Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.

In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.

Rosalind Helderman: Bylined reporter on two of the Post’s most corrected stories. Twitter/@PostRoz

But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S.

But the Post’s response also exhibits the limits of the media’s Steele-induced self-examination. First, the reporters bylined on those two articles, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger, and their editors have declined to explain how and why they were so egregiously misled. Nor have they revealed the names of the anonymous sources responsible for deceiving them and the public over months and years.

Perhaps more important, the Post, like other publications, has so far limited its Russiagate reckoning to work directly involving Steele – and only after a federal indictment forced its hand. But the Steele dossier has been widely discredited since at least April 2019, when Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents were unable to find evidence in support of any of its claims.

The dossier was also only one aspect of the Trump-Russia misinformation fed to the public. Even when not advancing Steele’s most lurid allegations, the nation’s most prominent news outlets nonetheless furthered his underlying narrative of a Trump-Russia conspiracy and a Kremlin-compromised White House.

Along the way, some journalists won their profession’s highest distinction for this flawed coverage. While co-bylining stories that the Post has all but retracted, Helderman and Hamburger also share a now increasingly awkward honor along with more than a dozen other colleagues at the Post and New York Times: a Pulitzer Prize. In 2018, the Pulitzer awards committee honored the two papers for 20 articles it described as “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Above, Washingon Post and New York Times reporters whose 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on the Trump-Russia affair is tainted by evidence in the public record that significant reporting was erroneous or misleading — reporting that still has not been corrected by their publications, even though the Post recently made numerous corrections regarding the long-discredited Steele dossier. Journalist identifications are here. (Credit: YouTube/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Although neither newspaper has given any indication that it is returning the Pulitzer, the public record has long made clear that many of those stories – most of which had nothing to do with Steele – include falsehoods and distortions requiring significant corrections. Far from showing “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage,” the Post’s and the Times’ reporting has the same problem as the Steele document that these same outlets are now distancing themselves from: a reliance on anonymous, deceptive, and almost certainly partisan sources for claims that proved to be false.

Many other prestigious outlets published a barrage of similarly flawed articles. These include the report by Peter Stone and Greg Gordon of McClatchy that the Mueller team obtained evidence that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had visited Prague in 2016; Jane Mayer’s fawning March 2018 profile of Steele in the New Yorker; the report by Jason Leopold and Anthony Cormier of BuzzFeed that President Trump instructed Cohen to lie to Congress — explicitly denied by Mueller at the time; and Luke Harding of The Guardian’s bizarre and evidence-free allegation that Julian Assange and Paul Manafort met in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

McClatchy and BuzzFeed have added editors’ notes to their stories but have not retracted them.

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

RCI sent detailed queries about these stories to the Post, the Times, and the journalists involved. The Post’s response has been incorporated into the relevant portion of this article. The Times did not respond to RCI’s queries by the time of publication.

Falsehood No. 1: Michael Flynn Discussed Sanctions With Russia and Lied About It

Flynn faces the press in his only White House Briefing Room remarks as national security adviser. YouTube/C-SPAN

Officials say Flynn discussed sanctions
By Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post, February 9, 2017

Less than a month after BuzzFeed published the Steele dossier, the Washington Post significantly advanced the then-growing narrative that the Trump White House was beholden to Russia.

A Feb. 9, 2017, Post article claimed that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn “privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia” with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak “during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The Post sourced its reporting to nine “current and former officials” who occupied “senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls” between Flynn and Kislyak following the Nov. 8, 2016 election.

The Post’s sources – who were revealing classified information, presumably from taps on Kislyak’s phone – left no room for doubt: “All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit.” They also added their own spin to the meaning of the conversations: Flynn’s calls with Kislyak “were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.”

Adding some mind-reading to the narrative, a former official told the Post that Kislyak “was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time.”

The Post and its sources fueled innuendo that Flynn had floated a payback for Russia’s alleged 2016 election help and lied to cover it up.

Facing a barrage of anonymous officials contradicting him, Flynn walked back an initial denial and told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.” Four days later, he was forced to resign. The following December, Special Counsel Mueller seemingly vindicated the Post’s narrative when Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, including about his discussion of sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

Flynn would later backtrack and reverse that guilty plea, sparking a multi-year legal saga. When the transcripts of his calls with Kislyak were finally released in May 2020, they showed that Flynn had grounds to fight: It wasn’t Flynn who made a false statement about discussing sanctions with Kislyak; it was all nine of the Post’s sources — and, later, the Mueller team — who had misled the public.

Sergei Kislyak: Transcripts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian Ambassador do not square with the Washington Post’s reporting. AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

In all of Flynn’s multiple conversations with Kislyak in December 2016 and January 2017, the issue of sanctions only gets one fleeting mention – by Kislyak. The Russian ambassador tells Flynn that he is concerned that sanctions will hurt U.S.-Russia cooperation on fighting jihadist insurgents in Syria. The sum total of Flynn’s response on the matter: “Yeah, yeah.”

The pair did have a longer discussion about a separate action Obama had ordered at the time: the expulsion of 35 Russian officials living in the United States. The expulsions, which were carried out by the State Department, were a distinct action from the sanctions, which targeted nine Russian entities and individuals under a presidential executive order.

In discussing the expulsions, Flynn never addressed what Trump might do; his only request was that the Kremlin’s response be “reciprocal” and “even-keeled” so that “cool heads” can “prevail.”

“[D]on’t go any further than you have to,” Flynn told Kislyak. “Because I don’t want us to get into something that has to escalate, on a, you know, on a tit for tat.”

In its rendering of the call, the Mueller team cited these comments from Flynn – but inaccurately claimed that he had made them about sanctions. The Special Counsel’s Office appeared to be following the lead of the Post’s sources, who had claimed, falsely, that Flynn’s references to sanctions were “explicit.” Both the Post and the special counsel used Flynn’s explicit comments about expulsions to erroneously assert that he had discussed sanctions.

Yet the release of the transcripts did not prompt the Post to come clean. Instead, both the Post and the New York Times doubled down on the deception. The Post’s May 29, 2020, story about the transcripts’ release was headlined “Transcripts of calls between Flynn, Russian diplomat show they discussed sanctions.” The Times claimed that same day that “Flynn Discussed Sanctions at Length With Russian Diplomat, Transcripts Show.”

In reality, the transcripts showed the exact opposite.

In response to RCI, the Post acknowledged that the Feb. 9, 2017 story had conflated “sanctions” with “expulsions.”

“We appropriately used the word ‘sanctions’ in reference to the punitive measures announced by President Obama, including Treasury penalties on Russian individuals, expulsions of Russian diplomats/spies and the seizure of two Russia-owned properties,” Shani George, the Post’s Vice President for Communications, wrote.

In other articles, however — including a Dec. 29, 2016 article linked in the Feb. 9 story’s second paragraph – the Post made a clear distinction between the two. Asked about dropping the distinction between sanctions and expulsions for the article discussed here, the Post did not respond by the time of publication.

Falsehood No. 2: Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence

Left to right, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone: Repeated contacts with Russian spies? Doubtful. FNC/AP

Trump Campaign Aides Had
Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence
By Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, February 14, 2017

On Feb. 14, 2017 – just one day after Flynn resigned – the New York Times fanned the flames of the growing Trump-Russia inferno.

“Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials,” the Times reported.

The story, written by three members of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning team, Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, also suggested that these suspicious “repeated contacts” were the basis for the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s potential conspiracy with Russia: “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.”

The article even threw in a plug for Christopher Steele, who, the Times said, is believed by senior FBI officials to have “a credible track record.”

The story helped build momentum for the appointment of Special Counsel Mueller, and then quickly unraveled.

Four months after the Times’ report – and just weeks after Mueller’s hiring – FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress about the story, saying that “in the main, it was not true.” When the Mueller report was released in April 2019, it contained no evidence of any contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials, senior or otherwise. And in July 2020, declassified documents showed that Peter Strzok, the top FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the Trump-Russia probe, had privately dismissed the article. The Times reporting, Strzok wrote upon its publication, was “misleading and inaccurate … we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

Comey on Times story: “In the main, it was not true.” It’s still uncorrected.

To date, the Times has appended two minor corrections. The most recent one reads: “An earlier version of a photo caption with this article gave an incorrect middle initial for Paul Manafort. It is J., not D.”

Rather than address its glaring errors, the Times left the story otherwise intact. When the Strzok notes disputing its claims emerged, the Times responded: “We stand by our reporting.”

Earlier this year, the Times even claimed vindication. The occasion was an April 15, 2021, press release from the Treasury Department. The Treasury statement alleged that Konstantin Kilimnik, a former aide to Trump’s one-time campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent” who “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy” during the 2016 election.

Writing that same day, Times reporters Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt declared that Treasury’s evidence-free press release — coupled with an evidence-free Senate Intelligence claim in August 2020 that Kilimnik is a “Russian intelligence officer” — now “confirm” the Times’ report from February 2017.

The Treasury announcement did not explain how the department, which conducted no official Russiagate investigation, was prompted to lodge an explosive allegation that a multi-year FBI/Mueller investigation found no evidence for. It also does not name the position Kilimnik allegedly held in Russian intelligence – much less say whether he was a senior official. It also failed to address ample countervailing evidence:

• that Kilimnik had shared this same, publicly available polling data with Americans;
• that the FBI still does not deem him a Russian intelligence officer, instead claiming that he has unspecified “ties”;
• that he had long been a valued State Department source;
• that he traveled to the U.S. on a civilian Russian passport, not the suspicious diplomatic one Mueller alleged without producing it;
• and that even the Senate Intelligence Committee was “unable to obtain direct evidence of what Kilimnik did with the polling data and whether that data was shared further.”

Wanted in U.S., Kilimnik shared his “R” (regular) U.S. visa and Russian civilian passport with RCI. Konstantin Kilimnik via RealClearInvestigations

In addition, no U.S. government or congressional investigator ever contacted him for questioning, Kilimnik told RCI in an April 2021 interview when he produced images of the civilian passport.

To declare victory, Mazzetti and Schmidt not only relied on one sentence of a press release but distorted the claims of their original story. Even if Kilimnik somehow proved to be a Russian intelligence officer, the Times’ 2017 story had reported that the Trump campaign had engaged in “intercepted calls” with multiple “senior Russian intelligence officials” – not just one person, and at a “senior” level.

To elide that, Mazzetti and Schmidt abandoned the plural Russian “intelligence officials” to spin the Treasury press release as proof that “there had been numerous interactions between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence during the year before the election.” It then returned to the use of the plural to further claim that Treasury’s statement is “the strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign.”

RCI sent Mazzetti and Schmidt detailed questions about their February 2017 article and their claim, four years later, that a Senate report and a Treasury press release confirm it. They did not respond.

Falsehood No. 3: George Papadopoulos’s ‘Night of Heavy Drinking’ With the Australian Envoy

The Times mischaracterized George Papadopoulos’s supposed Russiagate-launching barroom chat. AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Unlikely Source Propelled Russian Meddling Inquiry
By Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo
New York Times, December 30, 2017

By late 2017, the Russiagate saga was engulfing the Trump presidency. The indictments of several figures connected to Trump fueled a media-driven narrative that Mueller was closing in on a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

But a roadblock emerged in late October. After a year of evasions, the Hillary Clinton campaign and its law firm Perkins Coie admitted that they had funded the Steele dossier and that a lawyer for the firm, Marc Elias, had commissioned it. The disclosure was forced by House Republicans, led by Rep. Devin Nunes, who had subpoenaed the bank records of Fusion GPS in a bid to identify its secret funder. (Fusion GPS was the opposition-research firm hired by Perkins Coie that in turn hired Steele.)

