Several conservative media outlets have
published stories critical of intelligence agencies that argue leaks from the
community led to the resignation of President Trump’s national security adviser
Michael Flynn.
Breitbart News, the right-wing populist outlet
once helmed by Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, described the effort
to oust Flynn as coming from “the Deep State,” or the entrenched bureaucrats
“who were here in DC when Trump arrived, and who look forward to seeing him
leave as soon as possible.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported this week
that allies of former President Obama still working for intelligence agencies
are working to undermine Trump.“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,” the Free Beacon wrote.
The Daily Caller in a Wednesday night report
cast Flynn as “the victim of a hit job launched by intelligence operatives,
Obama government holdovers and former Obama national security officials.”
The conservative-leaning editorial board of
the Wall Street Journal also wrote two opinion pieces this week demanding an
inquiry along these lines.“Did U.S. spooks have a court order to listen to
[Flynn’s] conversations? Why?” read the sub-head of one editorial.
Trump has repeatedly blasted leaks from the
intelligence community, more recently with regards to Flynn’s dismissal. The
White House is reportedly appointing a close Trump ally, Stephen Feinberg, the
co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, to lead a broad review of
intelligence agencies.
Conservative news outlets are offering
support for Trump’s argument that the real story of Flynn’s resignation is of
illegal leaks by government workers. The Free Beacon described a
“behind-the-scenes effort” to plant damaging stories about Flynn, who is a
critic of the Iran nuclear deal.
It singled out former Obama adviser Ben
Rhodes as “the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he
described as a pro-Iran echo chamber.” “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,” the Free
Beacon reported.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board railed
over how intelligence agencies had recorded Flynn’s call with Russia’s
ambassador to the United States, and then leaked information about it. Flynn
was a private citizen at the time. “U.S. intelligence agencies are supposed to
“protect the identity and speech of innocent Americans,” the Journal argued,
“yet the Washington Post, which broke the story, says it spoke to multiple U.S.
officials claiming to know what Mr. Flynn said on that call.”
In a follow-up editorial, the Journal
demanded Congress and the FBI investigate Flynn’s leaked phone call and
transcript in conjunction with existing probes into Russian interference in the
U.S. election and Trump allies’ connections to Moscow.
Criticisms also appeared on Bloomberg, where
the news service’s Eli Lake, who once wrote for the conservative Washington
Times, wrote a blistering piece called “The Political Assassination of Michael
Flynn.”
Lake wrote that “it's very rare that
reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens.”
In the past, it was “scandalous for senior U.S. officials to even request the
identities of U.S. officials incidentally monitored by the government,” let
alone to leak that information to the press, Lake argued.
“Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and
citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good
reason,” he wrote. “Selectively disclosing details of private conversations
monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy
reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.”
Lake said Flynn was “a fat target” for the
national security state and for Democrats because he had been a fierce critic
of the Intelligence community in the past. Conservatives are also casting
liberals as hypocrites on the issue of mass surveillance, saying they claim to
be against the practice except for one it takes out one of their political
opponents. Even some liberals have made this case.
0 Comments