FBI to Michael Flynn: “Trust us. You don’t need a lawyer”

Image via wwaytv3.com

 

 

Flopping Aces

By DrJohn

On January 24, 2017, the FBI interviewed Michael Flynn. At the time, Flynn was found to have done nothing wrong.

The FBI eavesdropped on telephone calls between President Donald Trump’s national security adviser and the Russian ambassador but found nothing improper, a U.S. intelligence official said.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said late Monday that there was never a formal “investigation” of the calls in December between retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn and Sergei Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador in Washington.

According to the source, who was confirming a Washington Post report earlier Monday, intelligence officials merely listened in as part of routine eavesdropping on Kislyak.

Yesterday we learned something critical- proof that Michael Flynn was set up by the FBI to take a fall. Many have wondered why Flynn would talk to the FBI without a lawayer present. It turns out that the FBI told Flynn NOT to include a lawyer.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who arranged the bureau’s interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017 — the interview that ultimately led to Flynn’s guilty plea on one count of making false statements — suggested Flynn not have a lawyer present at the session, according to newly-filed court documents. In addition, FBI officials, along with the two agents who interviewed Flynn, decided specifically not to warn him that there would be penalties for making false statements because the agents wanted to ensure that Flynn was “relaxed” during the session.

The new information, drawn from McCabe’s account of events plus the FBI agents’ writeup of the interview — the so-called 302 report — is contained in a sentencing memo filed Tuesday by Flynn’s defense team.

Citing McCabe’s account, the sentencing memo says that shortly after noon on Jan. 24 — the fourth day of the new Trump administration — McCabe called Flynn on a secure phone in Flynn’s West Wing office. The two men discussed business briefly and then McCabe said that he “felt that we needed to have two of our agents sit down” with Flynn to discuss Flynn’s talks with Russian officials during the presidential transition.

Who led this charade? None other than Andrew McCabe:

McCabe, by his own account, urged Flynn to talk to the agents alone, without a lawyer present. “I explained that I thought the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between [Flynn] and the agents only,” McCabe wrote. “I further stated that if LTG Flynn wished to include anyone else in the meeting, like the White House counsel for instance, that I would need to involve the Department of Justice. [Flynn] stated that this would not be necessary and agreed to meet with the agents without any additional participants.”

Worst of all?

“The agents did not provide Gen. Flynn with a warning of the penalties for making a false statement under 18 U.S.C. 1001 before, during, or after the interview,” the Flynn memo says. According to the 302, before the interview, McCabe and other FBI officials “decided the agents would not warn Flynn that it was a crime to lie during an FBI interview because they wanted Flynn to be relaxed, and they were concerned that giving the warnings might adversely affect the rapport.”

They screwed him royally. This is atrocious. This is how the Comey/McCabe cabal ran the FBI. The country is once again reminded of the two tiered justice system established by James Comey; one for the democrats, and another for everyone else.

hillary clinton’s aides were given immunity.

hillary and her aides were allowed to destroy evidence.

hillary and her aides were allowed to dictate the terms of the investigation and interviews.

Cheryl Mills was allowed to sit in on hillary’s FBI interview. Andy McCarthy:

Finally, something else about those lawyers. I nearly fell out of my chair upon reading the very first paragraph of the notes of Clinton’s interview, which identifies the lawyers for Clinton who were permitted to be present for the interview. Among them is Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s longtime confidant and chief-of-staff at the State Department.

Readers may recall that I suggested back in May that “the fix” was in in the investigation of the Clinton emails. The reason was that the Justice Department was allowing Cheryl Mills – a witness, if not a subject, of the investigation – to invoke attorney-client privilege on behalf of Mrs. Clinton in order to thwart the FBI’s attempt to inquire into the procedure used to produce Clinton’s emails to the State Department. Mills was a participant in that procedure – and it is the procedure in which, we now know, well over 30,000 emails were attempted to be destroyed, including several thousand that contained government-related business.

When she worked for Clinton at State, Mills was not acting in the capacity of a lawyer – not for then-Secretary Clinton and not for the State Department. Moreover, as Clinton’s chief-of-staff, Mills was intimately involved in issues related to Clinton’s private email set up, the discussions about getting her a secure BlackBerry similar to President Obama’s, and questions that were raised (including in FOIA requests) about Clinton’s communications.

hillary’s FBI interview was neither under oath nor recorded.

