Much is being said about Trump’s NSA head, Mike Flynn, and the recent past, the politics within the WH, and now, some of what might be going on. A bit of it is from this; If I am channel surfing and pass by Fox News, I’ll click back if Dr. Sebastian Gorka is on – I like what he says and how it says it. One also has to respect his background as well. He had this to say (reformatted, emphasis mine for all the snippets, and with some other links, this post could go on for a bit and STILL not capture all of this issue but a basic taste, sure):
“I can’t comment on what was said, or what wasn’t said, on those telephone calls even though the good general himself says that he can’t remember all the details,” Gorka said. “All I can tell you is my personal experience. I spent several months working very closely with General Flynn and the transition team, in his National Security Council transition team. He’s a man you would trust with your life. He’s a great patriot, man of honor, worn the cloth of the Republic.
“The bottom line is, he shook things up in the DIA, and there are a lot of people who want to take revenge on him. Names I’m not going to list across the airwaves right now, but people who do a little bit of research can work out. The Establishment doesn’t like General Flynn, and for me, that’s a good thing,” he told SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
Marlow proposed that Flynn was but the latest target of the Left’s “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” strategy, as defined by Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals.
And he comes out with a list of who the Left, the Obama sycophants and embeds, and the denizens of the Deep State that believe THEY are the Government no matter who is in elected office – and there’s a catch:
“You’re absolutely correct,” Gorka said. “Whether it’s Steve Bannon, whether it’s Stephen Miller, whether it was Monica Crowley, or whether it’s General Flynn now. Important point for the listeners, and this is what has to be grasped: it’s never about the issues. It’s not about Russia, it’s not about the safety of Americans, it’s not about preventing attacks like Paris or Nice happening in America. It’s the triangulation. We have to isolate and take down the individuals, separate them from their community, pillory them, and then just make their position untenable. It’s classic Alinsky, and I’m sorry, they’re just picking on the wrong guy, because this guy is as hard as nails.”
In the end, however, we all know what happened in that Flynn resigned last night. Another reporter says pretty much the same thing (H/T: Powerline):
Lake quotes Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, as follows: “”First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus.” “Put another way,” Lake adds (melodramatically?), “Flynn is only the appetizer; Trump is the entree.”
J. Christian Adams goes a bit deeper:
…Instead, today, a subversive alt-government is emerging, in line with the alt-left’s growing resistance to use any means necessary to slow, stop and obstruct Trump’s agenda, from inside the government, to make America ungovernable.
Christian Adams, a lawyer and the author of “Injustice,” has witnessed ideological battles inside the Department of Justice. In this exclusive video interview, he condemns the intolerant left wing, with its violence, fire, riots and “totalitarian tendencies,” daring to label others as fascists or nazis. He says it’s a tactic used to scare and conjure up horrors against their enemies. Adams says that use of such labels, is an Orwellian corruption of the language, showing how far the left has sunk in its hatred of America. The “civil service has been radicalized and is an instrument of the institutional left,” he says, mentioning immigration, open borders, green energy, labor policy for unions and more. He says, with the power and protections of civil service employment, these bureaucrats are poised to impose their own ideological will through the administrative state, despite Trump’s victory at the ballot box.
As for the ideologically-hostile bureaucrats left in place from the Obama administration, Adams says “there are not enough Donald Trumps in the administration.”
Dennis Prager has more:
For context, radio host and author Dennis Prager has deemed what is happening against our new president as a new American civil war. These alt-government tactics, joined with escalating anti-Trump street protests, boycotts, orchestrated congressional obstructionism and slow downs by Democrats surpasses protests of yesteryears. Previous resistance efforts were designed to irritate and draw attention to a cause. Yet, since election day, the array of third-world revolutionary tactics unfolding throughout the culture, Congress, the media, along with the mass manipulation and name calling is designed to overturn the voters’ choice, and punish and destroy the opposition.
Faceless bureaucrats are maliciously leaking confidential information against President Trump already. Classes are forming to train federal workers on acts of civil disobedience.
And in a piece called “The Empire Strikes Back” (e.g., the Deep State), Michael Walsh is also sounding the alarm:
With the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in the face of a howling media mob, the knives are now out not only for other administration officials, but for President Trump himself. Make no mistake about what’s happening here: this is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department (Sally Yates, take a bow) and the lickspittles of the leftist media, all of whom have signed on with the “Resistance” in order to overturn the results of the November election.
Mike Flynn, a good man who saw the enemy clearly, and had the courage to name it, saw Russia not as an enemy but a geopolitical adversary with whom we could make common cause against Islam — and who also vowed to shake up a complacent and malfeasant IC — was its first scalp, and an object lesson to new CIA Director Mike Pompeo should he have any reformist notions. As for the media, having previously failed to take down Trump aides Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Flynn was the next best thing; their joy today is unbounded.
Is this what you thought you voted for in November? Is this how you thought American democracy worked? Is this the country you want to live in?
