Mike Flynn’s Higher Loyalty

For President Obama, the rise and rise of the billionaire property developer and reality tele­vision star Donald Trump constituted a danger to American democracy and a retreat from his peace-for-the-world doctrine. Trump, formerly an unserious political figure, became Enemy Number One.

Not everyone in the Obama administration was sold on the Obama Doctrine, not least the 2015 Iran Deal. The retired three-star general Michael Flynn (above), Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency until 2014, despaired at the direction of America’s foreign policy—volubly so—and found himself fired. By the end of 2015 he was offering advice to an array of Republican presidential candidates. In early 2016, the lifelong Democrat Flynn took the next logical step and signed up as senior foreign policy strategist for the surging Trump campaign. By doing so, or so the conventional pro-Trump narrative goes, he made himself Enemy Number Two. The Great Kremlin Conspiracy is one way to describe the cloak-and-dagger operations against not only Trump but also Flynn. If we are to take solace from Shakespeare’s admonition that “bloody instructions, which being taught, return / To plague the inventor”, then we might expect the deeds of those who perpetrated America’s greatest political scandal to come back and haunt them.

This analysis appears in the latest Quadrant.
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One of the many ironies of the Great Kremlin Conspiracy or Russiagate is that its likely initiators, President Barack Obama and then-CIA Director John Brennan, were no longer in the White House when the project took on a whole new lease of life under then-FBI Director James Comey. This begins with Flynn being interviewed by FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka in the White House on January 24, 2017. Trump’s administration had moved into the White House only four days before, and Flynn was in his second official day as national security adviser (NSA). Why had Comey sent his agents on a mission to destroy Flynn? The Obama administration, on December 29, 2016, imposed sanctions on Moscow as well as expelling thirty-five Russian diplomats as a result of America’s intelligence community concluding that Russian government operatives tried to “interfere” in the 2016 presidential election by perpetrating a cyber-attack on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta (of the Clinton campaign) on July 27 that year, the very same day that Candidate Trump, at one of his election rallies, caustically called for the Kremlin to find Candidate Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails from her tenure as Secretary of State (2009 to 2013). The intelligence community, the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, Mueller’s Special Counsel and the mainstream media have always insisted that Russian cyber-criminals passed their digital contraband on to Julian Assange who, in turn, Wikileaked it to the media in two instalments, at the end of July and then in October.

There are numerous problems with the “Russian hackers” narrative, including the fact that Comey’s FBI failed to investigate the scene of the crime, leaving it to CrowdStrike, a private company with links to the DNC, to uncover the source of the cyber-attack. CrowdStrike indicated that, yes, the self-identified culprit, Guccifer 2.0, was Russian. Others, such as a 2018 Special Counsel leak to the Washington Post, later claimed that Guccifer 2.0 was a team of Russian intelligence operators attached to the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Nevertheless, Shawn Henry, CEO of CrowdStrike, went on record in May 2020 to say he “couldn’t be certain” the Russians were to blame.

We cannot be sure if President Obama really believed “the Russians” hacked the DNC/Podesta, but he certainly acted as if that were the case. The mini-Cold War he tried to launch on December 29, 2016, was predicated on Russian intelligence perpetrating the July 27 cyber-attack. All other attempts to link the Russians to the Trump campaign had not delivered the goods. The FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane turned up nothing on the Trump–Kremlin collusion front. CIA Director Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted as much when they later appeared as witnesses under oath before the Special Counsel. The genesis of the anti-Trump “dossier” might explain why Comey and not Brennan thought it might be genuine as late as 2018. Comey heard about Donald Trump’s supposed exploits at the Moscow Ritz Carlton Hotel from two different sources. He was, in the first instance, informed by Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe who, in turn, had been apprised of the salacious tale by Bruce Ohr, Associate Deputy Attorney-General in the Justice Department. What Comey might not have known is that Ohr’s wife, Nelly, was not only an employee of Fusion GPS, the organisation paid by the Clinton campaign to generate “opposition research”, but also a CIA contractor. During the latter part of the year, when Comey began receiving from Brennan instalments of the anti-Trump “dossier”, he erroneously came to believe the Moscow Ritz yarn had been corroborated. The master gamesman was being played.    

