Did the FBI Sabotage Trump’s Foreign Policy?
Renée Parsons
We now know that, before Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, the FBI had the ouster of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the President’s National Security Adviser, in its sights. By February 13th, Flynn was out the door.
Think about it. Why was Flynn’s removal of the utmost importance to the FBI, more vital than removal of any other cabinet officer like the Pentagon or State Department?
So crucial was it that they created a specific strategy willing to embrace prosecutorial misconduct and agency malfeasance to take Flynn down. Prosecutorial misdeeds are nothing new to the FBI as they have a well-founded history of corruption over the years with its warts now publicly displayed.
It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn’s immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump’s entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan.
In retrospect, the entire fraudulent Russiagate conspiracy makes sense when viewed from the perspective of an effort to rein in Trump’s foreign policy goals of which Flynn would have been a necessary, integral part.
The question is where did the first glimmer of setting up Flynn originate? Who had the most to gain by disrupting Trump’s foreign policy agenda? A number of suspects come to mind including the evil Brennan/Clapper twins, a bureaucratically well-placed neocon, an interested foreign entity like Israel or somewhere deep within the dark bowels of the FBI, all of which are in sync with the Democratic leadership and its corporate media minions.
At the time, the Washington Post, a favorite CIA organ, was reporting that Flynn had ‘hinted’ to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that Trump might be willing to ‘relax’ sanctions against Russia. It was then claimed that Flynn had ‘misled’ VP Pence by denying that he had had a conversation regarding sanctions with Kislyak. None of it was true.
With Flynn removed, Trump never regained his footing on foreign policy – which no doubt was exactly as intended; thereby opening the door for the likes of Jared Kushner to assume the role of ‘trusted adviser.”
Let’s examine how the FBI eliminated Flynn:
In August, 2016, an FBI ‘strategic intelligence briefing’ was conducted for candidate Trump with Flynn as his national security adviser in attendance. The briefing, which was not a traditional ‘defensive’ briefing in which a presidential candidate is alerted of a foreign government’s effort to intercede in their campaign, was led by an anonymous “experienced FBI counter intelligence agent.” According to the IG Report on FISA abuses, at that time Flynn was already a “subject in the ongoing Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”
The IG Report confirms that, after the election, top FBI officials discussed ‘interview strategies’ regarding how to set Flynn up in an ostensibly innocent conversation. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe arranged the meeting with the goal to walk Flynn into a well-laid trap without informing him that there was a criminal investigation underway or that he was a target.
Such a procedure is called ‘entrapment’ and considered illegal. (See Clint Eastwood’s new film Richard Jewell for details on the FBI’s entrapment techniques).
On January 24, 2017, four days after the Inaugural, Peter Strzok, former FBI Chief of counterespionage and the same unnamed SSA1 (Supervisory Special Agent) who led the August briefing met with Flynn for a friendly chat, more popularly referred to as the Ambush Interview.
At that time, either one or both agents took handwritten notes while neither provided the usual heads-up about penalties for making a false statement – since that would have tipped their hand. Since Flynn believed this was an informal visit, he did not feel the need to have an attorney present or inquire why, if this was a friendly get-to-know chat, the need to take notes.
That conversation led to Flynn being charged with ‘lying to the FBI’ regarding his conversation with Kislyak.
After the interview, preparation of a 302 form is normal procedure. A 302 is a summary of and a formalizing of those notes taken during the conversation. It is those original 302 notes which are in dispute and which the FBI refuses to provide to either the Senate Judiciary Committee or to Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell.
What does that tell you? Powell believes, based on sworn witness testimony, that the final 302 is not an accurate reflection of the 302 notes or Flynn’s statements of January 24th.
It is curious that an SSA1 whose identity remained cloaked in secrecy throughout the entire IG FISA Report continues to be mentioned as a significant participant in the Bureau’s Crossfire Hurricane while his name remains redacted on official documents. Disguising his identity may simply be attributed to activities worth concealing.
In an unexpected turn, it was Sen. Chuck Grassley, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee who outed the SSA1 as agent Joe Pientka in his May 11, 2018 letter to the Bureau.
Pientka remains a central figure in the FBI scam against Flynn as well as other clandestine activities identified within the Crossfire operation – and there’s more.
According to Strzok, Pientka was “primarily responsible” as the ‘note taker’ and prepared the 302 report of the interview on which Flynn’s prosecution is based. Powell has challenged authorship since the final 302 version contains falsified statements never made in the original interview that are now being criminalized.
