by WorldTribune Staff, February 15, 2017

Intelligence agencies, national security honchos and former Obama administration officials used leaks to the major media to bring down a man, Michael Flynn, who had the audacity to blow the whistle on U.S. intel failures, analysts say.

Sen. Chuck Schumer last month warned the Trump administration what would happen if it dared take on the CIA. The New York Democrat said that President Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer said on MSNBC.

“First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican, told columnist Eli Lake.

“Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer – Trump is the entree,” Lake wrote for Bloomberg on Feb. 14.

Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said “there does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said.

“From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”

“It’s possible that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues,” Lake wrote. “It’s also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government.”

Flynn, Lake wrote, “was also a fat target for Democrats. Remember Flynn’s breakout national moment last summer was when he joined the crowd at the Republican National Convention from the dais calling for Hillary Clinton to be jailed?”

Thomas Lifson, writing for American Thinker on Feb. 14, said: “Make no mistake: we have just witnessed an operation by members of the CIA to take out a high official of our own government. An agency widely believed to have brought down democratically elected governments overseas is now practicing the same dark arts in domestic American politics. Almost certainly, its new head, Mike Pompeo, was not consulted.”

The law was broken “by whoever leaked the transcripts to the media,” Lifson wrote. “Not only is the crime underlying the ‘scandal’ being ignored, but the criminals are being hailed. On Morning Joe’s first hour today, the host, a former congressman (i.e., a lawmaker) himself, called the leakers ‘heroes.’ ”

“This interference in domestic politics by the CIA should be regarded as a major threat to our democracy, but of course our Trump-hating domestic media are reveling in a major point scored against the new president.”

David P. Goldman, writing for PJ Media, explained the level of hatred the CIA has for Flynn for “daring to take on its spectacular failures”:

“… the CIA has gone out of its way to sandbag Flynn at the National Security Council. Flynn is the one senior U.S. intelligence officer with the guts to blow the whistle on a series of catastrophic intelligence and operational failures. The available facts point to the conclusion that elements of the humiliated (and perhaps soon-to-be-unemployed) intelligence community is trying to exact vengeance against a principled and patriotic officer[.] … The present affair stinks like a dumpster full of dead rats.”