How General Flynn and Sidney Powell Used the Brady Rule to Expose Obama and His Coup d’État Co-Conspirators as Traitors
Part 1: Strzok’s “Papadopoulos Entrapment” Scheme Explained
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
On September 11, 2019, attorney Sidney Powell filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., a motion to compel the production of Brady material [Brady v. Maryland,
373 U.S. 83 (1963)], i.e., exculpatory evidence the prosecution has not
shared with the defendant, General Michael Flynn. The list of
exculpatory evidence Sidney Powell demanded reveals that Flynn knew
documents existed that would prove that President Obama and his
administration co-conspirators, aided by Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton, had engaged in treasonous activity. It was also apparent how
desperately the Obama administration had worked to keep the requested
documents from the American public. Had the federal government complied
with Powell’s requests for Brady material, Flynn could have
established that Obama’s treasonous activity began by spying on Flynn
before April 30, 2014, when Obama forced Flynn to resign as director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
The Obama administration’s treasonous activity reached a new level of
intensity in a secret Oval Office meeting on January 5, 2017. In that
meeting, Obama approved FBI Agent Peter Strzok’s illegal plan to ensnarl
General Flynn in a “perjury trap.” The secret Oval Office meeting
occurred one day after the Department of Justice (DOJ) had exonerated
Flynn regarding telephone calls Flynn made as President-elect Trump’s
incoming national security advisor with Russian Ambassador Sergey
Kislyak in December 2016.
Powell’s motion, filed September 11, 2019, clarifies that if Flynn
had taken office, he would have proven that U.S. intelligence agencies,
with the full cooperation of the U.S. Department of Justice,
collaborated in 2017 with British intelligence in the Obama-approved
coup d’état plan to remove Trump from the White House. He also could
have exposed that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
in 2011 had supplied arms to the al-Qaeda splinter group that became
ISIS in another covert plan that involved U.S. and British intelligence
working together.
Paragraph 4 of Powell’s September 11, 2019, motion for Brady
materials asks explicitly for “all payments, notes, memos,
correspondence, and instructions” between, on the U.S. side, the DOJ,
CIA, and Department of Defense (DOD), and the U.K. side, with several
British intelligence agents going back to 2014 regarding General Flynn.
Powell mentions Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who
seconded as an intelligence officer. As we covered in Part 1 of this
series, Halper accused General Flynn of colluding with Russia during a
Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar in the U.K. in February 2014
that Svetlana Lokhova attended. Lokhova was a Russian-born British
scholar who was taking courses at that time at Cambridge University.
Halper fabricated charges that Lokhova was a Russian spy with whom Flynn
had an affair. Powell also asked for documents related to Sir Richard
Dearlove of British intelligence (MI6) and Professor Christopher Andrew
of Cambridge University (connected with MI5). Dearlove had a forty-year
career with MI6, where he rose to serve as its head from 1999 to 2004.
After graduating from Cambridge, MI6 recruited Christopher Steele
(author of the infamous “Steele report”). At MI6, Dearlove was Steele’s
mentor. Dearlove assisted Halper in running the Cambridge University
seminar Flynn attended in 2014. Andrew was an emeritus history
professor at Cambridge and an associate of Dearlove and Halper.
On the U.S. side, Powell asked for communications and correspondence
involving various DIA, CIA, DOJ, and DOD. Had the government been
honest, Sidney Powell would have succeeded in obtaining for Flynn’s
defense documentary evidence of crimes the Obama administration
committed using the intelligence and justice agencies of the U.S.
government for criminal purposes. Under the Supreme Court standard of Brady v. Maryland, General Flynn had a right to demand that the federal prosecutors had to disclose exculpatory material to the defense. Flynn
knew that the government had to keep the requested documents secret, or
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and a score of other Obama
administration officials faced severe criminal charges, including
treason. The list of Obama’s coup d’état co-conspirators that Flynn
could quickly identify was extremely long. Flynn’s list would
undoubtedly have included John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, James
Comey, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page.
Powell’s motion also asked for any information regarding Joseph
Mifsud. Joseph Mifsud was a Maltese-born academic associated with Link
Campus University, a school established in 1999 as the Rome branch of
the University of Malta. Mifsud played a central role in the setup of
George Papadopoulos. The Democrats on the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence have asserted
that the Russians, in their approach to Papadopoulos, “used common
tradecraft and employed a cutout—a Maltese professor named Joseph
Mifsud.” But the evidence is otherwise. Mifsud is an academic by
training and profession, but he also has close ties with British,
Italian, and U.S. intelligence. Real Clear Investigations reporter Lee
Smith tagged
Mifsud as the “Maltese Phantom of Russiagate,” noting that although
Mifsud has traveled many times to Russia and has contacts with Russian
academics. Misfud’s closest ties are to Western governments,
politicians, and institutions, including the CIA.
Experts who have studied the coup d’état against Donald Trump launched by British and U.S. intelligence have realized,
“all roads in Russia-gate lead to London.” On July 31, 2016, the FBI
opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Text messages exchanged between
Peter Strzok and Lisa Page document, on August 3, 2016, only three days
after the opening of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, Strzok was in
London. A declassified memo
from the majority staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence (HPSCI) to the majority members made clear that Strzok ran
the FBI counterintelligence investigation. The memo stated: “The
Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI
counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete
Strzok.”
Strzok met with Claire Smith, a U.K. Joint Intelligence Committee
member in London. Strzok knew Smith had worked with Mifsud at three
different institutions—the London Academy of Diplomacy, the University
of Stirling in Scotland, and Link University Campus in Rome. Smith was
also a U.K. security vetting panel member and could brief Strzok on
Mifsud, given that she had followed him from the London Academy of
Diplomacy to Stirling University and Link University Campus in Rome.
Smith and Mifsud were photographed together in October 2012 in Rome at
Link University Campus, where they were involved
in training Italian law enforcement on intelligence operations.
According to reports published in Italy, Link Campus University
officially terminated Mifsud’s contract when Mifsud’s role with
Papadopoulos became known. Then, in November 2018, Mifsud went missing;
U.S. authorities presumed he was dead. Seven months later, however,
Mifsud resurfaced. It turns out he never left Rome! Italian newspapers reported
that when Mifsud was missing and presumed dead, he lived comfortably in
an apartment near the U.S. embassy in Rome. A Greek diplomat owned the
apartment, and Link Campus University paid the rent. Strzok’s trip to
London in August 2016 appears arranged to ensure the details of his
Papadopoulos entrapment scheme remained hidden.
Let’s review the details Strzok engineered in a scheme designed to
make it appear Papadopoulos knew in April 2016 that Russia had stolen
Democratic party emails that contained information damaging to Hillary
Clinton. Remember, this was the predicate Strzok needed to open
Operation Crossfire Hurricane at the end of July 2016. In his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump,[1]
Papadopoulos explained step-by-step how he fell into Strzok’s trap.
George Papadopoulos describes Link Campus University in Rome as “Spook
University” (pp. 37-38). On April 26, 2016, after Mifsud returned from a
trip to Russia, Papadopoulos met him for breakfast in London at the
Andaz Hotel, near the Liverpool Street station. This breakfast meeting
was the critical meeting in this Strzok’s entrapment scheme. At the
breakfast meeting at the Andaz Hotel, Mifsud surprised Papadopoulos.
Mifsud leaned across the table conspiratorially and whispered to
Papadopoulos, “the Russians have ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton—emails of
Clinton. They have thousands of them” (p. 60). In his book,
Papadopoulos says he was shocked to hear this but didn’t know what to do
with the information. “My mission is to make a meeting [between Trump
and Putin] happen. End of story. Hacking, security breaches, potential
blackmail—that is illegal and treasonous. I want no part in it.” (p.
61). Papadopoulos insists he did not want to pursue the subject but
instead returned to the proposed Putin-Trump meeting. “But when we said
goodbye, I have a feeling he’s still just spinning me” (p. 60).
After the meeting in which Mifsud “dropped the bomb” (p. 59) on
Papadopoulos, intelligence-connected operatives intervened to set up
Papadopoulos to meet with Alexander Downer, a leftist Australian
politician who served as Australian high commissioner to the U.K. from
2014 to 2018. Papadopoulos explained in his book that Christopher
Cantor, his acquaintance at the Israeli embassy in London, called him to
introduce him to his girlfriend, Erika Thompson. (p. 63). Ericka
Thompson, whom Papadopoulos first described as “an Australian woman in
her mid-thirties,” introduced Papadopoulos to Downer (p. 64).
Papadopoulos subsequently described Erika as “the Australian ‘diplomat’
who is ‘dating’ the Israeli ‘political officer’ Christopher Cantor.
Papadopoulos explains: “Yes, those quotation marks are there for a
reason. A high-profile reporter based in Washington recently told me
that Christopher and Erika were both intelligence officers for their
respective countries, something Erika has repeatedly denied” (p. 71).
On the rainy London evening of May 10, 2016, Papadopoulos met with
Downer and Erika for drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Now,
Papadopoulos describes Erika and Downer as follows: “It’s a wet, ugly
London evening on May 10, 2016, when I go meet Erika Thompson and her
boss, Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer” (p. 73). The point
is that Papadopoulos is catching on that the people who approach him
seemingly innocently while he is in London are all intelligence officers
connected to the country of their nationality. This swanky joint boasts
of having some 150 different wines by the glass. A day or two after
the meeting at the wine bar, Downer reported by cable to his diplomatic
superiors in Canberra that Papadopoulos knew the Russians had damaging
information on Hillary Clinton. Downer, who also appears to be an informant
to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (the equivalent of the
CIA), claims to have reported by cable to his diplomatic superiors in
Canberra about his conversation with Papadopoulos at the wine bar.
This information appeared buried within the Australian government
until July 22, 2016, when over two days, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
began making public some forty thousand stolen DNC emails that forced
Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair. Papadopoulos suggests
that Downer shared the information with Chargé d’Affaires Elizabeth
Dibble. She was the U.S. deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in
London. Dibble, a career diplomat, was the Deputy Chief of Mission and
Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rome from 2008-2010.
Papadopoulos comments in his book that Dibble was in close touch with
Gregory Baker and Terrence Dudley, two presumed CIA agents posing as
military attachés to the U.S. embassy in London (p. 76). Baker and
Dudley were monitoring Papadopoulos in London, possibly from the first
moment he arrived in March 2016. Papadopoulos explained: “The most
widely reported sequence of events is that within forty-eight hours of
our meeting, Downer sends a cable to Australian intelligence reporting
my alleged remark” (p. 76). Once Downer’s information reached the State
Department, it was conveyed to the FBI by Jonathan Winer, the former
deputy assistant secretary of state who communicated with Christopher
Steele during the summer of 2016.
Reporter Kimberley A. Strassel at the Wall Street Journal correctly noted
that the information from Downer about Mifsud’s conversation with
Papadopoulos originated with Downer and reached the FBI outside normal
channels. Strassel reports the chain of communication as follows:
When Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April [2018], he sat for an interview with the Australian,
a national newspaper, and “spoke for the first time” about the
Papadopoulos event. Mr. Downer said he officially reported the
Papadopoulos meeting back to Australia “the following day or a day or
two after,” as it “seemed quite interesting.” The story nonchalantly
notes that “after a period of time, Australia’s ambassador to the U.S.,
Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.
But Strassel insists that her reporting “indicates otherwise.” She explained:
A diplomatic source tells me Mr. Hockey neither transmitted any
information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the trip.
Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his
information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.
Why is this important? The United States is part of the “Five Eyes,”
an intelligence network that includes the U.K., Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand. “Five Eyes” originated
in 1946 as an alliance between the U.S. (National Security Agency,
NSA), the U.K. (Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ), Australia
(Australian Signals Directorate, ASD), Canada (Communications Security
Establishment Canada, CSEC), and New Zealand (Government Communications
Security Bureau, GCSB). Each of the Five Eyes nations conducts its own
interception, collection, acquisition, analysis, and decryption
activities, sharing all the intelligence each obtains with the others by default.
Strassel stressed that Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to
Canberra and leave it to Australian intelligence. “We also know that
it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI,” she wrote.
“The document that launched the FBI probe [Operation Crossfire
Hurricane] contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever. So if
Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel
compelled to act on it.” Strassel’s point is that the Obama State
Department was the agency that acted on Downer’s information. “The
Downer details landed with the embassy’s then-chargé d’affaires,
Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant
secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.”
Strassel put the puzzle together as follows:
When did all this happen, and what came next? Did the info go
straight to U.S. intelligence? Or did it instead filter to the wider
State Department team, who we already know were helping foment
Russia-Trump conspiracy theories? Jonathan Winer, a former deputy
assistant secretary of state, has publicly admitted to communicating in
the summer of 2016 with his friend Christopher Steele, author of the
infamous dossier.
But Strassel picked up on a disconnect between the Mifsud
communication of what Papadopoulos supposedly said and Downer’s version.
Meanwhile, something doesn’t gel between Mr. Downer’s account of the
conversation and the FBI’s. In his Australian interview, Mr. Downer
said Mr. Papadopoulos didn’t give specifics. “He didn’t say dirt, he
said material that could be damaging to her,” said Downer. “He didn’t
say what it was.” Also: “Nothing he said in that conversation indicated
Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect
information on Hillary Clinton.
Her research into the Papadopoulos affair led Strassel to begin
doubting the veracity of the FBI’s decision to use Papadopoulos’s
remarks to Mifsud as the pretext for opening a counterintelligence
investigation into Trump. She concluded:
For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that
Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May
[2016], before they became public in June [2016]. But according to the
tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI
received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said
the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did
this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a
presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance
warrants? Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to
act, and when. The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.
The truth is that Papadopoulos knew nothing about who stole the DNC
emails. Papadopoulos’s goal in London was to see if he could elevate
himself in Trump’s eyes by arranging for Trump a meeting with Putin.
Mifsud was the operative Strzok used Papadopoulos to plant on him the
“Russia stole the DNC emails to get dirt on Hillary” origin.
In London, just days after the FBI opened Operation Crossfire
Hurricane, Strzok met with Downer. McCarthy noted the extraordinary
nature of this Strzok meeting with Downer. “Breaking with diplomatic
protocol after tense negotiations, the American and Australian
governments had agreed that Strzok and another agent would be permitted
to interview High Commissioner Alexander Downer, Canberra’s top emissary
to London,” McCarthy wrote.
“Downer had informed the American embassy that he believed
Trump-campaign advisor George Papadopoulos had tipped him off to a
Russian scheme to swing the presidency to Trump—mainly by hacking and
releasing information that could damage Clinton, such as the tens of
thousands of Democratic party emails now in circulation.” So now, the
FBI was involved in international diplomatic affairs, working with
British intelligence GCHQ, mixing responsibilities with the State
Department and the CIA, by meeting Downer in London with obvious consent
of GCHQ and the Australian government.
