FLYNN, mike gen

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SEE FIVE 3 26

SEE TWO

see bak

BARRACK BAYROCK SATER

MBZ

PUTIN ROHRABACHER KISLYAK, RT ARTEMENKO GEoRGE NADER? RICK GATES VEKSELBERG

AKHMETOV

zamel

wacko/ fascist/ both?

sentence? 180 on cooperation?

1119 name keeps popping up, eg evo morales, nunes

1119 devin nunes in opening of impeach raise dems use of steele doss

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pardoned?!

1220 federal judge says Trump's pardon of Michael Flynn may have been ‘too broad’: report

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/flynn/

army pay docked b/c russia $ = persecution

:{===

Wikistrat

The WSJ reported in April 2018 that Mueller’s team was investigating Wikistrat, a company founded in Israel in 2010 described as a “crowdsourced consulting firm,” and its co-founders Joel Zamel and Daniel Green. Wikistrat had been contracted by the UAE in 2015 to conduct war game scenarios on Islamist political movements in Yemen. According to a source Zamel had met with Mueller who asked about George Nader, a former employee of Erik Prince at Blackwater, and recently an adviser to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed.

Attorney Marc Mukasey (a former partner of Giuliani) said that his clients Zamel and Green were not a focus of the probe. Mueller also asked Zamel “questions about his work, including for certain clients.” Per reporting on Psy-Group’s August 2016 meeting arranged by Erik Prince with Donald Trump Jr., one of Joel Zamel’s prospective clients was Donald Trump.

According to a June 2018 *Daily Beas*t article, Joel Zamel “wanted former national security adviser Michael Flynnto be a member of the firm’s (Wikistrat’s) advisory board.” Adam Lovinger, a Pentagon strategist who had been named to the National Security Council by Flynn and wasreportedlyassociated with Flynn Intel Group, introduced Joel Zamel to various Pentagon officials. Per a source Zamel had been introduced to Flynn by Bijan Kian, Flynn Intel Group’s former vice chairman of its board of directors, however Zamel’s attorney Mukasey denied Zamel and Flynn met. It appeared in 2017 that Wikistrat had ceased operations.

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NO LNX VID? ABC

What Trump has said about Michael Flynn since firing him

He has been positive and, at times, protective in public comments about Flynn.

ByMEGHAN KENEALLY

:{December 4, 2017,

Trump: 'I feel badly' for Michael FlynnThe president's comments to the press included an attack of Hillary Clinton.

 -- "Wonderful" and "fine" are among the adjectives President Donald Trump has used to describe his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Trump has also defended Flynn as someone who "was just doing his job,” despite his asking for Flynn's resignation earlier this year.

Trump's public comments about Flynn have been overwhelmingly positive, even sometimes protective.

Just this morning, Trump said he feels "badly" for Flynn, who he said has "led a very strong life."

Here are Trump's public comments about the retired Army lieutenant general since his departure from the administration Feb. 13, when Flynn resigned at the president’s urging, writing in a letter that he had “inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador.”

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump shake hands during a joint news conference at the East Room of the White House, Feb. 15, 2017.

"Michael Flynn, General Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media -- as I call it, the fake media, in many cases. And I think it’s really a sad thing that he was treated so badly," Trump said.

"I think it’s very, very unfair what’s happened to General Flynn, the way he was treated, and the documents and papers that were illegally -- I stress that -- illegally leaked. Very, very unfair," he said.

Feb. 16 -- White House news conference

PHOTO: President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference on Feb. 16, 2017, at the White House in Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference, Feb. 16, 2017, at the White House.

Trump was directly asked whether he fired Flynn.

"Mike Flynn is a fine person, and I asked for his resignation. He respectfully gave it. He is a man who -- there was a certain amount of information given to Vice President Pence, who is with us today, and I was not happy with the way that information was given," Trump said.

"The first thing I thought of when I heard about it [Flynn's call with the Russians during the transition] is, how does the press get this information that’s classified? How do they do it? You know why? Because it’s an illegal process, and the press should be ashamed of themselves. But, more importantly, the people that gave out the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves. Really ashamed," Trump said.

When asked why he kept Pence "in the dark for almost two weeks" about Flynn's conversations with Russians, Trump said, "when I looked at the information, I said, ‘I don’t think he did anything wrong.’ If anything, he did something right. He was coming into office, he looked at the information. He said, huh, that’s fine, that’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to be -- and he didn’t just call Russia. He called and spoke to, both ways -- I think there were 30-some-odd countries. He’s doing the job."

"He was just doing his job. The thing is he didn’t tell our Vice President properly, and then he said he didn’t remember. So either way, it wasn’t very satisfactory to me. And I have somebody that I think will be outstanding for the position, and that also helps, I think, in the making of my decision. But he didn’t tell the Vice President of the United States the facts, and then he didn’t remember. And that just wasn’t acceptable to me," Trump said.

Former White House National Security Advisor Michael Flynn at the White House, Feb. 13, 2017.

Asked again later whether he thought there was any wrongdoing in Flynn's calls, Trump reiterated that, "when I first heard about it, I said, ‘Huh, that doesn't sound wrong.’ My counsel came -- Don McGahn, White House Counsel -- and he told me.... He said, he doesn't think anything is wrong."

Trump was also asked whether he directed Flynn to make the calls, and while he denies having done so, he said he would have no problem if he did.

"I fired him because of what he said to Mike Pence, very simple. Mike [Flynn] was doing his job. He was calling countries and his counterparts. So it certainly would have been OK with me if he did it. I would have directed him to do it if I thought he wasn’t doing it. I didn’t direct him but I would have directed him because that’s his job," Trump said.

March 31 -- Twitter

The day after Flynn's lawyer released a statement asking for "assurances against unfair prosecution" if he were to testify in front of the Senate and House Russia investigations, Trump weighed in on Twitter.

"Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!" he wrote.

Mike Flynn should ask for immunity in that this is a witch hunt (excuse for big election loss), by media & Dems, of historic proportion!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 31, 2017

April 30 -- Interview with CBS News

Trump pointed to the Obama administration for giving Flynn security clearance in the first place.

"I didn't realize this, when he went to Russia, it was 2015 and he was on the Obama clearance. When General Flynn came to us, as you now know, he already had the highest clearance you can have. I think the same clearance as the president of the United States would have. He had this really high clearance," Trump told CBS News’ John Dickerson.

May 8 -- Twitter

He reiterated that line of argument a week later.

"General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration - but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that," Trump wrote in a tweet.

General Flynn was given the highest security clearance by the Obama Administration - but the Fake News seldom likes talking about that.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 8, 2017

May 11 -- NBC News interview

In an interview two days after firing FBI Director James Comey, Trump told NBC News’ Lester Holt that Flynn was "fired ... because of lying to the vice president."

Trump was asked whether he knew that Flynn had received payments from the Russian and Turkish governments, and Trump said no, but suggested that "Obama perhaps knew" because Flynn's security clearance was granted during that administration.

July 19 -- Interview with New York Times reporters

During an interview with The New York Times, Trump recounted a controversial comment he allegedly made to Comey before he was fired.

"He [Comey] said I said 'hope' — 'I hope you can treat Flynn good” or something like that. I didn’t say anything," Trump told the paper.

PHOTO:Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, left, with his attorney Robert Kelner, center, as he arrives for a plea hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington,D.C., Dec. 1, 2017.

Former U.S. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, left, with his attorney Robert Kelner, center, as he arrives for a plea hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Dec. 1, 2017.

Dec. 2 -- Fielding questions

The day after Flynn entered a guilty plea for lying to the FBI, Trump was asked by a reporter whether he was concerned about what Flynn might tell special counsel Robert Mueller.

"No, I'm not," Trump said. "What has been shown is no collusion, no collusion. There has been absolutely no collusion."

"So we're very happy and, frankly, last night was one of the big nights," he added, apparently referring to the Senate's overnight passage of the GOP tax overhaul.

Asked then whether he still stood behind Flynn, Trump said: "We'll see what happens."

Dec. 2 -- Twitter

That same day, a tweet was shared on Trump's account that his personal lawyer John Dowd said he wrote. The tweet read that Trump "had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI" which would suggest that Trump knew Flynn had lied to the FBI when he had asked Comey to "treat Flynn good."

I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017

He posted another tweet wherein Trump wrote that "Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday “interrogation” with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?"

So General Flynn lies to the FBI and his life is destroyed, while Crooked Hillary Clinton, on that now famous FBI holiday âinterrogationâ with no swearing in and no recording, lies many times...and nothing happens to her? Rigged system, or just a double standard?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017

Dec. 3 -- Twitter

"I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!" Trump wrote on Twitter.

I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 3, 2017

Dec. 4 -- Weighing in

President Donald Trump today again addressed the guilty plea by his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, saying he feels "badly" for him.

"Well, I feel badly for General Flynn. I feel very badly. He's led a very strong life. I feel very badly," Trump said when reporters asked about Flynn on the White House South Lawn.

He also compared Flynn to Hillary Clinton, saying Flynn is receiving far worse treatment for what Trump described as similar actions by Clinton.

"I will say this, Hillary Clinton lied many times to the FBI. Nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and they destroyed his life," Trump said.

"Hillary Clinton, on the Fourth of July weekend, went to the FBI, not under oath. It was the most incredible thing anyone's ever seen. She's lied many times; nothing happened to her,” he alleged. “Flynn lied and it's like they ruined his life. It's very unfair.”

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trump coup

WHAT IS SUBSTACK?

https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/major-breaking-news-team-trump-had

NO LNX MANY VID?

Team Trump Had a Second Pre-Insurrection War Room

An investigation of who was in this second Insurrection Eve war room has now begun.

Seth Abramson

Jun 6

Introduction

As this publication has exclusively and exhaustively detailed, on the eve of the January 6 insurrection Team Trump convened a 23-person war council at Trump International Hotel in D.C. to plot out—as attendees have since confessed—what would happen the following day. It is now clear that a second, contemporaneous pre-insurrection war council was held at a nearby Washington hotel and that it may well have been linked, through either phone or video conferencing, to the first.

This previously unreported news could significantly swell the size of Donald Trump’s pre-insurrection planning team, even as it remains possible (indeed, a possibility that has been extensively investigated here at Proof) that any remote conferencing that occurred the night before the January 6 insurrection also included the White House.

The Two War Rooms

The group that convened at Trump International on January 5 included, per eyewitness accounts previously compiled by Proof, the following members of Trump’s family, legal team, campaign staff, advisory corps, donor class, circle of friends, allies in Congress, and presidential administration:

Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Corey Lewandowski, David Bossie, Michael Flynn, Peter Navarro, Adam Piper, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Nebraska GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Lindell, Eduardo Bolsonaro, Doyle Beck, Daniel Beck, Layne Bangerter, and two additional unnamed U.S. senators, one of whom prior Proof reportssuggest was Ted Cruz (R-TX). Domestic terrorist Ali Alexander“attended” by phone.

Other possible attendees—whose status is still being investigated in light of evidence they were present—include Alex Jones, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Guiliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. As Proof has previously noted, and as will become vital to the account below, four individuals from the two lists above now claim (or have had it claimed by legal counsel) that they weren’t, in fact, part of any meeting involving Trump International Hotel on January 5, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. Those individuals are Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and David Bossie.

Based on the evidence now available, the largest possible size of the group that met at Trump International Hotel on January 5—all members of Trump’s inner circle—is 23.

But emerging evidence—see below—now suggests a sizable team of Trump insiders concurrently gathered, on January 5, at the Willard InterContinental Washington D.C. Hotel (“the Willard”) at 1401 Pennsylvania Ave., 0.3 miles from the White House.

The group that gathered at the Willard Hotel on January 5 appears to have been nearly as large, if not larger, than the group at Trump International Hotel. Possible attendees include, of those not also reported to have been involved in the January 5 meeting at Trump International, the following: Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, Robert Hyde, Russell Ramsland Jr., Jim Penrose, Sal Greco, Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, and Dustin Stockton. Moreover, among the Willard war room attendees concurrently said to have been involved in a meeting at Trump International Hotel we find Rudy Giuliani, Ali Alexander, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Phil Waldron, and Peter Navarro.In all, the suspected roster of Willard war room attendees numbers 16, though that number may swell after additional investigations at Proof and elsewhere.

Indeed, just two photos of the Willard war room taken by Robert Hyde on Insurrection Day alone (the one below and this one) show ten people, only three of whom—Giuliani, Eastman and Hyde—can be identified,and are thus included in the attendee list above.

{Note: The man in the white shirt in the first picture belowmay be Owen Shroyer, who works with and for Alex Jones at InfoWars. The second picture below is Shroyer on January 5, 2021. Shroyer introduced Jones at the Freedom Plaza event that day.The two were followed on stage by Ali Alexander, who oddly said that Trump “calls me ‘Sammy Davis Jr.’ every time he sees me” (emphasis supplied). Alexander introduced Roger Stone by noting that Stone, who was then staying at the Willard, had offered “counsel” to Trump’s legal team—headquartered at the Willard—and that, as of January 5, Stone’s Stop the Steal “movement” was at “war.” After Stone speaks, someone is heard repeatedly calling “Victoria! Victoria! Victoria!”, which may refer to Trump lawyer Victoria Toensing. It is unclear if Toensing stayed at the Willard also.}:

Those who have followed the January 6 investigation closely will note that the Willard Hotel war room attendee list includes a substantially larger number of dubious figures (for instance Hyde, who aided in Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 presidential election in Ukraine, as detailed in a chapter in my 2020 Macmillan book Proof of Corruption) as compared to the Trump International list, which may underscores why it has taken so long for this second war room to be disclosed to the public.

Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and the Willard

While Roger Stone spoke briefly to the crowd at Freedom Plaza on January 5—and in his remarks incited insurrection through militant, bizarrely pseudo-religious rhetoric—and while he also spoke in front the Supreme Court building earlier on January 5, in both instances traveling via golf cart and flanked by Oath Keepers, everyone seems to agree that Stone wasn’t at Trump International on January 5; that he never showed up to Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech, as his Stop the Steal co-organizers Alexander and Jones and had expected him to do; and that he never showed up for his “Wild Protest” speech at the Capitol, despite having publicly raised money for the latter appearance.

So where was Roger Stone the rest of the time on January 5 and January 6? According to Stone himself, he was at the Willard Hotel. A video from ABC News confirms that this is where Stone was staying during the insurrection, with Stone further telling the network that he “never left the site of my hotel until leaving for Dulles Airport” on the afternoon of January 6. Stone’s statement makes clear that it was not that he stayed in his room at the Willard, but that he remained on hotel grounds—a distinction that is critical now. Stone’s NYPD bodyguard Sal Greco stayed with him at the Willard Hotel.

As for Alex Jones—who has said the White House asked him to lead the march on the Capitol; who has said he (with Alexander) was in text communication with the Trump campaign from the Capitol as it was being attacked; and whose top lieutenant Owen Shroyer appears to be pictured above, with Rudy Giuliani, in the Willard war room—per Yahoo! News he stayed at the Willard for a Stop the Steal event in November 2020 and, per Politico, also stayed at the Willard for a December 2020 Stop the Steal event.

But now an amazing five-part exposé by a French independent journalist publishing via Montréal-based website Centpapiers further reveals—using simple and easily confirmed photographic analysis—that the January 5 interview Michael Flynn conducted with Alex Jones, reported on at length at Proof, was held at the Willard, meaning both men were at the site of Trump’s second war room on Insurrection Eve.

{Note: This same exposé offers pictures that seem to indicate top Trump adviserPeter Navarro was with Dustin Stockton at the Willard at some point during the lead-up to the insurrection, as well as providing pictures of Stockton and his wife Jennifer Lynn Lawrence in the VIP area of Trump’s Ellipse speech alongside top Trump congressional ally Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of Ali Alexander’s self-confessed co-conspirators in plotting the dire events of January 6.}:

The aforementioned couple, Lawrence and Stockton, have at various points been Steve Bannon acolytes, employees, and business associates, and were known to have been at the Willard Hotel pre-insurrection. According to this report by the New York Times,

Two organizers helping the [post-election Stop the Steal] effort, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, were close to Bannon, having worked at Breitbart and then at his nonprofit seeking private financing to help complete Trump’s border wall. In August [2020], federal prosecutors accused Bannon of defrauding the nonprofit’s donors, after an investigation that included a raid of Lawrence and Stockton’s motor home; they were not implicated, and Bannon, who pleaded not guilty, was later pardoned by the president. A onetime organizer for the hard-line Gun Owners of America, according to his LinkedIn page, Stockton had come to know members of the Three Percenters militia group.

…

[Jennifer Lynn] Lawrence had personal ties to Trump. Her father was a real estate broker in the Hudson Valley, where Trump has a golf club and his sons have a hunting ranch. “He’s done business with Trump for over a decade, so I’ve had the opportunity of meeting the president and interacting with him on a lot of occasions”, she said in an interview. She also knew [Michael] Flynn through their mutual association with a conservative think tank.

…

By [approximately 2PM ET on January 6], with “all hell breaking loose”, as Stockton put it, he and Lawrence decided to take golf carts back to their room at the Willard Hotel and “await instructions about whether to go back to the Ellipse.”

While Lawrence and Stockton’s presence at the Willard Hotel doesn’t ensure Bannon’s, the two Bannon associates’ unusual use of golf carts in downtown Washington during the insurrection—mirroring the use of such vehicles by Stop the Steal, Roger Stone, and the Oath Keepers—as well as the notion that they went to the Willard to “await instructions” from an unnamed superior, group of superiors, or group of compatriots, suggests the possibility that Bannon and/or the Three Percenter leadership were at the Willard at some point during the run-up to the insurrection or on Insurrection Day.

How Proof Learned About the War Room at the Willard

On May 5, 2021, in a little-heard interview with self-described “birther” Peter Boyles, former Chapman University and University of Colorado-Boulder law professor John Eastman—known for falsely saying prior to the 2020 election that Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was ineligible to run for Vice President due to not being a U.S. citizen—told Boyles that that in January 2021 he “was representing the President of the United States in the Supreme Court on one of the most significant legal issues to have come down the pike in half a century.” Eastman, who notes that he “spoke right before the president” at the Ellipse on January 6, further tells Boyles he can reveal private conversations he had with his “client” Donald Trump pre-insurrection because he has received “express” permission from Trump to do so.

Eastman confesses to Boyles that in the days prior to and including the attack on the Capitol, he, Giuliani, and unnamed others “had a war room at the Willard Hotel [in Washington] kind of coordinating all of the communications.…[it was in] a suite of offices.” Significant in this, of course, is not only Eastman’s description of the space as a “war room,” but his contention that Giuliani used the room in the days prior to the insurrection. Why does this matter? Because it raises new questions about another pre-insurrection war room: the one at Trump International. Was Giuliani at the Trump International war room on January 5, the Willard war room, or both? This question has larger implications than may at first appear, so we begin by unpacking what we know:

(1) Charles W. Herbster vacillated on the presence of only one person at the January 5 pre-insurrection war council at the Trump International Hotel: Rudy Giuliani.

After first writing on Facebook that he (Herbster) was “standing in the White House”, Herbster edited his post to write that he was in fact in Trump’s “private residence” in Trump International. But he also edited out Giuliani’s name, as if he’d either (a) been mistaken about Giuliani being at Trump International, or (b) suddenly felt it critical to not say that Giuliani was with him. Note that Herbster took this view of no one else at Trump International;as Proof has detailed, David Bossie and Michael Flynn both now maintain they weren’t at Trump International, and yet Herbster still hasn’t changed his contradictory statement on the matter.For a time even Tuberville contradicted Herbster and said he wasn’t at Trump International, and yet, despite Tuberville being a senator, Herbster still didn’t amend his statement on Facebook. Yet as to Giuliani Herbster did correct himself, suggesting a possibility Giuliani really was at a different location than the other individuals Herbster mentioned—but nevertheless attended the meeting Herbster described. Proof previously noted that this would be possible if the January 5 meeting at Trump International was “conferenced” with other locations.

(2) When the Associated Press asked Rudy Giuliani if he was at Trump International Hotel on January 6, Giuliani told the AP that he would have to check, via his “diary.”

Giuliani never got back to the AP, despite there being no known illegality—as yet—with respect to the event at Trump International. So why not tell the AP where he was on January 5? Doyle Beck told the AP Giuliani was at Trump International; it’s unclear why the conversation regarding his whereabouts isn’t one Giuliani is willing to have.

(3) On January 5, Flynn gave a long interview with Alex Jones at the Willard Hotel.

Both Stone and Giuliani were staying at the Willard Hotel, and Alex Jones and his team would have had to reserve a room at the Willard for any live recording there, so this creates numerous opportunities for overlap between Jones, Stone, Flynn, and Giuliani—the last of whom was then running an on-site Trump war room. Note that, as previously reported at Proof, Michael Lindell has said he was consistently with Flynn and Giuliani in the days prior to the insurrection. If Herbster is unclear and Giuliani cagey about whether Giuliani was ever at Trump International on January 5; and Flynn maintains he wasn’t at any meeting at Trump International (despite an Instagram photo placing him in the hotel lobby that day), one possibility is that any war room meeting(s) Flynn attended on January 5 were attended from the Willard, where we now know he was with Jones on January 5. Flynn is so adamant he wasn’t at Trump International on January 5 that he had his attorney send this author a letter threatening legal action for citing news reports placing him at that location on that day; this suggests a degree of confidence that no one can place him inside the Trump Townhouse at Trump International, his presence in the hotel lobby notwithstanding.

(4)As Proof has reported, Corey Lewandowski was also cagey about his location on January 5, telling a reporter for The Atlantic that he “met” with Donald Trump on that day—but also implying that he didn’t go to the White House in order to do so.

How could Lewandowski meet with Trump without being in the same space? Again, the specter of a very simple explanation—the use of phone or video conferencing—manifests. This might also explain the confidence that David Bossie, Lewandowski’s business associate, has had in maintaining he never entered Trump International on January 5, even as Herbster places him at an event Herbster attended from the hotel.

What Happened at the Willard Hotel

Eastman describes the “suite” of offices at the Willard—a term that suggests multiple rooms and work stations—as designed for “coordinating all of the [pre-insurrection] communication[s]” between members of Team Trump. Certainly, the suite could have coordinated communications via phone conferencing rather than video conferencing, but in either case it would seem that to “coordinate” communications between a large team of people at least some conferencing would have to have occurred at some point.

So if Giuliani had a “war room” at the Willard on January 5 that was specifically set up to “coordinate communications” pre-insurrection, why on earth would he need to walk over to Trump International to attend a second war room? Why not just conference the rooms? This question begs another: if Giuliani did decide to needlessly travel from one war room to another on January 5—during a period of hours that time was precious to Team Trump—why didn’t he bring Eastman with him? Indeed, an unresolved paradox is that Eastman appears to place himself with Giuliani fairly consistently during the days before the insurrection, yet no one places Eastman at Trump International Hotel.

A similar paradox involves Giuliani, Flynn, Lindell, and Powell. As Proof has reported, Lindell says he was with Giuliani, Flynn, and Powell on January 5, yet Flynn says he wasn’t at Trump International, Herbster at first wrote that Giuliani was there and then corrected himself, and no one places Powell at Trump International. Given that Powell was, like Eastman and Giuliani, a Trump legal adviser on January 5, one explanation for this would be that Flynn, Giuliani, and Powell were with Eastman at the Willard on January 5, whether or not they—or Lindell—also visited the Trump International war room.

More Bombshells From the Eastman-Boyles Interview

(1) Trump cybersecurity advisers Russell Ramsland Jr., Doug Frank, and Jim Penrose were with Eastman in the Willard Hotel war room at some point on January 5, 2021.

Specifically, Eastman told Boyles that “the [election] experts that I had met with [in November and December 2020, a group into which Eastman puts Ramsland, Frank, and Penrose] were with me on January 5.” Given this statement, it’s worthwhile to say a little more about two of these men.

Jim Penrose

According to The Hill, Penrose is “a former head of the National Security Agency’s Operational Discovery Center.”

Besides having run an operational center for the NSA—which sounds oddly similar to Eastman’s depiction of the Willard Hotel war room as having been a “communications coordination” center during the insurrection—one of Jim Penrose’s specializations, reportedly, is “how misinformation campaigns [can]…influence elections.” Does this mean that Trump had a misinformation operations expert running a secret war room during the January 6 insurrection? That’s a question the FBI will now need to answer.

:{:{}:

Russell (“Russ”) Ramsland Jr.

Russ Ramsland co-founded Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), a Dallas-area cybersecurity firm, with a number of men, among whom was Adam Kraft, a former DIA employee of Michael Flynn. Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Trump after the 2020 election, has referred to ASOG as “our [Trump’s] team” on Fox News Channel.

The Washington Post writes that in 2018 ASOG began pitching GOP candidates on schemes to challenge their election losses by claiming election fraud. Per the Post,

:{:{}:

By late 2019, ASOG’s examination [of elections in which Republicans had lost] had moved beyond audit logs. Among other claims, Ramsland was repeating the ominous idea that election software used in the United States originated in Venezuela, and saying nefarious actors could surreptitiously manipulate votes on a massive scale. As the 2020 election approached, he privately briefed GOP lawmakers in Washington and met with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, documents and interviews show. ASOG’s examination [of elections] by last summer [the summer of 2020] had already cost more than $1 million, according to a document the company gave government officials that was obtained by the Post. Ramsland had sought funding from Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas and fracking industries.

