John R. Houk
© March 2, 2017
Michael Ginsberg has some interesting speculation pertaining
to Mike Flynn’s resignation as National Security Advisor to the President.
Ginsberg senses a witch similar to the experience of Scooter Libby. The Dems
hunted President Bush and wanted him to go down in flames.
When nothing else worked, the Dems fabricated a felony
committed by Scooter Libby while he was Chief of Staff for then Vice President
Cheney. The Dems talked their way into having a Special Prosecutor assigned to
investigate who might have revealed that desk jockey Valerie Plame worked for
the CIA. The accusation occurred because Plame’s name became public in a news
story in regard to the now largely discredited report of Joe Wilson. Wilson – a
Dem acolyte – was dispatched the nation of Niger to investigate if there was any
accuracy to Intel reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to import uranium
yellow cake for a nuclear weapons program.
Libby AND no one else was EVER convicted of releasing Plame’s
name. When the connection failure occurred in the Special Prosecution, Special
Prosecutor Fitzgerald went after Scooter Libby for lying even though the truth
was a mix-up of memory. Yup, that was the ONLY egregious crime to get a
conviction. And even that conviction is tainted with prosecutorial misconduct
by preventing exonerating evidence from the Defense effort.
Ginsberg senses a repeat of a “no there – there” prosecution
instituted under the pressure of Dems who can’t stand that Crooked Hillary lost
to President Trump.
Plamegate Witch Hunt Articles
o
Scooter Libby Case Could Expose CIA to Scrutiny;
By Roger Aronoff; (Cross posted from The National Ledger) SlantRight;
6/11/07
JRH 3/2/17
************
Trump Should Beware
Of The Flynn Affair Becoming The Plame Game
The resignation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn
bears more than a few disturbing similarities to a scandal that brought the
Bush administration to its knees.
MARCH 1, 2017
Ever since the inauguration,
Democrats have been searching high and low for ways to discredit and undermine
the Trump administration. Some Democrats, such as Maxine Waters, have openly
admitted they want to impeach President Trump and are on alert for any possible
grounds.
Dan Rather has gone on record
comparing the Mike Flynn affair to Watergate, and pundit Sally Kohn tweeted a
step-by-step recipe for removing President Trump and replacing him with Hillary
Clinton. Not a day goes by that the media doesn’t seize upon some alleged Trump
gaffe, misstep, or scandal or, when all else fails, supposed dysfunction in the
Trump White House.
It is obvious that Democrats
and the media are intent on strangling the Trump administration in its crib.
They seek every weapon to accomplish this goal. They slow-roll the confirmation
of Trump’s cabinet. They play up the argument that Trump lost the popular vote.
They regularly attack him and his advisers as a racist and anti-Semitic. So
far, despite the exhausting, daily swirl of hyperbolic reporting, the Trump
administration has more or less stayed on course in implementing its policies.
However, this does not mean
danger does not lurk. The scandal and resignation of former National Security
Adviser Flynn bears more than a few disturbing similarities to a scandal that,
a decade ago, brought the Bush administration to its knees. I am referring, of
course, to the Valerie Plame affair.
You Remember the Valerie
Plame Affair
The Plame affair started
innocently enough. The Central Intelligence Agency sent a former ambassador,
Joseph Wilson, to Africa to investigate the possibility that Saddam Hussein
sought yellowcake uranium to support an illicit nuclear program. According to
Wilson, the CIA greenlighted the trip to answer a question Vice President Dick
Cheney’s office had asked the CIA regarding Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium in
Africa.
Wilson reported his findings
to the government. He also took to the pages of The New York Times to
discuss “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” detailing how he had concluded that
Hussein had not sought yellowcake from Africa. He also claimed intelligence had
been “twisted” to “exaggerate” the threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
The Bush administration,
unaware of who Wilson was or why the government had sent an administration
critic like him on this mission, endeavored to find out. Reporter Bob Novak was
also curious, and he learned that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the
CIA and had recommended her husband for the mission. Novak duly published his
findings. Not long after, all hell broke loose.
Wild accusations immediately
overtook the Bush administration. Wilson accused the administration of outing
his wife as a CIA officer to retaliate for his article. Many people thought a
White House staffer leaked Plame’s name to Novak. Wilson himself blamed Karl
Rove, saying he wanted to see Rove “frog-marched” out of the White House “in
handcuffs.”
MSNBC gleefully jumped onto
the story—it was a staple of Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” for years. Others suggested
the Bush administration had violated the Espionage Act or other laws protecting
CIA officers. Antiwar Democrats made Plame and Wilson antiwar heroes and
martyrs.
