- Jul 21, 2010
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What a dumbass! His dementia makes it impossible for him to remember what he has previously stated.
Trump Tweets He Knew Flynn Lied to FBI When He Asked Comey to âLet Flynn Goâ
Whether the president remembered it or not, he has never before stated that Flynn lied to the FBI. Whether the president realized it or not, conceding that he knew about Flynnâs FBI lie â to which Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday â opens Trump up to a world of legal hurt. Trump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.
âThis tweet makes it clear that Trump knew at the time that he made his request to Comey to let the investigation go that Flynn had lied to the FBI, which is a criminal offense,â Barbara McQuade, who until January served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told The Daily Beast.
Trumpâs original explanation for firing Flynn on the evening of February 13 was that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his December conversations with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak concerning new U.S. sanctions on Russia. On February 14, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump fired Flynn for what Spicer called an âevolving and eroding level of trustâ with Flynn.
That same day, Trump met with several national security officials, including Comey, and dismissed the others to talk with Comey in private. Comey at the time was in charge of the Russia inquiry.
âI want to talk about Mike Flynn,â Trump told him, according to Comeyâs sworn Senate testimony in June. âThe President began by saying Flynn hadnât done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.â (If Trump told Comey that Flynn lied to the FBI, Comey did not include that in his highly anticipated testimony.)
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Trump quickly got to the point of the one-on-one discussion.
âI hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,â Comey quoted Trump saying. âHe is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.â
Comey said he promised Trump nothing, and considered Trumpâs request such a breach of FBI independence from the White House that he prepared a memo on it â a subpoenable document, in other words â that he shared with his FBI leadership team and not Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Less than three months after that meeting, Trump fired Comey, citing the Russia investigation as the cause to NBCâs Lester Holt, which itself was a revision from the initial White House excuse that Comey had mistreated Hillary Clinton.
Trumpâs tweet âadds to the evidence that Trump was attempting to obstruct or impede the investigation of a crime,â said McQuade, the former federal prosecutor.
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
The admission from the president also suggests that White House counsel Don McGahn had informed the president about Flynnâs potential to âbe blackmailed by the Russians,â as Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, put it in May testimony.
Yet according to the timeline Yates provided of briefing McGahn, Trump kept in office for another 18 days a man he now says he knew lied to the FBI â deepening Flynnâs compromise, and even potentially Trumpâs, should the Russians have come to know Trump was sticking with Flynn.
âTrump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.â
Flynn lied to the FBI in an interview on January 24. Yates testified that on the morning of January 26, she called McGahn with âa very sensitive matterâ she needed to discuss with the White House counsel in person. That day and the next, Yates told McGahn that Flynn was in a âcompromise situationâ owing to Penceâs untrue public presentation of Flynnâs conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak.
In her public testimony, Yates was careful not to discuss two pieces of classified information. First, U.S. intelligence had intercepted the Flynn-Kislyak conversations â legally, since Kislyak was an agent of a foreign power; as the other party on the call, Flynn was collected âincidentally,â in surveillance parlance â thereby disproving Penceâs public account of the calls. Second, Flynn had just given the FBI what Flynn has now conceded was an untruthful account of the Kislyak conversation.
But without saying Flynn had lied to the FBI, Yates made it nonetheless clear that Flynnâs FBI interview was significant enough to prompt her urgent White House visit. (After all, Penceâs TV appearance was on January 15, 11 days prior.) Yates said she had ânotes that described that interviewâ that she took to her parley with McGahn, along with a senior Justice Department national-security official in contact with the FBI. As well, Yates recalled that during a follow-up meeting on January 27, McGahn asked her about âthe applicability of certain statutes, certain criminal statutesâ to Flynn.
Yates said she was not in a position to know what McGahn did with the âurgentâ information on Flynn that she gave to him. She did not hear from the White House counsel again until January 30, she testified: âI don't know what happened after that because that was my last day with DOJâ â when Trump fired her, ostensibly for her refusal to defend Trumpâs anti-Muslim travel ban in court. Mueller interviewed McGahn last week, the Washington Postconfirmed.
Flynnâs agreement to cooperate has substantially deepened the White Houseâs exposure to Muellerâs probe. There are not many administration officials senior to Flynn against whom Mueller would want him to testify. While Mueller has never confirmed that Trump himself is under investigation, Trump is on that short list.
