Why the dismissal of Michael Flynn’s case could win Trump reelection

By Michael Walsh

May 9, 2020 | 9:59am | Updated

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Flynn made enemies among the Obamans for his refusal to downplay the Islamic threat. Now, with his case dismissed, Trump can rally his supporters by arguing the general was framed.Getty Images

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Until Thursday, Donald Trump’s reelection chances were not looking good. The booming economy — the lynchpin of his reelection campaign — lay in a COVID-induced coma, his near-daily jousting with a contemptuous press corps was yielding diminishing returns, and the Democratic leadership was salivating at running the cardboard-cutout version of Joe Biden against their hated enemy, trapped in the White House by the coronavirus panic.

What a difference a couple of days makes. With the stunning announcement Thursday that the Justice Department was dropping all charges against Mike Flynn, Trump’s short-lived first national security adviser, the tables have suddenly turned. Since the first month of the new administration, when Flynn was ambushed by a rogue FBI under James Comey, forced from office after just 24 days, indicted for “lying to the FBI” by Robert Mueller’s kangaroo court investigation of the Trump campaign’s imaginary “collusion” with Russia, and coerced into a single-count guilty plea, the president is finally free to go on offense against those who would have seditiously denied him his electoral victory.

Stripped of his office, his dignity and his money, Flynn — the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama — was awaiting sentencing for his nonexistent crime when the news came. With a new lawyer, Sidney Powell, leading on his defense, and an attorney general (William Barr) determined to see real justice done, Team Flynn finally pried loose a document cache indicating the sheer malfeasance of his malicious prosecution by an FBI goon squad led by the repellent Peter Strzok, overseen by Comey as well as by other Obama holdovers such as Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, CIA Chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

In dropping all charges against Flynn, US Attorney Timothy Shea wrote: “After a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information … the Government has concluded that the [FBI] interview of Mr. Flynn was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn.”

In other words, Flynn was framed.

Throwing Flynn to the baying hounds of the Democrat-Media Complex was a major blunder. It made Trump look weak, unable or unwilling to defend one of his campaign’s chief advisers. Sensing blood, the media turned its basilisk glare on the hapless attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who quickly recused himself from anything pertaining to “Russian collusion.” And so the beast took on a life of its own, destroying careers and chewing up time and money, only to culminate in Mueller’s nothingburger of a report two years later.

Flynn’s scalp was more than simply symbolic. With his appointment to the DIA (one of the CIA’s rivals and generally dismissed by Langley as the B team), the bantam Irish-American Marine general from Rhode Island had quickly made enemies among the Obamans for his refusal to downplay the Islamic threat, leading to his firing in 2014. When, a week into his tenure, Flynn put a belligerent Persia “on notice” for violating the terms of Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal, it was payback time — and Flynn’s enemies (in Clapper’s words to a Washington Post mouthpiece) took their “kill shot” at Flynn.

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Did Flynn make mistakes? Yes. The decorated Lt. Gen. should never have gotten involved with lobbying for a country as odious as Erdogan’s Turkey. Naïve in the ways of civilian Washington (like Trump at the time), he never suspected he was being set up by men he thought of as colleagues, especially when he was just doing his job in meeting with the then-Russian ambassador. None of that, however, excuses the breathtaking misconduct of Obama’s rogues’ gallery — all of whom should be lawyering up right about now. Elections, as they say, have consequences.

And now the floodgates are open. Trump has given his disheartened followers an important victory over the bumbling Mueller and the sanctimonious Comey; meanwhile, in the shadows, Barr and acting DNI Ric Grenell are busily declassifying and releasing documents that will doubtless reveal even more details about the Democrats’ criminal plot against the president. Meanwhile, the salivating media, which awarded themselves slews of Pulitzers for their “collusion” coverage, have been exposed as the partisan ventriloquist’s dummies they are.

As the country roars back from the economically disastrous shutdown, Trump now needs to sideline the doctors, ignore the media and resume his place at the bully pulpit. And, with the vindication of Mike Flynn, see that real justice is done.

Michael Walsh is an author and screenwriter. His next book, “Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost” (St. Martins), is out later this year. Follow him on Twitter @dkahanerules.

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MICHAEL WALSH: Why the dismissal of Michael Flynn’s case could win Trump reelection. It certainly should.
And my “living, breathing Constitution” analysis says Trump should get a third term, to make up for the criminal effort to undermine his first term. After all, the Constitutions is made to change and adapt to the times, and the Framers could never have imagined this unholy alliance between the dregs of the bureaucracy and the media, along with seditious members of Congress.

87Posted at 6:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

TRUMP SHOULD EXTRADITE ERIC HOLDER: Mexico asks U.S. for answers over historic gun-running row.

Mexico’s president on Friday urged the United States to shed light on a gun-running sting that caused bilateral friction under the Obama presidency, questioning the behavior of past U.S. administrations for the third time this week.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his government would send a diplomatic note to Washington for information on the 2009-2011 operation known as ‘Fast and Furious,’ a topic that has resurfaced in recent days amid a debate over historic U.S.-Mexico cooperation on security and possible corruption under previous administrations.
Setting out to stop cross-border gun smuggling, the U.S. scheme allowed people to illegally buy arms in the United States and take them to Mexico so that the weapons could be tracked and lead law enforcement officials to drug cartel bosses. Some weapons were later blamed for gangland slayings in Mexico.
“How could this be? A government that invades in this way, that flagrantly violates sovereignty, international laws,” Lopez Obrador said at his daily news conference.
To avoid a repeat, the matter needed to be cleared up, said Lopez Obrador, who noted that President Donald Trump had last year been “respectful” to Mexico in discussions over joint co-operation following two major security incidents.

It wasn’t a scheme to stop cross-border smuggling. It was a scheme to send traceable guns to Mexico where their use in crime would be an excuse for stricter gun laws in America. It was another political abuse of law enforcement power, of the sort that was common under Obama, and the Trump Administration should help Mexico get to the bottom of it, and ensure that the wrongdoers are punished appropriately.

143Posted at 6:52 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

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