Then-national security adviser to President Donald Trump, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, arrives to a swearing in ceremony of White House senior staff in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Jan. 22, 2017. (Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images)

Flynn Was Working in Conjunction With DIA During Controversial Russia Trip

More than a year after Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz ripped the lid off the growing Spygate scandal in December 2017, The Hill’s John Solomon continues to be one of the only reporters digging into it and finding new revelations.

While mainstream media outlets such as McClatchy spent the last week desperately trying to rehabilitate both Christopher Steele and his bogus Trump dossier, Solomon scooped them all again by finding a source that verified to him that Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was actually working in coordination with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) when he took a trip to Russia in December 2015.

In a column that I wrote the day after Flynn’s Dec. 17, 2018, sentencing hearing, I discussed that on Aug. 25, 2017, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a letter to both Secretary of Defense Gen. Jim Mattis and DIA Director Lt. Gen. Vince Stewart.

In that letter, Grassley talked about a classified briefing his committee had received from DIA personnel on May 25, 2017, where he and the other members learned something so startling that he was writing them to request that some of the information be declassified, out of what Grassley said was “fairness to Flynn.” For reasons yet unknown, Grassley’s request was denied.

Now, Solomon’s source appears to have revealed the contents of at least some of that DIA briefing that the Senate Judiciary Committee received in May 2017. Solomon writes:

“Were the information Grassley requested made public, America would have learned this, according to my sources:

“Before Flynn made his infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow—as a retired general and then-adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—he alerted his former employer, the DIA.

“He then attended a ‘defensive’ or ‘protective’ briefing before he ever sat alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Russia Today (RT) dinner, or before he talked with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

“The briefing educated and sensitized Flynn to possible efforts by his Russian host to compromise the former high-ranking defense official and prepared him for conversations in which he could potentially extract intelligence for U.S. agencies, such as the DIA.

“When Flynn returned from Moscow, he spent time briefing intelligence officials on what he learned during the Moscow contacts. Between two and nine intelligence officials attended the various meetings with Flynn about the RT event, and the information was moderately useful, about what one would expect from a public event, according to my sources.”

For more than three years, the narrative that the mainstream media has promoted about Flynn is that of a disgruntled former military intelligence official angry, about being fired by Obama, who decided to abandon his principles by selling his expertise to the highest bidders. This became a key piece of the narrative that members of the Trump campaign had inappropriate ties with Russia.

Consider this Politico piece from 2017, titled “Pentagon: No Record of Flynn’s 2015 Russia Trip,” in which it sure looks like Flynn just surprised everybody by suddenly showing up in Russia right at Putin’s elbow without any warning whatsoever.

Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were understandably alarmed that it seemed Flynn just showed up in Moscow, without giving anyone advance notice he was going to be there.

We now know that the DIA was at the very least was very well-informed of the fact that Flynn was headed to Russia and who he’d be meeting with. That would mean what Flynn was doing was no secret to at least one of the agencies inside the U.S. intelligence community.

This leads to the next question: What else was Flynn doing that we don’t know about yet that might drastically change the popular media narrative about him?

Consider another angle to all of this: The Senate Judiciary Committee has known about this exculpatory evidence that favors Flynn since May 2017, and the panel has been forced to sit on that because the information is currently still classified.

It’s very telling that this information didn’t leak in a year and a half.

One side in the information war surrounding the Spygate scandal leaks constantly and the other side doesn’t. The side that’s constantly leaking is the one that knows the mainstream news media is its ally in this information war. That’s why we’ve seen the Spygate plotters repeatedly engage in strategic leaking strategies, using their media fellow travelers.

I guarantee you, the other side in the information war on Spygate doesn’t view what Andrew Breitbart often called “The DNC Media Complex” as any kind of ally in this fight. Far from it. Those media outlets are viewed as the enemy, working in concert with the Spygate plotters. There is no way the good guys in this fight would leak anything to them. You don’t leak to people who have spent three years tirelessly working to advance the causes and the political narratives of the people with whom you are locked in informational combat.

This is why one side in the Spygate scandal keeps feeding leaks—which are quite often false and deliberately misleading—to the mainstream press in order to attack certain people and drive certain political narratives, while the other side remains steadfastly and resolutely silent about who they are investigating and the status of those investigations.

In fact, some of the leaks by the Spygate plotters and their enablers in recent months seem to be geared to get the guys on the other side to tip their hands and show their cards early. Thus far, the people I refer to as The Silent Professionals have rejected all such desperate gambits.

Whether inside the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the DIA, or Congress itself, these people pursuing the real investigations don’t leak. Although the popular perception is that the side doing all the strategic leaking and making targeted attacks through their mainstream media sycophants is winning this fight, that’s not actually the case.

Despite their best efforts to hold onto power, all the major players in the Spygate plot have been forced out. Despite all their frantic efforts, the entire plot was exposed to public scrutiny.

The strategy of the Silent Professionals appears to me to have always had three phases to it:

1. Removal from power

2. Exposure of the plot

3. Prosecution of crimes

It isn’t the side actually winning this fight that is doing all the leaking, in attempts to stave off what’s coming. Phase Three begins this year.

Brian Cates is a political pundit and writer based in southern Texas and the author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.