The NPR Politics Podcast - Flynn Pleads Guilty, Senate Gets Closer To Passing Tax Bill

Episode Date: December 2, 2017

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the Senate is moving toward a final vote on a major tax overhaul. This episode: host/congressional reporter Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Kelsey Snell and justice reporter Ryan Lucas. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hello everyone, this is Ari, flying at 35,000 feet in the air on a red-eye from Phoenix, Arizona to my new home in New York City. This podcast was recorded at 6 o'clock on Friday, December 1st. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Keep up with all of NPR's blue logo coverage at npr.org, the NPR One app, and on your local public radio station. Okay, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. That's right, you did just hear our weekly roundup, but we are back in your feed because it's been a very newsy Friday.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. And on Capitol Hill, the Senate is moving toward a final vote on a major tax overhaul. That's after a Thursday night speed bump momentarily added some last minute drama to that effort. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. Kelsey, why don't you hang tight, watch the proceeds on the Senate floor, and we will tag you in in the second half of this podcast, if that works for you. I will sit here riveted watching the Senate floor.

Okay. C-SPAN 2 is an exciting place. C-SPAN dose. So, Ryan, you will tag out with Kelsey in a little bit. And let's start with Flynn. This is the big news today in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election. Today, Trump's first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia's ambassador during the transition. Flynn is now the second Trump aide to plead guilty in the

investigation. Two others have been charged, including former campaign chair Paul Manafort. What exactly did Flynn plead to today? So Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in an interview that he had with FBI agents on January 24th. So after he was named national security advisor and after Trump had been sworn in as president. What he lied about, it turns out, are conversations that he had with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, on December 22nd and December 29th. Now, those conversations revolved around on December 22nd, a resolution before the UN Security Council related to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Obama administration was signaling that it was going to go one way and abstain on the resolution.

The incoming Trump administration wanted and was very public about this, wanted this resolution to either be vetoed or delayed. And so what Flynn did was reach out to various diplomats, including, it turns out, the Russian ambassador, Sergei Kislyak, to try to get him to have Russia veto or postpone it. Russia ultimately said, no, we are not going to do that. The other calls were on December 29th. Those were about sanctions the Obama administration had just imposed on Russia over Russia's meddling in the U.S. election, over Russian interference in the election. Those were those conversations. And this is what Flynn misrepresented in his interview with the FBI. And, Tam, those conversations, contemporaneously, the Trump transition team

denied their nature. Flynn denied them. Vice President Mike Pence went on television and said that's not what the conversations were about. And it was only when the Washington Post reported otherwise that the story changed. So initially, the transition team said, oh, they were just holiday greetings. We now know it wasn't just holiday greetings. Michael Flynn was asking the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and the Russian government to not respond to these sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration, saying, just wait for Trump to come. And the bigger context here is that these conversations were misrepresented, right? Because one of the major stories early on in the Trump administration was that Flynn said one thing publicly.

Flynn, we learned today, confirmed today, said one thing to the FBI publicly. Flynn did something else very differently. And then acting Attorney General Sally Yates said, hey, you've got yourself a problem here. Right. So that all happened in the late January, early February period. And shortly thereafter, Flynn was forced to resign. He was kicked out. And the White House said that he was booted because he lied to the vice president because the vice president then went on television and said there were no contacts with Russians. Let's actually listen to that. This is one of several interviews Mike Pence did just before he became vice president. This one was with CBS. So did they ever have a conversation about sanctions ever on those days or any other day?

They did not have a discussion contemporaneous with U.S. action. But what about ever? In my conversation with General Flynn. Well, look, General Flynn has been in touch with diplomatic leaders and security leaders in some 30 countries. That's exactly what the incoming national security adviser should do. But what I can confirm, having spoken to him about it, is that those conversations that happened to occur around the time that the United States took action to expel diplomats had nothing whatsoever to do with those sanctions. So why does this matter to him?

Why does this matter? Well, I mean, it depends on who you ask, because the White House will say, yep, Flynn lied to the vice president or the vice president elect. And he lied to the FBI in a very similar fashion. That's what the White House is saying today is this is not news. Flynn was part of the administration for 25 days. He used to be part of the Obama administration, though he was fired from there. And there is nothing to see here. Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Flynn. But there was a lot of talk today about something in the documents that we saw mentioning a very senior member of the Trump transition being involved in this process, maybe even telling Flynn to initiate it. What do we know?

