To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IALy-lBUqM

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ALG Editor’s Note:  In the following featured column from the National Review, Andrew McCarthy reveals why the FBI was gunning for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn to take out President Donald Trump:

The FBI set Flynn up to preserve the Trump-Russia probe

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Perjury trap was not score-settling. To investigate the president, it was a practical necessity to sideline his chosen national-security adviser.

Michael Flynn was not the objective. He was the obstacle.

Once you grasp that fundamental fact, it becomes easier to understand the latest disclosures the Justice Department made in the Flynn case on Thursday. They are the most important revelations to date about the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane.

The new disclosures, in conjunction with all we have learned in the last week, answer the all-important why question: Why was Flynn set up?

The answer to the what question has been clear for a long time: The FBI set a perjury trap for Flynn, hoping to lure him into misstatements that the bureau could portray as lies. In the frenzied political climate of the time, that would have been enough to get him removed from his new position as national security adviser (NSA), perhaps even to prosecute him. On that score, the new disclosures, startling as they are to read, just elucidate what was already obvious.

But why did they do it? That has been the baffling question. Oh, there have been plenty of indications that the Obama administration could not abide Flynn. The White House and the intelligence agencies had their reasons, mostly vindictive. But while that may explain their gleefulness over his fall from grace, it has never been a satisfying explanation for the extraordinary measures the FBI took to orchestrate that fall.

Concealing Information ‘as It Relates to Russia’
To understand what happened here, you have to understand what the FBI’s objective was, first formed in collaboration with Obama-administration officials. That includes President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Flynn’s predecessor, national-security adviser Susan Rice, with whom then-Acting Attorney General Sally Yates and then-FBI director James Comey met at the White House on January 5, 2017 — smack in the middle of the chain-of-events that led to Flynn’s ouster. Recall Rice’s CYA memo about the meeting: “President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia” (emphasis added). Rice wrote those words on January 20, at the very time the FBI was making its plan to push Flynn out.

The objective of the Obama administration and its FBI hierarchy was to continue the Trump–Russia investigation, even after President Trump took office, and even though President Trump was the quarry. The investigation would hamstring Trump’s capacity to govern and reverse Obama policies. Continuing it would allow the FBI to keep digging until it finally came up with a crime or impeachable offense that they were then confident they would find. Remember, even then, the bureau was telling the FISA court that Trump’s campaign was suspected of collaborating in Russia’s election interference. FBI brass had also pushed for the intelligence community to include the Steele dossier — the bogus compendium of Trump–Russia collusion allegations — in its report assessing Russia’s meddling in the campaign.

But how could the FBI sustain an investigation targeting the president when the president would have the power to shut the investigation down?

The only way the bureau could pull that off would be to conceal from the president the fullness of the Russia investigation — in particular, the fact that Trump was the target.

That is why Flynn had to go.

President Trump was a political phenomenon but a novice when it came to governance. He was not supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize in the campaign. The staff he brought into the government consisted mainly of loyalists. There were some skilled advisers, too, but their experience was not in the national-security realm.

The exception was Flynn. The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency knew how the spy agencies worked. He knew where and how they kept secrets. He had enough scars from tangles with the intelligence bureaucracy that he knew how the game was played — how intelligence officials exploited information, or selectively withheld it.

Someone as smooth as Director Comey might be able to dissuade President Trump from inquiring too deeply into the Russia investigation. Trump would be satisfied as long as Comey kept assuring him not to worry because the bureau was not investigating him personally — even though it was. The unseasoned Trump staff would also be easy to brush back: Just tell them that the FBI was rigorously independent, and that if the White House poked around too much, Trump staffers would be accused of political meddling. The staff was green enough to be bullied into minding its own business even about the FBI’s counterintelligence mission, in which the bureau is supposed to serve the White House, not the other way around.

