It might seem bizarre to say that an administration only 23 days old needed a fresh start, but look: If Adele can stop 45 seconds into a live performance at the Grammys and begin again, so too can Donald Trump. The departure of Michael Flynn from the White House could be Trump’s Adele moment.
The chaos and infighting and unforced errors at 1600 Penn that have left everyone dizzied may be viewed as rookie mistakes to be overcome by on-the-job training. So it was for Bill Clinton’s White House, which also began horribly in 1993 — and needed a whole bunch of departures and reassignments to steady itself, not just a single change.
But what happened with Flynn also represents a frightening portent.
Leftists have become fond of saying that Trump shouldn’t be “normalized.” That concern should now go both ways. Every American should be equally concerned at the potential “normalization” of the tactics used by unnamed government officials to do Flynn in.
To be sure, Flynn’s ouster after three weeks is proof positive he should never have been given the national security adviser job in the first place. Flynn’s deceits about his conversations with a Russian official cannot be viewed in isolation from the overly close relationship with the Russian government he forged following his firing by the Obama administration in 2013.
Still, unelected bureaucrats with access to career-destroying materials clearly made the decision that what Flynn did or who Flynn was merited their intervention — and took their concerns to the press.
In one sense, the larger system of American checks and balances worked: The Trump White House couldn’t ignore the Flynn problems because they went public. On the other hand, the officials who made the problems public did so using raw information that was in their possession for reasons we don’t yet know and may not have any right whatsoever to know.
This information might have come because the US intelligence community has an active interest in the Russian official to whom he talked.
Or it could have come because the FBI had been pursuing some sort of secret investigation and had received authorization to monitor and track his calls and discussions.
If this was intelligence, the revelation of the Flynn meeting just revealed something to the Russians we shouldn’t want revealed — which is that we were listening in on them and doing so effectively.
And if it was an FBI investigation, then the iron principle of law enforcement — that evidence gathered in the course of an investigation must be kept secret to protect the rights of the American being investigated — was just put through a shredder.
Keeping our intelligence-gathering assets hidden from those upon whom we are spying is a key element of our national security.
And as for playing fast and loose with confidential information on American citizens: No joke, people — if they can do it to Mike Flynn, they can do it to you.
This is the ultimate Pandora’s box. It makes a public mockery of the presumption of innocence that is the hallmark of our legal system. Such a thing is only acceptable, even morally, if you believe that the Trump White House represents such an unprecedented threat to everything that a higher law must govern your actions.
It would be pretty to think so, but we also know that Flynn had an antagonistic relationship with America’s intelligence agencies. If these leaks came about not out of high principle but because officials at those agencies were taking out a potential adversary, that is nothing more or less than a monstrous abuse of power.
And that’s true even if Flynn is guilty of something. But we can’t know if he’s guilty of something unless he’s charged with a crime and tried in the courts. That’s how law works.
If those who fear Trump embrace antinomianism because they think he’s going to destroy our democracy, they should stop and consider whether their zeal to stop him might be blinding them to a different threat from the federal government that will erode our rights as citizens.