For those wedded to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, the admission was problematic: After months of anonymous media claims that Steele’s dossier was “credible” and even “bearing out,” the heralded document was exposed as a paid partisan hit job from Trump’s political opponents. If the FBI was found to have relied on the dossier, the Clinton campaign’s key role could discredit the entire investigation.

Just before the 2017 year-end deadline for 2018 Pulitzer eligibility, the New York Times produced a new origin story for the probe that would temper these concerns and help the newspaper win the prize. The FBI’s decision to open the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with Steele, the Times claimed. Instead, the instigator was George Papadopoulos, a low-level campaign volunteer indicted by Mueller two months prior.

“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016,” the Times’ piece began, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer that Russia had “political dirt on Hillary Clinton,” including “thousands of emails.” Papadopoulos, the Times said, had learned of the Russian scheme the previous month from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic who claimed to be in touch with “high-level Russian officials.” Mifsud’s claim signaled inside knowledge of Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee, the Times said, because at that point the “information was not yet public.”

Alexander Downer: The Australian diplomat’s account of his conversation with George Papadopoulos conflicts with the Times’ reporting. Twitter/@AlexanderDowner

When Downer, via the Australian government, relayed this information to the U.S. in July, the FBI decided to open its Trump-Russia probe, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, the Times reported.

“The [DNC] hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the Times claimed. The article pointedly asserted that the Steele dossier “was not part of the justification to start a counterintelligence inquiry, American officials said.” (In a possible contradiction, it also claims, without specifics, “that the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British.”)

Several key aspects of the article have been challenged by the principals involved — leaving aside a key question the Times appears never to have asked: Why would the FBI launch a counterintelligence probe of a presidential campaign based on a barroom conversation involving a volunteer?

Moreover, the Times or its sources mischaracterized the barroom conversation, according to both of its participants. Speaking to a Sydney-based newspaper a few months later about the fateful London exchange, Downer said Papadopoulos had never mentioned “dirt” or “thousands of emails” — which the FBI would have linked to the DNC hack. Instead, Downer told The Australian, Papadopoulos “mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.” Contrary to the specificity of the Times’ rendering, Downer recalled that Papadopoulos “didn’t say what it was.” He also said Papadopoulos made no mention of Mifsud, a mysterious figure with rumored ties to Western intelligence who vanished after a cursory FBI interview.

A declassified FBI document would later confirm Downer’s account of a vague conversation. In May 2020, the Justice Department released the July 31, 2016, FBI electronic communication (EC) that officially opened its Russia investigation. The EC states that Downer had told the U.S. government that Papadopoulos had “suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist” the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing damaging information about Clinton and President Obama. The EC made no mention of any “dirt,” “thousands of emails,” or Mifsud. It also acknowledged that the nature of the “suggestion” was “unclear” and that the possible Russian help could entail “material acquired publicly,” as opposed to hacked emails by the thousands.

Another declassified document, the December 2017 testimony from Andrew McCabe — the former FBI deputy director who helped launch and oversee the Russia probe — also undermined the Times’ premise. Asked why the FBI never sought a surveillance warrant on the Trump volunteer who supposedly sparked the investigation, McCabe replied that “Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t particularly indicate that he was the person … that was interacting with the Russians.”

Despite the countervailing claims of Downer, McCabe, and the FBI document that opened the investigation (not to mention the recollections of both Papadopoulos and Downer that they only had one drink, belying the Times claim of “a night of heavy drinking”), the Times has never run a single update or correction.

Falsehood No. 4: Russia Launched a Sweeping Interference Campaign That Posed a ‘National Security Threat’

Social media posts from Russia’s effort to “assault American democracy,” as the Times put it. HPSCI Minority

Doubting the intelligence, Trump pursues Putin
and leaves a Russian threat unchecked
By Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe and Philip Rucker
Washington Post, December 14, 2017

To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans
By Scott Shane
New York Times, September 8, 2017

As the Pulitzer-winning media outlets relied on anonymous intelligence officials to fuel innuendo about Trump-Russia collusion, they turned to these same sources to imply that a compromised president was unwilling to confront the existential threat of “Russian interference.”

“Nearly a year into his presidency,” a Pulitzer-winning December 2017 Washington Post story declared, “Trump continues to reject the evidence that Russia waged an assault on a pillar of American democracy and supported his run for the White House.” As a result, Trump has “impaired the government’s response to a national security threat.”

The Post’s article was sourced to “more than 50 current and former U.S. officials” including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who “described the Russian interference as the political equivalent of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”

Another Pulitzer-winning story, written by Scott Shane of the New York Times two months earlier, offered a revealing window into the merits of the Russian interference allegations, and the appropriateness of equating them to attacks like 9/11.

“To Sway Vote, Russia Used Army of Fake Americans,” the Times’ headline blared. Aside from the Pulitzer board, Shane’s article also impressed the New York Times’ editors, who proclaimed in a follow-up editorial that their colleague’s “startling investigation” had revealed “further evidence of what amounted to unprecedented foreign invasion of American democracy.”

But from the details in Shane’s article, it is difficult to see why anonymous U.S. intelligence officials, Pulitzer judges, and Times editors saw the alleged Russian “cyberarmy” as such a seismic danger.

Melvin Redick, suspected Russian operator. The proof? Articles “reflecting a pro-Russian worldview,” the Times reported. New York Times

Shane’s piece opened by describing a June 2016 Facebook post by an account user named Melvin Redick, who promoted the website DC Leaks, alleged by the U.S. to be a Russian intelligence cutout. Redick’s posts, Shane writes, were “among the first public signs” of Russia’s “cyberarmy of counterfeit Facebook and Twitter accounts” that turned the platforms into “engines of deception and propaganda.” To Clint Watts, a former FBI agent turned MSNBC commentator, Russia’s infiltration of Facebook and Twitter was so dangerous that social media, he said, is now afflicted by a “bot cancer.”

But these explosive conclusions, Shane’s own piece later acknowledged, were undermined by a lack of evidence. The online users who manipulated social media, Shane quietly notes near the bottom, were in fact only “suspected Russian operators” (emphasis added). Shane’s uncertainty extends to Melvin Redick, the alleged Russian bot who begins the story. Redick is one of several identified accounts that “appeared to be Russian creations,” Shane concedes. The only proof tying Redick to Russia? “His posts were never personal, just news articles reflecting a pro-Russian worldview.”

Robert Mueller’s final report two years later also tried to raise alarm about what he called a “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference campaign. But as with the Pulitzer-winning outlets before him, the contents of his report failed to support the headline assertion. The Russian troll farm blamed for a sweeping social media campaign to install Trump spent about $46,000 on pre-election posts that were juvenile, barely about the election, and mostly appeared during the primaries. After suggesting that the troll farm was tied to the Kremlin, the Mueller team was forced to walk back that innuendo in court, and later dropped the case altogether. The other main claim regarding Russian interference – that the GRU (Russia’s foreign intelligence agency) hacked the DNC’s email servers and gave the material to Wikileaks – was quietly undermined by Mueller’s qualified language and key evidentiary gaps, as RCI reported in 2019.

The Russian hacking claim suffered an additional setback in May 2020, when testimony from the CEO of CrowdStrike — the Clinton-contracted firm that was the first to publicly accuse Russia of infiltrating the DNC — was declassified. Speaking to the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017, CrowdStrike’s Shawn Henry disclosed that his company “did not have concrete evidence” that alleged Russian hackers had stolen any data from the servers.

Despite its once exhaustive and alarmist interest in the operations of Russia’s cyber army, neither the Times nor the Post has ever reported Henry’s explosive admission. This includes Pulitzer-winning Post national security reporter Ellen Nakashima, who effectively kicked off the Russiagate saga by breaking the news on CrowdStrike’s Russian hacking allegation in June 2016. Other than Henry, Nakashima’s main source was Michael Sussmann – the Clinton campaign attorney recently indicted for lying to the FBI.

Falsehood No. 5: The Justice Department Pulled Its Punches on Trump

Justice Dept. Never Fully Examined
Trump’s Ties to Russia, Ex-Officials Say
By Michael S. Schmidt
New York Times, Aug. 30, 2020 (Updated June 9, 2021)

When Mueller ended his investigation in 2019 without charging Trump or any other associate for conspiring with Russia, a collusion-obsessed media formulated more conspiracy theories to explain away this unwelcome ending.

First came the belief that Attorney General William Barr had forced Mueller to shut down, misrepresented his final report, and hid the smoking-gun evidence behind redactions. When Mueller failed to support any of these allegations in his July 2019 congressional testimony, a new culprit was needed.

Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times: Shared two Pulitzer prizes in 2018. Andrew Lih/Wikimedia

One year later, the New York Times found its fall guy: Mueller’s overseer, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, had handcuffed the special counsel.

“The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia,” Michael Schmidt reported on Aug. 30, 2020. Rosenstein, Schmidt said, “curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere” and preventing the FBI from “completing an inquiry into whether the president’s personal and financial links to Russia posed a national security threat.”

To buttress his case, Schmidt cited the Democrats’ leading collusion advocate, Rep. Adam Schiff, who feared that “that the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Division has not investigated counterintelligence risks arising from President Trump’s foreign financial ties.”

But as Schmidt’s article tacitly acknowledged, that outcome did not come from Rosenstein but the Mueller team itself. After Rosenstein appointed Mueller, Schmidt reported, members of the special counsel’s team “held early discussions led by the agent Peter Strzok about a counterintelligence investigation of the president.” But these “efforts fizzled,” Schmidt added, when Strzok “was removed from the inquiry three months later for sending text messages disparaging Mr. Trump.” If Rosenstein had indeed “curtailed” a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller’s team, why did the special counsel staffers discuss it, and why did it only “fizzle” upon Strzok’s exit three months later?

Strzok himself disputed the premise of Schmidt’s article.

“I didn’t feel such a limitation,” Strzok told the Atlantic. “When I discussed this with Mueller and others, it was agreed that FBI personnel attached to the Special Counsel’s Office would do the counterintelligence work, which necessarily included the president.” The only problem, Strzok added, was that by “the time I left the team, we hadn’t solved this problem of who and how to conduct all of the counterintelligence work.” Strzok’s “worry,” he added, was that the counterintelligence angle “wasn’t ever effectively done” – not that it was ever curtailed. Another key Mueller team member, lead prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, also rejected Schmidt’s claim.

NYT story today is wrong re alleged secret DOJ order prohibiting a counterintelligence investigation by Mueller, “without telling the bureau.” Dozens of FBI agents/analysts were embedded in Special Counsel’s Office and we were never told to keep anything from them. 1 of 2

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020

Also erroneous is NYT claim “Rosenstein concluded the F.B.I. lacked sufficient reason to conduct an investigation into the president’s links to a foreign adversary.” See DOJ Special Counsel Appointment Order, para. (b)(i). 2 of 2

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) August 31, 2020

Rosenstein’s May 2017 scope memo, which established the parameters of Mueller’s investigation, indeed contained no such limitations. It broadly tasked Mueller to examine “any links and/or co-ordination” between the Russian government and anyone associated with the Trump campaign, as well as – even more expansively – “any matters that arose or may arise directly from that investigation.”

In his July 2019 congressional appearance, Mueller had multiple opportunities to reveal that his probe had been impeded or narrowed. Asked by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) whether “at any time in the investigation, your investigation was curtailed or stopped or hindered,” Mueller replied “No.” When Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) tried to lead Mueller into agreeing that he “of course … did not obtain the president’s tax returns, which could otherwise show foreign financial sources,” Mueller did not oblige. “I’m not going to speak to that,” Mueller replied.

With no curtailing or interference in the probe, perhaps Mueller never turned up any Russia-tied counterintelligence or financial concerns about Trump because there was simply none to find.

