SOME resignations from high office are like the cauterising of a wound: brutal but decisive. Others resemble a battlefield amputation: a painful loss which cannot dispel the sinister whiff of some deeper infection. As Washington, DC absorbs the news, just before midnight on February 13th, that Michael Flynn has quit as National Security Adviser to President Donald Trump after less than a month in office, an ominous note lingers in the air. There is something unhealthy about the way this new government operates.
Mr Flynn, a retired three-star general and former chief of a Pentagon spy agency, had to quit after admitting that he had misled Vice-President Mike Pence about his contacts with a Russian envoy after the November presidential election but before the inauguration in January, when Mr Flynn was still a private citizen. That inaccurate briefing had left Mr Pence to head out onto television and unwittingly spread false information as he defended the man who on January 20th became head of the National Security Council. In his half-contrite, half-defiant resignation letter, Mr Flynn wrote of having sincerely apologised to both Mr Pence and Mr Trump for “inadvertently”...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2lJPvjt
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