Justice Dept. tosses Flynn’s criminal case
U.S. attorney says illegitimacy of probe renders any lying irrelevant, not illegal
WASHINGTON — After an extraordinary public campaign by President Donald Trump and his allies, the Justice Department dropped its criminal case Thursday against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
Flynn had previously pleaded guilty twice to lying to FBI agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016.
The move was the latest example of Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation. Documents that Flynn’s lawyers cited as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct were turned over as part a review by an outside prosecutor whom Barr assigned to reexamine the case. Barr has cast doubt not only on some of the prosecutions in the Russia investigation but also on the premise itself, assigning another independent prosecutor to scrutinize its origins.
The decision for the gov
ernment to throw out a case after a defendant had already pleaded guilty was also highly unusual. It undoes what had been one of the first significant acts of the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference — the prosecution of a retired top Army general turned national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.
Though Trump fired Flynn weeks into his presidency for lying to Vice President Mike Pence about the conversations with the diplomat, he has long complained that a corrupt few at the FBI mistreated Flynn and suggested he might pardon him. Law enforcement officials moving to drop the charges took issue in a court filing with the questioning of Flynn in January 2017 as part of the Russia investigation that Mueller later took over.
The questioning “was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn,” the acting U.S. attorney in Washington, Timothy Shea, wrote in a motion to dismiss the charges. Prosecutors said that the case did not meet the legal standard that Flynn’s lies be “materially” relevant to the matter under investigation.
“The government is not persuaded that the Jan. 24, 2017, interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” Shea wrote.
‘Thoroughly corrupt’
Democrats condemned the move. “A politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the president’s crony simply walk away,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, DN.Y., the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. “Americans are right to be furious and worried about the continued erosion of our rule of law.”
He said he would ask the Justice Department inspector general to investigate the dropped charges and work to secure Barr’s testimony before his committee as soon as possible.
In dropping the charges, law enforcement officials abandoned the stance of prosecutors who had been on the case, who had argued that Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, “went to the heart” of the FBI investigation.
‘An innocent man’
Trump told reporters Thursday that Flynn was “an innocent man” and accused Obama administration officials of targeting him to try to “take down a president.” He angrily tore into his unnamed persecutors. “I hope a lot of people are going to pay a big price because they’re dishonest, crooked people,” Trump said. “They’re scum — and I say it a lot, they’re scum, they’re human scum. This should never have happened in this country.”
The Justice Department said that it did not brief the White House before it dropped the charges.
“I want to make sure that we restore confidence in the system,” Barr said in an interview with CBS News. “I believe that justice in this case requires dismissing the charges against General Flynn.”
When asked whether Flynn lied, Barr said that “people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.”
Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, said on the Fox Business Network that she and her client were “relieved and gratified” that Barr withdrew the case. She called the decision “a restoration of the rule of law.”
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak during the presidential transition. He had also entered a guilty plea a second time in 2018 at an aborted sentencing hearing. At the time, Flynn said he knew that lying to the FBI was a crime and accepted full responsibility for what he had done.
It is now up to the federal judge in Washington overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, to decide whether to dismiss it and close off the possibility that Flynn could be tried again for the same crime.