured him “we can have a better
conversation” about relations between the two countries after Trump
became president.
Democrats
said the transcripts showed that Flynn lied to the FBI when he denied
details of the conversation, and that he was undercutting a sitting
president while communicating about sanctions with a country that had
just interfered in the 2016 election. But allies of the president who
maintain the FBI had no reason to investigate Flynn in the first place
insisted that the transcripts showed he had done nothing wrong.
The
transcripts were released by Senate Republicans on Friday after being
provided by Trump’s new national intelligence director, John Ratcliffe,
who waded into one of the most contentious political topics in his first
week on the job. Ratcliffe’s extraordinary decision to disclose
transcripts of intercepted conversations with a foreign ambassador is
part of ongoing efforts by Trump allies to release previously secret
information from the Russia investigation in hopes of painting Obama-era
officials in a bad light.
The
transcripts are unlikely to significantly reshape public understanding
of the contact between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak,
a central moment in the Russia investigation. They do show that the men
did in fact discuss sanctions, matching the general description of the
call provided in the 2017 guilty plea that Flynn reached with special
counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
But
the documents will unquestionably add to the partisan divisions of the
case, which have intensified in the last month with the Justice
Department’s motion to dismiss the prosecution.
Rep.
Adam Schiff, the Democratic chairman of the House intelligence
committee, said in a statement that the transcripts show Flynn lied not
only to the FBI but also to Vice President Mike Pence, who erroneously
stated publicly that Flynn and Kislyak had not discussed sanctions.
Trump later forced Flynn out for misleading the administration.
“These
calls took place shortly after the Russian government interfered in the
2016 election in an effort to help Trump win, and Flynn was engaged in
trying to mute the Russian reaction to sanctions imposed by the Obama
Administration over that very interference,” Schiff said.
But
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, one of the GOP senators who released
the transcript, said Flynn had done nothing wrong. Attorney General
William Barr has similarly called the conversation laudable.
“Our
justice system doesn’t work when one side holds all the cards. But this
isn’t just about safeguarding access to justice; it’s also about
exposing shenanigans and abuses of power by those entrusted to uphold
and defend the law,” Grassley said.
Flynn
attorney Sidney Powell tweeted that Flynn “should be applauded for
asking for ‘cooler heads to prevail’ and trying to keep things on ‘an
even keel’ — encouraging the mutual interest of Russia and the United
States in stability in the Middle East and fighting radical Islam.”
The
documents show that Flynn and Kislyak spoke multiple times between the
time Trump was elected and took office. The call that Flynn pleaded
guilty to lying about took place Dec. 29, 2016, the day after President
Barack Obama signed an executive order hitting Russia with sanctions for
election interference.
During the call, Flynn urged Kislyak that any action Russia took in response to the sanctions be “reciprocal.”
“Don’t
— don’t make it — don’t go any further than you have to. Because I
don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you
know, on a tit for tat. You follow me, Ambassador?” Flynn said,
according to the transcripts.
Kislyak
replied that he understood, but that there were angry sentiments
“raging” in Moscow. Flynn said that even so, “cool heads” needed to
prevail since the U.S. and Russia had common interests in fighting
terrorism in the Middle East.
“I
know, I — believe me, I do appreciate it, I very much appreciate it.
But I really don’t want us to get into a situation where we’re going,
you know — where we do this and then you do something bigger, and then
you know, everybody’s got to go back and forth and everybody’s got to be
the tough guy here, you know?” Flynn said.
The
FBI interviewed Flynn about the call in January 2017. In that
interview, according to a guilty plea reached with Mueller’s team, Flynn
denied having asked Kislyak to refrain from escalating the situation
over sanctions.
He
also said he did not recall a conversation two days later with Kislyak
in which the ambassador intimated that Moscow had decided against an
aggressive response to the sanctions.
“Your proposal that we need to act with cold heads, uh, is exactly what is uh, invested in the decision,” Kislyak said.
The
release follows the recent declassification by Richard Grenell,
Ratcliffe’s predecessor as intelligence director, of names of
intelligence and Obama administration officials who in late 2016 and
early 2017 asked the National Security Agency to reveal to them the name
of an American whose identity was concealed in classified intelligence
reports. That American was revealed to be Flynn.
Names
of U.S. citizens are routinely redacted in intelligence reports that
document routine surveillance of foreign targets, but U.S. officials can
ask to receive the identity if they believe it is vital to
understanding the intelligence.
The
nature of those intelligence reports remains unclear, and they were not
among the documents released Friday. The use by U.S. officials of a
routine process known as “unmasking” to learn Flynn’s identity from
those reports has become a major issue for Trump supporters.
There
is nothing unusual about unmasking requests, which have been more
prevalent at the beginning of the Trump administration than they were at
the end of the Obama administration. But supporters of Trump have
suggested that the requests were made for political reasons.
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