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1) How Russian Intelligence May Have Initially Ensnared Michael Flynn
Time permitting, I will be posting a thread this afternoon detailing the subtle enticements that may have initially led Flynn astray. If you find this material helpful, please retweet. @HunterJCullen
Time permitting, I will be posting a thread this afternoon detailing the subtle enticements that may have initially led Flynn astray. If you find this material helpful, please retweet. @HunterJCullen
2) In the mind of the average political observer, nothing generates more interest than a good old sexual scandal involving a political opponent. But those whose specialty is intelligence and its role in protecting national security are fully aware of this.
3) Thus, they are aware that such scandals can be used to absorb much of public interest and prevent the public psyche from ever sufficiently considering the more important legal or counterintelligence function that sexual scandal may be serving.
4) We see this with the Steele dossier, a case where everyone seems to be preoccupied with what gross sexual acts an old man like Trump might have been engaged in, instead of being preoccupied with how a powerful man so-compromised might be coerced into betraying his country.
5) And we see the same thing with Michael Flynn and accusations that he may have had an affair with Svetlana Lokhova whom he met at Cambridge University in 2014. Everyone is obsessed with the possible affair and not the counterintelligence implications. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39863781
6) But let's consider Flynn's personal and professional contexts in 2014, and the more subtle overtures he received in those contexts from Lokhova when he visited Cambridge. Let's, for a moment or two, learn to think less like gawkers and more like spies.
7) In June 2013, Flynn became the first U.S. intelligence officer to visit the headquarters of Russian military intelligence. By all accounts, he was very impressed, and as a result, would later take a keen interest in Lokhova in her role as a historian of Soviet intelligence.
8) Back home, Flynn was widely known to clash with the Obama administration, with some feeling he was insubordinate, willing to subvert official policy, and loose with the truth. Flynn, however, felt the administration was running a coordinated campaign of lies against him.
9) Against this backdrop, notice some facts from the BBC article linked above. Lokhova notes that it was her intention to "impress" Flynn and thereby gain his attention. With that attention, she proceeded to tell Flynn the story of an early postcard she had from Joseph Stalin.
10) But so much of the Stalin story seems to parallel that of Flynn. Stalin, the top spy in Soviet history, was a revolutionary who reached out to a female who was in a position to help him escape the surveillance of an oppressive Tsarist regime.
11) Was Lokhova signalling that she considered Flynn, the top U.S. spy as the DNI, to be a revolutionary in need of aid, and that she was someone who could provide it? Was he reading too much into the story of the postcard or is that the very reason she wanted to exchange emails?
12) Whatever the case, an email correspondence between the two did begin, and Flynn let his guard down, calling himself "General Misha" in some, with Misha being Russian for "Michael." And at least one more hint from Lokhova was forthcoming.
13) In response to Flynn's continued interest in Russian espionage, she sent him the below article: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-34012395
14) Was Lokhova signalling to Flynn that, like Belfrage, she was a "sixth man" at Cambridge, a Russian spy who instead of being outed was put under heavy surveillance because the former action would have been an embarrassment to the intelligence establishment?
15) Flynn appears at the very least to have become convinced that Russian intelligence could indeed purloin Clinton's "missing" Secretary of State emails and get them back to Trump's team undetected. It's this very task that brought him to the RT dinner table with Putin in 2015.
16) And, as Rick Gates's interview transcripts from the Mueller investigation show, Flynn was convinced that his friends at the GRU were just too smart for American intelligence to catch them in the act. Thus, they could freely be used as allies against his political enemies.
17) It's this arrogance, as much as the espionage itself, that will be Flynn's ultimate downfall.
If you find helpful or interesting, please retweet.
If you find helpful or interesting, please retweet.
18) Closing the loop with a link back to the beginning. Hope this doesn't confuse any threader apps. 
https://twitter.com/pdavidmullinsjr/status/1265718592617746432?s=20
https://twitter.com/pdavidmullinsjr/status/1265718592617746432?s=20
