After an extraordinary public campaign by President Trump and his allies, the justice department dropped its criminal case on Thursday against Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.
Flynn had previously pleaded guilty twice to lying to FBI agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016.
The move was the latest example of attorney-general William P. Barr’s efforts to chisel away at the results of the Russia investigation. Documents that Flynn’s lawyers cited as evidence of prosecutorial misconduct were turned over as part of a review by an outside prosecutor whom Barr assigned to re-examine the case. Barr has cast doubt not only on some of the prosecutions in the investigation but also on its premise, assigning another independent prosecutor to scrutinise its origins.
The decision for the government to throw out a case after a defendant had already pleaded guilty was also highly unusual. Former prosecutors struggled to point to any precedent and portrayed the justice department’s justification as dubious.
By abandoning the case, the department undid what had been one of the first significant acts of the special counsel investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia’s 2016 election interference — the prosecution of a retired top army general turned national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators.
Though Trump fired Flynn weeks into his presidency for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about the conversations with the diplomat, he has long complained that a corrupt few at the FBI mistreated Flynn and suggested he might pardon him. Law enforcement officials dropping the charges took issue with the FBI’s interview of Flynn in early 2017 as part of the Russia investigation that Robert S. Mueller III later took over.
Agents’ questioning “was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Flynn”, the acting US attorney in Washington, Timothy Shea, wrote in a motion to dismiss the charges. Prosecutors said that the case fell short of the legal standard that Flynn’s lies be “materially” relevant to the matter under investigation.
“The government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017, interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” Shea wrote.
Democrats condemned the move. “A politicised and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the President’s crony simply walk away,” said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
“Americans are right to be furious and worried about the continued erosion of our rule of law.”
He said he would ask the Justice Department inspector general to investigate and work to secure Barr’s testimony before his committee as soon as possible.
In dropping the charges, law enforcement officials abandoned the stance of the career prosecutors who had been on the case, who had argued that Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador to the US at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, “went to the heart” of the FBIs Trump-Russia investigation.
Trump told reporters on Thursday that Flynn was “an innocent man” and accused Obama administration officials of targeting him to try to “take down a President”. He angrily tore into his unnamed persecutors.
“I hope a lot of people are going to pay a big price because they’re dishonest, crooked people,” Trump said. “They’re scum — and I say it a lot, they’re scum, they’re human scum. This should never have happened in this country.”
Barr explained the decision as an effort to “restore confidence in the system” and that law enforcement officials had a duty to dismiss the charges. He said he was “doing the law’s bidding,” not Trump’s.
