Fiery Dan Bongino on Flynn Case: 'Obama Knew'
For Dan Bongino, it’s all about the “body of evidence.”
And to the former Secret Service agent and ardent defender of the Trump administration, the body of evidence emerging that’s being studiously ignored by the mainstream media shows that the principal architect of the “Russia collusion” scandal is former President Barack Obama.
“We have a body of evidence right now that Obama knew, and if you are a journalist or a media representative and you are not asking the question right now, ‘What did Obama know and when did Obama know it?’ you seriously need to find a new line of work,” Bongino said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Monday.
Bongino is so passionate he sometimes verges on the bombastic, but the recent outpouring of revelations about the former president’s involvement in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign and those who’ve been close to the president — primarily former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — prove his point.
Check out his appearance here. The first five minutes deal with the Flynn investigation, and it’s worth every second.
Last week, in a deadly blow to the investigation of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr dropped its criminal case against Flynn on a charge of lying to the FBI during a meeting at the White House — a meeting former FBI Director James Comey has admitted orchestrating.
Bongino said the evidence emerging that Obama knew all about the FBI’s intention to target Flynn — combined with previous texts uncovered between former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI Attorney Lisa Page — shows how deeply the former president was involved in sabotaging his successor.
As Mollie Hemingway reported at The Federalist, testimony released last week by a reluctant House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff showed former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates learned at a Jan. 5, 2017, White House meeting that Obama was aware that the FBI had recorded conversations Flynn — at the time the incoming national security adviser — had had with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Until that meeting, Yates was unaware of the recordings, even though the FBI falls under the Justice Department. But Obama — the chief executive — was fully informed of them?
Even stranger, the Obama officials at that meeting discussed whether Flynn had violated the Logan Act, a little-known, never-prosecuted law from the John Adams administration that makes it illegal for American citizens to engage in diplomacy with foreign governments.
If that wasn’t convincing enough on its own, Bongino pointed out that texts between Strzok and Page that have been public knowledge for years show the two were operating under the belief that the White House was behind their investigation of the Trump campaign.
“It’s not just now that we know, we categorically know, that Barack Obama knew about Mike Flynn’s call with the Russian ambassador, which is bizarre why Barack Obama would take a personal interest in that, but remember we also have a series of communications with the FBI agents leading this,” Bongino said.
In one text from Strzok to Page in August 2016, Strzok cited an unnamed Obama administration official as saying the “White House is running this.”
“Here is a quick question for the liberals here,” Bongino said. “There is text and email exchange out there that clearly says, ‘The White House is running this,’ between the FBI agents who are talking about the case.
“So how do we know the White House is running this? They texted each other and [Democrats] say, ‘Well, we don’t know they were talking about that.’ What do you think the FBI was talking about? Making brownies? They were talking about this case.”
Another text Page wrote to Strzok in September 2016 — two months before the election — was even more potentially damning: “potus wants to know everything we’re doing.”
To Bongino, that message was clear.
“The POTUS, an acronym for president of the United States, wants to know everything we’re doing,” Bongino told “Fox & Friends.” “The president was Barack Obama. He knew.”
As further evidence, Bongino referred to words Obama spoke in a supposedly private conference call with supporters Friday that was leaked to journalists. (Considering how self-serving Obama’s words were and how critical they were of the Trump administration and the Flynn case, its surfacing in the media felt more like a news release than a “leak.”)
“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said, with his usual disregard for the truth. The Flynn case was a huge story and it played like that in the media.
“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Obama said during the Friday call. “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms, but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”
First of all, Flynn was never charged with “perjury.” He was accused of lying to FBI agents, including Strzok, during what even Comey has admitted was an unorthodox interview at the White House. It would behoove a former constitutional law professor to get terminology like that right.
Second of all, Obama was launching a pretty serious charge against the Trump White House.
And Trump wasn’t taking it — labeling the new revelations about his predecessor’s actions “Obamagate.”
He got caught, OBAMAGATE! https://t.co/oV6fum0zIS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 11, 2020
As the evidence about the “Russia collusion” hoax continues to build — a hoax that plagued the presidency until it imploded with the release of the Mueller report in April 2019 and was buried by Mueller’s disastrous appearance before Congress in July — Bongino is raising a question that only gets more serious as the November presidential election approaches.
How far with the media go to keep ignoring a body of evidence the American people deserve to know about?
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