For a media establishment that had spent years promoting a Trump-Russia collusion narrative and sidelining countervailing facts, that was indeed a tough outcome to fathom.

But it’s no time for excuses or false claims of vindication: The tepid accounting spurred by the Steele dossier’s collapse should be just the start of a far more exhaustive reckoning. Broadly misleading journalism that plunged an American presidency into turmoil demands much more than piecemeal corrections.

realclearinvestigations.com

During the US war in Vietnam, a protester in Providence, Rhode Island set up a tiger cage and lamented that approaching the middle of the decade of the 1970s it was impossible to garner any significant protest against that war from which the US had withdrawn ground troops in 1973.  The Vietnam War ended in 1975. Those who recall will remember that tiger cages were devices of torture that the South Vietnamese government used against its enemies. At play in RI in the middle 1970s was the trend that had swept the US: If a person’s skin wasn’t at risk from the military draft, then protest was no longer chic.

All of the idealism and discussion about the rules of war and atrocities were forgotten by many with the ease of a change in fashion. Being against war was no longer fashionable for some.

Fast forward to the contemporary US where the military enjoys 89% approval. Two issues were recently raised, one about POWs during the Vietnam War and one about the reputation of a member of the Trump administration who received a pardon from Trump for lying to the FBI. The lies had to do with communicating with a Russian official, a whole other ball of wax that deserves separate treatment. The issue of POWs from the Vietnam War involves the late Senator John McCain, and the case of lying to the FBI and a presidential pardon involves retired General Michael Flynn.

It’s a good idea not to lie to the FBI since it’s a felony, but since federal government agencies now know everything about us and all of our communications, why bother to lie. The Patriot Act ended a host of our protections under the Constitution against unreasonable searches and seizures and the idea of the government needing a warrant to search through our communications is a joke. Edward Snowden is living proof of the latter.

CovertAction Magazine reports “New Evidence Reveals That Senator John McCain and Other High-Ranking Vietnam War POWs May Have Lied to the American Public About Being Tortured, “June 21, 2021. This article is intriguing since it documents a much different narrative about the treatment of US POWs at the hands of their Vietnamese captors during the Vietnam War. Additional allegations noted that some POWs intimidated other POWs to toe the line and agree about the purported torture of US POWs to the point of endangering the well-being of some former POWs.

There’s no surprise there since the laundering of the US war in Vietnam began before Ronald Reagan’s “noble cause” propaganda to enable him to launch low-intensity wars in Central American countries and further sanitize the Vietnam War. POW flags became ubiquitous on federal buildings and on some state and local government buildings.

Glorifying past wars is always important in conducting new wars and readying the civilian population to support new wars.

Recently, controversy about an honorary degree granted to the retired general, national security advisor to Trump, and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Obama, Michael Flynn, was raised. Flynn, a graduate of the University of Rhode Island, received an honorary degree from the same school in 2014. There was a debate among the trustees of the University, but not a public debate, about his honorary degree following Flynn’s calls for armed rebellion against the government of the US and his conviction and pardon for lying to the FBI about his dealings with Russia during his tenure in the Trump administration.

Taking away an honor from an earlier time makes no sense whatsoever. It’s about as useful as trying to invent a time machine to change what already is. It’s the present that needs attention and not some relic from the past. There’s more concern that the former general has spoken of violent rebellion to remove the present government of the US, then in some fairly meaningless honorary degree (“Michael Flynn suggested at a QAnon-affiliated event that a coup should happen in the U.S.,” New York Times, June 1, 2021).

Why would readers be surprised at any of this bald-faced militarism when the 2021-2022 military budget stands at about $753 billion? It’s no accident that bipartisan sponsorship of militarism has gained such a hold on most in the US beginning with the acceptance of low-intensity warfare of the 1980s to the endless wars of the 2020s. If 89% of respondents have a favorable view of the military, then militarism can go along unchecked with massive profits for the war planners and war makers with no questions asked. Income inequality soars and the environment tanks and we’re all in a sort of Vietnam-era tiger cage. And few want to protest that condition, while the human and material costs of maintaining an empire soar.

Proof of the bipartisan nature of US wars is reflected in “US Carries Out Airstrikes In Iraq and Syria,” (New York Times, June 27, 2021). In that respect, Biden has not missed a step in these attacks against Iranian-supported militias. The New York Times documents that Biden gave George W. Bush the authorization to go to war in  Iraq in 2002. What could be more bipartisan than that? The cycle of violence goes on and on in the empire’s version of an eye for an eye.

counterpunch.org

With the financial support of Mercer Family Foundation far-right heiress financier Rebekah Mercer, exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, U.S.-based Falun Gong cult leader Li Hongzhi, and the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, which is associated with the fascist Opus Dei Roman Catholic sect, Donald Trump’s sporadic political adviser, Steve Bannon, has implemented a multi-pronged approach to enabling fascist control of governments around the world. Bannon’s ideological approach to furthering fascism globally can be called “Bannonism.”

Bannon and his fascist political allies around the world have embarked on a project that seeks to take over existing major political parties of the traditional conservative slant and transform them into fascist parties. What has occurred with the U.S. Republican Party with it becoming a far-right cult of personality organization beholden to Trump is a case in point. Bannon and his allies hope to achieve the same results with the British Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada.

Another tactic employed by the fascist is to create or dominate existing parties of the far-right and achieve initial representation in provincial or regional parliaments, councils, or legislatures. After gaining seats in legislatures with devolved political powers, the fascist parties can use their local power to aim for legislative seats at the national level, or, as in the case of the European Parliament, at the supranational level. An examples of this tactic includes the creation of the Brexit Party in Britain by Bannon and Trump ally and founder of the anti-European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP), Nigel Farage, the modern-day Oswald Mosley of British politics. Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists prior to World War II. His politics, like those of Farage, originated within the British Conservative Party. The British Tories, which also launched the career of racist politician Enoch Powell, have served as a well-spring for nurturing fascism. Farage and UKIP went on to commandeer a majority of the UK’s seats in the European Parliament. Farage now hopes that his far-right Brexit Party can have the same success with the British Parliament. Bannon appreciates the role of the Tories have played in fostering far-right political leaders and he is taking full advantage of the fact that Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government is the most far-right of any recent British Conservative government.

Bannon understands that making alliances with small far-right extremist political parties can pay off handsome dividends with patience and a healthy degree of financial support. The Nazis saw dismal election results when they first began to contest elections in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. They polled just 3 percent of the vote in the national election for the Reichstag in 1924. Their vote share fell to 2.6 percent in 1928, and they won a mere 12 seats out of 491 in the Reichstag. The Nazis fared no better in state elections. They saw 2.4 percent in East Prussia in 1928. In Bavaria, where the Nazi coup attempt failed in 1923, the Nazis inched up with 6.1 percent of the vote in the state election and 9 seats in the Bavarian Landtag. But patience and increased party funding from wealthy German industrialists, no different than the Mercers and the Koch family in the United States, paid off. In 1932, the Nazis won 36 percent of the vote for the East Prussian Landtag and 162 seats. That victory was followed by a Nazi coup that ousted the East Prussian government. In July 1932, the Nazis garnered 32.5 percent of the national vote for the Reichstag and 43 seats, which they were to use as leverage form a government the following year. Once Hitler became chancellor, the Weimar Republic – democratic Germany – was doomed.

One of Bannon’s staunchest fascist allies, Matteo Salvini, saw his far-right Northern League, which advocates independence for northern Italy, achieve major success in winning 29 out of 80 seats in the Regional Council of Lombardy. Salvini even entered a national coalition government consisting of his League and the Five Star Movement as the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Interior. Salvini’s rapid rise in Italian politics made him a valuable ally for Bannon, who has established a secretariat for a de facto “Fascist International,” known as “The Movement,” in Brussels. Salvini, to Bannon’s delight, established close links with two other far-right European leaders, National Rally chief Marine Le Pen in France and Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders in the Netherlands.

Salvini’s political strength in Italy, stemming from his co-option of the Northern League, originally a fringe party in northern Italian politics, is what Bannon, a student of fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, hopes to achieve in other countries. With Salvini’s support and that of other Italian far-right leaders, Bannon has ominously attempted to create a fascist academy to train a new generation of political leaders at the 13^th century Trisulti monastery on the slopes of Monte Rotonaria in central Italy. Although the Vatican, Pope Francis I, and the current Italian government have opposed Bannon’s plans, the nation that launched the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini is seen by those like Bannon, Salvini, Farage, and others as a natural birthplace for a renewed international fascist movement.

These developments directly impact on the United States. The fascist co-option of the U.S. Republican Party has ensured that the opposition pro-democracy Democratic Party has been relegated to very weak minority status in some state legislatures around the country, particularly in the South and the West. Bannon and his fascist associates believe that takeovers of existing parties in certain other countries can achieve the same type of success. One of Bannon’s closest foreign associates, Brazil’s far-right neo-fascist Mussolini- and Adolf Hitler-admiring president, Jair Bolsonaro, worked his way into the presidency by joining the electoral slates of small far-right fringe parties, including the ill-named Brazilian Progressive Party, the Social Christian Party, and another inaptly named party, the Social Liberal Party. Bannon has provided political consulting not only to President Bolsonaro, but also to his three politician sons, all having higher ambitions beyond federal Senate and Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo municipal politics.

The Bolsonaros would have never been a serious factor in Brazilian politics had it not been for the strong support they receive from Brazil’s right-wing Christian nationalist evangelical community, which is steadily supplanting the traditional political influence of the Roman catholic Church across the nation. Christian nationalists are serving as a convenient vehicle for right-wing extremists to gain political power, from the U.S. state of South Carolina, where they dominate politics to the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, where a far-right Christian extremist currently serves as foreign minister.

It is now very apparent that Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party march on Rome in October 1922 served as the inspiration for the march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Mussolini’s march was not taken seriously by either Prime Minister Luigi Facta or King Victor Emmanuel III. On October 28, 1922, after Mussolini besieged the Italian government with some 25,000 Blackshirt militia supporters, the King handed over the reins of government to Mussolini and his fascists. By 1925, Italy was a fascist dictatorship. The Parliament was dissolved and replaced by the “Chamber of Fasces and Corporations.” It is clear that the January 6 American coup plotters intended to replace the U.S. Congress with a rump parliament consisting of only Trump supporters. With the elimination of much of the Congressional leadership through assassination, the January 6 coup marchers and internal Republican enablers at the White House and in Congress would have ensured the rejection of the 2020 electoral victory of Joe Biden and declared Donald Trump the winner. Such an act would have ushered into being an American fascist dictatorship using the example set by Mussolini in Rome in 1922.

Although Prime Minister Facta declared a “state of siege” in Rome as the Blackshirt militias marched on the city in October 1922, the King refused to sign the order to deploy the military to quell the Fascist insurrection. Similarly, neither acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller nor Joint Chiefs staff director, Lt. General Charles Flynn, the brother of Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, ordered the National Guard to protect the U.S. Capitol from attack. In November of last year, Michael Flynn called for Trump to declare martial law and order the military to conduct new elections in the “battleground” states that Trump lost to Biden. The fact that there have been sieges by pro-Trump fascists, similar to the U.S. Capitol attack, on the state capitol buildings in Michigan, Georgia, Oregon, and Washington state are a clear indication that the Mussolini example will continue to be followed by fascist forces everywhere. In February 2020, the Trump-friendly president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, entered the Legislative Assembly with armed police and soldiers in what was called an attempted coup. The fascists have the stage for similar anti-parliamentary actions everywhere.

