One Damn Thing After Another by William P. Barr

Author:William P. Barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Upholding Fairness, Even for Rascals

I had always thought there was something strange about the FBI’s interview of Michael Flynn at the start of the Trump administration, as well as the charges leveled by Mueller’s team against the general for lying to the FBI in that interview. But Flynn had pleaded guilty to those charges, and the Department of Justice ordinarily has a strong interest in keeping guilty pleas from being upset. For that reason, I had planned to let matters play out in the normal course—which meant that I expected Flynn to be sentenced to between zero and six months. I had not discussed the department’s handling of the Flynn case with the President or anyone else at the White House.

At the beginning of 2020, however, two developments occurred that required taking a closer look at the charges brought against General Michael Flynn by Mueller’s office and the ongoing dispute over Flynn’s pending guilty plea.

One of the developments drawing new attention to the Flynn matter was the widening scope of the Durham investigation. Originally, I thought the main focus would be the FBI’s activities prior to the 2016 election. But, by the end of 2019, it was clear that the FBI’s conduct just after the election potentially raised even more serious questions.

In late December 2016 and January 2017, it appeared that the FBI had doubled down on its counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign—that is, just as Trump was entering office. By then, the collusion narrative was beginning to collapse under the weight of counterevidence, but the bureau’s leadership wasn’t behaving that way. Instead, it upped the ante by going after Flynn without any apparent basis. Figuring out the FBI’s motivations for redoubling its efforts pursuing the discredited collusion narrative required a closer look at its handling of the Flynn affair. Thus, even if Flynn’s defense counsel had not challenged the guilty plea, just our own investigative interest in the FBI’s actions called for a review of the Flynn case.

The second development requiring an examination of the Flynn case occurred during the fall of 2019 through January 2020, when his new defense counsel, Sidney Powell, filed a raft of motions seeking to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea. The motions claimed prosecutorial misconduct, alleged the withholding of exculpatory evidence by the government, and asserted that the lawyers who advised him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI had a conflict of interest. Flynn’s original attorneys, Powell’s motions claimed, had advised Flynn, before he returned to government, about his consulting work on behalf of Turkey, which related to the matter that was being dropped as part of the plea.

From early in the Trump administration, Powell, a DOJ alumnus in private practice, had appeared frequently on Fox News shows challenging the Russiagate narrative and the Mueller investigation. Some of her criticisms proved justified, and the President had become a big fan of hers. Before I went into the department, he suggested I consider her for a position there. I took this under advisement but never acted on it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.