But Flynn was different. After 33 years in the Army chain of command, the decorated former combat commander grasped that the FBI, like other executive-branch components, worked for the president. As NSA, Flynn would ensure that Trump ran the intelligence agencies, not be run by them. If Flynn wanted to know what was going on in intelligence investigations, he’d be able to find out — he wouldn’t take Jim Comey’s “no” for an answer. He was loyal to Trump, not to the intelligence establishment or the “policy community.” And he was White House staff, not a cabinet appointee — i.e., he did not have to wait interminably on an iffy Senate confirmation; he would be on the job from the very first moments of the new administration, getting his arms around what the executive branch intelligence apparatus was up to.

Collusion Narrative and the Sanctions Controversy
The eleven pages of documents the Justice Department released on Thursday are a treasure trove for analysts who’ve followed the collusion caper. There will be time to discuss various aspects of them, particularly the matter of how disgraced former agent Peter Strzok managed to keep open the Flynn thread of the Russia investigation (“Crossfire Razor”) after the FBI had seemingly closed it on January 4 — the day before Comey’s Oval Office meeting with Obama & Co. For now, though, let’s focus on that why question.

Upon the new president’s January 20 inauguration, Flynn was the matter of most immediate urgency to the FBI. That was not because the agents were trying to make a case on him. It was because he was already starting his new job as Trump’s NSA.

It was also a frenzied time, with the media and Democrats pushing the collusion narrative, creating an uproar over whether Flynn had discussed anti-Russia sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak. Flynn publicly said the subject did not come up. Vice President Pence publicly backed him. But the FBI had had surveillance coverage on the Russian envoy. The bureau knew the issue of sanctions had been discussed. Though Flynn had said nothing inappropriate on the subject, its mere mention would become a huge political problem.

We do not know for sure what Flynn’s conversation was with Pence. Maybe he misinformed the vice-president. Maybe there was a garble (the difference between didn’t come up and wasn’t discussed inappropriately could easily be confused). Or maybe Pence decided it was politically expedient to back Flynn’s account, regardless of whether it was true. Whatever happened, such political matters would not be the business of the Justice Department and the FBI in most administrations. Can anyone imagine the Obama Justice Department and FBI getting alarmed that the president, National Security Adviser Rice, and Secretary of State Clinton were publicly saying things about the Benghazi attack that the FBI knew to be untrue?

This was the Trump administration, however, so Obama holdover officials, such as Acting AG Yates, would pose as aghast that Pence was publicly echoing Flynn’s misstatement. Even though they knew the misstatement was trivial . . . which explains why the FBI moved to close the Flynn investigation on January 4, after Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak — they plainly knew Flynn was not a Kremlin mole.

More to the point, the newly revealed documents include emails between Strzok and other FBI officials from the weekend before the FBI’s January 24 grilling of Flynn.

Most of the press attention has been about the planning for that grilling — about how brazenly the bureau spoke of trying to get Flynn to lie, about the renegade scheme to orchestrate an interrogation of Flynn without informing the Trump White House, as protocol required. That’s significant, but it misses the bigger picture. The January 21–22 emails show that the FBI did not start out with that perjury-trap plan. They ended up with the perjury-trap plan because there was no practical alternative if the bureau was to achieve its objective — the withholding of information about Russia from the incoming Trump team, in order to keep the Trump–Russia investigation alive.

No Alternative
The perjury trap was set for Flynn out of necessity. If the Justice Department had informed the White House about recordings of Flynn and Kislyak discussing sanctions, and the FBI then asked for permission to interview Flynn, the bureau knew permission was sure to be denied. Flynn would be untouchable, and free to discover the entirety of the Obama administration’s extensive but secret effort to depict Trump and his minions as Russian operatives — an effort the FBI was determined to keep pursuing.

If no way could be found to sideline Flynn (the way Attorney General Jeff Sessions would later be sidelined), then Flynn was going to find out about Crossfire Hurricane. He was going to be a hands-on NSA, so that was a given.

Get full story here.

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