First, Strzok needed GCHQ to pin the Russian collusion narrative on
Papadopoulos. Next, Strzok needed Australian intelligence to pass the
message to the U.S. State Department in London. Strzok could not let
anyone know pinning the Russian collusion on Papadopoulos was a
convoluted Five Eyes intelligence operation. None of the Five Eyes
countries want their intelligence agencies spying on their own citizens,
and Strzok knew that if the FBI learned about the Papadopoulos escapade
through GCHQ, his cover would be blown. When the State Department in
London passed the information to the State Department in Washington, and
the State Department in Washington passed the information to the CIA,
Strzok sanitized the information to be FBI actionable. Strzok realized
that the information from the Papadopoulos setup together with the
Steele dossier was a sufficient predicate to open a counterintelligence
investigation into Trump and his campaign officials. But the scheme
would only work if the FBI got the Papadopoulos information through
normal diplomatic channels, not Five Eyes.
Strzok’s scheme was complicated, but it worked. Strzok used Mifsud
to plant the “Russia stole Hillary’s email” comment on Papadopoulos.
Then Downer met with Papadopoulos and passed the word on to Australian
intelligence. Having informed Australia, Downer shared the statement
with the State Department in London. The State Department in London
told the State Department in Washington. The State Department in
Washington passed the information to the FBI. The FBI opened Operation
Crossfire Hurricane.
Flynn must have figured out that Strzok had invented the Papadopoulos
entrapment scheme just as Strzok invented the Flynn perjury trap over
Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. Powell filed the motion to get delivered to
Flynn’s defense team the documentary evidence Flynn needed to expose
Strzok’s ingenious circular methodology. The FBI needed a tie between
the Trump campaign and Russia to claim Trump colluded with Russia to
release damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Strzok estimated
that Papadopoulos was an easy mark. Papadopoulos was young and
inexperienced in international affairs, but Papadopoulos was also
ambitious and connected to the Trump campaign. What Strzok also knew was that what he did was both criminal and treasonous.
Strzok also knew that if Powell got the documents she requested in her
motion to the court on September 11, 2019, Flynn would make public
evidence exposing Strzok as the operational mastermind of the
Obama-directed coup d’état against Trump. The threat of having to
release Brady exculpatory material was most likely the last
straw convincing the Obama administration to drop all charges against
General Flynn.
Strzok morphed the coup d’état scheme first to prevent Trump from
winning in 2016, then to remove Trump from the White House after he won
the election. After the FBI decided Flynn had done nothing wrong in his
telephone conversations with Kislyak, Strzok shifted to running a
perjury trap on Flynn over whether or not Flynn discussed with Kislyak
the sanctions Obama had placed on Russian intelligence. Strzok schemed
to open the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane hoping to deflect
attention from the content of the DNC emails Assange was releasing.
Strzok’s original goal was to elect Hillary Clinton president. When
Trump won the 2016 election, Strzok’s plan shifted to removing Trump
from office for having colluded with Russia to intervene in the
presidential election for his benefit. On May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel.
Strzok trusted that Andrew Weissman on Mueller’s team would establish
enough evidence that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia and
Julian Assange at WikiLeaks to make the DNC emails public so as to
inflict maximum damage on Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.
So, what is the answer to why Obama was so determined to destroy Trump? Obama knew that Flynn had the goods on him. If Flynn had been allowed to be Trump’s national security advisor, Obama’s treason would be exposed. Now, as the end game to get Flynn released from his plea deal, Powell decided to use the Brady
rule to get Flynn’s defense team possession of the documents that would
prove the DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, President Obama, and top members of
Obama’s administration were all in a treasonous coup d’état criminal
scheme. Powell succeeded in that the DOJ dropped all charges against
Flynn. Powell also succeeded in communicating through her court filings
the reality of how Strzok criminally politicized U.S. intelligence to
implement Obama’s treasonous coup d’état. The time for a new Church
Committee investigation is long overdue.
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] George Papadopoulos, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump (New York: Diversion Books, 2019). Page numbers are inserted into the text to identify quotations used here from the book.
Jerome Corsi: Part
II on How General Flynn and Sidney Powell Used the Brady Rule to Expose
Obama and His Coup d’État Co-Conspirators as Traitors
By Joe Hoft
Published February 13, 2023 at 8:15am
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
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).