Finally, the Bush
administration buckled to external pressure and named a special prosecutor,
Patrick Fitzgerald, to investigate who leaked Plame’s name. Fitzgerald learned
that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had leaked Plame’s name to
Novak. Despite this mystery, he continued investigating. Eventually, he brought
one man to trial: Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, for
perjury.
The Trial Was Really
Political Sabotage
Although the trial was for
perjury, its purpose for the antiwar left was to put the Iraq War and entire
Bush administration on trial. The trial intended to make the war and
administration illegitimate and, essentially, wreck its ability to function.
That it did. The
administration and press was consumed by Fitzgerald’s investigation. In fact,
it is now known that Libby had argued for a surge much earlier in the Iraq War
but was unable to push his position strongly because the Plame affair so badly
consumed him. Libby was forced to resign as Cheney’s chief of staff in October
2005, and only at the end of 2006—after another year of bloodshed—did the
United States implement the surge strategy Libby had advocated.
A 2007 Washington
Post editorial noted a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee
determined that nearly all of Wilson’s claims were false. The Post acknowledged
there was no nefarious conspiracy to destroy the careers of Wilson and Plame.
Worse, journalist Judith Miller stated in her 2015 book that Fitzgerald
withheld evidence from her that led her to testify falsely. In effect, she
recanted the testimony Fitzgerald used to win Libby’s conviction.
Nevertheless, the damage was
done to the Bush administration’s ability to fight the Iraq War and take other
policy actions, from reforming Social Security to eliminating the Syrian
nuclear reactor at al-Kidar to dealing with Iran.
The Flynn Dox Might Be a
Fishing Expedition
The matter that led to
Flynn’s resignation has more than a whiff of déjà vu all over again. Once
again, we have a high government official forced to resign not for his actions,
but for supposed untruths he told about his actions after the fact. In this
case, Flynn is supposed to have misled the FBI by stating he did not discuss
sanctions during a call with the Russian ambassador to the United States in
December 2016.
Supposedly transcripts of the
call exist, though they have not been made public. Surely the transcripts are
available to the FBI agents who interrogated Flynn. They could easily determine
exactly what Flynn discussed with the Russian ambassador without needing to
interrogate Flynn. Interrogating Flynn about a telephone call whose contents
were already available to the FBI could serve only one purpose: to create a
perjury trap for Flynn.
This has obvious similarities
to what happened to Libby in the Plame matter. Even though the Plame special
prosecutor knew the Plame leaker was Armitage, he continued to investigate and
supposedly caught Libby in a perjury trap.
It was perfectly proper for
Flynn, the incoming national security adviser, to speak with foreign countries’
ambassadors to the United States. That is what transitions are for. It is
ludicrous to believe that an incoming administration can take no action and
talk to no foreign representatives before noon on January 20. That is absurd,
and I strongly doubt the Obama team met this standard. The point of a
transition is to be able to hit the ground running and maintain continuity in
government, including in relationships with foreign countries.
So what did Flynn in was not
the fact of his call to the Russian ambassador, just as Libby was not done in
by leaking Plame’s name (as he wasn’t the leaker). Both cases involved “a
cover-up in search of a crime,” as columnist Charles Krauthammer has said.
Flynn Also Has Plausible
Deniability
One can also easily imagine a
scenario in which Flynn did not believe he had discussed the new Russia sanctions
but, in a strict interpretation, one might believe he did. If during the call
the Russian ambassador asked about the sanctions, and Flynn said “We are going
to review the entire Russia policy, but I can’t discuss the sanctions or
anything else specifically,” did Flynn discuss the sanctions?
Another similarity between
the Plame and Flynn affairs is that the Democratic Party is deliberately
muddying their meaning to inflate their significance. In the Plame case, the
trial became a proxy for the entire Iraq War effort. Recall that many Democrats
initially voted for the authorization to use force in Iraq and only turned
against the war when the United States began suffering setbacks.
Democrats, led by their
presidential candidates including John Kerry, justified turning against the war
by claiming President Bush had lied them into supporting it. They proclaimed
Libby’s perjury conviction as proof. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated, “the
[Libby trial] testimony unmistakably revealed—at the highest levels of the Bush
administration—a callous disregard in handling sensitive national security
information and a disposition to smear critics of the war in Iraq.”