In a message to his paramour Lisa Page, Strzok thanked Page for her ‘edits’ on the 302 regarding the Flynn-Kislyak conversation on sanctions that never occurred while Strzok suggested that, at some future time, they discuss a ‘media leak strategy.’
Soon after Flynn’s resignation, a skeptical Grassley requested unredacted transcripts of the Flynn – Kislyak conversation with the FBI repeatedly refusing to comply.
Grassley’s May 11th letter confirms that Comey was aware that Flynn had not lied regarding the Kislyak conversation and further points out the stunning revelation that Pientka was ‘on detail’ as staff on the Judiciary Committee, presumably with the Democrats. For all his persistence, the FBI continues to rebuff Grassley’s assertions for a transcript of the Kislyak conversation as well as demanding Pientka’s presence “for a transcribed interview with Committee staff.”
In response to an ‘insufficient’ FBI reply, Grassley then let loose with a June 6th zinger detailing a compilation of FBI lies, failures and hypocrisies too numerous to be articulated (but worth reading) here.
While a review of the FBI’s entire prosecution of Flynn raises considerable legal and ethical questions, the Bureau’s consistent refusal to turnover evidentiary material is indicative of a deceitful agency protecting its own criminal behavior.
- Why is the FBI embedding an SSA1 with the Senate Committee that has legislative jurisdiction over its mission? Does this strike anyone else like the tactic of a totalitarian state?
- How does Flynn’s case move forward without the FBI providing the necessary exculpatory documents legally required for every defendant?
- How does a Congressional Committee provide effective oversight and accountability if they are continually stonewalled by the very agency within their legal authority?
- How can the FBI ever be rehabilitated if Congress, fearful of a constitutional crisis, has no political will to assert its proper authority and issue a Contempt of Congress subpoena?
- With the FBI out of control, Is this any way to run a country?
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC. Renee is also a student of the Quantum Field and may be reached at @reneedove31.
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The end is nigh in Idlib and Allepo. The final push is on as reported on MoA and some absolutely stunning btl comments and twitter links – this one seems minute by minute https://mobile.twitter.com/GeromanATP Meanwhile up-pompe0 farce moves to Kazakhstan as he reinvents the spelling of Uyghar as Oghar and praises the Kazakhs for ‘taking back’ the US proxy jihadist head choppers! Mist of whom have decided that the monthly blood money is not enough and are retreating with their families rather than get squashed by the SAA pincers – no wonder Erdo is in a panic – these guys want to use their Turkish passports to settle down there with their families! And not go to Libya or back to China. I suppose the ‘reinforcement’ columns that were snuck in are not Turks but more fools who will now find THEY will face incineration by air – it is… Read more »
Pompeo may also have been in Kazakhstan to inspect the ongoing biowarfare research being undertaken there by the US, into bat-borne coronaviruses.
Pompeo is going to be keeping a big distance between Iranian Drones and himself for the rest of his life. Where is that research btw?
Unfortunately not.
Pompeo was in Minsk and is likely to get White Russia onside.
It’ll end up worse than Ukraine, but the leaders are eager to enrich themselves at the expense of their country.
‘Pompeo’s visit is seen widely as a further effort by the U.S. administration to encourage Lukashenka and nudge Belarus further out of Russia’s orbit. However, days prior to his departure, a list of a new countries that would be added to an existing U.S. travel ban leaked to reporters. Belarus was among the countries on the list.’ He is on a last ditch effort to stop that lot from of countries from throwing fully behind the SCO. And to find a home for all his head choppers – probably signing the surrender secretly with Russians. Turks and Syrians as both the major highways were spectacularly taken by the Syrian Army in hours totally surrounding the hastily and illegally erected Turkish ‘Observation Posts’ and no they are not bombing the Syrians it would be suicide. Idlib and Allepo mere kilometres away. The Impeachment circus and DNC pantomimes designed to avoid the… Read more »
The way this entrapment works is that they ask you what you did last Tuesday.
You think about it and say you went out and bought a bottle of milk from Tesco’s.
They check the bottle and see it has an Asda label, so they charge you with lying to them.
Any answer they don’t like or doesn’t fit in with their agenda is classed as lying to them.
The only way to cover yourself is refuse to say a word.
Trump is no friend of Russia.
