As we speak, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, the anti-Trump resister-in-chief, is testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about Crossfire Hurricane and Michael Flynn. The hearing on Obamagate is here, but which path should Senate Republicans choose. Will they try and get answers that they probably already know about this heinous Obama Department of Justice operation? The GOP base sure knows what happened. Is it time to get some payback for how House Democrats treated Attorney General William Barr who was yelled at for merely defending the administration’s policy of enforcing federal laws? This hearing should be a brutal one. It should put enormous pressure on Yates, who was fired by Trump for refusing to enforce and defend his executive order on immigration, to answer for all the bad behavior the DOJ administered on behalf of the Obama administration.
First, she lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the phone calls then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. We now know Obama gave the order for his minions to take out Flynn by entrusting his team of national security and law enforcement officials with finding “the right people” to deal with him. This was part of the infamous January 5, 2017 meeting Obama had regarding what to do concerning protecting the FBI’s Russia investigation from the incoming Trump administration.
The order was clear, as then-FBI Director James Comey and Andrew McCabe, his top deputy, set out to get him—no matter what. Comey even admitted that the calls to Kislyak were legit. There was no impropriety, but a perjury trap was planned for their interview with Flynn for which there was no basis. The FBI had no evidence against Flynn, nor anything that would suggest he was a Russian agent except for the Russian collusion hysteria that was being manufactured by the media and spurred on by the infamous, unverified, and utterly fantastical Trump dossier. We now know that six days after the FBI’s January 2017 interview with Flynn in which the agents who spoke with him felt like he didn’t lie to them, the DOJ all but cleared Flynn of being a Russian agent. This was buried for years. Someone gave the order to hide this key piece of exculpatory evidence when the Mueller investigation put the screws to Flynn based on a shoddy Logan Act angle, which former Vice President Joe Biden suggested, by the way, which led to the former general pleading guilty to “lying to the FBI” charges. He was threatened with financial ruin.
Yates alleged that Flynn was open to blackmail. He was compromised, which was an odd take since the former general’s security clearance was renewed around the same time. Paul Sperry wrote in a May op-ed for the New York Post about how Yates might have been a blackmailer trying to sew mayhem in the early days of the Trump administration regarding Flynn, Russia, and this whole collusion delusion. In short, the overture was clear: Fire Flynn, or there will be a price:
Sally Yates was the real blackmailerhttps://t.co/lULpNHujIt
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) May 10, 2020
Yates knew what the FBI knew when she raced over to the White House on Jan. 26 to warn Trump’s general counsel that Flynn was “compromised.” She also knew that the Obama administration had just weeks earlier renewed Flynn’s national security clearance at the highest levels. And that the intelligence community had “no evidence,” as Obama’s intelligence czar just reconfirmed, that Flynn “colluded” with Moscow.
Still, Yates insisted Flynn posed a threat to the government. Why? Because, she said, he failed to truthfully brief the vice president.
The implication was that unless Trump fired Flynn, he’d pay a price. So it was Yates, in a sense, who was blackmailing Trump.
“Why does it matter to the Justice Department if one White House official lies to another White House official?” White House Counsel Don McGahn reasonably asked Yates, when she rushed into his office with her hair on fire.
She explained that by lying to Pence, Flynn could be exposed to the Russians at any time and that might open him up to blackmail. The Kremlin, she added, likely had its own proof he lied to the vice president and could use it to maintain “leverage” over foreign-policy decisions as long as he remained in office.
Wait a minute.
That makes no sense: Any “leverage” the Russians may have had over Flynn vanished the moment Yates informed the White House he lied. The only way he was vulnerable to blackmail at that point was if McGahn kept Flynn in the dark about what had been revealed to him and other White House officials. But McGahn, White House spokesman Sean Spicer and other top officials no doubt huddled with Flynn to get his side of the story as soon as Yates left. So any threat of extortion left with her.
Yates deserves a grilling. It better be a show. So far, it looks like we might see Lindsey Graham 2.0, the best version, regarding this since the FBI lied to the Congress about the Trump dossier. Last week, Graham made it clear that he feels someone should be sent to jail for this nonsense. Ed Morrissey has more:
“Stay tuned next week,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo … The documents released on Friday by Graham as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee show that the FBI knew full well that the subsource for the Steele dossier was not based in Russia — and that he himself called it unreliable “bar talk” rather than actual sourced intelligence. The memo that Graham declassified shows that the FBI knew full well what that meant to the credibility of Christopher Steele’s dossier, and never told the FISA court in securing more warrants to surveil Carter Page.
Not only did the FBI repeatedly lie to the FISA court, Graham tells Bartiromo, he’s about to prove that the FBI lied to Congress about it, too. “Somebody needs to go to jail,” Graham warns…
Yates should be used as a punching bag the way Democrats tried to deliver haymakers to Barr. The only difference is that the Obama administration has considerable evidence that it went off the reservation to hamstring the incoming Trump administration and the campaign itself. They spied on them. Sorry, they had secret informants trying to glean information off of Trump campaign officials under false pretenses and then relaying any information to their superiors. This is Crossfire Hurricane—and it was a spy operation. The Democratic president had his DOJ spy on the presidential campaign of the rival party. There’s no getting around that. And the paperwork that set off this surveillance operation filed by Peter Strzok is a train wreck as well. To quote former FBI intelligence official Kevin Brock, “what this FBI document clearly establishes is that Crossfire Hurricane was an illicit, made-up investigation lacking a shred of justifying predication, sprung from the mind of someone who despised Donald Trump, and then blessed by inexperienced leadership at the highest levels who harbored their own now well-established biases.”
Care to elaborate, Ms. Yates. Show no mercy. Reclaim time if necessary. This is a de facto 2020 campaign event. Barr was treated miserably by Democrats. It’s time to return the favor to Ms. Yates who did engage in a plot to politically assassinate Flynn, who did nothing wrong. She was involved in the overall narrative of Russian collusion that was grounded in lies and destroyed another man’s life as well—Carter Page—whose FISA spy warrants altered key information or straight-up omitted exculpatory information regarding his supposed ties to Russia. Someone should go to jail, yes. Skewer Yates, Republicans. Skewer her good.
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