by Debra Heine
Attorney Sidney Powell says she’s seeking total exoneration of her client General Michael Flynn (Ret.) from the Department of Justice in a case that she says should be dismissed.
“We don’t want a pardon,” she told John Solomon for his podcast John Solomon Reports. “We want an exoneration.”
Powell said Flynn would accept a pardon, but stressed that they were hoping for a more just outcome. The case, which has dragged on for years, has taken a heavy toll on the retired general.
Flynn, President Trump’s short-lived National Security Adviser, was forced to sell is house in 2018 to help pay for his crippling legal bills. By July of 2019, he had reportedly built up a tab of more than $4.6 million before parting ways with his attorneys Covington & Burling.
“We want this case dismissed in the interest of justice,” Powell said. She told Solomon that anything less than that would be “disgraceful.”
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in December of 2017, even though the FBI agents who interviewed him at the White House that January initially said they saw no signs of deception in his answers. They had questioned Flynn about his telephone conversation during the transition period with Sergey Kislyak the then-Russian ambassador to the United States. But there was actually no reason for him to lie, as nothing he had said in the phone call was improper.
“There was a group of about 10 people in the FBI who met regularly and schemed and planned in multiple meetings how to catch him off guard, keep him off guard, keep him relaxed, so that he did not even know he was the subject of an interview, much less that he was being investigated, or, you know, warned of his rights,” Powell told Solomon.
Last month, Powell asked the court to allow Flynn to withdraw his plea “because of the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness and breach of the plea agreement.” She also accused federal prosecutors of refusing to “comply with … their constitutional, legal and ethical obligations.”
Attorney General William Barr earlier this month assigned U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Jeffrey Jensen to look into the circumstances surrounding Flynn’s FBI interview.
“They’re required to give us anything that’s favorable to the defense, and obviously they haven’t given us that for two years,” Powell told Solomon. “That alone would require dismissal of the case, for suppression of evidence.”
She explained that the original 302 was probably altered by former “FBI lovebirds” Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and is being hidden to cover up “egregious government misconduct.”
Strzok, former counterespionage chief at the FBI, and former FBI lawyer Page were both removed from the Mueller investigation for anti-Trump bias revealed in a series of text messages the pair exchanged while deeply involved in the bureau’s investigations into both Hillary Clinton’s private email server and Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
“You can’t look at the altered 302 and the agents’ notes and not realize that they inserted things in there that weren’t there before,” said Powell, author of Licensed to Lie, a book exposing overzealous federal prosecutors.
Once Jensen is able to review the original 302 report, Powell sees no reason why the case couldn’t be over within a week.
On Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Senator Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), and all of their Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz requesting an investigation into a series of actions taken by Attorney General Barr that they say “appear to benefit the president’s personal or political interests,” including his intervention in the Flynn case.
“The public record provides a number of reasons to believe that President Trump or other White House officials are seeking to influence the Justice Department’s handling of certain investigations, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecutions,” the senators wrote.
They continued, “Our concern is that politically motivated enforcement of federal law could become standard practice. This would permanently damage the integrity and independence of the Justice Department.”
On Friday, The Gold Institute for International Strategy announced that it will honor Flynn with the “Protector of Liberty Award” in NYC on May 11th.
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Debra Heine is a regular contributor to American Greatness.
