How General Flynn and Sidney Powell Used the Brady Rule to Expose Obama and His Coup d’État Co-Conspirators as Traitors
Part 2: Strzok’s Five Eyes Intel Scheme to Destroy Trump Explained
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
This is the second report on this topic from Dr. Corsi. Yesterday, TGP published the first report.
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson is a member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Johnson is confident the Obama co-conspirators utilized the “Five Eyes club” for intelligence sharing “without attracting undue attention.” Papadopoulos sent emails in 2015 to Corey Lewandowski after Lewandowski was appointed Trump’s first campaign director. Johnson documents his reasons for being confident that Britain’s GCHQ and the NSA intercepted Papadopoulos’s emails to Lewandowski. He wrote: “It is now clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that these emails [that Papadopoulos wrote to Lewandowski] were transmitted as SIGINT [Signals Intelligence] reports.” On April 24, 2019, in an interview on the One America News Network (OANN), Johnson explained Britain’s reasons for spying on Trump:
The British did this [use GCHQ to spy on Trump] in part, I am given to understand by people familiar with what was up, because they were concerned about Trump’s policies on NATO and Syria, and they wanted to make sure they could start understanding what he’s up to.
Johnson is further certain that Papadopoulos’s emails were “unmasked.” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA Act) surveillance is a loophole that allows the FBI to conduct warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens with practically no checks or accountability on the process. Obtaining a FISA Court warrant to authorize surveillance against U.S. citizens is supposed to be difficult under FISA law. To get a warrant to authorize surveillance, DOJ attorneys, working with FBI agents, need to convince the FISA Court that probable cause exists to believe a U.S. citizen is an agent of a foreign power. Section 702 of the FISA legislation allows the FBI—and other entities within the federal government, including the White House—to query the NSA to obtain any information it may have on a U.S. citizen being monitored by the NSA. But the query is only legitimate if the government can establish credible (i.e., not fabricated) evidence to be suspicious a particular citizen is engaged in suspicious activity with foreign agents acting against the national security interests of the United States.
To be clear, under Section 702, the White House or the FBI, in practice, can merely use a foreign intelligence concern to ask the NSA about any information it may have obtained on U.S. citizens believed to be involved in foreign espionage activities. Many Russian intelligence operatives and government officials were already under NSA electronic surveillance. So, FBI counterintelligence agents and various Obama administration officials could merely have asked the NSA under Section 702 for any information that the NSA may have collected on Flynn, or other Trump associates, regarding suspected “Russian collusion.” Thus, Section 702 under Operation Crossfire Hurricane functioned as an FBI backdoor to conduct electronic surveillance on U.S. citizens. The FBI could simply utilize Section 702, thus avoiding the requirement to gather legitimate probable cause evidence to get a warrant from a FISA Court authorizing electronic surveillance of the same U.S. citizens the FBI is targeting. In Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the Obama administration co-conspirators illegally disregarded the rules. They used Section 702 to query the NSA about political opponents. They also fabricated evidence (i.e., the Steele dossier) to falsify probable cause evidence to obtain from a FISA court a warrant to conduct electronic surveillance on political opponents.
Another severe violation of Fourth Amendment rights occurs when U.S. citizens who the NSA surveils without a warrant are “masked.” Federal law requires the names of U.S. citizens under NSA surveillance to remain secret unless there is a genuine and overwhelming national security interest justifying that the person is named—or, in intelligence terms, “unmasked.” Several Obama administration officials, including former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, and former CIA Chief John Brennan were subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee investigating illegal unmasking in the Russian collusion hoax for political rather than legitimate national security reasons. When the Obama administration decided to leak to David Ignatius at the Washington Post the information about Flynn’s phone calls with Kislyak, James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, urged Ignatius to “take the kill shot.” Predictably, however, in the Russian collusion hoax, the DOJ has issued no indictments for unlawful unmasking of names, even when the names were illegally leaked to the press by senior Obama administration officials.
