Obama Official Ben Rhodes Admits Biden Camp is Already Working With
Foreign Leaders: Exactly What Flynn Did
In late 2016, the FBI investigated Gen. Michael Flynn when he was a
transition official for the possible "crime" of talking to Russia about
foreign policy. Why can Biden do this?
Glenn Greenwald
Nov 10
White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice, shakes hands with incoming
White House National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn, on January 10,
2017, in Washington, DC (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
________________________________________
Two weeks after Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the President-elect
named Gen. Michael Flynn to be his National Security Advisor in both the
transition and the new administration. Flynn, who had previously served as
President Obama's Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and then
campaigned for Trump, quickly got to work in his new position by reaching
out to his counterparts in foreign governments, as is customary for national
security transition team officials.
One of the calls Flynn made, in late December, was to Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak, after the Obama administration has imposed a series of
sanctions on Moscow in response to pressure to punish the Russians for
interference in the 2016 election, including the expulsion of diplomats.
Gen. Flynn - fearful of an excessively retaliatory response from Moscow that
could provoke what he saw as unnecessary confrontation, particularly given
the growing anti-Russian sentiment in the U.S. - sought to persuade the
Russians that there was no need for them to retaliate because the new
administration, which was only three weeks away from taking over, would
reset its relations with Moscow and try to forge a more constructive
engagement. Flynn's efforts were successful: Russian president Vladimir
Putin announced on December 30 that they would not expel diplomats in
response.
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It is customary for post-election transition officials to work with their
counterparts in foreign governments to lay the groundwork for relations with
the new administration. As The Washington Post said about Flynn's call: "it
would not be uncommon for incoming administrations to interface with foreign
governments with whom they will soon have to work."
Despite its normalcy, Flynn's call, which was recorded by the National
Security Agency that had been targeting Russian officials, prompted the FBI
- under the leadership of then-Director James Comey and Deputy Director
Andrew McCabe - to decide to criminally investigate Flynn's conversations
with Kislyak.
Although the mid-2016 FBI investigation into Flynn's possible corrupt
connections to Moscow had been ordered closed for lack of evidence, the FBI
manufactured a possible ground of criminality to justify its investigation
of Flynn for this call: namely, possible violations of the Logan Act, a
150-year-old law that purports to criminalize attempts by a private citizen
to conduct foreign policy at odds with official U.S. foreign policy which
(a) has never been used to prosecute anyone; (b) is almost certainly
unconstitutional; and (c) has been ignored - properly so - in countless more
blatant cases, such as when then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi
undermined Bush administration policy to isolate Syrian leader Bashar
al-Assad for helping Iraqi insurgents kill U.S. troops in Iraq by visiting
Assad in 2007, infuriating the Bush White House and leading to frivolous
calls from fringe right-wing voices for Pelosi's prosecution under the Logan
Act.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (R) meets with US House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi at al-Shaab Palace in Damascus, 04 April 2007 during her two-day trip
to Damascus that has infuriated the White House. (Photo credit should read
LOUAI BESHARA/AFP via Getty Image)
But Flynn's ordinary call with the Russian ambassador became the pretext for
further abuse of FBI and NSA powers as part of the security state's ongoing
efforts to interfere in the 2016 election and then sabotage the Trump
administration before it even began. One way this corrupt agenda was carried
out was by attempting to criminalize officials of the Trump campaign and
then the new government with blatantly political motives.
First, agents within the security state committed the most serious leaking
crimes that exist under U.S. law - revealing the contents of intercepted
communications with foreign officials - by leaking the contents of Flynn's
calls to The Washington Post's long-time CIA spokesman David Ignatius, which
Ignatius reported on January 12. Two weeks later, on January 24, McCabe -
acting on Comey's orders but without notifying the White House Counsel,
angering outgoing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates - called Flynn and
told him that FBI agents would visit him to interrogate him about this call.
