The Ruling Class Railroading of...
The Ruling Class Railroading
of Michael Flynn
The release of the names of Obama officials who sought the unmasking of Michael Flynn is longer than expected. It seems to include everyone but the White House custodian. Naturally, the media is treating this revelation as perfectly normal. You see, one party spying on the other is only shocking if Republicans do it. But if Democrats do it? Well, the Obama officials who wanted a peek at Flynn’s conversations were simply “doing their duty.” Right. That’s why they had been spying on him since at least 2014. Recall that the Cambridge academic Stefan Halper, the “confidential informant” the FBI used to try and trip up George Papadopoulos, had been spying on Michael Flynn too. Halper reported on a visit Flynn made to Cambridge as far back as 2014.
Flynn had become a reviled figure in the eyes of Obama officials by daring to question its soft approach to Islamic terrorism. Ever since Obama sacked Flynn as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Obama officials had been gunning for him. They feverishly worked up a hypothesis that he was in cahoots with the Russians and couldn’t resist an attempt to prove their partisan hunch by spying on him relentlessly.
Such was their desperation to nail Flynn that Sally Yates and company faked up a concern about the possibility of Flynn having violated the Logan Act, an antiquated law that has never been enforced. We now know that even Joe Biden wanted to get his finger into that pie. This is the same Joe Biden who has said that the Obama administration wasn’t guilty of even a “hint of scandal.”
The I’m-not-guilty note Susan Rice wrote to herself on inauguration day takes on more meaning in light of the extensive unmaskings. Why did she wait until the last moment to write that note? Was she waiting to see what would happen with all the frenetic spying on Flynn? Obama told us everything had to be done “by the book,” she wrote to herself — a Freudian aside indicating her fears about the eventual exposure of how not by the book their spying on an incoming administration would appear.
The railroading of Michael Flynn is inconceivable without the double standards the ruling class applies to Democrats. Just imagine the endless furor that would have erupted had the George W. Bush administration unmasked incoming Obama officials on some half-baked hunch that they were conferring with enemies of the United States. Imagine the outrage if it further came out that, say, Eric Holder, had been the target of spying for years.
Obama pompously calls all of this the “rule of law.” It is nakedly the rule of men, weaponizing America’s intelligence agencies against political adversaries. Let’s hope that John Durham, the prosecutor whom Bill Barr has assigned to get to the bottom of Obamagate, will pull on the Flynn string and unravel the whole story of the political espionage. When exactly did it start? Did the “interagency taskforce” CIA Director John Brennan assembled long before the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane began discuss how to nail Flynn? Remember that group ranged across agencies. Does that account for why so many people in the Obama administration, including Treasury officials, wanted to unmask Flynn during the transition?
The unmaskings raise more questions than they answer. But this much is clear: Obama presided over the very autocracy he claims to fear from Trump — the autocracy in his case of an entrenched liberal ruling class that fearing its lost privileges pulled out all the stops to sabotage a president it deemed “illegitimate.” They convinced themselves that since he represented an affront to “norms” they could play dirty and betray norms themselves.
It is impossible to overstate the intensity of the Trump Derangement Syndrome that gripped Obama and his aides — a hatred that led to an extraordinary level of entitlement. Out of nothing more than political spite, they were determined to use the transition to get a political adversary fired and prosecuted.
Their gross presumption rested entirely upon the undemocratic conceits of an elite that fools itself into thinking that the “rule of law” is synonymous with its will and appetite for power. The media exists to make the railroadings of the ruling class look respectable, but in truth they are no different than those of third-world autocrats. Sober historians will look back at the political espionage of the Obama administration against the incoming Trump administration as the stuff of banana republics.
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