Paul Sperry reported that FBI lawyer James Baker wanted to indict hillary clinton but was overruled by you guessed it- James Comey.

James Comey is a pompous lying jackass who needs a good enema. Mueller should also get one. Flynn was framed- as I said nearly a year ago. Mueller then went on to ruin Flynn financially and finally got Flynn to cop a plea when Mueller threatened Flynn’s son with the same.

Michael Flynn was a three star general with 33 years of service, five of them in combat. He deserves better.

Want more proof that this is pure politics? The leak of the Flynn-Kislyak conversation is an egregious felony but Mueller has zero interest in it. As the Russian collusion fantasy falls apart completely democrats are turning to Trump’s personal finances.

It’s not about justice. It’s all politics and it needs to end. Mueller has created crimes that did not exist prior to his investigation.

Enough.

BTW, so you know:

In one striking detail, footnotes in the Flynn memo say the 302 report cited was dated Aug. 22, 2017 — nearly seven months after the Flynn interview. It is not clear why the report would be written so long after the interview itself.

Clearly, it went down that way so someone could rewrite it to incriminate Flynn.

Yes, Virginia, there is a deep state. And it’s at State

Image via kwese.com

 

Flopping Aces

By DrJohn

Over the last 18 months, democrats have been fond of saying that the walls are closing in on Donald Trump. So much so, that David Rutz of the Washington Free Beacon put together a hilarious montage of it:

Well, the walls are closing in. On Bruce Ohr and the deep state. The conspiracy is being ripped from the clutches of the FBI and the DOJ and pushed into the light of day. Yesterday Devin Nunes has some very interesting things to say. He asserted that exculpatory evidence was left out of the FISA app on Carter Page:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes claimed Monday that the FBI and Justice Department failed to include exculpatory evidence in surveillance warrant applications against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“There is exculpatory evidence that we have seen, of classified documents that need to be declassified,” Nunes said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“Exculpatory in nature in what way? Exculpatory in what way?” Hannity asked.

“In that the Carter Page FISA when the judges should have been presented with this exculpatory evidence that the FBI and DOJ had,” Nunes replied.

Then he went on to leave a teaser:

The pieces fall into place. All the Russian dossier roads lead right to Hillary Clinton

 

Flopping Aces

By DrJohn

Last night another shoe dropped in the Russian “collusion” mystery which largely completed the puzzle of the dossier.

We learned of the massive financial tie between Alexander Downer and the Clinton’s:

Former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s role in securing $25 million in aid from his country to help the Clinton Foundation fight AIDS is chronicled in decade-old government memos archived on the Australian foreign ministry’s website.

Downer and former President Clinton jointly signed a Memorandum of Understanding in February 2006 that spread out the grant money over four years for a project to provide screening and drug treatment to AIDS patients in Asia.

Sounds very nice on its face, but it was mishandled.

The materials Smith is giving the FBI focus on a 2006 memorandum of understanding between the Australian government and the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton HIV/AIDs Initiative (CHAI). Smith claims the foundation received a “$25M financial advantage dishonestly obtained by deception” as a result of actions by Bill Clinton and Downer, who was then Australia’s minister of foreign affairs.

Also included in the Smith materials are evidence he believes shows “corrupt October 2006 backdating of false tender advertisements purporting to advertise the availability of a $15 million contract to provide HIV/AIDS services in Papua New Guinea on behalf of the Australian government after an agreement was already in place to pay the Clinton Foundation and/or associates.”

A third complaint concerns what Smith describes as “the $10 million financial advantage dishonestly obtained by deception between April 1, 2008, and Sept. 25, 2008, at Washington, D.C., New York, New York, and Canberra Australia involving an MOU between the Australian government, the “Clinton Climate Initiative,” and the purported “Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute Inc.”

You’ll remember that Downer is the person who tipped off his government about his meeting with George Papadopoulos in a London bar in 2016 that democrats, who used to claim that the Russian dossier was everything, now assert that the meeting between these two was the spark for the Russian investigation. Oddly, the FBI did not disclose any of it.

Downer, now Australia’s ambassador to London, provided the account of a conversation with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos at a London bar in 2016 that became the official reason the FBI opened the Russia counterintelligence probe.