It should be noted that Mussolini’s successful march on Rome in 1922 was followed the next year by a march by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi supporters in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Hitler hoped to repeat the success of Mussolini in laying siege to the Bavarian government and overthrowing it in a “Beer Hall Putsch,” or coup d’etat. Unlike the situation in Rome, Bavarian troops opened fire on the vastly outnumbered 2000 Nazis, killing 16 of them. Hitler was given a lenient prison sentence for his role in the march and putsch attempt. When Hitler and his colleagues were freed from prison, they were more dangerous than ever, having garnered sympathy from some of the conservative-leaning members of the German electorate. This should be kept in mind by juries and judges handling the criminal cases of hundreds of Trump supporters arrested for their role in the U.S. Capitol attempted putsch. The granting of bail to some of the accused Capitol coup plotters is setting the stage for significant problems in the near future.

The playbook for the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol was the October 1922 insurrection of Mussolini’s fascists in Rome, albeit with two different outcomes. Bannon has been serving as Trump’s resident ideological fascism chief since joining the ex-president’s campaign in 2016. In many respects, Bannon has been for Trump what Nazi ideological chief Alfred Rosenberg was to Adolf Hitler. Rosenberg promoted Nazi ideology to not only nations under German occupation but to countries around the world, including the United States, where a pro-fascist first-generation German-American, Fred Trump, Sr., became enamored of fascist and racist beliefs in his hometown of New York City. Bannon’s promotion of fascism goes back to at least his time as editor for the far-right Breitbart News, a media operation funded by Rebekah Mercer and her father. Today, Mercer money has supported the far-right social media platform Parler.

United Nations Secretary António Guterres recently told the UN Human Rights Council that the threat posed by global neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been “cheered on by people in positions of responsibility in ways that were considered unimaginable not long ago.” Guterres added, “We need global coordinated action to defeat this grave and growing danger.” He is correct.

The sooner the nations of the world awake to the clear and present transnational threat posed by fascists abusing electoral systems to gain dictatorial power, the possibility of a repeat of the fascist rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s can be snuffed out – now and far into the future and, hopefully, permanently.

Last week President Trump granted a “full pardon” to Gen. Michael Flynn, his first National Security Advisor. In a White House statement announcing the pardon, the Administration pointed out that the relentless pursuit of Flynn was a partisan effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

The pursuit of Flynn was spearheaded by people who refused to accept the results of the 2016 election and worked to undermine the peaceful transfer of power, said the White House. These same people are the ones accusing Trump of undermining the election by challenging what appears to be serious voting irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.

That is called “projection.”

The White House statement also cites partisans in politics, the media, and the Deep State which sought to prevent Trump from being elected, to prevent him from taking office once elected, and to remove him on false pretenses once in office.

In order to push the false narrative that Trump was somehow elected due to the intervention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the coup-masters had to make it appear that a high-ranking official was involved in monkey business with the Russians. Flynn was the unlucky victim of their smear machine, accused of “Russia collusion” over an innocent telephone call with the then-Russian Ambassador in Washington during the transition to a Trump Administration.

Yet when Joe Biden’s transition people bragged recently that Biden was connecting with foreign officials before inaugurated, the media praised it as a welcome return of the “experts” to foreign policy.

While it is very good news that President Trump is in the mood to pardon those victims of the warmongering Deep State, I very much hope that he is only warming up. It would be a great tragedy if other Deep State victims are left to suffer for their non-crimes.

Tweeting about her legislation that calls for charges against Edward Snowden and Julian Assange to be dropped and the Espionage Act reformed, US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told President Trump, “since you’re giving pardons to people, please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”

My good friend Rep. Thomas Massie, a Ron Paul Institute Board Member, is a co-sponsor of Rep. Gabbard’s legislation, making it a real bipartisan effort to restore the rule of law in the United States and to rein in the Beltway warmongers.

Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are not criminals. They are heroes for telling us the truth about what criminals in government were doing in our name and with our money.

The fact is we were lied into war over and over again. While those wars were profitable for the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex, they snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people overseas and robbed our own children and grandchildren of trillions of dollars wasted on neocon lies. And meanwhile, as Ed Snowden showed us, the intelligence community declared us the enemy and set up an elaborate internal spy network that would make the East German Stasi green with envy.

President Trump: you have the incredible opportunity to right the terrible wrongs perpetrated by the Obama/Biden Administration. History will smile kindly upon you if you also grant full pardon to Julian Assange and Edward Snowden – and any other truth-teller who faces persecution for exposing the Deep State warmongers.

ronpaulinstitute.org

– Julius Caesar

The illegal invasion of Libya, in which Britain was complicit and a British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s report confirmed as an illegal act sanctioned by the UK government, over which Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister (weeks before the release of the UK parliament report), occurred from March – Oct, 2011.

Muammar al-Gaddafi was assassinated on Oct. 20^th, 2011.

On Sept 11-12^th, 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyron Woods and Glen Doherty were killed at two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi.

It is officially denied to this date that al-Qaeda or any other international terrorist organization participated in the Benghazi attack. It is also officially denied that the attack was pre-meditated.

On the 6^th year anniversary of the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama stated at a partisan speech on Sept 10^th, 2018, delivered at the University of Illinois, that the outrage over the details concerning the Benghazi attack were the result of “wild conspiracy theory” perpetrated by conservatives and Republican members of Congress.

However, according to an August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report  (only released to the public in May 2015), this is anything but the case. The report was critical of the policies of then President Obama as a direct igniter for the rise of ISIS and the creation of a “caliphate” by Syria-based radical Islamists and al-Qaeda. The report also identified that arms shipments in Libya had gone to radical Islamist “allies” of the United States and NATO in the overthrowing of Col. Muammar al-Gaddafi. These arms shipments were sent to Syria and became the arsenal that allowed ISIS and other radical rebels to grow.

The declassified DIA report states:

“AQI [al-qaeda –iraq] SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN OPPOSITION FROM THE BEGINNING, BOTH IDEOLOGICALLY AND THROUGH THE MEDIA… WESTERN COUNTRIES, THE GULF STATES AND TURKEY ARE SUPPORTING THESE EFFORTS… THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION… THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME…” [emphasis added]

Another DIA document from Oct 2012 (also released in May 2015), reported that Gaddafi’s vast arsenal was being shipped from Benghazi to two Syrian ports under the control of the Syrian rebel groups.

Essentially, the DIA documents were reporting that the Obama Administration was supporting Islamist extremism, including the Muslim Brotherhood.

When the watchdog group Judicial Watch received the series of DIA reports through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits (FOIA) in May 2015, the State Department, the Administration and various media outlets trashed the reports as insignificant and unreliable.

There was just one problem; Lt. Gen. Flynn was backing up the reliability of the released DIA reports.

Lt. Gen. Flynn as Director of the DIA from July 2012 – Aug. 2014, was responsible for acquiring accurate intelligence on ISIS’s and other extremist operations within the Middle East, but did not have any authority in shaping U.S. military policy in response to the Intel the DIA was acquiring.

In a July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera, Flynn went so far as to state that the rise of ISIS was the result of a “willful decision,” not an intelligence failure, by the Obama Administration.

In the Al-Jazeera interview Flynn was asked:

Q: You are basically saying that even in government at the time you knew these groups were around, you saw this analysis, and you were arguing against it, but who wasn’t listening?

FLYNN: I think the Administration.

Q: So the Administration turned a blind eye to your analysis?

FLYNN: I don’t know that they turned a blind eye, I think it was a decision. I think it was a willful decision.

Q: A willful decision to support an insurgency that had Salafists, al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood?

FLYNN: It was a willful decision to do what they’re doing.

Flynn was essentially stating (in the 47 minute interview) that the United States was fully aware that weapons trafficking from Benghazi to the Syrian rebels was occurring. In fact, the secret flow of arms from Libya to the Syrian opposition, via Turkey was CIA sponsored and had been underway shortly after Gaddafi’s death in Oct 2011. The operation was largely run out of a covert CIA annex in Benghazi, with State Department acquiescence.

This information was especially troubling in light of the fact that the Obama Administration’s policy, from mid-2011 on, was to overthrow the Assad government. The question of “who will replace Assad?” was never fully answered.

Perhaps the most troubling to Americans among the FOIA-released DIA documents was a report from Sept. 16, 2012, which provided a detail account of the pre-meditated nature of the 9/11/12 attack in Benghazi, reporting that the attack had been planned ten days prior, detailing the groups involved.

The report revealed that it was in fact an al-Qaeda linked terrorist group that was responsible for the Benghazi attack. That despite this intelligence, the Obama Administration continued to permit arms-trafficking to the al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebels even after the 9/11/12 attacks.

In August 2015, then President Obama ordered for U.S. forces to attack Syrian government forces if they interfered with the American “vetted, trained and armed” forces. This U.S. approved Division 30 Syrian rebel group “defected” almost immediately, with U.S. weapons in hand, to align with the Nusra Front, the formal al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

Obama’s Semantics War: Any Friend of Yours is a Friend of Mine

“Flynn incurred the wrath of the [Obama] White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria… He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out.”

– Patrick Lang (retired army colonel, served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency)

Before being named Director of the DIA, Flynn served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, as Director of Intelligence for the U.S. Central Command, and as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command.

Flynn’s criticisms and opposition to the Obama Administration’s policies in his interview with Al-Jazeera in 2015 was nothing new. In August 2013, Flynn as Director of the DIA supported Gen. Dempsey’s intervention, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in forcing then President Obama to cancel orders to launch a massive bombing campaign against the Syrian government and armed forces. Flynn and Dempsey both argued that the overthrow of the Assad government would lead to a radical Islamist stronghold in Syria, much like what was then happening in Libya.

This account was also supported in Seymour Hersh’s paper “Military to Military” published in Jan 2016, to which he states:

“Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, director of the DIA between 2012 and 2014, confirmed that his agency had sent a constant stream of classified warnings to the civilian leadership about the dire consequences of toppling Assad. The jihadists, he said, were in control of the opposition. Turkey wasn’t doing enough to stop the smuggling of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria.’ The DIA’s reporting, he [Flynn] said, ‘got enormous pushback’ from the Obama administration. ‘I felt that they did not want to hear the truth.’

[According to a former JCS adviser]’…To say Assad’s got to go is fine, but if you follow that through – therefore anyone is better. It’s the “anybody else is better” issue that the JCS had with Obama’s policy.’ The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success’. So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing U.S. intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State [ISIS].” [emphasis added]

According to Hersh’s sources, it was through the militaries of Germany, Israel and Russia, who were in contact with the Syrian army, that the U.S. intelligence on where the terrorist cells were located was shared, hence the “military to military”. There was no direct contact between the U.S. and the Syrian military.

Hersh states in his paper:

“The two countries [U.S. & Syria] collaborated against al-Qaida, their common enemy. A longtime consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command said that, after 9/11, ‘Bashar was, for years, extremely helpful to us while, in my view, we were churlish in return, and clumsy in our use of the gold he gave us. That quiet co-operation continued among some elements, even after the [Bush administration’s] decision to vilify him.’ In 2002 Assad authorised Syrian intelligence to turn over hundreds of internal files on the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany. Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers.

…It was this history of co-operation that made it seem possible in 2013 that Damascus would agree to the new indirect intelligence-sharing arrangement with the U.S.”

However, as the Syrian army gained strength with the Dempsey-led-Joint Chiefs’ support, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey escalated their financing and arming of al-Nusra and ISIS. In fact, it was “later” discovered that the Erdogan government had been supporting al-Nusra and ISIS for years. In addition, after the June 30^th, 2013 revolution in Egypt, Turkey became a regional hub for the Muslim Brotherhood’s International Organization.

