Thanks to Ben for the link!
via Zero Hedge.
Now, following the latest report in the WaPo, the young Trump administration may have no choice but to make Flynn the first casualty. According to the Bezos-owned publication, the acting attorney general informed the Trump White House late last month that she believed Michael Flynn had misled senior administration officials about the nature of his communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States, "and warned that the national security adviser was potentially vulnerable to Russian blackmail." The message was delivered by Sally Yates and was prompted by concerns that Flynn, when asked about his calls and texts with the Russian diplomat, had told Vice President-elect Mike Pence and others that he had not discussed the Obama administration sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan also reportedly shared Yates’ concerns about Flynn. The pair believed “Flynn had put himself in a compromising position”, thinking that Pence had a right to know that he had been misled, and agreed with Yates’ decision to warn the White House. One official told the Post all three officials believed Pence had a right to know Flynn had possibly misled him about his talks with Kislyak. Furthermore, current and former officials told the Post they believed Flynn deceived the vice president, adding they could not rule out the possibility he acted with the knowledge of other transition officials. Yates, who was then the deputy attorney general, considered Flynn’s comments during an intercepted phone call with Kislyak last December “highly significant” and “potentially illegal.” The WaPo adds that an official familiar with Yates’ thinking told the Post she suspected Flynn may have violated the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from interfering in diplomatic disputes with another nation. Trump fired Yates last month, after she refused to have the DOJ defend his temporary ban on visitors from seven Muslim-majority nations in court. Making matters worse - for Trump - is that a senior Trump administration official said that the White House was aware of the matter, adding that “we’ve been working on this for weeks.”
The final nail in Flynn's coffin is that according to a report in the NYT, the Army has been investigating whether Mr. Flynn received money from the Russian government during a trip he took to Moscow in 2015, according to two defense officials. Such a payment might violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits former military officers from receiving money from a foreign government without consent from Congress. The defense officials said there was no record that Mr. Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, filed the required paperwork for the trip.
If confirmed, and if Flynn indeed lied, Trump will have no choice but to let him go.
Don't let this report from Zero Hedge fool you. Despite what many of you think they generally play it straight. Additionally you can verify this information from several other news sources that are more to your liking quite easily.
What I want to point out to you are several names....Clapper...Yates....Brennan and finally unnamed sources in the Dept of the Army.
This thing smells!
I might be wrong but I get the whiff of a political hit job and I also sense that the Trump administration simply fell prey to opinion inside the beltway. They stood strong against the fury that's been unleashed upon them but for some reason they caved on Flynn.
Clapper? He hated Flynn's guts. Brennan? Same. Yates? An Obama Admin operative that had already attempted to derail the Trump Admin initiatives (remember her public statement not to defend the Executive Order.....this I believe is her cleansing so that she can position herself for bigger and better things including a return to SES later)! Oh and let's not forget the Dept of the Army. If you've never seen the Big Green go hunting for scalps then you haven't seen a real hunt! Step off the reservation, go against the club and don't worm your way back into their good graces (see Petraeus) and they'll curb stomp you in a heartbeat.
This was all political. Nasty political. The only thing left to wonder is whether they're satisfied with Flynn being dismissed or if they want to taint the Trump Admin. My guess is that they want to mire him in scandal. There really is nothing illegal here. But they will push. They will MAKE this a scandal and this is the push to make the Trump win illegitimate.
Who do you need to watch today? My guess would be McCain and Graham. If they come out full force then we know that the Neo-Cons smell blood. If they're joined by Democrats and we hear more leaks from the Intel Community then we know that it's damn near a soft coup.
Time will tell.
AND YES! I know this is a conspiracy theory from hell but this was too swift, too sudden and too complete to be just a confluence of events. This was planned and I don't think they're done yet.
UPDATE! Check out this article from the Daily Caller...
Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker told his reporters Monday the paper would not abandon objectivity in its coverage of President Donald Trump, and directed them to find work somewhere else if they want to adopt a more oppositional tone.
“It’s a little irritating when I read that we have been soft on Donald Trump,” he told his reporters and editors, a source at the newsroom meeting told The New York Times. Baker held the meeting ostensibly to have a casual conversation on the editorial direction of the paper, but it was held on the heels of reports the newsroom is in turmoil over the Trump coverage.
The Trump coverage is “neutral to the point of being absurd,” one source inside the newsroom recently told Politico. Criticism peaked when Baker sent a memo to staff instructing reporters and editors to tone down the use of “loaded” language in coverage of Trump’s immigration ban.
Baker strongly defended his paper’s coverage as objective in the meeting, going so far as to read from a list of past WSJ headlines compiled to refute the criticism. He suggested it is other outlets such as The New York Times that have abandoned fair reporting standards and objectivity — not The Wall Street Journal — and that those standards aren’t going anywhere.
Reporters who don’t like that, he said, might want to find work somewhere else.
Some journalists at other outlets have openly criticized the idea of treating Trump and his former Democrat opponent Hillary Clinton equally in the press. In an amazing justification of this kind of blatant bias, New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg described the thinking behind this new “norm” of objectivity.
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that,” he wrote. “You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.”
Do you get the force of connection here? Haven't you seen it with your own two eyes? The media is on a feeding frenzy with the Trump Admin and they're exploiting every misstep, every mistake...hell even late press conference....to shape a narrative to the public.
And that narrative is not good.
Take that under consideration when thinking about the news that you're hearing and how its being presented. Things that would have been swept under the rug during the Obama Admin are instead magnified to obscene levels now. Journalists are BEGGING to join the frenzy!
The fourth estate is no longer valid!