Documents finally made public earlier this year show that the FBI agents who
visited Flynn did not believe he was lying to them, and that they openly
discussed their intent to entrap Flynn into lying so that they could concoct
a crime. Although Flynn said he could not remember having spoken to Kislyak
about sanctions, the FBI agents, as well as FBI Director Comey himself, said
that they believed this was the by-product of honest lack of recollection,
not an intent to deceive. After all, what motive would Flynn have for
concealing a perfectly normal, customary and legal call as a transition
official with this Russian counterpart other than, perhaps, a desire to
avoid triggering what had became the insanely intense anti-Russian political
obsession in the Democratic-friendly press?
Despite doubts by the FBI itself that Flynn had lied when saying he did not
recall talking with Kislyak about sanctions, the Mueller team negotiated a
deal with Flynn in which he would plead guilty to one count of lying to the
FBI about his call with Kislyak. Mueller recommended no jail time for Flynn.
Like so many guilty pleas that prosecutors coerce, it seems that Flynn pled
guilty in large part due to threats by the Mueller team to prosecute his son
if he refused.
One irony of the Flynn prosecution was that - while authoritarian liberals
now insist that of course lying to the FBI is and should be a crime without
any other underlying crime required - it has long been a steadfast view in
liberal jurisprudence that it should not be a crime to lie to the FBI at all
absent some underlying crime, so as to prevent the FBI from having the power
to convert people into criminals through interrogations.
The seminal opinion on that was written by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who now
resides in heaven. Writing in dissent in the the 1997 case Brogan v. The
United States, Justice Ginsburg insisted that federal law does not
criminalize a false denial of a crime to the FBI - because people have the
right to try to exculpate themselves rather than the duty to confess crimes
to agents of the state. The then-Justice Ginsburg, now a heavenly angel,
also warned of "the dubious propriety of bringing felony prosecutions for
bare exculpatory denials informally made to Government agents" (two other
liberal justices, Stevens and Breyer, wrote separately to warn of the
dangers that "an overzealous prosecutor or investigator - aware that a
person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal
case - will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those
acts, and receiving a false denial."
Once the new documents were released earlier this year showing that even FBI
agents had doubts that Flynn was lying and that the interrogation seemed
designed to entrap him, the DOJ moved to dismiss the criminal case,
infuriating law-and-order liberals who are morally outraged that a citizen
would fail to obediently confess non-existent crimes to the FBI. As a result
of the release of those new documents, I produced a 90-minute video program
exploring all the reasons why the Flynn prosecution is such a profound abuse
of power and sham.
One of the primary arguments I made there was that there should never have
been an FBI interrogation of Flynn about his completely proper call with the
Russian ambassador in the first place:
There was no valid reason for the FBI to have interrogated Flynn about his
conversations with Kislyak in the first place. There is nothing remotely
untoward or unusual - let alone criminal - about an incoming senior national
security official, three weeks away from taking over, reaching out to a
counterpart in a foreign government to try to tamp down tensions.
That was always the most shocking part of this abusive prosecution by a
radically politicized FBI: the blatantly improper attempt to convert a
normal conversation by a transition official into a form of treason.
Any doubts about how customary it is for such calls to be made by transition
officials were unintentionally obliterated on Monday night by former Obama
national security official Ben Rhodes, who is almost certain to occupy a
high-level national security position in a Biden administration. Speaking on
MSNBC - of course - Rhodes, while amicably chatting with former Bush/Cheney
Communications Director turned-beloved-liberal-MSNBC-host Nicolle Wallace,
admitted in passing that "foreign leaders are already having phone calls
with Joe Biden talking about the agenda they're going to pursue January 20,"
all to ensure "as seamless transition as possible," adding: "the center of
political gravity in this country and the world is shifting to Joe Biden."
Tom Elliott @tomselliott
.@brhodes: Biden is already "having phone calls" with foreign leaders about
"the agenda they're going to pursue January 20th"
November 9th 2020
1,971 Retweets3,668 Likes
That Joe Biden - despite Donald Trump still being the President - is
"already having phone calls" to "talk about the agenda they're going to
pursue January 20" is completely normal: something we should want a
President-elect and his transition team to do. That's what made the FBI's
attempt to convert Gen. Flynn's identical transition activities in 2016 into
a crime so corrupt: just one more instance of the abuse of power that
plagued the security state throughout the 2016 election and into the new
administration.
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