He was just flying a kite about improving relations with Russia to break up the Russia-China alliance, because he sees China as more of a threat to the US Empire.
That is it. Trump’s ‘friendship’ attempts with Russia were intended to form an alliance against the Great Enemy, the racial, cultural, civilizational and psychological threat to the Ubumenschen of the West that is China. Unfortunately he ran into the road-block of Ukrainian Nazi emigre billionaires and their assets like Clinton, and their allies and Fifth Columnists like the triple loyalty Vindiman brothers.
OK, baby steps. The FBI is the secret police force of the authoritarian (aching to be totalitarian) govt hidden behind “Truth, Justice & the American Way”. The “democratic” facade of the US politics is, in fact, close to the Greek original: A cabal of oligarchs who decide distribution of power without daggers, and naturally exclude slaves (workers), landless peons (minorities), women (grudgingly later included, once indoctrinated) to maintain the status quo. The “vote” the oligarchs advertise as proof of their democratic credentials in allowing the hoi polloi to have a say is insultingly quaint and blatantly futile. All elections are rigged. Of course! The outcome is preordained. Would you let some naive do-gooder wreck your decades of building an empire? Never! If a “ringer” sneaks through the gauntlet of oligarchic vetting and slips the leash, he (always HE) is put down and the Electoral College is invoked to re-establish the… Read more »
If an outsider threatens the duopoly, they are neutralised. The latest, and charmingly blatant, iteration is the ‘failed app’ excuse-the ‘Iowa Option’.
The FBI always has been completely out of control and a law unto itself, a secret police organisation with an extensive blackmail and intimidation operation that dates back decades against politicians and public figures. This was true from the early days of its transvestite director Hoover. He denied the existence of the US Mafia for years. During the war, some German agent saboteurs landed from a U boat in 1942. They had been pressured into this and immediately gave themselves up to US police on landing, revealing all the details of the operation, handing over their equipment and offering to work for the US. Hoover tried to pass this off as a brilliant counter espionage operation on his part. He had the surrendered agents tried in a secret trial and quickly executed by electric chair. That was the sort of person he was. Nobody dared touch him because of all… Read more »
Thanks for this excellent article.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/03/self-employed-workers-protest-paris-france-pensions-row-deepens-strike
This thesis is strictly for the QAnon dummies, ain’t it? If the Deep State (or whoever) had to work so hard to remove Flynn, then we must assume, as the writer asks us to, that they weren’t behind his appointment in the first place. So far so good! Then who was? Peace-loving, sound foreign-policy seeking Trump? The same Trump who has surrounded himself with warmongering Zionist psychopaths ever since Flynn? Hmm.. Or are we supposed to believe that the Deep State took control of Trump’s foreign policy appointments only post-Flynn, but kinda hoped for the best and in the spirit of free enterprise, or something, let him get on with it before? This one’s strictly for the same boneheads who believe that the Guardian shitrag was a good newspaper before GCHQ (reportedly) descended on them for publishing Edward not-still-working-for-the-US-government-honest-guv Snowden’s leaks, forcing those poor, public-spirited journos to smash up the… Read more »
Have pity. They’ll understand when they grow up.
The Guardian has certainly proved your point every second that has passed since the MI6 and Integrity Initiative full take-over. But where has Nutaly Nougatbrain gone-she was my favourite bat-crap crazy Maenad.
The diehard Trump fans placed too much hope and faith in the miscreant’s foreign policy. They thought voting for the buffoon was a way of securing rapprochement with Russia and less militarism. Let’s face it, in 2016 the two nominees were reprehensible–there was NO good choice. The electorate could choose the terrible warmonger Hillary, who would accelerate Obama’s imperialist policies against Russia, China, and the Middle East or they could vote for the “phony” supposed non-interventionist.
The bottomline as always is that the “winner” is completely subjugated to the foreign policy whims of the security/surveillance state. It’s naive to think otherwise. During the last three years there’s been an internal conflict between various factions of the military/security/ surveillance state, but generally speaking they’ve done quite well under Trump. In fact, when it comes to foreign policy it’s almost as if Hillary had been elected……..
Charlotte exactly sums up the situation.
Time to clean house. There will be trails within the NSA,FBI, and CIA with close connections to the Joint Chiefs.
Trump should fire all colluding members if only on suspicion. Make these self serving agencies all transparent. The clandestine nature of their activities is not about national security, it is about hiding chicanery, and treason.
