Was General Flynn Railroaded by the Democrats?

Why Was the FBI Investigating General Flynn?
There appears to have been no basis for a criminal or intelligence probe.

The following is from a recent column by “NATIONAL REVIEW”.

Why would Flynn be the subject of an investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department? We are told that the FBI was monitoring the phone calls of Russian ambassador Kislyak under FISA. Makes sense — he’s an overt foreign agent from a hostile government. Flynn called Kislyak on December 29, 2016. It was not a nefarious communication: Flynn was a top adviser of then-president-elect Trump, a part of the Trump transition team, and just three weeks from formally becoming the new president’s national-security adviser. His communications with Kislyak were just some of the many conversations Flynn was having with foreign officials.

The call to Kislyak, of course, was intercepted. No doubt the calls of other American officials who have perfectly valid reasons to call Russian diplomats have been intercepted. It is the FBI’s scrupulous practice to keep the identities of such interceptees confidential. So why single Flynn out for identification, and for investigation? FBI agents did not need to “grill” Flynn in order to learn about the call — they had a recording of the call. They also knew there was nothing untoward about the call.

We know that from the Times report — a report that suggests an unseemly conjoining of investigative power to partisan politics. The report informs us that as the FBI set its sights on Flynn, its agents were consulting with “Obama advisers.” Interesting, no? Ever since Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump on November 8, Obama’s Democratic party had been pushing a narrative that “Putin hacked the election.” The narrative continues to have two major flaws.

First, while the Russian dictator may have preferred Trump to Clinton, there is no evidence that his Russian regime did anything to compromise the voting process. The media-Democrat complex has desperately sought to obscure this problem by emphasizing Putin’s likely role in publicizing embarrassing Democratic e-mail communications. Notwithstanding Democratic talking points, that is a far cry from “hacking” the voting process.

The second flaw is that, although Trump has made disturbingly flattering remarks about Putin, there is no evidence his campaign has given or promised Russia any actual accommodation in exchange for Putin’s favor. Democrats hope to erase this problem by finding something, anything, that could be spun as a quid pro quo. Obviously, they hoped the Flynn–Kislyak conversation would answer their prayers. No such luck. As the Times puts it: Obama officials asked the FBI if a quid pro quo had been discussed on the call, and the answer came back no, according to one of the officials, who like others asked not to be named discussing delicate communications.

The topic of sanctions came up, they were told, but there was no deal. Asked not to be named discussing delicate communications. That’s a good one. Let me translate: The officials don’t want you to know who they are because they are corrupt — (a) FISA intercepts are classified, so disclosing them to the press is a crime; (b) by revealing the Flynn–Kislyak conversation to the press, the “officials” inform the Russians that whatever countermeasures they are taking against U.S. surveillance have failed, assuring that the Russians will alter their tactics, making the job of our honorable intelligence agents more difficult; and (c) the FBI’s investigative powers are not supposed to be put in in the service of a political party’s effort to advance a partisan storyline, like “Putin hacked the election.” So since there was no impropriety in Flynn’s call to the Russian ambassador, why did the Bureau continue investigating Flynn? Why did FBI agents interrogate him?

According to press reports of other rogue intelligence leaks, the FBI was sicced on Flynn after Trump officials gave inaccurate public statements about his conversation with Kislyak, to wit: They said that it had not touched on the punitive actions President Obama took against Russia on the same day the conversation took place, when in fact there had been some discussion of that topic — which the FBI and Justice Department knew from the recording. Specifically, Flynn denied any discussion of these sanctions, unnamed Trump officials denied it to the Washington Post, Vice President Pence denied it in a CBS interview shortly before the inauguration, and finally White House spokesman Sean Spicer denied it again on January 23.

According to the Times, it was the Spicer denial that triggered the FBI’s interrogation. It was as if the Bureau and Justice Department intentionally waited to pounce until Trump was in power — which meant that any misstatement could now be framed as a false representation by the sitting president. But just ask anyone who knows that you can’t keep your health-care plan and your doctor if you like them, that the Benghazi massacre was not caused by a video, that the IRS really did harass Americans over their political beliefs, and that Iran will be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Anyone who knows those things — that would be all of us — also must know that misleading statements by presidential administrations, even egregious ones, are not grounds for FBI investigations.

