New attorney for Flynn: 'One atrocity after another'

FPI / February 17, 2020

Attorney Sidney Powell has fired several legal broadsides since she took up the case for retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. But it was the first salvo the Texan fired which alerted Attorney General William Barr that Flynn may have been railroaded, a report said.

In the first paragraph of a private letter she sent to Barr, “Powell requested an outside auditor not associated in any way with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,” Rowan Scarborough wrote in a Feb. 16 report for The Washington Times.

“She argued that Mueller’s lawyers threatened Flynn’s son with prosecution to persuade the retired officer to plead guilty to lying to the FBI.”Powell wrote in the letter to Barr: “We request the appointment of new government counsel with no connection to the Special Counsel team of attorneys or agents to conduct review of the entire Flynn case for Brady material that has not been produced and prosecutorial misconduct writ large.”

“Brady” is a term of exculpatory evidence to which the defense is entitled.

Powell also asked for “a determination of when, how, and on what basis the first investigation of General Flynn began,” reads the letter stamped confidential.

Scarborough noted that “From that day forward, Powell, an appeals court specialist and longtime Justice Department critic, filed a series of arguments accusing the FBI and the special counsel team of gross misconduct.”

Neither Flynn nor any other Trump associate has been charged in the alleged election conspiracy for which Mueller was hired to uncover.

Barr moved to open an independent review of the prosecution of Flynn.

Powell told The Washington Times she doesn’t know exactly why Barr acted. “But [I] am guessing it is from what has been revealed in my filings,” she said.

Powell said the FBI officially put Flynn under investigation in August 2016 in its Russian election interference probe but didn’t tell him during two encounters over six months.

An agent visited the Trump presidential campaign under the guise of a defensive briefing on Russian interference. In fact the agent was there to surreptitiously investigate Flynn, according to a report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Scarborough detailed the targeting of Flynn:

Six months after opening the probe into Flynn, two FBI agents, including Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, visited Flynn at the White House under the guise of a friendly chat about national security. At that point, the FBI had no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy outside of the Christopher Steele dossier, which Republicans say turned out to be a Kremlin hoax.

During the presidential transition, the U.S. had intercepted calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador in which they talked about sanctions.

Inside the Obama Justice Department there was talk of investigating Flynn for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring civilian interference in foreign policy for which no one has ever been convicted.

The call was leaked to The Washington Post, whose story mentions the Logan Act. Flynn defenders say it was a sure sign that Obama administration holdovers were trying to destroy Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.

In her June letter to Barr, Powell recited her version of events. She said prosecutor Brandon Van Grack later acknowledged that the Flynn call was “perfectly legal.” It did not violate the Logan Act, which appeared to be the basis for the FBI visiting Flynn that day.

“There was no ‘Logan Act violation,’ and everyone knew it,” Powell wrote. “Yet General Flynn was illegally unmasked by the Obama administration and his call leaked to explode the ‘Russia collusion’ narrative in the press. The FBI interview was worse than ‘entrapment.’ He was led to believe he was having a casual conversation with friends about a training exercise from a day or two before, when in truth, it was a set-up-tantamount to a ‘frame, manipulated by Yates, Comey, Strzok, McCabe, and others to take General Flynn out of the administration. [Mueller team] then used it to pressure him to try to take out President Trump.”

In an appearance on Fox News’s “Hannity” on Friday, Powell said that “not only was [Flynn] not warned of his rights, he didn’t even know that he was being investigated. In fact, he was led to believe that he wasn’t being investigated.”

Powell added that Flynn’s case was the first instance she had heard of in which a defendant accused of making false statements to the FBI was not warned of his rights or informed that he was under investigation.

“They say they can’t find [it], he can’t produce it [the 302 form],” she said of Van Grack, who she claimed has a separate conflict of interest in the case.

“There is one atrocity after the other in this case,” Powell said.

Flynn last month moved to rescind his December 2017 guilty plea.

The New York Times reported Friday that Barr tapped Jeffrey Jensen, a former FBI agent who serves as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to review the Flynn case.

Free Press International