Michael Flynn accused prosecutors of withholding and manipulating evidence in a Wednesday motion to dismiss his case, marking the latest move in the onetime National Security Adviser’s turn from government cooperator to conspiratorial agitator.
Alleging “outrageous misconduct,” Flynn is trying to convince a federal judge to throw his case out “in the interests of justice” due to allegedly overwhelming prosecutorial wrongdoing.
Flynn is making the request after withdrawing his guilty plea in the false statements case, which saw him briefly cooperating with the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Now, Flynn has taken a recent Justice Department inspector general report, allegations that a federal prosecutor suborned perjury, and allegations of withheld exculpatory evidence to claim that he was framed and setup by his own government in shockingly inappropriate and wrongful conduct by the ‘leadership’ of the FBI, DOJ, and ‘intelligence officials.'”
“Only the dismissal of this prosecution in its entirety would begin to get the attention of the government, the FBI, and the DOJ needed to impress upon them the ‘reprehensible nature of its acts and omissions,'” wrote Sidney Powell, counsel for Flynn.
Flynn argued that a DOJ inspector general report which identified omissions in FISA warrant applications last month exposed how the prosecution against him was politically motivated.
The IG report itself drew no such conclusion; but, to Flynn, it was a “scathing indictment of the conduct of the leadership and small group in the FBI that ran this operation against Mr. Flynn.”
“The IG Report evinces that Mr. Flynn has still not been provided with all the evidence of egregious government misconduct dishonestly wielded to destroy the National Security Advisor to President Trump as part of their larger anti-Trump scheme,” the motion reads.
Flynn also implied at one point in the filing that he remained some kind of unspecified source for the Defense Intelligence Agency after leaving it. “The documentation of his work with the DIA after he retired is a significant part of the Brady evidence the government has refused to produce to Mr. Flynn,” his defense attorneys alleged.
The former national security adviser also pointed a finger at Brandon van Grack, a former Mueller prosecutor who now heads up the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act unit.
Enforcement of FARA, which mandates that lobbyists for foreign interests register with the Justice Department, is being ramped up.
Flynn accused van Grack of trying to suborn perjury, saying that the prosecutor “sought to have Mr. Flynn make a false statement in his EDVA interview on June 25, 2019, and was encouraging subornation of perjury by Mr. Flynn.”
The FARA episode came out during the July 2019 prosecution of former Flynn associate Bijan Rafiekian. Robert Kelner, Flynn’s former lawyer, testified at the time that the former national security adviser reviewed and approved a FARA filing to the DOJ which contained false statements.
But in Flynn’s motion to dismiss, he paints the episode as all part of a grand conspiracy — in which both he and President Trump are victims.
“From the FBI’s insertion of [a confidential source] into the August 17, 2016 presidential briefing of candidate Trump and Mr. Flynn, to the former Director of the FBI bragging and laughing on national television about his own cleverness and violations of FBI/DOJ rules in dispatching agents to the White House to interview the new President’s National Security Advisor, to the still missing original FBI FD-302 of the January 24, 2017 interview — everything about this prosecution has violated long-standing standards and policy for the FBI and the DOJ,” Flynn argued in the Wednesday filing.
He went on to argue that the government’s conduct “perverts the rule of law and grossly abuses its power and might.”
Flynn withdrew his plea after the Justice Department recommended that Judge Emmett Sullivan sentence Flynn to between zero and six months behind bars. Last month, Sullivan rejected similar, deep state-oriented theories that Flynn and his legal team had put forth.
Read the filing here:
