Gradually The Truth Emerges

The treatment of retired General Flynn by the FBI has alarmed many Americans. It has become increasingly apparent to people who don’t rely on the mainstream media for their news that the treatment of the General was an attempt to cripple the Trump administration. Information on what was actually going on has remained secret because career people in the FBI have a vested interest in hiding the truth. On September 25th, The Epoch Times posted two articles highlighting information that is coming from people involved in the investigation (here and here).

The first article reports:

FBI agent William Barnett told government investigators last week that he heard other FBI agents at the special counsel’s office (SCO) “comically talk about wiping cellular telephones,” according to a summary of the interview released as part of the court proceedings in the case involving former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“Barnett had a cellular telephone issued by the SCO which he did not ‘wipe.’ Barnett did hear other agents ‘comically’ talk about wiping cellular telephones, but was not aware of anyone ‘wiping’ their issued cellular telephones,” the summary (pdf) states.

The article also notes:

Two well-known members of the Mueller team, FBI attorney Lisa Page and Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok, mentioned sending and clearing iMessages from their SCO iPhones on more than one occasion.

“Clear imsg …” Strzok wrote to Page on June 5, 2017, and again on June 8.

The records officer, who isn’t identified in the documents, noted that Strzok’s phone contained “no substantive texts, notes or reminders.” Page’s phone went missing under questionable circumstances after she left the Mueller team. When it was recovered more than a year later, the device was already wiped.

The second article reports:

An FBI agent assigned to the investigation of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn wanted to be taken off the case, he recently told FBI investigators, saying the prosecution of Flynn was being used as a means to “get Trump.”

FBI agent William Barnett was assigned to the Flynn case shortly after it was opened in August 2016, as part of the FBI’s probe into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, which was dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane.” But the case was “opaque,” lacking much detail of specific evidence of any crimes, Barnett told FBI and DOJ investigators on Sept. 17 (pdf).

The case theory was “supposition on supposition,” he said.

The second article concludes:

The lawyers were convinced Trump aide K.T. McFarland was the “key to everything” who had conveyed Trump’s orders for Flynn to talk to Kislyak. The “ground just kept being retreaded,” but it was just “astro projection,” he said. No evidence was found.

On multiple occasions, when Mueller lawyers interviewed people from Trump’s circle, it was Barnett who stepped in with clarifying and follow-up questions, such as, “Do you know that for a fact or are you just speculating?”

One time, the lawyers tried to kick Barnett off a McFarland interview. He had to threaten he’d report them to the inspector general before they allowed him in. When he started to ask clarifying questions, he said, they paused the interview and warned him, “If you keep asking these questions, we will be here all day.”

He called the lawyers in question the “obstruction team.”

In one interview, Flynn said something that suggested Trump knew about the calls to Kislyak. Barnett had the impression Flynn was just trying to say what the lawyers wanted to hear. He had to step in with a follow-up question and Flynn clarified that Trump wasn’t aware of the calls.

Flynn said in court papers his lawyers told him after the first special counsel interview that the investigators weren’t happy with his answers. For the subsequent session, his lawyers coached him to use words he wouldn’t have used himself, he said. He eventually fired the lawyers and accused them of ineffective counsel due to a conflict of interest.

The dismissal of his case is scheduled for a hearing on Sept. 29 before District Judge Emmet Sullivan after Flynn’s bid to have a higher court force the judge to accept the dismissal without further proceedings failed in August.

The FBI is out of control and will remain so until some of the people involved in this scandal are held accountable. So far only Kevin Clinesmith has been charged with anything. This is a disgrace.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Townhall reported yesterday that the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two asylum-seeking brothers who blew up the Boston Marathon, has been overturned by a U.S. Appeals Court.

The article reports:

Dzhokhar’s lawyers argued that the terrorist himself was a victim of intense media coverage and an unfair jury trial. The attack on the 2013 Boston Marathon killed three people and wounded around 280 others. Many of the victims lost limbs and suffered other horrific injuries. 