There’s more of interest here than can be unpacked in one article. For instance, Stop the Steal’s Ali Alexander is believed to have contacted a DHS number to join a 90-minute conference call on December 21, 2020, the same day Trump met in the Oval Office with a delegation from the House Freedom Caucus led by Rep. Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).Of the call to DHS, Alexander wrote on Twitter that he hoped it would “change the world”, raising the question of who at DHS could have been in contact with Alexander, and whether they were also in touch with Ramsland as he worked with Trump’s legal team. {Note: While I’ve confirmed that Alexander called a “DHS” number, it remains unclear whether it’s a “Department of Homeland Security” call-in number or a D.C. “Department of Human Services” number; in the latter case, the call may have been about January 6 permitting, though it’s unclear why this would “change the world.”}:

Trump’s 2019 and 2020 efforts to steal the election—detailed in Proof of Corruption—were linked to, among others, Texas Republican donors whose fortunes were made in the oil, gas, and fracking industries, an echo of the phrase used to describe Ramsland’s donors and investors. Were any of the individuals who met in Texas in 2019 with Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, and Florida-based Trump donor Harry Sargeant III to discuss the 2020 election, energy issues, and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian oligarchs who allegedly had dirt on Joe Biden involved in funding Ramsland’s dubious pre- and post-election “election integrity” efforts? Republican donors who made their fortunes in the oil, gas, and fracking industries were also, as Proof of Corruption details, involved in Trump’s clandestine outreach to Venezuela in 2019 and 2020—Venezuela being the nation in which the Post saysRamsland’s donors were hoping he’d look for and find political dissidents to reveal a supposed election-theft scheme originating in Caracas.[ghost of hugo chavez?]

:{:{}:

The Post notes that Ramsland’s lies “were circulated by Rep. Louie Gohmert(R-TX), a staunch Trump ally who had been briefed by ASOG. And Ramsland’s assertions were incorporated in the ‘kraken’ lawsuits filed by conservative lawyer Sidney Powell—who the Post has learned had also been briefed two years earlier by ASOG—and aired publicly by Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, as they tried to overturn Joe Biden’s victories in key states.” Rep. Gohmert attended the December 21 pre-insurrection meeting at the White House, intended as a follow-up to the raucous December 18 Oval Office meeting attended by Giuliani and Powell. This underscores that, at a minimum, three individuals who Ramsland had worked with to spread false claims of election fraud were in the Oval Office with Trump during the 120 hours—December 17 to December 21—it appears the initial planning for the insurrection occurred. Indeed, the Post writes the following of November and December of 2020:

During that period, Trump was hyper-focused on making the case that the election had been rigged, former White House aides said. He would listen to “literally anyone” who had a theory about it, in the words of one former senior administration official.

The Post alleges that at least three such “anyones”—Gohmert, Powell, and Giuliani—were part of Ramsland’s “network” of collaborators. Per the Post, “ASOG provided research for Powell and Giuliani but…[Ramsland] never spoke[ ] to Trump himself.”

Whether or not Ramsland spoke with Trump pre-insurrection, the fact that he is, per the Post, a Cruz donor as well as a Trump donor; someone whose first client was an “associate of Steve Bannon”; co-founder of ASOG with a Flynn associate; and a man who successfully lobbied top Trump congressional ally Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) to use his services underscores that if he was in the Willard war room on January 5 the number of Trump associates who may have been there, nearby, or in contact with the war room is considerable.

Beyond the obvious figures, others written about at Proof but with less frequency may also be in the picture with respect to the Willard war room. The Post reports that one apparent investor in Ramsland’s efforts to spread election conspiracy theories prior to the 2020 election was Charles Richard Saulsbury, the fabulously wealthy Texan whose son Bubba Saulsbury was with Mike Pence at the vice presidential mansion on the night of January 5,as exclusively reported by Proof. If a Ramsland investor was with Pence while Ramsland was at the Willard, is it possible that any phone- or video-conferenced strategy session that evening involved not just the Trump International and Willard Hotel war rooms but both the White House and vice president’s mansion? We can’t, at present, know this. But we do know that Bubba Saulsbury—who’d come to D.C. thrilled about marching to the Capitol—saw or heard something on the evening of January 5, while with Pence, that caused him to flee Washington the next morning to avoid all of the events of January 6. What had Bubba Saulsbury heard, and from whom?

{Note: Saulsbury’s Facebook photos indicate he was staying at Trump International Hotel.}:

The Post reports that, during the time Ramsland may have been receiving investments from the Saulsburys—in 2019 and beyond—everything he did “became about getting to Trump. He had this idea [that] it [his plan to challenge elections Republicans had lost] had to get to Trump.” This doesn’t sound like a man who would have sat at the Willard on January 5 without making any attempt to get in touch with the president.

Indeed, the Post reports that “In July 2020, ASOG gave a two-hour briefing to seven members of the House Freedom Caucus”—possibly the same seven Freedom Caucus members who five months later would be in the Oval Office discussing an allegedly stolen election with Trump: Gosar, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Gaetz, Greene, and Rep. Jody Hice (R-GA). Certainly, Trump was well aware of Ramsland by mid-November of 2020, with the Post reporting that “late on November 15, Trump retweeted to his millions of followers a video clip of Ramsland saying in a pre-election interview that votes from twenty-nine states were routed through ‘a server in Frankfurt, Germany’ and that [Spanish election systems company] Scytl ‘controls and reports your vote.’”

But Ramsland’s connections to key insurrectionists go well beyond these, to include ex-Trump legal adviser Lin Wood and Giuliani cybersecurity adviser Phil Waldron. The Post writes that “Ramsland contributed material to [Sidney] Powell’s lawsuits and to one brought by L. Lin Wood Jr., another pro-Trump lawyer, seeking to overturn Biden’s victory”, and also that “Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel who specialized in psychological operations and is now chief executive of a cybersecurity firm…said he was working with ASOG to examine the 2020 election.”

Even former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a participant in the unprecedentedly wild December 18 meeting at the White House, is tied to Ramsland.Per the Post, “By December [2020], Ramsland was opening doors for people seeking to challenge the election results. He connected Patrick Byrne, the billionaire former CEO of the online retailer Overstock, with Powell, and Powell connected Byrne with Giuliani.”

So if Eastman was with Ramsland in the second Trump war room on Insurrection Eve, did Ramsland’s associates Ellis, Gohmert, Byrne, Bannon, Wood, Powell, Saulsbury, Sessions, Waldron, Giuliani, or Flynn join them there at any point on January 5 or 6?

(2) Eastman was in the Oval Office on January 4 in a previously unreported meeting.

According to the ex-law professor, on January 4 three people met in the Oval Office with him and Donald Trump: Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob. Per Eastman, prior to the meeting someone had advised Trump that “law review articles” written about the 2000 election indicated that “maybe the Vice President had unilateral authority to determine the validity of electoral votes.” Presumably it was not Eastman who provided such erroneous counsel to Trump, as Eastman says that during his meeting with Trump and Pence,

Pence asked Eastman if he believed vice presidents had the authority that Trump had been advised they had, and Eastman purportedly told Pence it was an “open question.” But per Eastman, he nevertheless told Pence it would be “foolish” to accept the alternate slates of electors the Trump campaign had had sent to D.C., as none had been certified by any state legislature. Eastman says he advised Pence to “delay the proceedings [in Congress]” in “response to the [GOP] state legislatures” that wanted time to “audit” their votes.

This meeting corroborates prior Proof reporting on Trump’s plan for January 6, which was not to win re-election—an impossibility—but simply to allow for so much chaos on Capitol Hill that Congress’ joint session would have to be postponed, giving GOP-led batlleground-state legislatures time to decertify their electors. As Eastman advised Pence and Trump on January 4, under such a scenario GOP-led state legislatures could try to certify new slates of Trump electors, arguably putting Pence in a novel situation the second time Congress met to certify Biden’s victory. Many of the voter suppression bills the GOP is now pushing across America are “insurrectionist” in just this way; they aim to realize the vision of our democracy that Eastman shared with Trump and Pence on January 4—one in which state legislatures decide elections, not U.S. voters.

Conclusion

The Willard war room seems to have been focused on “coordinating communications” to ensure sufficient delay in the joint session of Congress that a coup of the incoming Biden administration would be possible through the creation of new slates of certified electors. While we know that the Willard war room hosted an advisory corps focused on the administrative components of this plot, the evidence also suggests that present in this second war room may have been individuals like Stone, Jones, Alexander, Flynn, Stockton, Lawrence, and Shroyer, who lacked the qualifications to have any role in any such administrative component—but would have been of great utility in orchestrating a paramilitary component to Trump’s plan to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.

At the nexus of these two parts of Trump’s apparent coup plan was Giuliani, whose ties to both of the two teams that appear to have used the Willard were considerable.Notably, it was Giuliani who said at the Ellipse, “Let’s have trial by combat!”—a line equally relevant to the administrative components of such a plot or paramilitary ones.

A robust investigation of the Willard Hotel “war room” has only just begun. Its size, technological capacities, traffic, purpose, and full roster of attendees remain an open question. This article therefore serves as only the first of a series of articles about this critical development in the story of the January 6 insurrection. More is forthcoming.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-pentagon/

no lnx twt

Trump’s Pentagon nominee promoted calls for the president to declare martial law: report

Alex Henderson December 04, 2020

Scott O'Grady is a former fighter pilot who President Donald Trump has nominated for a senior position in the Pentagon. And according to CNN, he is also a Trump loyalist and far-right conspiracy theorist who has been echoing Trump's baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and shared tweets calling for martial law.

Trump supporters who have posted or forwarded tweets urging the president to declare martial law include attorney Lin Wood (who has been fighting President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Georgia) and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

According to CNN reporters Nathan McDermott, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, O'Grady "retweeted an account that shared an article that said former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had shared a petition that called for martial law. He then retweeted the same account which suggested that Trump should declare martial law."

That account said, "I don't know who needs to hear this, but calling for martial law is not a bad idea when there is an attempted coup against the president and this country happening right now."

O'Grady has a history of sharing unhinged tweets.

McDermott, Kaczynski and Steck report, "CNN's KFile reviewed O'Grady's tweets and media appearances and found that O'Grady shared other debunked election conspiracies and that he also degraded top military and intelligence officials. In a radio interview, he called former President Barack Obama and military generals 'sworn socialists' and advocated that the military justice system should bring back treason charges. He retweeted a tweet that called former Defense Secretary James Mattis a 'traitor.'"

On top of that, the CNN reporters note, O'Grady "tweeted that Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a star witness during the Trump impeachment hearings, should be charged 'for insurrection because he is a biased liberal political operative' and said, on a radio show, that it was 'disgusting' for Vindman to testify against Trump. He also spread a baseless claim that the whistleblower in the impeachment saga dated the daughter of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff."

O'Grady has been nominated for assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. If he is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he would only remain in the Pentagon until the end of Trump's presidency. Inauguration for Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is set for January 20.

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The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn

Michael Flynn is a retired general who served as Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 presidential campaign, the transition, and the early days of his White House tenure. At various points during that timeline, Flynn was also assigned by Trump to find the Hillary Clinton emails he had publicly asked Russia to procure; was under investigation by the FBI, which was concerned with whether he was serving as a witting or unwitting agent of the Russian government; was illegally acting as an unregistered agent of the Turkish government, for which he was reportedly involved in discussions of a kidnapping plot; and was seeking Trump’s approval for a plan to transfer nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia after working as a paid adviser for the group behind the proposal.

On December 29, 2016, the day the Obama administration placed sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the presidential election, Flynn called Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and urged him that Russia not retaliate for those sanctions. Flynn was fired as Trump’s national security adviser after reports surfaced that he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about those conversations, which opened Flynn up to blackmail from the Russian government. He would later repeatedly plead guilty as part of Mueller’s probe to lying to the FBI about those calls before renouncing that plea last year.

The position on Flynn among Trumpists like Fox host Sean Hannity is that he is an American hero, that there was no good-faith reason to probe any of his actions during that period, and that anyone involved in such an effort was a participant in the broad-ranging Obama administration conspiracy to take down Trump, which the president terms “OBAMAGATE.”

Their argument features Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak in two ways: They argue that the FBI’s interview with Flynn was a nefarious “setup” and suggest that the leak about the conversation from a “senior government official” to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius for his 2017 column, which brought the call into public light, was an illegal attempt to take down Flynn and Trump by someone who had improperly “unmasked” his identity from intelligence intercepts.

William Barr’s Justice Department showed last week that the Trump administration is putting the force of the federal government behind Fox’s conspiracy theories when it filed a dubious and virtually unprecedented motion seeking to drop the government’s case against Flynn, citing the FBI’s interview tactics. And on Wednesday, Grenell tried to use his own power as the director of national intelligence to provide grist in support of the other fork of the Flynn defense.

“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows

On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that Grenell had declassified and provided to the Justice Department what the paper described as “an Obama-era document related to President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn” and “a list of Obama administration officials who sought to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials.” Later that day, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to Grenell and Barr asking for the document. Grenell provided it to the senators on Wednesday, and it was immediately leaked to CBS News’ Catherine Herridge, a former Fox reporter whose work often promotes Republican talking points. Herridge then published the letter on Twitter. (The document did not turn out to be precisely what the Times had reported. It had been generated on May 4, not during the “Obama era,” and dealt solely with cases involving Flynn, not “Trump associates” more generally.)

In NSA reports derived from the legal surveillance of foreign targets, analysts anonymize (“mask”) the names of U.S. persons to protect their privacy. It is routine for senior officials to ask the NSA to reveal (“unmask”) those identities in cases where they believe that information is necessary to understand the intelligence. The NSA has a standard procedure for doing this, including a review of the justification of the person seeking the unmasking. For context, Trump administration officials sought and received the unmasking of U.S. persons from the NSA more than 10,000 times in 2019 and nearly 17,000 times in 2018.

The document is a list created at Grenell’s request of several dozen “officials who submitted requests” to the NSA between Trump’s election and the end of January 2017 to unmask an identity which turned out to be Flynn, as detailed in an attached memorandum to Grenell from NSA Director Paul Nakasone. It provides the names of the officials, which include then-Vice President Biden, Cabinet secretaries, and intelligence agency leaders, and the date on which their requests were processed. It is the second version of the document -- as Nakasone detailed, the list was originally provided in alphabetical order but revised to be chronological.

That’s it.

Contrary to the insinuations from the right-wing figures, the document provides no evidence that any single unmasking was related to Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. In fact, the record suggests none of them were the original unmasking that first discovered Flynn had made the call, as that one was done by the FBI from its own intercept, not the NSA’s. Nor does it show that Flynn was in some way targeted -- by definition, unmasking occurs when senior administration officials don’t know the name of an American referenced in an intelligence report.

Indeed, there is no indication in the document that anyone listed behaved inappropriately -- in fact, it makes clear that the Obama-era unmaskings happened by the book. “Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSA’s standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request,” it states. It also points out that the NSA cannot confirm that any of the persons who requested the unmaskings eventually saw the information.

Grenell’s noninformation plot

Grenell is totally unqualified for his post. While previous occupants of his position ran intelligence agencies, he at most was a consumer of their products during a brief stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. What he brings to the table instead, along with unswerving loyalty to the president, is broad experience in public relations and shaping news cycles, which he honed as a spokesperson for Republican politicians and for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, a strategic communications consultant for domestic and foreign clients, a Fox contributor, and a notably unhinged Twitter troll.

Grenell personally requested, sought revisions to, declassified, and provided the document to Congress in precisely this form, showing precisely what he wanted to become public.

If he wanted the document to include more information -- by for example, including the actual documents for which Flynn’s name was unmasked, or summaries thereof -- it would. Without that, despite the right-wing chorus linking Grenell’s document to Flynn’s Kislyak calls, it doesn’t provide evidence that any single unmasking had anything to do with them.In fact the majority of the unmaskings predate the calls and thus could not be related. Indeed, it doesn’t even indicate that Flynn was a participant in the intercepts used in the intelligence reports in which his name was unmasked, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage points out:

If Grenell had wanted the document to include less information -- by, for example, limiting the date range to after Flynn’s December 29 calls with Kislyak, which would reduce the list from 39 names to only eight -- it would.

What he produced is a very long list of names that maximized its impact, with no information whatsoever that any of them were involved in something the least bit inappropriate. That is, presumably, exactly what he wanted to do.

Perhaps Grenell has no evidence of wrongdoing, and few or none of the unmaskings reference the Kislyak calls (which is not implausible, as the FBI derived and distributed its own intercepts of the call with no masking as part of their already in-progress counterintelligence probe of Flynn). In that case, he’s declassified and released this information for a political purpose.

Perhaps he does have that evidence, but isn’t releasing it for now so he can continue to dribble documents out and generate more news stories as the presidential election approaches. In that case, he’s withholding that information for a political purpose.

Fox’s propagandists understand that their role in this noninformation campaign is to fill in the gaps left by the document with feverish, often fact-free speculation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson described Flynn’s unmasking as a “domestic spying operation” that was “hidden under the pretext of national security,” and that the Obama administration officials involved are “amoral creeps” who committed “felonies” and should be “punished.” His prime-time colleague Hannity by asking, “What did Barack Hussein Obama know and when did he know it? Tonight, we will unravel the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history.” He also attacked Biden for “lying” about the story and claimed on Wednesday that if the officials involved in Flynn’s unmasking don’t face “justice,” “the great American republic will disintegrate before your eyes.” Despite how little information the Grenell document provides, they are convinced that it vindicates their conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Fox personalities are attacking the mainstream press for not obsessing over the story, with Hannity arguing that this proves they are “Democratic shills.” On Friday, Trump himself picked up that angle, praising the Fox morning show for “covering, supremely, the greatest political scandal in the history of the United States, OBAMAGATE,” while pillorying CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times as “Fake News” for failing to do so.

It’s no coincidence that Trump and Fox are trying to bully the mainstream press into giving the story more attention. They are counting on journalists to repeat the failures of the 2016 electionand flood the zone with context-free scandal coverage that dirties up the president’s opponent. That’s the play Trump is calling, and the leaders of the Justice Department and intelligence community are eagerly supporting the effort, and will likely continue dropping noninformation and disinformation until Election Day.

5/20

new Documents From the Sham Prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn Also Reveal Broad Corruption in the Russiagate Investigations

Glenn Greenwald

Our newest episode of SYSTEM UPDATE provides a comprehensive look at these grave abuses of power.

retired judge amicus (manafort is home, cohen still in jail. stone?]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/judge-in-michael-flynn-case-throws-a-new-curve-ball-suggesting-the-trump-ally-may-have-committed-perjury

520 an

Ex-prosecutor accuses Bill Barr of a ‘big cover-up’ in Flynn case Tom Boggioni / Rawstory

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/former-doj-ag-barr-took-my-words-out-of-context-to-justify-dropping-the-case-against-michael-flynn/

https://www.mediamatters.org/michael-flynn/fox-news-laid-groundwork-department-justices-decision-drop-charges-against-michael

The Department of Justice dropped its charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn on Thursday, following a prime-time campaign by Fox News to lay the groundwork for Flynn’s exoneration. According to court documents filed in D.C. District Court, the Justice Department did not consider the continued prosecution of Flynn to “serve the interests of justice.”

Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and then withdrew his guilty plea in January 2020. The motion to dismiss the charges against Flynn claimed that recently uncovered documents from the FBI indicated Flynn’s interview was never “material” to the Mueller investigation. The filing “was signed only by the politically appointed U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea” and not by any career prosecutors. Moments before the motion was filed, the top prosecutor in the Flynn case abruptly withdrew from it without explanation.

Flynn’s legal team claimed that the new documents turned over to them from the Department of Justice demonstrated that the FBI was trying to trap Flynn in the 2017 interview. Fox News has been echoing this talking point from Flynn’s legal team throughout the past month and showcasing his lawyer Sidney Powell regularly on the network.

In reality, as Marcy Wheeler reviews at length, none of this evidence was new. She concludes that “by making a claim there’s new information when DOJ had the information all the time but Mike Flynn did not” that “DOJ has become the defense attorney for a sworn felon.” That would make Fox News co-counsel.

Indeed, Flynn lawyer Powell has been a regular on the network, often lambasting the Mueller probe. She appeared on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show on May 5 to argue her client’s case. During that interview, Hannity called for Flynn and all others arrested during Mueller’s investigation to be set “free” and demanded to know if the judge in Flynn’s case would “vacate what is obviously a verdict with exculpatory information withheld.”

In fact, prior to the DOJ’s May 7 announcement, Hannity has hosted Powell on either his Fox News show or his radio program every day since April 27. She's also been on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show frequently, including today.

...no lnx vid]

Flynn’s legal team claimed that the new documents turned over to them from the Department of Justice demonstrated that the FBI was trying to trap Flynn in the 2017 interview. Fox News has been echoing this talking point from Flynn’s legal team throughout the past month and showcasing his lawyer Sidney Powell regularly on the network.

Indeed, Flynn lawyer Powell has been a regular on the network, often lambasting the Mueller probe. She appeared on Sean Hannity’s prime-time show on May 5 to argue her client’s case. During that interview, Hannity called for Flynn and all others arrested during Mueller’s investigation to be set “free” and demanded to know if the judge in Flynn’s case would “vacate what is obviously a verdict with exculpatory information withheld.”

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https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/after-barrs-doj-drops-flynn-charges-right-wing-media-set-sights-sally-yates-and-barack

many lnx vids

After the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr filed a motion to drop charges against former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, right-wing media voices are stepping up a new campaign: to incriminate former President Barack Obama, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and others for supposedly launching the Flynn investigation — and the wider Trump-Russia investigation in the first place.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to FBI investigators aboutmultiple phone calls he had in late December 2016 with Russia’s then-Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak during the transition period between the 2016 election and President Donald Trump’s inauguration. During the call, Flynn had discussed the possible lifting of sanctions that Obama had just placed on Russia. (Flynn was fired by the White House when it was revealed that he also lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the conversation.)

The newest angle on the case from right-wing media hinges upon Yates’ recollection that Obama had “learned information about Flynn,” as he discussed in a White House meeting on January 5, 2017. Flynn’s pivotal interview with the FBI later occurred on January 24, 2017. (This element also ties into the search by both the Justice Department and right-wing media to find the government sources who leaked the details of Flynn’sphone calls to the media.)

Right-wing voices have claimed that Flynn was “set up” by the FBI agents who interviewed him, exposing him to perjury charges. Obama’s possible knowledge of the wiretapped calls, and his telling Yates that something was going on with Flynn, become a new hook for conservatives to accuse investigators of pursuing an illegitimate investigation against Trump and his aides. But the fact remains that he was interviewed as part of a legitimate inquiry, and he was caught telling lies to multiple people.

And with the Barr Justice Department now moving to throw out Flynn’s guilty plea, the hunt is on against Obama, Yates, and other officials — including presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

On May 7, the same day that Barr’s DOJ filed to drop the case against Flynn, Tom Fitton, head of the right-wing legal organization Judicial Watch, appeared on Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight and pointed the finger at Yates as well as Obama: “Now, Yates was obviously involved too, because she was pushing the Logan Act fraud on the White House as well to get Flynn fired. No clean hands here, Lou. No clean hands.”

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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fob Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight

Fox News anchor Ed Henry appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss how Yates found out that Obama was aware of the Flynn probe. “Remember, she was at the Obama Justice Department at the end,” Henry said, “and she is having a hard time processing this from Barack Obama. Why did he know that information about Flynn?”

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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight

Sean Hannity also called Thursday on his radio show for Barr to “investigate Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Department of Justice.” Later on his Fox News show, he interviewed Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell. “Who would have told Barack Obama? And I'd like to know what he knew and when he knew it,” Hannity said. “I want to know what Biden knew and when he knew it.”

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CitationFrom the May 7, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Hannity

On the Friday morning edition of Fox & Friends, former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman further said that “Sally Yates may be key to” proving that Obama had directed the Flynn investigation. He also said that the Obama administration's “questionable sanctions” against Russia had been a “Trojan horse,” apparently setting up Flynn in order to go after Trump and stop his policies.

“It’s so true,” co-host Brian Kilmeade responded. “By the way, if you want to continue your policies, Hillary Clinton had to win the election. When she didn’t, they had to come up with a Plan B. This looks like their Plan B.”

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CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

And on the May 8 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo, former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy — a staunch defender of presidential prerogatives for Trump — claimed new documents show that “the top officials of the Obama Justice Department and the Obama intelligence community were here pushing against what the FBI wanted to do in terms of handling the Flynn case.” Bartiromo responded by asking if “this goes all the way up to the Obama administration in terms of the coup to take Donald Trump down?”

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CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox Business’ Mornings with Maria Bartiromo

Trump himself appeared later on in the Friday episode of Fox & Friends for a phone interview, during which co-host Steve Doocy asked about Yates’ recollections of the meeting with Obama: “Have you thought about calling him up and finding out what he knew or calling Joe Biden up and asking him what he knew?”

