Monday, September 16, 2019

Tectonic Rumblings by James Howard Kunstler

The memory hole that appeared in America’s zeitgeist around 2016 is expanding like some evil cosmic rot. Things happen and then things unhappen and after a while it’s like they never happened. For instance, little seems to have happened all summer long with the matter known as RussiaGate, the attempt by high US government officials to overthrow the result of the 2016 election by pretending that Russia was trying to interfere in the 2016 election.
Quite a confection of lies and subterfuge. It apparently grew out of an effort at the highest levels of the Obama administration well before 2016 to run so-called intel operations against the perceived enemies of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy. One target was General Michael Flynn, who until 2014 had headed the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is devoted to military intel analysis. General Flynn was known to be unfavorably disposed to Mr. Obama’s deal to pay billions to Iran for a halt in that country’s nuclear weapons program.
After retiring, General Flynn set up his own intel consulting company, which had two clients in Russia: a short-hop airline and a cyber-security firm owned by a holding company in Britain. In late 2015, General Flynn attended a Moscow dinner for Russia Today (RT) where he sat next to Vladimir Putin and gave a speech for which he was paid $45,000. Note: at that point, General Flynn was a private citizen and we were not at war with Russia. It was one of many European nations that Americans were allowed to do business in.
My own heuristic analysis is that rival Intel chief, John Brennan of the CIA, enlisted British Intel “asset” (i.e., agent) Joseph Mifsud to sandbag General Flynn in order to put him out of business and shove him offstage. The scheme failed, and soon the General was seen around rallies for candidate Donald Trump. In one notorious scene at the Republican convention, he castigated his former colleague Hillary Clinton and joined in the crowd’s chant to “lock her up.” I’m sure that went over well with Mrs. Clinton and all the Obama administration honchos then still running the CIA, the FBI, and the DOJ.
After Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, he moved to appoint General Flynn as his National Security Advisor. Within a few days, FBI director James Comey pulled off an entrapment gambit to incriminate General Flynn over a conversation he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak — as if incoming high officials for foreign policy are not supposed to associate with foreign ambassadors. You understand now that the government had continued its surveillance of General Flynn for years, including tapping his phone when he moved into his White House office. That enabled Mr. Comey to set up a perjury trap. The General was successfully sandbagged this time, kicked offstage, and conned into a guilty plea. He’s been awaiting sentencing for more than a year.
A few months ago, General Flynn fired his old lawyers and hired Sidney Powell, an attorney who literally wrote the book on discovering prosecutorial misconduct in the case of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, whose prosecution over Mickey Mouse comped hotel bills was thrown out of court by the same Judge, Emmet Sullivan, who presides in the US versus Flynn. Ms. Powell has now declared that she intends to prove “egregious prosecutorial conduct” and suppression of exculpatory evidence against the DOJ lawyers who ran the case against General Flynn. The government never would have had a case if they revealed the FBI’s internal memos on General Flynn.
Attorney Powell is seeking to have the case thrown out of court. The FBI and the DOJ lawyers who conducted the prosecution have stonewalled the court on producing the documents at issue. Judge Sullivan may sense that he’s seen this movie before. The case took on a life of its own long before William Barr was confirmed as attorney general and one wonders if he has any role in ending this damaging farce. Legal protocol may require Judge Sullivan to complete the case one way or another. I wrote in this space a year ago that General Flynn had been subject to prosecutorial misconduct. Now, I’ll venture to assert that if Judge Sullivan does not throw the case out, Mr. Trump will step in and pardon General Flynn, and in doing so will make it clear exactly how and why he was run into court in the first place.
The case against General Flynn was an intersection between all the malign forces operating in RussiaGate: rogue high government officials, the vengeful Mrs. Clinton, her allies in the media, and  the ass-covering of figures in Barack Obama’s White House inner circle. The case needs to be resolved to plug the memory hole in American political life.
Meanwhile, all indications are that former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe is about to be frog-marched into an indictment for his part in the epic, many-tentacled RussiaGate intrigue. Perhaps today. Many of the other well-known players will follow. Until they do, the Justice branch of the US government may be considered an enemy of the people.

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