President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s sentencing was postponed after he filed to withdraw his guilty plea.
Flynn was originally scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 28 in Washington, D.C., but Judge Emmet Sullivan pushed back the sentencing to Feb. 27.
On Tuesday, Flynn’s legal team moved to change his guilty plea, citing “the government’s bad faith, vindictiveness, and breach of the plea agreement.”
The Justice Department recommended up to six months in prison for Flynn after he pleaded guilty to lying to investigators about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about U.S. sanctions and a United Nations Security Council vote.
Flynn, 61, pleaded guilty more than two years ago and cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Last week, the Justice Department said Flynn no longer deserved credit for his cooperation in the Russia investigation, reversing its earlier recommendation of probation after his attacks against the FBI and the department.
Flynn’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, has argued that the former national security adviser would have never pleaded guilty if Flynn had known 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 said for the prosecution which has operated in bad faith from the inception of the ‘investigation’ and continues relentlessly through this specious prosecution.”
