Polack part of Flynn’s criminal case team
Democratic candidate helped finalize plea deal
Democratic congressional candidate Roger Polack says he would be willing to team up with Republicans to get things done if he is elected this November.
“I would certainly be working to compromise with Republicans across the aisle and would push hard for issues that I care deeply about and that bring up the well-being of the people of southeastern Wisconsin,” Polack recently told the Janesville Gazette.
It’s a novel argument in a Democratic primary.
But here’s what Polack — who is running to take on GOP U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil — doesn’t say: He already crossed the aisle in a big way by lending a helping hand to one prominent Republican in an extremely high profile case.
Records show Polack, 37, was part of the legal team that helped negotiate and finalize a plea deal for President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Yes, the Democratic candidate was assisting a top member of the Republican president’s team in this seemingly never-ending criminal case.
In 2017, Flynn admitted to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. shortly before Trump’s inauguration. Flynn also acknowledged submitting false reports to the U.S. Department of Justice about his work for Turkish interests during the campaign.
The Justice Department has since moved to drop the charge against Flynn, and a U.S. Appeals Court last week agreed to hear the matter.
Nowhere is this case mentioned in Polack’s rather lengthy resume.
As an associate at the Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, Polack certainly wasn’t the lead attorney on the Flynn case. That fell to partners Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony.
Rather, Polack was one of four other attorneys at the firm to assist Kelner and Anthony, who were named “litigators of the week” by The American Lawyer after the plea deal.
“Plus, they have a crack team supporting them at Covington, which includes of counsel Brian Smith and associates Josh DeBold, Alexandra Langton and Roger Polack,” The American Lawyer blog wrote in December 2017.
Pretty high plaudits for someone
who just earned his law degree earlier that year.
Now staffers at the Covington firm are playing a big role in funding Polack’s campaign. Of his 207 individual campaign donors, 92 are from Covington employees, accounting for $40,100.
Not that Polack wants to talk about any of this.
His campaign agreed that he would do a videoconference about the issue with the Journal Sentinel in this race to represent southeastern Wisconsin in the U.S. House of Representatives. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Polack’s campaign manager, Christian Duffy, issued a statement on his work on the Flynn case.
“As a new associate in a law firm, Roger was assigned to work on the ongoing case along with other attorneys,” Duffy said. “One thing Democrats and Republicans generally agree on is that in the American legal system, everyone is entitled to representation.”
Duffy said the Flynn case represented a small percentage of Polack’s caseload. He was more focused on human rights and international work. This included, Duffy said, “arguing for crimes against humanity and genocide in Asia and suing Russia at the International Court of Justice.”
But it doesn’t appear that Polack was just a glorified gofer in the Flynn case.
Federal records show that he received highly detailed, confidential summaries of meetings and phone conversations between his firm and the staff for former special counsel Robert Mueller III. He was asked to help pull together information on Turkey and Flynn’s consulting firm in preparation for Flynn’s meeting with investigators.
Interestingly, this cache of internal records from Polack’s former law firm was made available only because Flynn’s new attorneys turned on Covington & Burley in their bid to have the former national security adviser withdraw his guilty plea.
Polack, who grew up in Racine, previously served at the U.S. Treasury Department as an intelligence analyst and policy adviser under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Polack’s involvement in the Flynn case — and his other experience in the federal government — was just too much for his long-shot congressional opponent, Josh Pade, who got 0.35% of the vote in the 2018 Democratic primary for governor.
“We need a Washington outsider to take on Bryan Steil in November, not another member of the Washington establishment,” said Pade, a 40-year-old business consultant. “Corporate special interests and political insiders have dominated Washington politics for too long — meanwhile, Wisconsin families are facing economic and healthcare crises.”
Polack has raised more than $235,000, nearly four times as much as Pade. The two square off in the Democratic primary next week. The winner faces Steil in November.