Why Obama, the FBI, and the CIA Orchestrated the Takedown of General Michael Flynn – Part 1
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
This article is Part 1 of a two-part series investigating why President Obama, the FBI, and the CIA masterminded a plot to destroy the career of Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn. Part 1 covers the period up to and including Obama’s decision to fire General Flynn as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency on April 30, 2014. Part 2 will cover Obama’s continued determination to ruin General Flynn’s career. Part 2 resumes the analysis, beginning with January 4, 2017, the day the FBI cleared Flynn of “Russian collusion” in the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Part 2 concludes on December 1, 2017, when Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI concerning his telephone conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the Trump transition months following the 2016 presidential election.
The Obama administration’s persecution of Lt. General Michael T. Flynn clarifies the degree to which Barack Obama, the FBI, and the CIA orchestrated the coup d’état that threatened to incarcerate Flynn while working clandestinely to deny Donald Trump a second term as president. Obama’s relentless determination to destroy Flynn also clarifies how much he feared Flynn. Why? Because Flynn was a national security expert in counterintelligence who understood cyber warfare. If anyone in the United States could expose the Obama-directed coup d’état Obama planned in his “fundamental” change of the USA into a neo-Marxist Stalinist state, it was Lt. General Flynn.
In an Oval Office meeting at the White House on November 10, 2016, less than 48 hours after the presidential election, President Barack Obama warned Trump not to put General Michael Flynn on his White House staff. Specifically, Obama explained to Trump that he had “profound concerns” about putting Flynn in a sensitive, high-level national security post. In 2014, Obama fired Flynn as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reportedly because of Flynn’s opposition to Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran. Other reports indicate Flynn had said Islam is a “cancer.” On November 18, 2016, Trump appointed Flynn, his national security advisor. On November 21, 2016, the Associated Press reported: “Of all Trump’s choices, White House officials said it was the selection of Flynn that felt like the most devastating blow, given the immense authority the national security advisor has over matters of war and peace.”
The question is burning for an answer: Why did Barack Obama hate General Flynn? In answering this question, we must remember that Obama’s animosity toward Flynn began in 2012 when Obama was running for re-election.
On April 17, 2012, President Obama nominated General Flynn for reappointment to lieutenant general. In the same announcement, Obama reassigned Lieutenant General Flynn to be the next director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Flynn then served as the assistant director of national intelligence for partner engagement at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ONDI). Like the National Security Agency (NSA), the DNI is part of the Department of Defense (DOD). Within the DOD structure, Flynn’s responsibilities over “partner engagement” meant that as an assistant director within ONDI, Flynn’s duties involved “cooperating and collaborating with U.S. allies and friends in the research, development, production, and support of weapons systems and related equipment.” Obama’s announcement of Flynn’s promotion portrayed him as an “outstanding military leader and intelligence professional.” Obviously, at this time, Obama had no reason to fear Flynn.
In 2012, under Flynn’s leadership as DIA director, the DIA issued a classified report obtained by Judicial Watch that predicted the chaos in Syria was creating conditions that would allow al Qaeda in Iraq to make a comeback and declare an Islamic caliphate. At that time, the Obama administration’s narrative was that Obama “ended the war in Iraq and put al-Qaeda on the path to defeat” with the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Then, on February 11, 2014, Flynn delivered the DIA’s “Annual Threat Assessment” to the Senate Armed Services Committee. In that report, Flynn predicted that ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to currently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.” In June 2014, Obama must have thought that Flynn had been insubordinate in his 2014 “Annual Threat Assessment.” In that assessment, Flynn did not parrot the Obama administration’s narrative that the national security threat represented by Middle East radical Islamic extremism died with the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Earlier that year, in January 2014, Obama had called ISIS the junior varsity. What Obama specifically said was: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think it is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.” Flynn’s problems with Obama grew even more severe in June 2014, when his predictions about the continued threat to U.S. national security created by radical Islamic extremism proved true. The extremist Sunni group, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL or ISIS), regained control of Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq and declared a new caliphate, claiming dominion over Muslims across the globe. In June 2014, Obama had to realize that as Director of National Intelligence, Flynn could persuade the American public that Obama was soft on ISIS because the truth was that Obama had always been strongly pro-Islam. Obama practiced Islam in Indonesia when he lived there as a child with his mother and his stepfather Lolo Soetoro. In a speech Obama delivered at Cairo University in Egypt on June 4, 2009, he said: “So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” Obama always characterized Islam as a “religion of peace.” In 2009, the Obama administration dropped the use of the phrase “war on terror.”
Instead of rewarding Flynn for accurately understanding ISIS as a dangerous Middle East terrorist organization, Obama fired him in 2014. On April 30, 2014, Flynn announced his retirement from the DIA a year before expected. Media stories at the time made clear that Obama effectively fired Flynn over disagreements over Flynn’s attempt to overhaul the agency. Why did Obama fire Flynn? The bottom line is that Flynn had embarrassed Obama as junior varsity when it came to anticipating before June 2014 the degree to which ISIS’s radical Islamic insurgency continued to threaten U.S. national security interests. Flynn had concluded Obama was not aggressive enough fighting radical Islamic terrorists. After leaving DIA, Flynn wrote: “We can’t win this war by treating radical Islamic terrorists as a handful of crazies. The political and theoretical underpinnings of their immoral actions have to be demolished.” After leaving DIA, Flynn retired from the Army and set up a private consulting firm.