Yeah. So what we know is that Flynn is cooperating. So Mueller probably knows exactly who this very senior transition official is. And actually, these documents that that Mueller's team put out include all kinds of Flynn consulted with the transition team. Flynn was directed by a very senior transition official. So in short, although Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer, put out this statement saying this is limited to Flynn, the reality is these documents would indicate that there are other people that Flynn was contemporaneously talking to, working with, taking direction from, coordinating with. And the fact that Flynn is cooperating means that he has information about some of these people that Mueller wants. There are a couple of interesting points here that I want to raise. One is that in the language in the court

papers, the verb that is used is directed. This very senior official directed Flynn to do X, Y, Z. That is not, you can't wiggle out of that. That is, Flynn has said he was instructed by this individual, and Mueller's going to know who that individual was, to do this on behalf of the transition team. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that the December 29th discussion that he had with Kislyak, this back and forth in the phone calls with the Russian ambassador, that day, the pool report from the transition team which was at Mar-a-Lago

and this is what in the court papers it specifies was speaking to someone Flynn was speaking to someone at Mar-a-Lago about his conversations with the Russian ambassador the transition team pool report has a list of participants from the morning national security meeting of President-elect

Trump it lists participants as Stephen Miller, Katie McFarland, Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Reince Priebus. Not Jared Kushner. Jared Kushner, it appears, was in Hawaii on vacation on that day. So he would not be the senior official mentioned in papers there. But Jared Kushner was very involved with the advocacy from the Trump team on the UN Security Council resolution. So what is the actual problem here? This is a group of officials who are going to be taking over the White House in less than a month. This is the incoming national security advisor having a conversation with an official from another country. I mean, I assume that these conversations happen all the time. Obviously, the Obama administration

was still in power. But is there anything wrong with Mike Flynn having a conversation with Russia's ambassador? Mike Flynn was not charged with having a conversation with the Russian ambassador. Mike Flynn was charged with lying about his conversation with the Russian ambassador. And what this is, I mean, what this whole plea agreement suggests is that Flynn has a lot more to tell. Because you look, I mean, what we know about Flynn's legal problems leading up to this, we know that there are issues of that he did not register as a foreign agent. We know that because he registered late. We know that there are questions about his business dealings with Turkey, about his business dealings with Russian businesses.

None of that is in the court papers today. He was not charged with any of those things. We also know that Flynn's son was a business associate in a number of those dealings. Flynn's son was not charged today. Flynn himself was not charged on those other business dealings. And Flynn himself, according to court papers, only faces from zero to six months in prison. The implication is that he's in a lot less legal trouble than he could be. And in exchange, he's cooperating with this investigation. Exactly. He said in a statement that he has decided to fully cooperate with the investigation for the good of his family

and the country. So this meeting that he had with Kislyak and what he lied to the FBI about it, I think, is relative to two big parts of the investigation. And I want to walk through them one at a time to see if we have any sense of what this means for the two different directions of the investigation. The first is the question of, was there any sort of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, Russian officials to help work with each other to defeat Hillary Clinton? The question early on was, is he meeting with Russian officials because of that pre-existing relationship? That's the open question, at least.

What I think this does is, one, it puts Mueller in a position to learn what Mike Flynn knows about those possible conversations during the campaign itself and whether, indeed, there were folks within the Trump orbit who were conspiring, working with the Russians against Hillary Clinton to win the election. It opens that door. It's all the knowledge that Flynn has during his time in the campaign, during the transition conversations he was in. That's all knowledge that Flynn can now provide to Mueller and his team. And they can continue to work up the chain. And Flynn traveled with candidate Trump. He was a very prominent surrogate for Trump and was deeply enmeshed in the campaign before he was then deeply enmeshed in the transition

and the early days of the Trump administration. And the early days of the Trump administration is the second prong of this investigation, because one of the biggest moments of the year when it comes to this investigation and what we learned about it was when it became public that in February, President Trump in the Oval Office asked Jim Comey, then the FBI director, to go easy on Michael Flynn. That's a paraphrase of what the conversation was. This is something Comey testified to. We now have a timeline filled in a little bit where a very senior member of the Trump transition allegedly directs Flynn,

is aware of Flynn talking to Russia's ambassador. Flynn talks to Russia's ambassador. Flynn lies about it. The Trump administration is warned that Flynn could compromise himself. And then after all of that, Trump says to Comey, go easy on Michael Flynn. Well, and Trump was also publicly saying, go easy on Michael Flynn. In a press conference February 16th, after Flynn had been fired, Trump was asked about it. And he basically argued that Flynn didn't do anything wrong. And that he was, he said he was a like a good guy yeah let's listen to that Mike Flynn is a fine person and I asked for his resignation he respectfully gave it he is a man who

there was a certain amount of information given to Vice President Pence who's with us today and I was not happy with the way that information was given. He didn't have to do that because what he did wasn't wrong. What he did in terms of the information he saw, what was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information. It was given illegally. That's the real problem.