This goes a long way to explaining Comey’s disdainful attitude towards Trump displayed in his memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leaders (2018). As I noted in “Big Brother’s Loyalty” (Quadrant, July 2018), Brennan and Clapper, on January 6, 2017, gave Comey the task of briefing President-elect Trump on the “sensitive material” about prostitutes in the Moscow Ritz. Doubtless Comey got the job because the other two sensed he still believed in the authenticity of the “dossier”. Comey’s contempt for Trump is palpable throughout Higher Loyalty. Being in close proximity with the man who supposedly made two prostitutes urinate on the best bed in the Ritz proved too much for Comey:

I walked out the side door, stepped into the armored car, and headed to the Manhattan FBI office to do what I loved. I walked floor upon floor of FBI offices and cubicles, thanking incredible people for their work. After the uncomfortable conversation I’d just had, it was like taking a shower.

Comey’s belief in the veracity of the “dossier” revealed itself during the promotion tour for Higher Loyalty, over a year later, when he continued to claim it was not just the product of Hillary Clinton’s opposition research. On Inauguration Day, January 20, 2017, James Comey was expecting to serve six more years as head of the FBI. He did not want to spend that time with the sordid Donald Trump occupying the Oval Office.

Comey, according to his own testimony, made his move on January 24, 2017, when he ordered agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka to insinuate themselves into the White House on the pretext of a friendly getting-to-know-you chat with the new NSA, Mike Flynn. Comey would later boast to an amused audience during his 2018 book tour that he chose this moment because security and vetting protocols were not likely to be in place at this point. Comey and the so-called “small group” at the FBI were under the impression they had Trump’s national security adviser in an impossible position as a consequence of intelligence community surveillance of Flynn throughout December and January, not least his December 29 and 31 phone calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Comey, through Andrew McCabe, wrangled an open invitation for Strzok and Pientka to visit the White House and casually ask if Flynn had perhaps discussed with Kislyak lifting the Obama administration’s December 29 sanctions imposed on Russia. The declassified FBI raw notes taken during the interview/interrogation suggest Flynn was (a) equivocal about the substance of his December phone conversations; and (b) did not appear to be lying to them when he expressed his uncertainty about the specifics of his brief exchanges with Kislyak.

There is every chance that then-NSA Flynn acted as if he had nothing to hide because, well, he had nothing to hide. His recollection of the December 29 and 31 conversations with Kislyak was unclear because his recollection was unclear. Evidence has emerged that, as Trump’s soon-to-be NSA, Flynn was making thirty to forty calls a day throughout December and perhaps another sixty person-to-person contacts, with only one assistant to keep a record of it all. For the December 29 and 31 calls, when he happened to be with his family on holiday in the Dominican Republic, there was no assistant. Flynn’s possible misremembering of specifics in that informal, getting-to-know-you chat with agents with Strzok and Pientka sounds entirely plausible. Moreover, the idea that Flynn committed “perjury” on January 24, a line Barack Obama is now promoting, says more about Obama’s desperation than Flynn’s guilt. How could Obama, an erstwhile law professor, claim Flynn perjured himself in an interrogation disguised as an off-the-record interview? The fact that the judge in Flynn’s case, US District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, once referred to Flynn’s inexact recollections as “treachery” is no less odd.

The one possibility that Flynn deliberately misled agents Strzok and Pientka is ostensibly substantiated in an FD-302 report finalised as late as March 2017. We now know, however, that the FD-302 does not exactly reflect the spirit of the original raw notes written by Strzok and Pientka. We also know, thanks to Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, that during the Mueller investigation the FBI wrongly attributed Pientka’s notes to Strzok. This matters, because Judicial Watch, through its use of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, had revealed that Peter Strzok and his then-girlfriend Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer, were rabidly anti-Trump. Strzok, we have also discovered, was the FBI operative most responsible for absolving Candidate Clinton of any criminal wrongdoing relating to the disappearance of some 30,000 emails from a private server during her tenure as Secretary of State. Strzok was, additionally, the FBI officer in charge of Operation Crossfire Hurricane throughout the second half of 2016. In fact, the record now shows—thanks to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell’s whirlwind of declassifications—that Strzok not only made the official legal case for initiating the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane but authorised it on behalf of the FBI. Moreover, we are not surprised to learn that he used the bogus Alexander Downer–George Papadopoulos “revelations” (outlined in “Downer Comes in from the Cold”, Quadrant, October 2019), to justify setting America’s principal domestic intelligence agency on Candidate Clinton’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race.