In Sept. 2015, Russia came in and directly intervened militarily, upon invitation by the Syrian government, and effectively destroyed ISIS strongholds within Syrian territory. In response, Turkey shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 on Nov 24^th, 2015 for allegedly entering Turkish airspace for 17 seconds. Days after the Russian fighter jet was shot down, Obama expressed support for Erdogan and stated at a Dec. 1^st, 2015 press conference that his administration would remain “very much committed to Turkey’s security and its sovereignty”. Obama also said that as long as Russia remained allied with Assad, “a lot of Russian resources are still going to be targeted at opposition groups … that we support … So I don’t think we should be under any illusions that somehow Russia starts hitting only Isil targets. That’s not happening now. It was never happening. It’s not going to be happening in the next several weeks.”

Today, not one of those “opposition groups” has shown itself to have remained, or possibly ever been, anti-extremist. And neither the Joint Chiefs nor the DIA believed that there was ever such a thing as “moderate rebels.”

Rather, as remarked by a JCS adviser to Hersh, “Turkey is the problem.”

China’s “Uyghur Problem”

Imad Moustapha, was the Syrian Ambassador to the United States from 2004 to Dec. 2011, and has been the Syrian Ambassador to China for the past eight years.

In an interview with Seymour Hersh, Moustapha stated:

“‘China regards the Syrian crisis from three perspectives,’ he said: international law and legitimacy; global strategic positioning; and the activities of jihadist Uighurs, from Xinjiang province in China’s far west. Xinjiang borders eight nations – Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India – and, in China’s view, serves as a funnel for terrorism around the world and within China. Many Uighur fighters now in Syria are known to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement – an often violent separatist organisation that seeks to establish an Islamist Uighur state in Xinjiang. ‘The fact that they have been aided by Turkish intelligence to move from China into Syria through Turkey has caused a tremendous amount of tension between the Chinese and Turkish intelligence,’ Moustapha said. ‘China is concerned that the Turkish role of supporting the Uighur fighters in Syria may be extended in the future to support Turkey’s agenda in Xinjiang. We are already providing the Chinese intelligence service with information regarding these terrorists and the routes they crossed from on travelling into Syria.’ ” [emphasis added]

This view was echoed by a Washington foreign affairs analyst whose views are routinely sought by senior government officials, informing Hersh that:

“Erdoğan has been bringing Uighurs into Syria by special transport while his government has been agitating in favour of their struggle in China. Uighur and Burmese Muslim terrorists who escape into Thailand somehow get Turkish passports and are then flown to Turkey for transit into Syria.”

China understands that the best way to combat the terrorist recruiting that is going on in these regions is to offer aid towards reconstruction and economic development projects. By 2016, China had allegedly committed more than $30 billion to postwar reconstruction in Syria.

The long-time consultant to the Joint Special Operations Command could not hide his contempt, according to Hersh, when he was asked for his view of the U.S. policy on Syria. “‘The solution in Syria is right before our nose,’ he said. ‘Our primary threat is Isis and all of us – the United States, Russia and China – need to work together.’“

The military’s indirect pathway to Assad disappeared with Dempsey’s retirement in September 25^th, 2015. His replacement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in July 2015, two months before assuming office, “If you want to talk about a nation that could pose an existential threat to the United States, I’d have to point to Russia.”

Flynn’s Call for Development in the Middle East to Counter Terrorism

Not only was Flynn critical of the Obama Administration’s approach to countering terrorism in the Middle East, his proposed solution was to actually downgrade the emphasis on military counter-operations, and rather focus on economic development within these regions as the most effective and stable impediment to the growth of extremists.

Flynn stated in the July 2015 interview with Al-Jazeera:

“Frankly, an entire new economy is what this region needs. They need to take this 15-year old, to 25 to 30-year olds in Saudi Arabia, the largest segment of their population; in Egypt, the largest segment of their population, 15 to roughly 30 years old, mostly young men. You’ve got to give them something else to do. If you don’t, they’re going to turn on their own governments, and we can solve that problem.

So that is the conversation that we have to have with them, and we have to help them do that. And in the meantime, what we have is this continued investment in conflict. The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just fuels the conflict. Some of that has to be done, but I’m looking for other solutions. I’m looking for the other side of this argument, and we’re not having it; we’re not having it as the United States.” [emphasis added]

Flynn also stated in the interview that the U.S. cannot, and should not, deter the development of nuclear energy in the Middle East:

“It now equals nuclear development of some type in the Middle East, and now what we want… what I hope for is that we have nuclear [energy] development, because it also helps for projects like desalinization, getting water…nuclear energy is very clean, and it actually is so cost effective, much more cost effective for producing water from desalinization.”

Flynn was calling for a new strategic vision for the Middle East, and making it clear that “conflict only” policies were only going to add fuel to the fire, that cooperative economic policies are the true solution to attaining peace in the Middle East. Pivotal to this is the expansion of nuclear energy, while assuring non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which Flynn states “has to be done in a very international, inspectable way.”

When In Doubt, Blame the Russians

How did the Obama Administration respond to Flynn’s views?

He was fired (forced resignation) from his post as Director of the DIA on April 30^th, 2014. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who was briefed by Flynn on the intelligence reports and was also critical of the U.S. Administration’s strategy in the Middle East was also forced to resign in Feb. 2015.

With the election of Trump as President on Nov. 8 2016, Lt. Gen. Flynn was swiftly announced as Trump’s choice for National Security Adviser on Nov. 18^th, 2016.

Just weeks later, Flynn was targeted by the FBI and there was a media sensation over Flynn being a suspected “Russian agent”. Flynn was taken out before he had a chance to even step into his office, prevented from doing any sort of overhaul with the intelligence bureaus and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was most certainly going to happen. Instead Flynn was forced to resign on Feb. 13^th, 2017 after incessant media attacks undermining the entire Trump Administration, accusing them of working for the Russians against the welfare of the American people.

Despite an ongoing investigation on the allegations against Flynn, there has been no evidence to this date that has justified any charge. In fact, volumes of exculpatory evidence have been presented to exonerate Flynn from any wrongdoing including perjury. At this point, the investigation of Flynn has been put into question as consciously disingenuous and as being stalled by the federal judge since May 2020, refusing to release Flynn it seems while a Trump Administration is still in effect.

The question thus stands; in whose best interest is it that no peace be permitted to occur in the Middle East and that U.S.-Russian relations remain verboten? And is such an interest a friend or foe to the American people?

The author can be reached at cynthiachung@tutanota.com

The legal case against Flynn cannot be truthfully understood unless and until the political battle that motivated it is adequately described:

Flynn had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under U.S. President Barack Obama until 2014, when Obama acrimoniously forced him out. Flynn then served for only the first 22 days of Donald Trump’s Presidency as the new U.S. National Security Advisor. The FBI, which still remained headed by the Obama appointee, James Comey, forced Flynn to quit on 13 February 2017. Comey wanted Flynn to testify against the new President — he wanted Flynn to say that in 2016 the Trump campaign had been conniving with the Russian Government.

(Here’s some background on the origin of that — this take-down of Flynn wasn’t against only Trump; it was also against Flynn himself, and here is why: Flynn in August 2012 had warned Obama against arming the resistance to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and predicted that arming them would likely result in Islamic extremists, allies of Al Qaeda, running the country, if the operation against Assad succeeded. Flynn advised Obama instead to work with Russia against that outcome. Obama ignored his advice, and fired Flynn in 2014, when Obama’s hostility toward Russia had already become public, due to Ukraine’s having turned against Russia in February 2014 and Obama’s blaming Russia for that. Although Obama was, in 2012, privately indicating to Russian Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev that if re-elected, Obama would soften America’s opposition toward Russia, Obama was actually planning to do the exact opposite, and he was even planning to take over Ukraine and expel Russia from its largest naval base, which was in Crimea which was in Ukraine. Flynn didn’t know that Obama’s public assertions about a “reset” to reduce tensions with Russia were only lies. Flynn had believed they were sincere. On the morning of 10 November 2016, just after Trump’s election-victory on November 8th, Trump met with Obama for 90 minutes privately in the Oval Office, and Obama warned Trump not to bring Flynn into his Administration. Trump ignored Obama’s warning. When Flynn was briefly serving as President Trump’s National Security Advisor, Flynn recommended to Trump a comprehensive global peace plan, which would have involved defusing the Middle East, transitioning away from fossil fuels, eliminating sanctions against Russia, and working with Russia to un-do Obama’s 2014 anti-Russian coup in Ukraine. So: the anti-Russian Obama intensely wanted to remove Flynn from the Trump Administration. Removing Flynn was removing the biggest threat against continuing Obama’s intensification of the Cold War, which intensification was Obama’s biggest achievement for America’s military-industrial complex or “MIC”. Trump would then be surrounded only by Cold-Warriors, assets of firms such as Lockheed Martin, the owners of America’s MIC, the Deep State, which controls the top level of the U.S. federal Government in both of the political Parties, which persons have now become America’s permanent government. Taking down Flynn was an important step toward preserving Obama’s legacy — his solidification of the Deep State’s control. Furthermore, Comey’s main lifetime income has been the tens of millions of dollars he has received via the revolving door between his serving the federal Government and his serving firms such as Lockheed Martin. For these people, restoring, and intensifying, and keeping up, the Cold War, is a very profitable business, not merely a matter of serving their friends, who are similarly engaged.)

Apparently, the FBI’s Comey didn’t, at the very start of Trump’s Presidency, feel that a winnable case could be presented against Flynn. On 23 January 2017, the Washington Post bannered “FBI reviewed Flynn’s calls with Russian ambassador but found nothing illicit”, and reported that,

The FBI in late December reviewed intercepts of communications between the Russian ambassador to the United States and retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn — national security adviser to then-President-elect Trump — but has not found any evidence of wrongdoing or illicit ties to the Russian government, U.S. officials said.

The calls were picked up as part of routine electronic surveillance of Russian officials and agents in the United States, which is one of the FBI’s responsibilities, according to the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss counterintelligence operations.

However, soon, Comey changed his mind, and he apparently reversed his opinion about whether a winnable case against Flynn existed. (Perhaps this change was due to the increasing frictions between Comey and Trump, which caused Trump to fire Comey on 9 May 2017. Comey might have been disappointed at not being retained into the new Administration. Eight days later, on May 17th, the crescendo of Democratic Party and news-media criticisms against the President for doing that, resulted in the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointing Comey’s friend Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate whether Trump had been conniving with Russia’s Government.)

For some reason, Flynn, though he was the former head of the DIA, either didn’t know that “routine electronic surveillance of Russian officials and agents in the United States … is one of the FBI’s responsibilities,” or else he didn’t think that when he was speaking to Russian officials, there was anything illegal in it or in what he was saying in those conversations. These conversations were taking place less than a month before he was to become America’s new National Security Advisor, and everyone knew that Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, Flynn’s immediate predecessor in that capacity, was rushing to make as difficult as possible the types of changes that Flynn — and also Trump — were advocating, in regard to policies toward Russia. The entire Obama Administration were then in overdrive to prevent any such policy-changes. For example, on 29 December 2016, the Washington Post bannered “Obama administration announces measures to punish Russia for 2016 election interference”, and reported that, “Taken together, the sanctions and expulsions announced Thursday were the most far-reaching U.S. response to Russian activities since the end of the Cold War.”

The WP itself might have helped to bring about that change. Their columnist, David Ignatius, whom even the Establishmentarian Democratic Party blogger Marcy Wheeler acknowledged to be “a mouthpiece for the IC [Intelligence Community] (and especially CIA)”, headlined on 12 January 2017, “Why did Obama dawdle on Russia’s hacking?” and Ignatius posed some questions that turned out to be prophetic about the Democratic Party’s subsequent handling of these matters:

“Question 1: Did Trump’s campaign encourage Russia’s alleged hacking to hurt his rival Hillary Clinton and help him, and does Russia have any leverage over him?”

“Question 2: Why did the Obama administration wait so long to deal with Russia’s apparent hacking?”

“Question 3: What discussions has the Trump team had with Russian officials about future relations?”

