A onetime deputy to former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn said she was “traumatized” by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
K.T. McFarland talked about how her life “went to hell” because of the Russia investigation as she promoted her upcoming book, Revolution: Trump, Washington and “We the People,” and touched on the case of her former boss, Michael Flynn.
She told Fox & Friends that FBI agents tried to set her up in a “perjury trap” when they showed up at her house “unannounced.” The former deputy national security adviser said “all” of her government records were seized, and she did not have control of them.
McFarland, who also served on President Trump’s transition team, was interviewed by the FBI in the summer of 2017. She initially denied talking to Flynn about any discussions he had with Sergey Kislyak, who was at the time the Russian ambassador to the United States, about sanctions in December 2016. McFarland reportedly revised her statement to say Flynn may have talked to her about the sanctions after his December 2017 guilty plea contradicted her prior assertion.
In an interview with WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall, McFarland said she got the impression “after, you know, 20, 30, 40 hours of hell, that they wanted me to either plead guilty to a crime I didn’t feel I committed or to talk about other people having done things that I didn’t think they had done.”
She said investigators eventually backed off “because I couldn’t give them what they needed to spin their web,” but the experience left her “so traumatized I left the country.” McFarland said her escape to the “remotest” islands of Scotland gave her time to reflect about what happened to the country and the government’s intelligence apparatus.
McFarland was also interviewed in December 2017. Recently released FBI notes show she talked about February of that year and offered information under a proffer agreement, which is typically given to people under criminal investigation. She was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Singapore, but she withdrew from consideration in February amid a protracted delay in the Senate as her career in the administration became embroiled in the Russia controversy.
McFarland’s critical assessment of federal investigators echoes that of Trump and his allies, who often speak of there being “dirty cops” conducting a “witch hunt.” Attorney General William Barr, who tasked U.S. Attorney John Durham with reviewing the origins of the Russia investigation, said last spring “some of the facts” about it “don’t hang together with the official explanations of what happened.” Democrats have criticized Durham’s inquiry, which transitioned into a criminal investigation in the fall, as a politically motivated scheme to undermine the work of Mueller and attack Trump’s perceived enemies.
Retired Lt. Gen. Flynn, 61, pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak and agreed to cooperate with Mueller.
After swapping legal teams, Flynn changed his tune, telling the U.S. District Court in Washington last month, “I am innocent of this crime.” He filed to withdraw his guilty plea after the Justice Department asked Judge Emmet Sullivan to sentence Flynn to up to six months in prison, though afterward, the department said it believed probation would also be appropriate. Flynn’s team, led by Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor, is now pressing for the dismissal of his case, arguing that the client was unfairly treated by the FBI.
Barr recently selected Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to review the criminal case against Flynn. Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia investigation, recently said the outside prosecutor is a ruse to target former FBI officials involved in the Russia investigation.
