Booman has a post up this morning about the Flynn situation.
Flynn is Gone, But the President is Still There
After a very well thought-out précis of what has happened so far, Booman basically concludes that:
… the problem isn’t and never was Flynn. The problem is the president.
As far as it goes, this is a fine idea.
But…it doesn’t go far enough.
Read on for more:
We now have a fourth branch of our supposedly constitutionally dictated, tripartite government. The executive, legislative and judicial branches have been joined…and thoroughly infiltrated as well…by a fourth branch.
Intelligence.
So has the media. Bet on it.
This has been true at least since the JFK assassination and ensuing coverup.
When the intelligence services…with the CIA as their dominant player, bet on that as well…decide that a president is unacceptable, they get rid of him. One way or another, he or she is gone. Ditto potential presidents. This is perfectly obvious now in the cases of JFK, RFK and Nixon, and it is happening today with Trump. Making believe that this is not so on plentiful historical evidence is either stupid, collusive or both.
It appears to me that the possession of even this one set of communications between Flynn and Sergei Kislyak…and God only knows how thoroughly the spooks have been watching this thing build…was enough to tumble Trump’s applecart right back into the sewer from which he has emerged. Before he was inaugurated, and quite likely before he was even elected.
But they didn’t act.
The question is…why?
Here’s my take on it:
They didn’t want either Trump or Clinton to be president. Clinton would have been too expert in using the wheels and levers of DC power to be effectively controllable, and Trump is a loaded, defective loose cannon.
Hmmmm…
What to do, what to do…???
Here is the apparent, emerging solution:
Get a vow of obedience from Trump’s vice-president and then mousetrap Trump after he was elected. Impeach him and sail along happily into the Pence presidency.
Watch.
Will it work?
I dunno.
Does Flynn value his own ass enough to turn state’s evidence on Trump?
Is there surveillance evidence available that will mean that Flynn has no say in the matter? Stuff that will…equally mysteriously…magically appear at just the right moment to pin him?
Watch.
Stay tuned.
Remember…Pence would look great on U.S. currency.
He looks like a bust of himself already.
The “hero” arises out of the manure pile.
Who’da thunk it, Myrtle!!!???
Precisely.
Who’da thunk it.
Me, for one.
Watch.
AG
P.S. From Politico (Yesterday. Quel coïncidence!!!), as thoroughly intelligence-infilitrated a rag as exists in this country as far as I am concerned:
Pence molds the government in his own image
Pence and his team bring an entirely different ethos and set of values to the administration.
Donald Trump never exactly fit the conservative mold — a fact that has unnerved the GOP’s true believers.
But as the Trump administration takes shape, Vice President Mike Pence has used his position atop the transition team and in the White House to install conservative allies throughout several agencies and at almost every level of government, giving the government a more orthodox cast.
“I think this whole administration is replete with social conservatives,” said Peggy Nance, CEO of Concerned Women for America, a Christian activist group, who was at the White House with other activists last week celebrating Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
Pence and his team bring an entirely different ethos and set of values to the administration. The vice president’s emphasis on limited government and his conservative social views are distinct from the America First-style populism of Trump or top advisers like Steve Bannon, creating a divide that could influence policymaking on health care, education and social issues.
Members of Pence’s tight-knit inner circle, such as longtime aide Josh Pitcock, now Pence’s chief of staff, hold key positions both in Pence’s office and across the Trump administration. Ex-Hill aide Marc Short is the White House’s liaison to Congress, and Pence political advisers Nick Ayers and Marty Obst are helping to run Trump’s new nonprofit political arm, which was created to boost the president’s agenda, and brought on Pence’s nephew, John Pence, as deputy executive director.
“Vice Present Pence surrounds himself with true conservatives,” said a former staffer from his days leading the GOP House Conference. “He did when he was on the Hill, and again in Indiana. That some of them are now in the administration bolsters the case that conservative principles will significantly undergird the president’s agenda to change Washington.”
Former employees interviewed by POLITICO describe Pence as a manager who values humility, self-discipline and employees who follow marching orders. Pence’s top aides tend to be deeply conservative and, like the vice president, evangelical Christians. Short and Ayers are devout church-goers. Pence also encourages staff to balance work with a focus on family, which stems from his deep faith.
—snip—
Howzat for an enconomium!!!
I especially like the “Vice Present Pence” typo. If that’s what it is, of course. A typo. The whole thing seems almost like a rewriting of something that would have been written in present tense during a Pence presidency future. Spooky.
Caesar is (
almost) dead!!!Hail the new Caesar!!!
Watch.
Update [2017-2-14 13:35:13 by Arthur Gilroy]: P.P.S. From Booman’s own employer, The Washington Monthly
Following Flynn’s Resignation, Questions Remain
by Nancy LeTourneauJust prior to Michael Flynn’s resignation last night, the Washington Post published this report.
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, current and former U.S. officials said.
The message, delivered by Sally Q. Yates and a senior career national security official to the White House counsel, 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, the officials said. It is unclear what the White House counsel, Donald McGahn, did with the information.Beyond the salacious idea that the National Security Advisor risked being blackmailed by Russia, what this tells us is that the White House has known Flynn was lying for at least 2-3 weeks. But then there is this tidbit from the report.
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.”
All of the sudden yesterday, in the swirl of this becoming public knowledge, the focus of the story became that Flynn had lied to Vice President Pence and the two connected for him to apologize. That makes no sense. If the White House has known that he lied for over 2 weeks, why did they wait until yesterday to tell Pence he’d been set up?
It is also true that intelligence sources signaled to Flynn and the White House via David Ignatius on January 12th that they had recordings of his conversations with the Russian Ambassador, prompting Flynn to supposedly lie to Pence. Are we to believe that everyone in the administration simply ignored that signal and waited until the contents were revealed last Thursday?
One way to explain why no one in the White House acted on this information prior to yesterday is that it is yet another example of their incompetence…the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing. Far be it from me to claim otherwise.
But short of an amazing level of incompetence are some troubling questions this raises. The most significant being the the one raised years ago by Howard Baker: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” In other words, was Flynn relaying information the president wanted to communicate to Vladimir Putin about his intent to get rid of the sanctions Obama had imposed for Russian interference in the election?
—snip—
The one thing we’re learning from these recent leaks is that the intelligence community has remained on this case even after the inauguration placed the target of them in the White House. I suspect that Flynn’s resignation isn’t the end of this story.
And the setup continues.
Watch.
This one’s gonna move.
Fast.
Watch.