PRESS RELEASE
Robert Parry Warns: Soft Coup on Trump Hidden in Plain Sight
June 8, 2017 (EIRNS)—Investigative Journalist Robert Parry exposes the "Soft Coup on Trump Hiding in Plain Sight" in today’s Consortium News.
He begins with Intelligence Community (IC) head John Clapper’s decision that FBI head James Comey should go alone to brief then-President-elect Trump Jan. 6 on British agent Christopher Steele’s phony dossier on Trump engaging in sex romps in Moscow, to be leaked in time to drain the dignity from Trump’s Jan. 20 Inauguration.
"Substitute J. Edgar Hoover for Comey, and you get the picture," says Parry. It was this decision to tack the classified Steele report on prostitutes urinating on clients onto Trump’s Jan. 6 briefing that gave press the chance to go wild with this report before Trump’s inauguration.
Just as Comey said he inferred an improper order when Trump expressed "hope" that Flynn would not be prosecuted, Trump could have likewise concluded that the obscene sex-urination story amounted to blackmail by the Intelligence Community. J. Edgar Hoover was a master at such warnings conveyed as sincere concern about some political figure’s well-being, Parry reminds readers. Only three days prior, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Trump was being "really dumb" to take on the IC, because "They can get you seven ways from Sunday."
Parry says Comey’s testimony yesterday was aimed at an impeachment or a resignation by Trump—a "soft coup."
The use of the Logan Act "should have set off alarm bells," adds Parry. That law was enacted in 1799 during the "Alien and Sedition" period, and was meant to stop private citizens from trying to conduct foreign policy on their own. It was always suspect, and has never been used in 218 years. So for Obama holdover Sally Yates to use it to go after Michael Flynn, suggests an intent to entrap. Parry recounts Flynn’s history as DIA head in 2012 when the DIA produced "the U.S. government’s most perceptive critique of Obama’s proxy war in Syria, and his prediction of the emergence of an "Islamic State." Seymour Hirsch reported that Flynn’s DIA sent a
"constant stream of warnings about the dire consequences of toppling Assad, Parry says. Flynn told Hirsch that those reports got "enormous pushback from the Obama Administration."
Flynn was out of a job in 2015; joined a speakers’ bureau, and spoke at RT’s gala 10th anniversary dinner in Moscow for a fee. Then, he signed up with the Trump campaign; Clinton’s defeat was a shock, and the IC’s claims about Russian interference in the campaign made Flynn an obvious target.
Parry concludes,
"Amid the mainstream media’s increasingly frenzied talk about Trump’s potential impeachment, there is another remarkable story—how the U.S. Intelligence Community is moving to reverse the outcome of a Presidential election—that is getting ignored in plain sight."
