The weaponization of the FBI/DOJ before and immediately after Donald Trump’s election is becoming less and less deniable. Some will continue to claim that it was all normal, just due diligence, etc. but as the facts continue to trickle out, we see what looks much more like a conspiracy.

Now we have fresh details on the effort to ruin Michael Flynn, which was led by none other than Andrew McCabe and Sally Yates. Those names appear consistently in these stories for a reason. Yates, you may recall, famously resigned in a huff after refusing to enforce a clearly legal diktat from the President. She was given a hero’s welcome by the media despite the fact that she was simply being insubordinate.

Hoover Institute Fellow and former journalist for the Investor’s Business Daily, Paul Sperry, has some details on exactly what led to Michael Flynn being fired.

BREAKING: McCabe personally saw to it that Gen. Flynn was fired: After Yate's pressuring of WH lawyer McGahn on Jan. 30, 2017, didnt accomplish their goal, McCabe sat VP Pence down in Situation Room on Feb. 10 & had him read his 302s on Flynn. The NSC chief was fired 3 days later — Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) April 9, 2019

What’s new here are the dates and details about how this went down. We see that Yates first pushed for his ouster as early as Jan. 30th, 2017. That was followed by McCabe setting up a meeting with Pence, pushing him with 302s of Flynn’s conversation with Russian Amb. Sergey Kislyak (which we now know were conveniently re-written months later). It was only then that Pence was convinced to push for Flynn’s firing.

In other words, before Pence was aware of anything about Flynn or Flynn lying, FBI/DOJ officials were already orchestrating his ouster behind the scenes. One of the common retorts you heard in the early days of all this from FBI/DOJ apologists was that because Mike Pence fired Flynn, there was clearly “deep state” involvement in the leaking of the phone call and his subsequent firing. This was a gross simplification of the chain of events.

What we know is that Barack Obama hated Michael Flynn and did not want him in the Trump administration. He even told Trump that personally. What we also know is that McCabe had an ax to grind and seems to have carried that over into his targeting of Flynn, from how he mislead Flynn about the original interview, to how he then weaponized the results to get him fired. Two years ago, a lot of this was nebulous. Today, it looks pretty distinctly like a pre-planned setup.

So, what exactly was that ax McCabe had to grind? It was actually covered by my Redstate colleague streiff all the way back in June of 2017. The details revolve around Robyn Gritz, who worked counterterrorism for the FBI.

John Solomon and Sara Carter writing at Circa.com have an interesting theory on the demise of Mike Flynn. As they see it, based on documents they have reviewed, Mike Flynn was brought down as payback and the payback was orchestrated by no other than the current acting director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe.

Gritz was a rising star who had done exemplary work for over a decade. That all changed the day she was transferred to work under McCabe. She received her first negative performance review of her career. As a result, she sought to file an EEOC complaint. McCabe admitted in testimony that he got wind of that and ordered an investigation into her as a result (specific quotes are at streiff’s link). This happened before she even filed the complaint, smelling of clear retaliation and an attempt to intimidate her.

Fast forward two years to all this being litigated and Flynn enters the picture.

As the action went into legal channels, Flynn wrote a letter supporting Gritz on DIA stationery. The FBI went to court to try to have Flynn’s letter removed from the personnel action file. And McCabe not only did not forget that Flynn had helped someone he was hellbent of firing, he made no secret of his dislike for Flynn.

It was then that the friction between McCabe and Flynn started. McCabe saw Flynn as undermining him. Flynn would also later become persona non grata in the Obama administration.

And then Flynn’s downfall began with a leaked story about his private conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Krislyak and his failure to tell Mike Pence the truth in the matter. We can guess that the FBI was the source of the leak because we know that the FBI reported it to the martyred Sally Yates.

As I reported yesterday, it appears that DNI James Clapper did the actual leaking. But McCabe started the chain of custody that got the information to Clapper to leak. There were no innocents in that equation.

Pulling all of this together, McCabe seemingly sought to go after Flynn the moment he joined the transition team. He knew that nothing said between Flynn and Kislyak was improper or illegal. Yet, he set up an interview anyway under the guise of just a friendly conversation. He advised Flynn to not have a lawyer present and then proceeded to elicit a supposed lie that he’d later be charged by Robert Mueller over. I say supposed because the original 302s were re-written and dated seven months later to August 2017. Why? We still haven’t received a real answer to that.

It’s after that interview that Yates enters the picture, joining forces to push Flynn out of the Trump administration. She goes to McGahn and pressures him to see to it that Flynn is fired. When that doesn’t work, McCabe takes the now mystery 302s and briefs Pence in such a way as to convince him to make the move. Yates would go on to testify against Flynn and bash him publicly after her DOJ departure. To this day, she’s still operating as a political partisan in the media.

To think this was all just good police work or coincidence is laughable. McCabe’s former beef with Flynn provides the clearest motivation for his actions. Yates being a fixture of an Obama administration that hated Flynn also gave her reason to go along with McCabe’s actions. The way in which they entrapped Flynn and then immediately used the evidence against him, not waiting for any further investigation, is too obvious of a ploy.

What was happening in the DOJ/FBI under Obama is the most under-reported scandal in the last fifty years. You had illegal leaks, targeting Trump officials, FISA applications based on bogus sourcing, Trump officials improperly unmasked and their identities revealed, and of course the myriad of orchestrations like described in this article that sought to entrap people. There is an ongoing IG investigation into all this but it’s been dead quiet. We’ll have to wait and see how that turns out. AG Barr, if he’s reputable at all, should be looking into all this and seeking to expose it. Only then can the DOJ/FBI begin to rebuild their tattered reputation.

————————————————-

Enjoying the read? Please visit my archive and check out some of my latest articles. I’ve got a new twitter! Please help by following @bonchieredstate.