Kelleyanne Conway, the Counselor to the President, nailed the latest in the saga of General Michael Flynn – and nailed it exactly.
The latest batch of FBI documents that have been unsealed makes it crystal clear that the officials at the very top of the Bureau were out to get then-incoming Trump National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn. Fox News has reported it this way:
“Documents unsealed late Wednesday by the Justice Department revealed that top FBI officials openly questioned if their “goal” in interviewing Flynn in January 2017 was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
The handwritten notes were penned by the FBI’s former head of counterintelligence Bill Priestap after a meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and before Flynn’s interview.
The notes suggested that agents also considered getting Flynn “to admit to breaking the Logan Act” when he spoke to former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period. The Logan Act is an obscure statute that has never been successfully used in criminal prosecution and was intended to prevent individuals from falsely claiming to represent the United States government abroad.”
There was no effort to get the truth here. The effort was, in the FBI’s own words, “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” In other words? Exactly as Kelleyanne Conway said this week, “the fix was in” among senior FBI officials, the object being to set up the General – and ruin him. And to do it for no other reason than that they hated the new president and could not abide by the conservative Flynn.
In an exclusive, Fox also reported that U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham, he who is leading an in-depth special investigation into the role of the FBI and the Department of Justice in all of this:
“…has reviewed the bombshell files released earlier this week showing FBI officials discussed whether they wanted to interview Michael Flynn in order to “get him to lie,” sources familiar with his investigation told Fox News, as the document drop renews attention on his probe of the law enforcement community’s Russia case.
Sources even said charges could be justified against officials, and that those reviewing the Justice Department and the FBI’s actions are building a “serious case.” Durham and Attorney General Bill Barr are said to be speaking regularly.
“Durham has seen all of this already,” one source told Fox News, adding that they “could be sufficient for some charges against agents.”
Make no mistake, this was a very, very serious – not to mention dangerous abuse of power. And not just by the FBI but the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Justice as well.
For those unfamiliar with the FBI and the other agencies, they are filled with lots and lots of good and decent people who work their chops off in service to their country.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that in the Bureau’s history there have been episodes of serious abuse of power with warrantless wiretappings, so-called “black bag jobs” and other inventions of the once-all powerful founding Director of the FBI – J. Edgar Hoover.
One of the more controversial episodes in the Bureau’s history concerned what was known in bureaucratic-style as “COINTELPRO” – the nickname derived from the Bureau’s “CounterIntelligenceProgram that existed from 1956-1971. The idea was to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt various American political groups seen in the day as anti-American. These groups, usually from the political Left, included the Communist Party USA, feminist organizations, anti-Vietnam War organizers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and various civil rights groups and others.
When the existence of the program became public in 1971, all political hell broke loose. Then-U.S. Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, launched a full-fledged investigation into all of this, and the program was terminated.
All of which is to say, the notion that there could be powerful people at the top of the FBI abusing the Bureau’s power is a historical fact. And yes, it clearly appears that this has happened again, this time with the Obama-Biden era FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and others, including Peter Strzok, now fired from his job in the Bureau as the Chief of the Counterespionage Section. And not to be forgotten, ex-CIA Director John Brennan.
There is more to come here. And one suspects that more will be coming sooner rather than later, either in what’s left of the spring or somewhere in the early summer.
But the bottom line at this point? General Flynn has been targeted by the FBI and other Obama-Biden senior officials with serious and dangerous abuse of power. He should either be pardoned by the President or exonerated outright.
But now? Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
Stay tuned.
