One of special counsel Robert Mueller’s top prosecutors said he believes the Justice Department is trying to “soften the blow” of a presidential pardon for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Andrew Weissmann, a former Justice Department official who was known as Mueller’s “pit bull” during the Russia investigation, said President Trump has “no business” pardoning his former adviser and took another shot at the outside prosecutor whom Attorney General William William Barr ordered to review the government’s case against Flynn.
“I was in the Department of Justice for over 20 years, and I think the way I look at this is from the parochial point of view of what I think the department is doing, which I think the department is trying to soften the blow and make it politically easier for the president to pardon Gen. Flynn. The disclosure of documents from a purported neutral team that is reviewing the Flynn case, it seems kind of laughable to me,” Weissmann told MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace on Thursday.
Weissmann was taking aim at Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, whose review has led to document disclosures this week in the Flynn case, which is a spinoff from Mueller’s investigation, as the former Trump adviser seeks to withdraw his guilty plea for lying to investigators about conversations he had with a Russian envoy or have the case dismissed due to alleged government misconduct.
“As far as I can tell, what was disclosed was really similar to what’s already been disclosed,” Weissmann said. “There’s nothing new there, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a pardon.”
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig made a similar prediction on the Dan Abrams Show on Tuesday, saying Barr is trying to “soften up” or “tenderize” the Flynn case before Trump steps in to pardon him.
Weissmann played an instrumental role in winning convictions against former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.
Having become an NBC News legal analyst, he has often been asked to comment about the Trump administration. He previously remarked about Jensen in February, at which time he said the DOJ review is a ruse to investigate Trump’s perceived enemies. At the time, Weissmann said the Justice Department swapped out the “loser case” of Andrew McCabe, who escaped criminal charges for allegedly lying to investigators about authorizing media disclosures, for a fresh one targeting top former FBI officials, including McCabe.
“All they did was swapped out a loser case for starting an investigation that is going to be of Comey, McCabe, Pete Strzok,” Weissmann told MSNBC host Chuck Todd.
All three officials were involved in the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, which Trump and his allies have called a “witch hunt.” Mueller, who took over the inquiry after FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017, found no criminal conspiracy when the investigation ended last year.
The documents that were unsealed on Thursday showed Strzok, a former special agent, blocked the FBI from closing its investigation into Flynn in January 2017 after the agency found no “derogatory information,” after which Flynn’s defense team says he was “set up” by the bureau.
Trump said last month he was seriously considering a pardon for his former national security adviser. With the disclosure of FBI notes this week, Trump has further fueled speculation about an impending pardon. He said on Thursday notes released the day before, which showed an FBI official expressing doubts about the bureau’s strategy with Flynn on the day the FBI interviewed him, meant “total exoneration.”
Weissmann, who is rejoining Jenner & Block as its investigations co-chairman, argued on Thursday this would be the “first case” in which the person being pardoned “is really somebody who was in bed with the president.”
“In other words, this is one — we’ve seen pardons which I think were fairly outrageous. I’ve seen that not just from this president but from other presidents in the past, but here, it’s somebody who he really has no business being involved in that process because he’s obviously not going to be objective in deciding what to do here,” Weissmann concluded.
