HOWIE CARR ON MIKE FLYNN: FBI railroading Americans, but we knew that here in Boston.

Via Instapundit:

Who would have ever believed that James Comey and Andrew McCabe might be arrested before Donald J. Trump?

As the president said Thursday of this greatest scandal in American political history: “I wish I knew then what I know now.”

Every day, in every way, this catastrophe of corruption by the FBI’s “human scum,” as the president so rightly describes them, metastasizes into something ever more appalling.

Did these effete, crooked cops ever stop railroading their fellow American citizens and obstructing justice?

And yet the Democrats and the media, but I repeat myself, just keep saying, nothing to see here folks, move along.

They’ve gone from covering the news to covering up the news.

According to one account Thursday, the “news” networks spent 2,284 minutes over the years promoting the Russian collusion hoax from start to finish.

But here’s the amount of airtime they’ve devoted to these latest revelations about the FBI’s pervasive top-to-bottom corruption in promoting the hoax:

CNN, ABC and CBS: a combined zero mentions. MSNBC: one mention, at 5:14 a.m., NBC: one mention, at 3:41 a.m.

The New York Times, which handed itself a Pulitzer Prize for years of “reporting” Russian collusion that didn’t exist, now argues that President Trump wants prosecutions of the crooked FBI agents so he can “weaponize” their criminal behavior for the campaign.

So it was totally OK for the feds to try to frame Trump and everyone around him, but to want someone brought to justice for it is just politics — weaponizing and seizing and pouncing on those wonderful Democrats in the FBI and the CIA?

Thursday, the Associated Press was still couching these latest revelations about the FBI’s frame-ups as something that Michael Flynn was “claiming” and “contending.”

One of the pro-Deep State blogs “claimed” and “contended” that the newly-revealed handwritten notes about Flynn were no big deal, because the briefers at the J. Edgar Hoover Building often brainstorm on how to best destroy anyone who gets in their way.

Which everyone in Boston, at least, has known for decades. But isn’t that the problem, that this has been going on forever?

Random Thoughts on Railroading General Flynn

Reminding everyone that General Flynn’s first law firm – Covington & Burling – charged him over $3.5 million dollars.  If the idea was to get Flynn fired, bankrupt him and send him to prison while urging him to plead guilty, it almost worked.   To thicken the plot, one of Covington’s partners is the disgraced Eric Holder – Barack Obama’s “wing man.”

Holder must have been chuckling seeing his firm getting rich while forcing Flynn to sell his home to pay them while they served him up to corrupt Federal Goons on a platter.

Those goons included not just Strzok, Comey, McCabe and the rest of the top FBI honchos but the evil Mueller team who kept the exculpatory evidence from Flynn as they threatened his son to get him to "confess" to a crime he didn't commit.

Flynn "confessed" after being financially destroyed, having his son threatened with jail and told by his team of lawyers - who had a severe conflict of interest - that it was the best way to have the government's attack stop. 

Can you say coerced confession? 
I knew you could. 

Now he's got a new lawyer who's busy  exposing the crooks who conspired against him and he's withdrawing his plea. 

Now the shoe is on the other foot and soon the goons who were responsible for this are going to plea bargain for the lowest jail time.  

More breaking news.  The FBI closed the case on Flynn after a thorough investigation until fired FBI agent Peter Strzok told them to hold off while he edited and rewrote the FBI report on the interview that Strzok and Pietrzak had with Flynn.  Insurance policy.

Fix the Flynn Frame-Up in the Courts

Mark Steyn:

I heard Kellyanne Conway being asked this morning about whether Trump should now pardon Flynn. No. It is for the court, as an act of judicial hygiene, to accept Flynn's withdrawal of his enforced guilty plea (made under threats by the feds to destroy the lives of various family members, too), quash the conviction as a miscarriage of justice, and invite the defense to lay before His Honor a wrongful prosecution suit.

If it requires a presidential pardon to bring garbage like this to an end, then we are all in trouble. Because if the Deep Staters can do it to Flynn, they can do it to anyone. It behooves Judge Emmett Sullivan to rule upon what has been a fraud upon the court from day one - and a fraud upon his court specifically: the documents made public this week were ordered to be handed over to Flynn's lawyers two years ago (February 2018) but were in fact only coughed up now because Jeff Jensen, a federal prosecutor in St Louis appointed by Attorney-General Bill Barr to look into the DoJ's conduct of the Flynn case, recently stumbled across them. A system in which prosecutorial misconduct requires a presidential pardon to undo it is not merely absurd but wicked: justice requires that Judge Sullivan extinguish the state's assault upon his own courthouse.

Oh, but the Comey-Mueller crowd will protest, Flynn confessed to the crime!

