‘I am so stressed about all the ways THIS has the potential to go fully off the rails…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The widening probe into criminal conduct by members of the Obama intelligence community during and after the 2016 presidential election has led to a re-assessment of the scandal that forced President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to resign.
Recent evidence has surfaced that corrupt, partisan FBI agents not only interviewed Flynn under false pretenses to set up a perjury trap but then manipulated their records after the fact to suggest he was lying, The Federalist reported on Friday.
Flynn’s attorneys filed a 37-page court brief last week pointing to newly released text message between FBI lovebirds Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, in which Page acknowledged changing the 302 form used by agents as the record of an interview.
Included: new Page/Strzok texts.
Discussion between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok re: editing the Flynn 302.
Strzok to Page: “I made your edits”
Also discussion of misleading leadership re: picking up 302. pic.twitter.com/w5wuU3SwZh
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) October 25, 2019
The court filing also made a shocking claim that in a conversation with a Washington Post reporter, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, instructed the journalist to “take the kill shot on Flynn.”
Flynn attorney Sidney Powell said in the filing that the scope of the intelligence operatives’ efforts to smear the decorated general were a staggering breach of the public trust by the very people sworn to preserve and uphold our justice system.
“When the Director of the FBI, and a group of his close associates, plot to set up an innocent man and create a crime—while taking affirmative steps to ensnare him by refusing to follow procedures designed to prevent such inadvertent missteps—this amounts to conduct so shocking to the conscience and so inimical to our system of justice that it requires the dismissal of the charges for outrageous government conduct,” said the court filing.
Flynn met with interrogators from the FBI and Justice Department in late January 2017, less than a week after Trump was inaugurated. The agencies claimed the discussion was to be about Russian collusion allegations surrounding the recently leaked Steele Dossier.
Instead, they purposely sought to deceive Flynn as to the nature of the interview and casually questioned him on whether he had discussed future sanctions with Russia’s U.S. ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, in late December, after President Barack Obama expelled several diplomats over the Kremlin’s alleged U.S. election interference.
Washington Post reporter David Ignatius revealed the conversations between Russia and the incoming national security adviser in a Jan. 12 article and questioned whether Flynn had “undercut the U.S. sanctions.”
Trump officials, including spokesman Sean Spicer, denied that the sanctions topic had arisen during the calls.
However, phone records suggest that Clapper—one of Obama’s top intelligence officials with a reputation as a notorious leaker—had spoken with Ignatius two days beforehand and that top brass within the intelligence community may already have furnished him with transcripts of the calls between Flynn and Kislyak.
The intelligence operatives involved in Flynn’s setup—among them, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, FBI Director James Comey, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Page and Strzok—also had access to transcripts of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak but asked him anyway whether the two had discussed the sanctions.
Flynn, who was not anticipating the line of questioning, indicated he had spoken with many different foreign dignitaries and could not recall the exact nature of the discussions.
Although indications are that the FBI agents initially left the meeting with Flynn believing he had not lied, Page later made substantial changes to the FBI’s 302 report of the conversation to indicate that he had, in fact, lied.
“The agents moved a sentence to make it seem to be an answer to a question it was not,” Flynn’s attorneys said in their recent filing. They also added a line with the words “FLYNN stated he did not.”
According to the filing, Page also sent a text to her secret lover, Strzok, revealing that she knew she was in the wrong.
“I can feel my heart beating harder,” she wrote. “I am so stressed about all the ways THIS has the potential to go fully off the rails.”
Page, herself, later lied and said she could not recall making any changes but that if she had they would only have been grammatical.
Lisa Page lied to the DOJ about her edits to the Flynn 302.
“Page didn’t recall whether she took part in editing the FD-302”
Upon seeing her texts, she “believes she must have seen it at some point…” pic.twitter.com/fgMaZcWnWa
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) October 25, 2019
In early February 2017, left-wing media including The Washington Post and New York Times—in likely coordination with Clapper and other deep-state intelligence officials—began to intensify their scrutiny of Flynn, reporting that he had, contrary to belief, discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
Along with the Steele Dossier and the firing of Comey, the events surrounding Flynn’s alleged scandal helped trigger special counsel Robert Mueller‘s appointment to investigate claims of Russian collusion.
Mueller threatened to prosecute Flynn for failing to register as a foreign agent in an unrelated issue. Flynn agreed to plead guilty, instead, to the minor charge of lying to the FBI, and also resigned his White House post in disgrace.
But the conclusion of Mueller’s investigation, finding no evidence of Russian collusion, helped to validate Flynn. So, too, has the ongoing criminal investigation now being led by DOJ special prosecutor John Durham, which is delving into the origins of the collusion conspiracy.
Flynn’s attorneys cite a Supreme Court precedent that conveys the graveness of the wrongs committed by Obama’s corrupt intelligence operatives against the decorated Army hero.
“The first duties of the officers of the law are to prevent, not to punish crime,” the filing says, quoting an 87-year-old court ruling . “It is not their duty to incite to and create crime for the sole purpose of prosecuting and punishing it.”
The filing seeks to hold prosecutors in contempt for continuing to stonewall and failing to provide Flynn and his counsel with crucial exculpatory records, such as the handwritten 302 forms from Strzok’s interview.
It contends that the plot to entrap Flynn is grounds enough to dismiss any further claims of wrongdoing against him.
“… [I]t is unconscionable, contrary to public policy, and to the established law of the land,” says the filing, “to punish a man for the commission of an offense of the like of which he … never would have been guilty if the officers of the law had not inspired, incited, persuaded and lured him to attempt to commit it.”