Also there are Trumpâs son-in-law and Pence himself, all of whom were senior transition-team officials at the time of the Kislyak calls. Pence, who has evaded suspicion in the Russia probe until now, ran the transition. Flynnâs agreed stipulation of the facts of the Kislyak calls claims they occurred with the full knowledge, and in one case at the direction, of the transition team.
As well, Flynnâs decision to seek a plea caused Trump to privately seethe weeks in advance, The Daily Beast reported Friday. Long before Flynn ever says Trumpâs name on a witness stand, the plea deal appears to have prompted Trump to casually and publicly proffer information that could lead Mueller to his doorstep.
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REAL RED PILL HEART AND BRAIN
Reeling From Flynn Deal, Alex Jones Issues Civil War âRed Alertââfor 15th Time in Two Months
The site has been warning that war here is imminentâand even announcing its startâsince the election. Lately, theyâve picked the pace up to 11.
BEN COLLINS
12.02.17 12:00 AM ET
Just after the word this morning that Gen. Michael Flynn had cut a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, InfoWars issued a âRed Alertâ warning that the âremoval of Trump will trigger a massive civil war.â
Host Alex Jones explained that if âthey remove Trumpâ after the âclassic Americana being promoted and dĂ©tente with Christian Russia,â it will cause a âmassive civil war.â
While the âRed Alertâ designation is new, InfoWarsâ doomsaying is not. Jonesâ site has referred to the imminent civil war over 50 times since Election Day in 2016, citing at different times various right-wing radio hosts, Kindle e-book authors, and Ted Nugent.
Other far-right websites, echoing the response from administration officials and Trumpâs personal lawyer, Ty Cobb, rushed to distance the presidentâs former national security adviser from the campaign and administration.
Breitbart quickly placed the blame on Jared Kushner, the presidentâs son-in-law and adviser, whose name was surrounded by emojis of princes on the website. âDid Mr. Perfect Sink Gen. Flynn?â the homepage headline blared on Breitbart, a website run by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who frequently feuded with Kushner when he served as senior adviser to the president.
The Daily Caller led with a story titled âWhite House Plays Down Importance Of Flynn Guilty Plea,â in a four-paragraph story that consisted mostly of Cobbâs statement.
At InfoWars, however, it was once again time to warn of the impending civil war, for the 15th time in the past two months.
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Beneath an all-caps red banner that screamed âONE DAY LEFT FOR 50% OFF SELECT ITEMS AND FREE SHIPPINGâ on items like âThe Real Red Pill Heart and Brain Formula,â Jones delivered a stern warning.
âNumber one, you better get yourself right with God, and that means Jesus Christ. And number two, if they kill Trump or remove Trump when theyâve committed all these crimes, and done everything they say heâs done, when people see the economy turboing back, with real jobs and real money and real optimism to the average person and classic Americana being promoted and dĂ©tente with Christian Russia and standing up to North Korea and securing our borders and just delivering at a dizzying levelâitâs biblicalâif we allow the evil people that hijack this country, the globalists, to remove Trump with all this fraud and if we buy into the hype and if weâre not strong and we donât speak out, if these crazy globalists that donât know how when to give up are actually able to remove TrumpâIâm gonna walk through the scenarios for that coming up, because they mean business, they said heâll be gone by the end of December, remember our intel from high-level Congressional sources? Just a few months agoâthis is it!â he said.
âIf theyâre able to do that, itâll cause a massive civil war in this country.â
InfoWars has spent the past few months warning in dozens of articles about a âCommunist Revolution,â a âViolent Uprising,â and an âAntifa Civil Warâ to âOverthrow the Governmentâ on Nov. 4. Despite the warnings of a YouTube star who dresses as a police officer, the uprising did not materialize.
The websiteâs Antifa civil war coverage began in early October, but conspiracies about a civil war triggered by the Las Vegas attack, citing a novelist who writes about fictional false flag attacks, and about an American civil war due to a âpolitical class emboldened after [French President Emmanuel] Macronâs victoryâ date back even further.
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
Less than a week after Trumpâs win, the site ran the headline âIS A REAL CIVIL WAR POSSIBLE?â and a subheadline replying that âthe very idea of America is in disrepute, and held in contemptâ above an aggregated piece from InternationalMan.com saying it was âunlikely,â since Americans take too many psychoactive drugs to âget off the couch.â
But that didnât seem to assure the siteâs stalwarts. Editor Paul Joseph Watson wrote that âThe left is willing to risk civil war in America & nuclear war with Russia because theyâre butt-hurt about losingâ in a story called âThe Truth About Russia âHacking The Electionââ last December.