Welcome to the Deep State, the democracy-sapping embeds at the heart of our democracy who have not taken the expulsion of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party lightly. They realize that the Trump administration poses a mortal threat to their hegemony, and so have enlisted an army of Democrats, some Republicans, the “neverTrumpumpkin” conservative die-hards, leftist thugs, Black Lives Matter and anybody else they can blackmail, browbeat or enlist. They mean business.
These are not your Joe Schmo type bloggers – they are connected, some with experience in those fields themselves and they know the layout of the land. They bring out what I have been seeing others say and I’ve been talking about the Administrative State and the bureaucrats that staff it for a very long time. There have been a lot of other posts alluding that the Deep State, fearing for its supremacy (for elected officials come and go but the Party of Big Government is always there).
And we start to get to the heart of the manner of why Flynn was targeted and held up as an example – the Iran nuclear deal and it was well known that Flynn wanted to have that deal publicly exposed knowing that the deal with Iran was horrible:
Report: Former Obama officials leaked to take down Flynn because he wanted to expose the Iran deal
…I’m not even sure it qualifies as a “secret” that Obama appointees were trying to take down Flynn. Last night’s WaPo bombshell about the DOJ warning Trump in January about what Flynn said to the Russian ambassador is littered with Obama administration names in the key details. It was Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General who ended up being fired when she wouldn’t enforce Trump’s travel ban, who took the information about the call to the White House. It was James Clapper and John Brennan who reportedly decided that Flynn’s sanctions talk with the ambassador — which was by all accounts ambiguous — was so grave that Trump needed to know, for fear of potential Russian blackmail. It also stands to reason that Obama guys down the chain would be the bureaucrats most invested in protecting the foreign policy status quo of the last eight years from the one guy in the new intelligence hierarchy who most threatened that status quo. Eli Lake called it a “political assassination” in a column earlier today insofar as Flynn’s destruction serves notice to the rest of the administration that they’d best not get too far on the wrong side of the current natsec establishment. And that establishment includes a lot of Obama fans.
But the article that is getting all the buzz is from the Washington Free Beacon:
Former Obama Officials, Loyalists Waged Secret Campaign to Oust Flynn
Sources: Former Obama officials, loyalists planted series of stories to discredit Flynn, bolster Iran dealThe abrupt resignation Monday evening of White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.
I’m betting that with all those Obama buttlickers in the MSM, it really wan’t about doing a lot of “planting” (which would take a lot of tedious effort), it was more like Wikileaks showed us during the campaign – reporters slobbering all over themselves just willing to help!
The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility, multiple sources revealed. The operation primarily focused on discrediting Flynn, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, in order to handicap the Trump administration’s efforts to disclose secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration.
Insiders familiar with the anti-Flynn campaign told the Free Beacon that these Obama loyalists plotted in the months before Trump’s inauguration to establish a set of roadblocks before Trump’s national security team, which includes several prominent opponents of diplomacy with Iran. The Free Beacon first reported on this effort in January.
Sources who spoke to the Free Beacon requested anonymity in order to speak freely about the situation and avoid interfering with the White House’s official narrative about Flynn, which centers on his failure to adequately inform the president about a series of phone calls with Russian officials. Flynn took credit for his missteps regarding these phone calls in a brief statement released late Monday evening. Trump administration officials subsequently stated that Flynn’s efforts to mislead the president and vice president about his contacts with Russia could not be tolerated.
However, multiple sources closely involved in the situation pointed to a larger, more secretive campaign aimed at discrediting Flynn and undermining the Trump White House.
“It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him,” said one veteran national security adviser with close ties to the White House team. “This pattern reminds me of the lead up to the Iran deal, and probably features the same cast of characters.”
The Free Beacon first reported in January that, until its final days in office, the Obama administration hosted several pro-Iran voices who were critical in helping to mislead the American public about the terms of the nuclear agreement. This included a former Iranian government official and the head of the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, which has been accused of serving as Iran’s mouthpiece in Washington, D.C.
Since then, top members of the Obama administration’s national security team have launched a communications infrastructure after they left the White House, and have told reporters they are using that infrastructure to undermine Trump’s foreign policy.
“It’s actually Ben Rhodes, NIAC, and the Iranian mullahs who are celebrating today,” said one veteran foreign policy insider who is close to Flynn and the White House. “They know that the number one target is Iran … [and] they all knew their little sacred agreement with Iran was going to go off the books. So they got rid of Flynn before any of the [secret] agreements even surfaced.” Flynn had been preparing to publicize many of the details about the nuclear deal that had been intentionally hidden by the Obama administration as part of its effort to garner support for the deal, these sources said.
Flynn is now “gone before anybody can see what happened” with these secret agreements, said the second insider close to Flynn and the White House. Sources in and out of the White House are concerned that the campaign against Flynn will be extended to other prominent figures in the Trump administration.
One senior White House official told the Free Beacon that leaks targeting the former official were “not the result of a series of random events.”
“The drumbeat of leaks of sensitive material related to General Flynn has been building since he was named to his position,” said the official, who is a member of the White House’s National Security Council. “Last night was not the result of a series of random events. The president has lost a valuable adviser and we need to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again.” Other sources expressed concern that public trust in the intelligence community would be eroded by the actions of employees with anti-Trump agendas.