“A core promise of our criminal-justice system is that even the very worst among us deserve to be fairly tried and lawfully punished,” reads the federal appeals court ruling vacating Dzhokhar’s death sentence. 

In 2015, a jury found Dzhokhar guilty on all 30 charges against him and sentenced the bomber to death. But because Dzhokhar had destroyed the lives of so many Bostonians, his defense attorneys have successfully argued that his death sentence was unfair because the trial should have been moved to a different city — presumably a city where Dzhokhar didn’t kill people. Dzhokhar told investigators that he and his brother’s next target was planned for New York City’s Times Square.

Dzhokhar will be given a new trial on the basis that his previous trial was unfair and should have been moved to a different city.

Let’s contrast that with the trial of General Michael Flynn. After a federal appeals court Wednesday ordered a trial judge to dismiss the case against President Trump’s first national security adviser, Micheal Flynn, the judge refused to dismiss the case.

On July 30th, The Business Insider reported:

A key federal appeals court in Washington DC agreed Thursday to reexamine the fight over whether former Trump national security adviswer Michael Flynn’s guilty plea can be summarily dismissed.

The new order from 10 members of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit comes a little over a month after a three-judge panel there ordered a lower federal district court judge who is overseeing the case against Flynn to dismiss the prosecution at the Justice Department’s request.

Recently declassified information on the Flynn case indicates that General Flynn was targeted as a way to tarnish the Trump administration (article here). There is enough information out there to prove that General Flynn’s guilty plea was coerced and that the charges against him should be dismissed.

Contrast the way our courts are treating someone who was caught after executing a terrorist act and a patriot who served our country for many years. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Why Was This Redacted In The First Place?

The redacted part of the Susan Rice memo-to-self was declassified on Tuesday. The Gateway Pundit posted an article yesterday that includes a picture of the entire memo including the redacted version.

The article reports:

Acting DNI Richard Grenell on Tuesday declassified the remaining portion of Susan Rice’s email.

CBS reporter Catherine Herridge obtained the declassified email and released it to the public

It was previously known the junk Russia dossier and General Flynn’s calls to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were discussed in the secret meeting.

The newly declassified portion of the email once again implicates Barack Obama and Comey!

Barack Obama and Comey discussed Flynn’s communications with Kislyak.

Comey suggested to Obama in the meeting that the National Security Council [NSC] might not want to pass “sensitive information related to Russia” to then-incoming National Security Adviser General Mike Flynn.

“President Obama asked if Comey was saying that the NSC should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied “potentially” and noted “the level of communication (w/Russian Ambassador) is unusual.”

Andrew McCarthy posted an article about the memo at The National Review today.

Andrew McCarthy notes:

Try not to get dizzy. Rice has gone from claiming to have had no knowledge of Obama administration monitoring of Flynn and other Trump associates, to claiming no knowledge of any unmaskings of Trump associates, to admitting she was complicit in the unmaskings, to — now — a call for the recorded conversation between retired general Michael Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to be released because it would purportedly show that the Obama administration had good reason to be concerned about Flynn (y’know, the guy she said she had no idea they were investigating).

Naturally, we have now learned that Rice was deeply involved in the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia investigation, including its sub-investigation of Flynn, a top Trump campaign surrogate who was slated to replace Rice as national-security advisor when President Trump took office. Last night, I did a column for Fox News, analyzing the newly unredacted paragraph from Rice’s previously reported email memorializing a White House meeting on these subjects.

The meeting took place on January 5, 2017, and involved Rice, Obama, and Vice President Biden, the administration’s top political hierarchy on national-security matters, along with Obama’s top law-enforcement and counterintelligence officials, deputy attorney general Sally Yates (soon formally to take the acting AG role she was already performing), and FBI director James Comey. Prior redactions had already demonstrated that the meeting’s central purpose was to discuss the rationale for withholding intelligence about Russia from the incoming Trump national-security team.

