The Railroading of General Michael Flynn

I remember in the early days of the Trump administration, things looked pretty chaotic.  It was clear that Trump had a steep learning curve ahead of him in regard to dealing with the Washington, DC swamp he intended to drain.

There was controversy right from the start, even before he took office, when we learned about the salacious Steele Dossier.  Remember those rumored pee tapes involving Donald Trump and hookers during a visit to Moscow a few years before?

And how did we learn about that stuff?  After an intelligence briefing given to President-Elect Trump by the Obama intelligence community… James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan.

Comey stayed behind after the briefing and told Trump about this salacious detail in the Steele memos, and then the existence of these memos was leaked to the press just a few days later.

And then we came to find out that there was a controversy regarding General Michael Flynn.  General Flynn was forced to resign after it was revealed he may have lied to Vice President Pence about a conversation he had with the Russion Ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

In December 2017, General Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversation with Kislyak.  It was rumored that he was going to potentially flip on President Trump.  I remember the giddy Joy Behar reporting this rumor on The View.

How my eyes were opened by the Flynn Prosecution

At that time, I was still on the fence about President Trump.  Up to that point, there was so much controversy surrounding his presidency, and it was clear he was getting fire from all directions…the Democrats, the press, some Republicans, etc.

His team was also under investigation by the Special Counsel team headed by former FBI Director Robert Mueller.  It was the Special Counsel that investigated General Flynn and got that plea deal out of him.

But, just a few days after General Flynn’s plea, there was an interesting news drop.  It was revealed that two FBI employees involved in both the investigation into General Flynn and the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, were having an affair and both were anti-trumpers.

One was a special agent by the name of Peter Strzok, and the other was the FBI legal counsel to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by the name of Lisa Page.

These revelations were contained in a dump of text messages between the two.  And, shortly after, it was revealed that both had been working on the Special Counsel team, only to have been removed months earlier.

Furthermore, it was revealed that Peter Strzok was one of the agents that interviewed General Flynn in early 2017, and it was that interview that lead to the guilty plea.

Beginning to give Trump the benefit of the doubt

As I mentioned, up to this point, I didn’t know what to think about all the events swirling around President Trump.  As someone who has been in the real estate business for years, I’ve understood that people like Trump are not afraid to step on toes to get what they want.

Real estate is big business, and at the level Trump was playing on, billions of dollars are at stake.  Therefore, I certainly could believe that Trump could be involved in some shady dealing.

Over time though, the more I’ve learned about the man, the more I’ve realized that, he clearly knows how to play hardball, but appears to have played within the rules, although he’s probably bent a few.

That’s not any different than most successful people in the world of real estate development, and particularly in the world of casinos.

But, once I learned about the Strzok-Page text messages, I began to have my doubts about what the FBI and Mueller were up to.

Not long after, it was then revealed that the judge who handled the guilty plea of General Flynn, Judge Rudy Contreras, was recused from the case.

No reason has ever been given for his recusal.  However, some text messages between Strzok and Page suggest there was some sort of a relationship between Strzok and Contreras.

Contreras was subsequently replaced by Judge Emmett Sullivan, who has handled the case ever since.

It has been nearly two years since General Flynn entered his guilty plea, and he has yet to be sentenced, for what amounts to a minor process crime.  George Papadopoulous, another Trump campaign aid, was sentenced to 15 days for a similar crime.

Throughout this time frame, more information has come out that suggests that General Flynn was railroaded into this guilty plea.

Yet, most Americans are completely unaware of this.  And this is the reason for this blog post.

I am going to explain this case as best I can, starting with some background.

General Flynn’s service under Obama Administration

One thing I’d like to point out that, when General Flynn was asked to become an advisor to the Trump campaign in early 2016, he was a registered Democrat.

From the beginning of his career in the military, General Flynn was focused on intelligence.  He was commissioned in the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant in military intelligence in 1981.

General Flynn worked his way up through the ranks serving in a variety of roles including command of the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade, director of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command, director of intelligence for the United States Central Command, etc.