Therefore, the FBI’s avowal that it accidentally mixed up this fellow’s raw notes with somebody else’s, as it did during the proceedings of the Special Counsel, is unbelievable in the truest sense of the word. Strzok, even more astonishingly if that were possible, served as a member of Robert Mueller’s investigation team in June and July 2017. What does that say about Robert Mueller? What does that say about then-acting Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein, who green-lighted the Special Counsel? Sidney Powell, not only Flynn’s attorney but also the author of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014), has questioned whether an earlier version of the Strzok–Pientka FD-302 report exists or, at least, used to exist. For example, Attorney-General Sally Yates went to the White House on January 26 with a warning from the Justice Department that the Russians might blackmail Flynn because he had misinformed Vice-President Pence about the nature of his December 29 and 31 discussions with Kislyak. Yates, an Obama holdover, mentioned nothing about Flynn lying to agents Strzok and Pientka two days before. The FBI, two days after the White House interview/interrogation, was not satisfied Flynn had committed a criminal act. Why, then, had it become convinced of it in March 2017? What changed is that Lisa Page, FBI lawyer and then-girlfriend of Peter Strzok, helped the FBI agent edit the FD-302, which was later presented to the Special Counsel and used to charge Flynn with deliberately deceiving officers of the FBI.

The details of all this are important. They show that no citizen can be assured of fairness when interrogated by the FBI due to its last-century method of reconstructing an interview. Citizens have to assume, for their own protection, that they cannot be guaranteed justice when they speak with the FBI because their guilt or otherwise is not dependent on what they say but on a report constructed by the two agents (or a third agent who did not attend the interview) after the event.

This method of inquiry, exploited by the FBI and its DOJ overseer, is a major theme of Powell’s Licensed to Lie and pre-dates Russiagate by some time. Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann are singled out for particular opprobrium by Powell in her exposé of ruthless and unscrupulous federal prosecutors going back to the time Mueller himself was FBI chief. To defend Mike Flynn against the lawfare employed by Mueller, Weismann, Comey, Rosenstein, Yates, Strzok et al, and sanctioned by the likes of Barack Obama and Judge Sullivan, must feel like the fight of Powell’s life, a grand showdown with the corrupt forces of the Deep State. The intricacies of the case against Mike Flynn are also important because the lawfare waged against him is a microcosm of the Mueller investigation’s attempt to take down the forty-fifth President of the United States.

Mueller’s FBI had television personality Martha Stewart imprisoned for six months in 2004 not for the original charge of insider trading, which could never be proven and which Stewart has always denied, but for obstructing justice by lying to FBI agents about mis-remembering the details of a past conversation. And so, a decade down the track we discover the FBI and the Mueller Special Counsel scheming to charge Mike Flynn with no underlining crime—that is, colluding with the Kremlin—but, instead, lying to FBI agents about not recalling the details of a conversation. No official under oath has been prepared to accuse Flynn of colluding with the Kremlin. None of the high-profile figures in Obama’s administration, including DNI James Clapper, were prepared to assert before the House Intelligence Committee or to the Special Counsel that Flynn was an agent of Russia.

The FBI wound up Crossfire Hurricane on January 4, which is after they had access to the December 29 and 31 Flynn–Kislyak phone conversations. The recently declassified transcripts explain why the FBI gave up the attempt to expose Flynn as a Russian asset. The designate NSA, who does initiate the calls, deports himself throughout with tremendous aplomb, never asking the Russians not to reciprocate President Obama’s December 29 sanctions and expulsions. He makes it clear he cannot speak for the US government until January 20, and if the Kremlin feels the need to respond to Obama’s actions then so be it. All he could do, as President-elect Trump’s presumptive national security adviser, is point out to the anxious Ambassador Kislyak that a disproportionate response by President Putin was not in anyone’s interests.