On the same day, Jones sent out an âEmergency Alertâ that âthe left are trying to overthrow Trump,â and that ârouge [sic] elements in CIA [are] helping the globalist left.â
The drumbeat continued through 2017, as a former Green Beret, Ted Nugent, and Roger Stone all predicted a civil war this year on InfoWars, with the site also citing far-right columnists and retired lieutenant colonels appearing on Fox & Friends to warn of the impending âbloody civil war [and] societal collapse.â
In February, InfoWars warned that a force led by former President Barack Obama himself was already assembled and awaiting orders. âSABOTAGE: OBAMA IS COMMANDING AN ARMY OF 30,000 ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISTS FROM HIS HOME 2 MILES FROM THE WHITE HOUSE.â
Alex Jones said we are âon the brinkâ of a civil war in May. In June, he upgraded the outlook to âimminent.â He forewarned, âIf Trump is impeached, BEWARE!â
Also in June, Jones prematurely declared that the âfirst shots (were) fired in second Civil war.â A week later, InfoWars posted a story titled âGET READY FOR CIVIL WAR!â pointing to a quote from Johnny Depp at a music festival in England.
The same month, the headline âTRUMP ASSASSINATION IMMINENTâ appeared above a story about a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar.
Jones further examined the question, âWould Trump Assassination Lead to Civil War?â, in a video in July.
In October, InfoWars revealed the âDemocratic Plan To Launch Civil War Using False Flag Discoveredâ by a man who ended the segment by asking viewers to buy his books on Amazon.com.
In December of 2015, then-candidate Trump appeared on an InfoWars broadcast, where he told Jones: âYour reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.â
https://www.thedailybeast.com/
Trump Tweets He Knew Flynn Lied to FBI When He Asked Comey to âLet Flynn Goâ
I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
â Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 2, 2017
Whether the president remembered it or not, he has never before stated that Flynn lied to the FBI. Whether the president realized it or not, conceding that he knew about Flynnâs FBI lie â to which Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday â opens Trump up to a world of legal hurt. Trump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.
âThis tweet makes it clear that Trump knew at the time that he made his request to Comey to let the investigation go that Flynn had lied to the FBI, which is a criminal offense,â Barbara McQuade, who until January served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, told The Daily Beast.
Trumpâs original explanation for firing Flynn on the evening of February 13 was that Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his December conversations with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak concerning new U.S. sanctions on Russia. On February 14, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump fired Flynn for what Spicer called an âevolving and eroding level of trustâ with Flynn.
That same day, Trump met with several national security officials, including Comey, and dismissed the others to talk with Comey in private. Comey at the time was in charge of the Russia inquiry.
âI want to talk about Mike Flynn,â Trump told him, according to Comeyâs sworn Senate testimony in June. âThe President began by saying Flynn hadnât done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President.â (If Trump told Comey that Flynn lied to the FBI, Comey did not include that in his highly anticipated testimony.)
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âVery Seniorâ Trump Official Authorized Flynnâs Russia Chats
Flynn Knew the FBI Heard His Russia Calls. Whyâd He Lie?
Trump quickly got to the point of the one-on-one discussion.
âI hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,â Comey quoted Trump saying. âHe is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.â
Comey said he promised Trump nothing, and considered Trumpâs request such a breach of FBI independence from the White House that he prepared a memo on it â a subpoenable document, in other words â that he shared with his FBI leadership team and not Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Less than three months after that meeting, Trump fired Comey, citing the Russia investigation as the cause to NBCâs Lester Holt, which itself was a revision from the initial White House excuse that Comey had mistreated Hillary Clinton.
Trumpâs tweet âadds to the evidence that Trump was attempting to obstruct or impede the investigation of a crime,â said McQuade, the former federal prosecutor.
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
The admission from the president also suggests that White House counsel Don McGahn had informed the president about Flynnâs potential to âbe blackmailed by the Russians,â as Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general, put it in May testimony.
Yet according to the timeline Yates provided of briefing McGahn, Trump kept in office for another 18 days a man he now says he knew lied to the FBI â deepening Flynnâs compromise, and even potentially Trumpâs, should the Russians have come to know Trump was sticking with Flynn.