His career was capped off by being promoted to Lieutenant General in 2011, and then nominated to be the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Obama in 2012.

General Flynn served in this position until he was forced to resign in Summer 2014.

General Flynn was notably critical of the Obama administration handling of Middle East policy.  Just prior to leaving the DIA, he expressed his concern that he thought the U.S. was less safe from Islamic terrorism than it was prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Here is one of the first things that should raise anyone’s eyebrows in regard to the Flynn prosecution… six months before he resigned, Flynn had an encounter with Stefan Halper at a London intelligence conference.

Remember that name… Stefan Halper.  He plays a key role throughout all of the shenanigans involving the Intelligence Community and the Trump-Russia investigation.

Apparently, Halper was so alarmed by Flynn’s association with a Russian woman at that conference that, through an associate, Halper notified American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised.

Post Retirement

Upon leaving the Obama administration and the military, General Flynn formed Flynn Intel Group (FIG) with his son, Michael Flynn, Jr.  The business provided intelligence services for corporations and governments.

His work involved providing services to a number of companies with ties to Russia, but also did work for such companies as Palo Alto Networks and Adobe Systems.

In December 2015, Flynn attended a gala dinner in Moscow in honor of RT, a Russian government owned, English speaking media outlet.  General Flynn had made a few appearances on the network as an analyst.  At the dinner, General Flynn was seated next to Vladimir Putin, which raised some eyebrows in the U.S. media and Obama administration.

In February 2016, General Flynn was asked to become an advisor to the Trump campaign, and accepted the position.  He was then vetted later in the Spring and Summer as a potential running mate for Donald Trump.

He subsequently gave a speech at the Republican National Convention that was highly critical of the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton, even leading chants of “lock her up.”

Later in the year, FIG was hired by Inovo BV, which had ties to the government of Turkey.  Subsequent further contacts with people and businesses with ties to the Turkish government, along with his phone call with the Russian Ambassador Kislyak are what eventually landed General Flynn in some hot water.

Early Investigation of General Flynn

It’s not quite clear when the investigation into General Flynn began.  The Obama administration, and President Obama himself shortly after the election had warned Trump to steer clear of General Flynn.

The Mueller report revealed that General Flynn had been under surveillance well before the election, and possibly even when Trump received his defensive briefing as the Republican nominee (Hillary Clinton was also given a defense briefing about ongoing issues in the world of intelligence and national security).

Ultimately, prior to naming General Flynn as his National Security Advisor, then President-Elect Trump had no idea that Flynn was under investigation.

It was the phone call with Russian Ambassador Kislyak in late December 2016 that appears to have set the wheels in motion for the Obama Administration to take down General Flynn.

All telephone calls involving foreign diplomats are monitored.  However, if an American is on the other end of the line, the name of that person is to be kept secret.  Keep that in mind.

The call with Kislyak was perfectly legal.  However, the Obama Administration was in an uproar as it was allegedly indicated by General Flynn to Kislyak that the incoming Trump Administration would ease the sanctions recently put in place as a response to the Joint Intelligence Community Assessment that suggested the Russians interfered with the 2016 election.

It is noted that then director of the National Security Agency, Admiral Michael Rogers, expressed only moderate confidence that this was the case, while the other agencies involved in the assessment indicated high confidence.

In any event, as a result of the call, which Flynn would likely know was being monitored, then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates expressed concerns that Flynn was violating the Logan Act.

The Logan Act is a United States federal law that criminalizes negotiation by unauthorized persons with foreign governments having a dispute with the United States.  It was enacted in 1799, and virtually no one had ever been prosecuted under this law.

A week after the call with Kislyak, General Flynn revealed to future White House Counsel Don McGahn that he was under investigation for his work involving Turkey.

On January 24, 2017, FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joseph Pientka are sent by FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to interview General Flynn.  Flynn is told by McCabe that there is no need to have an attorney present, so he does not have one.

It’s notable that then FBI Director James Comey in a later interview indicated that one reason he sent over the two agents for the interview with Flynn was because the new administration was not yet in place, and clearly in disarray.