But lawmakers say the FBI didn’t tell Congress about Downer’s prior connection to the Clinton Foundation. Republicans say they are concerned the new information means nearly all of the early evidence the FBI used to justify its election-year probe of Trump came from sources supportive of the Clintons, including the controversial Steele dossier.

This disclosure completes what The Hill reporter Alison Spann called the “four pillars” supporting the Russian dossier

Christopher Steele: Paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC and who paid Kremlin operatives for the dirt on Trump

(Steele shopped the dossier to numerous journalists in the summer of 2016 after calling his buddies in the Kremlin for dirt on Trump. He ever went to Russia for the information)

Michael Isikoff: Wrote the Yahoo article based on the information fed to him be Steele.

Sid Blumenthal: Fed information to Christopher Steele via the Bruce Ohr at the obama State Department.

Alexander Downer: Now tied directly to the Clinton’s

It is also very curious that Downer just happened to sit next to Papadopoulos at the very same London bar and strike up a conversation about Hillary’s emails. What are the odds?

All of the information in the dossier ties directly to the Clinton’s. The circle closes. One has to wonder- were the Russians even involved at all?

Let’s add one more part- the Clinton’s bought Andrew McCabe and compromised him earlier.

You have to say this about the Clinton’s – they invest well.

Syria’s use of chemical weapons should frighten you about obama’s deal with Iran

Image via conservativedailypost.com

 

Flopping Aces

Accolades from both sides of the aisle and from foreign policy experts continue to flow to Donald Trump for his surgical strike in Syria.

Christopher Kozak, a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, agreed the strike was a necessary development toward reestablishing U.S. deterrence, but stressed that the administration needs to persist in deterrent measures to reap lasting results.

“The key point is that outside actors are going to be perceiving that this is a world where the U.S. and the White House will be willing to use military force in order to assert itself in a way that the U.S. has not been doing for quite some time now,” Kozak said in an interview.

“But if this isn’t followed through with a larger strategy to achieve our national security objectives, if it’s not followed through with sustained pressure on Assad and his backers, then it really accomplishes little and may even be counterproductive depending on the reactions its provokes from other actors,” he added.

Kozak and Schanzer emphasized the need for the administration to take on Syria with a two-pronged strategy that addresses both the Islamic State and the Assad regime. Kozak said the administration will fail in its fight against ISIS unless it deploys diplomatic and military action to strike a negotiated settlement between the Syrian government and rebel groups.

Even Fareed Zakaria was impressed:

Trump’s actions also brought out the mental illness in democrats. Lawrence O’Donnell went off the rails:

O’Donnell said, “[W]ouldn’t it be nice if it was just completely, totally, absolutely impossible to suspect that Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week so that his friend in the White House could have a big night, with missiles, and all of the praise he’s picked up over the last 24 hours? Wouldn’t it be so nice if you couldn’t even in your wildest dreams imagine a scenario like that?”

Another idiot democrat (but I repeat myself) suggested that Trump might have been distracting from his collusion with Putin by destroying tens of millions of dollars in Putin’s assets. You can’t make this stuff up.

Hillary Clinton: A Career Criminal

 

Just a few (25) of the scandals, lies, and criminal activity of Hillary Clinton.

Two Scandals on Hold as Presidential Primaries Unfold

 

Accuracy in Media

It appears that, with only one week left until Super Tuesday, the mainstream media are content with the slow pace of the various investigations into Hillary Clinton’s malfeasance. Come March 15, over half of the states will have voted for their favorite primary candidates. Yet the FBI investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email server and her handling of classified material, along with the House Select Committee’s Benghazi investigation, may be going nowhere.

“[Republican Congressman Trey] Gowdy [SC] has said he hopes to wrap up interviews with witnesses in February,” reported Sarah Westwood for The Washington Examiner on February 18. “His committee will then release a highly-anticipated report on its findings.”

But that report may not effectively tell the story of Benghazi if, as Gowdy says, he is going to allow his audience to draw their own conclusions. “It’s not my job to tell you what happened,” said Gowdy on the Don Smith radio show. “It’s my job to tell you what the witnesses say. I wasn’t there.”

Gowdy also said that he was “pleased and frankly proud” of the effort his committee had made that revealed to the public that Clinton was using a private server for all of her emails.

