Gen. Michael Flynn never should have been national security adviser. But it is now clear that the legal case against him was crooked.
Attorney General William Barr was right to recommend vacating Flynn’s conviction. Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan ought to accept that recommendation.
But let’s also not mince words: Flynn is no paragon of virtue. He took money to cozy up to Vladimir Putin’s propaganda outfits and took on unsavory work for Turkey’s horrible regime. He filed misleading official documents about his work for Turkey, and then he admittedly gave materially incorrect information to FBI investigators about a conversation with a Russian diplomat. It strains credulity to suggest he couldn’t remember, from a conversation not many days earlier, whether or not he discussed sanctions with that ambassador.
Nonetheless, it has been evident for at least 17 months, even to critics of Flynn and his onetime boss, President Trump, that Flynn was the victim of an ethically dubious perjury trap. Documents released in the last week show that key officials involved in that perjury trap did so specifically while discussing whether the goal was to “prosecute him or get him fired.”
All along, however, it had appeared to many of us that even the perjury trap was in pursuit of a legitimate purpose. As the investigation was focused on improper actions by Russians and potentially improper relationships that some Trump officials had with Russians, it seemed that Flynn’s discussions about sanctions might have been suspect in themselves.
The new documents, along with a guest column in the New York Times, now make clear that those assumptions weren’t true. When the FBI set the perjury trap for Flynn, its agents knew the Flynn conversation with the Russian had not been improper. The perjury trap had been set not in pursuit of a matter material to the broader investigation but for the sake of the trap itself. In fact, the FBI already had concluded the conversation showed an “absence of any derogatory information or lead information.”
This indicates an enormous abuse of power by the investigators.
Writing in the New York Times, former top Justice Department official Mary McCord argues that the perjury trap was justified anyway, meaning “material” to the bigger investigation, not because the substance of the sanctions conversation itself was legally problematic but because Flynn’s public misrepresentation of it left him open to potential blackmail by the Russians.
Read that again: Flynn had done nothing legally actionable. Yet because an apparent public fib or misstatement made him potentially vulnerable to blackmail, the FBI and Justice Department sought to force him to perjure himself so they could put the screws to him before the Russians did.
In sum, because he might be put in a compromising position by someone else, they decided to put him in a compromising position of their devising.
Sorry, but that is not a reasonable justification for a matter being legally “material” to the Russian investigation. By that logic, a wife worried that her husband might be tempted to cheat would be justified in sending a Sports Illustrated supermodel to his office to do a striptease when he’s working late one night — and then condemning him for lying about being tempted, even if he didn’t actually succumb to temptation.
This isn’t justice — it’s a perversion of power.
By all means, Flynn merits public opprobrium, and he clearly was a bad choice to serve at the fulcrum of this nation’s military and diplomatic policy. Still, he should have been treated only as a man of suspect judgment and ethics — but not, absolutely not, as a criminal.
