They say that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That certainly seems to be the case these days with the rise in gas prices, inflation that the government has reluctantly admitted is likely to remain permanent, and the debacle in Afghanistan that is eerily similar to the fall of Saigon, at least in terms of optics. It’s like we’re living through the 1970s all over again, just without the fantastic rock and roll music. But the Aug. 12th episode of “Truth Over News” doesn’t deal with the current political climate, instead rolling back the clock to the great Red Scare, when Congress was obsessed with foreign actors infiltrating our society and corrupting our government.
Unfortunately, I’m not speaking of the McCarthy era, but the 2016 election. Though to be fair, with how quickly things are falling apart under the Biden administration, 2016 kind of feels like the good old days. Apparently we’re stuck in some kind of time loop where American history plans to repeat itself every 40 to 60 years. At this rate, we’re way overdue for World War III, so it’s a darned good thing China hasn’t been doing any saber rattling recently or making overt threats to seize Taiwan. Oh, wait.
“The Coordinated Attack on General Flynn” serves as a good primer on recent history for anyone who may have only taken a passing interest in the terrifying prosecution of Michael Flynn. Hosts Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke do an excellent job of laying out the timeline of the FBI’s framing of General Flynn, going all the way back to the 2015 dinner Flynn attended celebrating the anniversary of RT (Russia Today), Russia’s international, state-run news network. Carlson and Mahnke use the episode to show how the case against Flynn was not only completely unfounded, but in many ways a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn’t a deep dive into the whole sordid tale, with a running time of a little over 13 minutes, but it connects the dots clearly for those who still believe the takedown of Flynn was anything more than a politically-motivated hit job.
The episode opens with a brief rundown of the recently released inspector general (IG) report that was supposed to get to the bottom of all the illegal leaks coming out of the FBI during the 2016 presidential campaign. It’s infuriating, but not entirely unsurprising, that the gist of the report is that some people did something, we just don’t know who and nobody’s talking. Ultimately, the culture at the FBI during the Obama administration had become so permissive, and so many employees ignored directives about leaking information to the press, that there’s just no telling who the culprits were, so oh well. That’s an absurd conclusion to reach considering the severity of the behavior. It’s like saying you can’t track down which football player assaulted the cheerleader because everyone on the team has been doing it and no one will say who it was. There are rumors that John Durham is still considering prosecutions over these illegal activities, but hoping for that feels a bit like expecting Lucy to hold a football while Charlie Brown takes another run at it. Why should we trust anyone in the government to hold people accountable when we know that’s something they just won’t do?
The left might say I’m being hyperbolic, but it really is that serious. One political party’s presidential campaign—the party of the outgoing president—conspired with the FBI to spy on and spread disinformation about the other political party’s candidate in the hopes of winning an election. When winning the election didn’t work, they kept right at it, hoping to unseat a duly elected president. The left is just fine with that because they hate Donald Trump, so to them the ends justify the means. It doesn’t cross their minds for an instant that they should decry these tactics, as someday the tables might be turned. Probably not, since the FBI is as swampy as any organization in our nation’s capital, but stranger things have happened; like Trump becoming president.
The left didn’t always hate Trump, of course. They started when he decided to run for president and expose them as the unAmerican globalists they are. This is why they don’t care about the government being weaponized against its citizens, so long as it’s the correct citizens. Ultimately, the left doesn’t care what happened to the cheerleader because she started eating with the band geeks and telling them all the popular kids’ secrets, which is simply not acceptable. In their eyes, she deserved it.
After discussing the IG report and the well-documented attempts by the Clinton campaign to sink the Trump campaign, Hans Mahncke talks briefly about the infamous interview Flynn had with Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, talking about two telephone conversations he had with the Russian ambassador in December 2016. To be clear, there was nothing inappropriate about these phone conversations, even though the media insisted for years that there was. Flynn was Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor. It has long been customary for the incoming administration’s staff to touch base with foreign ambassadors with whom they’ll have close contact. Still, it was leaked to the media that the call had occurred and the FBI was happy to follow up.
It was revealed, long after the fact, that the agents interviewing Flynn questioned whether the point of their interview was to find out the truth, or to get Flynn to lie so they could prosecute him and get him removed from Trump’s staff. It was also revealed, well after the fact, that the agents didn’t actually think Flynn was lying, but the swamp has never let something as trivial as that get in the way of a good railroading. Flynn was ultimately coerced into pleading guilty but later rescinded that guilty plea, which led to a legal battle for the ages against, among other people, Judge Emmet Sullivan, who sunk his teeth in and refused to let go even after the Department of Justice dropped their case against Flynn. The episode doesn’t deal with the after, however, as that would make it much longer. Instead, it backtracks from here to talk about the before.
Mahncke and Carlson start their timeline in 2015, when the problem with being in the wrong place at the wrong time truly begins for General Flynn. By all outward appearances, Flynn should have been safe from Democratic smears, having served as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under President Obama from 2012 to 2014. However, given his forced retirement after clashing with the establishment’s views on terrorism in the Middle East, acknowledging him as the competent, respected officer he used to be was always too much to hope for.
