CIVIL WAR IN WASHINGTON
The ousting of Trump’s National Security Adviser – over wire tapped phone calls – is the latest blood-letting in a terrifying battle between the President and his intelligence services . . .
DONALD Trump’s White House was locked in a civil war with its own intelligence services last night with terrifying implications for the rest of the world. The new administration’s National Security Adviser has been forced to quit just 24 days into the job after leaked intelligence agency transcripts revealed his dealings with Russia.
Mike Flynn was asked to step down for secretly discussing sanctions against Russia with the country’s ambassador to America — then trying to cover it up.
The development raises dramatic questions about whether the FBI and other intelligence agencies — with the complicity of Obama supporters — are exacting revenge on Trump after he publicly criticised them.
Mr Flynn, a fiery retired three-star general, was one of Mr Trump’s closest advisers, but will now be remembered chiefly as the person who held the office of National Security Adviser for the shortest time in U.S. history.
His downfall came after the intelligence services wiretapped phone calls that he and Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak, had made in December.
Because the discussions happened before Mr Flynn took office, they would be a breach of protocol and a possible criminal offence.
It was acting Attorney General Sally Yates — an Obama appointee who was later fired by Trump — who raised the issue with the White House three weeks ago, warning that Mr Flynn could be blackmailed by the Kremlin.
The FBI agreed that Mr Flynn was vulnerable because he was publicly denying that he spoke about sanctions, when a transcript of a call showed that he had.
Mr Flynn put out false statements saying he had made no mention of sanctions and he is
Flynn has fallen thanks to the CIA and FBI
said to have lied to officials, including Vice President Mike Pence — who defended him in TV interviews.
In his resignation letter, Mr Flynn said: ‘Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the Vice President and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador.
‘I have sincerely apologised to the President and the Vice President, and they have accepted my apology.’
Mr Flynn is also being investigated following claims that he was paid money by the Russian government on a trip to Moscow in 2015. He appeared in the Russian capital at a special event honouring the tenth anniversary of Russia Today, the Putin regime’s international propaganda outlet.
While Donald Trump’s opponents are celebrating over the developments, others are deeply worried that an elected administration appears to have been outmaneouvred by an unelected intelligence community.
In the spy books, it’s usually the ‘other side’ which brings down the intelligence chief. But Michael Flynn has fallen thanks to the CIA and the FBI rather than Russian intelligence or any other hostile foreign power.
Richard Perle, a former senior defence adviser to presidents Reagan and George Bush Jr, said there had been a ‘ huge effort to make problems’ for Flynn.
What is most significant for canny Pentagon veterans such as Perle isn’t so much the content of those conversations that were wiretapped and then leaked — but who was responsible and why they did it.
‘What’s really striking is ... these leaks of intercepts are coming from inside of the [U.S.] intelligence community, and that’s a terrible thing, undermining the National Security Adviser by leaking information,’ he said.
It was obvious, he added, that the intelligence community did not like Flynn because he ‘ shook them up when he was trying to make our intelligence services effective in Afghanistan. And he did a lot of things that were not welcome by the CIA’.
Perle, who described Flynn as a ‘very capable guy’, said he was being ‘pushed out by manoeuvring on the part of the CIA, working with opponents of the administration’.
It was a development, he cautioned, that ‘will be a very bad sign of things to come’.
His comments were echoed by Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who described Mr Flynn’s ousting as a ‘ well orchestrated’ attack by Mr Trump’s enemies.
The notion that Flynn’s ousting was essentially a brutal but effective act of intelligence agency revenge cannot be dismissed simply as wild-eyed conservative speculation.
The Trump administration and the Obama-appointed intelligence chiefs whose operations it has vowed to shake up have been engaged in an undeclared war for months.
The involvement not only of some of Obama’s outgoing spy bosses, but also at least one vociferous critic of the Trump White House, is clear in Mr Flynn’s removal.