Well, sorta: He was prevailed upon to (in the sleazy euphemism) "settle". I hate settling - because, in the civil courts, it incentivizes the use of litigation as a form of blackmail; and, in the criminal courts, it leads to what happened in the Flynn case: a man confessing to a crime he does not honestly believe he has committed.

So why did he do it? Well, his then lawyers told him to. Why would they do that? Because the dirty rotten stinking corrupt federal justice system wins 99 per cent of its cases, 97 per cent without going to court. Kim Jong-Un's Attorney-General (assuming he has or needs one) can only marvel. A culture of judicial "settling" is by definition corrupt. ...

"Settling" is a very unsettling concept in the criminal context - in part because it destroys equality before the law: Someone who's got twenty bucks in his savings account can be forced to "settle" long before someone with twenty mil. In the case of this particular investigation, there was certainly foreign collusion in the 2016 election: Mrs Clinton colluded with an MI6 spook who colluded with his contacts in the Kremlin. But Hillary doesn't have to "settle" because she's never had anything to fear from the Strzoks and Comeys. For those less able to withstand the onslaught, the preponderance of American media see no injustice in the Flynn fit-up. For example, former federal prosecutor and CNN "legal analyst" Renato Mariotti:

This isn't unusual at all.

Michael Flynn was treated like thousands of other subjects who were interviewed by FBI agents.

If you don't like how Flynn was treated, change the rules for everyone. Because this is how it works.

...

Misremembering to the FBI should not be a crime - especially not on the basis of a politically motivated policeman's supposedly contemporaneous "notes", rather than an audio or video recording. Instead of a presidential pardon, why not repeal this vile pseudo-crime that mocks due process? I take it that, the GOP having lost the House, Congress will not enact a new Strzok Act, restoring the citizen's right to misremember to a corrupt police agency's goons, but why cannot Bill Barr suspend this "crime" pending an investigation into its misuse by prosecutors over recent years?

... There's a popular American vernacular expression to the effect that, if you're not on offense, you're on defense. After three years of seeing innocent persons traduced and ruined by a corrupt bureaucracy working to subvert the results of free and fair elections, is it too much to expect the enervated Republican Party and its flabby cheerleaders in Conservative Inc actually to rouse themselves and try a little offense?

Persecuting Flynn

Mark Steyn:

The latest revelations in the Deep State entrapment of Michael Flynn (Trump's first National Security Advisor, for about twenty minutes) confirm what most sentient creatures have known for three years - that there was never any good-faith basis for the FBI's investigation, only (in the now released words of Assistant Counterintelligence Division Director Bill Priestap) the object "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired".

The official pretext was that there might have been "a violation of the Logan Act". Oooooooh! The Logan Act of 1799 refers to a Dr George Logan, physician, farmer and Pennsylvania state legislator, who, at a time of tension in Franco-American relations, engaged in his own negotiations with the government in Paris. In the two and a quarter centuries since, there have been no convictions under the Act, and, in the event anyone were ever to be the first so convicted, it would undoubtedly be struck down as unconstitutional. John Kerry, one notes, has not been prosecuted for his recent meetings with his pal Zarif, "foreign minister" of Iran, about how to save Obama's deal with the mullahs.

In the case of Flynn, any hypothetical Logan prosecution would have been more ridiculous still - because he was not a freelance Pennsylvania doctor but the duly designated National Security Advisor of the incoming president. Peter Strzok went over to Flynn's office to (as they say of bent British coppers) fit him up - and indeed they did fit him up.

So one conversation, with disgraced corrupt rogue agent Strzok, without counsel present and without the defendant being aware that this was an interrogation of him as opposed to just a friendly intragovernmental chit-chat, has consumed three years of Flynn's life and all his savings.

Michael Flynn withdraws guilty plea

Flynn’s legal team filed a motion with the U.S. District Court in Washington less than two weeks before he was scheduled to be sentenced. They say the guilty plea should be vacated “because of the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement.”

“Mr. Flynn will not plead guilty. Furthermore, he will not accede to the government’s demand that he ‘disavow’ any statements made in his filings since he obtained new, unconflicted counsel,” defense attorney Sidney Powell wrote.

Good!

NYT Suppressed This Interview

Fascinating.  Svetlana Lokhova and her ordeal by the press.

Q. Describe the circumstances under which you met Lt. Gen. Flynn. Where were you, what was the scene like, how many people were there? Most important: What did you and General Flynn discuss, and how long did your conversation last?

A. I am a British author and historian. My specialization is Soviet espionage undertaken in the 1930s.

Back in Feb 2014, I was a fellow of an organization called the Cambridge Security Initiative. It was one of many groups consulting on long-term global security issues with amongst others the DIA and other Western intelligence agencies. I was a Russian expert.