âTrump had asked James Comey, the former director of the FBI, to drop an inquiry into a man Trump now says he knew lied to the bureau.â
Flynn lied to the FBI in an interview on January 24. Yates testified that on the morning of January 26, she called McGahn with âa very sensitive matterâ she needed to discuss with the White House counsel in person. That day and the next, Yates told McGahn that Flynn was in a âcompromise situationâ owing to Penceâs untrue public presentation of Flynnâs conversations with Russian ambassador Kislyak.
In her public testimony, Yates was careful not to discuss two pieces of classified information. First, U.S. intelligence had intercepted the Flynn-Kislyak conversations â legally, since Kislyak was an agent of a foreign power; as the other party on the call, Flynn was collected âincidentally,â in surveillance parlance â thereby disproving Penceâs public account of the calls. Second, Flynn had just given the FBI what Flynn has now conceded was an untruthful account of the Kislyak conversation.
But without saying Flynn had lied to the FBI, Yates made it nonetheless clear that Flynnâs FBI interview was significant enough to prompt her urgent White House visit. (After all, Penceâs TV appearance was on January 15, 11 days prior.) Yates said she had ânotes that described that interviewâ that she took to her parley with McGahn, along with a senior Justice Department national-security official in contact with the FBI. As well, Yates recalled that during a follow-up meeting on January 27, McGahn asked her about âthe applicability of certain statutes, certain criminal statutesâ to Flynn.
Yates said she was not in a position to know what McGahn did with the âurgentâ information on Flynn that she gave to him. She did not hear from the White House counsel again until January 30, she testified: âI don't know what happened after that because that was my last day with DOJâ â when Trump fired her, ostensibly for her refusal to defend Trumpâs anti-Muslim travel ban in court. Mueller interviewed McGahn last week, the Washington Postconfirmed.
Flynnâs agreement to cooperate has substantially deepened the White Houseâs exposure to Muellerâs probe. There are not many administration officials senior to Flynn against whom Mueller would want him to testify. While Mueller has never confirmed that Trump himself is under investigation, Trump is on that short list.
Also there are Trumpâs son-in-law and Pence himself, all of whom were senior transition-team officials at the time of the Kislyak calls. Pence, who has evaded suspicion in the Russia probe until now, ran the transition. Flynnâs agreed stipulation of the facts of the Kislyak calls claims they occurred with the full knowledge, and in one case at the direction, of the transition team.
As well, Flynnâs decision to seek a plea caused Trump to privately seethe weeks in advance, The Daily Beast reported Friday. Long before Flynn ever says Trumpâs name on a witness stand, the plea deal appears to have prompted Trump to casually and publicly proffer information that could lead Mueller to his doorstep.
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REAL RED PILL HEART AND BRAIN
Reeling From Flynn Deal, Alex Jones Issues Civil War âRed Alertââfor 15th Time in Two Months
The site has been warning that war here is imminentâand even announcing its startâsince the election. Lately, theyâve picked the pace up to 11.
BEN COLLINS
12.02.17 12:00 AM ET
Just after the word this morning that Gen. Michael Flynn had cut a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller, InfoWars issued a âRed Alertâ warning that the âremoval of Trump will trigger a massive civil war.â
Host Alex Jones explained that if âthey remove Trumpâ after the âclassic Americana being promoted and dĂ©tente with Christian Russia,â it will cause a âmassive civil war.â
While the âRed Alertâ designation is new, InfoWarsâ doomsaying is not. Jonesâ site has referred to the imminent civil war over 50 times since Election Day in 2016, citing at different times various right-wing radio hosts, Kindle e-book authors, and Ted Nugent.
Other far-right websites, echoing the response from administration officials and Trumpâs personal lawyer, Ty Cobb, rushed to distance the presidentâs former national security adviser from the campaign and administration.
Breitbart quickly placed the blame on Jared Kushner, the presidentâs son-in-law and adviser, whose name was surrounded by emojis of princes on the website. âDid Mr. Perfect Sink Gen. Flynn?â the homepage headline blared on Breitbart, a website run by Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who frequently feuded with Kushner when he served as senior adviser to the president.
The Daily Caller led with a story titled âWhite House Plays Down Importance Of Flynn Guilty Plea,â in a four-paragraph story that consisted mostly of Cobbâs statement.