The article at The National Review concludes:

It is vital that the documentary record, which should have been uncovered years ago, continue being brought to light. It is good that Trump’s National Intelligence director Ric Grenell is forcing the issue. But let’s not forget: When it turns out that Obama officials have intentionally inserted after-the-fact CYA memos into “the File,” we have to ask why they have done so . . . and to read what they’ve written with that in mind.

I strongly suggest that you follow the links to both of the above articles to read the details of the redacted part of this memo. It is becoming very obvious that the Obama administration was not interested in participating in a peaceful transfer of power.

 

The More You Know…

John Hinderaker at Power Line Blog posted an article yesterday about some of the things we have learned as information about spying on the Trump campaign and transition team is declassified. One thing that I don’t think has been widely reported is that Obama Treasury Department officials were on the list of those making unmasking requests relating to General Michael Flynn.

The article reports:

When Acting DNI Richard Grenell released the list of individuals who made unmasking requests relating to General Michael Flynn, one of the curious facts that stood out was the presence of a number of Obama Treasury Department officials on the list. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew and no fewer than five of his subordinates–Deputy Secretary, Under Secretary, Acting Assistant Secretary, and so on, all political appointees in the Obama administration–all made unmasking requests with regard to conversations that turned out to involve General Flynn, on the same day: December 14, 2016. Lew made a second request on January 12, 2017.

The mystery of why President Obama’s Treasury Department was interested in electronic surveillance carried out for national security purposes may have been solved by this scoop in the Ohio Star: “The Treasury Department Spied on Flynn, Manafort, and the Trump Family, Says Whistleblower.”

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers.

“I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is not anything there.”

The whistleblower said she only saw metadata, that is names and dates when the general’s financial records were accessed. “I never saw what they saw.”

By March 2016, the whistleblower said she and a colleague, who was detailed to Treasury from the intelligence community, became convinced that the surveillance of Flynn was not tied to legitimate criminal or national security concerns, but was straight-up political surveillance among other illegal activity occurring at Treasury.

“When I showed it to her, what she said, ‘Oh, sh%t!’ and I knew right then and there that I was right – this was some shady stuff,” the whistleblower said.

“It wasn’t just him,” the whistleblower said. “They were targeting other U.S. citizens, as well.”

Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The Star’s source says that she filed a formal complaint with the Treasury Department’s Inspector General in March 2017, but nothing was done. There is much more at the link.

Please follow the link to read the entire article–it is fascinating.

The article concludes:

We don’t know what Flynn communication these Obama officials were poring over, but we do know that the Treasury Department was never able to make any kind of a case against Flynn for financial misdeeds of any kind. It bears remembering that Jacob Lew was an unusually political Secretary of the Treasury. He was Obama’s Chief of Staff before taking over the Treasury Department. We have written about him several times, e.g. here.

Evidence continues to grow that the corruption of the executive branch of the U.S. government by Barack Obama was comprehensive and perhaps unprecedented.

Consequences are justified and needed.

Why Should These Records Remain Hidden?

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit reported the following:

On Monday General Flynn Attorney Sidney Powell tweeted out that the law firm Covington and Burling that mis-represented General Michael Flynn is resisting turning over all documents and specifically those of Eric Holder and Michael Chertoff discussing the Flynn case.

It should be noted that Michael Chertoff is considered to be the co-author of the Patriot Act. Also, who helped General Flynn in deciding which law firm to hire? The article reminds us of the conflicts of interest the law firm had in representing General Flynn:

President Obama’s first Attorney General, Eric Holder, left a corrupt life in public office and returned to the law firm Covington.  While at Covington, lawyers from his firm represented General Mike Flynn and requested dirt on President Trump while withholding important information from General Flynn.  It needs to be asked.  Was Eric Holder involved?

After working for President Obama for six years, Attorney General Eric Holder returned to the law firm where he had previously worked, Covington, where he became a partner in 2015.

