In a rare move, a three-judge panel ordered the judge in the criminal case against Flynn to respond to his attorney's petition for a writ of mandamus.

Yes, they didn't want Trump elected, but there was far more to it than that. //

Flynn not only made it clear that he wanted to undo the Iran Deal, he also broadcast his determination to find the documents detailing the secret deals between Obama and Iran, and to publicize them. With Flynn on the march, the outgoing administration was keen to shield the JCPOA. Obama diplomats consulted with their European counterparts and gave the clerical regime more sanctions relief, even after the Senate agreed with a 99 to 0 vote to renew the Iran Sanctions Act. Kerry called his Iranian counterpart to tell him not to worry. //

Recall that Obama was not profoundly interested in Russia prior to the election. While it’s easy to look back and assume he was all aboard the collusion train in 2016, the truth is that he was mostly AWOL, allowing Russia to run roughshod when he thought it would benefit him. As Smith points out, it was Hillary Clinton who wanted to use Russia as a campaign issue. Meanwhile, Obama made some empty threats and essentially did nothing.

In other words, the idea that this was always about Russia doesn’t add up. What makes far more sense is that Obama originally turned his sights on Flynn over the Iran deal. He wanted to protect his legacy and cover up his administration’s misdeeds. To do that, he needed to buy time. Going after Flynn and eventually piggy-backing off the newly founded Russia hysteria afforded him exactly that.

In the end, Obama was such a narcissist, so wanting o protect his “greatest” achievement, that he was willing to do just about anything. If that meant reviving a previously deemed non-viable case against Flynn to stop him from uncovering what had happened, then so be it. Pretty soon, Flynn had been fired and H.R. McMaster, who largely supported the Iran deal, was put in place at the urging of the established order.

And he’d have probably gotten away with it too if not for Sidney Powell, who came onto the scene and decided she wasn’t going to let what happened stand.

A former federal prosecutor breaks it down.

The tapes meet the Steele Dossier standard and we know what that means //

Laocoon
2 hours ago
“… But we do have a solution. A special counsel. Department of Justice regulations say this about the appointment of a special counsel: …”

With all due respect sir, not only NO…but HELL NO!

I remain your #1 fan but this is crazy-talk. Special Counsels and Independent Counsels before them…with few exceptions…have proven to be complete disasters. They unilaterally expand their investigations, stretch their charter to the edge of the laugh-test envelope, inevitably abuse their powers, almost always shift their focus to finding even the most tangential wrongdoing by REPUBLICANS, and quickly begin to operate like the thoughtcrime police from 1984.

A Special Counsel on Biden will inevitably morph into an investigation of Rudy, his collusion with Russia to influence the 2020 election, and pressure the entire Trump administration brought to bear on the government of Ukraine to play ball with Trump. AGAIN. He/she will try to indict Don Jr. for obstructing their investigations of Rudy, Ivanka for having a Russian-sounding name, Jay Sekulow for opposing Trump’s impeachment, Sidney Powell for wearing white pants before Memorial Day, Kellyanne Conway for aggravated mopery, Rick Grenell for conspiracy to dawdle, and AG Barr for…whatever.

In my admittedly uninformed opinion, I think that doing another Special Counsel after 3 years of the Mueller/Weissman inquisition is pure crazy-talk. Remember…distinguished Republican former Judge Lawrence Walsh investigated Iran-Contra for 7 damned years producing nothing but 2 overturned verdicts against Republican NSC officials and an indictment of Casper Weinberger for lying to his freakin’ diary. Good Republican Patrick Fitzgerald studiously spent 4 years ignoring Republican-appointed State Department official Richard Armitage (who Fitzgerald knew about on day 1 of his “investigation”) to go after the innocent Republican Scooter Libby and convict him in a pathetic tilting-at-windmills attempt to get VP Cheney. I won’t even go into the serial horror-show that was the 3 year Mueller inquisition.

Special Counsels are an abominable extra-Constitutional perversion of justice. They have led to nothing but partisan hatred, financial ruin, broken lives, disillusion with the justice system, FBI corruption, and uncounted civil rights abuses. The worst of them are nominal Republicans who typically only consider criminal charges against Republicans. No more Special Counsels EVER…under any circumstances. Ceterum autem censeo Specialis Consiliator esse delendam!

The tapes meet the Steele Dossier standard and we know what that means

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.” //

The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.