If the CIA, FBI, or DOJ, in their hate-Trump zeal, circumvented U.S. law to receive intelligence from unauthorized sources, the entire “Russia collusion” investigation—including all applications to the FISA Court—may have been illegal. If Flynn had been allowed to take office as Trump’s national security advisor, he most certainly would have ended Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and Robert Mueller would never have been appointed Special Counsel. Strzok understood that the only way he could perpetuate Operation Crossfire Hurricane after Trump took office was to ensure Flynn never took office.
General Flynn and Sidney Powell understood that Strzok’s entrapment scheme against Papadopoulos was needed to make Crossfire Hurricane an FBI counterintelligence operation. In 2016, Strzok realized the only way he could access NSA surveillance information on Trump and his associates was to implicate Trump and his associates as spies. Since this was not true, Strzok had to fabricate the evidence. That’s why Strzok hit upon using Mifsud to make it appear that Papadopoulos, a Trump associate (even if peripheral to Trump’s campaign), knew in April 2016 that the Russians had stolen the DNC emails. Strzok knew the NSA had the Trump campaign under surveillance, and he wanted to access that mother lode of secret information. He also knew that the NSA was the pivotal U.S. intelligence agency in the Five Eyes scheme. Powell, in her motion to the court dated September 11, 2018, paragraph 7 requests the following: “All documents, reports, correspondence, and memorandum, including any National Security letter or FISA application, concerning any earlier investigation of Mr. Flynn and the basis for it.” Powell referenced this request by citing the Mueller Report, Volume II, pages 24 and 26. Pages 24 and 26 involved Flynn’s telephone calls with Kislyak. Flynn must have explained to Powell that the Obama administration had accessed the NSA for surveillance information the NSA had collected on Flynn.
In January 2016, John Brennan organized a secret “Donald Trump Task Force” in the CIA, with the blessing of James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence. Brennan organized the Donald Trump Task Force on the premise that Trump was a spy, an asset of Putin running for president in the United States. The Task Force members, including officials from the FBI and NSA, were handpicked, with no posting of jobs. As a counterintelligence operation, Brennan’s Task Force could recruit foreign intelligence agencies, including MI-6 in the U.K., as well as Italian [i.e., Mifsud’s involvement with Link University in Rome] and Australian [i.e., Downer] intelligence operatives. The Task Force spent CIA money to fund travel overseas and to pay cooperating assets to set up entrapment schemes of Trump campaign officials, including Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
In July 2016, CIA Director John Brennan wrote a two-page E.C., or “electronic communication,” to FBI Director James Comey. In the E.C., Brennan communicated to Comey details of the meeting between Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as reported by Downer. According to GOP Representative Devin Nunes, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Brennan’s E.C. was not an official product of the U.S. intelligence communities, nor was Brennan using information gained through official partnerships with the Five Eyes. Instead, the CIA appears to have enlisted the assistance of foreign intelligence assets to run operations against the Trump campaign, perhaps starting as early as late 2015. Two of the foreign intelligence assets the CIA recruited were Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud, both with extensive ties to the CIA. Brennan’s E.C. to Comey and the information Mifsud shared with Papadopoulos at their famous breakfast meeting at the Andaz hotel in London on April 26, 2016, were the final pieces needed to trigger the FBI into opening Operation Crossfire Hurricane as a counterintelligence investigation.
Remember, the FBI opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, as a counterintelligence investigation rather than a criminal investigation. By so doing, the Obama administration avoided the rigorous probable cause standard of proof demanded in a criminal investigation to bring a criminal indictment. The administration knew that a counterintelligence investigation would operate under less stringent standards of evidence, from demanding probable cause to merely requiring that the conduct being investigated must have a legitimate national security concern. An FBI counterintelligence investigation is aimed at finding and convicting foreign spies operating in the United States, as well as prosecuting U.S. citizens collaborating with foreign spies.
