Home » What’s the Flynn investigation all about? [Plus ABC’s “clarification”/correction]

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What’s the Flynn investigation all about? [Plus ABC’s “clarification”/correction] — 21 Comments

  1. The object of ABC News’ false reporting is indeed to spread the misinformation as wide and far as possible. Strong impressions frequently last, despite later contrary evidence. Many will take nothing substantive coming out of Mueller’s “investigation” as ‘proof’ that ‘justice’ has been denied.

    This is about “preparing the battle space” for the 2020 and 2024 elections. And also for building the case against Trump for impeachment, add Flynn’s plea deal to the list of Trump’s ‘misdemeanors’.

  2. This is all too peculiar to understand:

    A senior FBI counterintel agent (Strzok) investigating Russia for Mueller was intimately involved with a member of Mueller’s team (Yates), and when this was discovered, Strzok was reassigned to Fibbie HR (!) and Yates apparently disappeared into the Deep State. Strzok had also previously headed the famously minimal investigation of Hillary’s emails! You know, where Huma’s laptop was not retained, but rather returned to her without downloading it all.

    FBI has no comment, and Mueller spokie’s comment is trivial, as in “We didn’t know”.

    What is going on here??

    the entire WSJ story is behind a wall:

    Mueller Reassigned Top Aide on Russia Probe After Anti-Trump Texts
    By Del Quentin Wilber
    Dec. 2, 2017 4:17 p.m. ET

    The former top FBI agent assigned to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election was removed from his post this past summer after a government watchdog launched an inquiry into text messages he sent expressing political opinions critical of then-candidate Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    Peter Strzok, the agent, had also led the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state.

    Mr. Strzok, who is considered one of the FBI’s most experienced counterintelligence agents, was reassigned to a supervisory job in the bureau’s human resources division after Mr. Mueller learned about the inquiry into the text messages. The inquiry is being conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, the person said.

    Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr. Mueller, said that “immediately upon learning of the allegations, the special counsel’s office removed Peter Strzok from the investigation.”

    Spokespeople for the FBI could not immediately be reached for comment. Mr. Strzok couldn’t be reached.

    The inspector general’s office released a statement Saturday saying that in January it had opened a probe of the FBI to determine “whether certain underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations and that we also would include issues that might arise during the course of the review.”

    “The OIG has been reviewing allegations involving communications between certain individuals, and will report its findings regarding those allegations promptly upon completion of the review of them,” the statement said.

    His reassignment was first reported by ABC News in August; the reasons for his reassignment were reported earlier Saturday by the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    The reasons for Mr. Strzok’s reassignment were tightly held, and his transfer befuddled many in the bureau. Several agents said the reassignmentwas evidence that Mr. Mueller would go to great lengths to protect the integrity of his investigations from any potential criticism.

    The allegations are sure to draw attention from Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump who have criticized the bureau’s handling of its investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server. Mr. Trump has called on the Justice Department to revisit that investigation.

    He has also chafed at the special counsel’s investigation of alleged meddling in the 2016 elections and possible collusion between his campaign and Moscow to help him defeat Mrs. Clinton. He has called the inquiry a “witch hunt,” and Moscow has denied meddling in the election.

    The person familiar with the inspector-general investigation said Mr. Strzok was exchanging texts with another FBI employee with whom he was romantically involved. That person was identified as Lisa Page, a lawyer who also worked briefly on Mr. Mueller’s team on a short-term detail. She left the office in mid-July. Ms. Page could not be reached for comment.

    Mr. Carr, the spokesman for Mr. Mueller, said that she had “completed her brief detail and had returned to the FBI weeks before our office was aware of the allegations.”

  3. Does anyone feel like we might be living in a Banana Republic? The “right people” aren’t in charge and the establishment is going to remedy that. Mueller is just one of their agents. The MSM, academia, Soros, Obama’s OFA, left wing politicians in blue states, and the GOPe are all hatching plots to take Trump down. I, for one, am glad Trump is a fighter. Most GOP pols under the weight of this onslaught would have surrendered by now. It looks like this is going to get worse. They have no remorse, no shame, and no end to their nefarious plans.

  4. I am cynical, so my working assumption is that the anonymous source is a Democrat, works for Mueller, and depended on Ross not asking the right question when he/she told Ross that Flynn would say candidate Trump told him to contact Kisylak. I write this because several other news outlets got the story right while others, and not obviously citing ABC, got it wrong. I think someone on Mueller’s team was shopping this lie for narrative purposes. Ross was the biggest fish to bite.

  5. Ross was punished for this “error.” I imagine because he cost a lot of people in the stock market a lot of money.

  6. I wonder if it is possible to sue ABC news seeing that their report caused the stock market to tumble 350 points. It is true that they can print anything they want but if it causes clear harm are they not culpable? Seems to me they could be held liable for loss. Just a thought.

  7. Ross is obviously a clown but the next question becomes, how unique is his level of Media Clownishness?

    It’s pretty obviously a systemic issue, and it’s gotten ridiculous just how prevalent these stories – “a single anonymous source says” followed by the lie of the day – have become, yet millions of sheeple continue to reflexively believe them.