David Corn, author of the spurious exposé Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump (2018), cannot allow himself to admit the obvious. First, that his “inside story” on the Great Kremlin Conspiracy was primarily a result of highly placed members of the intelligence community providing him with disinformation. Second, that Putin’s “war on America”, if such a thing can be said of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, makes more sense if its intended victim was Candidate Trump rather than Candidate Clinton. We shall have to await the declassification of material that shows then-CIA Director Brennan suppressing reports of Vladimir Putin’s administration hoping for Clinton victory in the 2016 election. I am not sure how the likes of Corn will spin their way out of that one, but we should never underestimate their ingenuity.

Trump, after all, expressed his determination to revisit Obama’s 2015 Nuclear Deal, which could only have the effect of disadvantaging Russia’s key ally in the Middle East, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in turn Assad’s Syrian regime, Hezbollah and the pro-Iranian militias in Iraq. Moreover, the anti-Trump “dossier”, which caused so much trouble for Donald Trump, probably had input from Russian dissemblers. Notwithstanding that, Corn’s response to the declassified Flynn–Kislyak transcripts is that they show Flynn betraying his country by “making nice” with America’s enemy.

There were many reasons why Trump’s transitional team did not want to want to enter the White House on January 20 caught up in an Obama-initiated Cold War, one of them being their identification of the People’s Republic of China as America’s primary geopolitical adversary rather than the Russian Federation. To recklessly inflame American-Russian relations would only serve the Leninist-imperialist ambitions of Xi Jinping’s regime by drawing Moscow even further into Beijing’s orbit. Only those overly invested in the naive and imprudent Obama Doctrine would disagree. Flynn committed no crime in his December 29 and 31 phone calls. A cabal of federal prosecutors nabbed him for deliberately lying to FBI agents about not recalling the details of a conversation, a conversation that was a non-crime. I would go further: Flynn’s uncertainty about exactly what he said to or promised Kislyak is somewhat explained by the fact that, in the published transcripts, he never asks Russia to turn the other cheek, and yet that was the course of action subsequently undertaken by Vladimir Putin.

The Mueller investigation (2017 to 2019) was a repeat of the conspiracy against Mike Flynn only writ large. All the main ingredients are there, starting with comprehensive intelligence community surveillance of the subject, all justified on the pretext of a non-crime, or at least a crime that can never be proved or is never proved in court. We have the Mueller report (March 2019) itself to confirm that the Trump campaign never did collude with the Kremlin. Mueller’s (or should we say Weismann’s) conclusion that the Special Counsel could not prove the charge means, outside the bubble of the Deep State, that the Trump campaign was not guilty of the charge.

On the charge of Donald Trump “obstructing justice”, which in this context means providing misleading information to the investigators probing his non-crime, Mueller and Weissmann were not prepared to “exonerate” Trump, even though they did “not conclude that the President committed a crime”. This, as Attorney-General William Barr clarified, meant Trump was not guilty of obstructing justice. Certainly Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s personal attorneys, is adamant that an explosive private exchange between Mueller and himself in 2018 showed the real entire purpose of the Mueller investigation: to entrap Trump by interrogating him under oath and then, as with Flynn, charging him with deliberately misleading a cabal of federal prosecutors. President Trump, had he appeared before the Special Counsel, would have been swept from power for mis-remembering the details of some past (surveilled) conversation, a conversation that was in no sense criminal. Mueller never did subpoena Trump. He decided against it, despite a two-year $32 million investigation involving 2800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witness interviews, because he had no proof Trump’s campaign “co-ordinated or conspired” with the Kremlin.

