Flynn Controversy Could Fire up GOP’s ‘High-Interest’ Voters | Eastern NC Now

Publisher's note: The author of this post is Mitch Kokai for the John Locke Foundation.

    Kerry Picket reports for the Washington Examiner on Republican activists' response to recent revelations involving President Trump's first national security adviser.

• Republicans will try to use the three-year Justice Department case against retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn as an election cycle issue to motivate their base.
• In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has crushed a once thriving economy under the Trump administration, Republicans see an opportunity to tell their constituents that the president and his allies were spied on by the previous administration. And according to this narrative, it was done with the help of an out-of-control FBI, intelligence community, and Obama-era holdovers who stayed in the federal government during Trump's first term in office.
• Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, was fired in February 2017 after a Washington Post column penned by David Ignatius suggested that he misled Vice President Mike Pence and other officials about his discussions with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
• Flynn's phone conversations with Kislyak were intercepted by the federal government during the Obama administration, and he pleaded guilty to giving false statements to federal agents in 2017 regarding those calls with the Russian envoy. However, he filed to withdraw his guilty plea earlier this year after the Justice Department recently requested the judge issue a sentence of up to six months in prison.
• As a result of a flood of declassified documents, along with Justice Department documents turned over to Flynn's attorney Sydney Powell, questions have arisen in the minds of Trump supporters who see a justice system treating individuals associated with the 2016 Trump campaign and transition team in an unfair way, Republicans say. ...
• ... North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told the Washington Examiner that the Senate Judiciary Committee receiving more information about the Justice Department's dismissal will lend more credence to its own investigations related to the Flynn case.

    The Flynn controversy could influence voters in November. Follow Carolina Journal Online's ongoing coverage of 2020 election issues HERE.