The truth is that in 2014 prior to Flynn’s decision to retire from the DIA, the Obama administration had the CIA spying on him. In February 2014, then-DIA director Michael Flynn attended a Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar in the U.K. that Svetlana Lokhova attended. Lokhova was a Russian-born British scholar who was taking courses at that time at Cambridge University. Stefan Halper, a professor at Cambridge University, was part of a small group that ran the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. As reported by Jerry Dunleavy in the Washington Examiner on April 10, 2019, Halper graduated from Stanford University in 1967 and received doctorates from Oxford University in 1971 and Cambridge University in 2004. At Cambridge, he was the director of American studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies; he taught classes and delivered papers at institutions worldwide, including Chatham House in London, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and the U.S. Naval War College.
On May 23, 2019, Lokhova sued Halper, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and MSNBC in federal district court for $25,350,000. Lokhova alleged that Halper “colluded with rogue agents of the FBI, with political operatives at Cambridge University, and with ‘journalists’ employed by the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media outlets” to spread lies about her and General Flynn. Specifically, Lokhova charged that Halper was “part of a sophisticated counterintelligence operation” that manufactured and published false and defamatory stores representing that Lokhova was a Russian spy. She also charged that Halper spread false stories that she had “an affair with General Flynn on the orders of Russian intelligence.” Halper’s allegations had focused on a dinner Flynn had with Lokhova during the 2014 conference at Cambridge University. The Wall Street Journal editorial board confirmed in print on May 22, 2018, that Stefan Halper was the “top secret” informant the FBI had asked to get close to Trump campaign officials, including Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Michael Flynn. On February 25, 2021, a declassified document confirmed that FBI-paid spy Stefan Halper spread the defamatory story of a supposedly inappropriate encounter between General Flynn and Russian-born Svetlana Lokhova at the University of Cambridge in 2014.
(Above Svetlana Lokhova and Stefan Halper)
As early as 2015, Halper had put a report on John Brennan’s desk at the CIA linking Flynn and Lokhova from when they had first met at that seminar in 2014. “In 2015, as word of Flynn’s interest in the Trump campaign spreads, the London-to-Langley spy ring fatten[ed] the file with more alarmist dreck—that Flynn had gone to a Russian Television gala and so forth,” wrote author George Neumayr, a contributing editor for the American Spectator. Neumayr continued, noting that in February 2016, when Flynn joined the Trump campaign as an advisor, “the spy ring move[d] into more concerted action…extend[ing] its radar to Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Paul Manafort.” Neumayr concluded that British intelligence was not only sending information to the CIA on Trump as early as 2015. Peter Strzok, as FBI liaison to the CIA, briefed CIA Director John Brennan on developments in the early stages of the FBI investigation of Trump before the FBI officially launched the Operation Hurricane investigation.
It turns out Halper played a controversial role in heading the 1980 Reagan presidential campaign “research staff.” In his “research staff” capacity, Halper assisted with a CIA spying operation on the presidential campaign of the then-Governor Jimmy Carter, the Democratic nominee facing Ronald Reagan. In 1983, news sources identified Halper as connected to the CIA’s successful effort to obtain a copy of Jimmy Carter’s briefing book, which was leaked to the Reagan campaign in advance of the only Carter-Reagan debate held in 1980. Throughout the 1980 presidential campaign operation, Halper was reported to have provided twenty-four-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan campaign. Halper’s connection to CIA spying on the Carter campaign was allegedly directed by George H. W. Bush, who had served as CIA director under President Gerald Ford from January 30, 1976, to January 20, 1977, and was Ronald Reagan’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980.
During the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation of Trump, the FBI opened Crossfire Razor, a special sub-investigation aimed at General Flynn. On January 4, 2017, a few days before Trump’s inauguration, the FBI closed its criminal counterintelligence investigation of General Flynn after finding no incriminating information. The FBI’s “case closed” memo effectively ended the FBI investigation into the Halper allegations against Flynn regarding Russia Svetlana Lokhova. But that was not the end of the story. Failure to find evidence that Flynn colluded with the Russians did not quell Obama’s determination to eliminate him.
To be continued.
In 2020, Jerome Corsi published Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, from which much of this article was drawn. In 2019, he published Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” explaining how the Mueller prosecutors confronted Dr. Corsi for over two months for hours at a time in a closed conference room with no windows. Dr. Corsi effectively ended the Mueller “Russian Collusion” investigation when he refused to take the Mueller prosecutors’ plea deal, alleging he had lied to the FBI. The FBI never indicted Dr. Corsi—further proof the Mueller prosecutors were the ones telling the lies.