It was James Clapper, the outgoing president’s powerful National Intelligence Director, and John Brennan, Mr Obama’s CIA director, who were approached last month by Sally Yates, the acting Attorney General.
Ms Yates is no friend of Trump — she was later sacked by him for an act of ‘betrayal’ after she urged officials not to enforce his immigration ban.
There is no suggestion that when approaching the spy chiefs with her concerns about Mr Flynn, she might have been motivated by anything but concern for the credibility of the new White House administration.
And as for the FBI, it routinely monitors the communications of Russian ambassadors and had not only been recording Sergey Kislyak’s calls with Mr Flynn but had picked up discrepancies between the tran- scripts and what he was telling the White House about them.
In her briefing to the spy chiefs, Ms Yates said she was particularly concerned that Mr Flynn’s communications with his Kremlin contact peaked after the Obama administration announced on December 29 that it would punish Russia for what it said was the Kremlin’s interference in the presidential election by hacking Democrat emails and spreading anti-Clinton ‘fake news’ stories.
Mr Clapper and Mr Brennan agreed that the White House needed to be informed that Mike Pence had been misled.
Word of the communications quickly leaked to a Washington Post journalist, David Ignatius, who in a January 13 story seemed very well briefed on the thinking of the intelligence and justice chiefs homing in on Mr Flynn.
Two days later, Mike Pence was asked about the controversy and said he had been assured by Flynn that his chats with the Kremlin official had nothing to do with moves to punish Russia.
Washington insiders insisted yesterday that Flynn was deeply naive about the workings of both U.S. and Russian intelligence not to think
‘It’s a very bad sign of things to come’
that his conversations with a senior Moscow diplomat wouldn’t be eavesdropped by both sides.
This may be true, but the scandal is simply the latest example of compromising information about the Trump administration being gathered by America’s spies — and then rapidly leaked to the media.
There is certainly no love lost between the two sides. Just as Mr Trump has baited them by reminding them of their worst failures — notably the CIA’s disastrous failure to discover that Saddam hussein had no weapons of mass destruction — so Washington’s spooks have been accused of interfering repeatedly in politics, and with spectacular results.
Last month, Mr Trump felt what looked very much like the ill favour of America’s spy chiefs following the leaking of an incendiary report on his activities in Russia.
The so- called ‘dodgy dossier’, compiled by a former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, contained jawdroppingly salacious claims about Mr Trump’s pre-White house financial and sexual activities with prostitutes in a Russian hotel.
The alleged evidence, it added, had not only been gathered by the Kremlin as potential blackmail material but — even more damning given Mr Trump’s friendly overtures to Vladimir Putin — the Trump camp knew that it had.
even some of his worst enemies admitted that the unvetted dossier appeared based on such flimsy evidence that it had been grossly unfair on President Trump to tack a summary of it onto a classified intelligence briefing that U.S. spy chiefs provided to Mr Obama, Mr Trump and senior senators.
It was an open secret in Washington that various media outlets had known about the dossier’s contents for months, but, unable to confirm any of them, were waiting only for an excuse to publish them.
They inevitably got this when a summary was presented to politicians who promptly leaked the information.
Mr Trump also virtually accused the intelligence community of leaking it, comparing their behaviour with that of ‘Nazi Germany’.
James Clapper, the very same Obama- appointed National Intelligence Director involved in the Flynn controversy, rang Mr Trump to express his ‘profound dismay’ at the leaking, but few Washinton insiders considered this anything but crocodile tears.
U.S. history shows that presidents often come out worse when they go up against over- mighty intelligence chiefs.
It was, for instance, an FBI assistant director who was the ‘Deep Throat’ source who leaked the Watergate scandal and brought down Richard Nixon.
While optimists predict the White house’s war with its spies will end when all the Obama appointees are gone, others see trouble ahead.
Given the vital importance of a U.S. intelligence in safeguarding all of us in an increasingly dangerous world, the implications of this civil war could not be more worrying.