The Dirty Wars Behind Obamagate

Cliff Kincaid

by Cliff Kincaid: “Obamagate” is the name being given to Barack Hussein Obama’s role in the Michael Flynn case, in which Flynn was framed for wrongdoing then cleared by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr. But why was Flynn targeted?

Flynn, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and a retired Lieutenant General, opposed the Obama policy – carried out by John Brennan's
CIA – of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. He understood that the proxy war the Obama administration had waged in the Middle East produced debacles that in Syria alone cost 560,000 lives and created millions of refugees.

Unfortunately, Flynn had made himself a target. On December 10, 2015, almost a year before President-elect Donald Trump named him as White House national security adviser, he appeared in Moscow at a conference held by the premier Russian propaganda channel, RT (Russia Today), marking its 10th anniversary as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda. Flynn’s appearance at the RT event, where he sat next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a special gala celebration dinner, was alarming to those concerned about how the propaganda channel, known as KGB-TV, uses Americans and other foreigners to spread Kremlin propaganda.

Flynn’s attendance at the RT dinner suggested to some observers that this retired officer, who attained a three-star rank during a 33-year Army career, viewed Russia as a potential U.S. ally in the war on terror. Ironically, he had written in his book The Field of Fight about how the Russian intelligence services had been involved in supporting radical Islam.

I was alarmed by Flynn’s participation at that RT event and first broke the story in 2015.

By going to such an event, Flynn made himself a convenient target. It’s understandable, therefore, why Flynn's conversations with the Russians, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, would draw attention. But Washington Post columnist David Ignatius crossed a dangerous line when he used top-secret surveillance intercepts of communications between Flynn and Kislyak to generate the controversy that Obama and his aides wanted. Ignatius quoted “a senior U.S. government official” as the source of the information about Flynn.

Flynn was forced out of his new position on the grounds that he forgot to tell Vice President Mike Pence about elements of the conversations he had with Kislyak. All of this was transformed into a “scandal,” resulting in Flynn being framed by the FBI on charges of lying. He pleaded guilty under pressure

Obamagate is more than Obama’s knowledge of what his people were doing to Flynn. The conversations with Kislyak were viewed by Obama and his people as a smokescreen designed to change the subject from the disasters in the Middle East that Flynn was exposing. The real issue, as Flynn had talked about publicly since he left the DIA in 2014, was the evidence of a U.S. role under Barack Obama and his CIA director John Brennan in facilitating an increase of radical Islam in the Middle East. He has cited the evidence contained in a DIA document, declassified and publicly released by Judicial Watch. Trump ended the disastrous Obama policy in mid-2017.

What happened to Flynn was truly an amazing diversion since Obama’s CIA director Brennan should never have received a security clearance. As CIA director, Brennan told a congressional forum that even voting communist, as he once did, was not a bar to employment at the agency. Brennan had voted for the Moscow-line Communist Party USA's presidential candidate, Gus Hall, in 1976.

The media knew that the Obama administration helped to produce the humanitarian disasters in the Middle East. They ran a few stories about CIA arms shipments to terrorists in the region through countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but did not highlight the criminal nature of the policy. And when Flynn got into a position of power and was able to do something about exposing these dirty wars, he became the target. They used Russia as the pretext to go after him.

The purpose of the leak was to stop Flynn before he could take action to reform the U.S. intelligence community. That’s obvious when you consider that Ignatius is considered a mouthpiece for the CIA. In a major new development, Judicial Watch just recently released documents showing extensive communications between Ignatius and an Obama holdover official in the Department of Defense. The owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, does business with the intelligence community through Amazon Web Services.

Looking back, we can safely conclude that Russia-gate was designed to divert the public’s attention away from Obama’s involvement – and the involvement of the CIA – in supporting terrorism in the Middle East. That policy had been approved by Obama and carried out by Brennan.
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Cliff Kincaid is a veteran journalist, media critic, director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and writes for RenewAmerica.

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