Breaking: Finally, the transcript of the Flynn/Kislyak call
I haven’t had time to read the transcript, and I’m about to go out for a while. But I wanted to post a link to a post about it and to the transcript itself, which is published there (the print is small for the text of the call, and you can read it in a bigger version here).
No wonder they tried to just talk about it, but never release it. It seems to be quite innocuous.
This is just my preliminary reaction, based on what other people are reporting. I plan to take a closer look myself later tonight.
And I assume that the left, the MSM, the Democrats – all of them – will continue to describe this call as some sort of outrageous action on the part of Flynn.
Also:
There are zero things wrong with this Dec 29 call between Kislyak and @GenFlynn. And the tone of the conversation is clearly about expulsions, not the wider economic and political sanctions. That @Comey and the Obama admin wanted to Logan Act this is a disgrace pic.twitter.com/amBv6hgg1P
— Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) May 29, 2020
Not to quibble, but this is more of a summary than a transcript.
Nevertheless, this is clearly innocuous stuff and what you would expect from an incoming NSA.
Why are Reps so unwilling to push this stuff out into public?
Why didn’t Trump declassify this as soon as Mueller released his report? Or Barr?
Or (MIA) Wray.
Not Fay Wray:
[Whatever happened
to Chris Wray.
That delicate,
Secret covered rear.
As crimes cling to his guys,
How I’m starting to cry.
‘Cause I’ve seen no indictments for years.
Who knew that Rocky Horror fun was going to become such a nightmare?]
Well now Judge Emmett, what do you think you ought to do? The jig is up on the Mueller team, do you want to die (metaphorically) for their cause?
Tom Grey:
You have to give the bastards plenty of time to spool out the rope that they have hung themselves (Clapper, Comey, Brennan, etc.) with.
Just wondering…What about the Obama regime wasn’t a “disgrace?”
This was the predicate for continuing to investigate Flynn? And for the SCO to force him to confess to lying to the FBI about the call? WoW! Just wow! Then the Department of Justice under acting AG, Rod Rosenstein, was not about justice? Crikeys, who would have guessed? 🙂
Now THIS is exactly what I didn’t want to see from Andrew McCarthy.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exposing-the-hoax
He rants and raves quite impressively on all the misdeeds of the Russia collusion hoax but shows no actual concern at the impact it all had on the first two years of the Trump Administration. McCarthy then concludes by stating:
1. We can’t possibly prosecute ANYONE of real significance because that would be seen as too “politicized.”
2. The REAL victim here isn’t Donald Trump, his supporters, or even the American public in general. The REAL problem isn’t the attack on the democratic process or the corruption of democratic norms. No, McCarthy says the REAL victim is the national security state because it might no longer enjoy blind and unreasoning support from the American people and their elected representatives.
THOSE are McCarthy’s ultimate takeaways. He still fundamentally has more regard for the individuals and institutions that committed the crime than he has for the victims of that crime. And he’s oh so worried that if the national security state no longer gets a blank check for everything from its traditional GOP/conservative defenders, it might not be able to protect the country like it always has. You know, like when the national security state…
…didn’t know Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
…tortured prisoners.
…spied on Americans without warrants.
…spied on U.S. senators.
…racked up decades of enough malevolence and incompetence to fill up every book in a library.
McCarthy’s no idiot, so I’m sure he’ll moderate and revise his views over time. But no one should ever forget that his initial gut reaction to all this wrongdoing was to lament that we can’t just shove it all under the carpet and go back to the way things used to be. Good grief.
Mike
He’s still a witch, you haven’t got better.
The summary and the transcript of the pages released can be seen on Catherine Herridge’s Twitter stream. Transcript gives a better sense of the telephone calls than the summary.
As to McCarthy, MBunge is not alone in his frustration. The acid test to me is that elements of the Obama administration were doing this to Flynn and Trump while at the same time they were using leaf blowers to clear the way for Hillary. Note, too, that this spying was totally unproductive of anything. Why did they do it? Because they could. That is why the people that did this need to go to jail
And McCarthy took the Hillary factor off the table in his rant by not mentioning it. The Washington establishment has lost its way to the point that they think banana republic police state tactics are the way to go. Does anyone think that a Democratic administration will not do things like this the next time they get a chance? Holder? Brazil? Abrams? Biden? Warner? Schiff? Nadler? Schumer? Pelosi? Perez? Omar? Ellison? Hirono? Durbin? Harris? Swalwell? Whitmer? Pritzker? Cuomo? It is like an all-star rogues gallery of second- and third- rate human beings.
MBunge:
I think it’s a good article by McCarthy, but then you and I see him quite differently. By the way, it was written before the transcript of the Flynn Kislyak call came out.
I don’t think he’s unconcerned with the things you think he’s unconcerned with. He’s written about them. But his emphasis at the end of the article is understandably his field of expertise and something he spent many years of his life working for: keeping the US secure from terrorist threats. Why wouldn’t he be upset at how this entire episode undermines that process? It’s a valid concern. It’s not his only concern.