In relation to #3, he reported that:

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States.

Regarding Ignatius’s “Question 2,” might Obama have held off so late in his Presidency to do this, in order to maximize the public pressure upon his successor to avoid any attempt to reverse Obama’s anti-Russian policies?

Wheeler’s commentary upon that column closed with a question of her own: “Clearly, Ignatius’ source on the Flynn call with Kislyak advanced the story in a direction that led to Flynn’s firing. What else were Ignatius’ source or sources for the this story trying to lead reporting to?” (This would have entailed Obama’s CIA Director, John Brennan.)

Flynn hadn’t phoned Kislyak in order to “influence a foreign government about ‘disputes’ with the United States,” but instead to express condolences for the shoot-down over Syria of a Russian plane that had been carrying a choir there to perform, and in order to express the hope for better U.S.-Russian relations — things that an incoming U.S. National Security Advisor is entirely within his rights, and even duties, to do.

On 30 November 2017, Flynn accepted a plea bargain with Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel who was assigned by Democrats to investigate whether Donald Trump was secretly a Russian Government asset. Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI when he had told the FBI that:

(i) On or about December 29, 2016 [NOTE: this was when Trump was already the President-elect, not a mere Presidential candidate], FLYNN did not ask the Government of Russia’s Ambassador to the United States (“Russian Ambassador”) to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the United States had imposed against Russia that same day; and FLYNN did not recall the Russian Ambassador subsequently telling him that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of his request; and

(ii) On or about December 22, 2016, FLYNN did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution; and that the Russian Ambassador subsequently never described to FLYNN Russia’s response to his request.

(Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001(a)(2))

Flynn subsequently said that he had been forced by Mueller to accept that Agreement, or else Flynn, and maybe his son, would likely be sentenced to long prison terms as punishment for Flynn’s having lied to the FBI. (Mueller was promising far milder punishment if Flynn would just plead guilty and agree to testify against the President.)

Though vague paraphrases of what the alleged lies by Flynn were have been published (such as here), the general public hasn’t been provided access to the specific statements, the alleged lies, for which he had been charged. Ever since 27 June 2019, Flynn has been saying that he hadn’t said anything to the FBI that he knew to be false at the time he said it. The transcripts of his conversation(s) with the FBI have not been released; and, even more importantly, the transcripts of Flynn’s conversations with Russia’s Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, haven’t been released. (As Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, told the Government’s prosecuting attorney, Brandon L. van Grack, on 27 June 2019, “He did not knowingly make the statements that he knew [at the time] to be wrong.” The reply by van Grack was “very heated,” saying, “Without willfully/knowingly [making false statements] it doesn’t make this an offense.” And, “First time your client or counsel [Powell herself] has made any statement like what you are saying. … Want to be clear — you are saying that he did not make any [knowingly] false statements?”

Ms. Powell replied that this was true, and, “You are asking my client to lie” to assert otherwise, and, “If you have something [which indicates to the contrary of Flynn’s statement], show us.” It still hasn’t been shown to the public.

She had been Flynn’s lawyer for only 15 days: Flynn had fired his original lawyers, the Washington Establishment law firm of Covington & Burling, on June 12th, and it was they who had advised him to accept the guilty plea. Ms. Powell, who is an anti-Establishment, non-megacorporate, independent lawyer, had privately been advising him not to accept the plea-deal; and, now, Flynn replaced the Establishment team, and appointed her to represent him.

On 1 November 2019, Powell presented to the court an extraordinarily bold 158-page “FLYNN REPLY IN SUPPORT OF MR. FLYNN’S MOTION TO COMPEL PRODUCTION OF BRADY MATERIAL AND TO HOLD THE PROSECUTORS IN CONTEMPT”, amply documenting that:

In this case, high-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity — they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn — but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false.

This is no paranoid “conspiracy” delusion, as the government implies. It is well documented by the evidence already made public, which was long known to the government — yet withheld from the defense — until after Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty and in clear violation of Brady v. Maryland and its progeny. This includes a still undisclosed discussion by the lead agent to use news of the “Steele dossier” as “a pretext to interview some people”; the FBI Director’s calculated decision (contrary to FBI/DOJ protocol) not to notify the White House Counsel that the FBI wanted to speak with a key member of the President’s staff; a strategically-planned personal call from FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, designed to prevent Mr. Flynn from seeking the advice of counsel or notifying the Department of Justice; planning and rehearsing tactics calculated to keep Mr. Flynn “relaxed” and “unguarded” so as not to alert him to the significance of the conversation; anxious text messages between Agent Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page — McCabe’s Special Counsel — disclosing the deep personal involvement of these officials and others in an enterprise without a legitimate law enforcement objective.

The government works hard to persuade this Court that the scope of its discovery obligation is limited to facts relating to punishment for the crime to which Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty. However, the evidence already produced or in the public record reveals far larger issues are at play: namely, the integrity of our criminal justice system.

Flynn formally withdrew his guilty plea on 29 January 2020. In his statement to the court, he made clear that “I realize my statement and determination to assert my innocence means the prosecutors, who already seek to imprison me, may retaliate further by seeking additional charges against me and dramatically increasing the penalty I face.”

The pro-war, neoconservative, Brookings Institution’s, Lawfare Blog (law in the service of international conquest — law for warfare), posted, on 1 May 2020, the most complete summary, till that time, of the case against Flynn, with links to all of the then publicly available source-documents. However, what may turn out to have been the biggest developments in the case have occurred between then and now.

On 7 May 2020, Trump’s U.S. Attorney General, William Barr, dropped the Justice Department’s criminal case against Flynn. The Democratic Party’s media were outraged. The New York Times bannered, on that day, “Editorial: Don’t Forget, Michael Flynn Pleaded Guilty, Twice”, and said: “To review: Mr. Barr is now saying he cannot prove charges to which Mr. Flynn has twice pleaded guilty in court — and for which there is ample evidence.” On 10 June 2020, the Washington Post headlined “Flynn committed perjury, and DOJ request to toss his conviction was ‘corrupt,’ ‘politically motivated,’ court-appointed adviser argues”, and reported that the judge in the Flynn case, Emmett Sullivan, had appointed a prosecutor to oppose the Executive Branch — the President — and, “Michael Flynn committed perjury, and his guilty plea of lying to the FBI should not be dismissed, a court-appointed adviser argued to a federal judge Wednesday, calling the Justice Department’s attempt to undo the conviction corrupt, politically motivated and ‘a gross abuse of prosecutorial power’.” Dropping a prosecution was ‘a gross abuse of prosecutorial power,’ this court-appointed prosecutor alleged. Normally, abuse of prosecutorial power is done not in order to set the defendant free but to get him convicted; but, in the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan’s chosen prosecutor of Flynn was saying that what the Executive Branch was doing by dropping charges was “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.” The Constitutionally authorized — the U.S. Justice Department’s — prosecutor dropping the case against that defendant is “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power,” he said. Overwhelmingly, America’s press backed that viewpoint: they didn’t care about the Constitution (they didn’t care about its separation of powers clauses), in this particular case. The Constitution should be violated in Flynn’s case, they said — but they didn’t even mention the Constitution: they simply ignored it.

That court-appointed prosecutor had been appointed by Judge Sullivan on May 13th. The Washington Post headlined at that time, “Court asks retired judge to oppose Justice Dept. effort to drop Michael Flynn case, examine if ex-Trump adviser committed perjury”. The judicial branch of the U.S. federal Government was now assuming an Executive Branch function (criminal prosecution); and, so, Judge Sullivan appointed not a federal prosecutor, but instead a retired federal judge, in order to carry out his action (as being a prosecutor) against the Executive Branch, to force the Executive Branch to continue its prosecution of this man. The Democratic Party’s media were extremely supportive of this, and entirely ignored its rather blatant unConstitutionality and simply backed this unConstitutional extraordinary action by a federal judge. (For example, not only the NYT and the WP, but on May 22nd, The Week magazine’s first headlined story on its front cover was “WHY BARR FREED FLYNN, p. 6”, and that news-report inside headlined “Flynn: Why Barr wants to drop all charges”. It summarized 5 anti-Trump commentaries, in The Atlantic, NBC News, the NYT, and two in the WP, plus 2 pro-Trump commentaries, one in the National Review, and the other in the Washington Examiner.) Judge Sullivan’s ruling, which reiterated what his appointed prosecutor had advised, importantly added, “It is further ORDERED that amicus curiae shall address whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.” He wanted Flynn’s alleged perjury, to the FBI, treated, now, as being perjury to his court, and therefore as a very serious new charge, “contempt of court” — a charge, furthermore, that Judge Sullivan would have more control over than he does over the previous charges.

However, since there was no actual prosecutor who was advising the judge, the court-appointed prosecutor was, himself, only an amicus curiae, a “friend of the court,” himself, advising the judge. When Judge Sullivan ruled “that amicus curiae shall address whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury,” Sullivan might have become shocked when he then received on June 9th an “AMICUS CURIAE BRIEF OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS IN SUPPORT OF DEFENDANT” — quite the opposite of what the incompetent judge had likely expected to come from such an organization as the NACDL. (Normally, criminal defense lawyers are arguing against, not for, prosecutorial discretion — they argue against allowing prosecutors free sway.)

This brief, slamming what Sullivan’s chosen prosecutor had said, is a brilliantly argued case, which, if the incompetent judge goes against it, might produce even greater embarrassment to him than merely an appeals-court’s overturning his subsequent ruling, but it would also produce a big Constitutional problem, which even the extremely right-wing U.S. Supreme Court might be reluctant to back Sullivan on. And, if this matter does reach the Supreme Court, then a ruling that would go against Judge Sullivan on it would endanger the system that handles almost all criminal trials in the U.S., which system is ‘justice’ by plea-bargains, instead of “justice” by the Constitutionally demanded trials-by-jury. American criminal ‘justice’ (its reality, which is comparable to court-systems in recognized dictatorships — not to its myth, which is taught in schools) could then fall apart, even more than the prosecution of Michael Flynn will. Therefore, highlights of this potentially historic amicus curiae brief will be presented here.

The brief was docketed on October 17th, and here are its highlights:

This case presents a question of great importance to NACDL because the vast majority of criminal prosecutions resolve by guilty plea. … Existing trial penalties (e.g., enhanced charges, sentencing increases), however, present not just the risk, but the reality that innocent defendants plead guilty to especially grave charges in order to avoid the risk of a greater term of imprisonment. Such defendants should not be threatened with perjury or contempt of court for doing so. …

Because defendants face a higher sentence as a result of going to trial, many innocent defendants will take the certainty of a lower sentence rather than elect to proceed to trial, where conviction rates are high. The resulting trial penalty, or the gap between the sentence received through a plea bargain versus going to trial, underscores exactly why some innocent defendants must and do plead guilty.

The criminal contempt sanction is a poor fit. A coerced, or even potentially coerced, act of perjury generally does not equate to criminal contempt of a court. And the plea-bargaining system’s core justification — efficiency — does not concern itself with the truth-seeking function that a jury trial entails. …

The contempt sanction better fits those acts of disruption in the courtroom or intransigence … that preclude the administration of justice. …

ARGUMENT

1. THE FEDERAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IS A SYSTEM OF PLEAS.

In 2012, the Court highlighted that “[n]inety-seven percent of federal convictions and ninety-four percent of state convictions [were] the result of guilty pleas.” … Last year’s statistics bear out this trend. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, 97.6% of federal convictions are obtained through a guilty plea, and only 2.4% of cases go to trial. … The figures are not much different in this district: 95.2% of convictions result from guilty pleas, and 4.8% from trial. … Accordingly, plea bargaining “is not some adjunct to the criminal justice system; it is the criminal justice system.” …

One proffered justification for the plea-bargaining system is that it functions as “an indispensable solution for an overwhelmed structure.” … [But] Why Innocent People Plead Guilty, N.Y. Rev. Books (Nov. 20, 2014), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/11/20/why-innocent-people-plead-guilty. … The system gives prosecutors enormous leverage to pressure criminal defendants. … A defendant who refuses to plead to a lesser offense may face at trial a more serious charge that has a mandatory minimum sentence of imprisonment of a decade or longer. … “[L]onger sentences exist on the books largely for bargaining purposes.” … As Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has explained, “our criminal justice system is almost exclusively a system of plea bargaining, negotiated behind closed doors and with no judicial oversight.” See Rakoff, supra.