    Such people have lost touch with reality. It’s a form of psychosis. They are rewarding the lies with internet clicks and TV ratings and therefore creating incentive to do more of it. So, apparently we will now be forced to watch the whole thing burn out and consume itself. Somewhat entertaining, I guess, but it’s still relentlessly stupid and alarming.

    We need a better class of citizen in this country.

  8. From McCarthy’s article:
    “Here’s what I’d be tempted to do if I were President Trump: I’d direct the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, including any Obama-administration collusion in that enterprise.”

    Who, exactly, would President Trump select who isn’t a Democrat Party operative to conduct such an investigation? The FBI has shown that their loyalties are with the Democrat Party, both by their sham investigations into Clinton, and their conduct of those investigations, against their own regulations, in such a way as to ensure that no such crimes as Flynn has been framed for can ever be done. Can’t charge anyone with lying to the FBI when you have refused to take the detailed recordings and notes required by regulations that would allow it.

  9. “…am glad Trump is a fighter.”
    Trump is not fighting hard enough. If the deep state and its so-called law enforcement agencies consider pre-election conversations – even business dealings years before running for office – with foreign powers a crime, then Trump must RICO every living former president and the Ted Kennedy estate. He also must begin the process of putting these former presidents on trial; perhaps before a military tribunal; hell, send to Gitmo to be held until the trials start. The time has come to fight fire with fire.

    In a sane world, Obama, Valerie Jarret and their crew would be charged with the real crime of insurrection.

  10. “the day the Obama administration announced retaliatory measures for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, ”

    The Obama retaliation was part of the disinformation campaign by Democrats to explain how Hillary could possible have lost the election that she had been guaranteed to win. The “Russia did it” was made up of whole cloth and was part of the dissemination of the fake “Dossier” cooked up by Fusion GPS.” I still want to see their financial records.

  11. personally, I don’t think people care about the collusion. It is confusing, and does not affect their lives directly like the tax plan might.

    To me, the real goal of the media is to frustrate the populous into voting Democrat just to stop the depressing, Nixon-like atmosphere and bring in a liberal Nirvana (according to the press).

  12. We are a mere hair’s breadth away from the media’s simply NOT correcting or clarifying.

    The Left has openly declared its intent of doing a coup d’ etat, bloodless if possible, but bloody if necessary.

    Gentlemen and ladies, arm yourselves. The country of our Founders is dissolving before our eyes.

    The South will indeed rise again.
    Mexico will recover the territories lost in 1848. The Pacific NW will become a haven for the Chinese (like British Columbia), and New England, Wisconsin and Minnesota may turn into additional Provinces of Canada. The Prairie States will have to ally, probably with the South. Texas will naturally become a free Republic once again.

  13. Thoughts on the Mueller strategy: if this witch-hunt is still going on without real result by next Summer, Trump is going to be able to paint for the voters a very nasty picture of what is effectively a coup and an effort to criminalize politics. Combined with dissatisfaction with Congress, and a likely vibrant economy that is generating actual pay increases, he will be able to say quite convincingly that he has delivered, and done so against the illegal and immoral subversion of the Democrats and many in his own party. It could be an electoral bloodbath.
    Other than by folding his tent, handing a stunning victory to Trump, how can Mueller avoid this? His only hope (assuming he finds nothing substantially impeachable) is to engineer an unwise move on Trump’s part – firing him. This would cement the Russia “gate” in the scandal pantheon for playback by the Dems and the media (Birm) forever. The trick will be to provoke the reaction with increasingly illegitimate indictments, without committing a transgression that he could not be protected from. Given the performance of his guardians so far, he has reason to be optimistic on that front, but the public may tire of repeated DeMedia freak outs over the months.

    In this dynamic it is worth asking: who is running Mueller? That he might be totally self-directed seems beyond reasonable, or at least it is beyond reasonable that he would not be reined in by some Democrats should he continue to provide repeated sensations that prove to be vaporware.

  14. So let’s get this straight–Flynn supposedly “lies” about meetings with the Russians to the FBI, who questioned him about meetings they had already illegally recorded (?) and this throws the stock market into a panic? Do I have this right?

    Kisilyak was the official Russian ambassador. The Russians are masters of the intelligence game; they know better than to use the ambassador for anything other than a mouthpiece and a spokesmodel for their official positions. Unless Flynn met with an FSB or GRU agent using the embassy as cover he could not have done anything wrong; the Russians would have seen to that as a way of covering themselves.

    What to me is more relevant is how this piece of non-news (it doesn’t rise to the level of “fake news”) could affect the stock market. A bunch of political hacks having a knife fight in Washington over essentially nothing is business as usual and has no impact on ordinary Americans, but when that blows up the stock market that’s another matter.

    Are the Democrats so desperate to regain power that they are willing to trash the investments of ordinary Americans–and in many cases those are hedges against Social Security–just to bring Trump down? Are they that recklessly irresponsible? Isn’t the legal term for that “depraved indifference”? And isn’t there a penalty for that?

