The final, brutal collapse of GOP's big Michael Flynn conspiracy theory

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:

Aaron Blake
@AaronBlake
In 2020, Trump DNI Grenell declassified a list of Obama officials who had allegedly requested Flynn's unmasking. GOP played it big.

But DOJ found, in fact, "all but one of the requests" were made by intel pros, "not at the direction of the official."

washingtonpost.com
Analysis | The final, brutal collapse of GOP’s big Michael Flynn conspiracy theory
A newly revealed report puts to rest the right's conspiracy theories about Michael Flynn.
7:55 AM · Jun 1, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/01/flynn-unmasking-bash-report/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/wXxY1

Among the many GOP efforts to counterprogram the Russia investigation with thinly constructed conspiracy theories, one of the most persistent ones was the so-called unmasking of Michael Flynn.

The idea was that Obama administration officials deliberately targeted Donald Trump associates — and particularly Flynn — by requesting the disclosure of their names in intelligence reports before Trump took office, doing so for political purposes. This fed into long-running allegations of the government “spying” on Trump, who chose Flynn as his national security adviser.

We knew before that this theory had fallen apart. We now know just how spectacularly.

BuzzFeed News late Tuesday revealed a previously top-secret Justice Department report that details the findings of a review ordered by Trump’s attorney general, William P. Barr. The report is a resounding rejection of the conspiracy theories, which were seeded and fertilized throughout Trump’s four years in office by Trump allies and GOP members of Congress.

Essentially, the idea was that the Obama officials might have sought the identity of Flynn in intelligence detailing his December 2016 calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then leaked details for political purposes. (Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about these calls.) And there were valid questions early on about the Obama administration’s use of unmasking, as we wrote in 2017.

*snip*

[Novara]

1. Those motherfuckers are losing all over the place lately

[Baitball Blogger]

3. Some real skull fuggery

Will Barr be held accountable for altering a report?

[underpants]

4. I came back to read this.

Saw it as I was leaving work.

The funniest part, to me, was that his name was never masked. There’s a link in the story to a WaPo article from 2020…and yet they persist with this story. Okay the second funniest part is that this all goes back to Trump admin officials (I think it was Kellyanne) saying the microwaves were bugged.

Jesus. All Flynn had to do was go cash in on his military service with a defense contractor and he’d be rich. I guess he wanted to stay in the game.