Mike Flynn Worked as a “Foreign Agent” While With Trump Campaign

Yet more foreign entanglements with foreign governments and Trump campaign officials were revealed today with the news that Mike Flynn, Der Trumpenführer's short-lived National Security Adviser, was receiving payments from the Trurkish government throughout much of the time he was with the Trump campaign.  True to form, Flynn had lied about the connections with Turkey - and the over $500,000 he received - and one can only wonder what else has Flynn lied about.  More importantly, what is Trump lying about?  Frighteningly, a growing number of Trump/Russia ties continue to be revealed and, combined with the new admission that Trump directed the change in the GOP platform in respect to Ukraine, suggest that collusion with Russia to throw the 2016 campaign to Trump may have occurred.  Here are highlights from Vox on Flynn's ties to Turkey:

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired in February after lying about his contacts with the Russian government, has formally registered with the Justice Department as a “foreign agent” and admitted that he had lobbied on behalf of the Turkish government as recently as November 2016.

As the Associated Press reports, Flynn’s lawyer filed paperwork with the Justice Department Tuesday disclosing that the retired Army general had done lobbying work between August and November 2016 that “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” According to the filing, Flynn’s company, Flynn Intel Group Inc., was paid at least $530,000 for the work.

[T]he disclosure that Trump’s top campaign adviser on all issues of national security and foreign policy was receiving money to lobby on behalf of a foreign power all the way through Election Day is another black eye for Flynn, who has the rare distinction of having been fired by two US presidents (Barack Obama ousted him because of his mismanagement of the Defense Intelligence Agency). The FBI is also continuing to probe Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the aftermath of the election.

Suspicions about Flynn’s ties to the Turkish government were sparked by an op-ed he wrote in the Hill on November 8 that basically read like a bald piece of Turkish propaganda. In it, Flynn, who had been Trump’s top national security aide during the campaign, slammed the outgoing Obama administration — and the US media more broadly — for not being supportive enough of Turkey’s autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

To summarize: A Trump campaign surrogate with substantial influence over the incoming president’s foreign policy views wrote an article parroting a conspiracy theory propagated by the Turkish government to justify a brutal and far-reaching crackdown on political dissent.

That got some American journalists wondering if there was something more there. And sure enough, just three days after the op-ed ran, the Daily Caller published a stunning report showing very suggestive links between Flynn's consulting firm and the Turkish government.

[A]s the AP report notes, “neither Flynn nor his company had filed paperwork with the Justice Department, which requires more extensive transparency about work that benefits foreign governments and political interests.”

After the Daily Caller report, Flynn’s company flatly denied having any ties to the Turkish government.

The new Justice Department documents essentially confirm that — contrary to the claims of both Kelley and Alptekin — the lobbying that Flynn Intel Group technically did for Inovo was actually being done on behalf of the Turkish government.

[Flynn] was literally acting as an agent of a foreign government right up to the point that he became Trump’s national security adviser, and during a time when he was acting as a top Trump campaign surrogate.

Given Trump's constant criticism during the campaign about the Clinton Foundation taking money from foreign countries, and Flynn’s own criticism of Hillary Clinton’s “lack of accountability,” this is pretty rich.

These latest revelations suggest that Flynn’s failure to be fully forthcoming about his ties to a foreign government didn’t stop with Russia.