The article continues:

Covington had numerous conflicts of interest related to their biggest case ever, representing General Michael Flynn in his unjust indictment by the Mueller gang.  Flynn’s attorneys at the firm withheld evidence from their client.  They asked for dirt on President Trump.  They hired individuals that were involved in the criminal Spygate scandal.

There is no way that a partner at Covington like Eric Holder was not aware of the firm representing General Flynn in the biggest case in the US.
This all is so corrupt, it makes you wonder if former corrupt Obama AG Holder was involved.

Thank God that Attorney Sidney Powell was willing to step in (pro bono) and give General Flynn the honest representation that he is entitled to under law.

Yes, The Documents Show It Was A Soft Coup Attempt

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted an article showing excerpts from some of the documents recently released from the Department of Justice regarding the Michael Flynn case.

The article reports:

Wow – the latest documents released by the DOJ provide additional evidence that the Obama White House was running the operation to spy on candidate and then President Trump in an effort to destroy the incoming administration and have President Trump eventually removed from office!

That is called a coup, and it isn’t supposed to happen in America.

The article continues:

The latest emails released from the DOJ today in the General Michael Flynn case show the Obama White House was running the show.  In the last line in the first paragraph on page 9 of the 12 page release it says:

We need to discuss what happens if DOJ directs us, or directly tells, VPOTUS or anyone else about the [redacted] specifically w/r/t [with regards to] what we do directly with him.  I think it will be very difficult not to do some sort of overt step with him, a defensive briefing or interview under light “defensive briefing” pretext unless WH specifically directs us not to.

The article includes a quote from Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell from 2018:

…These folks are so far out of bounds and so far beyond that pale. When people talk about it being a coup, there’s no exaggeration there. It was a coup. It was an effort to unseat or destabilize the Trump Administration, the President personally but actually his entire administration and we’ve never seen anything like it.

This makes, you know, pick your favorite scandal, Watergate, Whitewater, whatever, it makes all that look like Keystone cops. This was a very sophisticated, very thought out….

There’s a very important text message from Lisa Page to Peter Strzok and that is from November of 2016 and the context for the text message is – Strzok asks Lisa Page, “Hey, what are you doing?” or words to that effect.

She reports back very excitedly that she’s preparing talking points for Director Comey to go brief the President on what they’re doing. And the quote from Lisa Page is quote – “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing” – closed quote.

That POTUS of course is Barack Obama. And, I will take Lisa Page at her word. It’s an off the cuff communication with her paramour. She’s excited. She’s getting the Director prepped.

I want to know, what did Obama know. What did he approve? What did he tacitly nod his head for? What did he explicitly authorize?

This entire, it’s a tragedy. It’s a scandal we’ve never seen before constitutionally. This rests entirely on Mr. Obama and his administration. It starts with them and we need real accountability. Let’s get Mr. Obama under oath.

I suspect there are a number of people who held powerful positions in the Obama administration that are not sleeping well these days.

Sometimes Justice Takes A Long Time

Yesterday John Solomon posted an article at Just The News detailing some new information in the investigation of General Michael Flynn. People who have followed this story closely have had doubts about the charges against the General from the beginning.

The article reports:

A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.”

The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicalization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe.

The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview — a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

The article includes a link to all of the FBI notes that were recently unsealed.

This is one of the notes:

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.”

The fact that they were even discussing the idea of getting General Flynn fired does not say good things about their motives.

The article includes other evidence that the interview with General Flynn might have been a set-up to frame him and have him removed from office:

Among the new evidence released Wednesday night is an email chain involving former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and Strzok, the lead agent in the Russia probe known as Crossfire Hurricane. In the email exchange, the two and others discuss whether the FBI has to follow its normal rules and give Flynn the customary “1001 warning” at the start of his interview that if he misled agents he could be charged criminally.

“I have a question for you,” Page wrote in an email that included Strzok. “Could the admonition re 1001 be given at the beginning at the interview? Or does it have to come following a statement which agents believed to be false? Does this policy speak to that?

