Recently released documents are “evidence of the brazenness of the operation” against President and then-candidate Donald Trump, and “the corruption of the Crossfire Hurricane team and other FBI and DOJ officials involved in it,” said investigative journalist Lee Smith in an interview with The Epoch Times for the “American Thought Leaders” program.
Before the election, the goal of the operation was “to help Hillary Clinton. After the election, the purpose of this operation was a massive cover-up,” said Smith, author of “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.”
“They were not about protecting institutions. They were certainly not about protecting the rights of Americans or advancing the interests of Americans. They were talking about protecting themselves and damaging other people and leaving a wake of destruction in their path like this country has never seen before,” Smith said.
Among the individuals targeted in the Trump-Russia collusion probe, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, was Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The premise of the FBI’s investigation was “nonsensical from the beginning,” said Smith.
If someone like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was actually seriously suspected to be collaborating with a foreign power, especially an often adversarial one like Russia, then he would have disappeared into supermax prison, Smith argued. “We’d probably never hear from him again because that person has access to all sorts of different programs that would put the lives of hundreds of thousands of troops, at least, in danger.”
Flynn, former national security advisor to President Trump, pleaded guilty in 2017 to one count of lying to the FBI in a January 2017 interview. On May 7, the DOJ dropped the case against him, saying the FBI’s interview with Flynn was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn.”
Documents, recently released by U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea, showed that the FBI’s investigation into Flynn had been slated to be closed on Jan. 4, 2017—nearly three weeks before the Flynn interview.
But Peter Strzok, then-head of the FBI’s counterintelligence operations, texted an agent handling the case, urging him not to close it: “Hey if you haven’t closed RAZOR don’t do so yet.”
After confirming, he texted Lisa Page, his mistress at the time and then-special counsel to the FBI’s then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.
“Razor still open. :@ but serendipitously good, I guess. You want those chips and oreos?” he wrote.
“Phew, but yeah, that’s amazing that he is still open,” Page replied.
Smith said targeting Flynn was a “central part of their coverup operation.”
Many members of the incoming Trump administration were new to Washington. But “the one person with extensive experience in the intelligence community is Michael Flynn. They know that Michael Flynn is going to present serious troubles if Flynn starts asking for the reporting they were using to open up all these investigations on Donald Trump,” Smith said.
The investigation into Flynn was continued on the basis of a potential violation of the Logan Act.
The Logan Act, passed in 1799, prohibits Americans from conducting diplomacy without authorization with nations that the United States has a dispute with.
In phone calls with then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak—which were leaked to the media in January 2017—Flynn had allegedly voiced some of the incoming Trump administration’s policy preferences to Kislyak and discussed President Barack Obama’s recent sanctions on Russia.
By turning normal conversations between a U.S. official and a Russian ambassador into something worthy of investigation, “they perverted the idea of diplomacy,” Smith said.
The Obama administration made the Russian ambassador “radioactive,” Smith said. “They turned him into a pariah.”
“The Russian ambassador is in Washington for one thing, and that’s to speak to American officials, right?” Smith said.
It’s only natural for U.S. officials to seek to avoid conflict through diplomacy, Smith argued. “The idea that they turned this into an instrument to damage Trump team officials is an astonishing thing,” Smith said.
Handwritten Notes
On April 29, a federal judge presiding over Flynn’s case unsealed four pages of documents, including a page of handwritten notes, dated Jan. 24, 2017, the day of the Flynn interview.The FBI official wrote: “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”
They were signed with the initials “EP,” suggesting the author may have been Edward Priestap, then FBI-head of counterintelligence.
In Lee Smith’s view, Priestap was “kind of a boy scout.”
Based on his sources, Smith believes “they had Priestap in the middle of this and they were taking advantage of him. They were using him as cover to do a whole bunch of bad things.”
The handwritten notes suggest Priestap was having second thoughts, Smith said.
“I agreed yesterday that we shouldn’t show Flynn [redacted] if he didn’t admit,” the author of the note wrote. “I thought @ it last night, + I believe we should rethink this.”
“We regularly show subjects evidence, with the goal of getting them to admit their wrongdoing. I don’t see how getting someone to admit their wrongdoing is going easy on them,” he wrote.
Smith said it’s likely that the redacted item they decided not to show Flynn was the transcript of his conversation with the Russian ambassador.
At the bottom of the page, the agent wrote, “If we’re seen as playing games, WH will be furious. Protect our institution by not playing games.”
In Smith’s view, Priestap had a conscience and was thus questioning the discussion he’d heard. Smith said.
“There is a room where this discussion is happening,” Smith said.
“Now, the important thing will be finding out precisely who is in that room. And we’re starting to get a pretty good idea that there are senior FBI officials in that room. Perhaps the director of the FBI himself at the time, James Comey; almost certainly the Deputy Director at the time, Andrew McCabe,” Smith said.
“The real bombshell news here is: why was the FBI sitting on this for so long?” Smith said.
And why did the FBI wait so long to release the now partially unredacted footnotes of the IG report? “Was Christopher Wray, the director, telling people not to disclose this information?” Smith said.
“If this was going on when Wray was confirmed to the post in August 2017, that is going to add more detail onto a very sad story for the FBI,” Smith said.
“We’ve known for a while what happened. This gives us more evidence of what they did,” Smith said.
