RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/17/the-left-is-what-it-once-loathed/

Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past.

Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA improperly over three decades had tapped into the phones of Americans, opened their mail, and worked with telecommunications companies to monitor the data of supposedly suspect politicians, actors, celebrities, and political activists. “Collusion” with the communists and the Russians was often the pretense to surveil American citizens.

Consider Church either a bastion of civil liberties protection or a dangerous firebrand who weakened the CIA and FBI. But the point is that the Left’s position had once mostly been that the government’s unelected deep-state intelligence officers simply had too much power to trust. 

Indeed, the ACLU was outraged at what the committee revealed. Church was deified as a liberal hero uncovering government abuse. About the worst thing a government could do, liberals reminded us, was to spy on its own citizens. 

Then we were also warned that the scandal was the result of the government, for over 30 years, targeting mostly liberals on grounds of trumped-up suspicions that they were sympathetic to Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Yet in addition, the Left argued that the state had no business spying on any American at all, unless it had a certified warrant and ample criminal cause—or we found ourselves in a war with enemies at home among us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/michael-flynn-versus-nidal-hasan-lloyd-billingsley/

The Department of Justice has halted the prosecution of Gen. Michael Flynn but judge Emmet Sullivan, who thought the charge should have been treason, is bringing in retired judge John Gleason to argue against the DOJ. The delay provides time to contrast the campaign against Gen. Flynn with government actions against another U.S. military officer.

Gen. Flynn, a Democrat, regarded the previous president as a weak leader and spineless coddler of terrorists. In his speech to the Republican convention in 2016 Flynn said, “We should always remember that our country, was built upon Judeo-Christian values and principles.” Hillary Clinton, Flynn said, “put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private e-mail server,” and “Donald Trump recognizes the threats we face and is not afraid to call them what they are.” That would be radical Islamic terrorists.

The “composite character,” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama did not want Gen. Flynn to become National Security Advisor, least of all with Trump in the White House. So the president targeted Flynn to facilitate action against Trump that would continue during his presidency.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/team-obamas-unmasking-dodge-11589746154?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The media are mostly ignoring the news that 39 Obama officials sought to read the transcripts of Michael Flynn’s conversations with foreigners, but here and there they’ve asked a question. The unpersuasive answers suggest there’s more to learn.

Take Joe Biden, who “unmasked” Mr. Flynn only a few days before leaving office as Vice President. Last week Mr. Biden told ABC that he knew “nothing about those moves to investigate Michael Flynn.” George Stephanopoulos reminded Mr. Biden that he attended a Jan. 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting when the FBI’s Flynn investigation was discussed. Mr. Biden replied that he’d misheard the question and admitted he was “aware that there was, that they’d asked for, an investigation. But that’s all I know about it.”

This was more straightforward than what Mr. Biden told MSNBC when he was asked about his “involvement in the investigation of Michael Flynn.” Mr. Biden replied: “I was never a part or had any knowledge of any criminal investigation into Flynn while I was in office.”

Except at the time there was no criminal investigation into Mr. Flynn—as Mr. Biden knows. In 2016 The FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn, and it was under that pretense that it conducted the interview in which it later claimed that Mr. Flynn lied. The lack of a criminal investigation is the primary reason the Justice Department moved this month to drop its prosecution. Mr. Biden still hasn’t explained why he personally unmasked Mr. Flynn.