Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasted a federal judge and members of the “deep state” who he says are working to inflict further damage on retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and the Trump administration.
Gingrich on Wednesday accused U.S. Judge Emmet Sullivan of being part of the deep state after he expressed interest in hearing the opinion of outside parties as to how the case against Flynn should proceed following the Department of Justice’s motion to drop the charges last week.
“It’s just one more outrageous effort by the old order, deep state if you prefer, to cause pain,” Gingrich told Fox News host Sandra Smith. “If the Justice Department comes in and says, ‘We’re not going to prosecute this,’ what are the grounds for the judge saying, ‘Well, I don’t care, I want you to prosecute it even if you’ve decided you can’t prosecute it’? This is one more old boy example of trying to do something to cause pain to somebody that Barack Obama disliked deeply.”
Speaking about Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators but later withdrew his plea, Gingrich said the former national security adviser “deserves a heck of a lot better treatment” than he received from FBI agents who discussed if the goal of their 2017 interview with the retired lieutenant general was to get him to lie so he could be prosecuted or fired.
Gingrich pointed to what he believed were suspicious events in the timeline of who in the Obama administration knew what in relation to investigations into Flynn and other members of President Trump’s transition team. He noted that former acting Attorney General Sally Yates learned that the FBI was targeting Flynn from former President Barack Obama, rather than former FBI Director James Comey.
“The testimony that the acting attorney general did not know what was going on and was surprised that the president of the United States, President Obama, knew what was going on, but she didn’t, ought to tell us something’s very fishy,” he said. “The level of corruption that we are seeing, whether the corruption is Adam Schiff lying for three straight years or the corruption, is frankly, large parts of the news media repeating the lies, or the corruption as the FBI’s top leadership having broken the law, or potentially the president of the United States having basically engaged in a vendetta.”
A former professor of history, Gingrich said he could not recall other examples outside of President Abraham Lincoln’s administration in which such “hostility” toward an incoming administration was permitted to occur.
“I don’t remember any occasion in American history … except maybe Lincoln in the Civil War, where an incoming administration had this kind of institutional hostility expressed at every level,” Gingrich said. “It was clearly an effort to try to destroy Trump before he could begin to change things.”