At InfoWars, however, it was once again time to warn of the impending civil war, for the 15th time in the past two months.
RELATED IN POLITICS
What Trump and His Gang Will Forgive Is Unforgivable
Trump Tweets Out Anti-Muslim âSnuff Filmâ
Why Canât More GOP Voters Back Doug Jones? One WordâAbortion
Beneath an all-caps red banner that screamed âONE DAY LEFT FOR 50% OFF SELECT ITEMS AND FREE SHIPPINGâ on items like âThe Real Red Pill Heart and Brain Formula,â Jones delivered a stern warning.
âNumber one, you better get yourself right with God, and that means Jesus Christ. And number two, if they kill Trump or remove Trump when theyâve committed all these crimes, and done everything they say heâs done, when people see the economy turboing back, with real jobs and real money and real optimism to the average person and classic Americana being promoted and dĂ©tente with Christian Russia and standing up to North Korea and securing our borders and just delivering at a dizzying levelâitâs biblicalâif we allow the evil people that hijack this country, the globalists, to remove Trump with all this fraud and if we buy into the hype and if weâre not strong and we donât speak out, if these crazy globalists that donât know how when to give up are actually able to remove TrumpâIâm gonna walk through the scenarios for that coming up, because they mean business, they said heâll be gone by the end of December, remember our intel from high-level Congressional sources? Just a few months agoâthis is it!â he said.
âIf theyâre able to do that, itâll cause a massive civil war in this country.â
InfoWars has spent the past few months warning in dozens of articles about a âCommunist Revolution,â a âViolent Uprising,â and an âAntifa Civil Warâ to âOverthrow the Governmentâ on Nov. 4. Despite the warnings of a YouTube star who dresses as a police officer, the uprising did not materialize.
The websiteâs Antifa civil war coverage began in early October, but conspiracies about a civil war triggered by the Las Vegas attack, citing a novelist who writes about fictional false flag attacks, and about an American civil war due to a âpolitical class emboldened after [French President Emmanuel] Macronâs victoryâ date back even further.
GET THE BEAST IN YOUR INBOX!
Less than a week after Trumpâs win, the site ran the headline âIS A REAL CIVIL WAR POSSIBLE?â and a subheadline replying that âthe very idea of America is in disrepute, and held in contemptâ above an aggregated piece from InternationalMan.com saying it was âunlikely,â since Americans take too many psychoactive drugs to âget off the couch.â
But that didnât seem to assure the siteâs stalwarts. Editor Paul Joseph Watson wrote that âThe left is willing to risk civil war in America & nuclear war with Russia because theyâre butt-hurt about losingâ in a story called âThe Truth About Russia âHacking The Electionââ last December.
On the same day, Jones sent out an âEmergency Alertâ that âthe left are trying to overthrow Trump,â and that ârouge [sic] elements in CIA [are] helping the globalist left.â
The drumbeat continued through 2017, as a former Green Beret, Ted Nugent, and Roger Stone all predicted a civil war this year on InfoWars, with the site also citing far-right columnists and retired lieutenant colonels appearing on Fox & Friends to warn of the impending âbloody civil war [and] societal collapse.â
In February, InfoWars warned that a force led by former President Barack Obama himself was already assembled and awaiting orders. âSABOTAGE: OBAMA IS COMMANDING AN ARMY OF 30,000 ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISTS FROM HIS HOME 2 MILES FROM THE WHITE HOUSE.â
Alex Jones said we are âon the brinkâ of a civil war in May. In June, he upgraded the outlook to âimminent.â He forewarned, âIf Trump is impeached, BEWARE!â
Also in June, Jones prematurely declared that the âfirst shots (were) fired in second Civil war.â A week later, InfoWars posted a story titled âGET READY FOR CIVIL WAR!â pointing to a quote from Johnny Depp at a music festival in England.
The same month, the headline âTRUMP ASSASSINATION IMMINENTâ appeared above a story about a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar.
Jones further examined the question, âWould Trump Assassination Lead to Civil War?â, in a video in July.
In October, InfoWars revealed the âDemocratic Plan To Launch Civil War Using False Flag Discoveredâ by a man who ended the segment by asking viewers to buy his books on Amazon.com.
In December of 2015, then-candidate Trump appeared on an InfoWars broadcast, where he told Jones: âYour reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.â
https://www.thedailybeast.com/