The Coup Attempt Continues

Some eight days before Trump's inauguration, and in the midst of the Russia hysteria, I wrote

I have never seen such a pile on as the one we are seeing with Trump. The press, the leftoid idiots on the street and in Hollywood are joined, of course, and most troubling, by at least some of our intel agencies which have allowed themselves pressed into the service of one political party. 

We could be seeing nothing less than an attempted coup by the bureaucratic mandarins and their minions in our federal government against an incoming president. 

It is not just political appointees at the top of key agencies who are involved. Let us not forget that, in their long march, the progressives have targeted such key institutions as the CIA, FBI, NSA, Homeland, and State for special attention. These agencies are now increasingly staffed from bottom to top by products of our progressive universities and are becoming full-time believers in the progressive vision of the world. In addition they see, thanks to Hillary Clinton, that mishandling classified information brings no penalty. They apparently have no reluctance to join efforts to subvert our electoral system.

If anything, those seemingly alarmist words seem now more accurate and relevant than when written over a month ago.

We all have heard the news. National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has been forced out of his position after a concerted media and Democratic Party campaign, a campaign abetted by anti-Trump bureaucrats. "Journalists" relying on half-stories, innuendo, and rank speculation "leaked" by intel agencies drove the assault on Flynn, and, of course, on Trump.  The whole episode was a sorry exhibition of how our democracy is now threatened by those who see themselves as the rightful and permanent ruling class in DC.

The Dems and their allies were abuzz with the words "Logan Act." You can follow the link to Wikipedia and, as is rare on Wikipedia, read a pretty good summary of this nearly 220 year-old act and its legal and political history.

Until the Flynn episode, I had not heard "Logan Act" since I left the Foreign Service. When I was at State, we would occasionally entertain ourselves noting persons who should be prosecuted under that ancient legislation. We came up with culprits such as: John Kerry for his role at the Vietnam peace conference in Paris; Ramsey Clark for his involvement in Iraq and Yugoslavia; Louis Farrakhan for Libya; Jesse Jackson for Syria, etc. Any number of NGOs and Congressional staffers could also in theory be charged under the Logan Act's text which reads, in part,

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

We, however, all recognized that the Act would likely be found in violation of the First Amendment.

Well, the MSM and the Dems, joined by Senators McCain and Graham, went gunning for Flynn, and tried to make him part of the increasingly stale story of how the Russians "hacked" the US elections to throw them to Trump. Flynn was accused of talking to the Russian Ambassador some time in December, and in the course of that conversation mentioning US sanctions on Russia. In the process of attacking Flynn, the media produced vague, poorly sourced, stories allegedly from US intelligence sources implying that Flynn had formed part of a persistent link up between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Flynn, who was still technically a private person, had no business talking to the Russian Ambassador about anything, but especially nothing about sanctions. Please. Get real. If Flynn committed an error it was trying to hit the ground running, and get a jump on his duties some three or four weeks before he became the National Security Advisor. Perhaps he outdrove his headlights. Let that serve as a warning to President Trump about dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy--it is not your friend and it is willing to damage the national security of the United States.

I would love to see a prosecution effort on Flynn. Right.

In the attack on Flynn, however, the Dems and their intel allies revealed that we had tapped the Russian Ambassador's phone line. Now, I am sure that the Russians always had assumed this, and that Flynn, former head of the DIA, suspected such a possibility, but these are not things talked about openly, and doing so only gave Putin talking points against us.

Let's review the gist of the case against Flynn and the Trump White House. As far as I can tell it consists of the following three hard and irrefutable facts,

1) Uhm;
2) Err; and
3) Ah.

That pretty well sums it up.

I hope and trust that AG Sessions will go after those in the intel agencies and, I suspect, among the Congressional staffers with access to intel, and prosecute them. Even more important, however, we need to have less classification of materials and far fewer people with access to the genuinely classified stuff.