Highly Recommended: Deep State Enmity For Michael Flynn--Why?
For those who are not familiar with Michael Flynn's history of serious conflict with the Deep State's intelligence establishment--best personified by James Clapper and John Brennan, but including others in the NSC--Larry C. Johnson has a fine summary account this morning. I say "summary," but it does in fact go into a fair amount of detail. It would be unfair to quote at length, so I simply urge anyone who is interested to follow the link: Michael Flynn Did Not Lie, He Was Framed by The FBI .
As you can see, the title of Johnson's piece doesn't convey the actual substance of the article, which focuses on Flynn's history of conflict with the intel establishment. On the other hand, Johnson is right to emphasize that well meaning narratives that speak of the FBI having "got Flynn to lie". In fact, Flynn did not lie . The frame up of Flynn was, as Johnson says, "a punishment in search of a crime." Johnson also rightly stresses the lack of a proper foundation for investigating Flynn--a crucial point.
What follows are some particularly incisive sentences, plucked from the midst of the detail, to whet your appetite for the entire article:
Flynn was perceived as a threat to the CIA and refused to cook the intelligence for the Obama Administration while he was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In 2010, Flynn co-authored an important analysis, Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. Flynn's key conclusion warned that the U.S. intelligence effort in Afghanistan was failing:
Flynn's work did not sit well with Jim Clapper and John Brennan. John Schindler, a rabid anti-Trumper, wrote a hit piece on Flynn in December 2017, that highlights the Deep State anger at Flynn.
This earned Michael Flynn the lasting enmity of DNI Director Jim Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan. Flynn would not play ball in down playing the jihadist threat in Syria.
Michael Flynn did not go quietly into retirement. He became a vocal critic of Obama's failed policies in the Middle East:
This made him a target of both Clapper and Brennan. When Brennan put together a CIA Task Force in the late summer of 2015, I believe that one of the targets of the intelligence collection from that effort was Michael Flynn.
Here's Johnson's hard hitting conclusion, which I like because it emphasizes the methodical, directed nature of the Barr/Durham investigation:
Michael Flynn's contact with the Russian Government and other members of the UN Security Council in the month preceding Trump's inauguration was appropriate and normal. He did nothing wrong. But President Obama's henchmen, including James Comey, John Brennan, Jim Clapper and Susan Rice were out for blood and relied on the FBI to stick the shiv into General Flynn's belly.
That travesty of justice is being methodically and systematically revealed in the documents delivered to the Flynn defense team thanks to the efforts of Attorney General William Barr. Barr is relying on the US Attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri (EDMO) to review the case and provide Brady material to the Flynn defense team. This is by the book. Doing it this way provides the legal foundation for future prosecution of the FBI and prosecutors who abused the General Flynn's rights and violated the Constitution. Stay tuned.