In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”

“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”

A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer. //

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

David EasonMay 15

The crime of lying to the FBI is premised upon the duty to speak truthfully in response to questions posed in the course a legitimate investigation. If the investigation is not legitimate, there is no duty to speak truthfully, hence no prosecutable crime. State power cannot criminalize lies that are immaterial to legitimate state purposes. And if we allow that to occur, there will be no limit to state power.

We do not have to sit here and grouse that "the media" won't cover this. Sure it will. And that's because we're the media too. //

If this were a Republican implicated, it’d be treated as the largest political scandal of the last hundred years.

And so it would. Therefore: Let’s treat it as the largest political scandal of the last hundred years. //

Abusing a term in office to employ the vast intelligence-gathering capabilities of the United States to conduct political surveillance on the opposition party, and then to use the Department of Justice to obstruct and sabotage the opposition party’s incoming elected President is — hello? — not a small thing. This isn’t like sending a team of clumsy goons to break into the other party’s campaign headquarters to plant a few bugs. This is using entire government agencies, and all the awesome tools at their disposal, to collect opposition research and to feed it into their party’s own campaign. And when they lost anyway, to throw sand in the gears of the next Administration. You know, the one The American People had just elected.

They did this. The Democrats did this. The Obama Administration did this. Career Civil Servants did this. This is Watergate on steroids. If we don’t stop it right here, right now, our elections will become mere formalities, as The Other Guys win one term after the other by seemingly miraculous means. //

The danger from what The Democrats — including their fans in the Civil Service — have done here is so obvious, so stark, and so threatening, that not even cats should need to be told which way to run. If we don’t all see the common interest in keeping the government itself from becoming an arm of the opposition political party, we are sure to lose this nation to a group of vicious and corrupt totalitarians who will do anything to gain and to hold power. //

The threat here isn’t from Obama. He’s gone. The threat is from all the nascent Brennans and Comeys who are brewing right now in our Civil Service, and who will do this again if we don’t nail the people who did it this time. //

For instance: how many people know that as early as 2015, before Trump was even nominated, the FBI Counterintelligence Division (that’s Strzok & Co.) were totally abusing the NSA’s database of texts and emails to repeatedly snoop on a group of “U.S. persons,” something that the NSA database is not even supposed to be used for? The FBI people even deputized contractors to conduct queries on their own, with almost no controls on what was done with the information so collected. That is so against the law. What the FBI was doing got so bad that the Director of the NSA ran an audit on them and decided to lock them out of the database. Very few Americans know this was going on. But we do. We know it for a fact.

There are a lot of these facts. It isn’t just Flynn. It isn’t just Carter Page. It isn’t just FISA. It isn’t just an FBI Director who lied under oath to the Court; or a Director of National Intelligence who lied under oath to Congress; or even a CIA Director who persuaded foreign allies to run sting operations on U.S. citizens for political purposes. It’s all of that, and a lot more. Only a tiny percentage of the public has the vaguest idea how much of it there really is. Things we know for a fact.

And the media know it.

When former president Barack Obama told supporters last week that the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former White House National Security Adviser Mike Flynn is a “threat to the rule of law,” he was relying wholly on the fiction, willingly propagated for years by a pliant media, that the Russia-Trump collusion probe launched by his administration was lawful and legitimate.

But of course it wasn’t. A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup.

If you haven’t picked that up from the news media, it’s not your fault. Instead of grappling with the implications of newly released details about what Obama officials were doing to undermine the incoming Trump administration during the transition, the mainstream media have fixated on Trump’s use of the term “Obamagate,” dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

Today's filing was long overdue. //

So, on January 4, 2017, the FBI agents and supervisors on Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor had determined there was no evidence, including in the transcripts of the calls, to support the proposition that Gen. Flynn was “wittingly or unwittingly” involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation that was a crime or a threat to national security.

That determination meant that had the closing of the file taken place as contemplated, any subsequent effort to interview Gen. Flynn would not be part of a pending or open investigation of him. That doesn’t mean the FBI could not interview Gen. Flynn — it means that the FBI could only interview Gen. Flynn about the specific matters still open with regard to Crossfire Hurricane. Questions put to Gen. Flynn about any other subject would not be deemed “material” to the pending investigation that justified an interview.

Whether or not interview answers given to FBI Agents are “material” is a question of fact that the jury must decide at trial. So “materiality” is an issue the government must prove as part of its case-in-chief.

