A Very Conspicuous ‘Coup’ Meeting in Obama’s Oval Office

May 11, 2020 (EIRNS)—The just-declassified 2017 testimony of former (fired) Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to the House Intelligence Committee, revealed to that committee (and now to the public) that a quite conspicuous meeting took place in President Barack Obama’s Oval Office on Jan. 5, 2017. Present were the intelligence chiefs Clapper, Brennan and Comey and other Federal intelligence officials, the Commander-in-Chief President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and National Security Adviser Susan Rice and UN Ambassador Samantha Power.

There, Yates reported, she was so stunned to learn that Obama had made himself familiar with the transcripts of the National Security Agency call intercepts of Gen. Mike Flynn and then Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and “wanted to know if he should be concerned,” that she “had trouble processing” what followed, and therefore couldn’t recall exactly what more Obama was told about the intercepts at that point.

Yates also could not recall if there were still others at the meeting. Nonetheless, this was an extraordinary gathering in the Oval Office to include the issue of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and on an extraordinary date. The next day, Clapper, Brennan and Comey, along with NSA Director Mike Rogers, were to hold their “briefing/blackmail” meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, threatening him with the salacious dossier of former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, then not yet publicized in the media; the meeting which Comey later joked in House testimony was his “J. Edgar Hoover moment.”

Susan Rice wrote her infamous “cya” “memo to myself” about this meeting.

Quite the planning session, evidently, with Obama—who appears now trying to emerge to front for the half-capacitated Biden—in the central role. Five weeks later General Flynn was forced to resign as Trump’s first National Security Adviser; Obama had clearly tried to order President-elect Trump not to hire Flynn, whom Obama had forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014 after Flynn had repeatedly warned him of the danger of the Islamic State jihadis, when the two Presidents met the previous November.

More, and different insight is still to come from these testimony transcripts House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff has been sitting on.