Lawyer for Flynn says she updated Trump on status of case

A lawyer for former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn told a judge Tuesday that she recently updated President Donald Trump on the case and asked him not to issue a pardon for her client.

The attorney, Sidney Powell, was initially reluctant to discuss her conversations with the president or the White House, saying she believed they were protected by executive privilege. But under persistent questioning from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, she acknowledged having spoken to the president within the last few weeks to brief him and to request that he not pardon Flynn.

She did not elaborate on the request, but it presumably reflected a defense team desire to have Flynn’s case dropped through the court system and have a judge concur with the Justice Department’s assertion that the prosecution may be abandoned. Attorney General William Barr, who appointed a U.S. attorney from Missouri to investigate the handling of the case, moved in May to dismiss the case despite Flynn’s own guilty plea.

The revelation that Powell had recently spoken with the president about the case that arose from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation underscored the politically charged nature of the prosecution. Flynn has emerged as something of a cause clbre for Trump supporters, while critics of Barr’s action - including former FBI and Justice Department officials - decry what they see as the politicization of law enforcement in the move to drop the case.

Current Justice Department officials rejected that characterization at Tuesday’s hearing, the first since a federal appeals court ruled that Sullivan did not have to immediately dismiss the prosecution just because the government wants him to. At issue before the judge Tuesday was what role courts can play in scrutinizing prosecutors’ request to abandon a case they had once brought.