Quote (Plaguefear @ May 13 2020 09:45pm)
Why would he lie then if there was no crime?
And from what i have seen it is quite debatable if there was a crime, he did seem to be working for russian interests.
Because he was in the middle of a geopolitical slapfight over foreign policy between the incoming and outgoing president. Obama took the unprecedented step of spiking major foreign policy issues during a transition and Trump took the unprecedented response of seeking to oppose it diplomatically prior to inauguration. So you had Obama seeking sanctions on Russia, ending the US veto on the UN condemnation of Israel and a whole host of other measures both foreign and domestic (planned parenthood funding mandate, bear ears monument, refrigerator regulations, etc etc). These were a bunch of politically toxic poison pills that Obama and democrats had avoided and it was an abrupt turn and obviously something he never planned on doing under the assumption Hillary was going to win. Its debatable what the motive was for each measure, some had arguable justification, some like the PP-mandate were blatantly unconstitutional and served no purpose but to give Trump a bad headline for a single news cycle. In effect, like lighting a bag of dog poop on fire and leaving it outside the white house doors. Or taking all the W's off the keyboards...
Its normal for incoming presidents to set up contacts with foreign diplomats during their transition- every president does it with every country- but not normal for the incoming president to use those diplomatic channels to undermine the outgoing president. Just like its unheard of for the outgoing president to undermine the incoming one. So Trump responded to Obama's last minute turds in his typical pugilist fashion. He sent his diplomatic staff to try to convince allies to oppose the UN sanction vote and he sent Flynn to reassure Russia that if they didn't escalate with reciprocal sanctions, he could deescalate once he was in office and things cooled down (hindsight: they didn't). Yet at the same time Flynn was seeking to use his transition channels to conduct diplomacy with Russia on Trump's behalf, the FBI was still spying on him. Flynn apparently felt assured that the safeguards of the FISA courts and masking were sacrosanct enough that he didn't need to worry about any wiretapping being weaponized against him for political purposes and felt safe in publicly lying about whether he was talking with Russia, something too toxic for Trump to be in the news. After all, the only way he could get exposed in that lie would be if someone committed a blatant crime by unmasking and leaking that. But of course, the FBI was run by a bunch of shitgibbons who happily did exactly that. Having lied about it publicly, he either had to stick to his story or instantly reveal his back channel to anyone if he backed away from his story in private. Strzok & Co were perfectly aware of this- because they were the ones who pierced that safeguard- and exploited it to force him to lie to them. Conducting an incoming president's diplomacy in the first place was not a crime under any real statute (hence their embrace of the defunct logan act), nor was lying to the public about it- to whatever extent it was reprehensible, it wasn't criminal. But it would have been a
scandal and fueled Democrat's Russia fever, which is why Flynn lied about it in the first place, and Strzok/McCabe/Comey/etc exploited those political pressures to entrap Flynn without any underlying crime.
It all boiled down to a bunch of politician from both administrations behaving like petulant children and their toadies in law enforcement throwing away any pretense of apolitical neutrality to go try to undermine Trump at any cost.