She added: “It seems to be if the former then it would be an easy way to just casually slip that in, Of course you know sir federal law makes it a crime to…”

A while later, Page gets an emailed response: “I haven’t read the policy lately, but if I recall correctly, you can say it any time. I’m 90 percent sure about that, but I can check in the a.m.”

The mere fact that FBI agents were using phrase like “slip that in” when talking about a warning designed to protect someone’s constitutional rights is certain to give Flynn’s lawyers more fodder to argue in court that his January 2017 interview was a set up as Powell has argued,

The people behind this operation need to be in jail. They have totally mishandled the trust the government placed in them to execute equal justice under the law.

Just for the record– so far none of this news has shown up on the Drudge Report. I am wondering how the mainstream media will report it (assuming they will report it).

An Interesting Perspective From Someone Who Would Know

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University. Yesterday he posted an article at The Washington Examiner about the charges against General Michael Flynn.

Mr. Gagliano begins the article by explaining the he was skeptical about an intelligence community effort to remove President Trump:

As a self-proclaimed adherent to Hanlon’s Razor, I once cynically viewed the frenzied focus on FBI actions during the 2016 Russian election-meddling investigation as partisan and overwrought. Hanlon’s Razor suggests that we never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. Having proudly served in the FBI for 25 years, I bristled at insulting accusations of an onerous deep state conspiracy. Some obvious mistakes made during the investigation of the Trump campaign were quite possibly the result of two ham-handedly overzealous FBI headquarters denizens, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, clumsily seeking to impress each other with ever-increasing levels of loathing for then-candidate Donald Trump.

FBI employees are entitled to their own political views. But senior-level decision-makers who express them on government devices, while overseeing a supremely consequential investigation into a political campaign, simply do not possess the requisite judgment and temperament for the job.

The article explains what changed his mind:

It is unheard of for someone not actually on the interview itself to materially alter an FD-302. As an FBI agent, no one in my chain of command ever directed me to alter consequential wording. And as a longtime FBI supervisor, I never ever directed an agent to recollect something different from what they discerned during an interview. Returning a 302 for errors in grammar, punctuation, or syntax is appropriate. This occurs before the document is ultimately uploaded to a particular file, conjoined with the original interview notes which are safely secured inside a 1-A envelope, and secured as part of evidence at trial.

With this in mind, this related text message exchange from Strzok to Page dated Feb. 10, 2017, nauseated me:

“I made your edits and sent them to Joe. I also emailed you an updated 302. I’m not asking you to edit it this weekend, I just wanted to send it to you.”

Powell charges that Page directed Strzok to alter his Flynn interview 302. As in most instances in life, words matter. The change in wording was instrumental in moving Flynn from a target to a subject. One recalls how critical wording was in the FBI’s decision not to argue that DOJ charge Hillary Clinton with a crime in the private email server investigation. Comey elected not to use “gross negligence” to characterize Clinton’s actions — which would have been the required language in the mishandling of classified information statute — and instead settled upon the more benign and non-indictable “extreme carelessness.”

Later, it was determined that none other than Strzok was the impetus behind the recrafting of Comey’s words.

The article concludes:

Here’s me, acknowledging my mistake. I was dead wrong. It now seems there was a concerted effort, though isolated, within the upper-echelons of the FBI to influence the outcome of the Flynn investigation. By “dirtying up” Flynn, Comey’s FBI headquarters team of callow sycophants shortcut the investigative process. Arm-twisting Flynn through the “tweaked” version of his interview afforded him criminal exposure. The cocksure Comey team felt supremely confident that would inspire him “flipping” and give them the desperately sought-after evidence of Trump-Russia collusion that the wholly unverified Steele dossier was never remotely capable of providing.

I am physically nauseous as I type these words. I have long maintained that innocent mistakes were made and that the investigators at the center of this maelstrom were entitled to the benefit of the doubt.

No more.

They have tarnished the badge and forever stained an agency that deserved so much better from them. I am ashamed. The irreparable damage Comey’s team has done to the FBI will take a generation to reverse.

