Barack Obama and the deep-state establishment are continuing to “fundamentally” change America. That’s the upshot of allegations made by many observers and by officials speaking anonymously. And the Monday evening resignation of White House national security advisor Michael Flynn — ostensibly because he had an inappropriate phone conversation with Russian official Sergey Kislyak — is just the first outward sign of this, the shadow government at work.
The Flynn affair makes clear just how wide, deep, murky and entrenched is the Washington swamp — and that its daggers are out. The Washington Free Beacon, citing sources in and out of the White House, reported Tuesday that former Obama officials and loyalists waged a secret campaign to oust Flynn while others assert that an intelligence agency was settling a score.
Flynn’s resignation, wrote the Beacon, “is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.”
Along with the recent court opinions blocking Trump’s constitutional travel ban targeting terrorist-spawning countries, this illustrates just how effective this effort to “handicap” our national security can be.
The Beacon continued, “The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes — the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber — included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility, multiple sources revealed.”
“‘It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him,’ said one veteran national security adviser with close ties to the White House team. ‘This pattern reminds me of the lead up to the Iran deal, and probably features the same cast of characters,’” the Beacon also informs.
Quite ominously, the site also tells us that this deep-state operation was “primarily focused on discrediting Flynn, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, in order to handicap the Trump administration’s efforts to disclose secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration.” Much is secret here, apparently — and some powerful people want to keep it that way.
One would suspect that these hidden Iran-deal details might illustrate more fully how Obama imperiled our nation.
In fact, it appears Flynn may be one of this affair’s more innocent players. Calling his ouster a “political assassination,” Bloomberg’s Eli Lake notes that it’s “not even clear that Flynn lied. He says in his resignation letter that he did not deliberately leave out elements of his conversations with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak when he recounted them to Vice President Mike Pence.”
Lake continues, “The New York Times and Washington Post reported that the transcript of the phone call reviewed over the weekend by the White House could be read different ways. One White House official with knowledge of the conversations told me that the Russian ambassador raised the sanctions to Flynn and that Flynn responded that the Trump team would be taking office in a few weeks and would review Russia policy and sanctions. That’s neither illegal nor improper.”
Moreover, David P. Goldman (a.k.a. Spengler) points out at PJ Media, “Senior officials speak to their counterparts in other countries all the time, and for obvious reasons do not want these conversations to become public. The intelligence community, though, was taping Flynn’s discussions, and the transcripts (of whose existence we are told but whose contents we have not seen) were used to embarrass him.”
As for supposed illegality, Goldman asserts that
the allegation of various Democrats that Flynn violated the 1799 Logan Act is silly. No-one ever has been prosecuted under the Logan Act. It forbids U.S. citizens from communicating with foreign governments “with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.” Flynn reportedly was talking about prospective policies of an administration that would take office in a matter of days; it is absurd to construe such discussions, whatever they may have contained, as an intent to undermine disputes with the United States.
But the legality of the leak damaging Flynn is a different matter. As he said himself, reports WND.com, “In some of these cases, you’re talking about stuff that’s taken off of a classified system and given to a reporter…. It’s a criminal act. This is a crime. It’s not just a wink and a nod.”
While Flynn said he doesn’t know which intelligence agency released the information, American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson puts the onus on a specific one, writing, “Make no mistake: we have just witnessed an operation by members of the CIA to take out a high official of our own government. An agency widely believed to have brought down democratically elected governments overseas is now practicing the same dark arts in domestic American politics. Almost certainly, its new head, Mike Pompeo, was not consulted.”
Note that both Trump and Flynn have been critics of the CIA.
Left-wing senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had predicted this type of intelligence-community skullduggery January 3. Saying that Trump was “dumb” to question the community’s assessment of Russia’s cyber activities, he warned, “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” reported The Hill.
But Lifson issues a different warning, one for all of us: “This interference in domestic politics by the CIA should be regarded as a major threat to our democracy, but of course our Trump-hating domestic media are reveling in a major point scored against the new president.”
This affair raises an interesting point. The media’s narrative on Trump’s presidential victory has been that the “Russians hacked the election,” referring to the allegation it was the Vladimir Putin government that provided WikiLeaks with the e-mails damaging to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats (WikiLeaks’ head, Julian Assange, denies this). Yet given that the information on Flynn was illegally leaked, can it now be said that the establishment hacked Flynn and the Trump administration?
However it’s framed, the ominous reality is that Trump faces a government bureaucracy infested with establishment enemies, many of whom are hard left-wing ideologues. Bill Clinton put such people in place — George W. Bush did nothing to drain that swamp — and Obama’s hires ratcheted the radicalism up a few more notches.
Moreover, as radio host Rush Limbaugh pointed out on the Wednesday edition of his program, now that the establishment has tasted blood in the Flynn ouster, they’ll be further emboldened to seek other administration scalps.
Cleansing the Washington bureaucracy of this shadow government and its treasonous spirit may be every bit the uphill battle Trump’s presidential bid was. But with the deep-state statists being intent upon making it impossible for Trump to govern, it’s entirely possible that if he can’t topple them, they will topple him.
