Yes, Trump is a wannabe tyrant, but Flynn was set up

The FBI, the CIA, and officials in the Obama White House engaged in serious misconduct in the run-up to and the carrying out of the Russiagate investigation. Neither Trump’s demented tweets nor his open disdain for legality change that.

Media outlets that trumpeted Russiagate for three years and still have not engaged in self-criticism over it are now in a tizzy over Attorney General Barr’s instruction to withdraw the charges against Flynn for lying to the FBI. That’s probably judicial overreach, but it pales in comparison with the overreach involved in targeting Flynn in the first place.

Flynn copped to lying to the FBI about his discussions with the Russian ambassador in the days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Flynn was to be Trump’s top security official, so the conversation itself was unremarkable. The FBI made a big deal out of it because of other suggestions that the Trump campaign was engaged in a quid pro quo collusion with Vladimir Putin to get himself elected since obviously actually getting Americans to vote for Trump voluntarily was inconceivable, right? Except that a lot of them did, even people who don’t watch broadcasts on RT.

Before exploring what Flynn said that was deemed untruthful, let’s recall that the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 started as an attempt by one party in a presidential election to spy on the other side. As Trump complains in his usual calm and restrained fashion, that’s exactly what the Obama-led intelligence agencies did to him. Now for several years, we’ve been told that the FBI had reasonable grounds to suspect something fishy was occurring in Trumpworld. That’s pretty easy to believe because everything about Trumpworld is fishy. But to justify a counterintelligence operation targeting Trump campaign officials, even former ones, in the midst of an election, the FBI had to have pretty solid evidence. Did they?

We now know that the notorious Steele dossier including the discredited pee-tape tale, none of which the FBI could independently verify, was used to obtain warrants to snoop on the Trump campaign. Steele himself peddled its contents to a variety of journalists, most of whom wouldn’t go near it. Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, however, did publish a story that the FBI was looking into its allegations. Remember that name.

Eli Lake at Commentary explains:

In the wake of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane,” a probe of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Over the course of a few months, the bureau sent informants and undercover agents to record five of Trump’s campaign advisers surreptitiously through conversations those informants and undercover agents set up on the FBI’s behalf.

Most significant, at the FBI’s request, was the behavior of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISC granted four successive warrants to eavesdrop electronically on the communications of a low-level Trump foreign-policy adviser named Carter Page. This was a highly unusual step in a matter involving a U.S. citizen because Page was working for the presidential campaign of the party out of power.

To get those warrants approved, the FBI submitted uncorroborated opposition research [the Steele dossier] that had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign without fully informing the court about the origins of the information.

. . . In its application for the FISA warrant against Page, the FBI used Isikoff’s Yahoo story as verification of Steele’s reporting. “Which means that the cloud over Trump’s presidency was the product of journalists and G-men using themselves to confirm a falsehood.

This is exactly how Dick Cheney used Judith Miller to get his phony tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on the front page of the New York Times. That led to the debacle of war. Russiagate threatens to engulf us once again in a new way.

Back to Flynn’s FBI interview: we learned last week through FBI internal emails that the agents sent to talk to him—which he naively thought was a friendly call—pondered whether they should “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” Using a time-honored police tactic, they pretended that the conversation was just a routine chat and did not suggest to Flynn that he was suspected of any crime. Anyone who watches police shows knows that this is a really good way to get yourself charged with one. (N.B. Never talk to the cops without a lawyer, especially if you are innocent.)

Flynn wasn’t in office yet, so he should have been more cautious in discussing Trump’s desires with the Russians, and perhaps he thought the FBI shouldn’t know exactly how much he ventured into policy details on the call while another Administration was still in power. Apparently, he forgot that the FBI guys would be sitting on the transcripts of exactly what he said to the Russian ambassador, which, as a former high-ranking snoop himself, he had to assume. But Flynn never suspected he was being set up.

It’s remarkable how eager erstwhile liberals are to applaud the FBI’s sneaky entrapment tactics given that agency’s long history of repression of social movements. For example, the agency loves to find developmentally challenged immigrants or hapless Muslim believers and manipulate them into thinking they’re staging a terrorist attack. They get to blow open the “plot” and attract lots of great coverage about how they’re protecting America while ignoring the white-collar crime wave that is bankrupting us.

If there is ever a serious mass movement against the direction the country is taking, we can rest assured that the FBI will be front and center infiltrating it, populating it with agents provocateurs to promote violent acts and snare militants, compiling dossiers on supposedly protected political activities, and generally doing the ruling elite’s dirty work. We should not defend them now as one of their dirty tricks comes apart, even if the victim was a reactionary nutcase from Trumpville.

Meanwhile, the potential damage of the Russiagate fantasy and gross bending of the laws by official actors is as yet incalculable. An FBI lawyer stands accused of altering a document used to renew the FISA warrants and is now himself facing the possibility of criminal charges. More investigations are ongoing, one of which has subpoena power to dig around inside the CIA as well as the FBI, both arenas where Trump would love to find dirt.

The Providence Journal in blue-state Rhode Island called the Flynn prosecution a “frame-up” and said Barr was right to drop the charges. Those winds may be shifting. In fact, we may face the prospect of high-profile indictments of elements of the “Deep State” coming out right about the time Americans have to decide between Trump and Biden. Good luck focusing the voters’ minds on Trumps shortcomings then. Instead of railing about Russiagate, Trump may discover it was the best thing that ever happened to him.