"Michael Flynn and the FBI"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Michael Flynn and the FBI”

May 8, 2020

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community –

they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

                                                                                                Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

                                                                                                Tuesday, January 3, 2017

                                                                                                MSNBC

On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to help consecrate a portion of that battlefield as a new cemetery. He spoke of the government, conceived in liberty, that had been formed eighty-seven years prior, a government in which people are the ultimate power – a government comprised of the people’s elected representatives and the appointees those representatives make; he spoke of the laws and regulations that are made by those elected representatives, and he emphasized that this government is for the people, to ensure the protection of their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Such a government, Lincoln understood, is rare. It relies on trust that those who labor within it work for the people, not for a party, a cabal or an individual. Once that trust is gone, the fragile edifice that comprises democracy crumbles. The Michael Flynn story is one of government servants subverting their role. No matter one’s political affiliation, the story of what happened to General Michael Flynn should frighten any lover of freedom and democracy.

This story has been ably told by Andrew McCarthy in National Review, Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and others, but its consequences are worth considering again, as it unravels. On May 1, Ms. Strassel wrote: “…evidence of law enforcement’s abuse keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know.” Establishment Washington could not believe that the people had elected Mr. Trump – this allegedly insensitive deal maker, a man who speaks frankly and crudely to and about his political opponents. He was demonized as authoritarian. He was an outsider. He had never served in government, nor in the military. He was a television star, famous for saying, “You’re fired!” In a country where leadership had too often descended into elitism, arrogance and hypocrisy, the mercurial Mr. Trump arrived as a disruptor.

To Washington’s establishment, Mr. Trump was naive. He is smart and shrewd, but the intelligence community is a different milieu, as Senator Schumer observed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “He was not,” as Andrew McCarthy wrote on May 2, “supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize during the campaign.”

On November 17, 2016, a few days after the election, the newly elected President named General Michael Flynn to be National Security Administration (NSA) chief. The three-star retired General had served in military intelligence since the 9/11 attacks. In 2012, he was named director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama Administration. General Flynn was a scrappy, outspoken officer who at times clashed with subordinates and superiors. Critical of Mr. Obama’s Middle East policies, he was asked to leave in 2014. But he knew how intelligence agencies worked, which is why Donald Trump tapped him as NSA chief, and which was also why his political enemies wanted him out.

The “what” of what happened to Michael Flynn is clear – that the FBI set a perjury trap based on a meeting he, as newly named NSA chief, had had with the Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, a conversation that the FBI had taped, so knew his conversation and knew he had said nothing wrong. In January 2017, the FBI “interviewed” Mr. Flynn, without telling him his rights or without a lawyer present – in fact, telling him one was unnecessary. However, handwritten notes from Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Division from 2015-2018, disclosed two weeks ago, made clear that the FBI “engineered” the “crime:” “What is our goal? Truth/Admissions, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Without a lawyer present, they got him to contradict some of what he had said earlier to the Russian Ambassador. They got him fired.

The “why” is the question that concerned Andrew McCarthy and which he addressed in his May 2 essay in National Review. The Obama Administration had had a Trump-Russia collusion investigation underway for several months. And the FBI and former members of the Obama Administration wanted it continued after the election. Michael Flynn stood in the way. A new Administration might discover how the intelligence agencies had been weaponized against domestic political enemies. And General Flynn would see what had been done. As well, he was despised by the hubristic James Comey. The latter feared Flynn would hamper the FBI’s ongoing investigation into their contrived story – that Mr. Trump had colluded with Putin about the election. The investigation culminated in Robert Mueller’s query as Special Counsel, which became a persistent and constant nuisance to the Trump Administration. The investigation took two years and consumed $35 million. It ended in finding that no role had been played by Russia in helping Mr. Trump – a conclusion obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense. Why would Putin want an unknown, supposedly volatile man as President when he could have a woman he had worked with, who had given him a “re-set” button, and from whom he had acquired 20% of U.S uranium deposits in the Uranium One deal? The accusation never made sense. (My guess is that Putin was most interested in sowing seeds of suspicion and doubt about our electoral process. In that, he succeeded.)