And I think he’s describing something when he says Obama won’t be indicted. He won’t. McCarthy’s correct, IMHO.
But knowing McCarthy’s history, and having read him through the years, I was especially struck by this personal note of his; he’s a man who’s not afraid to admit having been wrong:
Amadeus 48:
McCarthy has certainly done more than mention Hillary in many columns. This particular one is about the Obamagate plot in general, and in particular the more recent revelations. Columns can’t go on and become books, and writers can’t go into everything in a column. I have not read his book Ball of Collusion; have you? But I’d wager he most definitely talks about Hillary, too.
In a quick search, I just now found this, for example.
Neo–I agree that McCarthy is focused on a different matter altogether than the squaring of accounts, namely, the impact of this fiasco on the national defense capacity of the USA in the future. However, there is a case for squaring accounts, and I trust that the Barr team will call out people who have broken the law and do what they can to bring violators to justice. But this case against Flynn shows how the FBI, the DOJ, and the IC draw the cloak of “protecting means and methods” to hide their wrongdoing. Every single thing that has been declassified shows how little substance there was to redactions and holdbacks on national security grounds. The fact that Covington and Flynn never got to see the 302 and the call transcripts, let alone the December case closing memo, before Flynn pleaded is outrageous. And everyone knows the rules, but they don’t follow them.
It is a real problem, but, obviously, wiping out the IC and the FBI isn’t the solution.
McCarthy is a deep state apologist, and I hate to use this word but it fits, a typical republican cuck, naive to the point of willful ignorance, who only recanted his credulity when the ice melted under his feet.
I also find him verbose, repetitive and tedious to read.
Mike
How do you reform the FBI? Presumably, the intro classes at Quantico don’t tell them to cheat, lie, and frame those known to be innocent. I’m just spitballing here.
Of the bad apples….what would the table of organization look like if all the bad apples were gone? Nobody could sign off requiring a new coffee pot.
This is a culture.
It was said that Bush missed 9-11, Who was supposed to tell him about it? The Orlando night club shooter had been fingered by his colleagues in advance and the fibbies checked him out. Said his colleagues were islamophobic. And his old man was an informant.
Anybody fired after Waco? You can say that it was a gigantic screw up, and it was. But not so gigantic, apparently, that the guys who did it missed a paycheck. So it’s no-harm, no-foul. Which is to say, none of the Right Sort of People cared. Had a very nice church lady say the other day about the scores of dead..”They were a cult.” The fibbies knew they could get away with it.
We might need a federal police force. But it should have a new name and new personnel down to, but not including the night janitor. And I’m not sure about the latter.
And perhaps it should have a sell-by date. After a certain number of years, it is dissolved and a new one stood up. The continuity of the institution might be interrupted, which would be good. It wouldn’t be good in an objective sense, but given the circumstances, less bad than the alternative.
Your problem, really, is that the Democratic Party is the electoral vehicle for a menu of occupational guilds, and those guilds at this time are populated with those who have credentials and connections (about which they are vain), who can write fancy resumes and ace job interviews, but are fundamentally lacking in honor, integrity, and (on occasion) mundane competence. In my experience, the apparat in higher education is chock full of such people. Everyone knows media companies of all sorts are very corrupt; our friend mac has pointed out that the bizarre and dyspeptic view of American business is brought to you by screenwriters whose experience of business corporations consists of dealings with media companies. And, of course, there are a great many crooked lawyers. Well, what sort of bourgeois vote Democratic, cut checks to the Democratic Party, and staff Democratic administrations? The big problem we have here is that the federal security state is now one of those guilds. The Democratic Party is now a collecting pool for all the worst people in and among our professional-managerial class. They are supported by dependents and hangers-on of the sort whose opinions litter our Facebook wall. Many in our circle have post-baccalaureate degrees, BTW; one of the worst offenders has two such degrees. The stupid is found among people of every strata. That’s the Democratic Party: a core of malevolent people and a periphery of stupid people. Remember George McGovern and Jimmy Carter? It didn’t used to be this way. People given to generational babble might have thought 20 years ago that things might improve when the Boomers shuffled off into retirement; they’ve now discovered that succeeding cohorts are worse. As a culture and a society, we don’t know where the bottom is.
Structurally, one problem you have is that federal judges cannot be disciplined for their malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. Doing so might require a constitutional amendment, and the criminal organization that is the Democratic Party would never co-operate. You might be able to pass statutory legislation to provide for the ruin of abusive prosecutors, but our awful federal judiciary might just insist that allowing the larger society to discipline the legal profession is ‘unconstitutional’ (Glenn Reynolds has noted that the comprehensive immunity judges and prosecutors enjoy was invented by judges).
A real problem you might attempt to fix is the federal criminal code. Since Congress accomplishes nothing but tossing bon bons and their various clientele, they aren’t likely to do this. A serious administration would have model legislation on deck to reduce the scope of the federal penal code, properly calibrate sentences for discrete offenses, reduce discretion over sentencing, and indemnify defendants for some of the cost of financing their defense (indemnities to be paid out of the budgets of U.S. Attorney’s offices).