Understandably, Trump is keen to reconfigure Russiagate, featuring himself in the role of arch-villain villain, as Obamagate with Obama playing the anti-hero. That would mean connecting the scandal of the Mueller investigation directly back to the genesis of Operation Crossfire Hurricane and beyond. A White House meeting held on January 5, 2017, is emerging as a pivotal moment in re-casting (or challenging the re-casting of) Russiagate as Obamagate. On the one hand, Acting Attorney-General Yates was, in her own words, surprised to learn on January 5 that not only had the intelligence community been surveilling Flynn throughout the previous month but that President Obama already knew, in advance of the head of the Department of Justice, about the December 29 and 31 Flynn–Kislyak calls. On the other hand, in an unusual email sent to herself on the morning of Inauguration Day, then-DNA Susan Rice asserted that at the commencement of the meeting President Obama assured everyone he would not be “asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective”. Obama reiterated—in Rice’s January recount, now fully declassified—that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’”. Barack Obama’s hands, in other words, are clean; or at least they are in Rice’s account, which she now admits was requested by “White House counsel”.

Rice’s “report”, clearly intended for posterity, frames then-FBI Director Comey—rather than President Obama—as “potentially” unwilling to share national security concerns, including Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election, with the incoming national security adviser. Did Barack Obama and his confidants use the January 5 tête-à-tête as an opportunity to build a firewall between their role in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy and the FBI and Justice Department? Were Comey, Strzok, Page, Yates, McCabe, Rosenstein, Mueller and Weissmann, duplicitous lawfare veterans one and all, the unwitting pawns in a greater political game about which they were ignorant? All of these players are political in the narrowest sense—opportunistic careerists, PC-inclined and anti-Trump to a person—and yet it is unlikely any of them are political in a deeper philosophical way, as Barack Obama and Brennan have always been. James Comey, for instance, was a registered Republican for most of his life. His boyish hero-worshipping of Barack Obama, as evidenced by Higher Loyalty, was personal. Perhaps Obama’s greatest achievement was to persuade people like Comey that he was the Healer-in-Chief, both for America (Obamacare and so on) and then, with the unfolding of Obama Doctrine, for the world. Comey’s feelings towards Trump were no less personal except characterised by disgust and contempt. Again, his memoirs are unambiguously clear on this. The politics of Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe and Andrew Weissmann were more openly pro-Hillary Clinton than Comey’s, and yet none of them had Obama’s or Brennan’s radical pedigree. They went after Flynn to destroy Trump. For Obama and Brennan, contrariwise, it might have been the other way around: they went after the Trump campaign—that is, unleashed the Great Kremlin Conspiracy—in order to destroy Flynn.

The Obama Doctrine was a calamity from start to finish, starting with outreach to the Muslim Brotherhood in 2009, moving on to the withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq in 2011 and the concomitant rise of the Islamic State and on to the 2015 Iran Deal. The whole wrongheaded enterprise has disaster written all over it. But there is every reason to believe Obama thought otherwise and reacted with icy silence when Mike Flynn, his Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, sent him a prescient report concerning the imminent rise of Salafi-jihadism in Iraq and Syria. The icy dismissal turned into something akin to fury when Flynn was not only proven right on that matter but began counselling against any attempt to achieve a nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had Flynn sacked in 2014, which prompted the lifetime Democrat Flynn to eviscerate the Obama Doctrine at every opportunity. In early 2016 he joined the Trump campaign.

It was at this moment, according to Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President (2019), that the Obama administration began co-opting sympathetic elements from within America’s seventeen-member intelligence community to take down Flynn. Smith makes the case that Flynn was the one member of the Obama administration, albeit briefly and in a relatively minor role, who had the knowledge, ability and desire to demolish what Barack Obama believed would be his greatest foreign policy legacy: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the July 2015 Iran Deal. Flynn was ousted from the Obama administration before the signing of JCPOA and likely knew President Obama “play’dst most foully for ’t”. For instance, Smith offers evidence that opponents of the Iran Deal, both inside and outside of Congress, were surveilled and know they were surveilled. What secrets is Mike Flynn holding close to his chest? The man could not be allowed to return to the White House, let alone as a key figure in a Republican administration. It is entirely plausible, if deeply ironic, that all along it was Mike Flynn, and not Donald Trump, who was Enemy Number One. Maybe the quest to unravel Obamagate is only beginning. A report in the Ohio News, generated by a whistleblower, claims that the Obama Treasury’s Office of Intelligence engaged in “straight-up political surveillance” of Mike Flynn from as early as March 2016. This would pre-date the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane by three or four months.

