FBI director orders review of agency’s probe of Flynn
WASHINGTON — FBI Director Christopher Wray has ordered an internal review into possible misconduct in the investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, the bureau said Friday.
The after-action review will examine whether any current employees engaged in misconduct during the course of the investigation and evaluate whether any improvements in FBI policies and procedures need to be made.
In announcing the review, the FBI is stepping into a case that has become a rallying cry for supporters of President Donald Trump — and doing so right as the Justice Department pushes back against criticism that its recent decision to dismiss the prosecution was a politically motivated effort to do Trump’s bidding.
The announcement adds to the internal scrutiny over one of special counsel Robert Mueller’s signature prosecutions during his investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The unusual review will be led by the bureau’s Inspection Division, which conducts internal investigations into potential employee misconduct. Trump has recently been critical of the FBI, and he suggested this month that Wray’s fate as director could be in limbo. An FBI official said Friday that the review had been contemplated for some time and that the FBI has cooperated with multiple Russia-related internal inquiries.
The FBI did not say what sort of potential misconduct it was looking for. But Trump and his allies have alleged that Flynn was effectively set up to lie when the FBI questioned him at the White House in January 2017.
Those concerns were given new life this month when the Justice Department moved to dismiss the case and identified a series of what it says were problems in the way Flynn was investigated.
The department’s motion to dismiss alleged that agents had insufficient basis to interview Flynn in the first place, especially because the FBI was prepared earlier in the month to close its investigation into Flynn after finding no crime. The motion says any imperfect statements he may have made during the interview were not material to the underlying investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign.
Attorney General William Barr defended the Flynn decision and said in a television interview that he was doing the “law’s bidding” and correcting what he felt was an injustice.
The Justice Department noted that Barr was acting on the recommendation of U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen of St. Louis, who was assigned by Barr to review the Flynn case.
But the Flynn decision outraged former law enforcement officials involved in the case, who said the department had ignored the seriousness of the false statements that Flynn admitted making, as well as the gravity of their national security concerns about Flynn’s interactions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn admitted in his guilty plea that he lied about having asked Kislyak to refrain from escalating tensions in response to sanctions imposed against Russia by the Obama administration for election interference. Obama administration Justice Department officials subsequently warned the Trump White House about that conversation, saying public misrepresentations about it left Flynn vulnerable to being blackmailed by Russia.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has assigned a retired judge to argue against the Justice Department’s position. Flynn’s attorneys have asked a federal appeals court to order Sullivan to dismiss the case and to reassign any future court proceedings to another judge. An appeals court panel, meanwhile, has asked Sullivan to respond to the defense request.