The people of this land have enough trouble in mind — what with livelihoods, careers, businesses, marriages, hopes and dreams circling the drain in the new insta-depression — but let’s hope they have just a little attention left over for the whirlwind denouement of the odious RussiaGate affair, now finally shredding the last defenses of the Deep State’s rogue Intel forces after years of deceit, treachery, and juridical depravity. The beginning of the end is at hand in the malicious prosecution of General Michael Flynn, and, as that’s revealed for the criminal plot it was, all the other threads in this vast tapestry of sedition will unravel.
Why does that even matter anymore, you may wonder? Because so many of our current troubles are mostly due to the culture of pervasive dishonesty America retreated into to avoid the mandates and rigors of reality in the 21st century. It operated in every area of our national life from the racketeering in medicine and higher-ed, to the games we played with our national debt, to the stupendous grift of politics, the futile wars we prosecuted, the idiotic gender conflict and race hustling, and, most flamboyantly, to the lawlessness around the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice during and after the 2016 election. This was the culture of Anything Goes and Nothing Matters. It has to be defeated if we expect to go on as a credible nation.
General Flynn had been an irritant to the Obama administration in his role as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He disagreed with a lot going on around him and he said so, especially the nuclear deal that was percolating with Iran. Mr. Obama canned General Flynn in 2014. Afterward, CIA chief John Brennan and DNI James Clapper put him under surveillance and played entrapment games with him, using some of the same shady characters (Stefan Halper, Richard Dearlove) who later showed up as RussiaGate players.
In early 2016, Gen. Flynn joined the Trump campaign as a foreign affairs advisor and that summer made the mistake of leading the “Lock her up,” chant to a delirious crowd at the Republican Convention. Perhaps he knew a thing or two about the activities of the Clinton Foundation. Perhaps he also knew what Jeffrey Epstein was up to. Then Mr. Trump shocked the world and won the election. Gen. Flynn was soon appointed incoming National Security Advisor. One can imagine the anxiety crackling through a Democrat-controlled Deep State on the verge of surrendering power to its enemies. The alarm bells that went off through the vast US Intel underground must have been deafening.
In a panic, the Intel Community set in motion a suite of operations to get rid of both Flynn and Trump. On December 29, late in the transition-of-power, President Obama lit up a diplomatic flare by confiscating country retreat properties in Maryland and Long Island owned by the Russian embassy and expelling 35 embassy employees, supposedly as payback for Russia “interfering in the 2016 election.” This prompted a conversation between incoming National Security Advisor Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. That cued the FBI to entrap General Flynn. The news media played along with the preposterous falsehood that high American officials should not communicate with diplomats posted to the USA. The shady gotcha interview about that with Flynn, conducted by FBI officers Peter Strzok and Joseph Pientka, has been dissected to death, so I’ll spare you that, except to say that it was carried out in obvious bad faith.
The court case over all that has dragged out for more than three years now, though anyone could see from the get-go that it was a malicious prosecution. (I said as much more than once in this blog years ago.) Presiding Judge Emmet Sullivan has overlooked flagrant misconduct by DOJ prosecutors, led by Brandon Van Grack. FBI Director Christopher Wray has concealed exculpatory evidence of FBI and DOJ misconduct that favored General Flynn for three years. General Flynn’s previous attorneys from the DC law firm of Covington and Burling — where Mr. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder is a partner — represented Gen. Flynn poorly, and did so apparently on-purpose. In spite of all that, the case is unraveling thanks to the diligence of Gen. Flynn’s new attorney, Sidney Powell, who cuts through government bullshit like a samurai sword through tofu.
The case is now moving swiftly to a climax, perhaps due to William Barr appointing Missouri federal attorney Jeffrey Jensen to review the matter. Someone, perhaps new Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, has pried bales of previously hidden documents from FBI Director Wray’s sweaty hands. They amount to clear evidence of a scheme to lawlessly railroad Gen. Flynn. If Judge Sullivan doesn’t dismiss the case in another two weeks, he will look like a fool and a scoundrel. He probably cares about his reputation. Any fair reading of this case would have this judge cite the DOJ lawyers for criminal contempt at a minimum.
The question arises: why has Attorney General Barr allowed this to go on and on. My guess is that he thinks the best course would be for Judge Sullivan to be forced by the weight of evidence to do his duty and move to dismiss the case against Gen. Flynn. After all, the objective is to restore the rule-of-law, and that includes getting the federal courts to operate honestly and fairly. If Mr. Barr took the extraordinary action of intervening, it would signify that the court could not be trusted, and that will not restore the rule-of-law. The same applies to a presidential pardon.
In the background looms federal attorney John Durham who has been at work for year looking into the matrix of suspicious conduct around all aspects of the RussiaGate hoax, the greatest scandal in US history. Mr. Barr has been accused of allowing quite a few culpable DOJ higher-ups to remain in their jobs this whole time,including FBI Director Wray, despite the shade thrown on them by the drip-drip-drip revelations of their misdeeds. I think both Mr. Barr and Mr. Trump have resisted the temptation to intervene in order to 1) steer clear of malign RussiaGate collaborators in Congress and the news media, and 2) for reasons similar to the process involving Gen. Flynn — to reestablish the regular wheels of justice and faith in the system.
RussiaGate and all its subsidiary mischief amounted to a seditious conspiracy by several agencies of government against the chief executive. It was explicitly an effort to overthrow a president by illegitimate means. The conspiracy extended to members of congress, who are not privileged with immunity against felony crimes, by the way. The partial list of government officials, current or former, who may be subject to prosecution in these matters should include Barack Obama, Susan Rice, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, John Carlin, Mary McCord, Michael Atkinson, James Baker (DOJ), James Baker (DOD), Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, Dana Boente, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Joseph Pientka, William Priestap, Bruce Ohr, Kevin Clinesmith, Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, Aaron Zebley, Jeanie Rhee, David Lauffman, Senator Mark Warner, Senator Richard Burr, James Wolfe, Rep. Adam Schiff, Eric Ciaramella, Col. Alexander Vindman. Players outside government include Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, Stefan Halper, Sidney Blumenthal, Cody Shearer, David Kramer. The following media figures might be named as unindicted co-conspirators: Dean Baquet, Martin Baron, Jeff Zucker, Andrew Lack, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Cuomo, Joe Scarborough, David Corn, David Ignatius, and Ari Melber.
Note: The New York Times has not covered this week’s developments in the General Michael Flynn case. So, there is no record of this epic injustice in the newspaper-of-record. Therefore, it is no longer the newspaper-of-record.