General Flynn, was head of the DIA at the time was to co-host a conference with Sir Richard Dearlove in Cambridge in 2015 for the DIA. To honor Flynn’s official visit to Cambridge, CSI hosted a formal dinner at Pembroke College.

There were perhaps at most twenty guests at the dinner who were all pre-cleared in advance with the DIA. I sat on the opposite side of the table away from the guest of honor.

Towards the end of the evening, I was asked by Professor Andrew to ...

Read the whole thing.  The WSJ is the villain of the piece.

Make No Mistake: The Mueller Investigation Was All About Flynn

What, then, was it all about? I think I know. It was all about General Flynn. I think it began on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, when Flynn changed the way we did intelligence against the likes of Zarqawi, bin Laden, the Taliban, and their allies.

Did the Obama Administration Spy on Michael Flynn?

Yes, next question.

Contreras Recusal Conflict – FBI Agent Peter Strzok Friends With Flynn Judge Rudolph Contreras…

For those following the increasingly curious case against General Mike Flynn, events take another unusual turn today. Congressional investigators have shared a set of unredacted text messages between FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his cohort DOJ Attorney Lisa Page which reveal a personal friendship between Agent Strzok and Flynn’s initial presiding judge Rudolph Contreras.

Read the whole thing.

General Flynn Should WITHDRAW His Guilty Plea. His New Judge Is A Government Misconduct Expert

Agreed.

Byron York: Comey told Congress FBI agents didn't think Michael Flynn lied

Where's the truth?

... lawmakers wanted Comey to tell them what was up. And what they heard from the director did not match what they were hearing in the media.

According to two sources familiar with the meetings, Comey told lawmakers that the FBI agents who interviewed Flynn did not believe that Flynn had lied to them, or that any inaccuracies in his answers were intentional. As a result, some of those in attendance came away with the impression that Flynn would not be charged with a crime pertaining to the Jan. 24 interview.

Nine months later, with Comey gone and special counsel Robert Mueller in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements to the FBI in that Jan. 24 questioning.

...

In any event, much happened after the FBI director's March briefings of Congress. In May, the president fired Comey. The Justice Department, under Trump-appointed deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, chose Robert Mueller to be the Trump-Russia special counsel. Mueller gathered a number of prosecutors known for tough, take-no-prisoners tactics. And on Dec. 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Yates went on to become a heroine of the Trump resistance (and at least one of Mueller's prosecutors) after she refused to enforce the president's travel ban executive order, and Trump summarily fired her. Her legacy lives on in United States v. Michael T. Flynn.

But to outside observers, mystery still surrounds the case. To some Republicans, it appears the Justice Department used a never-enforced law and a convoluted theory as a pretext to question Flynn — and then, when FBI questioners came away believing Flynn had not lied to them, forged ahead with a false-statements prosecution anyway. The Flynn matter is at the very heart of the Trump-Russia affair, and there is still a lot to learn about it.

Loyalty

Let’s face it; General Flynn is the victim of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And Donald Trump is a decent man who didn’t want to see Flynn destroyed in a hysterical attempt to destroy Trump. So he went to FBI Director Comey to argue for the same kind of prosecutorial discretion that allowed Comey to give a pass to Hillary Clinton for her private server and her lies. The same kind of prosecutorial discretion that allowed Loretta Lynch to refuse to pursue charges against Lois Lerner for using her position to discriminate against Conservatives groups at the IRS.

One of the most disheartening things I saw during the George W. Bush administration was for Bush to allow Scooter Libby to hang out to dry. Libby was the fall guy for Bush Derangement Syndrome and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew at the very beginning of the investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame that Libby was not the leaker – his primary task. But he was determined to justify his pursuit and needed a victim. He chose Libby, who had nothing to do with the original “leak” and ended up getting him indicted and convicted for lying to the FBI when his actual crime was a bad memory.

Which gets us back to Trump’s conversation with Comey. According to a third-had account of a memo written by Comey, Trump told Comey “I hope you can let this go.” What is the “this?” What crime is Flynn accused of? It’s not clear to me. Travelling to Russia and attending a dinner is not a crime. Neither is getting paid for giving a speech. Neither is it a crime to speak with the Russian ambassador. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security advisor because he either deliberately or inadvertently lied to Vice President Pence about speaking to the Russian Ambassador about sanctions. But even lying to the Vice President is not a crime. So what is Flynn’s crime? Will he be getting the Scooter Libby treatment and convicted of lying to the FBI about an unrelated event?

I suspect the latter is that case. We all know that if a prosecutor wants to convict you of something he will find something and you will be convicted, or if not convicted be impoverished defending yourself. I suspect that Trump knew this and wanted to protect Flynn from being destroyed simply because he was a Trump loyalist.

That’s what people who are loyal do.