Tag: obama

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
-James Madison

Andrew McCarthy is, IMO, the best single analyst writing about the Obama administration’s Russia-centered conspiracy to depose Donald Trump. Here, he proposes a novel theory about one part of it.
Unmasking? The Real Story Is When Flynn Was Not Masked in the First Place

This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.

He does not mention other #Obamagate Hydra heads – hidden Congressional testimony providing zero evidence of “Russian collusion,” secret plea agreements not disclosed to Judge Sullivan’s court, absence of evidence that Russia hacked DNC emails, CIA (Brennan) suppression of evidence indicating Russian support for a Hillary Clinton presidency, nor even the FBI’s use of the DNC funded Steele Dossier to mislead the FISA court.

Michael Flynn was not a FISA surveillance target, but connections may be found:
How The IG FISA Abuse Report Affects Michael Flynn’s Case
Note, in that link, that this is not the first time Judge Sullivan is in the middle of hearing about politically motivated prosecutorial malfeasance in a burgeoning surveillance state.

In her 2014 book Licensed to Lie Sidney Powell, Sullivan’s current nemesis in the Flynn case, praised him:

The judicial hero of my book, Emmet Sullivan held federal prosecutors in contempt for failing to disclose evidence, dismissed the corrupted prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the Department of Justice.

This makes Sullivan’s animus toward General Flynn hard to comprehend.

You might think that what Judge Sullivan knows about Flynn (remember Sullivan called Flynn out for treason, and then retracted it), is so serious that Sullivan’s attempt to charge him with perjury for pleading guilty under compulsion is justified. Or, you might conclude that what’s different is that Trump is now President, and Sullivan is running a Soviet style show-trial to damage Trump.

The Flynn/Kislyak phone call was NSA/CIA tapping Kislyak’s phone. This does not require a FISA application, since Kislyak is not an American citizen. That’s where Flynn’s identity was supposed to be protected and required the “unmasking” requests, which took place at the discretion of a surprising number of bureaucrats closely associated with dirty cops, rogue prosecutors, and slimy politicians.

What McCarthy is saying in the National Review article is that the surveillance of Trump (and thus Flynn) strongly appears to have preceded any unmaskings of Flynn. It probably started the day Trump announced his candidacy.

Here’s another article worth reading on this with a broader overview of the whole plot, and why it is “the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history.”
John Brennan and the Plot to Subvert an American Election

This quote from that link summarizes McCarthy’s National Review speculation:

[T]he most significant thing about these unmaskings may be the dog that didn’t bark—there was no unmasking request for December 29, 2016, the date that Flynn, then on holiday in the Dominican Republic, made his famous call to Sergei Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. McCarthy speculates that the call was intercepted by “an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service.”

Seems like there might be more Brady material there. What did the CIA, or MI6, tell the FBI and when did they tell it?

Let’s extend the dot connecting to the more general case for Progressive lawlessness. Here’s Liberal Matt Taibbi:
Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties

If they’ll do all that to a Lt. General to get to Trump, of course they’ll tell you you can’t leave your house, buy seeds, or get a haircut in order to damage the economy. Because Orange man bad:

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

The deplorables in fly-over country need to be taught their place. To paraphrase Commandante Witmer, “Protests must stop, or I’ll extend the house arrest edict.”

Masks are coming off.