So a year and some change after his forced retirement, Flynn was in business for himself, providing intelligence services to governments and businesses. Like so many people who were once employees of the Washington machine, Flynn was paid to attend and speak at that fateful RT anniversary dinner in December 2015 and happened to be seated next to Vladimir Putin. No one thought anything of it at the time. Being paid to attend dinners after leaving government service is just what people do (ask the Clintons or Obamas), and nothing untoward occurred. Jill Stein, who was the Green Party’s candidate for the presidency in 2016, also happened to be seated at that table and attested to the fact that Flynn and Putin didn’t even speak to each other really. This shouldn’t be surprising, since Flynn isn’t fluent in Russian, and while Putin is undoubtedly fluent in English he rarely uses it in public, preferring to keep up the illusion that he needs a translator. Stein would also eventually be smeared once her attacks on Clinton became a problem.
This dinner continued to be a non-issue even when Flynn joined the Trump campaign in February 2016, and was not the subject of scrutiny until July 2016. Carlson shows a clip of Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News International asking Flynn why he attended the RT event, during an afternoon interview before Flynn spoke at the RNC convention. This was well after the Clinton server scandal exploded, and Flynn ended up joining chants of “Lock her up!” coming from the crowd. While his speech went over like gangbusters with attendees, General Flynn clearly painted a very large target on his back that day. Trump became the party’s official nominee the next day, and it was on.
Carlson details the steps the Clinton campaign took next to begin the “Russia Russia Russia” narrative, which happened in rapid succession. Christopher Steele started the first smear against Carter Page. Robby Mook suggested the Russian government was responsible for releasing Hillary Clinton’s emails specifically to help Trump. Suddenly everyone related to the Trump campaign who had ever breathed within 10 feet of a Russian was actively working to subvert the Clinton campaign. It was yet another cliché example of how whatever the left accuses the right of doing, that’s what they’re actually doing themselves.
Mahncke grabs the ball to run with it from there, reminding the viewer of Trump’s ill-timed joke regarding Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails. He said in an interview that maybe Russia could find them, with the clear implication that anyone could have access to them because of how unsecure her server was—friends, enemies, or friendly enemies. Of course, the left has absolutely no sense of humor so they were incapable of recognizing that he was kidding. It was easy for the media to latch onto this statement as some kind of tacit admission on Trump’s part that he was in bed with Russia and Putin’s puppet. Steele then wrote another made-up memo, which the FBI seized on to start investigating the Trump campaign. The CIA hopped on the bandwagon next, bolstering the claims that Clinton’s email hack was an attempt by the Russians to undermine her campaign. Then Steele was back with a third memo, which explicitly mentioned both Flynn and Jill Stein as being supported by the Kremlin—Russian assets, in effect. It was the beginning of the Red Scare all over again.
FBI informant Stefan Halper entered the proverbial chat room next, with even more dubious claims about Trump associates that all turned out to be false. As Carlson recounts, he claimed Flynn shared a train ride in London with a supposed Russian oligarch’s daughter, of whom Halper was “suspicious.” That didn’t happen, and Carlson asserts the story could have been disproven easily, but again, the swamp has never let the truth get in the way of framing an enemy. Shortly after, the FBI officially began to investigate Flynn, and the media joined the fray in one big circle jerk.
The media claimed they were taking it seriously because the FBI was taking it seriously. The Steele dossier would later be called “verified” and used to open a FISA investigation into Flynn because the media had reported on it. Michael Isikoff claimed he’d asked Flynn about the RT dinner because the FBI was looking into him, but months before he’d been reporting spurious claims about Trump campaign official Paul Manafort. Anyone who watches this episode and can’t see the incestuous nature of the media and the FBI in regards to the Russia claims and the Trump campaign simply doesn’t want to.
Mahncke closes out the episode before the hosts go any further down the rabbit hole (and there’s a long rabbit hole to go down) with a reminder that Congress got in on the “Flynn’s a Russian plant!” game as well. Elijah Cummings and Jason Chaffetz, speaking officially for the House Oversight Committee, claimed Flynn didn’t request permission for his speaking engagement at the RT dinner. The agenda is transparent enough to turn the stomach, especially given the number of political commentators who have long claimed that if Trump had Flynn at his side from the very beginning, his four years in office might have gone much differently, allowing him to accomplish more of his agenda.
“The Coordinated Attack on General Flynn” scratches the surface of this travesty of justice just enough to engage and whet the appetite for finding out more about the Michael Flynn saga. By keeping the information short and concise to what led up to Flynn’s prosecution, it might even give those who still believe he did something wrong enough pause to reconsider. There’s enough in the episode to enlighten without overwhelming anyone who might not have known any of this happened and possibly have them rethink whether or not it’s really okay for one political party to weaponize intelligence organizations against their opponent. This installment of “Truth Over News” definitely deserves a view, a like, and a share, since it talks about how the FBI maliciously targeted Flynn in the first place, which the media has quietly swept under the rug.
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