Radio Recap – General Flynn Still Waiting on Justice

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
May 15, 2020

5 min read

Constitution

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General Michael Flynn is still waiting for justice.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live we continued our discussion from yesterday's show about this week's bombshell developments in the General Michael Flynn case, as well as our previous work to expose the truth behind the Obama Administration’s unmasking efforts.

We’ve gone deeper in our analysis. In June of 2019, we had a blog about a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that we had to go to court over with the State Department and the NSA about U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power. It said:

Over the last two years, we’ve all seen the reports of the unprecedented unmasking of U.S. citizens by senior Obama official, Ambassador Samantha Power, in the final days of the Administration – to the tune of more than one a day. Now, through our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, we have unearthed evidence of significant political bias during the same time period she was unmasking Americans.

The media has reported that among other Obama Administration officials, former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power made numerous requests seeking the “unmasking” (or unredacted identification) of names and other information about members of the Trump campaign team whose communications had been incidentally caught up in intelligence surveillance efforts. Power’s requests, reported to number in the hundreds, occurred mostly in the final days of the Obama Administration, that is between the election of President Trump in November 2016 and his inauguration in January 2017.

Now, the media didn’t like to focus on what we found in one of our FOIA reports, which was what was behind Ambassador Samantha Power’s unmasking requests. Our June 2019 blog further made the following points:

The evidence we obtained shows email chains to and between Power and her Counselor, Nikolaus Steinberg, just three days after the election in which Power actively discusses an “idea to seek maximum amplif[ication]” of her politically biased messaging.  Steinberg first raised the idea of “a useful (and somewhat cathartic) vessel to Channel some post-Trump messages about who we are.” Minutes later Power responds, “Need to move out on 60 mins idea to seek maximum amplif. [sic] I can write Charlie or bill Owens if he’s still there.”

After a brief discussion ensued over who would reach out, later that evening, Steinberg sent Power a “Draft pitch email” for her to send to 60 Minutes, yet that draft is completely redacted. Subsequently, he suggested doing the pitch to 60 Minutes or CBS Sunday Morning on the issue of refugees, stating, “with the hook being the foreshadowing that Trump and company may try to undo all of this.”

Think about this, it’s very political. President Trump is not yet in office at the time and her unmasking requests begin ramping up. She then shoots off an email to the Executive Editor of 60 Minutes. We quoted the email in our blog:

We’re still reeling here, as you might imagine. My mission to the UN is a cabinet agency under President Obama, but will be demoted to something very different in January. Notwithstanding this, Tuesday’s results have given us an even greater sense of urgency to get our work done in our last few months. 70 good long days left!

Now we know some of that work was to undermine the State of Israel. Right off the bat, the Obama Administration was not facing any more elections and they undermined Israel. Their decision to not veto, or to abstain, on a U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israel, severely undermined our ally.

ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett made the following point:

It was the same as walking away from them. It had been a U.S. veto historically that had kept the Security Council from passing that resolution. Under Ambassador Power’s watch and President Obama’s watch the United States walked away from that in the waning days of the Administration. Fortunately, this Administration has put it back in place.

As terrible as that decision was, at least it was in the core of Ambassador Power’s duties and responsibilities. All of what you’re talking about, Jordan, has nothing to do with being U.N. Ambassador. Some of those exchanges between her deputy Steinberg were on December 14th. That was the day she made two of the unmasking requests and if you continue going through the timeline, really she kept going back to the unmasking requests to bolster, not her official job, but to bolster what had become her unofficial job down the stretch. That was undermining the next Administration.

We now know that Ambassador Samantha Powers made a total of seven unmasking requests regarding General Michael Flynn.

We also discussed that President Trump delivered remarks on vaccine development to fight COVID-19 today.

The entire broadcast is complete with more in-depth analysis of the Obama Administration’s unmasking efforts as well as a discussion of the status of General Flynn’s case.

Watch the full broadcast below.