“No I'd rather have it come out in papers,” Trump said — also seeming to allude to details of the wider Trump-Russia investigation, both before and after the election itself. “Why would I call them up? They tried to take down the president of the United States — a sitting, duly-elected president of the United States — before I even won, and this was going on — this was the fake dossier that was totally fake.”

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CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

Trump also later added: “If this were a Republican, and if this were — 25 people would be in jail for 50 years already. They’d be in jail for 50 years, and it would’ve happened two years ago.”

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CitationFrom the May 8, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends

However, in the recent impeachment saga over Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine to investigate Biden’s son, Fox News and other right-wing media voices actually defended the idea that a president could personally order investigations of his opponents. In fact, it was Trump’s own impeachment attorney Alan Dershowitz who argued to the Senate that the president could pressure another party into investigating a political opponent, because that president’s election (or by implication, the defeating of the opponent) would be “in the public interest.”

But even by this right-wing media argument, this comparison would be incorrect. The Justice Department’s own inspector general report on the Trump-Russia investigation busted a number of right-wing media conspiracy theories, affirming for example that the entire probe resulting in Flynn’s charges had a legitimate beginning: The FBI received a tip that Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos said that “the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to [Hillary] Clinton (and President Obama).”

By contrast, Trump actually attempted to launch baseless investigations of his political rival — the same thing right-wing media are now twisting the Flynn saga to accuse Obama of doing.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/columnist-zeros-in-on-the-core-mystery-of-michael-flynns-case-that-mueller-never-solved/

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn got a lucky break when, on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorney General William Barr decided to drop the federal case against him. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his communications with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, but Barr clearly shares President Donald Trump’s view that Flynn never should have been prosecuted in the first place.

Washington Post opinion writer David Ignatius, however, raised a key point in his column that that gets to a core mystery of the Russia investigation: If Flynn did nothing wrong during a phone conversation with Kislyak on December 29, 2016, why did he lie about it?

Ignatius recalls that when he wrote about Flynn’s interaction with Kislyak in his column in early 2017, he quoted a question that Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, had asked him: “why would (Flynn) conceal the nature of the call unless he was conscious of wrongdoing?” And Schiff’s question, according to Ignatius, is still valid now.

Looking back on December 2016 — which was President Barack Obama’s last full month in office — Ignatius recalls that on December 29, Obama kicked 35 Russian diplomats out of the U.S. because of Russian interference in the presidential election. And Flynn spoke to Kislyak that same day. Obama, Ignatius notes, “was trying to impose costs on an adversary,” whereas the “evidence shows that Flynn wanted to reassure this same adversary and to avoid confrontation.”

AD REMOVED FOR SUBSCRIBED USER

Flynn has admitted that when he spoke to Kislyak during that lame duck period — when Obama was on his way out and Trump was on his way in — he told the Russian ambassador, “We’ll review everything.” And later, Flynn was questioned by the FBI.

“Was Flynn improperly tricked in his January 24, 2017, interview with the FBI into misstating what he had told Kislyak?,” Ignatius writes. “If so, why did he resign and later plead guilty?”

According to Ignatius, “The issue Flynn was discussing with Kislyak was so serious. Russia had secretly subverted our democratic elections. Obama, who had delayed sanctions far too long, finally took action with the December 29 expulsions. He did so on behalf of the nation, whose election system had been attacked.”

On February 13, 2017, Flynn resigned from his position as national security adviser in Trump’s new administration.

“In Flynn’s February 13, 2017, resignation letter,” Ignatius explains, “he admitted that he had made misleading statements to Vice President Pence about the Kislyak call. Here’s how he put it: ‘Because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding phone calls with the Russian ambassador.’ That’s not the FBI talking, it’s Flynn. And the question, again, is why he misstated the facts.”

Even Special Counsel Robert Mueller never got a full answer to this question.

Ignatius wraps up his column by stressing that when an outgoing president was sanctioning the Russian government for interfering in a presidential election, the last thing Flynn should have been doing is saying something reassuring to a Russian ambassador.

“Why was the incoming national security adviser telling the Kremlin’s man in Washington not to worry about the expulsion of 35 of his spies, because when the new administration took office, ‘we’ll review everything?’” Ignatius writes. “That was the wrong message to be sending in December 2016. And with the accumulation of evidence since then about the scope of Russian subversion, it’s even more troubling.”

---

5/20

omfg

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/on-putins-payroll-what-the-corrupt-move-to-drop-the-case-against-michael-flynn-really-means

dcj dc reptr

In a major step toward establishing a Trump dictatorship, the Justice Department moved Thursday to drop the criminal case against confessed felon Michael Flynn, the retired Army general and secret foreign agent who was Trump’s first national security adviser.

Instead of seeking equal justice under law, an extraordinary court filing demonstrated that Trump has one standard of justice for his enemies and an entirely different one for his allies. The court action shows how fully Trump has turned our Justice Department into his personal protection agency.

The 108-page court filing is rife with falsehoods and tortured interpretations of established facts, a mendacious necessity since Flynn twice confessed to multiple crimes under oath in open court. It argues that the lies Flynn told FBI agents were not “material” to the case against him. The trial court judge has already dismissed that as nonsense.

Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser.

It also argues that there was no legitimate reason ever existed to investigate Flynn, an astonishing claim since Flynn was secretly a well-paid agent of foreign interests while serving as Trump’s national security adviser. The claim is all the more remarkable because it is made by an ostensibly Republican administration after decades of Republican clamor about Russian spies and influence peddling.

Based on all this and more we can now reasonably refer to Trump’s Injustice Department.

Trump could have pardoned Flynn. “He was an innocent man,“. “I’m very happy for General Flynn.”

But a pardon would not have allowed Trump to mark his territory, signaling to any who dare challenge his assertions that he is above the law.

From President to Dictator

By demonstrating unfettered control over our Justice Department, Trump has achieved a critical step required for a transition from a president with limited authority to de facto dictator.

The motion to drop the Flynn case fits Trump’s fact-free declaration last summer that “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Our Constitution allows no such thing. You might think that Trump, who has been saying since 1987 that he should be president, would have read Article II, which is only 1,023 words. But either Trump never read Article II or he doesn’t care about the limits it places on him including the requirement that he “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Attorney General William Barr—better and properly called Attorney Specific to Trump—lacks unilateral power to dismiss the case against Flynn. Dismissal requires court approval under Rule 48(a) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Admitted His Crimes

Eminent lawyers stood beside Flynn when he confessed twice in open court to felonies. He allocated to crimes for which charges were dropped in a plea deal. Given this robust record of criminality, the Injustice Department’s action raises obvious questions:

Will Republican senators, notably lawyers Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and Ted Cruz, at long last stand up for the rule of law or continue as moral jellyfish – blind, spineless and floating aimlessly in the waves of chaos and corruption flowing from the Trump White House?
Will Speaker Nancy Pelosi authorize House investigative hearings into Trump violating his oath to “faithfully execute” the duties of his office and endangering our national security?
If Trump persists with his refusal to cooperate with all House investigations, will Pelosi exercise the House’s Constitutional power to arrest recalcitrant witnesses, including Barr, and if appropriate to try them and upon conviction incarcerate them for contempt of Congress and other crimes?
Will Joe Biden pledge that if elected his Justice Department will fully pursue the Russian connections to Trump and his campaign until we find out why Team Trump has worked so diligently to hide the truth?

Justice Department Turmoil

The extraordinary court filing follows what must have been a ferocious, months-long fight inside Barr’s Injustice Department because some career prosecutors resigned from the case earlier to avoid sullying their reputations.

The Thursday motion was signed only by Timothy Shea, a Barr protégé installed three months ago as acting United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

Missing from the latest court papers were the signatures of Jocelyn Ballentine, an assistant prosecutor, and Brandon Van Grack, a veteran espionage case prosecutor. Van Grack resigned from the case in a one-sentence filing just moments before the motion to dismiss was submitted to Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of U.S. District Court.

Judge Sullivan can order Justice and its lawyers to explain these unusual actions. He could refuse to allow the case to be dropped or allow it, but with leave to refile the charges in the future. That would make Flynn vulnerable if Trump does not get a second term.

On Putin’s Payroll

Flynn and his company were on Putin’s payroll and worked for Turkish interests with deep ties to the Kremlin. Flynn was paid at least $680,000, some of which he lied about. At the time he was the president elect’s designated national security adviser.

After the allocation, Judge Sullivan told Flynn “arguably you sold out your country.” (Trump, on Thursday, called Flynn “a hero.”)

“All along, you were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the national security advisor to the president of the United States,” Sullivan told Flynn. “That undermines everything this flag over here stands for,” Sullivan said.

“This is a very serious offense… A high ranking senior official of the government making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation while in the White House, very serious crime.”

That the Trump administration would shield a secret foreign agent who was the White House intelligence chief shows how important it is to Trump that he keep Flynn in his fold. Flynn made himself susceptible to blackmail by taking Russian money and lying about it, but it is not known if Flynn engaged in unquestionably traitorous conduct.

More Kremlin Connections

The Flynn case has its roots in Russian interference to help Trump win the 2016 election. So do other allies. Among these are the felony prosecutions of Roger Stone, Trump’s dirty tricks specialist, and campaign Manager Paul Manafort, a longtime foreign agent for dictators and Russian-speaking criminals and politicians.

Trump denies the Russians helped him become president. But America’s intelligence agencies, the bi-partisan chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the 418-page Mueller report and emails from none other than Donald Trump Jr. all make clear the Kremlin helped Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. The only issue on which the facts are not complete was whether Trump was a passive beneficiary or he knowingly worked with the Kremlin, whether obliquely or hand-in-glove.

The president’s eldest son was told in writing in June 2016 that the Kremlin wanted to help his father become president. Trump Jr. replied enthusiastically “love it” and then met at Trump Tower with Kremlin agents. The son then lied and denied, telling both Fox News and ABC News that no such contact took place. More than a year later, as The New York Times was about to expose these lies, the namesake son released the damning emails.

Economic Collapse and Riots

Trump has openly talked six times about being president for life.When criticized for such assaults on American Constitutional principles, Trump lamely claimed he was joking. He also said last June that he anticipates that after completing the maximum of two terms his supporters will “demand that I stay longer.”

Trump campaigned on a promise to destroy our government, an issue that has disappeared from the news after getting almost no attention during his campaign.

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

That promise came after Trump told Fox News in 2014 how to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster… you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great,” he said.

On Wednesday, as the pandemic death toll surpassed 75,000 Americans he renewed his demand that the law be made history. Repeal would leave at least 20 million Americans with no health insurance.

Just weeks after assuming office Trump held an unannounced meeting in the Oval Office with Russia’s foreign minister and Russian ambassador and a “photographer” for the Kremlin-owned Tass news agency. The Russians revealed the meeting. They also disclosed that Trump gave them “sources and methods” intelligence, which is closely guarded to protect human and technological assets.

Trump Places Trust in Putin

In 2018 in Helsinki Trump declared that he trusts Putin fully, but not America’s intelligence agencies.

Trump has met alone with Putin and Putin subordinates through his presidency. He ripped up the notes of his translator after one meeting, a crime under federal law. He met alone with Putin for at least one lengthy conversation using Putin’s interpreter.

These actions demonstrate Trump’s disloyalty and unfitness to be president, yet Senate Republicans refused to hear testimony after the House impeached him last year. Senate Republicans then voted twice not to convict except for one vote by the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, now the junior senator from Utah.

This latest abuse of power to protect a criminal crony who was on Vladimir Putin’s payroll and a secret foreign agent is more than an impeachable offense. Trump, Barr and Shea also sent a clear message: Team Trump harbors no regard for the rule of law, the foundation of our liberties and democratic freedoms.

---

post impeach purge

Barr installs outside prosecutor to scrutinize Michael Flynn case

Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Attorney General William Barr has reportedly installed an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

---

Republicans are not outraged by John Solomon’s hit job in the Hill targeting an Ambassador who has served presidents of both parties, they’re not outraged that Mike Flynn was writing an op-ed to be placed in the Hill that was paid for by the Turkish state even while getting Top Secret briefings with Trump as candidate.

They are, however, outraged that a Hill op-ed by Ukraine’s Ambassador to the US points out that America has made past commitments to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

empty whl

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trumpista?!

https://www.salon.com/2019/10/29/former-trump-aide-who-now-works-for-devin-nunes-reportedly-leaked-ukraine-whistleblowers-name/

former Trump aide who now works for Devin Nunes reportedly leaked Ukraine whistleblower’s name

Derek Harvey, a former Trump adviser who now works for Nunes, outed the whistleblower who reported Trump's call

IGOR DERYSH

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Atop aide to Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., leaked documents identifying the Ukraine whistleblower’s name in an attempt to out him, The Daily Beast has reported.

Derek Harvey, a former adviser to President Trump who now works for Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee, handed notes to House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of closed-door depositions in the Trump impeachment inquiry in hopes of getting the name in the record of the proceedings, which Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff vowed to release, sources told The Daily Beast.

The allegation follows a Saturday Washington Post report that Republican lawmakers and aides have “repeatedly” used the whistleblower’s purported name during the secret depositions. The Post reported that Harvey was “passing notes the entire time” one former Trump official was being questioned, suggesting that he was feeding Republicans questions.

Mark Zaid, an attorney for the whistleblower, warned that exposing his client’s identity would put him and his family at risk.

“Exposing the identity of the whistleblower and attacking our client would do nothing to undercut the validity of the complaint’s allegations,” Zaid told The Daily Beast. “What it would do, however, is put that individual and their family at risk of harm. Perhaps more important, it would deter future whistleblowers from coming forward in subsequent administrations, Democratic or Republican.”

00:00/00:00

:{:{}:

Far-right news outlets like OANN and the Gateway Pundit have identified an official they claim to be the whistleblower.

The whistleblower’s account has long since been corroborated by witnesses from Trump’s administration.

Harvey has also spread a false story claiming that the whistleblower contacted a Democratic staffer on the Intelligence Committee before submitting his complaint about Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the subsequent cover-up. Harvey was apparently attempting to “discredit” the whistleblower as a partisan, a source told The Daily Beast.

Democrats grew so “alarmed” at Republican lawmakers’ “eagerness” to go after the Democratic staffer in question that they reached out to Republican leaders about the matter.

“We are aware of these unsupported and false attacks on a respected member of our staff,” a senior Intelligence Committee official told The Daily Beast. “It is completely inappropriate, and we have previously urged the Republican leadership to address this situation.”

This isn’t the first time Harvey has passed similar information to conservatives. Harvey compiled a set of documents that contained a list of State Department officials he suspected of being disloyal to Trump, The Daily Beast reported in March. Harvey previously worked at the White House as a member of the National Security Council, where he was hired by former national security adviser Mike Flynn during the latter's brief tenure. Harvey was later fired by Flynn's successor, H.R. McMaster.

Harvey is not the only Nunes associate doing the White House’s dirty work. Politico reported that Kash Patel, a former Nunes staffer who now works on the National Security Council, fed Trump damaging information about Ukraine.Patel got his White House position after leading Nunes’ effort to discredit the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

Nunes himself has been using his time at the closed-door depositions trying to defend Trump by repeatedly citing theSteele dossier,The Daily Beast reported earlier this month. The dossier is at the heart of the Republican conspiracy theory that operatives of the "deep state" had conspired to stop Trump in 2016. It was completely irrelevant to the topics discussed at the depositions, sources told the outlet, describing Nunes’ questioning as “nutso.”

On Monday, Nunes appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News prime-time show to declare the impeachment inquiry, which has uncovered damning revelations from members of Trump’s administration, the “Ukraine hoax.”

Despite near-daily revelations from Trump staffers, Nunes claimed that the “hoax” is based on “conspiracy theories” and bragged that he won’t discuss them with reporters.

“These aren’t real reporters. They are assassins,” Nunes said. “They are assassins that are taking information from the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee and they are spreading it out there.”

Schiff, who replaced Nunes as chairman of the Intelligence Committee after Democrats won a House majority last year, hit out at Republicans for ignoring the mounting evidence against Trump and for their criticisms of the investigation.

“It will be said of House Republicans,” Schiff tweeted, “When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, they consoled themselves by attacking those who did.”

120

Justice Department just sharply changed course and pushed to lock up Michael Flynn

Igor Derysh / Salon

still not sentenced 619? shifted to fox liar/lawyer, thus angling for pardon?

he was in a deal that req elimination of sanctions? trms?

flipped? coop witness?

subpoena for his Biz records, fight over corp personhood

prolly neglected

---

wapo

no lnx

Analysis

Surprise: Trump allegedly got his Ukraine conspiracy theory from the Russia-tied criminals on his campaign

Aaron Blake

November 4, 2019 at 10:21 AM EST

More and more, we’re learning it's not.

Rick Gates, a former Manafort deputy and Trump campaign aide, told investigators that the three of them were pushing the theory to Trump. According to the newly released Mueller documents, Gates told investigators that “Flynn was adamant the Russians did not carry out the hack” and that Flynn told Trump that U.S. intelligence “was not capable of figuring it out.” He also said that Manafort said the hack of Democratic emails “was likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians.” And Gates said Manafort’s theory was “parroted” from Kilimnik, who “also opined the hack could have been perpetrated by Russian operatives in Ukraine.”

Gates pleaded guilty to lying to investigators before he began cooperating with Mueller’s team.

Mueller’s investigators concluded that Kilimnik, Manafort’s associate in Ukraine, had ongoing ties to Russian intelligence during this whole period. They have indicted him for witness tampering, although he is unlikely to ever face the charges, given that he is overseas.

But he is hardly the only one with a controversial relationship with Russia.

Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, has ties to Russia and Russian interests dating back more than a decade, as Philip Bump has documented. He was indicted after documents revealed nearly $13 million in undisclosed payments from a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. The New York Times reported in July 2017 that Manafort was $17 million in debt to pro-Russian interests in Ukraine. He and Gates were also in business with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who sued them in 2018 for allegedly defrauding him to the tune of $19 million. There is evidence that Manafort signed a $10 million a year contract with Deripaska in 2006 to push a proposal that was pitched as something that “can greatly benefit the Putin Government,” and there is also evidence that Manafort took out a $10 million loan from Deripaska at one point.

Flynn’s ties to Russia are more tenuous, but he has made a series of curious decisions involving himself with it. In 2013, as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, he became the first U.S. official to visit Russia’s GRU, its military intelligence agency. Flynn then reportedly sought to invite GRU officers to the United States, even after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. After leaving the Obama administration, Flynn sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a gala in 2015 for the English-language Russian propaganda channel RT and was paid $45,000 for his trip. He was paid another $23,000 by Russia-tied entities that year, according to documents released in 2017.

When serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser in early 2017, Flynn lied to Vice President Pence and investigators about his talks with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, claiming they had not discussed sanctions during the transition period even though they had. It was enough to cause Sally Yates, then acting attorney general, to warn the White House that Flynn was vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the investigators.

And now Trump has pushed the theory so far, despite its baselessness, that it has put him on course for impeachment. Given that Russia’s goal has always been more about destabilizing the West rather than necessarily supporting Trump, it’s about the best that the Kremlin could have hoped.

Impeachment: What you need to read

Updated November 8, 2019

Here’s what you need to know to understand the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.

How we got here: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the beginning of an official impeachment inquiry against President Trump on Sept. 24, 2019. Here’s what has happened since then.

What’s happening now: Lawmakers are conducting an inquiry, which could lead to impeachment. An impeachment would mean the U.S. House thinks the president is no longer fit to serve and should be removed from office. Here’s a guide to how impeachment works.

What’s happening next: The House will hold public impeachment hearings, beginning on November 13. House committees conducting the investigation have already held closed-door hearings and subpoenaed documents from dozens of witnesses relating to the president’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are key dates and what’s next.

https://www.amgreatness.com/2019/11/07/as-the-flynn-case-disintegrates-parallels-with-ukraine-emerge/

hmmn bs?

BRAndon Van Grack, the Robert Mueller Justice Department holdover who continues to prosecute Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, just filed a new “notice” with the court including the stunning admission that he had “misidentified the authorship of the handwritten notes from the January 24, 2017 interview with the defendant.”

That’s the critical interview the government is using as the sole basis for prosecuting President Trump’s former national security adviser.

It’s a mistake Van Grack could never have made in good faith if he had bothered to inform himself with the basics of his case. He should start paying attention because the case not only has ruined a man’s life, it has also undermined public confidence both in the Justice Department and the FBI.

This is the latest crack in a case that is disintegrating in plain sight.

That Van Grack did not know which agent wrote which set of interview notes suggests a fatal weakness in his case. Van Grack cannot answer this fundamental question: What exactly did Flynn say to FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka in their January 24, 2017 interview?

Nearly two years after Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about calls with the Russian ambassador, the answer to that question remains unclear. As I reported here and here, the FBI produced multiple drafts of the “FD-302” which is the form the agents used to record Flynn’s statement. The government, in effect, has conceded that it cannot account for all drafts of this form and that there may be at least one version that remains unaccounted for.

Since the time Flynn spoke to Strzok and Pientka, senior FBI figures Lisa Page, Bill Priestap, and Andrew McCabe all had a hand in editing the account of Flynn’s statement. These changes were made without the knowledge or consentof the person whose words were being edited: Michael Flynn.

Worse yet, as noted by Flynn’s attorney and Twitter sleuth Techno Fog, these edits were far from superficial. But there’s actually another half to this equation. The thing he “lied” about remains a secret. This is because the government withheld the transcripts of the phone calls with the Russian ambassador. It made this representation to the court on May 31, 2019, “The government further represents that it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part of the sentencing record.”

If the government were forced to take this case to trial, it would have to prove to the jury exactly what Flynn said in the January 24, 2017 interview. But the government apparently has no audio recording of the actual Flynn interview, it has only the notes and summaries prepared by the FBI agents. Indeed, the original charged “lies” as charged in the indictment aren’t even direct quotes, just general paraphrasing of the gist of what Flynn said in the interview. The jury would need to know exactly what Flynn said before convicting him of lying.

How odd. We know Strzok possessed a smartphone with which he could have recorded the conversation with Flynn. We know this because we’ve read the text exchanges with his lover Lisa Page in which they discussed, among other things, their intent to use the power of the FBI to “protect” the country from the results of the 2016 election.

To prove that Flynn violated 18 USC 1001, the government must clearly demonstrate Flynn’s statement was false. But how can it do that without actual transcripts of the calls with the Russian ambassador? A jury would need to know exactly what Flynn said to the Russian ambassador in order to gauge whether Flynn’s retelling of those calls was false....

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Russia-tied Manafort, Flynn fed Trump Ukraine conspiracy ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2019/11/04 › surprise-trump-al...

6 days ago - Surprise: Trump allegedly got his Ukraine conspiracy theory from the ... in the special counsel's investigation: Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn.

As the Flynn Case Disintegrates, Parallels with Ukraine Emerge

https://www.amgreatness.com › 2019/11/07 › as-the-flynn-case-disintegrat...

3 days ago - Brandon Van Grack, the Robert Mueller Justice Department holdover who continues to prosecute Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, just filed a ...

There was a Cohen-Flynn-Ukrainian Back-Channel that ...

https://www.dailykos.com › story › 2018/12 ›

Dec 2, 2018 - Michael Cohen, Felix Sater, and a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician were hatching a secret plan to “lease Crimea” to Russia for 50 years.. ... The back-channel effort also sought to have the Trump administration drop sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama White House.

Trump Advisers Pushed Unproven Theory on Ukraine, Mueller ...

https://www.wsj.com › articles › trump-advisers-pushed-unproven-theory-on...

7 days ago - Trump Advisers Pushed Unproven Theory on Ukraine, Mueller Documents Show. Flynn, Manafort and others didn't believe Russia acted to ...

Flynn | KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice

https://www.kyivpost.com › tag › flynn

Associated Press: Flynn's new lawyer is a Mueller critic, praised by Trump ... The Guardian: What has Robert Mueller told us about Cohen, Flynn and Manafort?

A Back-Channel Plan for Ukraine and Russia, Courtesy of ...

https://www.nytimes.com › politics › donald-trump-ukraine-russia

Feb 19, 2017 - A week before Michael T. Flynn resigned as national security adviser, a sealed proposal was hand-delivered to his office, outlining a way for ...

Trump's Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Came From Paul Manafort

https://www.thedailybeast.com › get-the-emails-trump-asked-campaign-staf...

Nov 2, 2019 - Trump's Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Came From Paul Manafort ... “[Michael] Flynn said he could use his intelligence sources to obtain the ...

Sater, Cohen, and Ukrainian Politician Bring Flynn “Peace Plan”

https://themoscowproject.org › collusion › sater-cohen-ukrainian-politician...

Sater, Cohen, and Ukrainian politician Andrey Artemenko conspire to bring Flynn a plan to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia in exchange for Russia's conditional ...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/michael-flynn-and-george-papadopoulos-slated-to-speak-at-event-hosted-by-qanon-conspiracy-theorist/

no lnx

Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos slated to speak at event hosted by QAnon conspiracy theorist

Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2019

Many right-wing activists avoid discussing the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that: (1) Democrats are involved in an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers, (2) President Donald Trump was put in the White House to secretly combat the ring, and (3) important updates are being sent via an anonymous figure named Q. But others are happy to promote it, including Yippy, Inc. CEO Rich Granville. And Trump allies Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, Mother Jones is reporting, are scheduled to speak at a conference Granville is organizing.