On November 10, 2016, two days after his start­ling election victory, President-elect Trump was summoned to the White House. There were any number of helpful warnings President Obama could have given his successor but, according to his ensuing leaks to allies in the mainstream media, he focused on two: North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Lieutenant General Mike Flynn. If you bought into the Great Kremlin Conspiracy, like almost every mainstream journalist/talking head in America and Australia, you could view Obama’s cautionary advice that Mike Flynn “wasn’t up for the job” of NSA as not only helpful but prophetic. However, if you have now processed the cold hard reality that neither Crossfire Hurricane nor the Special Counsel were able to corroborate the collusion-delusion, then President Obama’s “helpful warning” about a man who worked for his administration for two years and enjoyed a full security clearance during that time takes on a different hue.

What, exactly, was Obama’s problem with Flynn? Why did Obama give Trump the “wasn’t up for the job” baloney if he truly believed Flynn was a Russian operative? Why did he fail to inform Trump that his likely NSA had been the subject of an FBI counter-intelligence operation since August that year? Did President Obama not know about Crossfire Hurricane? Is that possible? Did he not know that, at the very moment he was chatting with President-elect Trump in the White House, the upper echelons of his administration had begun a torrent of “unmasking” requests concerning Mike Flynn (but also Trump’s family) which would continue up until the morning of Inauguration Day? Lee Smith’s thesis about the origins of Russiagate, “a purposeful extension of the Obama administration’s Iran media campaign, and of the secret espionage operation targeting those opposed to Obama’s effort to realign American interests with [Iran]” makes even more sense as Barack Obama’s mask continues to slip. 

Mike Flynn might not only have been the first target in the Great Kremlin Conspiracy but the person who did the most—and continues to do the most—to expose a conspiracy initiated by the Radical-in-Chief which, thanks to the machinations of the Deep State, turned into something more ambitious: an attempt to bring down the forty-fifth President of the United States. The compliant mainstream media has, in the service of the Great Kremlin Conspiracy, done much to tarnish Flynn’s reputation. If you were to limit your research to the Washington Post or Wikipedia, for instance, the image emerges of a freeloader keen to sell his services to Russia or Turkey or whoever was prepared to pay. However, just the fact that Flynn vehemently opposed the Iran Deal makes nonsense of the idea he was a Russian asset; while his intention to destroy the pro-Turkish jihadists in Syria demolishes the claim he was in Erdogan’s pocket. Paradoxically, perhaps, General Flynn’s greatest achievement might have been the enhancement of real-time intelligence gathering on the battlefield and hostile environments in 2010. Here is an innovation that the cabal of federal prosecutors and intelligence bureaucrats, ensconced in Washington DC, were never likely to devise.

Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to one charge of deliberately lying to FBI agents in December 2017 because the Special Counsel presented him with a fraudulent FD-302 and, according to Flynn, threatened to prosecute his son if he did not comply. Mueller/Weissmann, we assume, anticipated Flynn would thereafter co-operate with the Special Counsel and assist them in their scheme to entrap President Trump, just as Flynn himself had been ensnared in their unconstitutional lawfare.

Flynn, a soldier of great courage who is loyal to the US Constitution, held out against the odds until the Special Counsel’s two-year-long attack ran out of steam, and then hired the legendary Sidney Powell to undertake a counter-offensive, one that continues. Judge Sullivan, who refuses to dismiss charges against Flynn despite two requests from the Justice Department, has now hired himself a defense attorney, making him the judge, prosecutor and defendant in the very same case. The critics invariably scorn Trump’s increasing use of the expression “Obamagate” and yet the very same critics have by now been wrong about the Great Kremlin Conspiracy for four years. “Strange things”, as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, are afoot.                               

Daryl McCann, a regular contributor to Quadrant, has a blog at http://darylmccann.blogspot.com.au, and tweets at @dosakamccann. He contributed “Global Inc versus the People” to the June issue