Thread by @hughhewitt

1 Not since the deeply corrupt prosecution/persecution of the late Senator Ted Stevens has DOJ been involved in so deeply scandalous an abuse of power as the prosecution of General Flynn. Most of what you will read in MSM is simple diversion. Dismiss it. newsweek.com/michael-flynn-…

2. The Manhattan-Beltway media elite will be in overdrive on Sunday shows as it has been since yesterday’s decision by #AGBarr to turn attention away from the deeply disturbing abuse of the prosecutorial power of the government to get @realDonaldTrump and to do so via Gen Flynn.

3. A handful of great journalists like @elilake and @AndrewCMcCarthy have zeroed in on the key issue: Flynn was targeted because he was not only an experienced intel pro but also a war hero. He was too much protection for @realDonaldTrump.

4. “I don’t want any of your listeners to think that there is an enemy that exists on this planet that cannot be defeated,” my author-guest told me in June of 2016. He was adamant. He was also not to be ignored b/c of his record.

5. This was a resolute warrior, a determined veteran of many battles with first Afghanistan’s killers and then Abu Musab al-Zarqawi‘s Iraqi terrorists.

He was not however a fan of Secretary Clinton or her 2016 campaign team.

6. “[Secretary Clinton] has a bunch of people that are around her that all came out of this [Obama] administration, and they’re just waiting in the wings to come right back in. I mean, most of people don’t even know” [the nature of ISIS] he told me.

7. “She’s got a personal staff of like 900 people. I mean, these are all just sycophants just waiting to get back into our government to keep going in the direction that we’re going.”

The man, a general, was very clear-eyed about the world.

8. “I’m going to just touch on Russia and Iran briefly,” he added. Both, he said “are allies of radical Islamism, and most people don’t know how they are interacting with each other.”

My guest, of course, was GeneralFlynn, which most readers will have guessed by now.

9. The interview occurred on June 4, 2016 hughhewitt.com/lt-gen-michael… Flynn would become among candidate Trump’s most trusted advisors, and he would lead a chant of “lock her up” at the Cleveland convention which earned him a deep enmity among Manhattan-Beltway elites.

10. It also gave them a cudgel with which to beat the General. This was a huge error by the military man to make. He was using a political event to urge the criminal process be used in politics.

That idea, unleashed, took hold not in his party but Clinton’s.

11. Indeed it appears to have already nested there in the arrogance of former FBI Director James Comey and his senior advisors.

This is Andrew C. McCarthy’s thoughtful conclusion based on his years of experience as a federal prosecutor. google.com/amp/s/www.nati…

12. @AndrewCMcCarthy has also been a colleague of many of the biggest names in this fiasco, some of whom are accused of deeply wrongful acts. It is McCarthy who has put front and center the key theory that is also the most troubling:

13. That General Flynn was targeted for removal as Trump’s national security advisor because Flynn had the tools, knowledge and experience with which to discover the agenda of the defeated Team Obama.

14. “The objective of the Obama administration and its FBI hierarchy was to continue the Trump–Russia investigation,” McCarthy concluded even before DOJ dismisses the case, “even after President Trump took office, and even though President Trump was the quarry.”

15. “The investigation would hamstring Trump’s capacity to govern and reverse Obama policies,” McCarthy concludes. nationalreview.com/2020/05/fbi-se… Think on that. The Beltway would rather not.

The deep institutional integrity of the Department of Justice has fractured in the past.

16. As noted above, DOJ prosecuted and persecuted, for example, then Alaska Senator Ted Stevens

“Stevens was convicted in October 2008 of violating federal ethics laws by failing to report thousands of dollars in gifts he received from friends.”

17. “But a team of prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice is accused of failing to hand over key exculpatory evidence and knowingly presenting false evidence to the jury,” according to a history of that case compiled by the D.C. Bar journal Washington Lawyer.

18. “On April 7, 2009, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia unleashed his fury before a packed courtroom,” the account continues. “For 14 minutes, [Sullivan] scolded. He chastised. He fumed. ‘In nearly 25 years on the bench.”

19. “I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case.” Sullivan thundered.

Turns out Judge Sullivan has presided over the Flynn fiasco as well and he’s yet to be heard from now that DOJ has dropped it persecution of Flynn.

20. The judge, who now has nearly 40 years on the bench, may tell us which was worse —the driving from office of a senator who would have preserved a GOP Senate majority or the driving out of a newly elected president’s choice for his eyes and ears on international threats.

21. We don’t need the judge, though, to recoil in disgust at what happened to the highly decorated hero here at the hands of blind, enraged, off-the-rail partisans armed with the power to set up honorable citizens for imprisonment.

22. People obsessed with beating Trump are still unwilling to linger long on what this repellent episode means for America. They may hate Trump so much they are blind to the threat to the country here. The “end” of getting. @realDonaldTrump justifies any means.

23. The people who went after Flynn, who got him say to the court that he lied to the FBI —the comments below this column will point to his guilty plea a few hundred times— were about trying to reverse an election. Our election.

24. They did in fact what the Russians wanted to do in theory: damage the U.S. deeply. Cripple it.

They did the Russians’ work. They have sown the wind and we are reaping the whirlwind. They have blackened the reputation of the finest law enforcement agency in history.

25. They have also given extremists of left and right an example of extremism within the government. What terrible things they have done, and not just to General Flynn, but to us all. John Durham can’t work fast enough.

26. But wait for Durham. Don’t humor to a conclusion. I urged people wait for Mueller and I’m doing the same thing here. Just as #AGBarr said in his recent CBS interview, there’s a different between repellent and criminal. We don’t know yet what is coming.