However, because of the FBI’s entrapment, General Flynn’s days at NSA were numbered. He quit on February 13, 2017 and spent the next two years, and millions of dollars in legal fees, trying to clear his name. When the FBI threatened to go after his son, he relented and admitted to a plea deal, of lying to the FBI. We also know that the FBI used fraudulent means to obtain FISA warrants against two members of Mr. Trump’s campaign staff, George Papadopolous and Carter Page.

Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped all charges against Michael Flynn. While that news is welcome, the facts remain that the FBI exceeded its powers. It had framed General Flynn. He should receive financial restitution for legal costs incurred, and the guilty parties should be punished.

When government servants abuse their powers, when they put politics above the will of the people, democracy shudders. No American citizen should experience what happened to General Flynn. People must be responsible for their actions, and government agencies must be accountable to the elected representatives of the people; they cannot be a law unto themselves. We should all – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – be thankful that Attorney General William Barr is conducting a full investigation into what happened. In this case, the accused was exonerated. Nevertheless, three years of his life were destroyed. Mr. Flynn should be compensated. The guilty parties should not be allowed to retire; they should be jailed. Lincoln would be abashed.

"The Memo"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“The Memo”

February 12, 2018

“Giving money and power to government

is like giving whiskey and car keys to teen-age boys.”

                                                                                                P.J. O’Rourke (1947-)

                                                                                                Parliament of Whores, 1991

Democracy is fragile. It must be handled with care. Sunlight is a disinfectant, but too much can be incendiary. Conformity in behavior is critical to civility, but conformity in ideas leads to ignorance. Government is the glue that binds a people into a nation, but when the rule of law is breached by government, tyranny supplants democracy.

The release of “the memo” did not prove or disprove any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It did not commend or condemn Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, or the dossier. It should not affect the Mueller investigation. It was not incendiary in the way Democrats forecast. But it was revealing in that it showed how usurpation of power can destroy trust in government and damage the fairness and equality necessary to a democratic society. The memo showed that agencies of the federal government (the DOJ and the FBI), in misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), conspired with one political party and candidate (Democrats and Hillary Clinton) to the detriment of another (Republicans and Donald Trump). Whether it was an act of omission or commission is less important than the fact that the FBI and DOJ were not honest in making their case before the FISC, regarding the request to wiretap Carter Page. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal put it well: “We recognize the need for the FBI to sometimes spy on Americans to keep the country safe, but this is a power that should never be abused.” The people who work for the DOJ and the FBI work for the American people, not a specific candidate or political party.

We all have opinions, government employees included. But the latter must not let opinions influence their work. From the start, I have never believed that the Machiavellian Vladimir Putin preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton. I found (and find) the proposition ludicrous. Mr. Trump was an unknown. He was (and is) volatile and unpredictable. Mrs. Clinton was disliked by Mr. Putin, but she was a known known, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it. Mr. Putin had dealt with her as a Secretary of State and had known her as a U.S. Senator and as the wife of a U.S. President. He had had dealings with the Clinton Foundation. He knew how to handle her, whereas Mr. Trump was a wild card. We have all read Peter Strzok’s (former lead FBI investigator into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia) e-mail of September 2016 to his paramour Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, about the alleged collusion: “My gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” If collusion existed, I believe it was between the Obama Administration/Clinton campaign and the DOJ/FBI, not the Trump campaign and Russia.

