He was invited to GRU HQ while he was DIA director. He was paid to attend RT’s annual gala, sat next to Putin. He later compared RT to CNN, MSNBC. Kislyak had all this in advance of the call. There is a difference between playing a dupe and recruiting someone. Flynn got played.
There is a broader debate to be had about how the media uses misleading or sensationalist terminology. The term “collusion,” for instance, I always found problematic. Unless someone is made into an agent of a foreign government, there is a very ambiguous zone in which...
Ideologues, narcissists, morons and arrivistes can simply be manipulated into thinking a certain way or doing things they might not otherwise do. In Flynn’s case, it wasn’t a hard sell: He was so fixated on Islamism and Iran, he was willing to believe Russia could team up...
With the US to fight both. The Russians simply encouraged him in this vein. Again, see the Kislyak transcript where the FSB and GRU are presented as partners in counterterrorism.
It takes a bit of time and nuance to explain that influence operations don’t involve Boris-and-Natasha-style espionage. The troll farm, for instance, seized upon already existing American pathologies and mostly amplified or encouraged them.
And note what @RidT pointed out about the Ukraine/DNC conspiracy theories — they all originated here: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
But were of course pushed heartily by Russian propaganda.
So much of what’s transpired in the US since 2016 — at least outside of the actual hack-and-release by the GRU — is the Kremlin equivalent of yelling “Jump!” to someone threatening to throw himself off a ledge.
And one can understand why this is difficult to accept. If we can say Russia orchestrated everything brilliantly, then we accept no culpability for where our country has wound up. Flynn was already a crackpot eager to be told what he wanted to hear; Russia simply obliged him.
