Sidney Powell, the attorney for former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, said Wednesday that she would like to see the transcripts of his calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak declassified and released.
Powell appeared on SiriusXM’s The Dan Abrams Show (weekdays from 2-3pm ET on SiriusXM POTUS channel 124). She told the host that she was absolutely certain that they would exonerate Flynn completely:
Abrams: Based on your position of sort of, no wrongdoing, he didn’t lie, et cetera, that you would support releasing the entirety of the conversations that he had with Kislyak, right?
Powell: I’d love to see them.
Abrams: So you would support that?
Powell: I think the reason we haven’t seen them is because the word “sanctions” doesn’t even appear in them.
Abrams: But so you would support the full release of the Flynn-Kislyak conversations?
Powell: I would — I would love to see the release of that transcript. Apparently, the Washington Post or the New York Times had it, but has the defense been allowed to see it? No. No defense lawyer for General Flynn has been allowed to hear the recording or see the transcript. And frankly, I would want both, because I can’t trust the FBI or the CIA or the NSA or whoever it was to do an accurate transcription of anything, given the lies I’ve seen in the 302.
The “302” refers to the FBI’s report of its meeting with Flynn in the White House on January 24, 2017, during which he is alleged to have lied to agents. The original 302 is missing.
Flynn was prosecuted, in part, because he allegedly told the FBI that he had not discussed sanctions with Kislyak during the transitional period between Election Day 2016 and Inauguration Day 2017. He was fired because he told Vice President Mike Pence the same thing.
However, it is unclear exactly what Flynn and Kislyak discussed.
Flynn became embroiled in controversy because his name was leaked to the Washington Post in mid-January 2017, where columnist David Ignatius first reported the Flynn-Kislyak conversations. Flynn’s name was apparently leaked after he had been “unmasked” in transcripts of surveillance of Kislyak’s phone calls.
One of those who asked for Flynn’s name to be “unmasked” was his immediate predecessor, Susan Rice. She wrote a now-infamous email to herself on Jan. 20, 2017 — hours before President Barack Obama left office — memorandizing a Jan. 5, 2017, meeting in the Oval Office where the outgoing administration discussed investigations into Flynn and Trump. She claimed that Obama had instructed that everything be done “by the
Acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Richard Grenell declassified the last portion of that email earlier this week, in which Rice records that Comey told Obama “he has no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak, but he noted that ‘the level of communication is unusual.’”
In response, Rice’s spokesperson called for the DNI “to release the unreacted transcripts of all Kislyak-Flynn calls. The American people deserve the full transcripts so they can judge for themselves Michael Flynn’s conduct.”
Others — on both sides of the controversy — have also called for the release of the transcripts. The report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russia “collusion” — which found none — only quoted Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak indirectly.
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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