And, you know, you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a, you know, fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats. And the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this. They know nothing about it. They weren't in Russia. They never made a phone call to Russia. They never received a phone call. It's all fake news. And he, later in this press conference, says, he's asked, did you direct Flynn to talk to Kislyak?

And he says, no, I didn't direct him, but I would have. If he hadn't been doing it, I totally would have if he hadn't been doing it. I totally would have because it would have been his job. Mike was doing his job. He was calling countries and his counterparts. So it certainly would have been OK with me if he did it. I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn't doing it. I didn't direct him, but I would have directed him because that's his job. Okay, so let's wrap this up. Ryan, we now have the former campaign chair of Trump's campaign charged. We now have a former top Trump advisor, the national security advisor for about a month, pleading guilty. What happens next in this investigation?

Well, I think that we have a couple of hints in the court papers that we've discussed. That would be the very senior transition official and the, quote, senior transition official. Those are people who Mueller's team may have spoken with, the FBI may have spoken with. We don't know what they said. They may have misrepresented, mischaracterized their meetings or what they knew about contacts with the Russians. This all allows Mueller, as I said, to move up the ladder, go after more people and get to the very heart of the question of his mission, which is, did the Trump campaign collude with Russia during the 2016 election? And Tam, how is the White House viewing this now that two senior aides have have either been charged or pleaded guilty? I talked to somebody who's close to the White House today who insisted that they are very focused not on the Flynn stuff, but instead on the Senate tax bill. Well, if they say they're focused on taxes, maybe we can take a cue from at least what they say they're focused on. And we'll talk about taxes for a bit.

Ryan, thank you very much for hanging out with us. Thank you. All right. Talk to you soon. All right. So Ryan has left. Kelsey, how have the last, you know, 15 minutes of your life been? Well, I have been watching the Senate floor and nothing has changed. We are still waiting for them to release a tax bill. We're still waiting for them to tell us when we're going to vote.

And basically, we have been in this holding pattern where Democrats are complaining that they haven't seen a bill and Republicans are complaining that the current tax code is complicated and they don't like it. OK, so let's rewind about 24 hours here, because in yesterday's podcast, we were talking about how confident Republicans were that this was going to pass. And then I was on All Things Considered last night getting ready to talk about just how confident Republicans were that this bill would pass. And I see Bob Corker standing in the middle of the Senate floor, surrounded by John Cornyn, surrounded by John Thune, surrounded by a lot of senior Republicans. And they are having an animated conversation. And you, Susan Davis, and I have a text exchange of, so what's going on here? Wait a second. What happened? And how did this temporarily derail taxes? So from what we can tell, they were having a conversation about whether or not

complicated Senate budget rules would allow them to include what they've been calling a trigger or this automatic way that they could have increased taxes or cut spending if the tax bill didn't actually grow the economy the way they expected. What happened was the parliamentarian, the person who decides whether or not something fits into Senate rules, decided that this didn't fit the Senate rules and it couldn't be added. And Corker and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona said that they just couldn't vote for this bill. Separately, there was another fight happening with Steve Daines of Montana and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who wanted there to be better breaks for small businesses. So these four are saying they just can't vote for the bill.

And if we've said it once, we've said it 16,000 times this year. If more than two Republicans vote against anything in the Senate, it's not happening. Right. So McConnell's upset. John Cornyn is upset. Basically, all of the Republicans who want to pass this bill are upset. And it takes about an hour. Eventually, they resolve whatever it is. They all leave the floor and say, you know what, guys, we're going to stop what we're doing. We're going to go back to the drawing board. And we're going to rewrite whatever we can rewrite overnight. And hopefully, we'll have a deal and we'll see you in the morning.

So things hit pause in the Senate. Tam, it might be a moot point now because they're not doing it.4 trillion over the next decade would be added to the deficit. And the proponents of this legislation say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't worry about that. The economy is going to be supercharged. As the president said in a speech, it is going to take off like a rocket. And the deficit is not going, not that much is going to be added to the deficit. And these senators who are concerned about these things are saying, but what if you're wrong? You haven't really given us a lot of proof that this is going to do what you say it's going to do. So they wanted a trigger that would somehow reel it back in, raise tax rates back up, or automatically cut spending. Some sort of a trigger to make it so that the deficit doesn't balloon if the tax cuts don't do the superpower rocket charging thing that they're supposed to do.