Sally Yates later testifies before Congress that, because of that interview, she made an urgent request to speak with Don McGahn.  She suggested to McGahn that Flynn was compromised and possibly open to blackmail by the Russians.

Within a couple weeks, it is revealed that General Flynn misled Vice President Pence about his phone call with Kislyak, and he is forced to resign.

General Flynn Investigation Post-Resignation Up to Guilty Plea

In subsequent testimony before Congress, it has been suggested that Andrew McCabe indicated that the agents who interviewed General Flynn did not believe he was lying to them during the interview, or that he was trying to mislead them.

Yet, the lone charge that General Flynn pled guilty to was effectively lying to the FBI during that interview.

On February 14, a day after Flynn’s resignation, President Trump had a meeting with James Comey where he apparently expressed that he hoped that the FBI could let go of the investigation into Flynn, “because he’s a good guy.”

Comey suggests he took this to mean that Trump was requesting the FBI drop the investigation.

It is this conversation, and the subsequent firing of Comey in May 2017 that lead to the naming of a Special Counsel, to be headed by Robert Mueller.  The Special Counsel was named by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from anything that had to do with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Mueller team, thought to be led by US Attorney Andrew Weissmann, immediately began to put the screws to General Flynn, thinking that he would be the most obvious member of the Trump team to flip on the President.

During this time, other members of the Trump campaign were under investigation… former campaign manager Paul Manafort and lesser known campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopolous.

Carter Page, even though he was surveilled for nearly a year, was never charged with a crime.  Manafort was charged and convicted for crimes unrelated to Russian meddling in the election, and Papadopolous pled guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI in October 2017.

Meanwhile, the Special Counsel was putting tremendous heat on General Flynn.  By this time, the focus was on Flynn’s business and its work with businesses with ties to the Turkish government.

The issue was that Flynn may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).  This law requires agents representing a foreign power to disclose their relationships and finances associated with that work.  Remember, Flynn had indicated to Don McGahn in January that he was being investigated for this work.

In October 2017, as revealed in the Mueller Report, DAG Rod Rosenstein, through a third investigation scope memo, gave permission to the Mueller team to name Michael Flynn, Jr. as a target of its investigation into General Flynn’s FARA issues.  At the time, Flynn, Jr. had a four month old child.

As a result of this added pressure, and the continued drain on his financial resources, General Flynn entered a guilty plea that stated he “knowingly and willingly” made false statements to the FBI regarding his phone call with Russian Ambassador Kislyak.

In exchange for the plea, he agreed to cooperate in an investigation of his business associate Bijan Rafiekian for FARA violations.

Major problems with the case against General Flynn

Ever since that first week after General Flynn’s plea agreement, it’s appeared that there are some major problems for the prosecutors in this case.

As I mentioned, within days after the plea, a trove of text messages between FBI special agent Peter Strzok, and legal counsel to Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, were released.

I won’t go into the details in this post, but these text messages, and subsequent other releases, indicated intense bias on the part of these two against President Trump as he was running for president, and after his election.

As I also mentioned, the original judge handling the case, Rudy Contreras, was recused.  No reason has ever been given.

There is also considerable evidence that the entire senior leadership at the FBI and DOJ were biased against President Trump.  This has been on display ever since his election by the likes of Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Sally Yates and others.

It is alleged that at some point after Trump’s election, during a senior leadership meeting at the FBI, Andrew McCabe said “first we fuck Flynn, then we fuck Trump.”

And what happened with all of this senior leadership team?  Comey, McCabe and Strzok were all fired from the FBI, and Sally Yates was fired from DOJ.  Chief FBI Counsel James Baker and a host of other agents at the FBI resigned, including Lisa Page and Comey’s chief of staff James Rybicki.

Given Flynn’s stance regarding the Obama Administration Middle East policy and his viewed of Hillary Clinton, it is no surprise there is animosity toward him from those who served in the Obama Administation.

