Obama's team takes down a brilliant patriot

William Corbett writes in part in the Federalist,

...While malfeasance emerged from multiple institutions, no organization discredited itself more acutely than the Federal Bureau of Investigation I have been privileged to serve for 22 years. With conflagrations ravaging the 2016 electoral landscape, the FBI should have served as a rule-of-law firebreak. But that role was enthusiastically abandoned by FBI headquarters arsonists whose names we have come to learn and loathe.

The entire fiasco has been a gutshot to the thousands of former agents whose careers faithfully adhered to the Constitution. How did law enforcement’s premier investigative agency, steeped with expertise in quashing public corruption, become so thoroughly devoted to abetting it?

The full answer awaits the completion of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s formal investigation, and possibly the deliberations of a federal trial jury. But FBI veterans also seek to know, how on earth was this allowed to happen?

Former FBI Director Jim Comey’s conspicuous dissembling and the self-serving, cable-TV twaddle of Andy McCabe offer no insights, only evasions. Each new document trove reveals their pretentious “It’s possible, but I don’t know” suppositions about the Christopher Steele dossier to be nothing more than high-octane sham.

After mutilating the FBI’s legacy of trust, these deceivers seek to absolve themselves with allusions to subordinates’ bad judgment and systemic incompetency. But wisdom and experience recognize this as yet another masking maneuver aimed at covering a more awful reality of bad faith and abject moral failure.

...As a private citizen, when I regard how brazenly Flynn’s persecutors deprived him of his constitutional rights and reputation, I am shocked and alarmed, and you should be too. As a former colleague, when I imagine the good will Americans have for the FBI used to camouflage a scheme for entrapping him, I am deeply ashamed.

In ordering a review to evaluate the “FBI’s role in the Flynn investigation and determine whether any current employees engaged in misconduct,” FBI Director Christopher Wray has taken an important, albeit tentative, first step. The record depicts FBI employees lying to the FISA court, spurious source-handling, doctored reports, and evading federal records laws and oversite compliance. This must be confronted with an unblinking application of all pertinent regulations and laws.

I have to wonder, against all the fanaticism Flynn contended with in far-off hellscapes, could he ever have imagined that ideological extremism would threaten his security and the well-being of his family here in our country?

Read more here.

More praise for General Flynn

In PJ Media, Michael Ledeen gives us several new (to me) pieces of information favorable to Michael Flynn. Judge Sullivan is set to consider sentencing Flynn tomorrow, in what will be the biggest story of the day. Read Ledeen's viewpoint here.

Silencing a man of honor

Jordan Schachtel reports for Conservative Review,

There’s a reason why you haven’t heard much from Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn lately. The man who served his country honorably for 33 years has been effectively silenced by special counsel Robert Mueller as he awaits sentencing.

Given the circumstances of his plea deal, Flynn cannot speak publicly about anything related to the charges against him. Doing so could void his plea agreement with Mueller’s team and open him up to further legal proceedings that he is financially unable to defend himself against.

Flynn, who has worked his entire career on a government salary, has spent over one million dollars on his legal defense. The financial burden has forced him to sell his home in Alexandria, Virginia, and move into a family home in Rhode Island.

He has been effectively bankrupted and has had his reputation torn to shreds, all for the supposed crime of misleading the FBI about a perfectly legal conversation he had, as incoming national security adviser, with the former Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Remember that the charges against Flynn stem from his advocacy for a detente with Russia, in addition to his reported lobbying against an anti-Israel United Nations resolution, which the Obama administration infamously endorsed through omission by abstaining from the vote. Neither of those activities are illegal or even immoral. In fact, foreign policy observers can be left to conclude that Gen. Flynn was merely acting in America’s best interests.

In order to come to the conclusion that Flynn apparently misled the FBI, the Obama intelligence community wiretapped Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador. Those conversations were then leaked to the press by elements of the intelligence community, in gross violation of federal law. The FBI review found no evidence of wrongdoing by Gen. Flynn, except for the charge of lying to the FBI, a charge that is now reportedly being disputed by the agents who interviewed him.

President Trump’s initial pick for national security adviser had long been skeptical of the unchecked power of the U.S. intelligence community. Flynn wanted to prioritize several foreign policy agenda items, such as ending the Iran deal, moving the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

There was one more priority item for Flynn. Through his experience as a general in foreign war zones, he found that there were several fractures in the intelligence cycle, which harmed U.S. troops’ ability to succeed on the battlefield. As national security adviser, Flynn intended to conduct an audit on the intelligence community as a whole. A full audit of the U.S. intelligence community’s activities has not been completed since 1975, following the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal.

