NY Times:

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time that they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

This is a big story. A very big story.

Note date.

Brian Beutler/TNR:

Trump’s Team of Weaklings

He promised that his administration would be tough. Instead, it is weak, rudderless, incompetent, and plagued by backbiting

Brian Beutler/TNR:

The Trump White House Is Screwed, Big League

So let’s assume Flynn just jumped on a grenade for his boss. Trump may have believed Moscow would never rat Flynn out, and may still believe Flynn will never claim—or prove—he was just following orders. But the truth is, Trump can’t be sure his own involvement won’t be exposed. And that compromises him, as well. It’s not just that Pence, Flynn, and Spicer should feel as if Trump hung them out to dry—it’s that he did so in a way that gives powerful people, perhaps even Russian intelligence officials, leverage over his administration.

The story is explosive, in other words, even when it’s walled off from other things we know: That Flynn and Kislyak were reportedly in contact, not just during the transition, but before the election. That other members of the Trump team and their Russian contacts are reportedly under federal investigation, stemming from a broader investigation into Russian subversion. That those inquiries are apparently significant enough that FBI director James Comey was initially reluctant to alert the White House to Flynn’s susceptibility to blackmail out of fear it would undermine the bureau’s work. That the intelligence community has corroborated certain non-sexual claims in the Trump-opposition dossier.

Eli Lake/BV presents the conservative Deep State defense:

Flynn was a fat target for the national security state. He has cultivated a reputation as a reformer and a fierce critic of the intelligence community leaders he once served with when he was the director the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. Flynn was working to reform the intelligence-industrial complex, something that threatened the bureaucratic prerogatives of his rivals.

He was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn's breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed. 

Sorry, WH is not off the hook. No reason to assume Trump and Pence were victims, full investigation only way to know.

Eliot A. Cohen/Atlantic:

 It’s not pretty—the ship rolls and lurches alarmingly—but it gets where it needs to go.

This could happen. Trump, overwhelmed by a leadership task far beyond his experience and personality, will focus his efforts on infrastructure projects and the like, and quietly concede the direction of foreign policy to his sober secretaries of state and defense, with a retired general or admiral to reassemble something like an orderly White House process. He is erratic but not stupid: he knows he is in over his head, hates the bad publicity his first few weeks bought him, and has family members nudging him in this direction.

Unfortunately, another possibility is more likely: The ship is in serious trouble. The first reason is that the system cannot function with an absent commander in chief. Since World War II, the United States has evolved a system for making foreign policy that depends on an effective White House operation in the form of the National Security Council staff. (The NSC itself consists of Cabinet secretaries and the like, not aides and bureaucrats.) The elaborate hierarchy of interagency committees that evolved actually works rather well most of the time, but it depends critically on the ability of a competent staff working directly for the president to orchestrate it.

This one is good, give it a try:

Charles P. Pierce/Esquire:

Trump's White House Has No Idea How to Handle This Mess

The Russia story does not end with Michael Flynn.

A couple of things. First, Sally Yates turns out to be an even bigger hero than we thought she was when she made the stand that got her fired on the immigration order. (And, one wonders what else was up with that now, too.) Second, I know it's hard to believe either Clapper or Brennan as far as you can throw a federal courthouse, but they had absolutely no reason to align themselves with Yates' concerns except out of a legitimate concern for the national security. Third, anyone fantasizing about what it would take to get the president* out of the White House and back on NBC where he belongs now has to factor in that Mike Pence is tainted by this dangerous nonsense, too.

At the very least, as people from Indiana warned us, the man is a dolt. 

 James Hohmann/WaPo:

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump should thank his lucky stars that Republicans control both chambers of Congress, because Democrats would be announcing a Benghazi-style inquest today if they could.

Michael Flynn lost his job as national security adviser after just 24 days — less because he offered potentially illegal secret assurances to Russia’s ambassador, an adversary of the United States, than because he gave a false accounting of those conversations to his colleagues in the White House, particularly Vice President Pence.

This imbroglio will make it politically untenable for Trump to scale back sanctions on Moscow now. The blowback from hawkish Republicans in the Senate would be too intense, hobbling the rest of the president’s agenda. The episode will probably give added momentum to Sen. John McCain’s effort to codify existing sanctions into law so that the administration cannot unilaterally unwind them.

First Read:

• How much credibility does this administration have left?

At 4:00 pm ET yesterday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told MSNBC's Steve Kornacki that the president had full confidence in Flynn, yet he resigned just hours later. (When NBC's Matt Lauer asked Conway on "Today" this morning if she was out of the loop, she replied that Trump "is a very loyal person," and that Flynn himself made the decision to resign.) On Friday, Trump denied that he had read the Washington Post's scoop that Flynn had indeed discussed sanctions with Russia's ambassador. "I don't know about it. I haven't seen it. What report is that?" (Does anyone believe that now?) And despite the administration's previous denials that Flynn discussed sanctions with the Russians, we now know Team Trump was notified A MONTH AGO that Flynn was possibly misleading them.

• A question for every member of Congress: Are you going to support a full investigation into arguably the biggest scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra?

Considering everything we now know about this story — an incoming administration was having conversations with a foreign adversary, and not telling the truth about them — you have to go back 30 years to Iran-Contra to think of a comparable scandal. And folks, we're today on Day 26 of the Trump administration. Here's the question that should be posed to every lawmaker, Republican or Democrat: Are you going to support a full investigation into arguably the biggest political scandal involving a foreign government since Iran-Contra?

Jack Goldsmith/Lawfare (conservative) blog:

McGahn is also at fault if it is true that, as the NYT reported without attribution, Trump was angry because “he was not fully briefed on details of the executive order he signed” concerning the organization of the National Security Council and the Principals’ Committee.   

It is possible, as I said in my original piece on McGahn, that the many White House screw-ups outlined above are less a result of McGahn's incompetence and more a result of his lack of access to the President.  If that is so, then the blame is partly the Chief of Staff’s, and McGahn needs to insist that the problem be fixed or resign.  I doubt this is the problem, however, since McGahn was Trump’s campaign lawyer and by all accounts remains a close senior advisor.  A related problem may be that Trump is simply a rogue elephant whom no chains can bind, and that McGahn is giving Trump appropriate advice that is having no impact on his behavior.  I doubt that is a full explanation either, since (among other reasons) many of the problems outlined above cannot have been a result of Trump’s intransigence.  

It thus appears that the problems noted above are less about access or influence, and more about McGahn’s substance and style.  McGahn is  reportedly “an iconoclast bent on shaking things up.”  Unfortunately for the President, that is not an attractive quality in a White House Counsel, whose main job is to ensure that the President and the White House steer clear of legal and ethical and related political problems. 

Trevor Timm/CJR:

LEAKS ARE COMING OUT of the White House at a seemingly record pace, many of which have painted a picture of a dangerously ignorant and ill-equipped president who is narcissistic to the extreme, unable to let go of even the smallest of slights. But some of these leaks have halted a Trump appointment and controversial policies in their tracks, and it’s a lesson showing how whistleblowers and leaks to the press are vital for democracy.