Recently unsealed notes show top FBI officials debated whether they should get President Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn “to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired,” or “admit to breaking the Logan Act” for talking to former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. As the deep-state onion gets peeled back layer by layer to its rotten core, it becomes clear this wasn’t mere government misconduct. It was a criminal conspiracy.
These are not mere procedural quibbles, but profound questions about the integrity and legality of the FBI’s investigations into key officials in the incoming Trump administration, including Trump himself. A pattern of collusive illegality on the part of the FBI and key Justice Department officials has become increasingly clear from these and other revelations.
The newly released notes contain shocking revelations of how the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigators and top FBI officials set their “perjury trap” for Flynn.
Flynn, you will recall, pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to federal officials. But he did so only after being forced to sell his home to fund his legal defense, and after threats to prosecute his son if he didn’t cop a plea.
It was coercion, plain and simple. The kind of thing a totalitarian or dictatorial regime would do. Yet such skullduggery was routine for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which tried to gin up false charges of Russian collusion first against the Trump campaign and later against the incoming Trump administration.
In questioning Flynn in January 2017, the FBI circumvented its own rules that require it to go through the White House counsel’s office. Instead, it brazenly barged in and questioned Flynn, a former Army lieutenant general, in his office just three days after Trump was sworn in.
Among the other illegalities, the FBI’s own notes of the meeting were later re-written – that is, tampered with – by both FBI special agent Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI lawyer Lisa Page. That tampered document was used as a pretense to overturn a decision in early January to close the case against Flynn. Instead, lacking any real evidence, the FBI chose to pursue an investigation it hoped would lead to a prosecution.
An honest mistake? Earlier emails released in the investigation of the FBI’s misconduct show that Strzok and Page loathed Trump and desperately wanted Hillary Clinton elected president. Yet, Strzok spearheaded the investigation into Trump, a clear conflict of interest. And he was one of the two FBI agents who interviewed Flynn in the White House.
Moreover, both Strzok and Page later admitted under questioning that they had never made the case of collusion with the Russians against Trump, either. And yet, their non-findings were used to create the Mueller investigation into a non-crime.
The notes, written by FBI counterintelligence chief Bill Priestap, provide a backdrop to Flynn’s White House interview that led to his bogus prosecution. They were written after Priestap met with FBI Director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and show the conspiracy to go after Flynn went to the very top of the bureau.
It’s damning on a number of levels. It shows not only the top FBI officials’ willingness to pursue a prosecution without evidence of a crime, but also their willingness to break their own rules to do so.
Comey even joked about violating FBI protocols in 2018, telling a laughing audience that it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more . . . organized administration.”
Yes, the twists and turns and convolutions of this case can be confusing.
But it’s important to recall that the impetus for all these investigations had one source: The Clinton presidential campaign, which, along with the Clinton-controlled Democratic National Committee bankrolled the spurious Fusion GPS investigation of Trump and his aides for alleged collusion with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election.
The resulting dossier on Trump from that investigation, written by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, was later shown to have been unverifiable. Even so, it was improperly used to convince a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to let the FBI spy on the Trump campaign.
But Steele, largely forgotten now four years later, recently has released a bombshell of his own.
According to the website justthenews.com, “Steele recently testified in a British court that he believed both then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and then-Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice were aware of his dossier research as it was going on in summer 2016.”
If so, that ties the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign to these organized efforts to undermine the Trump administration and overturn the results of the entirely legitimate 2016 election.
As you read this, U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the Crossfire Hurricane fiasco is grinding ahead. Even amid then Wuhan virus outbreak, Durham this month expanded his investigatory team as he nears completion.
He’s looking at possible misconduct and prosecutable offenses by public officials, including even former CIA Director John Brennan, who appears to have played a leading role in orchestrating the Trump investigation from the shadows.
Durham’s probe comes on the heels of a report on the FBI’s Russia investigation last December by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, an Obama appointee. It found at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” in the bureau’s FISA application to spy on Trump and for relying on the tainted Steele dossier, which may have been distorted by Russian disinformation.
These, it’s clear, are the real crimes. Not the imaginary collusion of Trump and his aides, including Flynn, with the Russians.
In January of this year, Flynn, still awaiting sentencing and no longer fearing retribution from the deep-state minions of the Obama administration, withdrew his guilty plea. We would hope, given the damning evidence against the government, that he would gain complete exoneration for his non-crimes and have his record wiped clean
Meanwhile, we would also hope that the Durham investigation will end with prosecutions of the government officials and politicians who put us all through four years of hell and sought to overturn a fair and legal presidential election. That is the real crime.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board.
Using these vague “policy violations,” Google is now threatening to demonetize us. It’s part of Big Tech’s effort to silence conservative voices.
Yet half the country still thinks there was Trump Russia collusion because the msm says so. Our nation has lost its way.
There is an interesting reaction from some on the Left. they say ‘well, this sort of stuff happens to poor people all the time”. HELL, yes it does and its just as wrong here as there.
Part of the Flynn Affair is political, but lets not ignore the part is the imperative bad cops & prosecutors feel to just get scalps. They just get to hide behind immunity, legal and de facto.
Until we start disbarring and locking up bad cops & prosecutors in every town and every state where this happens, we can expect this to continue.