I ashamedly join Hanlon’s Razor in getting this one wrong.

All Americans need to pay attention to what this man is saying.

How A Kangaroo Court Works

The website study.com includes the following definition of exculpatory evidence:

In Brady v. Maryland (1963), the Supreme Court held that exculpatory evidence withheld in a criminal trial can result in a re-hearing of the case. In this case, Brady was convicted for murder, and the prosecutor failed to tell a jury that another defendant, who had committed the murder with Brady, had already confessed to the killing. The court stated that the jury needed to hear that evidence because it could assist them in their decision regarding Brady. From then on, any exculpatory evidence the prosecutor or law enforcement has is called Brady material, the requirement to turn Brady material over to the defense is called the Brady rule.

Any evidence from a crime scene is subject to the Brady rule.

But what other kind of evidence is exculpatory? The law says ‘any evidence’ that tends to show innocence of the defendant is included. This can include crime scene evidence, witness testimony, DNA results, and medical records.

…The Supreme Court said that without the rule, the defendant’s due process rights would be violated. Due process comes from the 5th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and means that before the government can take away your liberty, it must first give the person the rights and process due to him or her under the Constitution. If the government has evidence that says you might be innocent, it would violate the fairness and impartiality of the trial process by just ignoring it and not letting the jury see it.

The concept of exculpatory evidence is going to be in the spotlight as the case against General Michael Flynn moves forward.

Yesterday John Solomon reported the following at The Hill:

For nearly two years now, the intelligence community has kept secret evidence in the Russia collusion case that directly undercuts the portrayal of retired Army general and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn as a Russian stooge.

That silence was maintained even when former acting Attorney General Sally Yates publicly claimed Flynn was possibly “compromised” by Moscow.

And when a Democratic senator, Al Franken of Minnesota, suggested the former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief posed a “danger to this republic.”

And even when some media outlets opined about whether Flynn’s contacts with Russia were treasonous. 

Yes, the Pentagon did give a classified briefing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in May 2017, but then it declined the senator’s impassioned plea three months later to make some of that briefing information public.

“It appears the public release of this information would not pose any ongoing risk to national security. Moreover, the declassification would be in the public interest, and is in the interest of fairness to Lt. Gen. Flynn,” Grassley wrote in August 2017.

Please follow the link to the article at The Hill to see the details, but the bottom line here is simple.

The article explains:

Rather than a diplomatic embarrassment bordering on treason, Flynn’s conduct at the RT (Russia Today) event provided some modest benefit to the U.S. intelligence community, something that many former military and intelligence officers continue to offer their country after retirement when they keep security clearances.

It’s important to wind back many months to where the Russia collusion narrative started and the media frenzy–driven suggestion that Flynn may have been on a mission to compromise America’s security and endanger this great republic when he visited Moscow.

Would the central character in a Russian election hijack plot actually self-disclose his trip in advance? And then sit through a briefing on how to avoid being compromised by his foreign hosts? And then come back to America and be debriefed by U.S. intelligence officers about who and what he saw?

And would a prosecutor recommend little or no prison time for a former general if that former military leader truly had compromised national security?

Highly unlikely.

It really is time for the deep state to stop its attack on President Trump and those who have supported him. Unfortunately, now that the Democrats control the House of Representatives, we can expect to see more taxpayer dollars spent on trying to undo an election they didn’t like.

 

Weighing The Facts

Yesterday I posted an article about the sentencing of General Michael Flynn. In the article I noted that there were some curious circumstances surrounding the interview in which General Flynn is accused of lying. Evidently I am not the only person concerned about those circumstances.

The American Thinker posted an article today about the judge who will be sentencing General Flynn.

The article reports:

Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is due to sentence General Michael Flynn next Tuesday, has thrown a wild card on the table, raising the possibility that a miscarriage of justice may finally be called out and the guilty plea coerced by Team Mueller thrown out.

Thanks to the sentencing memorandum filed by counsel for General Michael Flynn, we now see that the FBI used deception to ensnare him in a perjury trap.

