The presses are stopped, the news is broken. Make that, the presses are broken, the news is stopped.

We're supposed to partake of paroxysms of Mueller-mania now that Mike Flynn has pled guilty to lying to the FBI (but #NeverHillary) and is "prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians, initially as a way to work together to fight ISIS together in Syria."

Whatever "initially" does or does not portend, we just might pause for some 3-D perspective, which our Cyclops Media cannot and does not want to register, let alone make plain.

Let's say President Trump did direct his incoming National Security Advisor Mike Flynn to make contact with the Russians about ISIS in Syria in the pre-Inagural weeks after the November 2016 election.

So what? 

That's a real question. It's also the first point of perspective worth adding to the stick drawings that sell (not well) as news today. So what? Advisable or not, there is nothing treasonous about seeking such pre-Inauguration contact.

Journalists could, of course, turn to the historical record (nah). Then again, there doesn't seem to be much presidential transition team history about contacting heads of state, and certainly not in real-time as we have learned it. Now, why might that be? Could it have something to do with the fact that previous administrations did not perfect and deploy the Police State Tactics of the Obama White House to eavesdrop illegally on its domestic political opponents, in this case, the Trump campaign-turned-incoming-administration, and then illegally leak their conversations to that cyclop media herd, now, as one, shrieking, Gotcha! (never mind what they got).

One historical example we do have, probably because it is dark enough to show up in a bad light in KGB archives, is that of the incoming Nixon administration, circa November 1968 to January 1969. It was at this time that Richard Nixon's incoming National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, was in contact with a straight-up KGB agent named Boris Sedov. 

In his first memoir, White House Years (1979), Kissinger i.d.'s Sedov, matter of fact, as a "KGB operative who seemed to have had the Rockefeller assignment during the campaign and who had tagged along with me ever since" (emphasis added).

Vasili Mitrokhin's notes, however, as transcribed by co-author Christopher Andrew in The Sword and the Shield (1999), date the relationship between Kissinger and Sedov back to Kissinger's days as a professor at Harvard, when, of course, Kissinger was very closely associated with the Rockefellers.

Immediately after this revelation, I am guessing that it is co-author Andrew -- always there to tamp down and/or muffle his defector-co-authors' more explosive bits of information -- who brings in Oleg Kalugin to comment. With the sweeping, total certainty that is always a tip-off, Kalugin declares: "We never had any illusions about trying to recruit Kissinger: he was simply a source of political intelligence."

Never? Sure.

Not that Kissinger being a "source of political intelligence" isn't bad enough. Sounds like Bill Clinton's KGB-"trusted contact," Strobe Talbott, but probably more devious. Indeed, it bears remembering that in the Trump transition period, Kissinger, age 93, was in contact with Trump.

The passage continues:

When Kissinger became an adviser to Nixon during the 1968 election campaign, he began to use Sedov to pass messages to Moscow that Nixon's public image as an unrecontructed Cold Warrior was false and that he wanted better relations with the Soviet Union.

What? Safely assuming Nixon was campaigning in 1968 as just such an "unreconstructed Cold Warrior" to get the American people to elect him, it's an outrage, at least, that his national security adviser to be, Kissinger, was passing winking/nodding "messages" via the KGB agent to Moscow that this "unreconstructed Cold Warior" stuff was all just a pose. Still, it's an outrage we can only battle over in the historical record.

Whatever it was, it's completely different from the breathlessly reported example of Trump directing Flynn to seek contact with Russia about potentially cooperating to defeat ISIS. After all, this was something Trump "often" talked about with the American people on the campaign trail! How do we get from there to scandal? 

To add another point of perspective, the campaign and run-up to Nixon's 1969 Inauguration followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and subsequent Communist crack-down. Quoting the State Department Historian: "Although the Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia was swift and successful, small-scale resistance continued throughout early 1969 while the Soviets struggled to install a stable government. Finally, in April of 1969, the Soviets forced Dubcek from power in favor of a more conservative (sic) administrator." (Emphasis added.) This was an on-going crisis for the brutal Soviets and liberalizing Czechs alike, even past Nixon's first Inauguration Day. 

If Bill Clinton's 1969-1970 winter vacation in Moscow and post-crackdown Prague still smells, Kissinger's quite offhand admission regarding his pre-Inauguration contact with Sedov still gives off something, too. 

He writes:

Sporadic communication continued with Sedov. His major preoccupation was that Nixon include something in his Inaugural address to the effect that he was keeping open the lines of communication to the White House.

Keeping communication lines open: The line itself sounds beauty-queen-anodyne but in the wake of the Soviets' Czech crack-down it also sounds weak. Meanwhile, Kissinger's admission that he enabled the Kremlin, via the KGB, to write any single line of a Presidential Inaugural Address is extremely unsettling. It even harkens back to Operation Snow, whereby the the KGB, via senior Treasury official and KGB agent Harry Dexter White, was able to turn a State Department cable into an American ultimatum to Japan, setting in motion the Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor, all according to Stalin's strategy. How often did such things occur?

Meanwhile, was this one Inaugural line the end of it? The preceding line of the address, too, echoes the Nixon-as-Dove-PR that Kissinger was supposedly spreading aroung the Politburo, per Mitrokhin, via Sedov during the 1968 campaign. "After a period of confrontation," Nixon said in his address, "we are entering an era of negotiation. Let all nations know that during this administration our lines of communication will be open."

We were also entering an era of American weakness. 

This is the last thing President Trump wants to do. President Trump wants to enter an era of American greatness, even if the way remains blocked to him. And isn't that really why the Swamp is trying to take him down?