Trials serve a specific and laudable purpose in our criminal justice system: to ensure that the prosecution can satisfy a jury of the defendant’s peers that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and to “so state[], publicly, in its verdict.” Id. Further, pre-trial motions contesting legal theories, constitutional violations, and evidentiary matters are vital to the development of the law. …

The prosecutor’s arsenal contains sufficient tools to ensure that a defendant who does not enter a guilty plea at the outset of a case will face an increased sentence. Prosecutors are able to choose among charges or stack charges on top of each other, and they have discretion to allege facts that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. …

The gap between the sentence that can be bargained for in a plea has widened so far from the sentence that will be received after trial as to become “an overwhelming influence” in defendants’ weighing of a plea offer. …

Amicus curiae’s statistical analysis of the Sentencing Commission’s 2015 data files shows that the “average sentence for fraud was three times as high for defendants who went to trial versus those who pled guilty.” Id. at 17. For burglary, breaking and entering, and embezzlement, the average sentence was nearly eight times as high for the defendant who went to trial. See id. Accordingly, “individuals who choose to exercise their Sixth Amendment right to trial face exponentially higher sentences if they invoke the right to trial and lose.” …

The federal criminal justice system has long recognized that a defendant may simultaneously proclaim his innocence and enter into a plea bargain. … When the Supreme Court initially held that plea bargaining was constitutionally permissible, it noted that it “would have serious doubts” about the practice “if the encouragement of guilty pleas by offers of leniency substantially increased the likelihood that defendants, advised by competent counsel, would falsely condemn themselves.” …

It is a sad and incontrovertible fact that our criminal justice system forces innocent people to plead guilty. …

Perjury Is Not A Contempt Of Court.

It has been settled for a hundred years that ordinary perjury is not a contempt of court because perjury does not “obstruct the administration of justice” at common law or under the contempt statute. … Perjury is not a contempt of court but only an ordinary crime, subject to prosecution in the exclusive discretion of the Executive Branch. …

If Judge Sullivan rules in accord with that brief, then Michael Flynn will be a free man, though perhaps overburdened to pay huge legal costs which the Democrats have thrust upon him. However, if Judge Sullivan rules against it, then there might follow a titanic Constitutional battle over whether ignoring the U.S. Constitution so blatantly can continue for much longer in America.

The Democrat, Marcy Wheeler, at her Empty Wheel blog, opposes that brief, by asserting “the sworn declaration Flynn submitted as part of his attempt to withdraw his guilty plea, which DOJ’s recent excuses for blowing up his prosecution increasingly rely on, also conflicts with what Flynn said to the grand jury as well as evidence submitted in this docket, which shows notes from Covington recording Flynn telling lies about his engagement with Turkey.” However, she is there advocating a fishing expedition to find something that’s unrelated to the Mueller investigation in order to imprison Flynn on such other matters unless he will accept the guilty plea and testify against Trump. Black and brown people, and all poor people, should know that the Democratic Party has now come out openly in support of such targeted prosecutorial fishing expeditions, such as have put so high a percentage of blacks and browns, and of poor people in general, behind bars. In such a country as this, what hope is there for individuals who can’t afford to hire adequate legal counsel? (Flynn has already spent more than $5 million on his defense, and he’s still not done.)

Furthermore, the Mueller Report was a hit-job. On Flynn, it is vacuous. For example, page 30 of v. 2 of the Mueller Report online merely summarizes and paraphrases what Flynn had told the FBI’s two agents who interviewed him, which interview was the basis for the charges against him:

On January 24, 2017, Flynn agreed to be interviewed by agents from the FBI.139 During the interview, which took place at the White House, Flynn falsely stated that he did not ask Kislyak to refrain from escalating the situation in response to the sanctions on Russia imposed by the Obama Administration.140 Flynn also falsely stated that he did not remember a follow-up conversation in which Kislyak stated that Russia had chosen to moderate its response to those sanctions as a result of Flynn’s request.141

That’s all there is. Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of the Mueller Report is the actual evidence — in this matter, Flynn’s transcript with the FBI — presented.

How can a criminal-prosecution system that consists more than 95% of coercive plea-bargains, and only under 5% of trials-by-jury, switch to 100% trials-by jury — how can it go from under 5% Constitutional, to 100% Constitutional? Or: is democracy now impossible in the U.S.? Certainly, the myth of there being in America a transparent system of justice, in which the public gets reasonably easy access to the evidence on a given case, is a total lie. What exists instead is merely a black box, filled with secrets and lies, which serve only the already-powerful.

There is also great irony in this situation: The Democratic Party, which claims to support the poor against the rich, is here advocating for the plea-bargaining system, which is especially unjust against the poor and protective of the rich. The sheer hypocrisy of that is astounding. Even Britain’s normally very Establishmentarian Economist magazine headlined an article, on 9 November 2017, “The troubling spread of plea-bargaining from America to the world”. But such a sentiment has now become too progressive for either one of America’s two billionaire-controlled Parties. They both support plea-bargaining, though it’s against the U.S. Constitution, and America leads the world in it.

The present writer is not advocating for the Republican Party, which openly flaunts its championing of the super-rich and its contempt against the poor, but the Democratic Party’s hypocrisy doesn’t make it any the better. And both Parties are enemies of the U.S. Constitution. Both are unAmerican. Both represent opposite sides of the same U.S. Establishment. That Establishment’s history is described here. They are enemies of what America’s Founders stood for. Neither side of this Establishment (neither the Democratic Party’s billionaires nor the Republican Party’s billionaires) represents America’s Founders — the group of individuals who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution. That country — that Constitution (with its Amendments) — is long-since gone, replaced, now, by this U.S.-counter-Revolutionary (i.e., anti-American, pro-King-George-III) Establishment.

That’s how deep the issues in the prosecution of Michael T. Flynn actually go. These are issues that go to the core of what America is, and will be.

Ray McGOVERN

Seldom mentioned among the motives behind the persistent drumming on alleged Russian interference was an over-arching need to help the Security State hide their tracks.

The need for a scapegoat to blame for Hillary Clinton’s snatching defeat out of the jaws victory also played a role; as did the need for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT) to keep front and center in the minds of Americans the alleged multifaceted threat coming from an “aggressive” Russia. (Recall that John McCain called the, now disproven, “Russian hacking” of the DNC emails an “act of war.”)

But that was then. This is now.

Though the corporate media is trying to bury it, the Russiagate narrative has in the past few weeks finally collapsed with the revelation that CrowdStrike had no evidence Russia took anything from the DNC servers and that the FBI set a perjury trap for Gen. Michael Flynn. There was already the previous government finding that there was no collusion between Trump and Russia and the indictment of a Russian troll farm that supposedly was destroying American democracy with $100,000 in Facebook ads was dropped after the St. Petersburg defendants sought discovery.

All that’s left is to discover how this all happened.

Attorney General William Barr, and U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr commissioned to investigate this whole sordid mess seem intent on getting to the bottom of it. The possibility that Trump will not chicken out this time, and rather will challenge the Security State looms large since he felt personally under attack.

Writing on the Wall

Given the diffident attitude the Security State plotters adopted regarding hiding their tracks, Durham’s challenge, with subpoena power, is not as formidable as were he, for example, investigating a Mafia family.

Plus, former NSA Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers reportedly is cooperating. The handwriting is on the wall. It remains to be seen what kind of role in the scandal Barack Obama may have played.

But former directors James Comey, James Clapper, and John Brennan, captains of Obama’s Security State, can take little solace from Barr’s remarks Monday to a reporter who asked about Trump’s recent claims that top officials of the Obama administration, including the former president had committed crimes. Barr replied:

“As to President Obama and Vice President Biden, whatever their level of involvement, based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man. Our concerns over potential criminality is focused on others.”

In a more ominous vein, Barr gratuitously added that law enforcement and intelligence officials were involved in “a false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative against the president. It was a grave injustice, and it was unprecedented in American history.”

Meanwhile, the corporate media have all been singing from the same sheet since Trump had the audacity a week ago to coin yet another “-gate” — this time “Obamagate.” Leading the apoplectic reaction in corporate media, Saturday’s Washington Post offered a pot-calling-the-kettle-black pronouncement by its editorial board entitled “The absurd cynicism of ‘Obamagate”?

The outrage voiced by the Post called to mind disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s indignant response to criticism of the FBI by candidate Trump, in a Oct. 20, 2016 text exchange with FBI attorney Lisa Page:

Strzok: I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot, is unable to provide a coherent answer.

Strzok – I CAN’T PULL AWAY, WHAT THE F**K HAPPENED TO OUR COUNTRY …

Page– I don’t know. But we’ll get it back. We’re America. We rock.

Strzok– Donald just said “bad hombres”

Strzok– Trump just said what the FBI did is disgraceful.

Less vitriolic, but incisive commentary came from widely respected author and lawyer Glenn Greenwald on May 14, four days after Trump coined “Obamagate”: (See “System Update with Glenn Greenwald – The Sham Prosecution of Michael Flynn”).

For a shorter, equally instructive video of Greenwald on the broader issue of Russia-gate, see this clip from a March 2019 Democracy Now!-sponsored debate he had with David Cay Johnston titled, “As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston”:

(entire debate is worth listening to). I found one of the comments below the Democracy Now! video as big as a bummer as the commentator did:

“I think this is one of the most depressing parts about the whole situation. In their dogmatic pushing for this false narrative, the Russiagaters might have guaranteed Trump a second term. They have done more damage to our democracy than Russia ever has done and will do.” (From “Clamity2007”)

In any case, Johnston, undaunted by his embarrassment at the hands of Greenwald, is still at it, and so is the avuncular Frank Rich — both of them some 20 years older than Greenwald and set in their evidence-impoverished, media-indoctrinated ways.

Deranged by Trump

Sadly, as is apparently the case with Covid:19, older people seem particularly susceptible to what has been called Trump Derangement Syndrome—the notion that Trump is uniquely evil, while, for instance, George W. Bush, who illegally invaded Iraq—what Nuremberg termed the worst war crime, the crime of aggression—was not.

Johnston now has his own website: DCReport.org. A piece dated May 8, bears the title “How Barr Is Advancing Trump’s Quest to Become President For Life.”

Adducing “evidence” of this purported effort by Barr, Johnston indicates that he does not like what Barr’s Justice Department did in moving to drop the charges against Gen. Michael Flynn. He does not like it, not one bit! Here are some additional gems from Johnston’s latest:

“— Flynn and his company were on Putin’s payroll

– Flynn made himself susceptible to blackmail by taking Russian money and lying about it.”

Johnston drivels on:

“Trump denies the Russians helped him become president. But America’s intelligence agencies, the bi-partisan chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 418-page Mueller report and emails from none other than Donald Trump Jr. all make clear the Kremlin helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. The only issue on which the facts are not complete was whether Trump was a passive beneficiary or he knowingly worked with the Kremlin, whether obliquely or hand-in-glove.

Just weeks after assuming office Trump held an unannounced meeting in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister and Russian ambassador and a “photographer” for the Kremlin-owned Tass news agency. The Russians revealed the meeting. They also disclosed that Trump gave them “sources and methods” intelligence, which is closely guarded to protect human and technological assets.