Politics is a blood sport. Democrats and the Clinton campaign wanted knowledge of any possible Russian connections Donald Trump might have had, thus the hiring of Christopher Steele. To obfuscate payments for the report they were seeking, they had their Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, pay for the research. Perkins Coie then hired Fusion GPS, a Washington-based commercial research and strategic intelligence firm. In turn, they hired Christopher Steele, a former British agent, sometime FBI informant and known Trump hater, to prepare the dossier, which he did – a 35-page document later described by FBI Director James Comey as “salacious and unverified.” Mr. Steele was allegedly paid $160,000 by the DNC and Clinton campaign. And the FBI paid to obtain the dossier. Despite Mr. Comey’s characterization of the report, he, along with Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, signed three FISA warrant requests to surveil Mr. Page, using the Steele dossier as an essential basis for the request. They did so without disclosing the connection of Mr. Steele to the DNC and Mrs. Clinton. As well, the FISA request cited a news story that had appeared in Yahoo News, but they failed to mention that the article was largely based on an interview with the discredited Mr. Steele, who had also leaked elements of the dossier to media organizations, in violation of FBI orders. The request did not mention that the DOJ official who met with Steele, Bruce Ohr, had a wife who was employed by Fusion GPS and who had worked on the dossier.

Before being released, Democrats claimed “the memo” would damage national security, which it did not. A rebuttal of non-politicized facts should be released, a move supported by Republicans, as should the transcripts to the FISA Court, as well as the name of the judge who authorized the wiretap. Normally such information would be kept private, but these are not normal times. Democracies demand a disinterested press and government employees who are above politics – men and women who accept the will of the people, not those who undermine the democratic process and who try to derail a duly nominated candidate.

The incident of the memo is a reminder of the fragility of democracy. It has become common among the Left to claim Trump as a wannabe dictator. While I believe we must always be vigilant and skeptical, that is not, in my opinion, the risk we face. Of far greater concern is the gradual assumption of power by an administrative state via an unaccountable bureaucracy dependent on big government. It is the growth of regulations that inhibit liberties that should concern us. It is the university that denies conservative viewpoints that should have us worried. It is a media that has foregone any semblance of fairness and disinterested reporting that should cause us disquiet. It is an FBI and Department of Justice that do the bidding of one political party to the detriment of another that threatens liberty. The actions exposed in “the memo” are reminiscent of a time when J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI abused the constitutional rights of those who challenged his authority. Considering risk to democracy in this way, the Obama Administration, with its expansion of agencies such as the EPA, HHS, CFPB and the FCC – not to mention Lois Lerner and the IRS – was far more dangerous to liberty than Mr. Trump.

Authoritarians do emerge. And they can come from segments of the population that have been ignored by elites, like religious, straight, working-class, white males – deplorables, as Hillary Clinton described them – who had been belittled and dismissed by Democrats focused on identity politics. But to succeed, an authoritarian requires an accommodative press and the acceptance by cultural institutions. When presidents have seized special powers, as did Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, it was during a time of war. Franklin Roosevelt came closest to assuming extraordinary powers, when he attempted to expand the Supreme Court, interned Japanese-Americans and ran successfully for president four times. He had the media on his side, but he was stymied by Congress in the first instance. The internment camps ended before the War concluded, in December 1944, and the ratification of the 22^nd Amendment in 1951 prohibited any future President from serving more than two terms. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” expanded the reach of government, as did Mr. Obama’s focus on “not letting a crisis go to waste.” Nevertheless, it is Mr. Trump who is slammed as a Fascist by the far left, the media, on college campuses and among pseudo intellectuals on cable TV and in Hollywood. What the memo exposed should concern all thinking Americans.

In 1972, five men working on behalf of the Nixon re-election campaign burglarized the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex. That was a crime. The scandal was worsened when an attempt by the Administration to enlist the CIA and the FBI to squash the investigation failed, and President Nixon was forced – rightfully – to resign. In the current situation, the Obama Administration successfully enlisted the DOJ and the FBI in a failed attempt to thwart the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the first instance, democracy won; in the second, it lost – at least so far, as the only head that seems at risk is that of the victim, Mr. Trump.