And of course, we need to reform processes for recruiting, promotion, and employee discipline in the federal civil service.
While we’re at it, the Department of Justice and the FBI need to be broken up.
Well, I’ve read the transcripts.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/29/declassified-flynn-transcripts-contradict-key-mueller-claims-against-flynn/
None of what they discussed was any of the FBI’s business. It was all perfectly banal.
As more records are declassified and released, we learn that there was no reason for withholding them from public scrutiny except they made the government look bad.
When I worked in the State Departments FOIA Office we were instructed that under no circumstances would we withhold records merely to protect the public perception of the Department.
Obviously, that instruction has disappeared or been rendered inoperative, which pretty much guts the purpose of the FOIA.
When I first came to the FOIA Office, I was not convinced the Act or all the offices it brought into being all over Washington was such a good idea. Why show all your warts to the general public, after all?
Now I am a firm believer in showing all those warts. Perhaps it will be a little conscience sitting on the shoulder of people drafting departmental records: “how will this be seen if it appears in the pages of American newspapers?” That seems like a good thing for drafters to keep in mind as they write. And I know from personal experience that the ability to classify documents was not always used to defend the national security — sometimes a drafter just wants to limit the distribution a document will get.
One of the biggest failings of the Freedom of Information Act is that it covers only the Executive Branch. It should apply to the Legislative Branch too. American taxpayers should be entitled to see their warts too.
Possibilities
1. The Deepers never figured it would come out. They thought they had it locked up. Nothing’s perfect but they thought they were as close as possible and close enough.
2. The Deepers figured it might come out but it wouldn’t make a difference. We’ll see.
3. The Deepers have a back up plan in case it comes out….
It is beyond outrageous that a lame-duck Obama clearly imposed heavy and humiliating sanctions on a dangerous world-power adversary, for the sole purpose of forcing his duly-elected successor to attempt to defuse the situation, so that those efforts made in good faith on behalf of America’s best interests could be falsely portrayed as treasonous!
What is just as outrageous is that Obama had spent years perverting vital parts of the US government into tools capable of serving such dishonorable purposes.
Obama deserves to be struck from the roles of US Presidents. Take that official portrait and smash it!
Roy Nathanson on May 29, 2020 at 10:14 pm said:
Not to quibble, but this is more of a summary than a transcript.
* * *
The transcripts follow the summaries.
“And McCarthy took the Hillary factor off the table in his rant by not mentioning it.”
Um, “[H]is RANT”?
“…not mentioning it.”?
From McCarthy’s article:
“…This inspector general report readily complemented the one completed two years earlier, in connection with the Hillary Clinton emails escapade, which documented rampant anti-Trump bias among key investigators assigned to the Clinton and Trump inquiries — as well as the unusually deep involvement in both cases of the bureau’s highest echelon, then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Also falling into place was another inspector general report, centering on McCabe. He had first orchestrated a leak of investigative information involving a dispute between the FBI and the Obama Justice Department over scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation; then, he made repeated misrepresentations to investigators, including under oath… “
A huge amount of the Trump Hoax was coverup by Obama & thugs over his obstruction of justice to save HR Clinton from indictment because of her illegal email server. America was so so close to electing a terrible criminal.
Still NeverHillary.
Too bad there’s no Special Prosecutor to look into her case AND the FBIs mishandling of it.
Breaking news – Barr gets first “voluntary” resignation – no jail time for subverting justice and attempted coup against the president, of course, but that’s how things roll in our two or three tiers of blind justice.
Now, if Boente had been passing fake twenties or bootleg cigarettes, that’s entirely different.
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/top-fbi-lawyer-resigns-allegedly-request-justice-department
Strike that “allegedly” about the exculpatory documents.
It’s about as proven as a fact can be.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/declassified-transcripts-add-evidence-fbi-had-no-legal
Gaetz is right about reforms — they have to have accountability enforced to be any good.
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/gaetz-calls-major-structural-reforms-fisa-its-only-good-people-running-it
ICYMI – Manhattan Contrarian points out the obvious, to those willing to look.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-5-20-obamagate-co-ordinating-the-cover-story
Biden himself is not coming up with these things – he only produces what his handlers are supporting.
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/05/27/joe-biden-oddly-rants-that-hell-break-a-law-democrats-relentlessly-accused-michael-flynn-of/
Of course, it does make sense, when the objective is gaining power by any means, and hypocrisy serves the agenda better than does any kind of principled consistency.
“But co-ordinating cover stories is not so easy.”
Quite so.
Which is where Susan Rice’s “memo to self”—so believable!, so credible!—comes in so handy.
Wonder, though, after Obama/Clinton & Co. have had a pretty decent run playing “Let’s defenestrate the president”, whether Barr & Co. are going to get a chance to play “Prisoner’s Dilemma”….
(Though with the MSCM riding shotgun, all bets are off on ANY truth getting out in the open.)