The one-day event, scheduled for September 14 in Atlanta, is billed as the Digital Soldiers Conference and claims it is designed to promote a “digital civil war” against “censorship and oppression.” Granville, who has posted many references to QAnon on Twitter, is not the only QAnon supporter who will be speaking at the event: Florida-based online broadcaster Bill Mitchell, another scheduled speaker, has often promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory on his show.

The letter “Q” is one of the ways in which QAnon supporters identify themselves, and the website for the Digital Soldiers Conference depicts an American flag with stars in a “Q” shape. But Granville told Mother Jones that the flag depicted on the site isn’t a QAnon reference but rather, a reference to the fact that Flynn (who briefly served as national security adviser in the Trump Administration in 2017) is a three-star general: three of the stars are depicted in gold rather than white.

Gen. Flynn set to speak at Digital Soldiers Conference in Atlanta@DigiSoldiers @GenFlynn #DIGITALSOLDIERShttps://t.co/j96rWMMayC #realDonaldTrump via @freedomoutpost

— Rich Granville CEO of Yippy.com (@GranvilleReal) August 13, 2019

Nonetheless, Granville acknowledged to Mother Jones that he is a QAnon supporter. And Mother Jones described Granville’s Twitter account as “littered with references to QAnon.”

According to the Digital Soldiers Conference site, most of the proceeds from the event will go to Flynn’s defense fund. Flynn, like Papadopoulos (a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign), faced federal charges as a result of lying to the FBI in connection with the U.S. Justice Department’s Russia investigation. Both of them agreed to fully cooperate with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, but while Papadopoulos has already served a brief prison sentence, Flynn has yet to be sentenced.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/fara-law-explained-794340/

RS andy kroll

Last year, American Media, Inc., the scandal-plagued parent company of the National Enquirer, produced 200,000 copies of a special-edition magazine called “The New Kingdom.” On its cover was the new crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. The glossy magazine championed the young Saudi leader and touted his supposed “reform” agenda in the wake of bin Salman’s March 2018 visit to the United States.

Before AMI published “The New Kingdom,” it consulted with the Department of Justice. According to the Wall Street Journal, the media company asked the DOJ if it would need to register as a foreign agent for the purposes of publishing its unabashedly pro-Saudi mag. DOJ lawyers ultimately said no, but the fact that AMI felt the need to ask at all shows how much a once-obscure law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), has been revived in recent years as part of the government’s larger effort to expose foreign influence operations on American soil.... ...has used it repeatedly in his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The DOJ’s more aggressive enforcement of the law has led to more political consultants disclosing — voluntarily or not — their work to influence American politics and public opinions on behalf of foreign governments."

Congress passed FARA in 1938 to expose those believed to be behind pro-Nazi propaganda in the United States. The law requires people working on behalf of a foreign official to influence American policy, politics or public opinion to disclose a wealth of information: How much they’re getting paid, who they’re meeting with, the tactics they’re using to push their client’s message and how they’re spending said client’s money. All of that information is posted online, giving journalists, members of Congress and regular citizens the ability to see how foreign governments are trying to influence this country and its government.

But for much of FARA’s existence, the law resulted in few criminal prosecutions. Between 1966 and 2015, there were only seven FARA-related prosecutions. A 2016 DOJ inspector general’s report concluded that the unit overseeing the law “lacks a comprehensive FARA enforcement strategy.” It was treated, as one foreign lobbyist recently put it, like “a stop sign in the desert.” There have been almost as many criminal prosecutions under FARA brought in the last 18 months — five — as there were in the preceding 40 years.

In late 2014, David Laufman, a career DOJ lawyer, became the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section in the department’s national security division, which includes oversight of FARA enforcement. Laufman tells Rolling Stone that, soon after he took over, he realized that “there was a great deal more we could do to enforce the statute appropriately and in a more muscular way.” Under his watch, he says, the DOJ began to enforce FARA more aggressively. (He says the inspector general’s 2016 findings were “outdated and inapt.”)

Mueller’s investigation is a big reason for this. Almost one year ago, a D.C. grand jury convened by Mueller indicted the Internet Research Agency and 13 Russian nationals for carrying out an assortment of tactics to sow discord in American elections, including the use of fake American identities and social media platforms to organize rallies and spread disinformation. The first count in that indictment accused the Russians of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by failing to register as foreign agents under FARA.

As Laufman, who left the DOJ last year and now advises clients on FARA compliance, writes in a recent Law360 analysis, Mueller’s case against the IRA and its agents may be the first time foreign nationals on foreign soil were charged with criminal acts under the act. Laufman says this is a signal that the DOJ intends to be more aggressive with FARA prosecutions, especially as the weaponization of social media becomes more commonplace in our elections.

“We’re living in an era where foreign influence operations present novel and sometimes destabilizing threats to the United States,” Laufman tells Rolling Stone.“The manifestations of that are not always transparent. The whole purpose of the statute is to effect and maximize transparency through registration and disclosure with respect to who the real parties and interests are behind lobbying activities and content that is propagated within the United States.”

A week after the IRA indictment, Rick Gates, the former Trump deputy campaign chairman and Paul Manafort protege, pleaded guilty to a similar conspiracy charge, this time for failing to register for lobbying work he did on behalf of the government of Ukraine and the pro-Russia Party of Regions. Last fall, Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016, also pleaded guilty to not registering as a foreign agent for Ukraine, the Party of Regions and former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Mueller’s investigation has also apparently led to two other FARA-related guilty pleas brought by other law-enforcement offices. In August 2018, Samuel Patten, a political consultant and ex-Manafort associate,pleaded guiltyin D.C. federal court to violating the law for not registering for political work he did for the Ukraine’s Opposition Bloc party and an anonymous “prominent Ukraine oligarch.”Last December, in what appeared to be another spinoff from the Mueller investigation, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginiacharged two men with ties to former Trump national security adviser_{ Michael Flynn}_ for acting as foreign agents for the government of Turkey without registering under FARA.

The Justice Department has also ramped up its FARA enforcement in the form of more demands for information from potential foreign agents, and in some cases pressuring people and companies to register under the act. In the past two years, for instance, at the DOJ’s insistence, Russia Today (RT) and RIA Global, two TV networks with ties to the Kremlin that operate in the U.S., registered as foreign agents. This month, CGTN America, the U.S. affiliate of a Chinese state-owned media organization, begrudgingly registered under FARA as well.

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/06/13/sidney-powell-michael-flynn-s-new-attorney-anti-mueller-conspiracy-theorist-and-fox-regular/223921

many lnx pix

Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn’s new attorney, is an anti-Mueller conspiracy theorist and Fox regular

Blog ››› June 13, 2019 12:01 PM EDT ››› MATT GERTZ

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

President Donald Trump praised former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s decision to replace his legal team with Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney, conspiracy theorist, and harsh critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe who has made dozens of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business in recent years.

“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell. Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!

87.9K

3:21 AM - Jun 13, 2019

32.4K people are talking about this

After pleading guilty to charges of lying to the FBI in December 2017, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s team. Last week, he fired his legal team, a move that “triggered speculation in legal and political circles that he’s considering backing out of his plea deal with the government in a play for a presidential pardon,” according to Politico.

Powell’s hiring should bolster that conjecture. She is a former federal prosecutor who specializes in federal appeals in commercial litigation, but has carved out a sideline as a Fox pundit. According to her website, “Sidney the Media Figure is highly sought to comment on current legal issues and government investigations—especially the special investigation lead by Robert Mueller and his chief lieutenant Andrew Weissmann,” who the site describes as the “true villain” of her 2014 book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.

Indeed, Powell is one of a handful of lawyers that Fox’s pro-Trump hosts have relied upon to put a legal gloss on their alternative narrative that Mueller’s investigation was the result of an illegal anti-Trump conspiracy by the “deep state.” She has used Fox’s platform to claim the probe “was set up, basically, to impugn this presidency and to make it as hard as possible for Mr. Trump to carry out his duties” and to describe investigators as “creeps on a mission to destabilize and destroy this president.”

While Powell has a lower profile than more regular legal commentators like Alan Dershowitz or Victoria Toensing, the former federal prosecutor has still made more than two dozen appearances on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show, and at least nine additional weekday interviews on Fox News, since January 2018.

Powell has an extremely active presence on Twitter, where she has argued that Flynn’s prosecution is a “horrific injustice” and that Mueller’s team engaged in “obstruction” by “hiding evidence that exonerates him.” As part of a pattern of frequently amplifying conspiratorial rants about the Mueller probe, Powell has also repeatedly retweeted major accounts that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory and shared articles from Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory website, Infowars (in October 2017, Powell was also interviewed by then-Infowars Washington bureau chief Jerome Corsi.).

Powell’s conspiratorial Twitter musings are not limited to the Mueller probe. She has repeatedly tweeted about George Soros, the Jewish billionaire philanthropist who is regularly targeted with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In December, she accused the Federal Reserve of deliberately trying to “#crash the market” as part of a deliberate plot to destroy Trump “and enrich #Soros & themselves. #Soros has done it before.”

She has also tweeted that “#Islam is only ‘religion’ of which I am aware that seeks to destroy others & would disenfranchise > 1/2 world population.”

Powell’s website sells T-shirts describing Mueller and six other key law enforcement figures in the case as “Creeps on a Mission.” The shirt is “a great gift for those who know the Mueller investigation of the President is its own crime,” according to the website.

One of Powell’s “other websites” is CreepsOnAMission.com, which breaks down the iconography of the shirt and provides capsule descriptions of the purported malfeasance of the people it depicts. It also embeds clips on that theme from the Fox shows of Sean Hannity and Mark Levin, claims “Mueller and his Hillary favored henchmen” are trying “to ensnare anyone he can reach within the circle of President Trump,” and urges readers to “Support President Trump & Our Mission” by wearing the shirt “to show your support for President Trump & The Rule of Law!”

Hannity frequently cites Powell’s book for its harsh criticism of Weissmann, a veteran federal prosecutor and former general counsel at the FBI who became a key member of Mueller’s team.

On Wednesday, Hannity praised Flynn’s hiring of Powell, arguing that a “change of course certainly looks imminent” for Flynn because “Powell said 16 months ago he should withdraw” his guilty plea.

Embedded video

Matthew Gertz

@MattGertz

Sean Hannity on Flynn hiring Sidney Powell: "Thank goodness... Powell said 16 months ago, blasting the Mueller witch hunt, is now taking over. No word if he plans to withdraw, but a change of course certainly looks imminent. Powell said 16 months ago he should withdraw that plea"

5:14 AM - Jun 13, 2019

See Matthew Gertz's other Tweets

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Indeed, in a February 2018 op-ed for The Daily Caller, Powell wrote that Flynn should withdraw his plea because the newly appointed judge in his case, Emmet G. Sullivan, was likely to dismiss the charges against him. (Powell was one of a series of Flynn defenders who misinterpreted one of Sullivan’s orders to speculate that the judge believed Flynn might have been the victim of prosecutorial misconduct.)

In another op-ed published shortly before Flynn’s sentencing hearing in December, Powell claimed that Mueller had obstructed justice by supposedly destroying or suppressing evidence he was required to provide to Flynn’s legal team. On Fox, she speculated that because of this, Sullivan would “throw the entire prosecution of Gen. Flynn out for egregious prosecutorial misconduct.”

Instead, at the hearing, the judge rejected the notion that Flynn had been mistreated by investigators, blasted Flynn himself, and convinced him to delay sentencing and continue working with Mueller’s team rather than risk jail time.

After signing on as Flynn’s lawyer, Powell said in a statement that Flynn “will continue to cooperate with the government in all matters.” But Fox commentator Sara Carter, whose slanted reporting from pro-Trump sources helps fuel the Fox counternarrative on Mueller, said on Hannity’s program that Powell also stressed to her in an interview that “it would take about 90 days to get through [Flynn’s] file,” which could delay any sentencing and leave open the possibility that he could withdraw his plea.

Fox’s pro-Trump commentators have been urging Flynn to withdraw his plea since he pleaded guilty in the first place. They have also been calling on the president to pardon Flynn and other purported “victims” of Mueller’s investigation -- a notion Trump’s team has reportedly entertained.

If Trump does ultimately pardon Flynn, the former national security adviser would be only the latest recipient in a series of clemency decisions influenced by the network.

619 about to be sentenced

politico

Trump applauds Flynn's hiring of FBI critic as new lawyer

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

06/13/2019 08:03 AM EDT

President Donald Trump on Thursday hailed Michael Flynn's move to hire a lawyer who has been a fierce critic of the FBI’s investigation into the former national security adviser.

“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”

The message from Trump is one of the strongest indicators Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, remains in the president’s good graces and hints that a pardon might still be within the realm of possibility.

Flynn continues to be a recipient of the president's public support despite having been fired for having lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

Last week, Flynn fired his legal team and hired Powell, a former Justice Department attorney who has publicly dinged the investigation into Flynn, accusing the FBI of spying on the retired Army general as part of a "setup," arguing he should withdraw his guilty plea and that his case should be dismissed.

Flynn's former legal team, which took a less hostile approach to his defense, attempted to advance such an argument late last year, earning his lawyers an admonishment from the judge handling his case.

Powell told POLITICO on Wednesday that Flynn would continue to cooperate with the government while he awaits sentencing.

Trump’s tweet comes less than a week after federal prosecutors released a voicemail left by former Trump lawyer John Dowd for one of Flynn’s attorneys just after Flynn withdrew from a joint defense agreement with the president in order to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller. In the voicemail, Dowd appeals to Flynn lawyer Robert Kelner for a "heads up" on information that could implicate the president and compromise "national security."

"Remember what we’ve always said about the president and his feelings toward Flynn and ... that still remains," Dowd said.

Though a transcript of that voicemail was included in Mueller’s report, the audio release has renewed speculation that the Trump team was dangling a pardon. Trump has appeared to hint at possible pardons for several of his former associates who were wrapped up in Mueller’s investigation, repeatedly refusing to rule them out for Flynn or for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

---

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/2/13/14559822/trump-islam-muslims-islamophobia-sharia

zach b

Last July, a sharply dressed man named Frank Gaffney:{ }:{ }::{onto the stage of a crowded convention center in downtown Denver and proceeded to calmly warn his audience that Muslims were working to conquer America from the inside.}:

:{:{}:

Speaking without notes at a glass lectern, Gaffney — who worked, decades ago, as a Pentagon official in the Reagan administration — told the audience that political leaders from both parties had spent years covering up the true threat to the US. It didn’t come from terrorists acting in the name of Islam. It came from Islam itself.

Gaffney said that sharia, the Arabic term for Islamic law, was a “brutally repressive, totalitarian, political, military, and legal program” for gradually subverting Western governments and replacing them with ones that adhere to harsh Islamic dictates. And in the US, those efforts were already well underway.

“This program of subversive, stealthy penetration and takedown is operating. It’s, in fact, been at work for 50 years,”. “Our government has been subverted.”

Gaffney wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He accused “agents of Hillary Clinton” of shredding files about Muslim radicals living both inside and outside the US and said that then–Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was surrounded by “a small echo chamber which is filled by Muslim Brotherhood operatives.”

The notion of senior US officials intentionally weakening American national security or appointing advisers who were literal members of a Middle Eastern Islamist movement is preposterous. But it’s important to take Gaffney seriously: He isn’t some little-known crank pumping out Islamophobic literature on the internet, and the event wasn’t a fringe gathering outside the political mainstream.

It was instead the, a major meeting of thousands of Republican activists in Denver billed as “the largest gathering of conservatives outside of Washington, D.C.” Other featured speakers included then-GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, major conservative media figures like Hugh Hewitt and Erick Erickson, and two sitting US senators.

Gaffney is an important cog in a vast and growing ecosystem that exists just out of sight of most Americans— one that has spent years pushing the notion that there is a creeping, quiet plot to take over America from within. It is a plan that springs from Islamic scripture itself, and is supported by most mainstream Muslim organizations, most mosques, and, in all likelihood, your Muslim neighbor.

The only way to be safe from the threat, according to Gaffney and other self-proclaimed "counter-jihadists," is to slash Muslim immigration, arrest key leaders of the Muslim American community, and shut down huge numbers of mosques. They have not gone so far as to propose outright ethnic cleansing; Gaffney, in his speech, says he has Muslim friends. Their dream, instead, is to destroy the Muslim American community without kicking out Muslims.

The dire warnings are spread through an influential lobby, slick documentaries, and best-selling books with titles like The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion. And now that fearful vision of Islam has found a home in the Trump White House.

[

The Truth About Muhammad - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_About_Muhammad

The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most intolerant Religion (2006) is a book by Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch ...

Author**‎: ‎Robert Spencer

Publisher‎: ‎Regnery Publishing

Response · ‎Reviews · ‎References and notes

The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant ...

https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Muhammad-Intolerant-Religion/.../159698528...

The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion [Robert Spencer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.

]]

Senior strategist Steve Bannon is a devotee of Gaffney’s ideas, as are National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Trump’s political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, has done polling for Gaffney designed to illustrate the scale of the threat Muslims pose to America. And Trump himself has said things that sound like they could have been ripped from counter-jihadist literature.

When the new president announced his ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations, it was widely seen as Trump moving to quickly carry out one of his most explicit — and most controversial — campaign promises. Yet it made no sense as a counterterrorism policy: No immigrant from one of the seven targeted countries has ever killed anyone in a terrorist attack on US soil.

That’s because the real motivation was rooted in counter-jihadist logic. The movement’s thinkers have, for years, advocated a similar ban on Muslim immigration. They look to Europe and see Muslim immigrants creating a continent ridden with terrorism and nearly lost to Islamist subversion. The Muslim ban only makes sense when seen as part of their plan to prevent America from going down the same path — by keeping out as many Muslims as possible.

The counter-jihadist influence in the Trump administration appears far from exhausted. They have long wanted to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, because they see major American Muslim organizations as Brotherhood fronts — and now that’s reportedly a major priority inside the Trump White House.

Trump’s policies reflect an even scarier kind of prejudice than his own: one with a plan.

The theory: ISIS represents the soul of Islam

Gaffney is the president of the Center for Security Policy, or CSP, a right-wing think tank located just blocks from the White House. In 2010, it convened a panel to study the Islamic threat to America. The group — which included former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Edward Soyster — called itself “Team B II.”

The original Team B was a working group put together in the ’70s as a kind of devil’s advocate in the Gerald Ford administration. Its goal was to provide a hawkish counterpoint to the softer detente policy toward the Soviet Union favored by the White House. Team B argued that communism was an insatiably aggressive doctrine, one that could not be appeased — a conclusion that would influencing Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy ideology.

Team B II aimed to do something similar, but for radical Islamism and today’s Republican Party. They drew on the arguments of a loose intellectual movement that had coalesced on blogs in the years after 9/11, and had come to refer to itself as the “counter-jihad.”

Counter-jihadists believe that mainstream scholars of Islam, and counterterrorism experts in governments the world over, have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the Islamist threat. Their basic mistake is that they overemphasize differences between Muslims, like the Sunni-Shia split, and assume that ISIS and al-Qaeda are aberrant distortions of Islam.

The truth, counter-jihadists believe, is more like the opposite. They argue that a correct reading of Islamic scripture shows that violence is intrinsic to Islam — that the religious doctrine itself, properly understood, commands Muslims to kill subjugate unbelievers. People who say otherwise — and CSP lumps both George W. Bush and Barack Obama into this category — are either willfully or unintentionally deceiving the American public.

In the years since its publication in 2010, the “Team B II” report — titled “Shariah: The Threat to America” — has become something of a counter-jihadist bible. It’s the clearest and most comprehensive summary of their ideas. To understand what they believe, and why they believe it, you have to understand this report.

The great enemy in the report is something called “sharia.” An Arabic word that literally translates as “law,” it’s the vast body of rules and regulations that guide daily life for believing Muslims — everything from not eating pork to who can lawfully be killed in a time of war to whether to charge interest on bank loans.

“UNDER ISLAMIC LAW, LYING IS NOT ONLY PERMISSIBLE, BUT OBLIGATORY”

But because there is no single authority in Islam (like, say, the pope in the Catholic Church), there is no single, official, agreed-upon interpretation of sharia. The thousands of rules and regulations that collectively make up the body of sharia have been deeply contested among Muslim scholars — and even individual Muslims — since the birth of Islam, with no agreement even on many vital issues.

Team B II argues that sharia is different from similar moral codes in other religions, like the Jewish law that governs the rules for keeping kosher. They argue that sharia is fundamentally political; that its aim is to govern the lives of all people, and not just Muslims, by seizing control of the world’s governments.

“There is ultimately but one sharia,” the report holds. “It is totalitarian in character, incompatible with our Constitution, and a threat to freedom here and around the world. Sharia’s adherents are making a determined, sustained, and well-financed effort to impose it on all Muslims and non-Muslims, alike.”

To make this argument, Team B II’s authors rely heavily on something called “abrogation.” This is a complex concept in Islamic legal theory, but it basically boils down to the idea that when trying to determine the “correct” answer to some legal question — say, whether it’s okay to drink alcohol, for instance — later verses in the Quran carry more weight than earlier ones. That is, the later verses abrogate, or override, the earlier ones.

This stems from the fact that the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed not all at once, but rather over a period of 23 years. During that time, the circumstances in which Mohammed and the early Muslim community were living changed quite a bit. The earlier verses of the Quran came down while Mohammad was more of an itinerant preacher in Mecca, whereas the later verses came down during a time when Mohammed controlled the city of Medina and commanded a large Muslim army.

The result is that the later verses tend to be more concerned with real-world administrative rules and military doctrine — including verses about conquering unbelievers — while the earlier verses are more focused on broader, more universal concepts of spirituality.

As a result of the doctrine of abrogation, Team B II claims, all Muslims are obligated to conquer the West and replace its governments with an Islamic theocracy called a caliphate. But one would be hard-pressed to find a single credible Islamic scholar who interprets it this way.

For Islamic legal scholars, abrogation is but one tool used to interpret the Quran, and not an ultimate trump card. And the Quran, like the Bible, contains scriptures that both endorse and reject violence. In the full context of Islamic law, the injunctions to kill and conquer are often interpreted as being specific to that time and place in history, and do not necessarily overrule other, more peaceful verses in the Quran (e.g., “let there be no compulsion in religion”).

Team B II dismisses this as a form of tactical, sharia-sanctioned lying. There is an actual Arabic term for permissible lying in sharia, called taqiyya. It’s an obscure medieval ruling that basically permits Muslims to verbally blaspheme God or renounce their religion without incurring God’s wrath if they are under compulsion to do so.

So, for instance, if a Muslim were traveling in a land where being Muslim could get him killed and is captured by the authorities, he is allowed to say he isn’t Muslim — or even do things like praise pagan gods or slander the Prophet Mohammed — if his survival is on the line, without God getting mad. It’s a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s also a concept generally associated with Shia Islam, as nearly all Sunni Islamic legal scholars reject the concept outright.

But the counter-jihadists have taken this medieval concept and turned it into a devious trick that Muslims are using to hide their true violent intentions.

They assert that the peaceful interpretations of Islam offered by Muslim authorities are a form of taqiyya designed to obscure the true nature of Islam from gullible Westerners. They point to things like the 9/11 hijackers going to strip clubs and drinking alcohol as examples of terrorists using taqiyya to blend in. And while the 9/11 hijackers certainly did those things, and may even have tried to justify their actions by saying they were just trying to blend in, they were all Sunni Muslims and therefore never would’ve used the concept of taqiyya to justify their actions.

“Under Islamic law, lying is not only permissible, but obligatory for Muslims in some situations,” Team B II writes in its report. “What Muslim audiences are required to know about Islam is not the same thing as what non-Muslim Western audiences are allowed to know — or encouraged to think — by Islamic authorities.”

This quickly takes on the character of a conspiracy theory. Any attempt to cite an Islamic authority who takes a different view of the Quran is only proof, to the counter-jihadists, that you are taken in by sharia propaganda. In that sense, arguing with the counter-jihadists is something of an impossible task. It’s a bit like attempting a point-by-point rebuttal of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

How a conspiracy theory goes from the fringes to the White House

[vid act for am]

When you ask credentialed experts on Islam and terrorism about counter-jihadist theories today, they usually don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“It's hard to reply without sounding snooty,” Will McCants, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations with the Islamic World, tells me in response to a question about counter-jihadists. “[They] sell a lot of books and scare the hell out of Americans, but their policy recommendations range from vague to downright harmful.”

McCants is not wrong about the books. America Alone, a 2006 book alleging that ”a large majority of Western Muslims support the terrorists’ strategic goals,” cracked the top five of the New York Times’s best-seller list. Several other counter-jihadist books, including The Politically Correct Guide to Islamand Because They Hate, made the best-seller list around the same time.

What few reviews of these books could be found in mainstream publications were not kind. Yale lecturer Daniel Luban wrote that they “can justly be called the new McCarthyism” in a review of the genre published in the Jewish magazine Tablet.

