New documents suggest that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had drafted a document dropping the case against incoming National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.) — until agent Peter Strzok intervened.
The documents are emerging as the result of efforts by Flynn’s defense team to obtain exculpatory information from the prosecution to which they are legally entitled. Flynn’s former lawyers at Covington and Burling, who encouraged him to accept a plea deal with the Department of Justice, neglected to turn over thousands of pages of documents to the new team. It is not clear whether the FBI files are also among the Covington documents.
The documents include text messages from Strzok to another agent urging that agent not to close the case. Strzok infamously texted FBI lawyer Lisa Page about their mutual dislike of Trump and his supporters, and talked about an “insurance policy” they would pursue in the unlikely event that Trump won the 2016 election. Strzok was later reassigned away from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into “Russia collusion” after his anti-Trump bias was discovered in the text messages. (No such “collusion” was ever found.)
Notably, the memorandum to close the investigation into Flynn — for allegedly violating the Logan Act, an archaic law preventing private citizens from conducting public diplomacy — was dated January 4, 2017.
Then-President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and other senior officials met with then-FBI Director James Comey the next day (Jan. 5), to give him instructions as to how he should brief President-elect Trump the following day (Jan. 6) about the FBI’s Russia investigation. Comey was instructed to tell Trump specifically about the salacious accusations in the Steele dossier, which were false and uncorroborated.
The FBI met with Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, and the Department of Justice used that meeting to prosecute him for lying to the FBI. Documents released Wednesday suggest the FBI was not attempting to find out anything new, but to trap Flynn in a lie. They did not warn him he was a target of investigation.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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