While serving in the Obama administration, Flynn’s earlier attempts at intelligence reform infuriated the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency. Flynn’s enemies list continued to grow when, as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) director, he testified in front of the Congress and challenged the Obama White House narrative that al Qaeda had been “decimated.” The Obama administration forced him into early retirement shortly thereafter.

It became quite clear that the incoming national security adviser posed a direct challenge to the fourth branch of government — the unaccountable Washington bureaucrat class, including the intelligence community, which some have come to refer to as the “deep state.”

A man who has spent his entire life dedicated to his country, who has served in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones on behalf of the United States, has been targeted for destruction. Robert Mueller’s team of Democrat prosecutors — using unethical wiretaps, along with the now-contested testimony of wholly corrupt FBI officials — has silenced Gen. Michael Flynn.

Some of Flynn’s associates have suggested that he should set up a GoFundMe drive to help with his tremendous legal expenditures, in addition to his legal defense fund. The former DIA director has outright refused, on moral grounds. “He refuses to do it. He is an honorable man and will not ask for money,” a person close to Flynn tells CR, on condition of anonymity due to the legal situation.

After being intimidated into pleading guilty for lying to the FBI — when the charges continue to fall flat under increased scrutiny — a lifelong patriot who has committed virtually zero wrongdoing now faces the prospect of a multi-year prison term.

The intelligence community and Mueller’s team have used leaks to the media and contacts with members of the TV pundit class to recklessly attribute labels to Gen. Flynn. Without evidence, we have heard for years now that Flynn has colluded with the Russians, with some even claiming he committed a form of treason. Flynn, on the other hand, has been silenced through legal intimidation tactics. He cannot speak for himself, so others must make the case for him.

The Michael Flynn case

At the Washington Examiner, Byron York is taking a look at the Michael Flynn case.

Flynn's conversation had the attention of the Obama Justice Department, and in particular of deputy attorney general Sally Yates, who reportedly believed Flynn might have violated the Logan Act, a 218 year-old law under which no one had ever been successfully prosecuted. (Two people were charged in the 19th century, but the cases were dropped.)

Despite the high level of classification, word of the Justice Department's concerns got to the press. On Jan. 12, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported that Flynn and Kislyak had talked. "What did Flynn say, and did it undercut U.S. sanctions?" Ignatius asked. "The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about 'disputes' with the United States. Was its spirit violated?"

Three days later, on Jan. 15, Vice President-elect Mike Pence (remember, this was all happening before the Trump administration took office) denied that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador. "They [Flynn and Kislyak] did not discuss anything having to do with the United States' decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia," Pence told CBS.

On Jan. 20, Donald Trump became president. On Jan. 22, the Wall Street Journal reported that "U.S. counterintelligence agents have investigated communications" between Flynn and Kislyak. The investigation "aimed to determine the nature of Mr. Flynn's contact with Russian officials and whether such contacts may have violated laws."

On Jan. 24, the Justice Department — the Obama holdover Yates had become the acting attorney general — sent two FBI agents to the White House to question Flynn, who talked to them without a lawyer present.

It has sometimes been asked why Flynn, a man long familiar with the ways of Washington, would talk to the FBI without a lawyer. There seems to be no clear answer. On the one hand, as national security adviser, Flynn had plenty of reasons to talk to the FBI, and he could have reasonably thought the meeting would be about a prosaic issue involved in getting the new Trump National Security Council up and running. On the other hand, the media was filled with talk about the investigation into his conversations with Kislyak, and he might just as reasonably have thought that's what the agents wanted to discuss. In any event, Flynn went ahead without an attorney present.

In addition, it appears the FBI did not tell White House officials, including the National Security Council's legal adviser or the White House counsel, that agents were coming to interview the national security adviser over a potentially criminal matter.

Read more here.

"They are seeing what isn't there; reporting their hopes!"

"We've all known this day was coming!" "Obama personally despised Michael Flynn. Obama doesn't believe there is something called militant Islamic terrorism. Flynn was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Administration and had a very different view of Islamic terrorism. Michael Flynn was unmasked (a crime!) by the Obama administration. Flynn worked for Trump for 25 days and was fired for lying.

Brian Ross of ABC News (remember him? He was the guy who said Aurora theater killer Holmes was a right wing tea party activist, which was totally made up by liar Ross) reports that Flynn will testify that Trump asked him to meet with Russians to lay groundwork for fighting ISIS. What we have here is the media so eager to find collusion that they cannot restrain themselves! They are seeing what isn't there; reporting their hopes and dreams! Lying Ross is alleging that Flynn will help Mueller get Trump or members of his team.