Regardless, the success of counter-jihadist literature spawned a whole mini industry — what author Nathan Lean termed “the Islamophobia Industry.” In 2008, an organization called theClarion Projectdistributed 28 million copies of a documentary titled, which alleged that more than 100 million Muslims were in thrall to “militant Islam.”

Another Clarion video, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, was blurbed by former New York City mayor and current White House cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ:{). Clarion’s 2015 mini documentary }:{, starring a Muslim woman named Raheel Raza who alleges a majority of her co-religionists want sharia to set national law, has more than 4 million views on YouTube.}:

These works found a large audience, mostly among conservatives, largely as a result of America’s encounter with Islamic extremism over the course of the 2000s. The 9/11 attacks, interestingly, did not themselves spark an immediate turn against Muslims.

Part of this can be attributed to concerted efforts by the George W. Bush administration to discourage such sentiments. Indeed, just a little over a month after the 9/11 attacks took place, Bush issued a message to commemorate the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, stating, "The Islam that we know is a faith devoted to the worship of one God, as revealed through The Holy Qur'an. It teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace."

But as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on and more and more American service members died in those countries at the hands of Muslims, and as terrorist attacks in the name of Islam continued to take place around the world, many Americans started to blame Islam in general for the continuing bloodshed.

[graf]

Under the Obama administration, this took on an overtly partisan flavor. When Bush defended Islam, few Republicans were interested in attacking him. Barack Hussein Obama got no such dispensation: Republicans attacked him as soft on ISIS and claimed he was more interested in protecting “the image of Islam” than in protecting America. Influential right-wing pundits suggested he was an Islamist sympathizer or even a secret Muslim himself.

All of this, combined with Trump’s much more overt anti-Islam rhetoric, has helped turn the Muslim religion into a partisan issue:

Right-wing media, recognizing the appeal of the counter-jihadist message among their audience, has embraced this extreme anti-Islam narrative the counter-jihadists are peddling. A study published by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center found that guests with extreme anti-Muslim views made up 11 percent of all guests on prominent conservative talk radio during a period they studied in 2010. Two prominent counter-jihadists appeared on Fox News 15 times between September 2015 and February 2016, according to a count by Media Matters. Prominent televangelists spread the anti-Islam gospel to yet another group of reliable conservatives. Pat Robertson, the host of the widely broadcast 700 Club, once said on air that “Islam is a political system that is bent on world domination.”

All of this is supplemented by a vast grassroots network, centering on a group called ACT for America. Billing itself as the “the NRA of National Security,” it claims to have a membership of 500,000 nationwide, clustered in 1,000 chapters around the country.

Its president, Brigitte Gabriel, is the author of one of those mid-2000s counter-jihadist bestsellers (Because They Hate). A Lebanese Christian immigrant who calls herself “one of the leading terrorism experts in the world,” Gabriel has no formal background in terrorism, either through working in government or academia. According to her book, the highest level of education she received was a one-year course in business administration at a YWCA. Her claim to authority stems, allegedly, from experiences of persecution at the hands of Muslims during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s — a historically dubious story that Lebanese-American journalist Michael Young once labeled a “con act.”

In a speech in at the Oasis Church in Middletown, Ohio, Gabriel delivered an accessible and entertaining speech on the counter-jihadist view of Islam. In her telling, the history of Islam is a history of bloodshed.Between Islam’s founding in the seventh century and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1924, she says, “Islam was responsible for 270 million people across the globe — killed by the sword.”

This violence was not accidental, Gabriel told the rapt crowd. It was the core of Islam itself.

Gabriel believes that for 12 years, Mohammed attempted to peacefully proselytize — and failed, miserably. Only when he turned to violence, to conversion at the point of the sword, did he begin to win success.

“Islam went from being strictly a spiritual movement, after 12 years, to becoming a political movement cloaked in religion,” she says. “Jihad is mentioned in the Quran 40 times — 36 times out of 40 as a holy war against the infidels, to either kill them or subjugate them.”

These are all historically inaccurate claims. Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that they “play loose and fast with very different eras, places and peoples,” in order to put together a narrative of a uniformly aggressive Islam. Yet Gabriel’s group has been profoundly influential.

[twt mar lago sec breifing look who i ran into djt]

Her activists have worked tirelessly to pass legislation, based on a template constructed by Gaffney and CSP in-house counsel David Yerushalmi, that would ban state courts from considering sharia a valid source of law.By 2016, they had succeeded in nine states: Alabama, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, Arizona, and Tennessee.

“No court, administrative agency, or other governmental agency may enforce any provisions of any religious code,” the South Dakota version reads, neutral language obscuring the clear intent.

More alarmingly, the ideas pushed by Gabriel and CSP have been embraced by the most important members of the Trump White House.

“Most people in the Middle East, or at least 50 percent, believe in being sharia-compliant,”Bannon said on theBreitbart Daily News radio show in 2015. “Sharia-compliant” is an innocuous phrase commonly used by Muslims to denote that something is in line with Islamic law: For instance, you can find sharia-compliant home mortgage companies in the US that cater primarily (but not exclusively) to Muslims, because Islamic law forbids Muslims from collecting or paying interest on loans.

The Team B II report’s authors sees things like sharia-compliant financial institutions as an insidious threat to the US Constitution (they never really explain how a home mortgage company that doesn’t charge interest threatens the Constitution).

It’s not just Bannon.But the Team B II report also frequently uses the term “sharia-compliant” to describe not institutions or practices, but people: specifically, Muslims with dangerous, anti-American beliefs, anti-constitutional beliefs. And this is exactly the way Bannon is using the term. “If you're sharia-compliant or want to impose sharia law, the United States is the wrong place for you,” Bannon proclaimed.

In his 2016 bookThe Field of Fight, Trump’s new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, wrote that Islamic scholars are attempting to trick the West to obscure the true nature of sharia.

“These so-called Islamic scholars keep their message so complicated so as to create chaos, to confuse in order to control,” Flynn writes. “Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Mussolini were more transparent. Sharia is a violent law that is buried in barbaric convictions.”

Trump’s new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, said more or less the same thing — in an official Senate press release. “Once again we face a totalitarian threat to the free world. This time it’s from ideological and apocalyptic Islam,” Sessions said.

“Theologically-based sharia law,” Sessions argued, “fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order that separates church and state, and that considers free debate and dissent the way to a better world.”

That these individuals all espouse the same weirdly specific interpretation of sharia is not a coincidence. Each one of them is deeply connected to the counter-jihadist world.

Bannon hosted counter-jihadists on his Breitbart radio show 41 times,according to a count by Mother Jones’s Josh Harkinson. Flynn is an adviser to the board of Gabriel’s ACT for America, and local ACT chapters organized many of the stops on the speaking tour for Flynn’s book. In 2015, Sessions received CSP’sKeeper of the Flame award, in honor of “his leadership on issues of great importance to the national security.”

And it goes even deeper than just Trump’s cabinet. Walid Phares, a fringe Lebanese Christian academic who served as Trump’s Middle East policy adviser during the campaign, once said, “It is absolutely constitutional and moral that citizens reject Sharia as a legal system that takes away their rights.”

Sebastian and Katharine Gorka, a married couple who are staples of the counter-jihadist movement, have been given high-level positions on Trump’s staff: Sebastian is now his deputy assistant in the White House, and Katharine was on Trump’s Department of Homeland Security transition team.

Trump himself, at times, has sounded a lot like a counter-jihadist.

“Sharia authorizes such atrocities as murder of non-believers who won’t convert, beheadings, and more unthinkable acts that pose great harm to American — especially women,, reading off a prepared statement during a December 2015 televised rally defending his proposal for a Muslim ban. “These are people who believe only in jihad. They don’t want our system.”

Several months prior to the rally, Trump had met with staffers at CSP for an hour-long briefing. The subject was the threat from sharia.

Counter-jihadists see leading American Muslims as part of the problem

The fact that most Muslims are not killers is, for the counter-jihadists, a most inconvenient fact. Over time, counter-jihadists have put less emphasis on the threat from overtly violent groups, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, and focused instead on a more insidious threat: the “stealth” or “civilization jihad.”

The foremost theorist of civilization jihad is a writer named Robert Spencer. “He’s author of so many books, and one of the top two or three experts in the world on this great war we’re fighting against fundamental Islam,” Bannon said, when hosting Spencer onBreitbart Daily News on August 9, 2016. “Trump is listening to people like you,” he told Spencer later in the interview.

Spencer, like Gabriel and Gaffney, has no formal training in Quranic scholarship. He received an MA in 1986 in religious studies from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and wrote his master’s thesis on Catholic history.

He’s run the blog Jihad Watch, a near-obsessive tracker of Islamist activity, since 2003. He is also the author of 16 books, with titles like The Complete Infidels' Guide to the Koran. Many of his books have been published by Regnery, the conservative publishing giant that also put out both Trump’s and Mitt Romney’s most recent books. Two of Spencer’s tomes made the New York Times best-seller list; there’s a decent chance you’ve seen him on Fox News in the wake of a terrorist attack.

In person, Spencer is short and portly, with a neatly trimmed black beard. He’s exceptionally confrontational, constantly trumpeting his willingness to debate all comers on Twitter and on Jihad Watch. When I contacted him for this story, his reply attacked the media — like most counter-jihadists, he sees journalists as some of jihad’s most powerful enablers.

“There you go again, Zack,” he wrote in response to one of my questions. “I know you’re a reporter, and a reporter for Vox, so I know where you stand.”

Spencer’s 2008 book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs, developed one of the most important ideas of the counter-jihad. Its arguments were cited repeatedly and amplified in the Team B II report and also appear, in a simplified form, in speeches delivered by people like Gabriel in towns around the country. Spencer also regularly gives “counterterrorism” seminars based on these arguments to law enforcement agencies.

The central idea is that terrorists aren’t America’s real Muslim problem.

“Distracted by foreign wars and the prospect of domestic terror attacks, Americans pay little heed to the true agents of intolerance in their midst,” Spencer writes. “The stealth jihad advances largely unopposed because it is largely unrecognized.”

The “agents of intolerance” at the heart of this stealth jihad, Spencer explains, are the Muslim Brotherhood.

It’s a group you’re probably at least passingly familiar with. Founded in Egypt in 1928, the Brotherhood is one of the oldest and most influential Islamist groups in history. The group’s goal has long been the toppling of the Egyptian government and its replacement with a Sunni theocracy.

Its tactics have varied over time, from promoting grassroots social change to fielding candidates for parliament, and some individuals and groups associated with the Brotherhood in the past have advocated violent revolution. The Brotherhood even managed to gain control over the Egyptian government briefly, when Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won in the country’s first democratic election following the Arab Spring uprising in 2011.

Today, the group’s influence is relatively limited — Egypt’s military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, overthrew Morsi in 2013 and since then has viciously suppressed Brotherhood activity. According to Human Rights Watch, he has killed more than 1,000 individuals linked to the Brotherhood and arrested many, many more.

In Spencer’s telling, though, the Brotherhood is not defined by its founding chapter in Egypt, or even its various open branches and offshoots (like the Palestinian militant group Hamas or the moderate Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia). The hidden history of the 20th century, according to Spencer, is a history of the Brotherhood’s stealth penetration of the West.

“Of course the MB still has the resources to act in the US and Europe,” Spencer tells me. “Its organizations here were well-established and handsomely funded before Sisi came along.”

In Stealth Jihad, Spencer rests this claim on a 1991 memo, written by a Muslim Brother named Mohamed Akram. The memo outlines a plan to establish a “global Islamic state,” starting in the United States. This begins, according to Akram, through a “shift from the collision mentality to the absorption mentality” — to move away from open conflict with Western authorities to suborning them from within.

This might seem like a pathetically impossible task, given the minuscule number of Muslim Brothers in the US. But — and this is the absolutely critical part — Akram thinks the Brotherhood has powerful allies who might successfully and quietly mainstream its radical agenda. In the memo, he writes out “a list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.”

The Brotherhood, and its present-day allies and friends, [are] really working to forward the ‘grand jihad,’” Spencer writes. “When we scratch the ‘moderate’ surface of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), we find links to terrorist organizations and exhortations to Islamic supremacism.”It reads like a who’s who of Muslim civic organizations in the United States, including the Islamic Society of North America (the continent’s largest Muslim civic group) and the Muslim Students’ Association (the organization that represents Muslim students on virtually every college campus in the United States). This one memo, for Spencer and Gaffney, is solid proof that these organizations are Brotherhood fronts.

The Team B II report, two years later, put the point even more clearly.

“The majority of Islamic organizations in America are affiliates of or associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in some way,” its authors explain. “Any organization that does not embrace sharia and the MB line has not been able to gain broad recognition as a Muslim-American force.”

The evidentiary basis for this claim is extremely thin. For one thing, scholars of the Brotherhood have found no evidence that Akram’s memo was an accurate representation of the Brotherhood’s reach.

“Nobody has ever produced any evidence that the document was more than something produced by the daydream of one enthusiast,” Nathan Brown, a George Washington University professor who studies the Brotherhood, told Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner in 2011. “Nothing in anything that I have heard has ever struck me as similar in tone or content to the ‘master plan.’”

Beyond that, the organizations themselves flatly deny being agents of the Muslim Brotherhood. Of course, as Spencer and his ilk would say, this could just be taqiyya. Except that the groups don’t just deny these affiliations — they openly advocate policies and interpretations of Islam that directly contradict this supposed grand Muslim Brotherhood plot against American values.

That does not stop Spencer, Team B II, and the rest of the counter-jihadists from citing Akram’s memo as gospel. Gaffney still tells audiences to download it (it’s available for free on CSP’s site).

The idea that the Brotherhood dominates Muslim American life serves a critical bridging point in counter-jihadist ideology. It is the only possible explanation for why, despite sharia’s supposed mandate to violence and domination, Muslim Americans are not all that violent. It’s not that they don’t believe in “Islamic supremacism” (a favored counter-jihadist term); it’s that they’re more strategic about it than the dummies in al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Militant groups can be bombed and killed. But stealth jihadists cannot: They wield Western commitments to free speech and political tolerance as a shield, allowing them to build up Muslim strength in the West without meaningful opposition.

Counter-jihadists latch onto any evidence of links between Muslim civic society and the Muslim Brotherhood to buttress this theory, wrenching quotes from Muslim leaders out of context and casting fringe figures as leading Muslim authorities.

Take their strongest and most commonly cited piece of evidence: a 2007 Justice Department case against the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity in the Dallas area that was diverting some of its donations to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.

This is the most significant and largest case of a terror-funding operation using an American Muslim civic group as a front. The Akram memo was uncovered during the HLF investigation.

But in addition to the five leaders of the HLF who were actually convicted in the case, more than 246 individuals and Muslim groups, including ISNA and CAIR, were named as “unindicted co-conspirators” in the indictment — meaning the prosecutors believed they were linked to HLF’s scheme but couldn’t prove it.

They couldn’t prove it because they had no real evidence for this claim. ISNA and CAIR later filed a suit alleging that the prosecutors had unjustifiably damaged their reputation by mentioning them in the indictment. Their evidence was that counter-jihadists were using it to smear them, and the court agreed.

“There is no real dispute that CAIR suffered injury to its reputational interest by being listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in this terrorism case. Press accounts and blog entries have reported, based on this case, that CAIR is a criminal organization that supports terrorism,”the presiding judge ruled. “The government has not argued or established any legitimate government interest that warrants publicly identifying CAIR and 245 other individuals and entities as unindicted co-conspirators.”

Now a faction in the Trump administration,reportedly led by Flynn, is pushing to do the same thing by executive fiat — to add the Muslim Brotherhood to the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations.But, as with the Akram memo, the counter-jihadists have not stopped using the HLF case as proof that America’s largest Muslim organizations are part of a stealth jihad. Multiple Republican members of Congress have parroted these accusations, most notably when they accused Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin of having ties tothe Muslim Brotherhood. Sen. Ted Cruz, a frequent speaker at CSP events, has repeatedly pushed legislation labelingthe Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group — a key recommendation in both Spencer’s book and the Team B II report.

The State Department reportedly opposes this move as illegal. A new CIA memo, reported by Politico, warns that it would boost ISIS and al-Qaeda recruiting. Virtually every expert on the Muslim Brotherhood thinks it would be unworkable and unwise.

Despite all this, the New York Times reports that the move has broad support in the White House. This should be no surprise: Both Attorney General Sessions and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, while in Congress, co-sponsored Cruz’s bill.

“There are organizations and networks here in the United States tied to radical Islam in deep and fundamental ways,” Pompeo told Gaffney in a February 2015 interview on the latter’s radio program. “They’re not just in places like Libya and Syria and Iraq, but in places like Coldwater, Kansas, and small towns all throughout America.”

Bannon has long been warning of the threat from the Muslim Brotherhood and stealth jihad; in 2007, he wrote a documentary script proposal specifically calling CAIR and ISNA "cultural jihadists" secretly working to build “an Islamic Republic in the United States.” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, in a2016 interview with Bannon, warned of “an explanatory memorandum” uncovered in the Holy Land Foundation trial telling Muslims “to infiltrate, to multiply, to gain positions of power, and to commit what they call ‘civilization jihad.’”

Officially labeling the Brotherhood a terrorist group, an odd step given that the Brotherhood has not been linked to a terrorist attack in decades, takes on much darker tones when viewed through a counter-jihadist light. Remember, counter-jihadists think the majority of Muslim American groups in the United States are Brotherhood fronts. It’s illegal for any American to provide assistance to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

This, then, could set the stage for a massive federal inquisition into America’s major Muslim organizations based on counter-jihadist conspiracy theories. The text of the Cruz-Sessions-Pompeo bill refers to CAIR and ISNA as “United States-Muslim Brotherhood affiliates,” citing the Holy Land case. Gaffney toldBloomberg View’s Eli Lake that "CAIR is one of the organizations [prosecutors] would have to look at” if the Brotherhood were designated a terrorist group.

Spencer told me that the solution to the stealth jihad was to “enforce existing laws regarding sedition and subversion,” adding that “Muslim organizations in the West should be called upon to back up their pro-forma condemnations of al-Qaeda and ISIS with transparent, inspectable, honest programs teaching young Muslims why they should reject the understanding of Islam offered by jihad terror groups.”

Investigations into, and perhaps prosecutions of, Muslim civic organizations. “Inspectable” programs ensuring that Muslim organizations toe a religious line that counter-jihadists find acceptable. That’s what the counter-jihadists really want from Trump.

Europe will soon be “Eurabia” — a fate America might share

In July of last year, I went to Cleveland to report on the Republican National Convention. It was a weird event by any metric, but the high point of strangeness had to be the evening I spent at a party for queer counter-jihadists.

The event, organized by Breitbart’s gay firebrandMilo Yiannopoulos, was called “Wake Up!” — as in, “wake up” to the threat of jihadism. Held in a dark ballroom adorned with pictures of mostly naked, extremely young-looking men posing in red “Make America Great Again” hats, the party attracted afairly infamous crowd.

I bumped into Pamela Geller, who co-founded (alongside Spencer) a counter-jihadist group calledStop the Islamization of America, since renamed the American Freedom Defense Initiative, wearing a rainbow sequin shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Love Will Win.” Geller is a regular on Fox News and conservative talk radio; she’s one of the most widely known counter-jihadists due to her assuming a leadership role in the fight against the “ground zero mosque” in 2010. She also has a tendency to embrace the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, once publishing a piece on her website suggesting that Barack Obama is the secret love child of Malcolm X.

When I ran into her, she was warning a partygoer of the imminent threat from Syrian refugees.

“ISIS said they were going to send a jihad army into Europe via migration in 2015. Then two months later, the migration started,” Geller said. The implication — that the refugee crisis was an ISIS plot — wasn’t especially subtle.

The ostensibly perilous state of Europe was something of a motif at the party. The featured speaker was Geert Wilders, the virulently anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant leader of the Netherlands’ far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). Wilders, an extremely tall man with slicked-back, Trumpesque hair, gave a fiery speech denouncing the influence of Islam in his homeland.

“There is only one Islam, and that Islam has no place in a free society,” Wilders told the crowd. “We should de-Islamize our societies. It’s a matter of our existence.”

One could not have hoped for a better summary of the counter-jihadist view of Europe. Proponents see the continent as a dark twin of America, a “there but for the grace of God” dystopia the Islamists are on the verge of conquering.

The key culprit, in their minds, is immigration. Prior to World War II, the Muslim population in Europe was negligible. After the war, a need to rebuild the continent led Europe to bring in a lot of people from the nearby Middle East and North Africa as guest workers. Many of these guest workers stayed, and eventually brought over their families. These people formed Muslim communities, which continue to be a draw for new Muslim immigrants today, at the same time that birthrates among white Europeans were slowing down.

The result was a rapidly growing Muslim minority in Western Europe. In 1950, 2 percent of Europeans were Muslim. That figure was 4 percent by 1990, and 6 percent by 2010.

In 2005, a Cairo-born woman named Gisèle Littman published a book warning of the dangers of this demographic shift, titledEurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. Littman, who publishes under the name Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “daughter of the Nile”), dropped out of a master’s program at the University of Geneva in the 1960s. Nevertheless, she spent much of her life publishing “academic” tomes on Islam and Europe, arguing that the history of Islam is an unbroken history of theologically driven conquest.

In Eurabia, Ye’or posited that Muslim immigration to Europe was not the benign economic migration it seemed. It was, instead, a dark plot — a plan, dating back to 1973, “superimposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies.” The goal was to Islamize Europe, to reduce European whites to “dhimmitude” — a term she uses for second-class citizenship granted to non-Muslims in an Islamic society.

In the pages of Jihad Watch and CSP publications, the notion that Muslim immigrants are imposing their rule on a hapless and clueless European majority is simply common sense. Every crime or terrorist attack committed by a Muslim, every law granting religious accommodations to Muslims, is cast as proof of the coming of Eurabia.Eurabia has gotten scant mention in the American press; mainstream historians have scorned it. Yet the book’s thesis has risen to the level of dogma among American counter-jihadists; Geller has called Ye’or “the world's leading scholar and historian on Islamic expansionism in Europe, the Middle East and the West.”

At the 2015 Values Voter Summit, the big annual gathering for right-wing evangelicals, Bannon sat down with ACT’s Gabriel to talk about the European refugee crisis. He referred to it as a Muslim “invasion,” and asked Gabriel if that was an overstatement.

“It is not,” she replied. “Europe will no longer be Europe by 2050. Europe has already become Eurabia. Europe is Eurabia right now.”

For this reason, immigration occupies a central role in the counter-jihadist imagination. If Muslim immigration turned Europe into a terror-ridden nightmare on the brink of sharia rule, then the first priority in the United States needs to be making sure the same thing can’t happen here. The Muslim Brotherhood is most easily defeated when you deny it foot soldiers.

One of the key recommendations of CSP’s Team B II report is that “immigration of those who adhere to sharia must be precluded.” More recently, CSP and ACT for America have been out front in opposing the resettlement of Syrian refugees. CSP has teamed up with longtime anti-refugee activistAnn Corcoran, who got her start in 2006 opposing the resettlement of African refugees in her area of rural Maryland. A CSP video starring her has racked up nearly 3 million views on YouTube.

“This process of Muslim colonization is called the hijra,” Corcoran says in the video, using the Arabic word for migration. “Mohammed told his followers to migrate and spread Islam, in order to dominate all the lands of the world ... and that’s exactly what they’re doing now.”

The “Muslim ban” and the counter-jihad

When Trump initially announced his plan for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” way back in December 2015, his campaign statement cited a poll conducted by CSP as the key piece of justification.

“A poll from the Center for Security Policy released data showing ‘25% of those polled agreed that violence against Americans here in the United States is justified as a part of the global jihad,’”the statement read. “51% of those polled, ‘agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to sharia.’”

This poll was, unsurprisingly, shot full of methodological problems. It was anonline opt-in poll, meaning that it was not a random sample of American Muslims, and several questions were written in such a way that the answers would end up sounding extremist no matter what.

More interestingly, though, is the person who conducted the poll on CSP’s behalf. It was none other than Kellyanne Conway, who would go on to become Trump’s campaign manager and chief press surrogate. According toMother Jones’s Pema Levy, who first reported the link, Conway’s firm had a relationship with CSP that dated back to 1998.

"It's very alarming to me that such a high number of individuals, Muslims living in the US, would say, 'Well, we can have a choice' [to follow sharia]," Conway said during a June 2015 appearance on a CSP podcast. “The Muslims living in the US themselves — 27 percent of them, anyway — say that this is what the purpose of jihad is, to either punish nonbelievers (16 percent) or, the other 11 percent, to undermine non-Muslim states."

This is the way in which the “Muslim ban” makes sense. Not as something Trump dreamed up by accident, but as a direct product of the counter-jihad’s influence on the president of the United States. You can even see the counter-jihadist influence in the text of the executive order itself.

“In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles,” the order reads. “The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.”

When the Trump administration talked about the Muslim ban to press, they warned that unfettered Muslim entry into the country would bring about a constant drumbeat of low-level terrorism — a warning that sounded a lot like some counter-jihadists’ descriptions of contemporary Europe.