They are left to the political process to sort out, and we don’t want the FBI turned into a political weapon. So how come the FBI got involved here? Is the FBI saying that Mike Flynn is an agent of a foreign power? A covert Russian operative? That would be absurd. As I’ve detailed, Flynn is on record — unambiguously, in the core theme in his bestselling book — urging Americans to view Russia as an implacable enemy of the United States that must be checked.

Now, are you unhappy — as I am unhappy — with the Trump administration’s blandishments toward the murderous, anti-American Putin regime? Sure . . . but that does not make Flynn and other Trump officials Russian agents — any more than Obama is an Iranian agent. Again, political disagreement is not a rationalization for drawing a ridiculous legal conclusion (“maybe he’s a ‘foreign agent’”) as a pretext for an investigation by the FBI. Fear of blackmail? That is a theory purportedly advanced by former acting attorney general Sally Yates, an Obama political hack who was eventually fired for insubordination by Trump (who had foolishly retained her).

The blackmail theory is almost too stupid to regurgitate. If you can follow this, the idea is that the Russians knew that Flynn withheld information about his Kislyak call from the Trump administration and was therefore vulnerable to extortion — i.e., the Russians could expose his concealment if he didn’t do their bidding. It should go without saying that blackmail works only if the compromising information is not in the possession of the aggrieved party.

Here, the United States — i.e., the Trump administration itself — had a recording of the Flynn–Kislyak call, a fact that both Russia and Flynn (who is deeply versed in intelligence craft) had to know was highly likely. Finally, there’s Flynn’s supposed potential criminal violation of the 1799 Logan Act.

Recall what we said at the start: The FBI’s criminal investigation and domestic security functions overlap. If there is not a valid foreign-intelligence basis to investigate someone, a potential law violation could do the trick. But . . . the Logan Act? Are you kidding? The statute is a discredited relic of the President John Adams administration’s over-criminalization of political speech on the grounds of its purported seditiousness. It is a highly dubious prohibition against foreign-policy freelancing by American citizens acting without executive-branch permission. As Jeremy Duda comprehensively explains in the Washington Post, in its 218-year history, there has been just a single Logan Act prosecution, ever — an unsuccessful, aborted charge brought in 1803 by an Adams-appointed U.S. attorney. It is not enough to say it is ludicrous to contemplate a Logan Act prosecution against a transition official who was the incoming national-security adviser over a phone call with a foreign ambassador.

Beyond that, we must refer to the high-profile July 2016 press conference held by FBI director James Comey. In contrast to General Flynn, as to whom there is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, there was a Mount Olympus of damning proof that Hillary Clinton committed felony violations of a law against mishandling classified information. Yet Director Comey concluded that “no reasonable prosecutor” would consider indicting Mrs. Clinton. Why? Because behavior of the type in which she engaged is never prosecuted. Now it happens that Comey was wrong about Clinton — to make his assertion, he had to paint a narrowly skewed picture of her misconduct and ignore several prosecutions of military officials for far less serious violations.

Nevertheless, he does run the Bureau, and so we must assume that his explicit guidance governs its investigative standards: “Responsible decisions . . . consider the context of a person’s actions, and how similar situations have been handled in the past.” If that is the standard, there was no conceivable chance that Flynn could ever be prosecuted for a Logan Act violation. Using the Logan Act as a pretext for interrogation would have been improper. And Flynn is not a foreign agent. And there was no need to “grill” him over the contents of a conversation of which the FBI and Justice Department already had a recording. And the FBI has no business probing the veracity of public statements made by presidential administrations for political purposes — something it certainly resisted doing during the Obama administration.

There appears to have been no foreign-intelligence or criminal-investigative purpose served by the FBI’s interrogation of General Flynn. It is easy to see why Democrats would want to portray Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador as worthy of an FBI investigation. But why did the FBI and the Justice Department investigate Flynn — and why did “officials” make sure the press found out about it?

You Can Read the Full Column at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445045/general-michael-flynn-national-security-adviser-fbi-investigation-phone-call-russian-ambassador