The FBI calls its report of a given interview a “302.” This Luddite insistence on a written summary in the age of easy voice recording opens the door to all manner of misinterpretation.

In the case of the 302 that recreated the initial interview with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn in January 2017, that misinterpretation may not be innocent. To have any value, a 302 must be prepared within five days of the actual interview. That is FBI protocol as well. Last week, when Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the Robert Mueller legal team to turn over the 302 for the Flynn interview, however, Mueller produced a 302 prepared seven months after the interview.

As Sidney Powell observes in the Daily Caller, there is ample evidence in the infamous Lisa Page-Peter Strzok texts and in the most recent Mueller filing that the FBI had prepared a 302 in a timely fashion. Strzok, in fact, conducted the original interview. That original 302 apparently has been lost or destroyed.

This is not the first time that the FBI -- or some entity with power over the FBI -- has manufactured a 302 in a politically sensitive case. In the case of TWA Flight 800, the 747 destroyed off the coast of Long Island in July 1996, the FBI and/or CIA manufactured second interviews with the three most critical eyewitnesses.

In fact, the CIA built its infamous “zoom climb” animation around a fully imaginary second interview with Mike Wire, “the man on the bridge.” In Wire’s case, no second 302 was put in his file, but someone did put counterfeit 302s in the files of other two key witnesses.

CIA animation

FBI Witness 32, Dwight Brumley, a U.S. Navy master chief, was looking out a right-side window on USAir 217, a plane heading northeast thousands of feet above TWA 800’s path. As recorded on his original 302, Brumley told the FBI he saw a flare like-object moving from “right to left,” very nearly perpendicular to the path of TWA 800. In a later presentation to officials from the FBI and CIA, CIA analyst Randy Tauss insisted that Brumley “observed flare ascending which moved left to right” (italics added).

This supposed flare, Tauss concluded, “matches aircraft trajectory.” In other words, what Brumley saw was TWA 800 in crippled flight after an imagined fuel tank explosion. Brumley, the CIA claimed, was said to have admitted as much “in a second interview.”

In truth, Brumley’s second interview was created out of whole cloth. No one spoke to Brumley after the first week of the investigation. “There was never a second interview with me by either the FBI, the CIA or any other government official,” Brumley firmly told researcher Tom Stalcup in a recorded interview. “I always maintained that the object moved from my right to left, and I never said otherwise.”

Careless or reckless or both, authorities left Brumley’s original 302 filed in the NTSB docket and manufactured a new one with the original date for his CIA file. It was only after the CIA file surfaced that the fraud became obvious.

FBI Witness 73, who has requested anonymity, may have been the best eyewitness of all. On July 17, 1996, Sandy -- not her real name -- was visiting friends on Long Island. They were relatives of her fiancé who was working in New York City. That evening Sandy and her two friends drove to a beach near the Moriches Inlet on the South Shore of Long Island.

Just a few minutes after sunset, the FBI would report in its original 302, “She observed an aircraft climbing in the sky, traveling from her right to her left.” This would have been from the west, JFK airport in New York City, towards the east, eventually Paris, the original destination of the ill-fated 747 with 230 souls on board.

The sun was setting behind her. “While keeping her eyes on the aircraft,” the FBI report continued, “she observed a ‘red streak’ moving up from the ground toward the aircraft at an approximately 45 degree angle. The ‘red streak’ was leaving a light gray colored smoke trail. The ‘red streak’ went passed [sic] the right side and above the aircraft before arcing back toward the aircraft’s right wing.”

According to the FBI, Sandy described the arc’s shape “as resembling an upside-down NIKE swoosh logo.” The smoke trail, light gray in color, widened as it approached the aircraft. Agent Lee Butler interviewed Sandy at her North Carolina home three days after the disaster and wrote down Sandy’s account on a 302.

“She never took her eyes off the aircraft during this time,” the 302 continued. “At the instant the smoke trail ended at the aircraft’s right wing, she heard a loud sharp noise which sounded like a firecracker had just exploded at her feet. She then observed a fire at the aircraft followed by one or two secondary explosions which had a deeper sound. She then observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back. She then observed burning pieces of debris falling from the aircraft.”

Weeks before the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were able to piece together the break-up sequence of the aircraft, Sandy had nailed it. She was the perfect eyewitness. She worked in the travel industry. She had a long-standing interest in aviation. She tracked the plane and the “flare” as separate objects. She read no more into the explosion than what she could observe.

At the Moriches Inlet, she was as close to the actual site of the explosion as any other witness, less than ten miles away. And she was not grandstanding. Just the opposite. Her friends and her fiancé were dead set against her cooperating with the FBI.

As the TWA investigation progressed past November 1996 and Bill Clinton’s successful re-election, the CIA got serious about fulfilling its unprecedented mission, namely discrediting the eyewitnesses to a domestic airline crash. By failing to interview a single one of the more than 250 eyewitnesses to report an apparent missile strike, the New York Times made the CIA’s job a whole lot easier.

According to a theory the CIA concocted, an internal explosion blew the nose off the doomed 747. The noseless fuselage then tilted back and rocketed upright for nearly a mile. According to the CIA, this zoom climb confused hundreds of credible witnesses into merely thinking they had seen a missile.

Only one person stood in the CIA’s way of selling this preposterous scenario to a willfully ignorant media. That was the head of the FBI missile team, Steve Bongardt. Bongardt demanded to know why the CIA analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object “hit the aircraft” or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800.  In all, he cited some thirty “problem witnesses” whose accounts did not begin to square with the “agency scenario.”

In his conclusion, Bongardt hit the CIA hard. He recommended that the CIA “withdraw its conclusions” until it could meet several conditions, any one of which would have unraveled the CIA scenario. These included the integration of radar data, the validation of key witnesses, and the reconciliation of the thirty “problem witnesses” with the zoom climb scenario.

At the time, Bongardt likely did not know that the newly minted CIA director George Tenet had already signed off on the CIA theory. A month earlier, the politically wired Tenet had sent FBI director Louis Freeh a letter assuring him that “what these eyewitnesses saw was the crippled aircraft after the first explosion had already taken place.”

“CIA will continue to look at problematic witnesses,” the CIA’s Tauss responded. He got to work quickly. On the very day Tauss sent this memo to his superiors, April 29, 1997, a second “302” was prepared for the most “problematic” of the FBI eyewitnesses, Witness 73.

In this second interview, Witness 73 conceded that she had been drinking ‘Long Island Ice Tea’ cocktails” before witnessing the explosion, a concession that undermined her original testimony. As “Sandy” told me years later, she did not know what a Long Island Iced Tea was, did not drink, and, like Wire and Brumley, did not give a second interview.

As a coup de grace, whoever put the second 302 in Witness 73’s file put Bongardt’s name on it. The Deep State was playing hardball even then.