The former campaign manager for the president said that Obama had “sinister” intentions when he advised President Trump to not hire General Michael T. Flynn to protect the Deep State.
They describe how President Obama and President-elect Trump sat talking for a long time in the Oval Office, stretching what was supposed to have been a ninety-minute meeting into a freewheeling session that went well beyond three hours.
‘You might have seen pictures of that day—all smiles, backslapping, and friendly handshakes. By all accounts, President-elect Trump truly enjoyed his meeting with President Obama that afternoon. Those smiles were all genuine, at least on Trump’s part.’
On the way back to Trump Tower from LaGuardia the president-elect called Lewandowski from the secure phone in the car.
‘Corey took the call in Dave’s office. Mr. Trump was elated. It might have been the first time he ever spoke to Obama face-to-face.
‘They talked about the Yankees and the Cubs and ESPN. “He’s a regular guy!” the president-elect exclaimed. Melania, too, had enjoyed the visit, having tea with Michelle Obama in the White House residence. The two then sat for an extended time on the Truman Balcony discussing their backgrounds and their children.’
There was one thing about the meeting, however, that seemed odd to Trump.
President Obama had given him one unique piece of advice—something he hadn’t asked for and wasn’t quite sure what to do with now that he had it.
‘Not that Mr. Trump minded. He was about to enter the most challenging job in the world, and Obama had been the president for eight years. He knew from staff briefings that it was customary for the current president to pass down advice and counsel to his successor.
‘Obama offered this counsel—”North Korea is your single biggest national security threat,” and second, he said, “Don’t let anyone influence you on who to hire or not.”
‘In light of these facts, the advice Obama had given Trump took us by surprise. Obama had prefaced the advice—more of a stern suggestion, really—by telling the boss that he should go with his gut when making decisions about his staff.
‘”Don’t listen to anyone who tries to talk you out of hiring who you want,”the president had said, according to Trump. He followed up that statement, however, with an odd turn. Something much more specific.’
No more than a few minutes after providing that advice, Obama told Trump not to hire General Michael T. Flynn, one of the few people we were already seriously considering for a position in the administration.
‘Only in looking back can we see how odd the suggestion was, especially considering what Obama had known about Flynn,’ write the authors.
‘As President-elect Trump recalled his meeting with Obama that afternoon, we were tempted to think that Obama’s aversion to Flynn was little more than a small annoyance—something he never should have said aloud but that had no real consequence in the end.
‘We even toyed with the notion that Obama had simply been trying to get into Trump’s head, thinking he could put our administration on its heels early out of spite.
‘Knowing what we know today, that might have been the case. But it also could have been something much more sinister.
‘We have little doubt that Obama had let his intelligence agencies spiral out of control during his eight years in office, even going so far as to either implicitly or explicitly allow them to conduct surveillance on citizens of the United States on domestic soil—and not just any citizens, but members of the Trump campaign.’
The people at the top of his government were more left-leaning than in any administration in history, and they obviously felt threatened by the incoming Trump administration, say Lewandowski and Bossie.
For Obama’s intelligence community, spy games like this were the rule rather than the exception, they claim.
Now that Flynn was slated to come in and take over as head of the National Security Council, he would have access to the most sensitive intelligence in the country.
‘It’s not unreasonable to assume that Obama knew Flynn could expose some of the misconduct in which his intelligence agencies had engaged—particularly when it came to the abuse of surveillance practices.
‘He certainly knew that Flynn could do some damage to the permanent power structures of his intelligence agencies and shake up the bureaucracy he had helped to grow.
‘Obama probably figured that if he could convince Trump in a private meeting—the details of which were never supposed to leak—not to hire Flynn in the first place, the chances of his illegal spying on American citizens ever coming to light would decrease dramatically.’
President Obama, likely at the behest of the Deep State’s leaders, such as then-CIA chief John Brennan, and the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, was going to do everything he could not to give Flynn a chance.
President-elect Trump was ready to take over the White House with a collaborative spirit, retaining as many nonpartisan staffers as he could and cutting back on the insults to liberals on twitter.
The authors say it was neither Clapper nor Brennan who changed the course of history. That person was the man who in one short meeting would set in motion a conspiracy that would seek to cause critical damage to the presidency: James Comey.
For it was Comey who delivered the damning dossier concocted by Christopher Steele to the president-elect.
‘By bringing that folder into his briefing with Trump, Comey transformed the dossier from unverified fiction to ‘a document that was presented to the president-elect in a private briefing with intelligence agencies.
‘Fake News organizations could now make it sound like an essential piece of information.
‘Comey had given the fake dossier legitimacy, and the Fake News license to print the whole thing, which BuzzFeed did a day later. He admitted he did this in his own memos, writing that CNN was waiting for a ‘news hook’ to publish.’