“We don't want a situation where 20, 30 years from now, it's just like a given thing that on a fairly regular basis that there's domestic terror strikes, that stores are shut up or that airports have explosive devices planted or people are mowed down in the street by cars and automobiles and things of that nature,” an unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson. “These are the realities that we're living in today.”

How counter-jihadists want to change America — if Trump will let them

There is a counter-jihadist master plan.

In 2015, CSP issued a follow-up report to the Team B II report. Titled “The Secure Freedom Strategy,” and authored by “the Tiger Team,” it fleshed out a broad slate of specific policy actions that could be taken to act on Team B’s diagnosis of the problem. Something like Trump’s ban on refugees entering the country is in there, as is the Flynn-Sessions-Pompeo plan for listing the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization.

Those aren’t the only two examples. The report spends a great deal of time lambasting the Obama administration for failing to openly name Islamism as our enemy.

“The Obama administration’s increasingly institutionalized secularist — if not actively pro-Islamic — policies have largely prevented the U.S. government from engaging in strategic information operations aimed at exposing and undermining the supremacist doctrine of shariah and the terrorism it commands,” its authors write. “Public clarity about that threat has also been compromised by the distortion of intelligence analysis and terminology used to describe Islam, jihad, and shariah.”

This has obvious resonances with the Republican attacks on Obama for failing to call terrorists “radical Islamists.” But it also targets, specifically, President Obama’s “Countering Violent Extremism” initiative — a program that focuses on preventing Americans from being attracted to violent political movements, Islamist and non-Islamist alike. This, the Tiger Team argues, is a way of downplaying the threat from the more dangerous stealth jihad.

Now bothReuters andCNN have reported that the Trump team is planning to revamp the CVE program to focus solely on Islamism. Its new name? “Countering Islamic Extremism,” nomenclature that a) is focused exclusively on Islam, and b) deemphasizes the threat from violence specifically.

News of the Trump team’s plans delighted counter-jihadists, who have long attacked US government counterterrorism training for downplaying the threat from sharia. Spencer told me the revamp of the CVE program was the Trump initiative that he was most excited about.

Spencer is being a bit premature — as of right now, the reports about the program still aren’t confirmed. But his glee points to something important, something missed in taking these things in isolation.

The Trump team is incredibly disorganized: According to one New York Times account, Trump staffers still haven’t figured out how to turn on the lights in the White House Cabinet room. They also have an insurgent ideology, one that’s in many ways at odds with what you hear from mainstream Republicans — especially on foreign policy. There just isn’t a clear sense of what they want to do on a lot of issues, or what specific tools they could use to do it.

The counter-jihadists, by contrast, are extremely organized. They have a think tank that has put out detailed policy proposals, intellectuals with fairly large megaphones who can argue for the think tank’s ideas, and a large activist network that’s surprisingly well-connected inside the Republican Party.

And, of course, they have a lot of like-minded sympathizers in the White House. So if the Trump team needs policy ideas on national security and terrorism, it’s entirely likely that they’d turn to CSP for help. Indeed, the explicit point of the Tiger Team’s Secure Freedom Strategy was to provide a comprehensive blueprint for a “war” on sharia to a White House that’s willing to listen.

So what are their actual policy proposals?

The report advocates reorienting training for counterterrorism staff around “the threat doctrine — sharia,” essentially meaning that the US should teach its spies and law enforcement officials that Islam is their enemy. It proposes “rolling up and shutting down [Muslim Brotherhood] front groups in the United States,” by which it means the main Muslim organizations in America. It suggests ending university programs that promote “Muslim-Christian dialogue,” and replacing them with “corresponding educational activities exposing the true nature of sharia and the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations.”

Some recommendations are even more jarring. The report calls on the US government to use “sharia adherent advocacy and practices as legal premises for deportation and stripping of American citizenship” — in other words, kicking out Muslims who publicly announce that they live by Islamic moral codes. Former Speaker of the House and staunch Trump supporter Newt Gingrich has fervently embraced this idea, telling Sean Hannity in June 2016 that the US government should deport all Muslims who believe in sharia.

The CSP report further states that “over eighty percent of U.S. mosques have been shown to be sharia-adherent and promoting jihad,” and that “they are incubators of, at best, subversion and, at worst, violence and should be treated accordingly.” The clear implication is that the US government should shut down 80 percent of American mosques and arrest their imams on charges of promoting terrorism.

This isn’t just a blueprint for war on sharia — it’s a blueprint for war on the Muslim American community. For using the power of the state to shut down Muslim organizations, arrest believing Muslims, and close the vast majority of mosques.

Prominent politicians have endorsed this plan (though it’s not clear if they’ve read it all the way through). At a 2015 CSP conference, the entirety of which is uploaded to YouTube, both Gingrich and Cruz labeled the Secure Freedom plan a sound strategy for fighting jihadism — a move that garnered very little attention at the time. The document is too obscure, and too boring, for most people to root through it.

But these ideas in it cannot be seen as obscure anymore.

“I definitely see individuals with this [counter-jihadist] network having a huge influence within this administration,” Yasmine Taeb, a lobbyist at the Friends Committee on National Legislation who focuses on terrorism and civil liberties, tells me. “[Trump’s] policies are ones that they’ve been advocating for ... which is scary.”

According to McCants, the Brookings scholar on Islam, “national security professionals on both sides of the aisle are freaking out” about the influence of counter-jihadists on Trump.

Would Trump be able to implement all of the policies in the Secure Freedom Strategy by executive fiat? Almost certainly not. More to the point, it’s not clear that he’d want to: Shutting down 80 percent of America’s mosques is extreme even for him, well beyond anything he’s said publicly.

The point, rather, is that this is where the people who are advising the president are coming from. Their repeated public statements, and the administration’s policy alignment with some key counter-jihadist priorities, cannot be ignored. These ideas, ideas which when taken to their logical conclusion end in a mass campaign of persecution targeting Muslim Americans, are now the dominant approach to terrorism among the president’s closest advisers.

Watching the video of Gaffney’s speech at the Western Conservative Summit no longer feels like watching the ramblings of a coot. It feels like peering through a window into the way the Trump White House sees the world.

hmmn

https://www.reddit.com/r/RussiaLago/comments/9529qd/the_shadows_of_erik_prince_peter_thiel_and/

punked? by twitterbots?!

28/50 General Michael Flynn, an advisor of the Trump campaign and thenMr. Trump’s national security advisor, called himself “General Misha” and followed and retweeted Russian material from five Russian accounts. He later confessed to a federal crime (#RoadToUnfreedom, p. 241).

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/top-takeaways-from-bombshell-report-flynn-wanted-to-give-nuclear-tech-to-saudis-may-have-broken-law/

Fired National Security Advisor and admitted felon Michael Flynnreportedly pursued the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Whistleblowers are saying that the National Security Council’s ethics lawyer found that Flynn may violated a conflict of interest statute.

Despite the lawyer’s recommendation that this should be abandoned, top Flynn aideDerek Harvey allegedly continued on, speaking to Flynn “every night” even after Flynn was fired for lying to the FBI. Flynn has since pleaded guilty to that crime and cooperated with investigators in multiple ongoing probes.

One of those investigations, we learned, had to do with Flynn’s ex-business partner Bijan Kian. Kian and Turkish-Dutch national Kamil Ekim Alptekinwere allegedly involved “in a conspiracy to covertly influence U.S. politicians and public opinion against a Turkish citizen living in the United States whose extradition had been requested by the Government of Turkey.” That Turkish citizen has been identified as cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen was accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of orchestrating a failed coup.

Another one of these up-to-now redacted investigations Flynn may have flipped on was revealed on Tuesday. Here are the key takeaways.

Dealings with Saudis Raise Questions About Trump Administration Policy

The House Oversight Committee has opened an investigation. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) already commented that the investigation is “crucial” for understanding the Trump Administration’s aims.

Flynn was allegedly involved in the following proposal, per NBC News:

The proposal, which involved enlisting the U.S. nuclear power industry to build nuclear plants across the Middle East, wasbacked by a group of retired generals who formed a firm called IP3. Flynn described himself in financial disclosure filings as an “advisor” to a subsidiary of IP3, IronBridge Group Inc., from June 2016 to December 2016 — at the same time he was serving as Trump’s national security adviser during the presidential campaign and the presidential transition, the report says.

Not only was Flynn told he might have violated the law, the Trump administration’s pursuit of this nuclear tech transfer, Cummings said, appears “ongoing.”

These goals may even raise new speculation about why President Donald Trump, for instance, responded the way he did in the aftermath of Saudi Arabian agents’ assassination of journalist and permanent U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

Rick Gates Knew About This, Too

Flynn’s aide Derek Harvey reportedly had a conference call with Trump friend Tom Barrack and former Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates. Gates, it should be noted, was also deputy chair of the Trump Inaugural Committee, which is also under investigation by federal prosecutors. If Gates knew about it Special Counsel Robert Mueller likely knew about it.

What this means is that, in all likelihood, the reason Mueller keeps pushing back Gates’ sentencing status updates is that Gates has cooperated in the cases against Paul Manafort, Flynn, and perhaps the Trump Inauguration.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are reportedly looking into whether Trump‘s Inauguration Committee misspent some of the $107 million raised from contributors or accepted money in exchange for access and influence within the Trump administration.

Remember the Judge Who Wondered if Flynn Could Be Accused of “Treason”?

Back in December 2018, Law&Crime’s Ronn Blitzer aptly described U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivanwondering aloud about Flynn and treason as a “crazy idea.” Sullivan knew it, too.

Sullivan blasted Flynn during his sentencing hearing, particularly for acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey.

“You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country while serving as the National Security Advisor to the president!” he said. “Arguably, this undermines everything this flag over here stands for! Arguably, you sold your country out!”

He asked prosecutors if Flynn’s conduct “rises to the level of treasonous activity?” and then asked again, “Could he have been charged with treason?” Mueller’s team said no, pointing out that Flynn had ceased his dealings with Turkey before he took office.

Sullivan called for a recess and when he came back, he said, “Don’t read too much into the questions I asked. I’m not suggesting he committed treason.”

The rest of the day went without much more ceremony and Sullivan declined to sentence Flynn then and there. He gave the parties until March 13 to file a status report with the court. It would be interesting to see how Sullivan might react to the revelation that Flynn may have knowingly and willfully violated or directed someone to violate the law for the purpose of pushing through a nuclear technology transfer involving a foreign power that has most recently been implicated in a murder and a cover-up that received global attention.

Bonus: All of This Makes the Narrative that Flynn Was Entrapped Look Pretty Bad

All of the days-on-end debate about whether the FBI did or didn’t entrap Flynn basically ended when Flynn was given multiple opportunities to challenge the circumstances of the FBI interview that got him busted in court, and he declined do so.

Remember when Mueller said this to silence the doubters? “When the defendant said he did not remember something they knew he said, they used the exact words the defendant had used in order to prompt a truthful response. But the defendant never corrected his false statements. The interview was voluntary, and lacked any indicia of coercion.”

The current investigation isn’t dealing with “mak[ing] false statements about his communications with the Russian ambassador (Kislyak) weeks before the FBI interview.” It’s about national security.

:{:{}:

Bijan R. Kian, sometimes written Bijan Rafiekian, is an Iranian-American businessman. He has been an executive or board member of many businesses and organizations.^[1]

Kian was a member of the Board of Directors of the Export–Import Bank of the United States from 2006 to 2011,^[2][3] after being nominated by President George W. Bush and receiving Senate confirmation.^[4]

Kian was a partner of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn in the Flynn Intel Group and worked with the incoming Trump administration's transition team on matters relating to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.^[5][6]

The US Special Counsel's office opened an investigation into Flynn and the Flynn Intel Group, including Kian, in 2017.^[7][8] On December 17, 2018, several months after Flynn entered into a cooperation agreement with the Special Counsel's office, and two weeks after Flynn pleaded guilty in Federal court for lying to the FBI, Kian and Kamil Ekim Alptekin were indicted in US Federal Court as well. At the time he was charged with illegally acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, and for conspiracy to unlawfully kidnap Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in the U.S., and bring him to Turkey.^[9]

Michael Flynn's business associates charged with illegally lobbying for ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../michael-flynns...partner.../46fb3762-020a-11e9-91...

Dec 18, 2018 - Bijan Kian made his first appearance in court Monday; a second defendant ... prosecutors say he and business partner Bijan Kian took hundreds of ... In fact, Flynn had called a senior transition official at Trump's Florida resort, ...

Ex-associates of former Trump aide Michael Flynn indicted in Turkey ...

https://www.cnbc.com/.../ex-associates-of-former-trump-aide-michael-flynn-indicted-i...

Dec 17, 2018 - Bijan Kian and Kamil Alptekin were charged in U.S. District Court in Eastern ... A former business partner of President Donald Trump's first national ... Kian served on Trump's transition team, in the division related to the Office ...

Former Michael Flynn Business Associates Indicted in Turkey ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/flynn-turkey-bijan-kian.html

Dec 17, 2018 - Two former business associates of Michael T. Flynn, President Trump's ... Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, ... with the Russian ambassador during the transition after the 2016 election.

Bijan Kian - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijan_Kian

Bijan R. Kian, sometimes written Bijan Rafiekian, is an Iranian-American businessman. He has ... Kian was a partner of retired United States Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn ... the incoming Trumpadministration's transition team on matters relating to the ... Trump transition aide was key player in Flynn's Turkish work.

Flynn's ex-business associates charged with illegal lobbying - AP News

https://www.apnews.com/6e4dfd935c4a408b8383402f4d9a54e9

Dec 17, 2018 - (AP) — Two business associates of Michael Flynn, President Donald ... Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin are accused in an indictment of conspiring to ... Rafiekian, a one-time business partnerof former National Security Adviser ... On Monday, Kian, a former Trump transition official whose full name is Bijan ...

This Trump-endorsed conspiracy theory about Michael Flynn just had ...

https://thinkprogress.org/michael-flynn-donald-trump-robert-mueller-turkey-erdogan-...

Dec 17, 2018 - Bijan Kian, a member of Trump's transition team, has been charged with ... It's been a year since Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump's former ... when the former national security adviser's business partner was charged ...

House Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of moving toward transferring highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of U.S. law. Critics say the deal could endanger national security while enriching close allies of President Trump. Saudi Arabia is considering building as many as 16 nuclear power plants by 2030, but many critics fear the kingdom could use the technology to develop nuclear weapons and trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California and Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter with ProPublica. Arnsdorf first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017. His reporting was cited in the House report.

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:** House Democrats are accusing the Trump administration of moving toward transferring highly sensitive nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in potential violation of U.S. law. Critics say the deal could endanger national security while enriching close allies of President Trump. Saudi Arabia is considering building as many as 16 nuclear power plants by 2030, but many critics fear the kingdom could use the technology to develop nuclear weapons and trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. During an interview with *60 Minutes* last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made clear that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would do the same.

CROWN PRINCE MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN:** [translated] Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb. But without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:** On Thursday, the House Oversight Committee issued an interim report on the proposed Saudi deal, after multiple whistleblowers came forward accusing several top White House advisers and Trump allies of attempting to push through the transfer of the nuclear technology despite legal and ethical warnings. At the center of the controversy is the company IP3, which was formed to help U.S. companies build nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, in what they dubbed a “Middle East Marshall Plan.” Former national security adviser Michael Flynn worked as an adviser for a subsidiary of the firm before entering the White House, and reportedly continued to advocate on behalf of the company once in office. IP3 was co-founded by former Reagan official Bud McFarlane, who pleaded guilty to participating in the Iran-Contra cover-up in 1988.

AMY GOODMAN:** The House report also names several other high-ranking Trump officials and allies reportedly involved in the proposed Saudi deal, including Trump’s son-in-law, his adviser Jared Kushner; Energy Secretary Rick Perry; and Trump’s billionaire friend Tom Barrack, who served as chair of Trump’s inaugural committee. According to the report by the congressional committee, the White House may still be discussing the plan.

We’re joined now by two guests. In Washington, D.C., Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley in California joins us. He serves on the House Oversight Committee. And here in New York, Isaac Arnsdorf is with us, a reporter with ProPublica. He first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017. His reporting was cited in the House report.

We welcome you both to *Democracy Now!* Congressmember Ro Khanna, let’s begin with you. What are you doing on the House Oversight Committee? What is the leadership doing there?

REP. RO KHANNA:** Well, it’s a very serious matter. Here’s why people should care. The Saudis have been giving arms to al-Qaeda in Yemen. There’s reports of that. And the last thing we want to do as a country is to transfer nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, which could lead to proliferation and a threat to our security.

And as the journalist you have on has reported, there is a lot of financial conflict of interest here. Tom Barrack, who headed up the president’s inaugural committee to raise $100 million-plus, is also pushing for this deal and has financial interest in the deal. So the Oversight Committee is going to have an investigation to see what are the financial interests that are driving this administration to potentially sell nuclear secrets to the Saudis and what laws have been violated, because, as you know, they have to come to Congress, under the Atomic Energy Act, and offer certain guidelines, which they haven’t done.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ:** And, Congressman, this attempt by the administration is still very much alive. There was a meeting February 12th, just last week, in the White House between President Trump and some nuclear power developers. What do you know about that meeting and what came out of there?

REP. RO KHANNA:** Well, we need to find out more facts. That’s why we need an investigation. We need to know who was in that meeting, what was discussed, whether they followed the law that the Atomic Energy Act requires. I mean, even when we transfer nuclear technology to allies, such as India, when George Bush did that, it requires years of process. It requires the consultation of Congress. Here you’re talking about the potential sale of nuclear secrets to the Saudis, who aren’t an ally, who have engaged in the proliferation of weapons that are being used against our own troops, and there is no process for notification of Congress. And you have extensive reporting of people who gain—stand to gain billions of dollars from these investments.

AMY GOODMAN:** So, Isaac Arnsdorf, the report of the House Oversight Committee cites your reporting. You did a piece yesterday. You did a piece last year. Explain first what the “Middle East Marshall Plan” is and then the financial interests of people like, well, Trump, a close confidant, spoke at the Republican National Convention, Tom Barrack, headed the inaugural committee, Michael Flynn and others.

ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, the “Middle East Marshall Plan” was this idea that bubbled up in this company that you mentioned, IP3, which was that they can strengthen economic and political ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia by having the U.S. companies export nuclear power technology to Saudi Arabia. And they started lobbying the Trump administration, and initially the Trump transition, about how this would fit with Trump’s ideas about his approach to the Middle East and make America great, restoring American jobs in American industry.

And Tom Barrack was very receptive to this idea, because he was promoting a similar kind of economic outreach to the region. He had a lot of ties with the leaders there. And thanks to the support of Tom Barrack and also General Flynn, who was involved in the project before he was in the White House, the project, the idea, gained a lot of traction in the early days of the administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And take it through to now.

ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, initially, in the first three months, as detailed by the whistleblowers who spoke to the House Oversight Committee, this was really something that was happening in kind of a—kind of being rushed through the National Security Council, and that wasn’t complying with the requirements of the Atomic Energy Act, that requires all kinds of review, because, obviously, the U.S. very tightly controls this technology, because it can be misused to build nuclear weapons.

More recently, the administration has been taking steps to go through that formal process and have negotiations with the Saudis about reaching a formal agreement to share nuclear power technology. If that were to happen, Congress would not have to actually ratify the treaty, but it would have 90 days to pass a joint resolution that could block it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you would think, though, with all the stuff that’s happened in relationship to Saudi Arabia—the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the decision by Congress to cut off military aid to the war in Yemen—that there would be some reconsideration of the Trump administration of such a controversial move. What’s your sense of what the thinking is, going on here?

ISAAC ARNSDORF: Well, there was already a lot of bipartisan skepticism about the idea of sharing nuclear power technology, and calls to tell Congress more about what was happening in those negotiations, or even call off those negotiations. And you’ve certainly seen an escalation, since all the things that you mentioned, of members of both parties saying, “We need to put a pause on this. We need to get some more information.”

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to Energy Secretary Rick Perry speaking last year at a meeting of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Energy Secretary Perry was asked to respond to concerns about nuclear proliferation in light of U.S. negotiations with Saudi Arabia on nuclear energy.

ENERGY SECRETARY RICK PERRY: That goes right to the point that we tried to make with the Saudi crown prince in our conversations with him and with his team, that not only will it send a powerful message if they go into an acceptable one, two, three, with additional protocols, but that we—that they do that, because if they don’t, the message that’s sent—if the Chinese or the Russians, which don’t require any of that, not only does it send the message—I think the wrong message—by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but it also sends the message to the United States that we’re no longer the leader in the world when it comes to civil nuclear power—Westinghouse, best reactor builder in the world. … The second point that we tried to really drive home to the crown prince was that if you want the best reactors in the world, you have to come to the United States, and you have to use Westinghouse.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Ro Khanna, the significance of the testimony of Rick Perry, the energy secretary, and his involvement here?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I think it’s a worldview into how the Trump administration looks at the relationship with the Saudis. It’s all about money, whether it’s selling them arms sales or selling nuclear secrets. There’s no moral consideration. I mean, Tom Barrack, as recently as a week ago, was out there defending the Khashoggi murder and defending the Saudi regime’s murder of Khashoggi. He actually said, appallingly, that the United States has done worse, which I totally disagree with. But it gives you a sense of what’s driving this. It’s financial interests. It’s selling interests into the Saudis for money, and no concern for our security and no concern for the morality of the Saudis’ policies.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Isaac, in that clip, the energy secretary referred to the one, two, three. A lot of people are not familiar with that. Could you talk about the legal limitations on what the administration can do or can’t do in terms of transferring nuclear power technology?

ISAAC ARNSDORF: So, that refers to the section of the Atomic Energy Act that requires these negotiations and these agreements before sharing this technology. And what the secretary was describing there is really a very challenging policy problem, where the Saudis want nuclear power—maybe they have a legitimate interest in diversifying their economy from oil, but, as you heard the crown prince describe in the clip that you played, maybe they also want to keep up with their neighbor Iran, with potential military implications. So, the Saudis want nuclear power. They’re pursuing it. If the U.S. doesn’t help them get it, are they going to turn around and go to Russia or China? And then there are going to be even less security assurances than they would have with the U.S. So, that’s a very real policy problem that security experts struggle with.

But what you’re seeing with the Trump administration is that they are arriving at an answer to that policy problem that, based on what we’ve seen out of the House Oversight Committee, was, to a large extent, based on people with conflicts of interest promoting this for other reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: I also want to talk about Jared Kushner’s connection to this. The House report states, “In January 2018, Brookfield Business Partners, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, announced its plans to acquire Westinghouse Electric for $4.6 billion. Westinghouse Electric is the bankrupt nuclear services company that is part of IP3’s proposed consortium to build nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia, and which stands to benefit from the Middle East Marshall Plan. In August 2018, Brookfield Asset Management purchased a partnership stake in 666 Fifth Avenue, a building owned by Jared Kushner’s family company.” Isaac?

ISAAC ARNSDORF: This is especially interesting given that Jared Kushner is on his way to the region very shortly. And there’s a lot of discussion in the House Oversight Committee’s report about materials being prepared for conversations between Kushner and the president, and obviously Jared Kushner has developed a very close relationship with MBS, the crown prince, and was reportedly described as “in his pocket.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ro Khanna, would you like to add to this?

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I would just say we need transparency. But here is one thing that the president and the administration could do to show some distance from the Saudi regime, and that is to sign the War Powers Resolution that will stop U.S. support for the Saudi war crimes in Yemen. As you know, we passed it through the House; next week, the Senate is going to take it up. And I hope that the president will sign it and at least put some distance between U.S. policy with the Saudis. But we need to understand all of the financial interests that administration officials and their friends have with the Saudis and what’s driving our policy.

AMY GOODMAN: One last thing, Congressmember Ro Khanna. You’re a leader in the Congress around the issue of Yemen. Talk about the legislation that was just passed and how getting nuclear power to Saudi Arabia, which could conceivably be turned into nuclear weapons, plays into this picture of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

REP. RO KHANNA: Well, I appreciate your reporting on this. There are nearly 14 million Yemenis who face the potential of famine. That is because the Saudis have been bombing the port cities, and food and medicine isn’t being allowed in. It’s being inspected, and that’s leading to hyperinflation in Yemen. People don’t have food and medicine.

We passed in the House the War Powers Resolution that would stop the U.S. support for the Saudi bombing in Yemen. It’s expected to pass the Senate next week or in the next couple weeks. That will be the first time in the history of this country that the War Powers Resolution has ever passed, since 1973. And what that will do is make it unambiguously clear that the United States doesn’t support the Saudi bombing. As it is, since we passed the House resolution, we’ve seen a temporary ceasefire in the bombing campaign, and some hopeful signs that food and medicine will go in.

I think it would be the exact wrong message for us to be selling nuclear secrets to the Saudis, especially given the reporting that the Saudis are transferring some of these weapons to al-Qaeda in Yemen. And in terms of the point that Russia or China may supply the Saudis, the United States has prevented that type of action when we want to. We prevented it in Iran. We’re trying to prevent it in other countries. There’s no reason the United States should tolerate any sale of nuclear weapons to the Saudis.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there but continue to follow this issue. Ro Khanna, Democratic congressmember from California, member of the House Oversight Committee, that’s going to be investigating this Saudi nuclear issue. Also with us, in New York, Isaac Arnsdorf, a reporter with ProPublica, who first wrote about the intense and secretive lobbying effort to give nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia in 2017, his reporting cited in the House report. And we’ll link to your latest report, “House Panel Probes Trump Advisers’ Push for Saudi Nuclear Deal.”

