Did She Blackmail Trump? Let's Rehash Another Key Player's Antics in the Flynn Fiasco

 

By Matt Vespa
TownHall.com

Source: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Sally Yates. Remember her, folks? She was the acting attorney general who refused to defend President Trump’s executive order on immigration from terrorist-infested nations. Trump rightfully fired her, but the Obama holdover issue was born. She was also one of Obama’s reported right-hand people to help protect the FBI counterintelligence investigation into Russian collusion. Protect it and possibly prevent the incoming Trump administration from finding out. You cannot do that without causing institutional decay and chaos, which these so-called patriots had no qualms doing. Look at what this has done to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. They’re ruined. Why should anyone trust what these people do when they spied on the Trump campaign, secure a spy warrant on a former Trump campaign official, Carter Page, and set forth an entrapment plot against a top Trump official, Michael Flynn, who did nothing wrong—there wasn’t even enough evidence for the FBI to speak with him about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The FBI brass at the time, led by disgraced individuals James Comey and Andrew McCabe, were out to get Flynn no matter what. This is the Obama Justice Department, folks. It’s political, biased, and totally unhinged. 

Yet, why was Flynn such a topic of discussion with the Obama crew? Well, remember, he could be subject to blackmail. We have to go back to an old column by Paul Sperry in the NY Post that torched this claim.  He laid out the case the Yates was the original blackmailer; she was blackmailing Trump with the Flynn allegations and consequences that could come if the president kept him. Oh, and why Flynn being vulnerable to blackmail was trash from the start. With Flynn exonerated, the FBI plot to entrap him exposed, it’s time to rehash this piece:

…in late December or early January, someone working under Obama’s own national security adviser, Susan Rice, unmasked routine NSA intercepts of the Russian ambassador. Was it to spy on Flynn, Rice’s replacement?

Just days after the inauguration, moreover, Yates used those same NSA transcripts to try to get Flynn fired, by warning the White House that he was “vulnerable” to Russian extortion.

[…]

Though he misinformed Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of his conversation with the Russian ambassador (the two did, in fact, discuss the sanctions Obama belatedly and conveniently slapped on Russia after the election), he did not make false statements to the FBI. And Flynn made no promises that the sanctions would be removed. The FBI declined to press charges.

Yates knew what the FBI knew when she raced over to the White House on Jan. 26 to warn Trump’s general counsel that Flynn was “compromised.” She also knew that the Obama administration had just weeks earlier renewed Flynn’s national security clearance at the highest levels. And that the intelligence community had “no evidence,” as Obama’s intelligence czar just reconfirmed, that Flynn “colluded” with Moscow.

Still, Yates insisted Flynn posed a threat to the government. Why? Because, she said, he failed to truthfully brief the vice president.

The implication was that unless Trump fired Flynn, he’d pay a price. So it was Yates, in a sense, who was blackmailing Trump.

“Why does it matter to the Justice Department if one White House official lies to another White House official?” White House Counsel Don McGahn reasonably asked Yates, when she rushed into his office with her hair on fire.

She explained that by lying to Pence, Flynn could be exposed to the Russians at any time and that might open him up to blackmail. The Kremlin, she added, likely had its own proof he lied to the vice president and could use it to maintain “leverage” over foreign-policy decisions as long as he remained in office.

Wait a minute.

That makes no sense: Any “leverage” the Russians may have had over Flynn vanished the moment Yates informed the White House he lied. The only way he was vulnerable to blackmail at that point was if McGahn kept Flynn in the dark about what had been revealed to him and other White House officials. But McGahn, White House spokesman Sean Spicer and other top officials no doubt huddled with Flynn to get his side of the story as soon as Yates left. So any threat of extortion left with her.

Sperry delivered one last dagger thrust to Yates, writing she was “no Paul Revere saving the nation from Russian moles. She was a partisan hack trying to save Obama’s liberal legacy.”

And Yates was definitely at that January 5 meeting, where Obama gave his final orders on how to protect the FBI’s collusion delusion circus act. It’s time for Ms. Yates to answer some more questions about this whole fiasco.