Michael Flynn

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has told investigators he will testify in exchange for immunity from prosecution. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

(Carolyn Kaster)

The twists, turns and new revelations just keep coming in the investigation into alleged collusion between President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russian operatives who sought to tilt the U.S. election to him.

The bombshell this week was the Wall Street Journal's report that retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security adviser, has informed the FBI and congressional investigators that "he is willing to be interviewed in exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution."

"General Flynn certainly has a story to tell, and he very much wants to tell it, should the circumstances permit," Flynn's lawyer, Robert Kelner, said.

But there was also other, more substantive news to come out of the investigation this week. The Senate Intelligence Committee, for starters, held its first public hearing into the matter and vowed to follow the money.

"Information about Donald Trump's finances, his family and his associates may lead to Russia," Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said Thursday during the hearing. "The committee needs to follow the money wherever it leads."

Trump, breaking with a 40-year tradition in U.S. presidential politics, has steadfastly refused to release his tax returns or turn over his business assets to a blind trust.

The Senate committee has now taken the lead in the public investigation after Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, damaged his credibility by releasing information he thought would reflect well on the president and then giving misleading responses to questions about where he got that information. The FBI is also looking into Trump-Russia ties.

Former FBI agent Clint Watts told the Senate committee on Thursday that Senate investigators should follow not just the money but also "the trail of dead Russians."

The Oregonian's politics reporter Gordon R. Friedman pointed out that "there have been a spate of suspicious deaths and arrests of Russian cybersecurity officials in recent weeks. A notable Kremlin critic was also gunned down outside his Kiev hotel March 23."

Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, denies that Russia tried to sow chaos in the U.S. election or aid Trump's campaign. Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Vietnam War hero and 2008 GOP presidential nominee, has said Putin can't be believed about anything, calling him a "murderer and a thug."

Watts, who's now with George Washington University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, says it's clear the Russians were involved in shaping the U.S. election debate last year. Along with hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and others, and passing the emails to anti-secrets site WikiLeaks, Russian operatives also funded and directed a massive "fake news" operation.

"There are a disproportionate number of fake-news outlets, conspiratorial websites" based in Eastern Europe and run by Russian intelligence, Watts testified.

He said the operation's goal wasn't just to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and boost Republican nominee Trump during the general election. He said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and other 2016 Republican presidential primary candidates were victims as well.

"It was the promotion of Trump over all other candidates," Watts said. "They were promoting him at such a volume that it drowned out organic support for [other] Republican candidates."

Watts added that these Russian fake-news purveyors not only significantly impacted the 2016 election -- a view in line with the U.S. intelligence community's official opinion -- but that, under President Trump, such disinformation is only going to get worse.

"Part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measures at times against his opponents," he said.

President Trump has regularly embraced conspiracy theories (that notion that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, for example) and other wild, unproven accusations (such as Trump's claim earlier this month that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, wiretapped Trump Tower last year). For years before running for president, Trump pushed the false allegation that Obama was born in Kenya.

"He claimed that the election could be rigged -- that was the number one theme pushed by RT [and] Sputnik News," Watts said, referring to two Russian propaganda outlets.

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a news conference after the hearing that Russia deployed hundreds of "internet trolls" to create and disseminate "fake news" targeting voters in crucial swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin -- states that were expected to go to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton but instead were won by Trump.

"[T]here were upwards of 1,000 internet trolls working out of a facility in Russia, in effect taking over a series of computers, which are then called botnets, that can then generate news down to specific areas," he said. Warner described it as " 'Clinton is sick', or 'Clinton is taking money from whoever for some source' -- fake news. An outside foreign adversary effectively sought to hijack the most critical democratic process, the election of a president, and, in that process, decided to favor one candidate over another."

Now, whether Trump or his associates actually worked with this foreign adversary during the campaign to push false narratives and time the selective release of hacked Clinton information remains to be discovered. That's where Flynn's potential testimony comes in.

The retired Army officer famously led the calls of "Lock her up!" that became a rallying cry of Clinton haters last year. Now he's facing the same calls from Trump haters.

Seeking immunity in exchange for testimony is not an admission that one is guilty of a crime, of course. Not that Flynn has taken that position in the past. "When you are given immunity, that means that you probably have committed a crime," he told "Meet the Press" last September while talking about investigations into Hillary Clinton.

Although new revelations about the Trump-Russia matter hit the news almost every day, the investigations are in their early stages. The House and Senate investigations, at least so far, are chiefly for show, to score political points. The FBI's investigation, which is taking place mostly under the radar, is likely to be the most consequential.

"The painful part is that we confuse people," FBI Director James Comey said this week, referring to the bureau's attempts to keep its work under wraps. "And the reason we confuse people is that most people see the world differently than we do, especially in [this] hyper-partisan environment. Most people are wearing glasses that filter the world according to side."

"We're not on anybody's side, ever," he added. "We're not considering whose ox will be gored by this action or that action, whose fortunes will be helped by this or that. We just don't care. And we can't care."

-- Douglas Perry