The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump pardons former national security adviser
Flynn had sought to withdraw his guilty plea for lying to FBI.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced he had pardoned hi s f or mer national security adviser Michael Flynn, ending a three- year legal saga that saw Flynn seek to withdraw a guilty plea for lying to the FBI and a controversial reversal by the Justice Department on his case.
Flynn pleaded guilty to a felony in December 2017, admitting he had misled investigators about details of his conversations with the Russian ambassador during Trump’s presidential transition.
His plea was one of the first major courtroom victories for special counsel Robert Mueller, who had been appointed seven months earlier.
But this spring, Attorney General William Barr and the Justice Department declared prosecutors should not have brought the case against him and sought to have it dismissed. That request has been pending before a federal judge, who has been reviewing the case.
Trump’s pardon of Flynn marks a full embrace of the retired general he had ousted from the White House after only 22 days on the job — and a final salvo against the Russia investigation that shadowed the first half of his term in office.
The president and his allies have touted Flynn’s cause in their efforts to discredit the special counsel inquiry into whether individuals associated with Trump’s campaign cooperated with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon. Congratulations to @ Genflynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”
Flynn is the second Trump associate caught up in the Mueller probe to benefit from the president’s power to grant clemency. In July, Trump commuted the sentence of his former adviser, Roger Stone, who had been convicted of lying to Congress about his efforts to secure information from Wikileaks during the 2016 campaign.
After his guilty plea in late 2017, Flynn initially cooperated with
special counsel prosecutors pursuing other cases, delaying his sentencing.
But once Mueller’s team disbanded, Flynn hired new lawyers, including attorney Sidney Powell, who this fall was briefly part of a team of Trump legal advisers working to overturn the November election results.
In the Flynn case, Powell argued that Flynn had been entrapped during his FBI interview, conducted at the White House four days after Trump took office. She maintained that he had never intended to lie and that key documents had been withheld from him by prosecutors.
Prosecutors at first continued to pursue the case, and a federal judge rejected several of Flynn’s new arguments.
But in May, acting on instructions from Barr, the Justice Department reversed course and said a new review of the case’s origins led prosecutors to conclude that Flynn’s lies could not be proved i n court. Because of t hat, t he department said, they were not material to an FBI investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election that was underway at the time.
T h e s t u n n i n g t u r n a r o u n d prompted fears of politicization at the Justice Department. Barr insisted that a review of the case concluded it should be dismissed.