On January 5th, 2017, there was a meeting among President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI boss James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. (source here) Susan Rice wrote a memo about that meeting to herself. These people have not gone away, although thankfully most of them have much less influence.
The New York Post article reports:
Rice sent the Jan. 20, 12:15 p.m., note (recently declassified) to herself at literally the last minute: President Trump was sworn in at noon that day; her administration was headed out the door.
Oh, and Rice’s lawyer says she drafted it “upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office,” Fox News reports.
The point? Ostensibly, to memorialize the meeting with her, Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, FBI boss James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, following a briefing on Russian hacking.
Obama, the memo claims, stressed that “every aspect of this issue” be handled “by the book” and then “reiterated” that law enforcement proceed “by the book.” Comey “affirmed” he’s “proceeding ‘by the book.’ ” That’s right: She used the term three times.
So let’s look at some of that meeting.
The article continues:
Comey, she wrote, had “concerns” about her replacement, Michael Flynn, and said the National Security Council should “potentially” withhold “sensitive information” on Russia from Team Trump. But Rice admits it was Obama who asked whether information should not be shared.
Yet they had no legitimate grounds to keep the new team in the dark about anything. The Obama folks knew full well by then that the FBI had found zero evidence of collusion or of Flynn betraying his country. Because they were listening in on his phone calls to foreign officials.
Another New York Post article reported:
Flynn had to be stopped. Obama had urged Trump not to hire him, but the new president ignored the advice. If they didn’t kill Flynn, he could take them all down.
Comey had the transcripts so he already knew that there was no criminal evidence against Flynn growing out of his conversations with the Russian ambassador, but this wasn’t about guilt or innocence. This was a fight for survival.
So, just four days after Trump’s inauguration, Comey sent two agents to the White House to try to trap Flynn into lying. Comey would later boast he took advantage of the helter-skelter start of the administration and did not follow the usual custom of getting approval from the White House counsel.
That alone is an unforgivable act of treachery against a sitting president.
The agents, one of whom was the odious Peter Strzok, misled Flynn about the nature of the interview, advised him not to get a lawyer and withheld the fact that they had listened to his calls with the Russian ambassador, hoping he would lie about the contents.
Thanks to a leak of classified information to The Washington Post about those calls and Yates’ intervention, Flynn soon was fired for not being straight with Vice President Mike Pence. Special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey’s friend, and his anti-Trump zealots later used the rigged interview to prosecute Flynn.
For more than three years, that kept a dangerous man quiet and out of the way.
So what if he was railroaded. It was all done “by the book,” just as Obama ordered.
This is what the new Trump administration will be up against. However, all of us are now wiser, and the mainstream media is less powerful.