RUTHFULLY YOURS

The abrupt resignation Monday evening of White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.
The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn’s credibility, multiple sources revealed.
The operation primarily focused on discrediting Flynn, an opponent of the Iran nuclear deal, in order to handicap the Trump administration’s efforts to disclose secret details of the nuclear deal with Iran that had been long hidden by the Obama administration.
Insiders familiar with the anti-Flynn campaign told the Free Beacon that these Obama loyalists plotted in the months before Trump’s inauguration to establish a set of roadblocks before Trump’s national security team, which includes several prominent opponents of diplomacy with Iran. The Free Beacon first reported on this effort in January.
Sources who spoke to the Free Beacon requested anonymity in order to speak freely about the situation and avoid interfering with the White House’s official narrative about Flynn, which centers on his failure to adequately inform the president about a series of phone calls with Russian officials.
Flynn took credit for his missteps regarding these phone calls in a brief statement released late Monday evening. Trump administration officials subsequently stated that Flynn’s efforts to mislead the president and vice president about his contacts with Russia could not be tolerated.
However, multiple sources closely involved in the situation pointed to a larger, more secretive campaign aimed at discrediting Flynn and undermining the Trump White House.
“It’s undeniable that the campaign to discredit Flynn was well underway before Inauguration Day, with a very troublesome and politicized series of leaks designed to undermine him,” said one veteran national security adviser with close ties to the White House team. “This pattern reminds me of the lead up to the Iran deal, and probably features the same cast of characters.”

If Donald Trump doesn’t understand now, he will eventually. Integrity and truth ultimately do matter, and if he wants to be a successful president, he’s going to have to appoint people to high office who won’t violate the public’s trust.

That means appointing more men like Neil Gorsuch and James Mattis. And it means keeping David Petraeus out of the White House.

This is a painful thing to say. I served under General Petraeus (far, far under, I was a lowly captain in an armored cavalry squadron deployed roughly 100 miles from Baghdad) during the Surge, and I saw with my own eyes the power of effective leadership, the right strategy, and the proper application of force. He came into Iraq at a time of maximum chaos and was instrumental in transforming an emerging and bloody defeat into a stunning battlefield victory.

It’s no understatement to say that by the September 2008 — when he turned over command in Iraq to General Raymond Odierno — he was an American hero, one of the great generals of modern times. Then he betrayed his family, violated the law, and established a precedent for prosecutorial favoritism that haunted America during the 2016 presidential election.

The facts of his case are simple and disappointing. Petraeus had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and provided her with notebooks containing highly classified information. Compounding his offense, he apparently initially lied to the FBI when they confronted him in 2012, denying that he had provided any classified information to his mistress.

Lest anyone think the disclosure was harmless — more the by-product of overclassification than an action that risked national security — consider the information he shared with Broadwell. As the Washington Post reported, the notebooks “contained code words for secret intelligence programs, the identities of covert officers, and information about war strategy and deliberative discussions with the National Security Council.”

This was a serious offense, but rather than serve the prison time that virtually any service member would receive under similar (or lesser) circumstances, Petraeus received a sweetheart plea deal. In exchange for pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information, Petraeus was sentenced to two years of probation and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.

It pays to be powerful.

Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser is an opportunity for Donald Trump to stabilize his White House operation. But it’s also an opening for Congress to clarify the troubling intelligence machinations over Mr. Flynn’s 2016 campaign contacts with Russia.

Mr. Flynn became a political liability after his account of Dec. 29 phone calls with the Russian ambassador was contradicted by news reports. In his resignation letter, the former intelligence officer said he had given Vice President Mike Pence “incomplete information” about whether he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia on these calls.

Initially Mr. Flynn claimed Russian sanctions hadn’t come up in the conversations, and that’s what the Vice President said in defending him on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” But U.S. officials then leaked to the press that transcripts of Mr. Flynn’s phone calls show that sanctions were discussed. “This was an act of trust, whether or not he misled the Vice President was the issue,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Tuesday.

Fair enough, if that’s the real reason. But as troubling is the fact that Mr. Flynn may have been targeted for political destruction by intelligence sources inside the government. We wrote Tuesday that the existence of transcripts of Mr. Flynn talking with a foreign official suggests that he may have been the subject of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) warrant.

Some media outlets have reported that the FBI requested the warrant as part of the Obama Administration’s investigation into contacts between associates of Mr. Trump and Russian banks. Democrats are now demanding hearings, which they believe will expose more serious and unseemly interactions between Vladimir Putin and the Trump campaign. The House and Senate intelligence committees are already investigating Russian election meddling.