Yesterday The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial titled, “The Flynn Entrapment.”

The editorial states:

Of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s many targets, the most tragic may be former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The former three-star general pleaded guilty last year to a single count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Now we learn from Mr. Flynn’s court filing to the sentencing judge that senior bureau officials acted in a way to set him up for the fall.

Not a rich man after decades in uniform, Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to avoid bankruptcy and spare his son from becoming a legal target. Mr. Flynn’s filing doesn’t take issue with the description of his offense. But the “additional facts” the Flynn defense team flags for the court raise doubts about FBI conduct.

The Flynn filing describes government documents concerning the Jan. 24, 2017 meeting with two FBI agents when Mr. Flynn supposedly lied. It turns out the meeting was set up by then Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who personally called Mr. Flynn that day on other business—to discuss an FBI training session. By Mr. McCabe’s account, on that call he told Mr. Flynn he “felt that we needed to have two of our agents sit down” with him to talk about his Russia communications.

There is another clue in The American Thinker article as to why the Judge is asking questions:

Chuck Ross reports for the Daily Caller News Foundation on Judge Sullivan’s startling order:

District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on Wednesday ordered Flynn’s lawyers to hand over two documents: a memo that then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe wrote after speaking with Flynn ahead his Jan. 24, 2017 interview with two FBI agents and the FBI summary of notes taken during that same interview.

That summary, known as an FD-302, was compiled on Aug. 22, 2017 by the two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn. It is unclear why the summary was put together seven months after the Flynn interview.

When you look at the actions of the FBI and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s team, you find that in some cases civil rights were trampled (attorney-client privilege, having a lawyer present, being put in solitary confinement for crimes that did not warrant it, etc.). Hopefully the actions of Judge Sullivan will cause both the FBI Special Prosecutor Mueller to be more aware of the civil rights of all Americans.

This Is Odd

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse reported that Robert Mueller has asked for yet another delay in the sentencing of former National Security Advisor General Mike Flynn.

The article reports:

The Friday filing indicates the Special Counsel requests the court to begin preparation of a pre-sentencing report. Lawyers for both sides proposed a status update of Aug. 24th.

However, later, in a minute-order, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the parties to explain by noon Monday July 2nd, the reason why the Court should depart from the normal practice of getting all the sentencing issues/dates done at the same time.

There was a joint status report filed on June 29. That status report said that Mueller did not believe that the matter was ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing.

Follow the link above to read the Joint Status Report filed June 29.

A comments on the article from Doppler explains one possible scenario:

The plea deal between Flynn and Mueller obligates Flynn to assist the ongoing investigation, which would include testifying against other defendants, which could take years. There’s nothing unusual about postponing sentencing repeatedly in such cases. Expect it to continue till Mueller is almost through.

What WAS unusual in this case is that the plea was promptly followed by release of the Strzok texts, Contreras’s recusal, then new Judge Sullivan’s sua sponte order to Mueller to turn over all exculpatory evidence, which should’ve been done before. Depending on what is in that exculpatory evidence, which could include ANY AND ALL of misdeeds by Srzok, Yates, Comey, McCabe, Lynch relating to the Russia collusion story, FISA application irregularities, spygate, 302 tampering, there may be reason to allow Flynn to withdraw his plea, and for disciplinary actions against the prosecutorial team.

What was also unusual about this latest request was the untimely request for a presentencing report, as if Mueller is about done with Flynn, while also citing the investigation as requiring further delay. That’s an inconsistency that the Judge wants explained before ordering the report by a different office. I can imagine he wants to know, and wants the Probation Office to know, what value Flynn’s bargained for cooperation had, before it recommends a sentence.

It’s just weird, and suggests disarray in the SC’s office, as does the typo.

Flynn was reported to have taken the plea to hold onto his savings, since to fight would quickly leave him broke. And to protect his son. He may be telling his lawyer: don’t spend any time on this at all, I can’t afford it.