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll be joined by a man whose father possibly faces the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. He’s in prison

11/16 nyt

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, has been much more outspoken about militant Islamists than he has about China and North Korea, the two main strategic concerns of the United States in Asia.

That has left scholars and analysts looking for clues about his views on Asia. A book published in July for which he was a co-author, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” offers some tea leaves. The half-dozen mentions of China and North Korea are couched in generalities, but there are glimpses into what the general thinks of the two nations.

General Flynn wrote that the United States needed to confront a global “alliance” between “radical Islamists” and the governments of China and North Korea, as well as Russia.

China and North Korea are officially secular Communist states, and China has blamed religious extremists for violence in Muslim areas of its Xinjiang region. In the book, General Flynn acknowledges that people may find the idea of an alliance between the Communist nations and jihadists to be strange, but asserts that it exists. He does not go into details on the alliance.

General Flynn is about to take on one of the most important foreign policy jobs in the United States government. He will be expected to coordinate policy-making agencies, manage competing voices and act as Mr. Trump’s main adviser, and perhaps arbiter, on foreign policy.

By appointing General Flynn, a former Army intelligence officer, Mr. Trump has signaled that he intends to prioritize policy on the Middle East and jihadist groups, though the Obama administration seems to have stressed to Mr. Trump the urgency of dealing with North Korea’s nuclear program.

General Flynn is an outspoken critic of political Islam and has advocated a global campaign led by the United States against “radical Islam.” He once wrote in a Twitter post that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

Based on his book, that campaign is the framework through which General Flynn sees China and North Korea. In the introduction, he wrote that radical Islamists “are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel.”

The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”

The general expanded on his definition of the anti-Western alliance: “The war is on. We face a working coalition that extends from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua. We are under attack, not only from nation-states directly, but also from Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, ISIS and countless other terrorist groups.”

“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.

General Flynn mentioned reports that North Korea had cooperated with Syria and Iran on nuclear programs and trade. Iran is the “linchpin” of the global anti-Western network, he wrote.

The general also wrote that there was a common ideology that bound the nations and militant Islamists together. “There are many similarities between these dangerous and vicious radicals and the totalitarian movements of the last century,” he wrote. “No surprise that we are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow and Beijing. Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told.”

....

11/16 nyt

General Flynn wrote that the United States needed to confront a global “alliance” between “radical Islamists” and the governments of China and North Korea, as well as Russia.

The introduction continued, “Those allies include North Korea, Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela.”

“Suffice to say, the same sort of cooperation binds together jihadis, Communists and garden-variety tyrants,” he added.

General Flynn mentioned reports that North Korea had cooperated with Syria and Iran on nuclear programs and trade. Iran is the “linchpin” of the global anti-Western network, he wrote.

....

mma

Over the past year, Sean Hannity and the cast of Fox News figures have deployed numerous theories in an effort to discredit and lay groundwork for an authoritarian response to the Mueller investigation. From referring to the investigation as “witch hunt” to claiming collusion isn’t a crime, the extended Fox News universe has tried it all.

When it comes to Trump's former National Security Adviser, Fox figures have taken to accusing the FBI of duping Michael Flynn into lying. Pro-Trump media have spent most of 2018 floating conspiracy theories about Flynn's guilty plea.

Those conspiracy theories have now been debunked. A federal judge did not throw out Flynn's guilty plea on Tuesday. Flynn and his lawyers instead conceded on the record that he knowingly lied to the FBI and did not believe his rights had been violated. Fox News personalities were forced deploy new spins on the situation. Each propagandist took their turn trying out new theories, seemingly throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick.

Just before the hearing, Fox guest Matt Schlapp compared Flynn's actions to "pulling off mattress tags, jaywalking, parking tickets."

Things really picked up speed after the hearing. Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett claimed that Judge Emmet Sullivan begged Flynn to throw out his guilty plea, and when he didn’t, the judge began to lash out at Flynn. As Matt Gertz explained, this makes no sense. Lou Dobbs took a simpler route, simply bashing the judge. And fittingly, Fox & Friends utilized the most convenient strategy: virtually ignore the issue entirely. Fox & Friends dedicated less than five minutes to the Flynn case during their Wednesday broadcast.

Gertz summed up Fox’s efforts: “If Fox propagandists had any standards or capacity for honesty, the Sullivan and Flynn saga might cause them to re-examine much of their unhinged Mueller coverage. They don't, so it won't -- and it's on to the next conspiracy theory.”

Where do we go from here? Fox is already floating a pardon for Flynn.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/michael-flynn-associates-indicted-lobbying-turkey

Monday, The New York Timesreported that two former business partners of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn were indicted in federal court:

Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, were unsealed on Monday in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom. The two men were charged with a conspiracy to violate federal lobbying rules, and Mr. Alptekin also was charged with making false statements to F.B.I. investigators.

The indictment is further evidence of a broad crackdown on unregistered foreign lobbying growing from the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who has investigated foreign flows of money from Ukraine, Turkeyand other countries designed to manipulate decision-making in Washington. Mr. Mueller referred the Turkey case to prosecutors in Northern Virginia earlier this year.

Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe last year, and who Mueller told a court has provided "substantial assistance" to the investigation, has been unsettlingly close to the Turkish government. In 2016, he wrote an editorial attacking Fethullah Gulen, a dissident cleric living in the United States who was accused by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of masterminding a failed coup attempt against him. Flynn and his son were even accused of plotting a conspiracy to kidnap Gulen and hand him over to Turkish authorities.

Prosecutors allege that Flynn and Kian sought to lobby members of Congress to extradite Gulen, and Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with ties to Erdoğan, helped finance the project.

It is unclear whether this scheme had any impact on U.S. policy. But the Turkish foreign minister claims Trump administration officials are now working on a plan to extradite Gulen, and reportedly even considered doing so as a bargaining chip to persuade Erdoğan to back down from his standoff with Saudi Arabia over the suspected political murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The idea of the U.S. handing over a dissident of an autocratic regime to ease international outcry against an atrocity committed by another autocratic regime would be horrifying on a number of levels.

If Flynn's associates illegally worked to influence any of this, they must be held to account — and the public deserves answers.

butina lavrov

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kt mcf

McFarland’s interview with Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff members went ahead, as planned, on July 19th, even though she couldn’t review her e-mails or calendars beforehand. During the closed-door session, staffers asked McFarland if she took part in any phone calls with Russian officials during the transition. According to officials, McFarland answered that she served as a note-taker during transition phone calls with the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. After the interview, committee staff members checked and found only one call, in November, between Trump and Putin, which was before McFarland joined the transition, and no call with Lavrov. Aides said that McFarland had botched her answers. She was forced to send a clarification letter to the committee, acknowledging that her recollections of the calls were mistaken.

On July 20th, McFarland appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for her confirmation hearing. That same month, Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, had given McFarland a series of written questions, including one about whether she had ever discussed “contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak directly with General Flynn?” McFarland’s curt written response read, “I am not aware of any of the issues or events as described above.”

long

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/us/russia-interference-election-trump-clinton.html

nyt

...

Mr. Trump had steamrollered his primary opponents in part by taking aim at Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. The post-9/11 wars were foolish and costly, he would often say at campaign events. America’s allies were deadbeats and freeloaders, he told supporters, who cheered in agreement. Russia was not an existential threat, he said, but a potential ally in beating back terrorist groups.

In early March 2016, the establishment struck back. In an open letter, dozens of the party’s national security luminaries vowed publicly to try to stop the election of a candidate “so utterly unfitted to the office.”

:{:{}:

They took particular umbrage at Mr. Trump’s remarks about the Russian president, writing that his “admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

But Mr. Trump was not cowed. He soon signed on new advisers and aides, including some who had been pushed to the fringe of a political party that had long lionized President Ronald Reagan for staring down Soviet leaders at the height of the Cold War.

To the Kremlin, they must have looked like a dream team.

Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had long viewed Russia as a natural ally in what he saw as a “world war” against radical Islam. In June 2013, when he was D.I.A. chief, he sat inside the imposing headquarters of the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, and chatted with officers. Two years later, he sat at Mr. Putin’s elbow at a gala dinner in Moscow.

Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 — hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates — and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.

Carter Page, a businessman who spent several years working in Moscow, was virtually unknown in Washington when Mr. Trump appointed him a foreign policy adviser. But the S.V.R., Russia’s foreign intelligence service, knew who he was.

:{:{}:

In 2013, Mr. Page met in New York with a Russian spy posing as an attaché at the United Nations andpassed along energy industry documents in hopes of securing lucrative deals in Moscow.

The F.B.I., which had been tracking Russian spies when Mr. Page came on the bureau’s radar, determined that he had no idea he was meeting with a Russian agent.

“I promised him a lot,” said the spy, Victor Podobnyy, speaking to another Russian intelligence officer about his dealings with Mr. Page, according to an F.B.I. transcript. “How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor.”

The new team was in place by the end of March, and Mr. Trump had a new message that was strikingly similar to one of Mr. Putin’s most ardent talking points.

“I think NATO’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”

“NATO’s not meant for terrorism,” he went on to say. “NATO doesn’t have the right countries in it for terrorism.”

By then, the Russian intelligence operation to intervene in the American election — including efforts to infiltrate and influence the Trump campaign — had begun.

Mr. Papadopoulos, the 28-year-old campaign adviser, did not know this when he met in the cafe of the London hotel with Mr. Putin’s “niece” (he has no niece) and an obscure Maltese professor in late March. The academic had taken an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos when he joined the campaign.

F.B.I. agents have identified the professor, Joseph Mifsud, as a likely cutout for Russian intelligence, sent to establish contact with Mr. Papadopoulos and possibly get information about the direction of the Trump campaign. He disappeared after his name surfaced last October, and his whereabouts is unknown. At one point he changed his WhatsApp status to a simple, if cryptic, message: “Alive.”

Professor Mifsud arranged an email introduction between Mr. Papadopoulos and a Russian foreign ministry official. The American also exchanged emails with Olga Polonskaya, the woman in the cafe. “We are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” she wrote in one message, and the two discussed a possible meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump.

Over time, though, Mr. Papadopoulos came to question whether the messages were actually from Ms. Polonskaya. The woman he had met in the cafe barely spoke English. The emails he received were in nearly perfect English.

“I even remember sending her a message asking if I’m speaking to the same person I met in London because the conversations were so strange,” he said during an interview this month.

In late April, Mr. Trump gave his first major foreign policy address in the ballroom of a historic Washington hotel. Some of the speech was a familiar litany of Republican policy positions — hawkish warnings to Iran and pledges to be tough on terrorism. But midway through the speech, as Russia’s ambassador to the United States watched from the front seats, Mr. Trump pivoted and said the United States and Russia should look for areas of mutual interest.

“Common sense says this cycle, this horrible cycle of hostility, must end, and ideally will end soon,” he said.

Video

The Associated PressPublished OnSept. 17, 2018]

“That’s the signal to meet,” Mr. Papadopoulos wrote in an email to his Russian foreign ministry contact that evening, meaning that Mr. Trump’s favorable comments about Russia suggested he might be interested in meeting Mr. Putin.

Just one day earlier, Professor Mifsud had told the campaign aide about a possible gift from Moscow: thousands of hacked emails that might damage Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy.

It was a breathtaking revelation. But there was no evidence that Mr. Papadopoulos — while ambitious and eager for advancement in the bare-bones campaign — passed the information along to anyone inside the Trump circle.

More than two years later, Mr. Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling anyone in the campaign about the emails. He said he was supposed to have a phone call that day with Stephen Miller, a top campaign adviser, but it was postponed. If the two men had talked, Mr. Papadopoulos said, he might have shared the information.

“How fate works sometimes, I guess,” said Mr. Papadopoulos, who has been sentenced to 14 days in jail for lying to the F.B.I.

As Mr. Trump continued to win primaries and vacuum up convention delegates late in the spring, the Russians made multiple attempts to establish contact with campaign officials.

A Republican operative connected to the N.R.A. tried to arrange a meeting between Mr. Trump and a Russian central banker at an N.R.A. convention in Kentucky in May. “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” wrote the operative, Paul Erickson, in an email with the subject “Kremlin connection.” “Ever since Hillary compared Putin to Hitler, all senior Russian leaders consider her beyond redemption.”

Mr. Page, the foreign policy adviser, was invited to deliver the commencement address at the prestigious New Economic School in Moscow. That invitation now appears to have been an effort both to gain information about the Trump campaign and to influence it by feting Mr. Page in the Russian capital. Russian television that year was describing him as a “famous American economist,” but he was an obscure figure in this country.

At that time, the last American to give the commencement speech was Mr. Obama, who used the opportunity to criticize Russia for its treatment of Georgia and Ukraine.

Mr. Page, though, criticized the “hypocrisy” of the United States and its NATO allies for lecturing Russia about bullying its neighbors, which were former Soviet republics, while the Westerners were taking “proactive steps to encourage regime change overseas.” During his time in Moscow, Mr. Page met with at least one top Russian official and numerous business leaders.

And there was the now infamous June 2016 approach to Donald Trump Jr. by Russians whom he and his father had known from their days taking the Miss Universe pageant to Moscow. The Russians met at Trump Tower in Manhattan with top campaign officials after promising damaging information on Mrs. Clinton.

See the timeline of events that surround the Trump Tower meeting.

...

https://www.alternet.org/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-explains-how-we-finally-know-why-mike-flynn-lied

As the Mueller investigation has moved along, names like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen have moved to center stage.

On Friday, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow went back to the start of the saga, when Donald Trump staffers like Michael Flynn and his aide K. T. McFarland were the focus of investigation and speculation.

"The big question about Flynn—and this has been raised over and over again by critics of the Mueller investigation—why did Mike Flynn lie about this?" Maddow asked. "There's always been something hard to figure out about the Flynn case... why did Mike Flynn lie about this stuff?"

Flynn was fired from his job as national security adviser after he apparently lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his communication with Russian officials. But this was far from his only lie, Maddow said.

"Mike Flynn also lied about those conversations he had with Russia talking about sanctions," she said. "He lied in public. He lied to reporters. He lied to the FBI. Why were they lying about it? I mean, on its face, they didn't need to. It would make sense that they'd be talking about sanctions to the Russian government conceivably. They're the top two security officials in the National Security Agency for the incoming administration. Obviously there is going to be a change on the policy. It's not that weird. But they lied about it."

Because Flynn and McFarland lied, Maddow said, "they were both compromised by Russia from the very beginning."

"Because, of course, Russia knew the truth, right?" she said. "Russia was on the other end of the phone. They knew that these guys had been having conversations about Russia, right? It wasn't secret from Russia. But it was being kept secret from the American public, the American press, the American Congress, and even the FBI."

At this point, Maddow circled back to the Trump Tower Moscow project, which Cohen and others lied about—and which came to an abrupt halt on the very same day that it was revealed Russian hackers were seeking to influence the election.

"The story about Russian government hackers being exposed for their role in trying to get into our elections—that was the reason they stopped working on the Trump Tower project that day. The secret project they'd been working on for many, many, many months including direct contact with the Kremlin and planned travel to Moscow stopped that day. Why? What was the connection between those two things?" Maddow asked.

"If the big picture Russian dream here is to have their very own president of the U.S.A., if their dream is to compromise an American presidential candidate so that candidate is beholden to them and then install that compromised candidate as president, then the Trump Tower Moscow project which compromises Trump and the election interference campaign [ruins it]," she said. "Install the candidate, and then leverage the candidate to lift sanctions and free Russia to do what it wants. Now, over this past week, we suddenly can see the full plan."

Watch the segments below.

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TRMS: artemko gave ukraine plan tio m cohen who said he gave it to flynn but also said not? 5/18

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https://www.alternet.org/bombshell-gop-report-says-mike-flynn-went-infamous-russian-spymasters-house-2015-very-productive

s team said that Friday’s news does not show any wrongdoing.

“As the congressman has acknowledged before, the meeting was a dinner with two longtime acquaintances ― Manafort and Weber ― from back in his White House and early congressional days. The three reminisced and talked mostly about politics. The subject of Ukraine came up in passing,” Ken Grubbs, Rohrabacher’s spokesman, told HuffPost in an email. “It is no secret that Manafort represented [pro-Putin Ukrainian President] Viktor Yanukovych’s interests, but as chairman of the relevant European subcommittee, the congressman has listened to all points of view on Ukraine. We may only speculate that Manafort needed to report back to his client that Ukraine was discussed.”

Still, Rohrabacher has emerged as an important figure in the investigations into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to help President Donald Trump and hurt his rival Hillary Clinton.

One of a mere handful of well-known GOP figures in Washington who were enthusiastic about Trump before his election victory, Rohrabacher was once under consideration to be the new administration’s secretary of state. He has cast doubt on the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about the election and said voters benefited from the hacksof Clinton campaign messages. Last year, he met with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, the group that released the stolen Clinton materials, and said he wanted to give Trump information proving the hack was not committed by Russia. Soon afterward, top Republicans curtailed his powers on his influential subcommittee. And in 2016, Rohrabacher had meetings with Trump adviser Michael Flynn ― who is now cooperating with Mueller ― and with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya ― who is known for a Trump Tower meeting she had with Donald Trump Jr., Manafort and others hoping that Russia would share information damaging to Clinton.

The 15-term congressman is courting controversy even as he faces what observers describe as his toughest re-election race yet in a California district that seems to be turning more liberal. He appears unfazed.

“My constituents couldn’t care less about this,” Rohrabacher told The New York Times last year. “They are not concerned about Russia.”

House Intelligence Committee issued seven subpoenas Wednesday, ramping up its investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election and into whether names of President Trump’s associates were improperly revealed in classified intelligence reports.

Subpoenas went to Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and to the president’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen. The Senate Intelligence Committee and a federal grand jury in Virginia also have issued subpoenas for Flynn’s business records.

In a statement, the House committee said it had issued subpoenas seeking “testimony, personal documents and business records” from Flynn and Cohen. It also approved subpoenas for the Flynn Intel Group LLC and for Michael D. Cohen & Associates PC.

“We hope and expect that anyone called to testify or provide documents will comply with that request, so that we may gain all the information within the scope of our investigation. We will continue to pursue this investigation wherever the facts may lead,” Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Texas), the committee chairman, and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), the ranking member, said in a statement.

The investigative moves come as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia, has cleared ousted FBI Director James B. Comey to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his contacts with the president, according to a Comey associate....LAT may 31?

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http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/flynn-intel

deleted page

Michael T. Flynn

Agustin 'Gus' M. Taveras, Jr.

"Gus" M. Taveras, Jr.

Chief Information Officer, Patrocinium Systems LLC

Today, Gus Taveras serves as the Patrocinium Systems LLC, Chief Information Officer (CIO) a Personal Security as a Service technology company, focused on empowering citizens with data - making them more situational aware of the environment around them. Gus still has a passion for the DoD and serves as a part time consultant to Booz Allen Hamilton consultant.

Prior to his current position Gus served as the Chief Technology Officer DIA, served as the senior interface for technology to the national intelligence community, the military services, the Combatant Commands, industry, and academia. Mr. Taveras advises and informs the Chief Information Officer (CIO) on technical issues and operations. He develops information technology (IT) strategy related to defense intelligence information management and technology, including technical architectures and standards, systems, applications, and networks; data processing; telecommunications; and other aspects of IT with a focus on information management capability integration and interoperability.

Prior to this appointment, Mr. Taveras served as a consultant to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and served 24 years in both the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army.

Agustin 'Gus' M. Taveras, Jr.

Honorable Bijan R. Kian

Mike Coomes, COO

Philip A. Oakley

https://www.linkedin.com/in/phil-oakley-3912118

Flynn Intel Group, Inc.

Flynn Intel Group, Inc. provides intelligence support and risk mitigation services. It provides assessment, training, analysis and integration solutions. The company is headquartered in Alexandria, VA.

Professional

Prior

Quaestor Federal Consulting LLC

Quaestor Federal Consulting LLC provides operational integration, logistics, and support services. It offers concept development, programmatic and logistical support and operational capabilities synchronization services. The company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Springfield, VA.

Philip A. Oakley

R. James Woolsey

Robert K. Kelly lawyer

intercept

DONALD TRUMP HAS repeatedly promised to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption. The new ethics pledgehe announced Wednesday would prohibit registered lobbyists from working for his transition team or administration.

But Trump’s supposed aversion to lobbyists has not harmed the fortunes of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, one of Trump’s earliest and most visible supporters, now a vice chair of the transition team and a rumored frontrunner for the influential postof national security adviser.

Though Flynn is not a lobbyist himself, his company, Flynn Intel Group, is registered with Congress as a lobbying organization, and has a registered lobbyist on its staff. A Flynn Intel Group client, Kamil Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with real estate, aerospace, and consulting interests, told The Intercept on Thursday that one of his companies, Inovo BV, paid Flynn’s company “tens of thousands of dollars” for analysis on world affairs. On election day, Flynn published an opinion piece for The Hill urging U.S. support for Turkey’s controversial strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and pushing for the extradition of Erdogan’s political rival, Fethullah Gülen, who now resides in Pennsylvania. “From Turkey’s point of view, Washington is harboring Turkey’s Osama bin Laden,” Flynn wrote, on November 8.

In a statement, Flynn said that he would sever ties with his own company if he entered Trump’s administration. He did not say whether he would close the business, where his son is listed as chief of staff, or disclose his other clients.

Alptekin said that while he agreed with what Flynn wrote, he did not have any influence over his views. “There is no money in the world that could make Gen. Flynn or anybody else who is being considered for a cabinet post write that article on election day,” he said. “I don’t think a billion dollars would make him do that.”

The ties between Flynn Intel Group and Inovo BV, Alptekin’s company, were previously reported by The Daily Caller and Politico. Robert Kelley, the Flynn Group’s general counsel and the main point of contact with the Inovo account, told Politico that the company’s duties included reporting on “the present situation, the transition between President Obama and President-elect Trump.”

Alptekin said that was “absolutely untrue. We never had a single conversation on that issue.”

He told The Intercept that he hired Flynn Intel Group “three months ago.” He said he knew of Flynn’s relationship with President-elect Trump, but that had no bearing on his decision to become a client. “It was more his reputation for integrity, and as a decorated war hero who knows the region,” he said. “I didn’t work with him directly. I never discussed the [election day] article with him directly. I didn’t sign off on the article.”

While Alptekin says the payments were not for lobbying, Flynn Intel Group is registered as a lobbyist for Inovo BV, a Dutch company controlled by Alptekin.

Flynn Intel Group had not registered as a lobbying entity until September. That month, Kelley, the company’s general counsel, registered as a lobbyist for Inovo BV. (A third filing, from late October, identifies a government relations company called SGR LLC as lobbying Congress on behalf of the Flynn Intel Group.)

Earlier 2016 filings with the Department of Justice from Kelley’s law office identify him as an agent of the National Mobilization Forces, an Iraqi military group trained by the Turkish government and controlled by the former governor of Nineveh province. The filings show that Kelley received a total of $90,000 from the Iraqi group and terminated the relationship in June.

Alptekin, a Turkish citizen who worked on Capitol Hill as a congressional fellow in 2003, confirmed that Inovo BV, his Dutch company, was a current client of Flynn Intel Group. “I don’t know him so well, but I met him a few times,” he said, of Gen. Flynn. “In general, when [Flynn] meets someone from the region, he ends up talking about the danger of radical Islam. He mentioned that radical Islam in Turkey is no different from other radical Islamic leaders in the past, with a different front face, a different back office. He compared Gülen to Ayatollah Khomeini. I remember that of the talking points he discussed with me. But I never said ‘go out and say this and do that.’”

“Mr. Flynn does not work on my contract,” he added. “Mr. Bob Kelley does.”

Neither Flynn nor the Trump transition team responded to requests for comment. Reached by phone on Thursday afternoon, Kelley read a three-sentence statement which he said had been prepared by Flynn. “Our counsel, Bob Kelley, registered pursuant to law for our company to represent the interests of a private company,” the statement read, in part.

It continued: “If I return to government service, my relationship with my company will be severed in accordance with the policy announced by President-elect Trump.”

Kelley declined to say whether the Flynn Intel Group had any foreign governments as clients. When asked whether Flynn’s son Michael, whose LinkedIn profile has him as Flynn’s “chief of staff,” would continue to have a role at the firm should his father move on to the White House, Kelley declined to respond.

“I can’t give you more than what’s in the statement,” he said.

---

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-16/trump-security-aide-flynn-has-deep-ties-to-defense-contractors

Trump Security Aide Flynn Has Deep Ties to Defense Contractors

By David Kocieniewski

December 15, 2016, 6:03 PM PST

Beefed up consulting company as he got classified briefings

Top job with top clearance doesn’t require Senate confirmation

Michael T. Flynn

Donald Trump’s selection of Michael Flynn as national security adviser caused concern last month when it was revealed that Flynn represented a business with ties to the Turkish government while getting classified briefings during the campaign. He promised to sever those ties before Inauguration Day.

