‘Innocent’: Michael Flynn files to withdraw guilty plea

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn filed to withdraw his guilty plea late Tuesday.

The motion, filed by Flynn’s legal team, which cites “the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement,” comes one week after the Justice Department asked a federal judge to sentence President Trump’s former national security adviser to up to half a year in prison.

“It is beyond ironic and completely outrageous that the prosecutors have persecuted Mr. Flynn, virtually bankrupted him, and put his entire family through unimaginable stress for three years,” wrote former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell and her co-counsel wrote in a filing in the U.S. District Court in D.C.

Flynn, 61, pleaded guilty in 2017 for lying to investigators about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak regarding U.S. sanctions and a U.N. Security Council vote. Former FBI Director James Comey admitted he took advantage of the chaos in the early days of the Trump administration when he sent then-special agent Peter Strzok and another FBI agent to talk to Flynn.

Last week, the Justice Department asked the judge to sentence Flynn to up to six months in prison in a reversal of its previous request that the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency get probation and no time behind bars. The Justice Department said Flynn no longer deserved any credit for providing assistance in its investigations or for accepting responsibility for his false statements to the FBI about discussions he had with Russia’s ambassador and his work for Turkey.

“The prosecutor seeks to rewrite history and send Mr. Flynn to prison,” Powell wrote. “This about-face places the government in breach of the plea agreement … It would constitute ineffective assistance of counsel to fail to move to withdraw his plea now in light of the government’s breach and change in sentencing recommendation.”

Prosecutors argued on Monday that their submission was appropriate. “There appears to be no dispute as to the applicable sentencing range or that a nonincarceratory sentence would be a reasonable sentence within that range,” wrote prosecutors Brandon Van Grack and Jocelyn Ballantine.

Flynn agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, admitting and then reaffirming his guilt in 2017 and 2018. The defense team that negotiated the plea deal was later fired, and, since taking over Flynn’s defense this summer, Powell has argued “there never would’ve been a plea to begin with” if Flynn knew how much information the Justice Department was reportedly hiding from him.

“Michael T. Flynn is innocent,” Flynn’s legal team said. “Mr. Flynn has cooperated with the government in good faith for two years. He gave the prosecution his full cooperation. He held nothing back. He endured massive, unnecessary, and frankly counterproductive demands on his time, his family, his scarce resources, and his life. The same cannot be sad for the prosecution which has operated n bad faith from the inception of the ‘investigation’ and continues relentlessly through this specious prosecution.”

Flynn was one of a handful of people connected to the Trump campaign who were targeted by the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, which began in July 2016.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, who has been presiding over the case, said last month, “The court summarily disposes of Mr. Flynn’s arguments that the FBI conducted an ambush interview for the purpose of trapping him into making false statements and that the government pressured him to enter a guilty plea” because “the record proves otherwise.”

During an appearance on Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show Tuesday evening, Powell said Sullivan could “go either way” on approving the motion to withdraw. Flynn’s attorneys also asked Sullivan to postpone the scheduled Jan. 28 sentencing by at least 30 days.

“He certainly has discretion as to whether to allow the withdrawal of the plea, but we’re more than convinced we meet all the tests, no matter which way you look at it,” Powell told Hannity. “And this is just the first part of the motion on that; this portion of the motion is based on the breach of the plea agreement. There are a lot of other reasons that we’ll brief as soon as we possibly can.”

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