This latest abuse of power to protect a criminal crony who was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll and a secret foreign agent is more than an impeachable offense. Trump, Barr and Shea also sent a clear message: Team Trump harbors no regard for the rule of law, the foundation of our liberties and democratic freedoms.”

Frank Rich Not Immune

David Cay Johnston enjoys the company of other erstwhile respected pundits, notably Frank Rich. In younger days, both wrote for The New York Times, where, sadly, writers of all ages are showing acute susceptibility to the syndrome.

In a New York magazine article by Frank Rich performsing what he passes off as analysis of the recent statement of President Donald Trump about Obamagate. Read it and lament over what has become of yet another formerly respectable journalist.

“Obamagate’, in Trump’s brilliant coinage, is a conspiracy so vast, a crime so dastardly, that it should guarantee his reelection as soon as he figures out how to tell voters exactly what it is. As best as I can glean from his spokespeople on the Rupert Murdoch payroll — at Fox News, the New York Post, and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal — it was a coup that involved both installing Trump in the White House so that he could preside over the most corrupt and incompetent administration in American history and propelling a beloved national hero, the Kremlin sycophant and former Obama official Michael Flynn, to prison. For a moment, it seemed that at least that second goal might be thwarted by Bill Barr’s effort to hand Flynn a Get Out of Jail Free card. But thanks to the deep-state intervention of a U.S. district judge in Washington this week, Flynn may end up behind bars after all. Obamagate Accomplished!”

Has Rich lost it? Is this dismissive gibberish meant to be facetious, sarcastic? Is it a pedantic attempt at reductio ad absurdum? — like Saturday’s Washington Post editorial board pronouncement of “ The absurd cynicism of ‘Obamagate’”.

Does Rich keep up with the news, or is he now filing from Joe Biden’s basement? Is Consortium News included in his diet of reading? Quick. Someone tell Rich that “Russia-Trump collusion” and the far-fetched charges that the Russian Internet Research Agency helped Trump become president — as well as the tall tale that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails — have all collapsed.

‘Statutory Senility’

My father, for many years a professor at Fordham Law School, used to speak jocularly of another all-too-familiar syndrome he nonetheless took seriously: he called it “the age of statutory senility.” As Chancellor of the Board of Regents, he resigned well before he reached that age, offering his own example to superannuated Board colleagues (to no avail).

These days, I think he would probably consider 70 the age of “statutory senility”, especially were he able to read the blather of once respected journalists — like Frank Rich, whose work he used to enjoy. Let’s make sure someone is working on a vaccine for the Trump Syndrome.

consortiumnews.com

If at some point in recent history Flynn was so terrified of being convicted of improper FARA registration (which could be treason) that he plead guilty strategically for mercy, it means that he currently feels that he can win this legal battle and be acquitted of the charges. Basically only now does he think his truth can win in a court of law. This newfound strength in Flynn’s belief in his own innocence implies is that the whole Special Counsel Robert Mueller/Russiagate thing has not only failed but is now going to be on the defensive.

Flynn’s counter accusations are not some sort of thing to do when you’re bored, it is a thing to do when one is sure they can win, so apparently he must have had some pretty strong evidence/tactics at-the-ready before revoking his guilty plea. He has had a few years worth of time to go to the media with his claim that Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandon Van Grack (during the plea bargain dealings) demanded that he provide false testimony against himself. Which means he is either very lazy or was sure things would only be worse if he did until now.

The former national security advisor growing a spine and standing up for himself probably has to do with the ever strengthening position of Trump in Washington. The Donald was under threat of impeachment even before taking office (which is so shockingly irrational and un-American that it should never be forgotten) and many thought he wouldn’t even survive a year in power before having to smell the coffee and go back to firing people on a reality show. A pillar of Trump’s strength has been his ability to turn the tables on Russiagate and attack the Democrats with their crimes and ethics violations that were a deep part of Ukrainegate/The Maidan. If the Left wouldn’t have pounced on Trump with Russia accusations he would have never had the opportunity to expose their work with and in Kiev. But they did and he has been wisely strengthening his American Presidency but swatting down attack after attack.

But Trump strengthening his position is not enough for Flynn to want to immediately run to the media to restore his legacy. There is a “known unknown” in this equation as Donald Rumsfeld would put it, that being the “why now” question. Flynn’s reversal could be the sign that Trump is going to shift from rightfully accusing certain Democrats of foul play to actually pushing for it to be proven in a court of law. For if the President and his allies are going to make a push against their enemies, it would sure help to get rid of that ugly “guilty plea” which looks so very bad on court documents and Mainstream Media headlines. In some ways Flynn’s plea bargain is a very large blotch on Trump’s legacy that needs to be erased before he can go forward so this could be the answer to the “why now” question.

Although Trump as the incumbent, who is far more popular than the talking heads will admit to, having a few timely convictions of Blue candidates would certainly help him clinch his second term and start if off with a lot of leeway for action, which he completely lacked the first time around. The best defense is a good offense, especially in Beltway schoolgirl mudslinging.

Some would say that this may be happening now because Trump has learned how to “play ball”. Meaning that this is why any attempts to pin him to Russia by lifelong professional politicians in large quantities have totally failed. Trump’s missile strike on Syria and later missile assassination of Iran’s beloved General Soleimani along with passionate verbal support for Israel have probably bought him a seat at the elite table or at least gotten the Orangeman out of the doghouse.

It is unclear if Trump is selling out, buying in, playing 3D chess, or just very lucky, but the Flynn reversal on pleading guilty is another sign of success and stability for Trump’s Presidency. We are very likely to see Trump’s accusers, probably starting with the Mueller Team, begin to get the fingers pointed back at them as Trump works his networking and favor giving magic from behind the Oval Office.

But regardless, if you haven’t read either of them, forcing someone to provide false witness (against themself) is a big “no-no” in both the Bible and the U.S. Constitution and if Flynn is innocent then this is a major victory for the U.S. Justice System.

Over the last month we have learned much more about the circumstances surrounding the departure of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. 

Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about a conversation with then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak; one on December 29, 2016 in which Flynn urged the Russians to "refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions that the US had imposed against Russia," and another conversation in which Kislyak told Flynn that Russia had decided to moderate its response following the request.

Nothing earth shattering, illegal, or collusive in the "witch hunt" sense – but Flynn was not forthcoming with the Justice Department, or Vice President Mike Pence. He was fired from his post and subsequently pleaded guilty in December 2017 to making false statements to the FBI. 

Flynn has been painted as a Russian stooge ever since – with critics pointing to his sitting next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a Russia Today (RT) dinner as "Exhibit A" that he was clearly a Kremlin puppet. US Green Party candidate Jill Stein was also in attendance. 

Except the Obama administration knew everything about the dinner, and Flynn briefed US intelligence officials on the trip, according to The Hill's John Solomon – whose claims his sources told him the contents of a classified briefing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in May 2017, which Grassley begged to be released to the 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," wrote Grassley in an August 25, 2017 letter to James Mattis and DIA Director Gen. Vincent Stewart. 

Via The Hill: 

Were the information Grassley requested made public, America would have learned this, according to my sources:

• Before Flynn made his infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow — as a retired general and then-adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — he alerted his former employer, the DIA.

• He then attended a “defensive” or “protective” briefing before he ever sat alongside Vladimir Putin at the Russia Today (RT) dinner, or before he talked with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

• The briefing educated and sensitized Flynn to possible efforts by his Russian host to compromise the former high-ranking defense official and prepared him for conversations in which he could potentially extract intelligence for U.S. agencies such as the DIA. 

• When Flynn returned from Moscow, he spent time briefing intelligence officials on what he learned during the Moscow contacts. Between two and nine intelligence officials attended the various meetings with Flynn about the RT event, and the information was moderately useful, about what one would expect from a public event, according to my sources.

In other words – when Obama's former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates publicly claimed Flynn had possibly been "compromised" by Moscow, the American public was denied the context surrounding the controversial RT dinner as the Justice Department remained silent.

Solomon notes that "Rather than a diplomatic embarrassment bordering on treason, Flynn’s conduct at the RT 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."

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. – The Hill

Of course, "there's no sugar-coating the mistakes Flynn did make," writes Solomon – noting that he misled the FBI and Pence – and that Flynn didn't file foreign-lobbying paperwork for money he received from Turkish business (of course, neither did "Steele Dossier" author Christopher Steele, who influenced the 2016 US election with his largely unverified anti-Trump opposition research). 

That said – the narrative that Flynn was a Russian stooge "as evidenced" by the RT dinner is now dead. Moreover, Flynn was never charged with anything remotely related to the event, and he came back to the United States and reported intelligence which would ultimately benefit his country.

As Solomon puts it, "the first accounts of the Russia-Flynn story — like many others in the still-unproven collusion narrative — should be amended to reflect that the retired general acted like a patriot, not a traitor, when he visited Moscow for the RT event."

zerohedge.com

Photo: Flickr

The first call was initiated at the request of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and related to Russia’s possible use of its United Nations Security Council veto to stop a resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlements, as the Barack Obama Administration had decided to abstain to send a message of disapproval to Tel Aviv. If Russia had agreed, which it did not, it would have meant conniving with Moscow to do something sought by Israel and opposed by the elected government still in power in Washington.

The second call possibly was requested by Donald Trump himself and was made while Flynn was lying on a beach in the Dominican Republic. It sought Russian agreement not to escalate the tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats that had been set in motion by the outgoing Obama administration. Russia delayed any possible expulsions, eventually implementing them when the Trump administration proved unable to mitigate other sanctions put in place by Obama. Both phone calls took place after the American election. Neither had anything to do with possible collusion regarding the election.

Flynn’s admission that he was lying is believed to be part of an agreement with Mueller, presumably eliminating a possible jail sentence and reducing the actual penalty to payment of a fine. Mueller will undoubtedly seek Flynn’s evidence confirming that he and both Kushner and Trump were all acting in violation of the Logan Act of 1799, which they quite possibly had never heard of, that bars private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments on behalf of the United States. At the time of the phone calls, neither Flynn nor Kushner nor Trump held any actual government office, but it should also be pointed out that no one has ever been convicted under the Logan Act and the de facto status of an incoming administration as a precedent for engaging with foreign powers has never been tested.

The Logan Act aside, the real purpose of the investigation is to “get” Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. If it were otherwise, Mueller would be looking hard at the Israeli connection since it is clear from the time line that Israel had approached Kushner who then asked Flynn to make the phone call. The New York Times described the sequence of events as “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel…” The Israeli overture is a clear example of actual foreign government interference in United States politics and foreign policy, but the interference was by Israel and not by Russia.

The Flynn case is also a prime example of how the American security services have been politically corrupted, but it is unlikely that Mueller will have any interest in that aspect of the case as the investigation itself has become little more than a political witch hunt in which the Washington-New York Establishment is seeking to explain why its candidate lost in November. Flynn was interviewed by the FBI regarding his two phone conversations on January 24th shortly after assumed office as National Security Adviser. During his interview, he was not made aware that the Bureau already had recordings and transcripts of his phone conversations, so, in a manner of speaking, he was being set-up to fail. Mis-remembering, forgetting or attempting to avoid implication of others in the administration would inevitably all be plausibly construed as lying since the FBI knew exactly what was said.

The argument used to justify the possible Flynn entrapment by the FBI, i.e. that there was unauthorized contact with a foreign official, is in itself curious as such contact is not in itself illegal. And it also opens the door to the Bureau’s investigating other individuals who have committed no crime but who find that they cannot recall details of phone calls they were parties to that were being recorded by the government. That can easily be construed as “lying” or “perjury” with consequences that include possible prison time.