The Democrats thus
deliberately and strategically used a narrow perjury conviction to discredit
the entire Bush Iraq policy and build a larger story of the nefarious, lying
Bush administration—while conveniently eliminating their culpability for
supporting the Iraq War.
Democrats are taking the same
approach with Flynn’s call, blowing it up into evidence that the Russians and
the Trump team somehow conspired to get Trump elected. The nub of the entire
Flynn controversy is that Flynn talked to the Russian ambassador just as the
Obama administration began taking action against Russia for its supposed
meddling in the presidential election. That is, Democrats’ ginned-up, recently
discovered concern about Russia is what underlies the entire Flynn matter.
The Obama administration only
began taking a hard line on Russia in the last few weeks of its tenure,
probably to help reinforce the notion that Russia somehow helped Trump win.
Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine and indiscriminate bombing and
atrocious human rights violations in Syria led to no serious consequences from
the United States. Only when the Democrats went looking for someone to blame
the election loss on did Russia enter the crosshairs.
Democrats Are Being
Vindictive Losers
Unable to win the election,
the Democrats have resorted to lawfare to re-litigate the election and destroy
the elected president. Democrats did not win at the ballot box and are
determined to tie the winners in knots to prevent them from governing. By
muddying the waters and conflating small incidents with their larger conspiracy
theories, they hope Americans will assume that where there is a whole lot of
smoke, there must be some fire, even if Democrats are manufacturing the smoke.
The Trump administration
needs to understand the game Democrats are playing and rewrite the rules.
First, it must not appoint a special prosecutor under any circumstances. In her
book, Miller says Libby’s lawyer told her “Fitzgerald had twice offered to drop
all charges against Libby if his client would ‘deliver’ [Vice President] Cheney
to him.” The Trump administration cannot similarly allow a special prosecutor
to run wild in search of a high-ranking scalp.
In addition, the
congressional committees investigating the Flynn matter need to avoid getting
drawn into a witch hunt for senior Trump officials. Republican leadership must
maintain firm boundaries around any investigations and avoid the fishing
expedition Democrats desperately desire. A fishing expedition will tie up
enormous resources in document requests, interviews, and testimony, distracting
from Republicans’ policy work. Such distractions would be a victory for the
Left.
The investigating committees
need to be very careful their investigation does not expand into any and all
communications with and ties to Russia of anyone associated with the Trump
campaign. The entire argument that the Russians “hacked” the election to
affirmatively assist Trump is an edifice of innuendo. Congress must not add
more bricks to it.
The investigating committees
should also focus on the leakers of the information about Flynn’s call
transcripts. These leaks are unacceptable and possibly criminal. They may also
represent the presence of anti-Trump bureaucrats attempting to undermine the
elected president. Unlike anything President Trump has done, this is a real
threat to democracy and the will of the electorate.
Double Down, Trump Team
Second, the Trump
administration needs to accelerate the pace of appointing officials to staff
the government. Federal agencies have had weeks without political leadership as
the Democrats have bogged down the confirmation process to an unprecedented
degree. Democratic-leaning bureaucrats have had weeks to create all kinds of
mischief, from inappropriate and potentially illegal leaking to organizing
resistance at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere. The agencies
need adult supervision immediately.
Third, the Trump
administration needs to change the subject. It got off to a good start by
replacing Flynn with Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster. It now needs to move forward on
its priorities: tax reform, budget cutting and seriousness about controlling
the national debt, and Obamacare replacement. These three initiatives are
likely to unleash as big an economic boom as we’ve seen in the twenty-first
century. Bill Clinton proved people will tolerate a lot during good economic
times.
That said, the Trump team
should be aware that the Flynn resignation is a bad precedent, just as the
Libby prosecution was. It’s a template for how to drive Left-displeasing
officials from office. The Trump team will need to be vigilant against
Democrats’ future deployment of lawfare to claim other scalps.
The Trump administration is
off to a good start and is building momentum to pursue conservative wish-list
items such as tax reform and Obamacare repeal. Democrats know this, and will do
everything they can to derail these efforts. With Flynn, Democrats proved they
are prepared to run the Plame play from their scorched-earth playbook. The
Trump team needs to be prepared for next time to effectively defend against it.
_________________
Will Plame Lie Repeat with
Flynn?
John R. Houk
© March 2, 2017
_______________
Trump Should Beware Of The Flynn Affair Becoming The
Plame Game
Michael is an attorney in
Washington DC for the U.S. government, and a 2002 graduate of Harvard Law
School.
Copyright © 2017 The Federalist, a wholly independent division of FDRLST Media, All
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