Why Obama wanted to get rid of General Flynn

In the American Thinker, Jack Cashill helps us to understand why Obama wanted to get rid of General Flynn.

...Flynn almost assuredly became Target Zero for his willingness to expose and undo what Obama considered his signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. Obama may have suspected that the deal was fatally flawed, but there was one thing he knew, namely that the deal was built on a framework of lies and deceptions.

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” the oddly incautious Obama foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes boasted of the Iran con job. “We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Flynn, by contrast, was saying things that invalidated the Rhodes talking points. In March 2015, while Obama’s people were selling a swooning media the deal’s imagined virtues, Flynn was sharing some inconvenient truths.

"Iran is also a country with ballistic missiles, cyber capabilities. They are also still a state-sponsor of terrorism,” Flynn told Chris Wallace on Fox News. “And here we are dealing with them as though we’re going to give them a carte blanche -- I know it will be some number of years to have a nuclear capability. Give me a break!"

Had Flynn remained a nutty outlier restricted to the conservative news ghetto, the Obama crowd could have ignored him. When Flynn moved into Trump’s inner circle, he morphed from nuisance to threat.

On February 26, 2016, the conspirators began their sabotage campaign against Flynn with an article in Yahoo News. The article led the with the seemingly shocking revelation that Trump was “receiving foreign policy advice from a former U.S. military intelligence chief who wants the United States to work more closely with Russia.”

The co-author of that article was one Mark Hosenball. As I detailed in a December 2019 article in American Thinker, Hosenball, wittingly or otherwise, served as the CIA’s chief propagandist in the investigation into the 1996 destruction of TWA Flight 800. I told Hosenball as much in 2003 when I met him at the Newsweek office where he was then working. As the reader might suspect, it was an unpleasant encounter.

In 2016, Hosenball was still apparently carrying water for the intelligence community. Three sources, allegedly “former foreign policy officials in past administrations,” tipped him off to this seemingly ominous news of Flynn’s softness on Russia.

In retrospect, what makes the article suspect is that Russia had not yet become the media’s public enemy number one, let alone the White House’s. In July 2015, for instance, Obama called Russian President Vladimir Putin to thank him for his help securing the Iran nuclear pact.

Obama had reason to be grateful. No foreign leader had more influence over the mullahs than Putin. As Obama told Tom Friedman of the New York Times, “We would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.”

In July 2015, it was still respectable for an American president to collaborate with Putin. If fact, as even Hosenball acknowledged, other Republican candidates had been criticizing Obama for being “weak in standing up to the Russian leader.” Indeed, Obama had famously mocked Mitt Romney in a 2012 debate for taking the Russian threat seriously.

“Weird” as it may seem, the conspirators at the White House chose to frame Russia in order to frame Flynn. To pull this off, they had to validate Romney’s claim in 2012 that Russia was “our No. 1 geopolitical foe.”

When Romney made this claim during the 2012 foreign policy debate, Obama countered with a scripted zinger: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for twenty years.” As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted at the time, the Obama jab “spawned approving headlines.”

For eight years, the headlines went wherever Obama directed them. Seeing how willing the media were to validate “what we had given them to say” about Russia and Flynn, the conspirators subsequently played the Russia card on Trump. I am sure even Obama was shocked at how well the whole damn thing played out -- at least until it didn’t.

Read more here.