Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Atlantic

    Why Michael Flynn Is Walking Free

    The former national security adviser figured out that loyalty to Trump is now a better bet than loyalty to the rule of law.
    by David A. Graham May 07, 2020 4 minutes
    Source: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

    Michael Flynn was an early, instinctive Trumpist.

    The retired general was an enthusiastic backer of Donald Trump’s candidacy, leading chants of “Lock her up!” at the 2016 Republican National Convention. And his less public work bore the hallmarks of Trumpism too: brazen lying, shameless profiteering, conspiracy-mongering, and bigoted tweeting.

    Nonetheless, Flynn didn’t immediately grasp how much the rules of the game changed when Trump won the 2016 election. When Flynn, the newly minted national security adviser, got in trouble with the law, he quickly took up the standard playbook of white-collar criminals in pre-Trump America. When the FBI caught him lying, Flynn copped a plea and agreed to cooperate with the government in exchange for a lesser sentence.

    Only after that

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Atlantic

    The Atlantic7 min readAmerican Government
    Could South Carolina Change Everything?
    For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again. Since the
    The Atlantic4 min read
    Hayao Miyazaki’s Anti-war Fantasia
    Once, in a windowless conference room, I got into an argument with a minor Japanese-government official about Hayao Miyazaki. This was in 2017, three years after the director had announced his latest retirement from filmmaking. His final project was
    The Atlantic5 min readAmerican Government
    What Nikki Haley Is Trying to Prove
    This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Nikki Haley faces terrible odds in her home state of

    Related Books & Audiobooks