Flynn dismissal shows Barr, Trump in sync on Russia
AG has challenged Mueller conclusions
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says he didn’t know the Justice Department was planning to drop its case against his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
The extraordinary action underscored the extent to which Trump and Attorney General William Barr have been in sync in their views on the federal Trump-Russia investigation — with or without communicating about it. Barr himself has openly challenged the decisions of predecessors and his own prosecutors. He’s launched internal probes to investigate the investigators.
Trump is emphatically welcoming the Flynn action. He has railed against the special counsel’s inquiry into his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Russia.
The decision to dismiss the Flynn case had the effect not only of undoing a key prosecution from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but also of sparing the president from having to make a politically charged pardon decision in the current election year.
The sudden action on Flynn has produced familiar divisions in public opinion. Trump allies cheered the results, while Democrats and some current and former officials expressed dismay.
“Bill Barr is a man of unbelievable credibility and courage,” Trump said during a Friday telephone interview on “Fox & Friends.” “And he’s going to go down in the history books.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed about going down in history but for a different reason. She said, “Attorney General Barr’s politicization of justice knows no bounds.”
If Trump was upset for political reasons about the case of Flynn, the Justice Department says Barr was troubled by legal issues. Those include what he believes were irregularities in the FBI’s 2017 interview of Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to agents about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.
The dismissal was just the most recent example of Barr challenging conclusions from the Russia investigations. Mueller criticized him last year for not capturing the severity of his findings in Barr’s four-page letter summarizing the probe’s conclusions. Barr has said he doesn’t believe there was sufficient evidence for the FBI to open a full investigation, and that the FBI launched “an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions.”
In February, he overruled prosecutors in the case of Trump ally Roger Stone, on grounds that they had recommended excessive prison time. He appointed one U.S. attorney to examine the origins of the Russia investigation — now a criminal investigation — and another to look into the Flynn case specifically.
The Flynn outcome was startling in multiple ways, not least because the Justice Department rarely undertakes internal reviews of its own prosecutions — let alone cases in which a defendant has pleaded guilty.