This sort of skulduggery was suspected all along…..Time for Indictments……Those involved need to be brought to Justice….NOW !!!!!
I think a few of these bad cops are going to go to prison on this one.
Overcharging followed by plea bargaining is basically the “criminal justice system ” if you don’t have the bucks. That is what happened to Flynn.
I am a hard core Conservative since before it was cool. Barry (Goldwater) days. But wrong is wrong.
One thing should be clear to any sentient human who has been paying attention these years — never, and I mean “never” — say anything to an FBI agent directly. If you have to impart something to them, lean over and whisper it to your attorney (who must always be present, right?) and let him/her tell them…or not. Just ask Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff, Governor Rod Blagojevich, Scooter Libby, former Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, and too many lesser lights to mention.
There is nothing to be gained by direct “conversation” with these people. You will not make them your friends. It should ALWAYS be an arms length proposition with an intermediary to block future use by them of you being prosecuted for making a false statement or concealing information (Section 1001 of Title 18), or leveraging you for their purposes. Any direct contact with an FBI (or government agency) person must be considered to be a potential adversarial encounter and treated that way in light of their abundant history.
Although it isn’t bad news…I’m really fed up with headlines like the one for this article. It seems like every week (or even more frequently) there’s another “bombshell” that “proves the conspiracy at the FBI/DOJ,” and yet…nothing ever happens to address it. Instead of hearing that anyone has been indicted for this corruption, we’ll get another article in a week…with a slight variation on the same headline. And nothing will happen to punish the corrupt agents or fix the FBI/DOJ. Lather. Rinse. REPEAT.
What is more frightening is that there has not been a flood of whistle blowers internally in the FBI. Is the FBI so corrupt that this behavior is normal and accepted? The leadership did not conduct this illegal investigation but only directed it. The entire FBI should be disbanded and all former employees ineligible to be hired in any other government agency. Let these miscreants live in the private sector and be subjected to the governmental overstep that others have been subjected to. There may be a few honest FBI agents but they could all fit in one minvan.
Lack of whistle-blowers in the FBI is easy – “Blue Line” – long time problem with bad cops…. yes, time to end this. US Marshal service has a long and great history. Dissolve the FBI, put those responsible in jail, and allow all current Special Agents apply to Marshal’s service, and if accepted, retain their retirement benefits. Perhaps, allow them to remain active beyond their 55th birthday. Organized crime understands if the dude before them is over 55, he’s not FBI.
So when is the Justice Department going to charge someone?
They are slow walking until the election. If Biden wins, and he is ahead by 6 to 8 points, this whole thing goes away.
If Biden wins, Covid also disappears.
Biden isn’t really ahead by 6 or 8 points. That’s the cheat margin that the polls are building in now so that no one questions the outcome of the election. How you don’t know that by now, after everything that has happened in the last 4 years, is beyond me.
I look at what I see as an open and shut case of an attempt to effect an election and a further attempt to remove a duly elected president, and wonder that these crimes can’t seem to be prosecuted……This is perhaps the REAL collusion.
The Federal judge presiding over this case had to be in on this from the beginning. Time to prosecute the whole bunch of them.
Jaul
While this is purely political, much of this is institutional. There are interesting comments on the left to the affect that “So what? This happens to poor people all the time” Yes! And that’s something we shouldn’t forget, whataboutism or no. It doesn’t make it right in either cases.
Too many times law enforcement, prosecutors and cops,get hung up about the scalp and not about justice. That’s how their incentives are structured. Too often, they also pay no price if the break the law or their oaths, as institutions take care of their own. .
In normal times, when the Police breaks the criminal laws, the FBI prosecutes these bad cops. BUT, when it is the top of the FBI who takes them to jail? As we allow “red team VS blue team” destroy our rule of law, we slip further towards going the way of ALL other government who were here pre-1776.
Even after Flynn is absolved, this case should not end there. There needs to be a full and thorough criminal investigation of the FBI, CIA and DOJ. Period!
Moderation…. Of what?
The link to TheHill (“earlier emails” highlighted) is critical. The DOJ knew BEFORE Rosenstein appointed Mueller there wasn’t anything “there”. They were determined to find something/anything and of course if that doesn’t work there was always the prospect of ginning up some kind of “process crime” which is how they “got” Roger Stone.
If journalism were not a cabal of slobbering neo-Marxists fronting for a bunch of rich liberal hypocrites, John Solomon would have already gotten a Pulitzer. Instead he got spied on and smeared by Adam Schiff.
Fox News appears to have banned the mention of the fact that the FBI coerced Flynn to lie by threatening to prosecute his son if he didn’t plead guilty. On Sunday, neither the Chris Wallace nor the Howard Kurtz show mentioned this. None of the “conservative” panelists did either. Also it appears that FNC has banned the word “Dementia” when referring to Biden.
Tom Berry
Tired of hearing pundits who claim “Most of the FBI are dedicated honest patriots, blah blah blah” Fact is, the u.s. inteligence community is a corrupt wholly out of control embarrassment. They fail to protect the citizenry from real evil doers, because they are evil doers. CIA and FBI both recruit psychopaths and narcissists because they have no moral impedance to abusing their power.