On Tuesday, President Donald Trump's former national security adviser admitted in court that he had lied to FBI investigators and was not entrapped, as his lawyers had tried to claim in a memo before his sentencing.
Flynn had reportedly hoped that the federal judge might throw his conviction for lying out, and instead was brutally cross-examined from the bench and accused of selling out his country.
At least one national security analyst who worked in two White Houses feels no sympathy. Samantha Vinograd served on the White House National Security Council for four years under President Barack Obama and before that worked under President George W. Bush. In a new Politico column she argues you "shouldn't feel sorry for Michael Flynn." Her team "worked around the clock" and "almost never slept."
Vinograd described how seriously she and her colleagues took their work, as they "spent almost two years working from a closet in the West Wing."
Different advisers approached their jobs differently, she writes, "but they all have had one thing in common: They put U.S. national security first."
"As far as I know, no national security adviser has ever put his or her personal business interests ahead of the country’," she writes. "Michael Flynn changed all of that."
By being paid by the governments of Turkey and Russia to advance their interests and not disclosing it, Vinograd writes, Flynn "did enormous damage to U.S. national security, counterintelligence efforts, and policymaking going forward."
As an experienced counterintelligence agent, Flynn understood what he was involved in, Vinograd argues.
"Lies are great bribery points, and there is zero chance Flynn didn’t know all of this from his decades of intelligence work. He wasn’t dumb enough to turn himself into a Russian or Turkish asset— he just didn’t care about the risks of doing so," she writes.
