Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed The Tennessee Star’s National Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line.
During the third hour, McCabe explained his exclusive story about UK scholar Svetlana Lokhova who has been falsely linked to Michael Flynn as his spy recruiter. He proceeded to lay out the timeline of the Russian hoax narrative and suggested that Stefan Halper, who is a former University of Cambridge professor and member of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar (CIS), should be looked at further.
Leahy: We are joined now by my good friend and former Breitbart colleague and veteran Washington journalist and now the national correspondent for The Tennessee Star and the Star News Digital Media newspapers, Neil McCabe. Neil, good morning!
McCabe: Good morning Mike. Great to talk to you.
Leahy: You’ve broken an exclusive story. This one is a humdinger. Tell us about the female UK scholar who’s been falsely flagged as Mike Flynn’s Russian spy recruiter.
McCabe: I did speak to Svetlana Lokhova and its an interesting story of somebody that’s almost on of these Jimmy Stewart/Alfred Hitchcock movies where there was like a completely regular person who had nothing to do with events gets sort of sucked in. She got pulled in to the Flynn sort of controversy quite accidentally.
I think the first way to really understand it is that retired lieutenant Michael T. Flynn had his top-secret compartmentalized information clearance which is the highest clearance in the government. This means if you ask for it you can see any program and you can ask about any program. That clearance was renewed in April 2016. August of 2016, the FBI opened an investigation into Flynn because they think he’s an agent of Russia.
Leahy: Well they don’t think he’s an agent of Russia, they want to pretend he’s an agent of Russia.
McCabe: Well, there you go. That’s a better way of putting it. They purport that he’s an agent of Russia. How do you give a guy who was the head of the intelligence defense intelligence agency and retired three-star general and the greatest this country has ever produced? That guy in April he gets the full stamp of approval and then August, four months later he’s an agent of the Russians.
Leahy: How does that happen? They created it out of thin air apparently. This was the Obama administration, right?
McCabe: The Obama administration. What happens is that in 2014 Flynn was still director of the intelligence agency and he attended one of these spy dinners. Like who’s a spy and who’s not a spy. (Leahy laughs) It was academics and NI5, NI6. It was a huge group dinner.
And Lokhova, she gives a presentation on her research when she was a graduate student and later became a fellow. Her research was based on Russia spies of the 1930s who went around the United States completely unchecked.
They would basically walk up to airplane factories and stealing all the secrets and take pictures of whatever they wanted. Kind of like what the ChiComs do now. She gave a presentation and she presented a vintage postcard from the Stalin era to Flynn. This became sort of the predicate for saying that Flynn has been compromised. I don’t know how much deeper you want to go into it.
Leahy: This woman is in her 30s at the time and her name is again Svetlana Lokhova right? That’s her last name. Svetlana Lokhova.
McCabe: Yes.
Leahy: Was she born in Russia or the UK?
McCabe: She was born in Russia. She became a British citizen. She has an English husband. She is a mother. The way it was reported in some places and certainly on social media and you’ve seen some of these reports that I sent you that she went home in a cab with Flynn. You talk to the woman and she says its absolutely absurd.
Leahy: Yes. Made up. So this started in 2017. There’s a great quote you have here in your story from the left-wing UK publication The Guardian. March of 2017 here is what they wrote:
“Flynn’s eradicate conduct has troubled US intelligence officials for some time. Multiple sources have told The Guardian involved an encounter with a Russian-British graduate student who Flynn met on a trip to Cambridge in February of 2014.”
That’s it. They are planting the seed there. A honey pot story right?
McCabe: That’s Margot Cleveland in The Federalist called it. Her mentor at the university was Christopher Andrew and he wrote a story in the London Sunday Times which The Times has taken down where he goes into more detail into this sort of relationship. And so what you have is they needed an excuse to go after Flynn. They had just given him the highest clearance this nation has.
What happens in August of 2016 I think, the Neil McCabe narrative, is the Trump campaign is not collapsing like everybody thought it would after the Republican convention. So what you have is on the 10th you have the FBI begins an investigation into Carter Page and to Paul Manafort. Then also into George Papadopolous. Later that week, you have Stefan Halper meeting with the FBI.
Then on the following Monday which would be August 15 you have Peter Strzok sending the insurance policy text to Lisa Page. Also on August 15, you have the black ledger coming out on Manafort. And then on August 16, you have the FBI opening the investigation into Flynn.
Leahy: And by the way, in this timeline when does Mike Flynn become affiliated with the Trump campaign?
McCabe: It was really around June or July.
Leahy: Ok. So just about a month before. Then our friend Steve Bannon takes over the campaign in August right around the time they started to turn around the campaign and that’s when the FBI begins their investigation into these phony charges against Flynn.
McCabe: Yes. The guy Stefan Halper whose name has been floated around. I actually visited his house when I was with One America News and rang the doorbell for our viewers. I just wanted to talk to the guy. He’s a guy who we knew that he got millions of dollars from the office of assessment of the Pentagon for doing studies I believe it’s the IG that researched those studies and found that out of about 800 footnotes, 800 were bogus. (Leahy laughs) So he’s obviously paid for something else.
And now we know, because of a very interesting leak in The New York Times that Halper was working for the FBI in addition to doing work for the Pentagon. He had all these interactions. He offered to hire Papadopoulos to work in some of these studies. He invited Carter Paige to stay at his home in Great Falls, Virginia which is Virginia horse country.
Lokhova is a victim in this and she was used as sort of an excuse. The guy we should be asking about is Stefan Halper. There is a lot of stuff out there about him. What do we really know? I don’t even know if the guy has even been in the country in the last few years.
Leahy: That’s Neil McCabe about his report on Svetlana Lokhova. She’s got a new book called, Spygate Exposedabout her experience at the heart of the Russian collusion hoax and how the FBI, CIA, and media all conspired to destroy Mike Flynn. Neil McCabe, thank you for joining us.
Listen to the full third hour here:
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