So that can't happen now because of Senate rules. So, Kelsey, here we are Friday evening. Is Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders, are they still trying to make Bob Corker and company happy or have they found their votes elsewhere at this point? Well, they're definitely not trying to make Bob Corker happy. He announced a little bit ago that he is not going to vote for this bill. And it looks like he might actually end up being the only Republican who votes against it. The kind of negotiations and work that they did overnight won over at least three other people who said that they had concerns, but now they're happy, they're willing to vote for it. But there's something that's still holding them up, and we're not entirely certain what it is. Right now, we're waiting for them to send over a final bill. But, you know, there could be billions of dollars in changes that we haven't seen yet. It's 6.28 p.m. sitting where I am right now. And they say they want to pass this bill by the end of the day today. And we don't know what's in it. I got to say, Kelsey, sitting in a small booth by yourself, that's the least exciting timestamp we've ever had on the podcast. I hope you have provisions. But I think that's worth underscoring because as we talk, they think they can vote within a matter of hours optimistically, and we still haven't seen the language. Yeah. So a little bit ago, Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz tweeted,

does anybody know a Republican lobbyist so I can get my hands on a copy of this bill? Whoa. Yeah. And Chris Murphy from Connecticut was making a similar complaint on the floor earlier today. I guess I would say I've never seen anything like it, but we just went through it earlier this year in which we were given about an hour to look at a complete reform of one-sixth of the American economy, the health care system. And we are now being asked to vote this evening on a multi-trillion dollar reform of our tax code. And not a single U.S. senator will have read it. There's no way you would have read it because I just saw how big it is. Maybe Republicans have read it because they've seen it in these secret negotiations, but I can guarantee you Senate Democrats will not have read this because

we have been kept out of the loop. I guess this is one of those situations where anyone listening to the podcast might know about the final bill than we do right now. I'm not sure how much time we should spend analyzing something hypothetically. But let's assume a language comes out. Let's assume there are no more hiccups for Republicans and this passes tonight. Tam, what happens next? And is this Christmas timetable suddenly much more possible? Well, they are not off schedule yet.

They are still on schedule, which is kind of remarkable if you think about it. The next step is a conference committee where the House version and the Senate version would be meshed up and they would try to work out the differences. And there are pretty significant differences, we think, based on what we know about the Senate bill and what we do know about the House bill. And I guess that's the next chance for people to actually look at what's in it is is through the conference committee process. But the conference committees tend not to be particularly sunlight filled processes. It's a lot of stuff happening behind closed doors. A lot of sort of leadership working it out. And then, oh, look, here it is. Here's the bill that we think that we have enough votes for. Well, Assistant Democratic Leader Dick Durbin is tweeting out photos of pages of the bill with handwritten ads in the margins. So if you want to see that, that's available on Twitter. And by ad, you mean amendment language? Yeah. Not like advertisements. Bye now. So Kelsey, you will have a really exciting Friday night. Going forward into next week, what do you think the biggest things to look for are as the House and Senate try and get on the same page? So it's going to be a negotiation between Republicans, as it has been from the beginning.

So we're going to see Democrats being upset a lot about what's happening, but with very little ability to do anything about it. And that may actually cause a problem because you know what else they have to do next week? They have to keep the government open. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. The spending bill that is currently funding the government expires next Friday at midnight. So while all of these tax conversations could be happening in a conference committee, they're also going to have to be trying to figure out, you know, what is it going to take to get Democrats to vote for a spending bill to keep the government open? So you're going to be watching these two-track conversations where

Republicans are negotiating amongst themselves about some pretty major changes to the U.S. economy, while other Republicans are going to be talking to Democrats about making sure that the U.S. economy doesn't get downgraded for a government shutdown. Wow. So who's bringing the snacks for next Friday? Yes, I'm looking forward to my microwave burger that is in the lab. On that super cheery note, we will wrap this special Friday podcast up. For sure, I feel fairly confident saying this will be our last podcast of the week because we're all going home except for Kelsey, who's hanging out at the Capitol. Tune into the radio.

You can keep up with all of our coverage over the weekend on NPR.org, NPR Politics on Facebook, and of course, on your local public radio station. Another reminder, if you are in the D.C. area in January, we'll be doing all of this live

at the Warner Theater. We, I am being told right now, have an actual name for the show. It's called President Trump One Year In. An intriguing title. And convenient since it will be one year into the Trump administration. So that's in partnership with WAMU. You can find more information and get your tickets at nprpresents.org. They are going quickly. So check out nprpresents.org. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House. And I'm Kelsey Snell. I also cover Congress. And Ryan Lucas, who covers the Justice Department, was talking to us earlier. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Have a great weekend and happy December.