Miranda Devine

Miranda Devine

Opinion

Michael Flynn fiasco will reveal Obama’s truth: Devine

No wonder Barack Obama is “pretty darn invested” in making sure Donald Trump doesn’t win re-election. The former president knows his Teflon coating is wearing thin.

With his nemesis, Gen. Michael Flynn, suddenly exonerated, he also knows that Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr are closing in on the truth of his role in the whole dirty Russia-collusion lie.

“There’s more to come,” President Trump told “Fox & Friends” on Friday, the day after the Justice Department dismissed its case against Flynn, having found that the FBI had laid a “perjury trap” for his short-lived national security adviser.

“I believe [Obama] and Biden … Sleepy Joe was involved in this also, very much.”

The only way to ensure that the truth about Obama never sees the light of day is to defeat Trump in November, even if all the Democrats have for a candidate is a sleepy guy in a basement.

“We got to make this happen,” Obama said Friday in a vehement conference call with 3,000 supporters.

The call was leaked to Yahoo News, in Obama’s first public declaration of war against Trump.

What brought him out of the shadows was the collapse of the case against Flynn.

“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Obama raged, although Flynn was not charged with perjury and plenty of people, including Bill Clinton, have escaped “scot-free” after lying under oath.

Obama said the Flynn case means “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

No, the rule of law was trashed long ago on his watch.

It was trashed when the collusion hoax was hatched in the dying days of his administration.

It was trashed when he planted the seeds of doubt with then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates about Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador.

It was trashed by the FBI’s targeted destruction of Flynn, who they knew was innocent from the start.

It was trashed when the Steele dossier, which we now know was Russian disinformation paid for by the Clinton campaign, was passed off by the FBI and CIA as legitimate intelligence to damage Trump and cover their own misdeeds.

Obama’s henchmen knew there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and, under oath, behind closed doors, they told the House Intelligence Committee so, yet the lie they let loose kept running.

Flynn was a marked man from the moment Obama fired him as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, ostensibly for “insubordination.”

Really, it was because Flynn, the most effective intelligence officer of his generation, had embarrassed Obama by refusing to go along with the “big lie” that the Islamist enemy was defeated.

In 2014, after Obama dismissed ISIS as a terrorist “JV team,” Flynn warned the Senate Armed Services Committee that the jihadist group was a growing threat. He was fired soon afterward.

“Frankly, at the White House, it didn’t meet the narrative,” he later told the New York Times.

Obama held onto his grudge against Flynn, a war hero in Iraq and Afghanistan, the man who, with another heroic general fired by Obama, Stan McChrystal, is credited with saving America from half a dozen terrorist attacks.

After Trump won the 2016 election, Obama went to the trouble repeatedly of warning him not to hire Flynn as his national security adviser.

Within a few weeks of taking the job with the new Trump administration, Flynn was forced to resign, after malicious leaks from intelligence operatives about a phone conversation with the then-Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

The man who probably took the greatest delight in blackening Flynn’s reputation was Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

In a July 17, 2017, interview with the House Intelligence Committee during its ill-fated Russia-collusion probe, Clapper claimed Flynn’s “strident views about ISIS” weren’t the reason for his dismissal by Obama. It was his “erratic management style [and] the infamous Flynn facts where General Flynn was convinced that the [Iranians] were behind the Benghazi attack.”

Clapper said he was “disturbed” about Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak, which had the effect of “essentially neutering — my characterization — the sanctions [against Russia] that had just been imposed [by the Obama administration].”

But that wasn’t true. There was “nothing wrong” with the call, Barr told CBS last week. “In fact, it was laudable.”

As a paid CNN contributor, Clapper repeatedly declared, with all the authority his former job carried, that Trump was a Russian “asset.”

Yet under oath, he told the Intelligence Committee, “I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”

It’s a tawdry story. The Trump presidency was booby-trapped from Day One by the Obama administration’s abuse of the rule of law.

The mystery is how a party so power-mad that it would inflict the collusion fraud on the nation could possibly choose a candidate as hopeless as Basement Biden for such a high-stakes election. Unless he is a placeholder. But for whom?

Maybe the clue is to be found on Netflix, where a new hagio-documentary of Michelle Obama offers a nostalgic mirage that a pandemic-weary nation might fall for.

In it, the charismatic former first lady manages to drop plenty of hints about her own “hopes and aspirations.”

A new and improved Obama would be the answer to Democratic woes.

A Pulitzer? Oh, pul-eeze!

Fat chance the Pulitzer Prizes won by the New York Times and Washington Post for their bogus Russia-collusion stories will be rescinded.

Much of their reporting of “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign” was wrong, and, worse, deliberately planted for mischief.

But the Pulitzer has a history of awarding prizes for shameless journalism, and the Times has a history of keeping them.

Take Walter Duranty, the Times’ Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936, who painted glowing portraits of life in the USSR, airbrushed over the gulags and denied there was a famine in the Ukraine.

For his efforts, he was awarded the Pulitzer in 1932. Sixty years later, the Times admitted it was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”

But they kept the prize.

We’ll tell you WHO’s got a lotta nerve!

It’s rich of the World Health Organization to complain that it’s not privy to US intelligence about the Wuhan lab where COVID-19 may have originated.

Who would share intelligence with an outfit that sold out the world to China?

The latest damning evidence of WHO’s complicity in the death and illness of millions comes in a report in Der Spiegel that German intelligence found Chinese President Xi Jinping asked the UN agency on Jan. 21 to delay the public announcement of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19.

This is despite the fact that an expert team sent to Wuhan from the Taiwan CDC say they confirmed transmission as early as Jan. 14 and tried to warn the UN health organization.

It took until March 11 for WHO to declare a pandemic — and by then, it was too late.