A multifaceted “criminal conspiracy” to destroy former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was launched by persons across the national security state apparatus to prevent audits of intelligence agencies’ operations, said Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History, in a Friday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Rick Manning.

“General Flynn’s lawyer, Sydney Powell, has done a fantastic job of unearthing a whole bunch of new information which clarifies what we’ve known — what we’ve suspected — for quite a long time, that large parts of the intelligence community targeted General Flynn,” Smith stated.

Smith added, “Sydney Powell has brought forth a whole bunch of important information … about how they tinkered with the FBI’s interviews. They also ambushed General Flynn in the White House for an interview, and we know how that went down. It was James Comey who asked his deputy director Andy McCabe to send agents down there to go after General Flynn.”

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Smith remarked, “Keep in mind, this is a very, very large operation against General Flynn that started long before Donald Trump was elected, and this was the other terrific thing that Sydney Powell has done with her work.”

“Stefan Halper, who was identified by the Washington Post and the New York Times as the confidential human source who was sent to spy on the Trump campaign,” noted Smith. “Now, what Sydney Powell has found, is that he had a handler at the Pentagon. So we’re talking about the Department of Justice, we’re talking about the FBI, but we’re also talking about the Pentagon. We are talking about a number of different agencies involved in targeting General Flynn.”

FBI agents are often able to claim their interview subjects “lie,” noted Smith, given the FBI’s convention to rely on notes from interviewing agents as opposed to actual recordings of interviews.

“I’ve spoken to people about this [perjury trap],” shared Smith, “former FBI agents who have said [and] who have pointed out quite correctly that these people are experienced in doing interrogation. They can get basically anyone to catch themselves up and lie or make an error, say something wrong, and then, if the prosecutor wants to take someone down and hurt someone, they’ll do that.”

“They wanted to both knock [Michael Flynn] out of power, knock him out of the White House, and to bankrupt him, and these are things that they’ve done to him,” Smith said.

Flynn sought to combat waste and fraud across intelligence agencies as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor via audits, said Smith.

“When General Flynn was coming to the White House, [he] was talking about conducting an audit across the intelligence community,” Smith explained. “He recognized the amount of waste [and] the amount of money that had been misspent. He knew what people were doing. He knew that people were hiding these things in different black programs, and he was going to look and start to inspect budgets.”

Smith continued, “He was going to get the entire senior intelligence service to hand in their resignations. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean he was going to fire everyone. What it means, though, is he wanted everyone to prove what they were doing, that they were doing their jobs, they were doing good for the country, they weren’t wasting money, they weren’t wasting time, and they weren’t running operations like the one they ran against General Flynn.”

“The intelligence community, at that point — what has correctly and colorfully became known as the deep state — they rose nearly as one and they realized that General Flynn was an existential threat,” assessed Smith. “He was actually going to start looking at their budgets and start looking at what they did. They had to find a way to fight him.”

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.