“The larger issue that should trouble the American people is the far-reaching power of unknown, unelected apparatchiks in the Intelligence Community deciding for themselves both who serves in government and what is an acceptable policy they will allow the elected representatives of the people to pursue,” said the national security adviser quoted above.
A bureaucrat Civil War? Sedition from within the inner bowels?
“Put aside the issue of Flynn himself; that nameless, faceless bureaucrats were able to take out a president’s national security adviser based on a campaign of innuendo without evidence should worry every American,” the source explained.
Eli Lake, a Bloomberg View columnist and veteran national security reporter well sourced in the White House, told the Free Beacon that Flynn earned a reputation in the Obama administration as one of its top detractors. “Michael Flynn was one of the Obama administration’s fiercest critics after he was forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency,” said Lake, who described “the political assassination of Michael Flynn” in his column published early Tuesday.
“[Flynn] was a withering critic of Obama’s biggest foreign policy initiative, the Iran deal,” Lake said. “He also publicly accused the administration of keeping classified documents found in the Osama bin Laden raid that showed Iran’s close relationship with al Qaeda. He was a thorn in their side.” Lake noted in his column that he does not buy fully the White House’s official spin on Flynn’s resignation.
“For a White House that has such a casual and opportunistic relationship with the truth, it’s strange that Flynn’s ‘lie’ to Pence would get him fired,” Lake wrote. “It doesn’t add up.” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer stated in his daily briefing that “the evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable incidents is what led the president to ask General Flynn for his resignation.”
A third source who serves as a congressional adviser and was involved in the 2015 fight over the Iran deal told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration feared that Flynn would expose the secret agreements with Iran. “The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal that rolled back Iran,” the source said. “So in December the Obama NSC started going to work with their favorite reporters, selectively leaking damaging and incomplete information about Flynn.”
“After Trump was inaugurated some of those people stayed in and some began working from the outside, and they cooperated to keep undermining Trump,” the source said, detailing a series of leaks from within the White House in the past weeks targeting Flynn. “Last night’s resignation was their first major win, but unless the Trump people get serious about cleaning house, it won’t be the last.”
We can now say when Big Government is too Big – when it overtly and covertly decides that it is more important than We the Peoples’ elected Representatives that are supposed to be its Masters. What should everyone of you readers be thinking when you read this? I blame both Parties for its creation – and if this same thing happens to a Democrat President in 8 years, it will still stink on ice just as bad and be just as dangerous. Too much power has been concentrated in too few hands and ALL of those hands are unaccountable to us.And they know it and are now openly bragging about it. And showing us what they can do.
This isn’t just about one retired General.
Oh, that catch? Whose next?
Fake News: Media Smear Sebastian Gorka as Nazi Sympathizer
The media, and the left in general, are attempting to smear former Breitbart editor Sebastian Gorka, who serves as Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States, as a Nazi sympathizer. As any of his Breitbart News colleagues could testify, Gorka is not only pro-Israel but “pro-Jewish,” and defends both against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.
But facts do not matter to the left and the mainstream media in their efforts to frighten the public and harass the administration.
The ridiculous accusation is based on a medal that Gorka was seen wearing at an inaugural ball. Eli Clifton of the LobeLog blog wrote on Sunday that Gorka “has appeared in multiple photographs wearing the medal of a Hungarian group listed by the State Department as having collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.” Clifton notes that the medal is associated with a military order, the “Hungarian Order of Heroes, Vitezi Rend” created after the First World War.
He goes on to speculate (wrongly — see below) that the medal could have been won by Gorka’s grandfather. The order, he adds, was later associated with Hungary’s Nazi-aligned government during the Second World War, and later banned by the Soviets. But Clifton notes: “The order was awarded to members of the Hungarian diaspora and individuals in Hungary since 1983.” Clifton does not bother to report why the order was awarded then, or even why the “Hungarian diaspora” existed in the first place; he shows no interest in the order as an anti-communist symbol, merely noting that the Soviets banned it.
And of course Clifton offers no evidence — none at all — that Gorka, or his antecedents, had any kind of empathy for the Nazi regime or its views. Clifton could have consulted Gorka’s book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, to know more about his background. His father grew up during the Nazi siege of Budapest and later joined the anti-communist resistance. He was betrayed by Kim Philby, a British double agent for the Soviet Union, arrested and tortured.
Talking Points Memo, while echoing Clifton’s false attack on Gorka, notes that it was Gorka’s father who won the award, which by then was an anti-communist symbol: “Gorka’s late father, Paul, fled Hungary for the United Kingdom during a failed 1956 revolt against the Soviet-imposed government. The flyleaf of Paul Gorka’s book ‘Budapest Rising’ identifies him as a recipient of the Order of Vitéz ‘for his bravery during the Resistance’” — i.e. the resistance against Soviet communism, which Gorka discusses in his book.
The Deep State is looking to kill the Trump Administration by the death of a million cuts – but is fine starting from the top and in the area most needing attention – the security of the nation.