Snowden and Assange should be placed in charge of the trash collection. Everyone should have known things were dire when 42,000 NSA employees , knowing the scumbag clique of Clapper and Brennan et al. were behind spying on the public , failed to act. This is the real aiding and abetting of treason.
Clue to naive rants: Should, ought, must, hope, vote. The vocabulary of the powerless. Dogs barking at the Moon.
I know but it makes me feel better.
Getting there Renee .
The smoking gun is the conspirators meeting the day BEFORE the Flynn ‘interview’ and the cover up ‘there’.
Publish it!
With the FBI and the other intelligence [sic] agencies repeatedly refusing to co-operate with the government they should be serving, and as Renee writes “are out of control”, how long is it going to be before they decide to drop the masks and openly take over? They must be pretty close already…
“It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn’s immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump’s entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan.” This is baloney, as I pointed out here: https://louisproyect.org/2017/02/19/deep-state-deep-confusion/ I always get a chuckle out of the notion that Trump and the neocons are mortal enemies. Do you know who co-wrote Michael Flynn’s “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies”? Does the name Michael Ledeen ring a bell? A profile on Flynn in the New Yorker Magazine revealed that much of the book is practically plagiarized from Ledeen’s sorry body of books and articles. Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. This is about as neocon as you can get with founder Clifford… Read more »
Funny you should bring up Ledeen, just after I posted a comment about him, eh Louis?
For whatever reason, Flynn decided to work with Trump and his removal, by his compatriots, is testament to his problematic policy shift. Who knows if he had a paradigm shift or thought he knew which side his bread was buttered. The thing is, as Renee says, the FBI are very much involved in internal politics.
PS. Ledeen is not, and never has been 10 times scarier than Hilary “We came, we saw, he died”, spouse of a peado, neocon Clinton.
You may be in the wrong place my friend, having shamed and discredited yourself beyond the point of anyone reading you.
Those down votes are awfully suspicious. Hmmm. I will give it a read.
Although I am not familar with all the players, in context to early 2017 the one part of the article I thought exaggerated was this:’Probably the most intelligent analysis of the Deep State was written for The Nation by Greg Grandin. Titled “What is the Deep State?”, it makes many very good points…In 1956, C. Wright Mills wrote that “the conception of the power elite and of its unity rests upon the corresponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political, and military organizations.” If nothing else, the “Trump v. Deep State” framings show that unity is long gone.’The three seem generally aligned with the people on the outside looking in. Infighting is the norm.
Two points are in order here:
1.) Just because some people in our ‘deep state’ don’t like Gen. Flynn or his policies does not give them the right engage in illegal and underhanded entrapment schemes in order to get rid of him.
2.) I confess I don’t know off the top of my head what Michael Ledeen’s position on Syria is. I do know that Flynn at some point turned against the plan of overthrowing the Syrian government, largely because of his fear (a well-founded one, I think) that this would lead to more Salafist terrorism in that country and beyond. In my view, that makes his position on this issue noticeably better than Hillary’s. She, after all, was campaigning in 2016 for a “no-fly” zone over Syria, which, if taken seriously, meant war with Russia, a nuclear-armed super-power. Thank God she lost the election!
Just to clarify something regarding point #2: I know Flynn wasn’t personally running against Hillary in 2016. But he was already advising Trump on foreign policy then, so that’s the reason for the contrast Flynn and Hillary.
Another ringer from Renée!
That’s exactly how I saw it at the time, and apparently, that’s how Steve Bannon saw it, too. A few months later, when he himself was forced out, he famously told the press: “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over.”
I was obvious that Flynn was targeted for elimination by what ludicrously calls itself the “resistance” right from the beginning using Hoover’s G-boys and girls who have by the way been heavily infiltrated by CIA to get him. Many of the players involved in this act worked in CI which is closely connected to the CIA’s own counter intelligence. In fact the connections are so incestuous that many of the FBI’s “agents” are sheep dipped Agency officers. One has to ask themselves why the FBI would be so interested in foreign policy? Hoover despite his many failings stayed out of the area of Foreign Intel yet the Bureau currently seems obsessed by it. Why? Probably because they are working on the same team as CIA, NSA, DIA, DHS and the other alphabet soup agencies who gain their power from what could be correctly called the War of Terror. Flynn being… Read more »
The FBI does have a counter-intelligence function, so that would give them some legitimate interest in the activities of foreign intelligence services, at least; but I suspect their obsession with Trump and Flynn goes far, far beyond any legitimate legal mandate.