The Obama administration knew that a counterintelligence investigation was a national security case that would require only reasonable suspicion to reach across to involve foreign intelligence services. The question was no longer limited to whether Donald Trump had committed a crime under federal election laws but now included whether he was a spy—specifically, whether he was acting as a Russian agent. Under the less rigorous standards of proof under which a counterintelligence investigation operates, the FBI’s mission was merely to investigate whether or not Trump had colluded with Russia to defeat Clinton. The FBI no longer had to meet the requirement of criminal law that to indict Donald Trump the FBI would have to establish probable cause evidence that Donald Trump personally or his campaign officials had violated the law.
But through the backdoor of a counterintelligence investigation, the Obama DOJ and FBI were also allowed to conduct a criminal investigation should any crimes be found in the espionage activity being investigated. In his closed-door testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, James A. Baker, the general counsel for the FBI on October 18, 2018 [Part Two], explained how counterintelligence investigations could also become criminal investigations. “The FBI always has all of its authorities in dealing with a counterintelligence matter,” Baker testified. “And so, to my mind, the FBI walks in with all of its options on the table. And it can pursue things in a strictly, you know, foreign intelligence channel, interacting with other intelligence agencies and things like that and never have anything to do with, you know, a grand jury subpoena or putting anybody in a courtroom or anything like that, or an indictment.” Yet, Baker acknowledged when a counterintelligence investigation transforms into a criminal investigation, the standard of proof becomes the more rigorous standard of probable cause. “But at the same time, if the facts and circumstances warrant going—using criminal tools, including up to and including prosecution, then the FBI can do that. And so I think it’s just misleading to think of a counterintelligence investigation as not also being, in part, at least potentially a criminal investigation.”
This point disturbed former U.S. assistant attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who has accused the DOJ and FBI of running a criminal investigation against Donald Trump under the pretext of a counterintelligence investigation. In his 2019 book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency,[1] McCarthy writes: “In the absence of a solid factual predicate for a criminal investigation, foreign-counterintelligence powers were used as a pretext to dig for criminal evidence that would support a hoped-for prosecution” (p. 227). McCarthy considered the FBI’s use of foreign intelligence sources in Operation Crossfire Hurricane a major and abusive flaw of the Trump-Russia investigation.
McCarthy also comments the Obama administration “bent over backward not to make a criminal case on Hillary Clinton—the candidate Obama heartily endorsed—despite a mountain of incriminating evidence” (p. 178, italics in original). In sharp contrast, he noted the Obama administration “exploited every tool in its arsenal (surveillance, informants, foreign-intelligence agencies, moribund and constitutionally untenable criminal statutes) to try to make a criminal case on Trump—the candidate Obama deeply opposed—despite the absence of incriminating evidence” (p. 178). McCarthy also explained this by noting that the Obama administration “notoriously political in its intelligence assessments and law-enforcement actions, used Trump contacts with Russia as a rationalization for a counterintelligence investigation because it saw Trump as a Neanderthal degenerate” (pp. 177-178). At the same time, the Obama administration “ignored Clinton contacts with Russia, or assumed they simply must have been good-faith contacts, because it saw the Clintons as bien pensant transnational-progressives” (p. 178).
Proof President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Schemed to Send Weapons to ISIS
In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton persuaded President Obama to arm the Free Syria Army rebels in Syria. Her goal was to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad. This complemented a strategy Clinton and Obama had already begun in Libya to switch sides by supporting Al-Qaida-affiliated militia to topple Gadhafi. On November 4, 2016, the Sun in London published a report that Julian Assange claimed that Wikileaks had emails in the Hillary Clinton email archive that established ISIS “was created largely with money from people who were giving money to the Clinton Foundation. This claim derived further support from a recording leaked to the New York Times. On the recording, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted the Obama administration not only hoped ISIS would depose the regime of Assad al-Bashar in Syria but also gave arms to the jihadist army and its allies to carry out the task.
As early as June 20, 2011, longtime Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal sent a confidential email to Clinton at the State Department. The email included an article published by David W. Lesch, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Trinity University in San Antonio. In the article, Lesch argued that a regime change strategy would work in Syria if the U.S. could find opposition groups in Syria capable of establishing “a Benghazi-like refuge from which to launch a rebellion and to which aid can be sent.”
