If Michael Flynn did nothing wrong, why didn’t he tell the truth?

With the Justice Department’s move Thursday to drop its case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, it’s useful to go back to a basic question: If Flynn did nothing wrong when he called the Russian ambassador on Dec. 29, 2016, the day President Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the presidential election, why did he conceal it?

One issue from the beginning was whether Flynn’s call to Ambassador Sergey Kislyak violated the Logan Act, which bars private U.S. citizens from trying to influence another country about “disputes” with the United States. But that was always a somewhat shaky legal argument. As I noted in my Jan. 12, 2017, column, which first disclosed Flynn’s call, the Logan Act has never been criminally enforced.

I wrote on Feb. 11, two days before he resigned: “Michael Flynn’s real problem isn’t the Logan Act, an obscure and probably unenforceable 1799 statute that bars private meddling in foreign policy disputes. It’s whether President Trump’s national security adviser sought to hide from his colleagues and the nation a pre-inauguration discussion with the Russian government about sanctions that the Obama administration was imposing.”