DID FBI AGENTS SEEK TO CORNER FLYNN?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Dec. 14, 2018) — On Friday night’s “Hannity,” former White House senior adviser Sebastian Gorka told guest host Jason Chaffetz that the FBI “had the transcript” of Michael Flynn’s conversations with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak when they spoke with him on January 24, 2017, an interview which resulted in Flynn’s “guilty” plea for allegedly lying to the FBI about those conversations.
Flynn’s late December 2016 conversations with Kislyak, presumably obtained from transcripts derived from surveillance, were leaked to the media with his name “unmasked,” a violation of federal law, although no one has been accused of the crime. During its first 6+ months, the Trump administration was plagued by leaks which then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed to prosecute.
“They lied to Flynn to get the interview,” Fox News Legal Analyst Gregg Jarrett told Chaffetz of the FBI, referring to the document Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office filed with the judge who will be sentencing Flynn on Tuesday. The brief contains an FBI report with the admission that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe made a deliberate decision to send agents to speak with Flynn under what appeared to be amicable circumstances and without informing him of his right to have an attorney present during questioning.
This past Tuesday, Flynn’s attorneys quoted from the “302,” or FBI interview summary, of Flynn, which is curiously dated July 19, 2017. It has also been reported that the 302 is a second-hand account of the interview, which was conducted by Peter Strzok, a now-disgraced and fired FBI agent who served as the second-in-command of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit.
McCabe was fired in March just days before he was to begin receiving a federal pension for 20 years of government service. He is reportedly under investigation for allegedly lying to the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General, who investigated the FBI and DOJ’s conduct and allegations of political influence during the 2016 presidential-election cycle.
In July 2016, the FBI launched a counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign which some former aides say was a purposeful effort to undermine Trump’s chances of winning by dispatching “spies” to speak with them under false pretenses.
Mueller does not appear to have shown an interest in investigating the commissioning of the now-infamous Trump-Russia “dossier” which the DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign paid for through intermediary Perkins Coie, which also represents the DNC and Democratic interests. The dossier was relied upon by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) when DOJ and FBI officials presented it as evidence that at least one Trump adviser, Carter Page, was acting as an agent of the Russian government and required surveillance.
Page said he was never charged with a crime nor interviewed by the FBI in an interview with Hannity this past fall.
The program’s three-guest panel Friday included investigative journalist Sara A. Carter, who said that her sources at the FBI told her that the FBI’s conscious decision not to warn Flynn that lying to the FBI is a crime and that he could have counsel with him during the interview constitute an egregious abuse of power and departure from FBI protocol. Earlier on Friday, Georgetown University law professor Jonathan Turley agreed. “They put him in a cage and shot him,” Turley told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum of Flynn.
The Mueller response to Flynn’s attorneys’ sentencing filing argues that Flynn lied prior to January 24, 2017. “The defendant made his decision to lie about his communications with the Russian ambassador two weeks before his interview with the FBI,” Mueller wrote. “On January 12, 2017, The Washington Post published a story asserting that the defendant had spoken with the Russian ambassador on December 29, 2016, the day the United States announced sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to that government’s actions intended to interfere with the 2016 election (collectively, “sanctions”). See David Ignatius, Why did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s hacking?, WASH.POST (Jan. 12, 2017).” Mueller did not question how The Post acquired that information.
Flynn’s sentencing is scheduled for Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan.
Dr. Jerome Corsi, who said he was interrogated with “abuse” by Mueller’s assistants over the last 2+ months, filed both a criminal complaint and civil lawsuit against Mueller and his team, in the civil case asking for $350 million in damages. The suit alleges that Mueller’s spokesman, Peter Carr, constantly leaked confidential information to the media and illegally surveilled Corsi’s communications.