Michael Flynn's guilty plea: 10 key takeaways

NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - Michael Flynn's plea on Friday (Dec 1) to a single count of lying to the FBI is a seismic event in the special counsel investigation.

For starters, it portends the likelihood of impeachable charges being brought against the President of the United States. Flynn, a former national security adviser, acknowledged that he was cooperating with the investigation.

His testimony could bring into the light a scandal of historic proportions in which the not-yet-installed Trump administration, including Mr Donald Trump personally, sought to subvert American foreign policy before taking office.

The repercussions of the plea will be months in the making, but it's not an exaggeration to say that the events to which Flynn has agreed to testify will take their place in the history books alongside the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals.

We're in new - and highly inflammatory - territory. Here are 10 immediate takeaways from today's news.

Both sides did not assess their risks and decide to hedge them with a compromise.

Rather, as we've known for weeks, the special counsel, Mr Robert Mueller, believed he had sufficient evidence to indict Flynn on a long list of criminal charges, including money laundering, tax offence and false statements.

Mr Mueller's team, as is standard prosecutorial practice, presented Flynn with that list and helped him understand that his life as he knew it had ended.

This is much bigger than Paul Manafort.

Mr Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, has been indicted, but this is a plea, and Flynn's cooperation - the real goal of bringing criminal charges - has been secured.

This puts Flynn in the same camp as George Papadopoulos, the campaign adviser who pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI on Oct 5 and is also cooperating with the investigation.

Unlike Papadopoulos, though, Flynn was a top adviser who was at the centre of communication with Russia as well as the potential obstruction of justice by President Trump in seeking to shut down the Flynn investigation itself.

Flynn was considered as a running mate and reportedly stayed quite close to the president even after being forced out of the administration in February.

Flynn's plea on Friday concerned just one crime. The other charges that prosecutors threatened him with continue to hang over him.

Flynn will not receive credit for his cooperation until after it has ended, at which point Mr Mueller may - if Flynn has held up his end of the bargain - move to dismiss the other charges.

In the interim, Flynn has to do anything Mr Mueller's team requests.

He is admitting that last December, before Mr Trump's inauguration, he asked the Russian ambassador at the time, Mr Sergey Kislyak, to refrain from reacting aggressively to sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia.

Russia reportedly agreed and Mr Kislyak told Flynn later that it had chosen to moderate its response to the sanctions to make nice with the Trump team.

If Flynn testifies to this - ABC's Brian Ross is reporting that he will - it presents another impeachable offence along with the possible obstruction of justice.

Even more, it brings the whole matter well outside the purview of the criminal courts into the province of a political scandal, indicating abuses of power arguably well beyond those in the Watergate and Iran-contra affairs.

He is admitting that last Dec 22, he asked Mr Kislyak to delay or defeat a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel for its settlement policy, which the Obama administration had decided to let pass.

The possible involvement or knowledge of Israel in the case will be one of many questions that congressional investigators will pursue.

In the end, Flynn's lies are secondary to the demonstration that the Trump administration was actively undermining American foreign policy before it took office.

This will most likely prove the most abiding scandalous fact of the Mueller investigation. And it's one that nobody on either side of the aisle could possibly defend.

Most immediately vulnerable? Mr Jared Kushner. Flynn was present at a Dec 1, 2016, Trump Tower meeting where Mr Kushner is said to have proposed to Mr Kislyak setting up a back channel for the transition team to communicate with Moscow.

Those and related details are now front and centre in the investigation.

Criminal liability aside, Friday's news - including a report that Mr Kushner was the one who directed Flynn to contact Russia - helps cement Mr Kushner's reputation as a callow and arrogant freelancer, authorised by the president to act way over his head, and possibly impairing some of the most delicate and important issues of foreign policy.

A possible winner, on the other hand, is the younger Mike Flynn, about whose criminal liability his father was extremely concerned. Look to see how Mr Mueller now chooses to treat the younger Flynn, who is being investigated over his work for his father's lobbying business.

The basis for the possible obstruction charge against the President has been his efforts to get the FBI director James Comey to shut down the Flynn investigation during a Feb 14 meeting in the Oval Office, coupled with his multiple lies on the subject.

Obstruction is plainly an impeachable offence. It's the offence for which Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment.

For months, it has seemed the possible culminating charge of the Mueller investigation, a straightforward and readily understandable high crime or misdemeanour.

Such a charge, per Department of Justice policy, would not be brought in the criminal courts but would rather form the basis of a report to Congress potentially recommending impeachment. If Mr Mueller brings that charge, it will be on the strength of Flynn's testimony.

There had been a prospect that the obstruction of justice charge, if it did come, would be dismissed by die-hard Trump supporters as subject to conflicting interpretations of Mr Trump's state of mind, and therefore not deserving of impeachment or removal.

No longer. Now Mr Trump and his circle will stand accused by a former member of the administration with plainly unconstitutional meddling in the most sensitive of foreign policy issues.

If the Congress and country believe Michael Flynn's account, it is hard to see what even the staunchest Trump defenders can say in defence.

That means that as Mr Trump and the administration look out at the new landscape featuring a guilty Michael Flynn, it's kill or be killed.