Catherine Herridge of CBS News has the full unredacted version of Susan Rice's famous "by the book" memo, written to herself, on January 20, 2017 regarding the January 5, 2017 meeting involving President Obama, VP Biden, herself, Sally Yates, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan. [CORRECTION: Clapper & Brennan were not at this meeting. They attended the meeting immediately prior regarding the Intelligence Community Assessment regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.] The existence of the memo has been known since 2018 but one paragraph had been completely redacted. It is now available:
Director Comey affirmed that he is proceeding "by the book" as it relates to law enforcement. From a national security perspective, Comey said he does have some concerns that incoming NSA Flynn is speaking frequently with Russian ambassador Kisylak. Comey said that could be an issue as it relates to sharing sensitive information. President Obama asked if Comey was saying the NSC should not pass sensitive information related to Russia to Flynn. Comey replied "potentially". He added that he has no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kisylak but he noted "the level of communication was unusual".My guess is the memo went through several careful drafts before reaching its final version.
I believe its purpose fourfold.
(1) Justify withholding of sensitive information during the last two weeks of the transition.
(2) Creating an "I told you so" if it turned out Flynn was compromising national security (Obama warned Trump against appointing Flynn)
(3) Justifying Comey's continued investigation of Flynn.
(4) Making sure Comey was the fall guy if it all went wrong.
It was no secret the intelligence community and President Obama had no use for General Flynn after he left the administration in 2014. He'd had major policy disagreements with the President and been public about his opinion of the quality of the intelligence agencies work product and leadership and having him as NSA meant their shortcomings would become public and the current organizational structure and embedded careerists threatened.
It is evident that from the time he left government service the intelligence community (including friendly foreign intelligence services) were keeping an eye on Flynn and he did himself no favors by miscues such as accepting payment from RT TV to attend a December 2015 dinner in Moscow where he was seated next to Putin.
How widespread the surveillance of Flynn was is still unknown. According to a story that broke yesterday a whistleblower at the Treasury Dept claims officials there were improperly tracking Flynn's finances as far back as 2015. While we only have the anonymous source at this point it is worth investigating to see if the story can be confirmed.
In addition, in early 2017, just after Flynn's resignation, a story broke, first in the U.K. and then in the U.S., that Flynn was having an affair with a Russian emigre and academic at Cambridge who was allegedly a intelligence operative for the Kremlin. What is of particular significance is that while the story only became public in 2017, I learned from reading the recently released House Intelligence Committee transcripts, that David J Kramer, an associate of Senator McCain, was told in September 2016 by Christopher Steele about the alleged affair (p.57) meaning the story was already in circulation in intelligence circles and part of a planned operation to destroy Flynn's reputation. The Russian in question is Svetlana Lokhova, who quite strongly, with documentation and, I think, convincingly, denied having an affair and being a Russian operative and has had her career destroyed as a result of the story. It is astonishing to see how the conspirators converted a dinner with several academics into a passionate affair by Flynn with a Russia agent. Moreover, the Mueller Report does not confirm the story and, as we know well, if it had the tiniest scrap of evidence otherwise it would have played it up.
Flynn was frequently in contact with Kisylak during the transition. In fact, Rice testified to the House Intelligence Committee, that in late November 2016, the head of Trump's National Security Council transition team, Marshall Billingslea, expressed concerned to her and her staff about Flynn's frequent conversations with Kisylak and asked for background on the ambassador, "that he seemed to want to use to persuade General Flynn that perhaps he should scale back the contacts". (p.44) [CORRECTION: Billingslea did not express his concern directly to Rice; Rice was informed of his concern via her chief of staff Susie George. Billingslea was also removed as head of this transition team at some point during the transition.]
This incident involving Billingslea became public in early May 2017 as part of the avalanche of press reports about the alleged collusion of the Trump campaign and administration with Russia. Here's a typical example. All of the stories contain the same note regarding sources;
"based on interviews with 11 current and former U.S. officials, including seven with key roles in the Obama administration."That implies four of the sources did not have key roles in the Obama Administration. Whether they were officials in that administration who did not have key roles or served in the Bush administration or were now in the Trump administration cannot be determined. And they are collectively cited as sources for the article which contains information beyond the Billingslea incident.
Billingslea has never publicly commented on the matter. He is currently Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing at the Treasury Dept. and on May 4 was nominated to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs. During the Bush administration, Billingslea held a number of senior positions at the Department of Defense.
However, as Rice's memo notes, as of January 5, Comey had no evidence Flynn shared classified information with the Russians. Moreover, the dislike of Flynn had another basis beyond the mutual disdain between he and the intelligence community - there was a basic policy disagreement. Flynn thought China a bigger threat than Russia; the Obama administration thought the opposite.
In her House Intelligence Committee testimony of September 8, 2017 Rice complained:
"We spent a lot more time talking about China in part because General Flynn's focus was on China as our principal overarching adversary. He had many questions and concerns about China. And when I elicited - sought to elicit his perspective on Russia, he was quite, I started to say dismissive, but that may be an overstatement. He downplayed his assessment of Russia as a threat to the United States. He called it overblown. He said they're a declining power, they're demographically challenged, they're not really much of a threat, and then reemphasized the importance of China." (pp.46-47)Rice's statement is ironic, coming from the administration which ridiculed Mitt Romney in 2012 for his claim that Russia was our #1 adversary (Mitt was wrong, by the way) while at the same time President Obama was caught on mic with Medvedev telling him to pass on a message to Putin that he'd have more flexibility after the election to screw our allies in Eastern Europe. And it was President Obama who appeased Russia's ambitions in the Middle East in order to get them to help with Putin's Iranian allies.
Let's not forget the operation to "get" Michael Flynn had two sequentially independent components. The first was to remove Flynn as NSA, a position where he could do damage to the intelligence community bureaucracy and the legacy of the Obama administration. That was accomplished when he resigned in February 2017 and the conspirators had no further interest in pursuing him. After that, Comey and McCabe were relaxed enough to admit in testimony that the interviewing FBI agents had not thought Flynn lied in his interview.
Things changed when the Mueller gang arrived on the scene. They wanted to pursue Flynn in a criminal investigation to pressure him to turn on Donald Trump. When he refused to do so, they pursued an alternative course, bringing a criminal prosecution to provide added fodder for the Russia collusion narrative to be used by the media in order to help the Democratic Party in the 2018 midterms.
My view is that Flynn was correct on the policy issue. Russia is not our friend and Putin would like to see a hobbled and weakened America (the media and the Democratic Party have helped him in that respect) but the biggest threat to American security and the rest of the free world is China. The challenge for America today is to develop a strategy, with other countries, to contain China and as part of that to find if there is a path to move Russia away from being China's junior partner. I also think he was also correct on the need for massive reform and cleaning out of our intelligence agencies. Flynn's lack of discipline in the RT TV matter, the Turkish government lobbying, and in not minimizing contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition period, particularly when he knew the security apparatus was gunning for him, contributed to his own downfall. The criminal prosecution however, is a disgrace, should never have been filed, and should be dismissed.
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