Another problem was that early on during the Special Counsel investigation, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were on the Special Counsel team.  This was until the Inspector General presented the text messages between Strzok and Page to Robert Mueller.  They were subsequently removed.

Judge Sullivan and his Brady order

Upon taking over for recused Judge Contreras, Judge Emmett Sullivan issued a standard Brady order to the prosecution to turn over any and all evidence to the defense team of General Flynn that may be exculpatory.

Sullivan does this with each case.  He is well known for holding US prosecutors accountable in the corruption case of deceased Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.  In that case, prosecutors withheld key evidence.  Sullivan then named a special prosecutor to investigage criminal misconduct by the prosecutors in the case.

Prior to his guilty plea, the text messages between Strzok and Page were never revealed to the defense.  That’s just one potential instance of a violation of Judge Sullivan’s Brady order.

General Flynn’s Sentencing

General Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of false statements to the FBI on December 1, 2017.  He has yet to be sentenced.  Since that date, there have been several extensions, and eventually a sentencing hearing was held in December 2018.

At that hearing, Flynn’s legal team at the time, hinted at the idea that he may have been pressured into a plea for a crime he doesn’t think he commited.  However, Mueller was recommending that he do no time in jail.

This may have ruffled Judge Sullivan’s feathers a bit.  He asked General Flynn several times if he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea.  Flynn said no.  The judge then indicated that, as part of his plea, the FARA charges against Flynn were being dropped, but those charges seemed to be pretty significant, bordering on treason.

After a recess, Judge Sullivan apologized for his remarks, but suggested that he might not go along with Mueller’s recommendation of no jail time.  As a result, General Flynn’s team asked for an extention based upon Flynn’s ongoing cooperation in the case against Bijan Rafiekian.

General Flynn hires new legal counsel, Sidney Powell

In June 2019, General Flynn hired a new legal team, headed by Sidney Powell.  Powell has been an outspoken critic of the Mueller investigation and believes that there has been prosecutorial misconduct in this case against General Flynn.

Powell is no stranger to cases where such misconduct has occurred.  She is the author of the book “Licensed to Lie,” which exposes the prosecutorial misconduct that resulted in the destruction of the accounting firm, Arthur Andersen LLP in the Enron case.

Arthur Andersen handled the bookkeeping for Enron, the energy trading company that imploded nearly 20 years ago.  Arthur Andersen employed 85,000 people worldwide at the time.  Mueller Special Counsel lead attorney, Andrew Weissmann was the director of the task force investigating Enron.

Margot Cleveland of The Federalist writes this about the Enron case just a few months ago… “The now unsealed records expose efforts by Weissmann, and the Enron Task Force he led, to intimidate witnesses and to interfere in the attorney-client relationship of a cooperating witness. Several affidavits unsealed last week catalogued veiled threats made to witnesses the Enron defendants sought to interview. However, because many of the attorneys would speak only off the record to Enron’s attorneys, the courts refused to consider the affidavits sufficient to prove prosecutorial misconduct.”

She adds… “in addition to Weissmann’s inappropriate attempt to push [Dan] Cogdell off the case, a 17-page report unsealed on Thursday by expert witness Michael Tigar detailed many more vagrancies. Especially troubling to Tigar was the Enron Task Force’s use of ‘multiple grand juries working over several years’ not to ‘return fresh indictments or start new cases, but to make the threat of indictment real and tangible’ to the nearly 90 unindicted co-conspirators.”

Eventually, Arthur Andersen LLP was found guilty at trial, but appealed the case.  It eventually found its way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction by a count of 9-0.

Weissmann is just one of the people involved in that Enron case that has been involved in the Special Counsel.  It was Robert Mueller who has had strong ties with Weissmann through the last 20 years.

Powell knows what she is dealing with and is taking the prosecution head on.

In late August, Powell filed a motion to compel for the prosecutors in General Flynn’s case to turn over potential exculpatory Brady material to the defense.  She indicated she’s been asking for such material for months, but has been stonewalled by the prosecutors.