But readers should understand how rare it is for electronic intercepts of a private U.S. citizen—which Mr. Flynn was at the time—to be leaked to the press. The conversations of American citizens are supposed to be protected, lest private reputations be ruined without accountability. So it’s unsettling to read that so many in the government claim to have read the transcripts of Mr. Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador, and then spoke about them to the press.

Former President Obama failed at transforming America, but did succeeded at transforming the Democratic Party. That is why we are witnessing an unprecedented all-out war against the new president.

Since President Trump’s inauguration, the headlines are all about leftist groups forcing Democratic Party politicians to adopt their strategy of “Resist!” and claiming President Trump is a threat to the country.

Believe your eyes: women in pink pussy hats led by a jihadi-supporting Muslim in a hijab, and youths in black masks attacking Trump supporters with clubs, are precisely what they look like – ideologues and extremists.

So where did all these agitators come from? From the moment he entered the Oval Office, Obama staffed up a leftwing DOJ, EPA and Department of Education, and began to target blacks, conservationists, and millennials with his leftwing, divisive messages. Enormous sums of money were lavished on radical groups and agendas.

As Paul Sperry tells us in an important New York Post article, Obama’s private foundation, Organizing for Action, directly churned out community organizers by the tens of thousands.

When former President Barack Obama said he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.

Significantly, Obama handed his famous state of the art election campaign – the data, the staff, the fundraising – to Organizing for Action, not to the Democratic Party. Eight years later, the Democratic Party is decimated at every level of government. And they are being overrun by professional agitators.

From the moment he took over the Oval office, Obama’s efforts were much bigger than the OFA’s direct training.

According to Hans von Spakowsky and Christian Adams, two attorneys who previously worked in the Civil Rights Division …every single one of the hundreds of lawyers hired during the Obama Administration—every single one—was a leftwing activist. “The Obama Justice Department,” they wrote, “has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Through the DOJ, President Obama instituted a shakedown system eerily reminiscent of the Acorn “Muscle for Money” program that he was a part of in Chicago. But as president, he could do it to the tune of half a billion, yes that’s a billion, dollars.

Yes, President Trump is shaking up Washington, but some things definitely need to be shaken up. Exhibit A is the nation’s mental-health services — or lack of same. As if we needed another reminder, when a man with a gun walks into an FBI office hearing voices and complaining that the CIA is pushing him to become a member of al-Qaeda, he is asking to be treated for his psychosis. Instead, he was given some anti-anxiety medication, released after three days, and given back his gun, which he then took to Ft. Lauderdale. Alaska or Arizona, Colorado or Connecticut — it is the same story, year after year, differing only slightly in detail and diagnosis. But the outcome is the same: innocent people needlessly killed and injured.

On the horizon of this bleak landscape, a light recently appeared. Within the 21st Century Cure Act, passed by Congress in an unusually bipartisan fashion in December, is a provision for an assistant secretary of mental health and substance abuse. This new position will have authority to coordinate efforts by the dozens of federal agencies that have mental-health programs. Equally important, the person will also have authority to reform the dysfunctional Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the $3.5 billion federal agency that is officially charged with reducing “the impact of substance abuse and mental illness on America’s communities.” Thus, it is critical that Representative Tom Price (R., Ga.), now confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, select as assistant secretary a mental-health professional who is strong, clinically and administratively experienced, and unafraid to rattle federal cages. Changing the direction of an aircraft carrier is simple compared with changing the direction of a federal agency.

What might we expect from successful leadership by an assistant secretary? We should expect improvement in the many measures of a failing mental-illness-treatment system that were brought to light by congressional hearings held by Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.), the author of the original legislation that proposed the creation of an assistant-secretary position.

These measures include homicides by people with untreated serious mental illness, suicides, homelessness, increasing numbers of mentally ill individuals in jails and prisons, increasing numbers sitting for days in emergency rooms waiting for psychiatric beds, and increasing encounters between mentally ill individuals and law-enforcement officials. Since SAMHSA came into being in 1992, the nation is significantly worse off on every one of these measures.

We should also expect the many federal agencies that have mental-health programs to speak to one another and meet regularly, which has not happened for years. Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the Veterans Administration, for example, all spend huge amounts on mental-health care, but there is virtually no coordination among them or with SAMHSA’s mental-health block grant to the states. Since the states have the ultimate responsibility for delivering the services, there must also be coordinated, federally funded demonstration projects and data collection to identify the programs that are most effective in stabilizing and providing rehabilitation and recovery for mentally ill individuals. The funding of assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) programs under the recent legislation is a step in this direction.