Michael Flynn
June 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
John Gleeson is the former judge tasked by Emmet Sullivan, the judge in the Michael Flynn case, with talking him into sentencing Flynn in a case that the prosecution has moved to dismiss. One wonders whether any such “talking” is required, other than for the sake of appearances. In any event, Gleeson today filed his brief. He argues that Judge Sullivan should reject the government’s motion and continue the prosecution
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May 14, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
We now know that Joe Biden was among the many Team Obama members who unmasked General Flynn. The mass unmasking of Flynn is bizarre and arguably problematic, but the big sin — a criminal one — was leaking the result of the unmasking to the Washington Post. With so many suspects, it may not be easy to determined who did the leaking. However, the timing of the Post’s report seems
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May 13, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Acting DNI Richard Grenell has released the document listing the names of those Obama administration officials who sought the unmasking of Michael Flynn’s name on the transcripts of his conversations with Sergey Kislyak in anticipation of his taking office as Trump national security advisor; Grenell released the list to Senators Johnson and Grassley. I have embedded Grenell’s cover letter and its attachments below. FOX News reports the story here with
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May 11, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Barack Obama has a conflict of interest — a personal stake — in commenting on the ordeal of Michael Flynn and the Russia hoax in which it was embedded. One would never know it, however, from the ecstatic dissemination of the leak of his halting comments on the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case. Jonathan Turley takes a headfirst dive into Obama’s comments in “President Obama Declares
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May 11, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The Sunday morning gabfests have become a complete waste of time and brain cells except insofar as one seeks to understand the line the media are enforcing. I am glad to have missed the story Andrea Widburg relates in the American Thinker column “Chuck Todd grievously misquoted Bill Barr on Meet the Press.” Picking up the story via Twitter (below) helped me to minimize the pain and the neurological injury.
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May 10, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss its case against Gen. Flynn doesn’t end the matter. Flynn pleaded guilty and the case is at the sentencing stage. In theory, Judge Sullivan could deny the DOJ’s motion and sentence Flynn. I say “in theory” because I understand that motions like the DOJ’s are routinely granted. As the DOJ states in its motion to dismiss, “When the Government so moves, the role
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May 9, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
The Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the prosecution of Gen. Flynn caused left liberal heads to explode. None exploded more loudly than that of Norman Ornstein. He tweeted, “Bill Barr is a fascist.” No serious analyst would make such a claim, even in the heat of the moment. It’s certainly not fascist to call for review of a case in which a public servant may have been set up for
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May 8, 2020 — Scott Johnson
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
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May 7, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Embedded below is the Department of Justice motion to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn. United States Attorney Jeffrey Jensen’s review of the government’s Flynn case file and previously undisclosed documents recently produced in the case are the key to the government’s decision to abandon the case. Attorney General Barr chooses not to defend the indefensible, though that is not how his decision will be depicted. The dismissal motion is
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May 7, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The conduct of the FBI and the Department of Justice in the Flynn case has been a complete and utter disgrace to both institutions. Earlier today Flynn Department of Justice prosecutor Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the case. Now comes news that the Department of Justice is moving to dismiss the case against Flynn, saving Judge Sullivan the necessity of ruling on Flynn’s pending motions. I believe I predicted this
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May 7, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The hits just keep coming. We know that Rod Rosenstein is an idiotic tool, but we had yet to see the scope memo he issued months late to authorize Robert Mueller’s work as independent counsel. The first “scope memo” was, shall we say, lacking. Now we can see the newly declassified and mostly unredacted version of the August memo Rosenstein issued to remedy the original memo’s defects. Politico’s Daniel Lippman
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May 6, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Former Whitewater/Lewinsky Deputy Independent Counsel Sol Wisenberg’s FOX News column on the Flynn case makes a salient point: [T]his was worse than the classic perjury trap, because in a perjury trap a legitimate investigation is underway. That was not the case here. Flynn had already been cleared in Crossfire Razor and the case file was only kept open under the false pretense of conducting a Logan Act investigation. It was
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May 4, 2020 — Scott Johnson
At last word, Judge Sullivan had ordered Flynn counsel Sidney Powell to stop filing exculpatory evidence newly produced by the government in the case until she had it all in hand. Is it possible Judge Sullivan has seen enough? We now learn from Catherine Herridge’s tweet (below) that Judge Sullivan has ordered the government to respond to General Flynn’s pending motion to dismiss the case on account of egregious government
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May 2, 2020 — Scott Johnson
Andrew McCarthy brings his professional background to bear in reconstructing the events whose outline is evidenced in the exculpatory documents most recently disclosed by the government to General Flynn and counsel Sidney Powell in the Flynn case (embedded below). I had a hard time in part 6 going beyond what appears on the surface of the documents. McCarthy doesn’t have that problem. He takes the documents and constructs an overwhelmingly
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May 1, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The government produced a few more documents to General Flynn’s counsel Sidney Powell yesterday. I have embedded the cover letter and accompanying documents below. John Solomon reports on the documents in his Just the News column “FBI found no ‘derogatory’ Russia evidence on Flynn, planned to close case before leaders intervened.” Sean Davis reports on them in the Federalist column “FBI Closed Flynn Case, Dubbed ‘Crossfire Razor,’ In Early 2017,
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April 30, 2020 — Scott Johnson
The sealed documents produced by the government to counsel for General Flynn this past Friday were unsealed last night. They include handwritten FBI notes documenting internal discussion on the day of the interview of Flynn by agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka. The author of the notes (identified elsewhere as assistant counterintelligence division director Bill Priestap) questioned whether the goal of the Flynn interview was “Truth/Admission” (regarding Flynn’s supposed violation
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April 29, 2020 — Scott Johnson
What we have here is failure to communicate. When Sidney Powell took over the representation of General Flynn from his attorneys at Covington & Burling, the law firm omitted to turn over an additional 17,500 pages it has now found in its Flynn file. Undercover Huber picks up the story in the linked tweets below. Here’s the cover page of the filing pic.twitter.com/bNOMbu3SvD — Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) April 28, 2020
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