The Latest Rundown on the Mike Flynn Deep State Hit Job

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The Latest Rundown on the Mike Flynn Deep State Hit Job
BY PATRICK POOLE
FEBRUARY 15, 2017

Obama officials and the establishment media continue to wave the scalp of resigned National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, trying to squeeze every last drop of anti-Trump narrative from the matter.

As I had said privately, Flynn was not long for remaining as NSA. It's not because he's a bad guy, and accusations that he was compromised by Russian intelligence are as absurd as the Trump dossier BuzzFeed published last month. It's just that Flynn wasn't ready for prime time; hopefully his replacement will be.
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The other big story last night came from Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon. Kredo writes that the hit job on Flynn was driven by former Obama officials concerned about protecting secrets of the disastrous Iran deal:

A third source who serves as a congressional adviser and was involved in the 2015 fight over the Iran deal told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration feared that Flynn would expose the secret agreements with Iran.
"The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal....

Yet absolutely no evidence has surfaced that anything in Flynn's discussion with the Russian ambassador was illegal.

The heavy breathing by the media about supposed Logan Act violations is totally overwrought, as there has never been a successful Logan Act prosecution in two centuries. But it bears recalling that in 2008 as the Bush administration was trying to negotiate on the Iran nuclear program, those efforts were scuttled by the Obama campaign without any complaint from the media or calls for Logan Act prosecutions.

As our own Michael Ledeen reported here at PJ Media back in 2014:

During his first presidential campaign in 2008, Mr. Obama used a secret back channel to Tehran to assure the mullahs that he was a friend of the Islamic Republic, and that they would be very happy with his policies.
The secret channel was Ambassador William G. Miller, who served in Iran during the shah’s rule.....

Another issue coming out of the Flynn affair is the politicization of intelligence. House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is demanding to know why Flynn's conversations were being wiretapped. As one of the congressional "Big 8," if there were a covert program targeting Flynn, he would be one of the few to know:

“Any intelligence agency cannot listen to Americans’ phone calls,” Nunes told reporters Tuesday night. “If there’s inadvertent collection that you know is overseas there’s a whole process in place for that.”
He explained, “It’s pretty clear that’s not the case, so then they could have been listening to someone else and inadvertently picked up an American. If that happens, there’s a whole process in place to where.....

Here's Eli Lake at Bloomberg:

There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted. It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do....

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