Extract of an interview with Matt Taibbi about what happened to me
Interviewer: "They ruined the lives of so many people, like this lady, Svetlana Lokhova. Have you talked to her? Tell us about that. Because I think this was one of the more harmful aspects of this. /1

It didn’t get too much play in the media, I don’t think, but it did get played in terms of how it affected Mike Flynn in his job, or in the case against him, right?

Taibbi: Yes. This is a very dark story and I’ve worked on this and haven’t been able to really tell all of it, /2

but the outlines of it are as follows. In February of 2014, Michael Flynn who was then Barack Obama’s the head of the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, he visited Cambridge, and he was at an official dinner, and during that dinner he was sitting at a table /3

where he was surrounded by two of these figures, Christopher Andrew and Richard Dearlove, and then a fourth person was this woman Svetlana Lokhova who was a doctoral candidate under Andrew. At that dinner she showed Flynn an old postcard written by Stalin that she had uncovered/4

[in] the old NKVD-KGB archives, and they had a conversation lasting about 10 minutes. The entire thing was supervised and surrounded by these sort of luminaries of British intelligence. And nobody said anything about it for two years. And then after all this nonsense started /5

in the summer of 2016, suddenly Halper — who was there that night, although he wasn’t at the dinner — Dearlove, and then later also Andrew ended up sounding the alarm and saying that that Flynn had been seduced by a Russian national at that dinner. /6

And this is something I know for a fact, which is that multiple members of the U.S. media were told by American sources that Flynn was actively having an affair with a Russian agent around that time. And if you go back and look you’ll find that at that time there were a series /7

of news stories that started to come out in December 2016. And then in March of 2017, about Flynn’s interaction with this woman. And it all came from this idea that these these goofballs cooked up that Flynn had been seduced in that five or ten minute conversation by a Russian,/8

because it was the only conversation with a Russian that anybody could think that he had, which is crazy.

Interviewer: this woman, as you just mentioned, was Andrew’s student. And he says at that time in 2014, she was a brand new mother and they just drag this woman /9

through the mud saying that she is a spy, a honeypot, working for Vladimir Putin to suborn Mike Flynn and compromise him in all this treason. I guess you said you talked to her. This really destroyed her life to a great degree, right?

Taibbi: Yeah, absolutely. /10

And it was completely sociopathic on the part of all these people. And I talked to a bunch of the journalists who covered the story…
Interviewer: Like who?
Taibbi: It was all off the record. You can guess by looking at the bylines. There were only five or six major characters/11

who covered this thing. But they all said the same thing. Basically, they were approached by Americans in late 2016. And told, you know, without any hesitation, that Flynn was having an affair with a Russian. This was this was big enough news that American reporters were flown/12

over to London to cover it. And they dug, they tore through this woman’s personal life and they eventually put her name out there. And they never had any kind of real indication that anything had happened.
Interviewer: Well, and they didn’t just pick up the phone and call DIA /13

and say "When this guy was your boss, did you guys have any indication that he was sleeping with the enemy?" How about that for a dog that didn’t bark?
Taibbi: Well and he had passed security clearances multiple times after that, which tells you that whatever these informants /14

thought, they certainly didn’t raise any alarm about it for a significant period of time, for years at least. So the whole thing was was absurd on its face, and I think that a good reporter would have run run screaming in the other direction from the story because there’s just/15

there’s no there there, you know, but they did it anyway. And what was amazing about that is that it led ultimately to the exposure of Halper because he was one of the people who alerted the FBI to this nefarious connection between Flynn and this woman. And his name eventually/16

came out in the newspapers, but they were far more concerned about protecting the identity of Halper than they were about Svetlana Lokhova. So the whole thing was crazy."
END