Thread by @SethAbramson

(🆚) NEW: With today's bombshell news about a scheme involving Barbara Ledeen and Erik Prince to run covert domestic intel operations to aid Trump, I'm releasing—for PROOF subscribers—a never-before-seen chapter on Ledeen from my book Proof of Corruption. sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-lost-cha…

1/ I was heartbroken when I had to cut this chapter on Flynn and the Ledeens from Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020), though I certainly didn't blame Macmillan for it—as the book was around 70,000 words (not a typo!) over where it was originally *expected* to be at that time.

2/ As PROOF (the Substack) didn't exist back in Spring 2020, I had nowhere to put the chapter—nothing to do with it but toss it, or so I thought then—so I first made desperate attempts to edit it down to a manageable size, hoping it could still be included in Proof of Corruption.

3/ That's one reason the chapter I just published at PROOF is shorter than the chapter would've been. (It's also why—once it was cut—I imagined it as being part of a fourth book in the Proof series, though I quickly realized that there was no narrative it would fit easily into.)

4/ One of the scariest things established by the Proof trilogy (Proof of Collusion, 2018; Proof of Conspiracy, 2019; Proof of Corruption, 2020) is that Trump had a cybersecurity team willing to do *anything* to get him into power and keep him there. Flynn was at the heart of it.

5/ The Ledeens are Flynn associates who were looking to illegally bring *foreign intelligence services* into the 2016 presidential campaign as early as mid-2015. And that's the story this chapter tells.

In doing so, it also dramatically inflects today's New York Times bombshell.

6/ Trump knew what Flynn and his crew were up to in 2015 and 2016, as established (repeatedly) by the Proof trilogy. And what did he do? He made Flynn his National Security Advisor, and, as we now know, Prince and Ledeen had a place running *domestic* intelligence ops for Trump.

7/ This makes Watergate look like a day at a kids' water park.

8/ In short, all the evidence suggests that Donald Trump summoned Flynn to Trump Tower in August 2015—later lying about *every single aspect of that meeting*—precisely *because* he believed that clandestine cybersecurity operations would be necessary to his presidential campaign.

9/ That Steve Bannon was privy to all of these plans, schemes, and agendas in Summer 2016 isn't just relevant to his and Trump's and Flynn's and Prince's attempts to steal the 2016 election, but even to events *many* years hence—like Trump's last-minute decision to pardon Bannon.

10/ What I don't touch upon in "Flynn and the Ledeens" is something else that needs to be said in light of this NYT report: as the Proof trilogy establishes, the Saudis and Emiratis repeatedly got involved in trying to oust Rex Tillerson from his position. So now that we know...

11/ ...that there was a clandestine domestic intelligence operation aimed at ousting another Trump pick neither the Saudis nor Emiratis would have been happy with—largely because he opposed everything Jared Kushner was doing—and that those behind that operation were looking to...

12/ ...work with foreign intelligence services—see the chapter at the link—as early as mid-2015 to help Trump, and given that Prince was *literally working for the Emirati government at the time*, one has to wonder, how many *foreign nationals* were behind the McMaster operation?

13/ In short—not to put too fine a point on it—I have 2,500 pages of national-bestselling, fully-sourced nonfiction on Donald Trump's clandestine intelligence operations that says that the New York Times has only scratched the surface here. They've reported the tip of an iceberg.

14/ It simply can't be credited that Emirati agent Erik Prince, who approached the Trump family at Trump Tower in August 2016 to offer Emirati election aid—as reported by the NYT!—would then be tied to intel work for Trump in 2017 and *not* have it be connected to the Emiratis.

15/ This is especially true given that—in that same year—the Emiratis and Saudis were meddling in Trump's Cabinet by way of trying to get Tillerson fired. (Why? Because Tillerson opposed MBS's desired ground invasion of Qatar; see The Intercept on this.) So why not McMaster, too?

END/ So as is always the case with complex news—and is the reason curatorial journalism exists and is practiced daily at PROOF—the NYT story is big, but when networked with other major-media stories it becomes... monumental. This "lost chapter" is a key part of the Ledeen story.

PS/ If you believe the lie below, I respectfully suggest you have your head examined...

NYT: "In an interview, Ledeen said 'someone she trusted' contacted her to help with the plan. She said she could not remember who."

(1) She remembers.
(2) Dollars-to-donuts, Flynn or Prince.

PS2/ By no means was this a domestic "honeypot" intelligence operation against America's sitting National Security Advisor! I post the below picture of the woman they planned to send at McMaster *for no reason whatsoever*.

(She lives in *Dallas*...now go see the "lost chapter.")

PS3/ I swear that when I wrote about Dallas in my annotations to the lost chapter I had somehow missed that Tarah Price lives there. I only discovered that on my second read of the NYT article. Could be a coincidence, but if you follow Flynn and Prince's circles... it's unlikely.

PS4/ Sharp-eyed folks will note the hole in the "lost chapter"—Lofgren. Yes, the original Chapter 6 did a deep dive on how the Ledeens would have wanted to work with Lofgren because of his access to KGB-cum-FSB intelligence sources. The dive was... *deep*. apnews.com/article/68bef1…