    This has been a non-story from the moment it was cooked up to deflect attention away from a badly run losing election campaign, and while it’s been amusing to political junkies it stopped being funny when it impacted normal people trying to live normal lives. It’s all fun and games up to a point, but now the question is who will be accountable for the pain inflicted on real people by political games? I’m looking at you, “Resistance”….

  15. Jeff Brokaw Says:
    December 3rd, 2017 at 8:04 am
    Ross is obviously a clown but the next question becomes, how unique is his level of Media Clownishness?

    It’s pretty obviously a systemic issue, and it’s gotten ridiculous just how prevalent these stories — “a single anonymous source says” followed by the lie of the day —
    * * *
    Fault of the editors, IMO, and some of them should be fired as well. Ross, IIRC, was a serial offender.

  16. Frog Says:
    December 3rd, 2017 at 11:44 am
    … Texas will naturally become a free Republic once again.
    * * *
    [Waves Lone Star Flag]
    But we will have to deport most of Austin, Houston, and Dallas, and severely deplete the ranks of officialdom in many other once-conservative cities and towns.

  17. SDN Says:
    December 3rd, 2017 at 8:54 am
    ..
    Who, exactly, would President Trump select who isn’t a Democrat Party operative to conduct such an investigation? The FBI has shown that their loyalties are with the Democrat Party, both by their sham investigations into Clinton, and their conduct of those investigations, against their own regulations, in such a way as to ensure that no such crimes as Flynn has been framed for can ever be done. Can’t charge anyone with lying to the FBI when you have refused to take the detailed recordings and notes required by regulations that would allow it.
    * * *
    (1) Some PowerLine comments are suggesting Rudy Giuliani, which would have worked for me a few years ago, but now I don’t know if he is still up to it. How about hiring Andy McCarthy?
    (2) This revelation should have caused heads to roll at the very beginning, Day 1 after the inauguration in my view.

  18. Worth reading:
    https://libertyunyielding.com/2017/12/01/flynn-pleads-process-crime-transition-period-chats-russians-like-ones-obama/
    “…The FBI was able to detect that Flynn made false statements about what he said to Kislyak because the Kislyak conversations were being monitored.

    And we’ve known since 23 January that the calls were being monitored, and that the FBI had found no wrongdoing in Flynn’s exchanges with Kislyak. That judgment was reportedly reaffirmed three weeks later, just after Flynn’s resignation in February.

    In other words, if there had never been an investigation of Flynn at all, it would have made no difference to the affairs of our fair Republic, because there was no crime to look into.

    What was unquestionably illegal was someone with a clearance leaking Flynn’s unmasked identity in those phone calls to the media two weeks earlier.

    Meanwhile, for the ignorant who imagine that there was something untoward in Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak during the transition period, consider an event from the Obama transition in 2008.

    Described by Time as “Obama’s first diplomatic test,” it was reported on 13 November 2008, nine days after the presidential election. The issue, like U.S. sanctions on Russia and the UN vote on the anti-Israel resolution in December 2016, carried significant freight:

    Obama’s team didn’t “defer” to the Bush administration with zero contact or silence on the matter — nor is there any reason why it should have. ..It’s even illuminating to ask yourself, if you do it honestly, whether an Obama team member, under questioning by the FBI, might end up months later making a false statement or two about the content of such exchanges — regardless of the reason for such an error.

    Special counsels are themselves a gray area: if we have so little trust in the routine processes of our normal legal system — that is, the normal legal system that said back in January that Michael Flynn had done nothing wrong — the right answer is not to crush individuals under the weight of “special prosecutions” or ” counterintelligence investigations.” It’s to clean our house to begin with.”

  19. Some voices of sanity still exist.

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2017/12/02/flashback-obama-state-dept-no-problem-trump-team-contacting-russian-officials/

    “…
    The statement cited in the tweet has been attacked as “fake news,” or a desperate maneuver by Trump. But, in fact, on 13 January, State Department spokesman Mark Toner explicitly said that there was no problem with the contacts the Trump transition team was making with foreign officials. I wouldn’t cite that as “authorization,” myself — but then, the State Department was clear that no authorization was required.

    You may remember that 13 January 2017 was the day after the Washington Post ran its first article on Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak. The question posed to Mr. Toner during the State Department daily briefing was clearly predicated on the leaked information in that article…
    Regarding the anti-Israel UN resolution, Team Trump floated with the Russians the possibility of preventing the vote from happening.

    So at worst, a vote the U.S. abstained on — and had been expected for weeks to abstain on — might not have happened.

    How is that conceivably sabotaging American foreign policy, or “helping a foreign regime violate international law with impunity”?

    Indeed, just before the UN vote, the State Department had been very clear that the U.S. did not endorse Resolution 2334; that in fact, we were not supporting it, or prepared to vote for it, because its language didn’t stress condemnation of violence strongly enough. The discussion of that at the 22 December 2016 daily briefing is here.

    So we’re supposed to take as a premise that a resolution we weren’t going to vote for simply had to come to a vote, in order for American foreign policy to remain unsabotaged? It was of the utmost importance for our policy that we have the opportunity to abstain from a vote?…”

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