"A small potatoes plea"

Let's check in with Andrew McCarthy at National Review on today's bombshell story about General Flynn.

The potential sentence is zero to five years’ imprisonment. Assuming Flynn cooperates fully with Mueller’s investigators, there will be little, if any, jail time.

...Obviously, it was wrong of Flynn to give the FBI false information; he could, after all, have simply refused to speak with the agents in the first place. That said, as I argued early this year, it remains unclear why the Obama Justice Department chose to investigate Flynn. There was nothing wrong with the incoming national-security adviser’s having meetings with foreign counterparts or discussing such matters as the sanctions in those meetings. Plus, if the FBI had FISA recordings of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, there was no need to ask Flynn what the conversations entailed.

Flynn, an early backer of Donald Trump and a fierce critic of Obama’s national-security policies, was generally despised by Obama administration officials. Hence, there has always been cynical suspicion that the decision to interview him was driven by the expectation that he would provide the FBI with an account inconsistent with the recorded conversation — i.e., that Flynn was being set up for prosecution on a process crime.

RWhile initial reporting is portraying Flynn’s guilty plea as a major breakthrough in Mueller’s investigation of potential Trump-campaign collusion with the Russian regime, I suspect the opposite is true.

...In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.

That is not happening in Flynn’s situation. Instead, like Papadopoulos, he is being permitted to plead guilty to a mere process crime. A breaking report from ABC News indicates that Flynn is prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians — initially to lay the groundwork for mutual efforts against ISIS in Syria. That, however, is exactly the sort of thing the incoming national-security adviser is supposed to do in a transition phase between administrations. If it were part of the basis for a “collusion” case arising out of Russia’s election meddling, then Flynn would not be pleading guilty to a process crime — he’d be pleading guilty to an espionage conspiracy.

Understand: If Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador had evinced the existence of a quid pro quo collusion arrangement — that the Trump administration would ease or eliminate sanctions on Russia as a payback for Russia’s cyber-espionage against the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic party — it would have been completely appropriate, even urgently necessary, for the Obama Justice Department to investigate Flynn. But if that had happened, Mueller would not be permitting Flynn to settle the case with a single count of lying to FBI agents. Instead, we would be looking at a major conspiracy indictment, and Flynn would be made to plead to far more serious offenses if he wanted a deal — cooperation in exchange for sentencing leniency.

To the contrary, for all the furor, we have a small-potatoes plea in Flynn’s case — just as we did in Papadopoulos’s case, despite extensive “collusion” evidence. Meanwhile, the only major case Mueller has brought, against former Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and an associate, has nothing to do with the 2016 election. It is becoming increasingly palpable that, whatever “collusion” means, there was no actionable, conspiratorial complicity by the Trump campaign in the Kremlin’s machinations.

Read more here.

Liars lie!

Disgraced retired three-star Army general Michael Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with Mueller to try to snare other Trump officials.

Read more here.

Shocking: The New York Times doesn't like Trump's picks!

Three big appointments made today by president-elect Trump. Jeff Sessions to be the Attorney General, Michael Flynn to be National Security Adviser, and Mike Pompeo to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Ann Althouse notes that the New York Times said about Flynn that Trump was

potentially putting a retired intelligence officer who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat in one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy...

That is the usual snark from the New York Times, but isn't that what we need in a person having a powerful role in shaping policy, someone who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat?

Pompeo

, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee....

Oh no, Trump is appointing someone to head the CIA who didn't like the way Hillary Clinton mishandled Benghazi!

Ann writes,

Lots of news coming from the transition team today — Flynn, Pompeo, Sessions. I guess that the MSM will do an abrupt shift from its theme of the last few days — that the transition is in disarray and falling way behind. The new theme — let me guess — is: all the President's men are terrible.

The Times saved its sharpest criticisms for Senator Sessions, implying that he is a racist. You thought we were going to be done with allegations that a person is racist? No, just the opposite. Get ready for racism allegations to be front and center on the Sessions nomination.
Read more here and here.

Flynn is Trump's choice for National Security Advisor

AP:

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the man Donald Trump has asked to be his national security adviser, built a reputation in the Army as an astute intelligence professional and a straight talker. What set Flynn apart after he shed his uniform in 2014 was the blistering public criticism he quickly leveled at the White House and Pentagon, taking issue with a wide range of national security policies, including the administration's approach to fighting the Islamic State group and, more generally, its handling of global affairs. In recent public comments, including his fiery address at the Republican National Convention, Flynn has emphasized his view that the threat posed by IS requires a more aggressive U.S.