However, the Select Committee wasn’t established so that its report would be issued by a stenographer. It was established to get to the truth of what happened, even if reporters and broadcasters alike dismiss the search for the truth as a “phony scandal.” So far, the committee does not appear to have interviewed outside experts—authoritative figures who could shine some light on the testimony of bureaucrats with ulterior motives.

How are Hillary’s emails not classified while on her server but are classified when they’re supposed to be released?

 

Flopping Aces

Pure political legerdemain.

About 300 Hillary Clinton/Benghazi emails were released the other day. Mostly.

WASHINGTON — The State Department released 296 Hillary Clinton e-mails from her private account on Friday, and one was deemed so sensitive that portions were reclassified as “secret.”

Excuse me? What’s going on here?

The Post then goes on:

Clinton insisted in March she never sent or received classified messages on her private e-mail account.

Not so fast.

“I didn’t email any classified material to anyone on my email.”

claims Hillary.

The NY Times:

“I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference on Tuesday at the United Nations. “I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.”

The Examiner:

They prove Hillary Clinton right. What she has said all along is that her private email address was not a recipient of classified information. And it wasn’t.

Wrong. That’s NOT what she said.

Have you caught it by now? Deja vu. All over again.

“It all depends upon what the meaning of the word is, is”

Once again, a Clinton parses words.

Hillary claims she didn’t send any classified or sensitive material. She did not assert that she didn’t receive any.

How is information not classified while it’s on Hillary’s server but suddenly becomes classified as soon as it is to be released?

“This information was not classified at the time” the email was written, Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, told reporters. While the FBI has now upgraded information in that email to classified, “the occurrence of a subsequent upgrade does not mean anyone did anything wrong,” she said.

Hillary’s explanation:

“I’m aware that the FBI has asked that a portion of one email be held back,” Clinton told reporters after a campaign stop in New Hampshire for her presidential bid. “That happens in the process of Freedom of Information Act responses, but that doesn’t change the fact that all of the information in the emails was handled appropriately.”

Excuse me, but bullshit. I am buying it. Not at all.

Far more likely is that the White House intercepted something damning and made it classified to prevent its disclosure. While on her computer the emails are considered SBU– sensitive but unclassified- right up until they are to be released and magically become classified.

Only in this way can Hillary not be guilty of violating secrecy laws.

She may or may have sent classified materials from her computer but she sure did receive some. This parsing is one more typically Clinton piece of rot.

 

It all depends on the meaning of the word “liar” is.

Obama explodes on press corps with ‘profanity-laced’ tirade

Free Republic

A veteran White House reporter says President Obama went on a “profanity-laced” tirade during an off-the-record meeting with journalists sometime in the past year.

ABC News reporter Ann Compton, who retired earlier this year, told C-SPAN that she witnessed Mr. Obama’s anger — and colorful vocabulary — firsthand.

“I have seen in the last year Barack Obama really angry twice. Both were off-the-record times. One, profanity-laced where he thought the press was making too much of scandals that he did not think were scandals. Another where he took us to task for not understanding the limits he has with foreign policy and the way he’s dealing with the Middle East and Iraq,…

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com …

All Obama’s World’s a Stage

American Thinker

“Sometimes stuff just happens,” according to former IRS chief Lois Lerner. 

It sure does, sometimes.  Forrest Gump would have something to say about that. 

Sometimes, though, when it happens is the most important characteristic of the “stuff.” Remarkable stuff with “remarkable timing” — not only confined to the desktops of the IRS or even the halls of the entire Obama administration — just so happens to land squarely on the Obama stage.  And on that stage, timing is everything.

The administration and the Democrat-media complex would have us believe that the stuff truly just so happened, and happened to occur when it did — as a matter of coincidence, and not craftsmanship.  Some of the events could be said to have plagued the Obama presidency; others ultimately worked to its benefit.  Still, the complex could be counted on to either present the stuff with the proper spin, or when necessary, pretend it never happened at all.

An opposing view suggests that the stuff itself, as well as the timing of the disclosure of it, was manufactured or contrived.  Or, at the very least, a situation with a promising slant may have been given a little behind-the-scenes nudge, shout-out, or front-page placement.  An event without a convenient angle (but not necessarily an inconvenient outcome for the administration’s agenda) would become part of a Friday news dump.  

