He May Be Cooperating with Mueller’s Trump-Kremlin Probe; Breaks Ties with Other Potential Targets
Russia probe. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn may be preparing to cooperate with the special prosecutor Robert Meuller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Flynn lawyer Robert Kelner told a Trump attorney that he can no longer discuss the investigation. Before this week, Kelner had been strategizing with lawyers for Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and First Son-in-law Jared Kushner.
A deal with Flynn, a retired three-star Army general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency, would give Mueller a behind-the-scenes look at the Trump campaign and the early tumultuous weeks of the administration. Flynn was an early and important adviser to Trump, an architect of Trump’s populist “America first” platform and an advocate of closer ties with Russia. Flynn led an infamous anti-Hillary Clinton “Lock Her Up” chant at the 2016 Republican convention.
His ties to Russia predated the campaign—he sat with President Vladimir V. Putin at a 2015 event in Moscow—and he was a point person on the transition team for dealing with Russia.
FCC hack. The Federal Communications Commission has not cooperated with a probe by the New York attorney general into fake comments made about a proposal by the FCC to scrap “net neutrality” regulations that ensure equal access to the internet.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans from New York, California, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas may have had their identities misused.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wrote that the FCC “has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.”
Schneiderman said his office requested logs and other records at least nine times since June: “Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None.”
Foreign students. The number of new foreign students coming to study in the United States has dropped, the first decline in a decade. Schools could face a significant financial challenge. Colleges rely on full tuition-paying foreign students to sustain their budgets in an era when Americans are increasingly unwilling, or unable, to pay expensive tuition. The figures are from the 2016-2017 school year which started just before Trump’s election. Educators expect Trump’s travel bans and anti-immigrant rhetoric to worsen the trend. Overall, the number of new international students dropped by about 10,000 or 3.3% from the year before. There are about 1 million foreign students in the United States.
Featured Photo: Michael Flynn at the 2016 Republican National Convention.