The legal question is generally formulated as follows: “To establish “materiality” … it is sufficient that the statement have the capacity or a natural tendency to influence the determination required to be made.” //

FBI agents are not empowered by law to questions people on “spec”. Their questions must relate to an authorized pending investigation. We know now that the pending investigation of Gen. Flynn was set to be closed on January 4, but it was then kept open at the direction of top FBI management. Why was it kept open when there was a finding of “no derogatory information” on the original justification for opening the investigation? The transcripts of his conversations with the Russian Ambassador were known to the FBI agents who were closing the investigation. Any fertile line of cross-examination at trial would have involved running down the “pretextual” reasons that were offered — such as the Logan Act canard — for justifying keeping the matter open in order to interview Gen. Flynn. //

This goes back to the three questions I posed at the outset — 1) What are the elements of the “false statement” crime? Materiality is one element. 2) Who are the witnesses and what evidence is admissible to prove that element? The witnesses are badly compromised by expressions of bias and potentially illegal conduct. 3) Did anything happen during the course of the investigation to making proving an element difficult or impossible? The FBI was set to close out the investigation, but then decided to keep it open on transparently pretextual grounds in order to justify the interview, and there is a written record of that fact.

...when you don't have facts or law on your side, you just make stuff up and shout //

it does not support the Justice Department’s assertion that the continued prosecution of the case against Mr. Flynn, who pleaded guilty to knowingly making material false statements to the FBI, ‘would not serve the interests of justice.’”

This is her second effort to claim the “materiality” argument for her side — but it is also the second time she has done so without explaining how his answers were material, or how the position of DOJ on the issue is wrong. //

DOJ’s position is clearly articulated — FBI internal documents state that the FBI should not have been investigating Gen. Flynn at the time of his interview.

“No further investigative efforts are warranted.” Those words were written by the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team. In a courtroom that would be called an “Admission”. //

Who was running that investigation? The Crossfire Hurricane team was running it. What did the Crossfire Hurricane team write about the investigation? They wrote as follows:

Following the compilation of the above information , the [CROSSFIRE HURRICANE] team determined that CROSSFIRE RAZOR was no longer a viable candidate as part of the larger CROSSFIRE HURRICANE umbrella case.

Again, that’s not AG Barr, that’s not US Attorney Jensen, that’s not US Attorney Durham – that’s the “Crossfire Hurricane Team” after it spent 5 months investigating General Flynn as part of that investigation. //

Finally, we get to the “Crown Jewel” of obfuscation and misdirection – the completely bogus “Flynn was possibly compromised by his lies” nonsensical claptrap.

How exactly can Gen. Flynn be compromised when both the U.S. and the Russians knew every word said by Gen. Flynn in the conversations? How could Russia “compromise” Gen. Flynn by threatening to reveal information the US government already knew? //

That’s three times she has claimed the interview answers were “material”, but also three times she has failed to explain why and how that was the case. Three strikes and she’s OUT!!!

The DOJ motion goes into great detail as to why they were not material. Is it too much to ask that the folks clutching their pearls over the dismissal to offer up an explanation for why DOJ’s view is wrong??

No wonder they're all nervous...

And there lie the denizens of the deep state, bloodied and bruised and barely breathing in the muck of the Washington swamp.

Federalist Senior Contributor Margot Cleveland joins Ben Domenech on another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour to discuss the corruption that led to the case against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.

Cleveland’s work has been instrumental in highlighting the wrongdoings of the Obama Administration’s mistreatment and mishandling of the case against Flynn.

In her latest article, Cleveland explains the importance of the FBI’s memo exonerating Flynn.

“The unsealing of the FBI’s closing memo on the Flynn investigation made two things clear: The FBI had no proper predication for investigating Flynn, and the confidential human source should be investigated for making false statements to the FBI,” Cleveland wrote.

Cleveland and Domenech break down the timeline and corruption behind the Flynn case.

The Ohio congressman reflects on his investigation of the Russian collusion hoax following the revelation of explosive new facts in the case against Michael Flynn:

We were right about everything.

After the documents about the effort to trap him were finally revealed last week, he posted this image:

[Video pans across woods and rests on American flag flying.]

General Flynn
✔
@GenFlynn
My grandson Travis...“and JUSTICE for ALL” ⚖️❤️🙏🇺🇸

A lot of lying has just been exposed.

by James A. Gagliano
| May 04, 2020 12:45 PM

The time has come to cease affording the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team generous benefit of the doubt. A steady stream of unflattering revelations, beginning with a report by the Justice Department's inspector general into egregious FISA abuses last December, has relentlessly pounded the reputation of my former agency. Now, further irrefutable proof emerges that a small cabal of FBI headquarters decision-makers was hellbent on undoing a presidency.

