Barr speaks

Attorney General Barr sat down with Catherine Herridge for an interview yesterday following the filing of the government’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case. CBS News has chopped the interview into bite-size bits, but it has published the transcript here. Highly recommended.

At the time of the FBI interview of Flynn on January 24, 2017, the FBI had no bona fide counterintelligence investigation of Flynn open. Barr explains:

On the very day they prepared the final papers, the seventh floor, that is the director’s office and the deputy director’s office up there, sent down word they should keep that open. So that they could try to go and question Flynn about this call he had with the Russian ambassador.

Let me say that, at that point, he was the designated national security adviser for President-Elect Trump, and was part of the transition, which is recognized by the government and funded by the government as an important function to bring in a new administration. And it is very typical, very common for the national security team of the incoming president to communicate with foreign leaders.

And that call, there was nothing wrong with it whatever. In fact, it was laudable. He– and it was nothing inconsistent with the Obama administration’s policies. And it was in U.S. interests. He was saying to the Russians, you know, “Don’t escalate.” And they asked him if he remembered saying that, and he said he didn’t remember that.

What about the Russian disinformation peddled to the FBI by the Clinton campaign in the Steele dossier? Barr criticizes the sainted Robert Mueller, whose office nailed Flynn’s hide to the wall. Mueller’s charter included “the potential of Russian influence [on the election]. But I think it was ignored and there was mounting indications that this could very well have been happening and no one really stopped to look at it.”

There is more to come. “[W]e’re in the middle of looking at all of this. John Durham’s investigation, and U.S. Attorney Jensen, I’m gonna ask him to do some more work on different items as well. And I’m gonna wait till all the evidence is, and I get their recommendations as to what they found and how serious it is.”

Then what? “[I]f we were to find wrongdoing, in the sense of any criminal act, you know, obviously we would, we would follow through on that. But, again, you know, just because something may even stink to high heaven and be, you know, appear everyone to be bad we still have to apply the right standard and be convinced that there’s a violation of a criminal statute. And that we can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. The same standard applies to everybody.”

I embedded the government’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case yesterday without exhibits. The whole thing, including exhibits, is must reading. Sol Wisenberg comments on it in the tweet above. I have embedded it below via the FOX News upload to Scribd.

Doc 198 Govt Motion to Dism… by Fox News on Scribd

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