At either end of possible truth of this view, the complex still spun and held its collective nose when any odors of inconvenient facts or extraordinarily convenient timing wafted by. Perhaps out of fear of being “seen as a ‘right-wing nut,’” as former CBS investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson offered, or because they’re so far in the tank for “their president” — the media focused on protection of the image they were largely responsible for creating, rather than discovering and reporting on the truth.

 

“Truth,” Mark Twain once remarked, “is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”  The truth of that quip is not only evident when attempting to get to the bottom of even one of the “scandals” of this administration, but also in recognizing the source of the aura that surrounds them.

For it is precisely the strangeness — the failure of an event to pass the smell test — that makes a charge of  “conspiracy theory” ring true.  The unusual nature, complexity, remarkable timing, volume and constant flow of “stuff” have combined to become a sort of defensive wall for the Obama administration. So has the audaciousness of some of the occurrences contributed to the aura of phoniness — for who could imagine the nerve?

“Have you noticed,” Jonah Goldberg recently remarked, “that basically the only way this White House can get out from under one scandal or controversy is by getting crushed by another?”

That cycle — scandal, outrage, subsequent rejection as “phony,” followed by another scandal — has conveniently appeared throughout the Obama presidency.  Pick any scandal and watch it run through the wash: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

“Scandal exhaustion,” noted Tom Blumer, seems to be a part of the left’s “Cloward-Piven attempt to overwhelm opponents. With so many scandals out there, no single outrage can generate concerted, sufficiently visible opposition.”

It’s “a scandal a month,” Ben Shapiro commented, “and then every so often, President Obama decides to replace one scandal with another, the media loses interest. Two years later, we’re still asking the same questions and then told, ‘Dude, that happened like two years ago.’”

Besides brushing off scandals as old news, Goldberg observed that the complex often focuses attention on the GOP reaction of “outrage” instead of the outrageousness of the scandal itself.

And should anyone take note of the remarkable timing of the scandal cycle, there’s always the most effective and often-used weapon of the left: Ridicule.  In this piece published at The New Republic titled “The Maddening Illogic of the IRS ‘Coverup’ Conspiracy Theory,” the author asserted:

Yet I’m 100 percent confident that if the IRS or another government agency were to rescue the Lerner emails a week from now, and provide them to Congress, the same people who are currently treating their absence as proof of a coverup would cast their reappearance as a conveniently-timed distraction from some other scandal.

The scandal-a-month program, conspiracy or not, certainly appears to be working to the benefit of the Democrats. In typical “Hollywood” fashion, noted John Hinderaker, they “have learned how to make childishness pay” by using talk of impeachment and lawsuits over the scandals as “fundraising props.”

The fact remains, though, that even one of the scandals, if shown in full but as fiction, would produce a screenplay too complicated to be remotely understandable — certainly not entertaining, much less believable. Presented as real news, the truth could never be grasped by low-information voters whose minds never make it past the headline spin.  Add all the scandals together, and the story would never make enough sense, as Twain quipped, to be considered acceptable fiction.

There are so many examples — actually, far too many notable events that just so happened to occur and be revealed at the time that they did — that to compile a list would undoubtedly play right into the complex’s hands as more evidence of a right-wing obsession with “scandal-mania.”

That list, though, seems to comprise a major part of the Obama script. Recall that Obama once lamented that his uninspiring storytelling was the biggest mistake of his first term. His technique has certainly been polished this time around, to include “meanwich,” “stinkburger,” and “so sue me” taunts, plus two new props — his pen and his phone. 

And while the Constitution, the economy and our national security crash and burn all around Obama’s stage — the teleprompter continues to scroll, the show goes on, and the media complex applauds.

It has been said that “hell is truth seen too late.”

With the Democrat-media complex in control, the truth of Obama’s stage may never be fully revealed. Hell, however, waits in the wings.

 

Media Bias and the Obama Scandals

Powerline

We live in a strange time. Historically, reporters and editors have believed that their job is to disseminate news. That is no longer true. Now, most reporters and editors believe that their principal function is to prevent people from learning things they are better off not knowing. Day after day, they run interference for their party, the Democrats. Blockading inconvenient stories from making the news is job number one.

Consider Fast and Furious. The Obama administration deliberately encouraged guns to be sold illegally and transferred to Mexican drug lords, for reasons that have never been explained. Hundreds of Mexicans and least one or two Americans died as a result. Was that a news story? In Mexico, yes; here in the U.S., it was generally greeted with yawns.