Billingsley's Brilliant: Obama's General Flynn Problem

Lloyd Billingsley's article at Frontpage is absolutely brilliant in sketching the big picture of the Obama years in relatively few words--Obama's General Flynn Problem:

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And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. 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. 

That was former president Barack Obama last week after the DOJ dropped the case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had not been “charged with perjury,” or anything else. The FBI set up Flynn in a perjury trap, with threats against his family, and that violated both institutional norms and the rule of law. The 44th president set up the whole thing in a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting with FBI boss James Comey, vice president Joe Biden, CIA boss John Brennan, and other administration officials. This revelation created a stir, but it’s really old news. 

“POTUS wants to know everything we are doing,” Lisa Page texted to Peter Strzok, the FBI factotum in the campaign against candidate and President Trump. To keep that operation going once Trump took office, POTUS needed to take down Flynn. The January 5 meeting was key but in May of 2017 a bigger bombshell would explode. 

'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.

This was the judgement of POTUS 44’s official biographer David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed author of Bearing the Cross, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and other books. ... 

Dreams from My Father was a novel, and Garrow was on to the composite authorship.  On page 1049 of Rising Star, an unidentified reporter explains, “The whole Obama narrative is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it’s not entirely true.” ... 

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There is “no precedent” for a composite character with a bogus autobiography becoming president of the United States, yet it happened in 2008, and again in 2012. There was no precedent for an outgoing president to deploy deep state operators to support his chosen successor and attack her opponent, yet in 2016 the composite character did just that. 

In similar style, there was no precedent for an outgoing president tasking the FBI to target a National Security Advisor with a perjury trap to destroy his life and reputation. In 2017, the composite character sprung that trap, and in 2020 he tricks it out with the lie that Flynn was charged with perjury. And if you like your plan, you can keep it.

There was no precedent--but there is now. And that means America will never be the same again. There was, up to now, a certain innocence in the American Dream, the American story, the myth of American Exceptionalism. Our Age of Innocence is over and done with. There are now new precedents. Are these new precedents a genie that can somehow be put back in the bottle? That's ultimately not up to Bill Barr but to the American people, and there's reason to doubt that the American people are up to that task.