Now if Huber was running a sting, and cut a separate, secret deal with Flynn to take the plea based on incomplete or falsified Brady production, with the promise that Flynn could later withdraw it, and be exonerated, then Huber may have somebody’s ass in his briefcase, somebody who is part of the Special Counsel’s team, knew of the falsifying, yet participated in the plea deal. If so, and I hope that is the case, it’s still just a small detail in the Big Ugly, and won’t come out until the bigger pieces are ready for prime time.

It is very sad to see people who have honorably served their country targeted by an out-of-control Special Counsel.

What Is A 302 And Why Does It Matter?

The Conservative Treehouse posted an article today about the FBI interview with General Michael Flynn.

The article reports:

This is a BIG deal, obviously. However, it is actually an even bigger deal when put into context with prior inquiry by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley about FBI manipulating FD-302’s, notes taken by FBI agents during interviews.

The current issue seems to align with Senator Chuck Grassley suspecting Andrew McCabe manipulated the FD-302 investigative notes from FBI Special Agent’s Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, after they interviewed Mike Flynn. There is enough sketchy and contradictory information giving weight to a likelihood that Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told FBI agents (Strzok and Pientka) to shape their FBI reports of the interview (FD-302’s) to assist a “Flynn lied” narrative.

It has been publicly stated that originally the FBI did not believe that General Flynn lied, so what happened in between the time of the original interview and the time that General Flynn entered a plea?

Please follow the link above to read the entire article–there is a lot of evidence that the FD-302 was tampered with to provide the desired result. The article includes email excerpts that indicate those involved in the deception are beginning to realize that they may be held accountable for their actions. It is becoming more and more obvious that there are serious problems in the upper levels of both our FBI and Department of Justice.

 

Things Just Got Murkier

Yesterday The Washington Examiner posted an article by Byron York about General Michael Flynn.

The article reports:

There was also a lot of concern in Congress, at least among Republicans, about the leak of the wiretapped Flynn-Kislyak conversation. Such intelligence is classified at the highest level of secrecy, yet someone — Republicans suspected Obama appointees in the Justice Department and intelligence community — revealed it to the press.

So in March, lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.

So what happened?

There seem to be some serious irregularities in the whole episode.

The article further reports:

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.

On February 13th, General Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor after charges that he had lied to the FBI were leaked. General Flynn later pleaded guilty to Special Prosecutor Mueller’s charges of lying to the FBI on January 24th. The only way this makes sense is when you consider the financial and emotional cost of defending yourself against the government. This is particularly disturbing when the weight of the government is aimed at the destruction of one innocent person.

This is reminiscent of the tactics used against Billy Dale during the Clinton Administration. On November 17, 1995, The Los Angeles Times posted the following:

Billy R. Dale, a White House official fired for allegedly mismanaging staff and press travel arrangements, was acquitted Thursday by a federal court jury of charges that he embezzled $68,000.

Culminating a 13-day trial, jurors decided in less than two hours that federal prosecutors had failed to prove charges that Dale stole funds paid to his office by reporters and photographers who traveled with the President.

A White House employee for more than 30 years, Dale broke into tears as the verdict was announced.

Dale, 58, was at the center of a Clinton Administration travel office fiasco two years ago that resulted in seven employees being fired, and later in reprimands for those responsible for the dismissals.

The 1993 dismissals were inspired by complaints of mismanagement from Catherine Cornelius, a distant cousin of the President, and Hollywood producer Harry Thomason, a close friend of Clinton’s.

Cornelius wanted a more powerful job in the travel office, and Thomason was seeking a federal aviation contract.

There was no mention in the article of the financial and emotional toll this ordeal took on Billy Dale.

If we are going to end the government being used as a weapon against innocent Americans, we have to begin to send those guilty of doing the weaponization to jail.

General Flynn was charged after an illegal wiretap. The charges should not be against General Flynn–they should be against the people involved in the wiretap. If we want to see the misuse of the intelligence agencies end, the guilty parties have to go to jail–regardless of who they are.