Powell and Flynn had a meeting with Judge Sullivan in early September, and this was followed by a hearing on September 10th where Judge Sullivan laid out the schedule to hear both sides of the argument in regard to the potential Brady material and whether Powell should be granted security clearance to view classified documents she feels would be beneficial to General Flynn.

Shortly thereafter, the unredacted motion to compel document was released.  The motion to compel lists 40 categories of evidence that Powell would like to see turned over to the defense.  You can read the motion here…it is quite a bombshell… Motion to compel.

Among the more significant items listed are

1) an alleged letter that was delivered by the British embassy after Trump was elected to the incoming national security team and outgoing National Security Advisor, Susan Rice.  The letter indicates that the British government disavows former British agent Christopher Steele, author of the Steele Dossier used to investigate the Trump-Russia BS.

2) The original draft of Flynn’s FD-302 and 1A file.

3) All payments, notes, memos, correspondence, and instructions by and between the FBI, CIA, or DOD with Stefan Halper—going back as far as 2014, regarding General Flynn.  Remember Halper’s name from earlier in this article?  

4) All of the Strzok-Page text messages, unredacted

5)  All national security letters and FISA warrant applications concerning early investigations of General Flynn, as mentioned in the Mueller report.

And the list goes on.

Bijan Rafiekian FARA case conclusion

In order to achieve a reduced sentence for his plea agreement, General Flynn agreed to cooperate in the DOJ’s case against Bijan Rafiekian for failing to register as a foreign agent representing Turkey.

Rafiekian was a business associate of Flynn, and it was this case, and not widely speculated cooperation in trying to nail Trump, that Flynn was providing his cooperation.

In July, a jury in the Eastern District of Virginia found Rafiekian guilty.  Rafiekian’s legal team immediately filed an appeal, and the presiding Judge Trenga just overturned the conviction and acquitted Rafiekian on all counts.

Judge Trenga filed a 39 page judgment in the case, which effectively stated the prosecution offered no evidence that the defendant had any ties to the government of Turkey.

This was an important finding for the General Flynn case.  The prosecutors had threatened to name Flynn as a co-conspirator in this case.  Judge Trenga’s judgment indicated there was no conspiracy.

Also, the prosecution team were suggesting this case was to be a benefit to Flynn for his eventual sentencing.  As part of his plea, they agreed not to go after Flynn, Jr.

Judge Trenga effectively blew up this entire FARA case that the Mueller team was holding over General Flynn’s head for over two years.

The end of the Flynn case is near

As I mentioned, Judge Sullivan laid out the schedule for the prosecution and the defense to lay out their arguments regarding the Brady evidence in this case.  Initially, the prosecution was scheduled to submit its argument this week, but I believe they may now have until early next week, October 1st.

Sidney Powell will then have three weeks to respond to the prosecution’s argument, and a hearing on this topic is scheduled now for early November.

I have no idea where all this will go.  However, it’s pretty clear to me that General Flynn had a target on his back due to his criticism of Obama and Hillary Clinton.

As a result of the investigations into General Flynn, he had to sell his home to finance his defense, and then had to cop a plea to prevent further financial damage and prosecution of his son.

And what for?  His plea has nothing to do with Trump-Russia.  I would venture to guess there are hundreds of lobbyists in DC guilty of violating FARA, but these cases are hardly ever prosecuted.

Furthermore, in the case of Hillary Clinton and her email scandal, she was given the kid glove treatment.  Even while there have been demonstrable lies by people on her team associated with that scandal, no one was ever charged for making false statements.

In fact, when she was finally interviewed by Peter Strzok, her close associate, Cheryl Mills, who was a potential witness, was allowed to sit in on the interview as her legal counsel!

There were no 4 am FBI raids on any Clinton associate in that case as there was ordered by the Mueller team for Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.

What’s been clear is that there has been two tiers of justice…one for the Democrats and anyone involved with Obama and Clinton, and another for anyone associated with President Trump.

This is what compelled me to finally begin writing about all these shenanigans, beginning with the railroading of General Flynn.  I will update down the road when the case is finally closed.