Former chief national security adviser Michael Flynn retroactively registered as a foreign agent for the government of Turkey for work he did while advising the Trump campaign and attending classified intelligence briefings with Trump but, if you're like, you suspected that wasn't the end of the story.
The next part of Flynn's story has arrived and, according to chief investigative correspondent for Yahoo News, Michael Isikoff, the Russia government paid for Flynn's trip to Russia in December of 2015 where he sat next to Putin himself (pictured above).
At the Russian government’s expense, Flynn — who was fired last month as President Trump’s national security adviser — was accompanied by his son, Michael Flynn Jr., on the three-day, all-expenses-paid trip, where they both stayed at the five-star Hotel Metropol in Moscow next to Red Square, according to documents obtained from Flynn’s speakers’ bureau, Leading Authorities.
The agency took a 25 percent commission, leaving $33,750 for Flynn. The Moscow booking was one of three speaking engagements the ex-DIA chief received from Russian interests after being fired from his Pentagon post in 2014 and before joining the Trump campaign as its principal national security adviser, the documents turned over to the committee show.
And there's more.
Flynn was also paid by other Russian companies before the infamous Putin dinner according to the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Flynn was paid $11,250 each by a Russian air cargo company that had been suspended as a vendor to the United Nations following a corruption scandal, and by a Russian cybersecurity company that was then trying to expand its business with the U.S. government.
Those engagements took place in the summer and fall of 2015, a year after he had been fired as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and while he continued to maintain a top-secret level security clearance.
In total, Flynn was paid more than $50,000 in cash payments that were previously undisclosed.
The Washington Post has more details about the companies that paid Flynn, raising many more questions. Flynn was reportedly paid by Kaspersky Lab, which is notable because the agency's top investigator was recently charged with treason by Russian authorities. A number of Russian operatives and officials have been arrested, killed, and otherwise disappeared over the past several months.
It's hard to say where this goes next, but it appears that Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone were Moscow's line to the Trump campaign.