True they’ve always had a CI function but it was more like a total Keystone Kops’ operation. Still is probably when you consider that Hannssen worked in their CI for over two decades without being detected.
Of there’s CIA with James Jesus Angleton who was a good friend of Kim Philby who wrecked any CI capability both FBI and CIA had by being suspicious of any Russiaphile.
In fact this whole Russiaphobia and hoax is probably the resurrection of the ghost of Angleton.
And the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover, too!
True Hoover spent more time chasing Commie and creating the Red Scare than he did cross dressing and hanging out a Mob hangouts which he assured us didn’t exist.
“Many of the players involved in this act worked in CI which is closely connected to the CIA’s own counter intelligence. ”
Fusion Centers. Created and run by the very same Andrew McCabe at the centre of Crossfire Hurricane and subsequently fired for malfeasance and abuse of public office.
The same Fusion centers were behind America’s biggest “terror” attacks, in the same way MI5 tend to be behind (or at least have very good knowledge of prior to) our own “attacks”
(just to let the admins know, I had Seamus Padraig’s details pre-filled in my text box)
Re your last comment to the admins. Normally that would be a very unlikely event unless either he used your phone or the site fills the form out.
The later apparently. Filing the cookie wrong would be a huge oops.
Does it know you now?
“a very unlikely event unless either he used your phone or the site fills the form out. The later apparently. Filing the cookie wrong would be a huge oops.” It’s happened before, at least once, some months ago. As you say and Wireshark confirms, the site fills the form out. There seem to be two separate possibilities: the wrong name/address shows up on the form or no name/address shows up on the form (the latter being described by affected users as “having to ‘log in’ again”, also reported some months ago). I thought about it just long enough to do a Wireshark dump when it was previously reported but, as it appeared to clear up immediately, was happy to run out of enthusiasm to pursue it further just as quickly (age-related enthusiasm degeneration, ARED). The most recent report prior to the above (a couple of days ago) was an instance… Read more »
I had someone else’s details pre-filled in the other day. Admin should look into this if it’s happening on a regular basis.
The FBI groomed and/or set-up just about every so-called ‘Islamist’ terrorist arrested in the USA, show-tried and sentenced to decades in SuperMax Hell.
Very true. This includes the WTC bombing of the early 90’s as well which was blamed on Arab Terrorist but like the later attacks and believe it or not the Oklahoma City bombing all had Mossad connections.
Really? Well thanks for not spoofing me, Yarkob. (I swear this is me, Off-Graun!)
@ Seamus: I’d never spoof anyone 🙂
@David Horsman…I know; I work in IT..I was as surprised as you (and Seamus)
@ Robbo: agreed.
I use Firefox Sync, too…it always remembers my name; this time it remembered Seamus’. it’s very odd, and, as you say, probably a cloudflare browser-token fuck-up. As per standard security protocol, Seamus uses a non-identifiable email address, but I don’t. My email is on a private server in a private network. The sorts of people that make their money doing this kind of thing *love* private networks/mail servers to try and hack into
It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn’s immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump’s entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan. Sometimes off-the-cuff remarks provide a true assessment of where a country stands on foreign policy. Michael Ledeen is freedom scholar at FDD, and is an internationally-renowned scholar on Iran, Iraq, terrorism, and international security, and a world-renowned Italianist and expert on fascism. Michael has served as a consultant to the National Security Council and the Departments of State and Defense, and as a special advisor to the Secretary of State. He’s also a neocon who made the following comment that sums up American foreign policy in the middle east, whoever’s the president. “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little… Read more »
Such a level of corrupt entrapment tells you all you need to know about ‘Freedom’ in the ‘Free World’.
“With Flynn removed, Trump never regained his footing on foreign policy – which no doubt was exactly as intended; thereby opening the door for the likes of Jared Kushner to assume the role of ‘trusted adviser.”
Keep in mind, that Trump’s Number One daughter married the likes of Jared Kushner. Trump then brought both into the White House as Senior Advisers. Nepotism?
Note that the Anti Trumpers never go after Trump about Jared-Ivanka and real or perceived nepotism. Hands off?
General Flynn was appointed by Trump as NSA, but removed on very dubious grounds/ processes by the FBI top.
Better ask: did Trump sabotage the foreign policy of the FBI – CIA – FED hydra?
Obama, the Clintons and the Bushes didn’t.