RT | June 24, 2020
New evidence shows that the decision to send the FBI after General Michael Flynn, president-elect Donald Trump’s top adviser, came from President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden and wasn’t “by the book” at all.
Biden was the one to raise the Logan Act, while Obama instructed FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to have “the right people” on the case during a White House meeting, according to a handwritten note from FBI Agent Peter Strzok.
The note was provided by the DOJ earlier this week to Flynn’s attorneys, who submitted it to the court as evidence on Wednesday.
While Strzok’s hard-to-read note does not mention names, it refers to people by letters – P for president, VP for vice-president, DAG for Yates, D for Director Comey, etc. – according to the court filing.
The Logan Act is an old law that bans private citizens from conducting foreign policy, but it did not apply to Flynn, since he was an incoming national security adviser to the president-elect. Even Comey admitted that his telephone conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak “appear legit[imate],” but was nonetheless told to pursue a case, according to Strzok’s note.
This directly contradicts the narrative about the meeting put forth by Obama’s security adviser Susan Rice, who wrote a strange memo to herself on the eve of Trump’s inauguration repeatedly saying that Obama wanted the investigation to be “by the book.”
Strzok’s note is undated, but the filing says it appears to be referring to a meeting on January 4, 2017 – the same date Strzok intervened to keep the FBI background case against Flynn open, though it had been scheduled to close due to lack of evidence of any wrongdoing. Strzok would later be one of the agents to interview Flynn, and admitted in texts to heavily editing the memorandum of that interview – which has not been made available as evidence.
Earlier in the day, the Washington, DC Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the federal judge in charge of Flynn’s case to immediately agree to the government motion to drop the charges. Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan responded to the DOJ motion to dismiss charges – in light of evidence revealing the prosecution of Flynn was improperly predicated – by appointing a hostile ex-judge to evaluate the motion and hiring a private attorney to represent himself, at taxpayers’ expense. Flynn’s team reacted by seeking a writ of mandamus from the appeals court.
Flynn was the first casualty of the ‘Russiagate’ probe targeting Trump for alleged “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election. The adviser was forced to resign after less than two weeks on the job, after the Washington Post accused him of lying to the FBI based on yet-unidentified leaks. He was charged by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in late 2017, and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI under pressure, but has been fighting the charges after getting a new legal counsel in 2018.
President Trump reacted to the news by wondering if Comey and the FBI, or Mueller and his prosecutors, or Obama and Biden, will apologize to Flynn and others caught up in the probe.
Mueller’s investigation ended in May 2019 finding no evidence of any collusion anywhere, forcing Democrats to claim Trump had abused power by withholding aid from Ukraine as a pretext to impeach him.