In a subsequent confidential email dated July 24, 2012, Blumenthal further advised Clinton that the “growing success of the rebel forces of the Free Syria Army, FSA,” inspired him to believe the Assad regime was increasingly vulnerable to being overthrown. In an email dated February 24, 2012, Blumenthal characterized the Free Syrian Army (FSA) as “loosely organized and uncoordinated,” noting it was “for the most part, local militias, many of them civilian-based, that are simply calling themselves the FSA to appear to be part of a whole.” Blumenthal added in that email to comment the armed resistance to Assad “is not well funded or well-armed.”
Then, on September 18, 2012, one week after the disastrous Benghazi 9/11 terror attack, Blumenthal sent a confidential memo to Clinton. In the email, Blumenthal alerted her to the possibility of an FSA military victory taking over Damascus, which would cause Assad’s wife and close relatives to urge Assad to flee Syria. Blumenthal reasoned that Assad would want to avoid “the fate of Assad’s former ally Muammar al Qaddafi of Libya, who was captured and killed by rebel forces while attempting to flee his home territory in Sirte.”
Former U.S. attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in National Review on August 2, 2016, reported Ambassador Stevens had moved an enormous shipment of weapons from Benghazi to the Syrian ‘rebels’ in Turkey. McCarthy pointed to a New York Times article in 2012, written three months before the Benghazi massacre. The article reported CIA operatives were secretly in Turkey, helping the Obama administration to decide which Syrian opposition fighters would receive arms clandestinely from the United States to fight the Syrian government. The New York Times article further reported that the weapons included automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition, and some antitank weapons. These weapons were being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries, including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
According to Seymour M. Hersh, writing in the London Review of Books in 2014, a secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdogan administrations, the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for transporting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria to support the FSA. Hersh commented: “The operation had not been disclosed at the time it was set up to the congressional intelligence committees and the congressional leadership, as required by law since the 1970s. The involvement of MI6 enabled the CIA to evade the law by classifying the mission as a liaison operation.”
Conclusion
By pointing out the numerous crimes the government had committed, Sidney Powell showed great diligence and skill in defending General Flynn. We know why the Obama administration pursued General Flynn with a determination to destroy him. General Flynn knew too much. Still today, the Biden administration hides the evidence that General Flynn knows exists. Judging from Sidney Powell’s motion to the court on September 11, 2019, Flynn knew he could prove the Obama administration and CIA, with the willing cooperation of British intelligence, committed treason. Once Flynn could establish the extent to which the Obama administration used U.S. intelligence agencies for partisan political purposes, he could explain how Obama clandestinely used U.S. intelligence agencies to arm ISIS. Obama knew he could never permit unredacted copies of the documents Powell demanded under the Brady rule to be shown the American people.
On September 12, 2019, Margot Cleveland, the Federalist’s chief legal correspondent, published an article entitled “Sidney Powell’s Latest Motion in Michael Flynn’s Case Is a Russiagate Bombshell.” In that article, Cleveland correctly noted that “the spying on Trump likely began with spying on Flynn and involved not just the FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense, but their British counterparts, and dated back to Flynn’s time as President Obama’s Defense Intelligence director.”
FDR famously declared that all we have to fear is fear itself. What General Flynn’s case proves is that FDR was wrong. Today, we must fear the U.S. government, a government our Founding Fathers would not recognize. Understanding what Lieutenant General Michael Flynn suffered after being forced to face imprisonment by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and their lying, treasonous associates serves only to display the exemplar courage of this brave patriot.
In 2020, Jerome Corsi published Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, from which much of this article was drawn. In 2019, he published Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” explaining how the Mueller prosecutors confronted Dr. Corsi for over two months for hours at a time in a closed conference room with no windows. Dr. Corsi effectively ended the Mueller “Russian Collusion” investigation when he refused to take the Mueller prosecutors’ plea deal, alleging he had lied to the FBI. The FBI never indicted Dr. Corsi—further proof the Mueller prosecutors were the ones telling the lies.
[1] Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency (New York: Encounter Books, 2019).