But Flynn has other potential conflicts. Just last week, he was re-elected to a paid position on the board of a surveillance drone company with Department of Defense contracts, federal filings show. And while taking part in the classified briefings for Trump last August, he revamped his consulting company -- Flynn Intel Group, or FIG -- by adding one senior executive whose firm does extensive cybersecurity work for government agencies and another who was soliciting defense department aviation contracts.

Public records, government contracts and documents posted online by Flynn and his partners show that they have vied in recent months for federal contracts to supply overseas military bases, fly diplomats in and out of conflict zones and provide cybersecurity and technology for defense and intelligence agencies.

Flynn’s recent moves at FIG -- as well as his partnerships with companies and private-equity executives who have military and intelligence contracts -- could conflict sharply with his government role. Ethics experts say that as the president’s top military-security aide, he will handle classified information on a daily basis and help lead the country’s military, diplomatic and intelligence response around the globe.

Reducing Activities?

Visits to two of Flynn’s offices in Virginia suggest they are reducing their activities: One was empty and being repainted. But neither Flynn, his partners, nor the Trump transition team responded to repeated questions during the past week about how he plans to comply with federal ethics rules that forbid executive-branch employees from having a financial interest in companies that do business with the agencies they lead.

The transition team also hasn’t provided information about Flynn’s business dealings in response to congressional requests. Representative Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who sits on the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Vice President-elect Mike Pence last month asking for details of Flynn’s business ties and steps he intends to take to avoid a conflict. A Cummings aide said none have been provided.

‘Potential for Pressure’

On Dec. 14, two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, sent a letter to the nation’s top intelligence officials arguing that Flynn’s ongoing ownership of his consulting company “creates the potential for pressure, coercion, and exploitation by foreign agents.” The letter said FIG is now run by Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., who was removed from the Trump transition team earlier this month after spreading false internet conspiracies that led to a shooting at a Washington pizzeria.

Flynn is a retired Army lieutenant general who was fired from his post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Barack Obama in 2014. His designation as Trump’s national security adviser offers him a key White House role requiring no Senate confirmation. He has been widely scrutinized for his brashness in the two years since leaving the military. He made a paid speech for RT, a news agency run by the Russian government, sat at a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin at a 2015 dinner celebrating RT’s anniversary, shared internet conspiracies on social media and last February tweeted that “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

Leveraged Experience

But little has been publicly disclosed about the path Flynn has forged in the business world. Like many retired officers, he leveraged expertise he developed in the service into a private-sector career. Rather than join a big defense company, however, he set up his own.

“I didn’t walk out like a lot of guys and go to big jobs in Northrop Grumman or Booz Allen [Hamilton] or some of these other big companies [like] Raytheon,” he told Foreign Policy magazine in 2015. “I’m very independent, and it’s very liberating actually.” He added, “I’m not going to be a general that just fades away.”

In 2014, he founded his company with Bijan Kian, a prominent Iranian-American banker who served on the board of the Export–Import Bank, was a senior fellow at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a member of the White House Business Council.

Federal ethics rules say that executive-branch employees who are in partnerships must avoid potential conflicts with businesses owned by fellow partners. Kian is a principal at Global Capital Markets, a mergers-and-acquisitions firm that has brokered deals involving an assortment of military contractors, and chairman and chief executive officer of GreenZone Systems Inc., a technology company that sells secure communications chips and computers designed for military and intelligence agencies.

Kian didn’t respond to numerous attempts to reach him.

Cybersecurity Experts

FIG positioned itself as an elite operation with the state-of-the-art skills to protect global businesses and government agencies.Flynn hired a handful of cybersecurity experts who worked under him in the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military posts. Much of their business centered around providing training and information-technology design advice to corporate executives concerned with protecting their companies from hacks.

By late 2015, Flynn had raised his public profile through an assortment of speeches and media appearances critical of the Obama administration’s anti-terror strategy, and he started advising several Republican presidential candidates. He also began to expand his own circle of business associations and his company’s portfolio.

Win Contracts

FIG brought in Phil Oakley, who ran Quaestor Federal Consulting, a contractor that provides training and advice to military and intelligence operations. FIG was hired by Levyx, a data-storage startup, which announced that the partnership was intended to help it win government and defense contracts. Flynn also joined the advisory board of Patriot Defense Group, the military-contracting subsidiary of Patriot Capital LLC.

In May 2016, Flynn took a paid position on the board of a company that makes surveillance drones, which grew out of a business that President-elect Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., represented until 2014. As a board member of Drone Aviation Inc., he has been paid $3,000 per month and also received 100,000 shares of restricted stock, now valued at more than $275,000, which will become fully vested next spring. Flynn continued to hold his seat after he began receiving classified intelligence briefings on August 17. Securities and Exchange Commission filings and federal-contract databases show the company was awarded one Department of Defense contract in late August and two more in October.

Ownership Stake

FIG worked as a lobbyist for Inovo BV, a Dutch company with close ties to Turkish President Recep Erdogan. When that arrangement was reported last month by The Daily Caller, Flynn responded by having FIG leave the field of lobbying and said he would “sever ties” with his company. But it isn’t clear whether he will retain an ownership stake. Because Flynn is a partner in the closely held business, and his son Michael is its chief of staff, he and his family would stand to gain financially from any business it does with the government.

He also was re-elected to his paid position on the board of Drone Aviation on December 6th, according to SEC filings.

Ethicists urge Flynn to end such arrangements and sell his company. Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, said even severing ties isn’t enough.

People in such positions “still know the company and how its business works, so they would know how a policy decision would affect it,” he said. “The only way to avoid that is for them to sell their interest and make a totally clean break.”

Erik Prince

In January, according to the Washington Post, the founder of notorious private security contractor Blackwater—whose sister is Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos—held a secret meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian close to Putin in an effort to establish an unofficial back channel between Moscow and Trump. Prince also reportedly advised Trump aides, including Flynn, during the transition. (Prince denies both claims.)

...

Ezra Cohen-Watnick

The 30-year-old National Security Council official is a member of the “Flynnstones,” as the dwindling cadre of Flynn loyalists on the NSC are known. After Flynn’s firing, incoming national security adviser H.R. McMaster attempted to remove Cohen-Watnick from his position, but top Trump advisers Kushner and Steve Bannon intervened to save his job. Cohen-Watnick—known for his hawkish views on Iran and for clashing with CIA staffers—was among a trio of White House officials involved in an effort to lend credence to the president’s baseless claim that he had been wiretapped by the Obama administration. The NSC staffer—along with White House lawyers Michael Ellis and John Eisenberg—helped provide Rep. Devin Nunes with access to classified documents that the House Intelligence Committee chairman cited as evidence, wrongly, that Trump associates had been inappropriately “unmasked” in surveillance intercepts.

inaug slush fund:

39 112 IND HABBOUSH, R.W. $500,0001/19/2017 6822 GEORGETOWN PIKE MCLEAN VA 22101 Donated $500,000, but company only has annual revenues of less than $100,000. Venezuelan lobbyist, trying to get sanctions lifted. CEO of Habboush Group met with members of National Security Council before Flynn resignation to discuss lifting ofsanctionson Venezuela

===

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-secretive-trump-lobby-wants-profit-breakup-iraq

Ex-Bush administration officials with pro-Trump leanings have forged a secret alliance with a former private Iraqi Pentagon contractor who is a member of one of Iraq’s wealthiest dynasties. Their mission is to promote the breakup of Iraq as the only viable way to defeat the Islamic State. They have achieved partial success: on Monday, the Trump administration announced a seismic shift in U.S. policy toward the possibility of Iraq’s dissolution.

Yet this network has been intimately connected toCambridge Analytica (the technology firm that ran Trump’s election campaign), entities that have sponsored ISIS and other Islamist militants, as well as to ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers — who might benefit from the breakup of the country. If you want an inside glimpse into how Deep State 2.0 under Trump is working, this is it. It’s all about networks of influence, vested interests and manipulation of public opinion, in the U.S. and Iraq, in particular. But it’s also about oil and raw materials, and how in some ways, sectarian tensions represent only the surface of deeper drivers of conflict.

By perusing documents, speaking to sources and digging into obscure public records, Insurge Intelligence was able to follow a thread that has so far only been guessed at: what is driving the Trump administration’s thinking on Iraq, a country the U.S. invaded and occupied in 2003, and where it still fights an endless "war on terror"?

A window into the answer comes from a little-known U.S.-Iraqi network, operating through the front of a supposedly patriotic American campaign group. The network was active through the latter half of 2016, coinciding with the final stages of presidential campaigning, and focused on opposing President Obama’s Iraq policy.

The locus of the activity is an organization called the Committee to Destroy ISIS, set up in July 2016 by Sam Patten. Patten served in the George W. Bush administration as a senior State Department advisor from 2008 to 2009, and previously was Bush’s presidential campaign coordinator in 2000. He is executive director of the Committee, which describes itself as a group of Americans and Iraqis campaigning for the western Sunni region of Iraq to achieve independence from the central government in Baghdad.

In October 2016, Patten’s Committee to Destroy ISIS provided financial support to the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington DC think-tank with direct ties to the Trump transition team, to produce a report which calls for the breakup of Iraq along sectarian lines.

The curious implications of the connection between Patten and the Hudson Institute report were first highlighted in October 2016 by Ali Hadi al-Musawi for 1001IraqiThoughts. The report, "West Iraq: The Search for Leaders and Leverage," describes itself as a "feasibility study" of western Iraq becoming an independent or autonomous Sunni statelet. The proposal would end up giving neighboring Saudi Arabia significant influence on the envisioned statelet.

The idea of breaking up Iraq is not new. It was, according to high-level sources in Jordan, actively discussed by Bush administration officials based on a vague plan brokered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a year before the 2003 invasion. Officials talked about engineering the sectarian partition of Iraq into three autonomous cantons for Sunnis, Kurds and Shi’as. This could make it easier for the U.S. to control the country and access the oil-rich regions.

The plan never left the drawing board, but the strategic thinking behind it lingered and continued to surface in neoconservative planning for the future of the Middle East. This thinking seeped across party political lines and reared its head repeatedly among Democrats. In 2006, Joe Biden, as the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, advocated splitting Iraq into three along sectarian divisions. Since then, pundits and policymakers have circulated the idea. But the U.S. government never formally adopted it as even a potential scenario , until now.

The lead author of the Hudson Institute report is Michael Pregent, with research assistance provided by Kevin Truitte. Pregent is a former intelligence adviser to General David Petraeus who served in Iraq and heads up a separate campaign group known as Veterans Against The Deal (VATD), set up to oppose the nuclear deal with Iran brokered by the Obama administration.

VATD launched in late 2015 with a million-dollar ad campaign against the Iran deal, claiming it would give Iran billions of dollars to fund terrorism in the Middle East. But the group did not disclose its donors.

To be sure, Iran has played an increasingly abysmal role in escalating atrocities in Iraq and Syria, fueling anti-Sunni sectarianism and, in turn, emboldening anti-Shi’a extremists. Yet conversely, Michael Pregent and his backers appear to have a curious blindspot on the role of Turkey and the Gulf kingdoms in supporting extremists linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

The Koch-Bush-Trump nexus

At its launch, VATD’s board members included Pete Hegseth, CEO of another pro-Republican campaign group, Concerned Veterans for America. Hegseth’s group was financed almost entirely by the Koch brothers’ $400 million political donor network.

A year later, Hegseth met with Donald Trump as a potential candidate for the post of Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He didn’t get the job. But Michael Flynn, Trump’s one-time National Security Advisor (before his untimely resignation in February) was also previously an advisor to VATD.

VATD’s PR campaign was run by a Washington DC PR firm, Javelin DC, founded by Matt Latimer, President George W. Bush’s deputy director of speechwriting and chief speechwriter to former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Javelin’s co-founding partner is Keith Urbahn, who served as Rumsfeld’s chief of staff.

VATD executive director Michael Pregent is also closely connected to the Center for Security Policy, a Washington DC think-tank founded and run by former Reagan defense official Frank Gaffney.Pregent frequently appeared as a guest on Gaffney’s CSP ‘Secure Freedom’ radio podcast from 2015 to 2016.

Gaffney — a staunch advocate of the Obama Muslim birther conspiracy theory — was asked by Trump to help him select his national security team, according to sources speaking to the Wall Street Journal. The Trump team denied that Gaffney formally advised the transition, but did not confirm or deny whether he had met with Trump.

Pregent declined to comment when asked whether he agreed with Gaffney’s bizarre conspiracy theories.

Cambridge Analytica

In their Hudson Institute report, Pregent and his co-author Truitte “acknowledge support from the Committee to Destroy ISIS, which helped defray expenses incurred during the preparation of this study.”

One of Donald Trump’s senior foreign policy advisors at the time of publication was George Papadopoulos, a former research associate at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015. During his Hudson Institute tenure, Papadopoulos worked under Richard Weitz, director of the think-tank’s Center for Political-Military Analysis.

Sam Patten, whose Committee to Destroy ISIS funded the Hudson Institute feasibility study for the breakup of Iraq, has his own ties to the Trump administration.

Patten’s biography on the website of his lobbying firm, Office of Sam Patten LLC, describes him as having worked with “one of London’s most innovative strategic communications companies to introduce new technologies and methodologies to US campaigns during the 2014 congressional cycle. This beta run of a cutting-edge electoral approach included taking micro-targeting to the next level. Currently this approach is being adopted by at least one major US presidential candidate.”

It’s now well-known that the London-based technology firm engaged in presidential campaigning in this way was Cambridge Analytica. The company, which has become notorious for its role in supporting Trump’s presidential campaign, previously supported the campaigns of Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

A spokesperson for the firm told me that Patten had indeed worked for Cambridge Analytica at the Oregon office of its parent company, SCL Group. Patten had got involved early when the firm was actively fine-tuning its methodologies in 2014 before the presidential campaign.

Trump’s chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon, is on the board of Cambridge Analytica, which is now actively using its close ties to Trump’s inner circle to pitch for new government contracts.

Michael Flynn — who advised Michael Pregent’s VATD — also served as an advisor to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Group, to help expand its contracting work. Under Trump, the firm has just finalized a contract with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on a new counter-extremism program.

Among the firm’s main financiers is billionaire Robert Mercer, one of Trump’s chief political donors, and previously a key funder for Bannon’s Breitbart News, among other projects.

In 2014, Bannon was the Mercer family’s political advisor, and played a key role in rolling out Cambridge Analytica for the US Republican election scene — precisely when Patten worked there.

In July 2016, the month Patten launched the Committee to Destroy ISIS, Patten was interviewed by Steve Bannon on Breitbart News’ radio show to discuss the Committee’s vision for a partitioned Iraq. Breitbart also published an op-ed by Patten putting forward the same views.

Asked about his relationship with Steve Bannon, and whether he believed the Trump administration might end up taking on the Committee’s proposals for a breakup of Iraq, Patten said: “One outcome of the US election is the likely change in approach to foreign policy. The new administration includes voices that oppose making America’s regional policy a hostage to a single Gulf nation’s ambition, and has been actively calling for new ideas.”

Patten also heaped praise on the White House chief strategist: “We met Mr. Bannon last summer and he struck us a thoughtful person, an avid student of history and an original thinker. We hope that new thinking may challenge the cynical, status quo of recent years….”

I asked the U.S. State Department whether it supported the Committee’s position, or still stood by the traditional U.S. position of previous administrations supporting a unified Iraq. A spokesperson sent me an excerpt from Monday’s press briefing, in which an official confirmed that the Trump administration was moving to accommodate the possibility of a divided Iraq: “With respect to the unity of Iraq, you’re right, that is something we make a point of saying. But ultimately, these are all internal political discussions that Iraq needs to have with all ethnic groups resident in the country.”

This is the first time that the State Department has officially declared the U.S. government’s willingness to contemplate the prospect of an Iraq breakup of some kind. The reality on the ground is that the process is already underway, but the Trump administration’s position is a major step toward formalizing it.

But former Bush PR guru Sam Patten is not just connected to the Trump administration. He simultaneously works with certain Sunni factions in Iraq — some of whom were suspected by U.S. intelligence of having ties to the anti-U.S. insurgency.

Flirting with insurgents

In 2014, as Iraqi writer Ali Hadi al-Musawi reported, Patten separately registered as a foreign agent on behalf of the Sunni-led Al Arabiya bloc, an Iraqi political coalition formed by then-deputy prime minister of Iraq, Saleh al-Mutlaq. Under Saddam, al-Mutlaq was a member of the Ba’ath Party until the late 1970s when he was expelled for insisting that five Shi’ite men should receive a fair trial.

Since then, however, al-Mutlaq unofficially maintained contacts with the Ba’ath Party on many levels, according to Jordanian writer Mohammed Hussainy. Disclosure filings confirm that during this time, Patten was paid from al-Mutlaq’s Jordanian office in Amman.

According to the Daily Beast, “some in U.S. intelligence have suspected him [al-Mutlaq] of having ties to Sunni insurgents over the years.”

In January 2007, U.S. forces were reportedly fired on from al-Mutlaq’s office in Baghdad, during a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda safehouse. “One of the buildings from which Coalition Forces received heavy enemy fire, including grenade launches, was later identified as belonging to Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq,” said a US statement. Al-Mutlaq denied the incident.

On April 17, 2007, al-Mutlaq called for Iraq’s insurgent groups to unite against the U.S. during an interview with Reuters from Amman. He said that insurgents must agree on a future vision of Iraq if the U.S. military did not abruptly pull out of the country.

His rapport with the wider Sunni population is questionable, though. A declassified December 2007 intelligence assessment by the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee described al-Mutlaq as commanding “little support from the Sunni street.”

But the key point is that Sam Patten didn’t seem particularly concerned by the fact that the U.S. administration he once served suspected al-Mutlaq of siding with the insurgency.

Lobbying for the dynasty

Patten’s loyalties are further revealed from documents he filed in accordance with lobbying regulations.

Congressional filings for the Committee to Destroy ISIS reveal that Patten’s Iraqi benefactors go far beyond al-Mutlaq and the al-Arabiya Coalition, to one of Iraq’s most powerful and wealthiest Sunni clans. The dynasty once maintained friendly relations with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, but went on to forge close relations with the U.S. military occupation run by the Bush administration.

The first filing, filed and signed by Patten in August 2016, reveals that the Committee is majority-owned by a foreign entity listed in the disclosure form as “Rhodes Precast Concrete Ltd.” The documents show that Patten is essentially acting as a lobbyist for this “foreign entity.”

no link

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html

Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.

The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.

The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls wasPaul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.

The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.

He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia. And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.

The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.

A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.

The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.

But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials. ...security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications....

https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/18/headlines/trump_chooses_lt_gen_michael_flynn_for_national_security_adviser

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A look at the scope of the intelligence community's investigations into Trump's ties to Russia

Natasha Bertrand

Jan. 24, 2017, 8:43 AM

The US intelligence community has opened investigations into several members of President Donald Trump's inner circle over the past year, focusing on the advisers' potential ties to Russian government officials throughout Trump's presidential campaign and beyond.

The investigations appear to have begun as early as last spring, when the CIA established a US counterintelligence task force to investigate whether the Trump campaign received funds from Russia. The task force consisted of the FBI, the Treasury and Justice departments, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency.

The BBC first reported on the existence of the investigation earlier this month, which McClatchy also reported was still ongoing. The investigation sought, among other things, to determine who financed the hacks on the Democratic National Committee and of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and whether any of Trump's associates served as middlemen between his campaign and the Kremlin.

John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, also received a recording of a conversation last year from one of the Baltic states' intelligence agencies suggesting that money from the Kremlin had gone to the Trump campaign, the BBC reported.

One night before Trump's inauguration, The New York Times reported that intercepted communications were part of the investigation into ties between Russia and people close to Trump, but the report said it was "not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump's campaign, or Mr. Trump himself."

The BBC report indicated that the task force was granted a warrant by a judge in the FISA court — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — on October 15 to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks that could have been implicated in any money transfer. Trump was not named in the warrant, but three of his associates were the subject of the inquiry.

All three associates contacted, but not named, by the BBC, denied the allegations contained in the report.

The 4 big names

Trump's potential ties to Russia have come under increased scrutiny amid allegations contained in a 35-page dossier from a former British intelligence officer. The unverified claims contained in the dossier include that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the election to undermine Hillary Clinton.

Paul Manafort, Trump's one-time campaign manager who served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012, emerged as a central figure in both the dossier and the intelligence community's early inquiries into Trump's ties to Russia.

Secret ledgers uncovered by an anticorruption center in Kiev and obtained by The New York Times revealed that former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych's political party, the pro-Russia Party of Regions, earmarked $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort for his work from 2007 to 2012.

Manafort has denied ever having collected the earmarked payments. But the unverified dossier on which top US leaders have been briefed alleges that Yanukovych "confided directly to Putin that he authorized kickback payments to Manafort," who "had been commercially active in Ukraine right up to the time (in March 2016) when he joined campaign team."

Paul Manafort

Paul Manafort.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The dossier also alleged that Manafort, who resigned as Trump's campaign manager on August 19, served as a liaison between Trump's campaign team and Russian government officials. The FBI looked into Manafort last year for ties to Russian officials and business interests that Manafort has said do not exist.

"I have never had any relationship with the Russian [government] or any Russian officials," Manafort told The Wall Street Journal. "I was never in contact with anyone, or directed anyone to be in contact with anyone."

Two other Trump allies, Carter Page and Roger Stone, have also been scrutinized by the intelligence community for their relationships with Moscow. Page served as an early foreign-policy adviser to Trump, and Stone advised Trump's campaign until August 2015.

Page's extensive business ties to state-owned Russian companies, stemming from his time as an investment banker in Moscow in the early 2000s, were investigated by the FBI last summer. The bureau also looked into Stone's ties to WikiLeaks, which published the hacked Podesta emails last year.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was being investigated by counterintelligence agentsover his phone calls to Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, on December 29. That was the day that President Barack Obama sanctioned Russia over its election-related hacking and expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US.

Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, said at the time that Flynn's calls to Kislyak "centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in."

But CNN reported on Monday that the calls, "captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats," raised "enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States."

Flynn's ties to Russia were scrutinized after he attended a gala in Moscow in 2015 celebrating the 10th anniversary of the state-sponsored news agency Russia Today. Flynn was photographed sitting next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the gala's dinner.

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https://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/trump-s-kitchen-cabinet-continued-what-media-needs-know-about-nominee-s-top-advisers-and-supporters/212477

Retired Army Lt. General Michael Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is reportedly “a trusted Trump adviser and go-to man on intelligence and national security.”

What You Need To Know

Flynn was forced out of his position in 2014 after clashing with senior officials. He has complained that “‘political correctness’ has prevented the U.S. from confronting violent extremism, which he sees as a ‘cancerous idea that exists inside of the Islamic religion.’” Flynn accusesthe U.S. government of concealing “the actions of terrorists like bin Laden and groups like ISIS, and the role of Iran in the rise of radical Islam.”

Flynn has publicly supported Trump’s idea that the families of terrorist suspects should be killed, and he also backs Trump’s proposal for a ban on Muslim travel to the United States. Flynn has written that “fear of Muslims is RATIONAL.”

In 2015, Flynn flew to Moscow and was filmed having a formal dinner with Vladimir Putin. The Daily Beast reported that “Pentagon brass were taken by surprise that he didn’t notify the department.”

Flynn was paid by the state-funded Russian television network RT for his appearance at the network’s anniversary gala.

Flynn spoke on Trump’s behalf at the Republican National Convention, saying that “war is not about bathrooms” in reference to controversy over anti-transgender laws. He also retweeted an anti-Semitic pro-Trump message which read in part, “Not anymore, Jews. Not anymore.” He later described the incident as “a mistake.”

FLYNN, mike gen

Wikistrat

The Trumpist defense of Michael Flynn

“Unmasking” and what Grenell’s document shows

Grenell’s noninformation plot

Glenn Greenwald

Ex-prosecutor accuses Bill Barr of a ‘big cover-up’ in Flynn caseTom Boggioni / Rawstory

From President to Dictator

Admitted His Crimes

Justice Department Turmoil

On Putin’s Payroll

More Kremlin Connections

Economic Collapse and Riots

‘Country Goes to Total Hell’

Trump Places Trust in Putin

Derek Harvey, a former Trump adviser who now works for Nunes, outed the whistleblower who reported Trump's call

OCTOBER 29, 2019

Trump applauds Flynn's hiring of FBI critic as new lawyer

The theory: ISIS represents the soul of Islam

How a conspiracy theory goes from the fringes to the White House

[vid act for am]

When you ask credentialed experts on Islam and terrorism about counter-jihadist theories today, they usually don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Counter-jihadists see leading American Muslims as part of the problem

Europe will soon be “Eurabia” — a fate America might share

The “Muslim ban” and the counter-jihad

How counter-jihadists want to change America — if Trump will let them

Ex-prosecutor accuses Bill Barr of a ‘big cover-up’ in Flynn case Tom Boggioni / Rawstory