The senior transition official who Flynn called into to confer on his conversations and negotiations with Russian Ambassador Kislyak was KT McFarland. Flynn conferred with McFarland and McFarland conferred with a group of other senior officials which, as I noted last night on the basis of the contemporaneous pool reports, appears to have been Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Reince Priebus.
McFarland had been tapped to serve as the Deputy National Security Advisor, a position she held until May. Her main qualification for the job was a long stint as a “Fox News National Security Analyst”, a position she had seemingly on the basis of a stint as a speechwriter in the Reagan Pentagon thirty years ago. As I’ve noted before, she is a notorious resume embellisher. More recent McFarland highlights include a failed run against Hillary Clinton during Clinton’s run for a second senate term in 2006. In that race, McFarland distinguished herself by claiming that Clinton saw her as such a threat that she was sending secret helicopters to surveil her estate in the Hamptons. That’s the level of person she is. McFarland was defeated in the GOP primary.
In other words, McFarland is a clown, a product of the New York GOP/Fox News/Roger Ailes ridicu-verse. The larger group she and Flynn were conferring with about carrying on a covert negotiation with the Russian Ambassador were basically people of the same caliber with the exception of Priebus, who is a fairly seasoned political operative but not someone with foreign policy experience. A New York Times story from today shows an extensive series of emails which largely involve the same individuals noted above. Those chains also include Tom Bossert, the current White House Homeland Security Advisor who has a clearer national security background.
The upshot is that other than Flynn, almost no one involved in the extended conversation had any experience that remotely qualified them to be part of the discussion. The point here is not to cut these folks slack because they were somehow naive or ignorant of the issues they were dealing with. It is that again and again in these key moments the decision-makers were people who were inexperienced, had histories of either poor judgment or extremism and were in many cases corrupt. With those qualities, you can expect that a lot of bad things to come.