I know it sounds strange to hear me make such an accusation. I’m the guy who long attempted to thread the needle, accounting for honest human frailties, trusting that mistakes should not always be chalked up to malice or sinister intent. Cautious skepticism was a default mindset that served me well across a quarter century as an FBI investigator. That condition failed me here because one thing is clear.

Michael Flynn got railroaded.

Careful examination of fresh facts related to Flynn pleading guilty to Title 18 U.S. Code § 1001 (essentially, lying to a federal agent) provides an eye-popping and clear-cut case of investigative inconsistencies and partisan political bias. At the request of defense attorney Sidney Powell, who is seeking to have the retired lieutenant general’s plea withdrawn, additional evidence related to the Flynn case has recently been released by the prosecution. According to Flynn’s defense team, some uncovered FBI notes illustrate a concerted effort by former FBI Director James Comey's team to set Flynn up. //

The FBI is charged with enforcing federal law. Nowhere in our identified mission and priorities exists a goal to set a perjury trap or, absent evidence of a prosecutable crime, get someone fired. Why even consider this an objective?

To borrow a line from comedian Jeff Foxworthy: If this doesn’t bother you, you might be a party-over-country partisan.

Since the FBI was already in possession of the transcript of Flynn’s telephone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, what exactly was to be gained by the interview? Nothing except the potential to jam him up and get him removed as national security adviser. It was never going to charge him for violations of the Logan Act or the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Even Robert Mueller’s team could have done so. It passed. These laws are seldom, if ever, enforced. Just ask the lobbyists on K Street. //

So Strzok (famously fired for his partisan text exchanges with Page), along with the FBI official who overruled case personnel and ordered that the Flynn case remain open after recommendations that it be closed for lack of any evidence, had his opportunity.

What happened next infuriates me.

The Flynn FD-302 interview notes appear to have been manipulated by Strzok and Page. Pientka was apparently the note taker. Consistent with FBI protocols, Strzok, as a party to the interview, can certainly discuss recollections with Pientka prior to the final document being approved by both. But somehow, Page, the DOJ attorney who was not present at the interview and was not an FBI agent, was involved in the edits. //

The uncomfortable truth is that the cases focusing on Trump (Crossfire Hurricane) and Hillary Clinton (Midyear Exam) were handled inconsistently. The Clinton investigation (which Obama-era Attorney General Loretta Lynch famously suggested be referred to as a "matter," not an investigation) was not handled aggressively or in keeping with the standards of the apolitical ethos of the FBI.

As former Rep. Trey Gowdy sarcastically described the stark differences between the hyperaggressive tactics employed against Flynn and the ludicrous preconditions that the FBI generously conceded to in order to interview Clinton in 2016:
“She had a medium-sized law firm in the room with her. They gave the questions to her lawyer before they interviewed her, and they most assuredly told her there’s a consequence for lying. None of which they did for Michael Flynn.”

The final nail in the coffin of those who pretend political bias did not influence the FBI’s decisions in 2016 and 2017 is a text exchange between Strzok and Page on Feb. 25, 2016, discussing how to approach the Clinton interview:

Page: “One more thing: She might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear. You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more DOJ than FBI?”

Strzok: “I called Bill and relayed what we discussed. He agrees.”

Compare that to Priestap's quote: “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or get him to lie, so we can get him fired?”

The contrast is stunning. No plausible explanation exists here other than rank partisan, political bias.

I’ll say it again: Michael Flynn got railroaded.

James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John's University. Gagliano is a member of the board of directors of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.

New court documents finally handed over to Flynn’s lawyer contain exculpatory evidence that has been long sought, yet concealed until now. //

Michael Flynn is the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern times — an innocent man who was unfairly targeted by the FBI, wrongfully prosecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller, and coerced into a guilty plea under threat. //

New court documents finally handed over to Flynn’s lawyer contain exculpatory evidence that has been long sought, yet concealed until now. The charge against him should be dismissed. Then, he should sue the very people and government that persecuted him under the pretext of a legitimate prosecution. //

It is now beyond dispute that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn committed no crimes. But, it appears that top FBI officials and prosecutors may have.