The judge overseeing Michael Flynn’s case rebuked the lieutenant general’s lawyers, denying claims Flynn was set up by the FBI and shooting down requests for allegedly exculpatory information.
“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. The record proves otherwise,” District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan said in a 92-page ruling Monday, ordering a sentencing hearing for Jan. 28.
Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell called the judge’s ruling “as wrong as it is disappointing” in a short statement to the Washington Examiner.
Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, 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 special agent Peter Strzok and another FBI agent to talk to Flynn.
Flynn agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, admitting then reaffirming his guilt in 2017 and 2018. The defense team that negotiated the plea deal was fired and, since taking over this summer, Powell has argued “there never would’ve been a plea to begin with” if Flynn knew how much information the DOJ was hiding from him.
The DOJ called Flynn’s claims of innocence “an extraordinary reversal.”
Sullivan’s denial comes one week after the release of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse. The watchdog found the FBI opened an investigation into Flynn in 2016 and used an intelligence briefing given to Trump and Flynn as a “pretext” to gather information for their investigation, and that the FBI told British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, the bureau was looking into Flynn in October 2016 even as the former MI6 agent worked for and passed information to Fusion GPS, hired by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
“There is a lot of information in the report that is material to General Flynn, and the report also raises more questions and provides clues to the existence of even more exculpatory evidence the government hid from him,” Powell told the Washington Examiner ahead of Sullivan’s ruling.
“Regardless of Mr. Flynn’s new theories, he pled guilty twice to the crime, and he fails to demonstrate that the disclosure of the requested information would have impacted his decision to plead guilty,” Sullivan said in his ruling.
Powell, a former federal prosecutor, spent months pushing the court to force the government to produce further evidence, under the Supreme Court decision requiring the government to turn over all relevant evidence.
“Mr. Flynn moves to compel the production of alleged Brady material under several theories, claiming that newly discovered evidence and the government’s suppression of evidence will exonerate him,” Sullivan said.
Flynn’s team argued his false statements were not “material” because his conversations with Kislyak were unrelated to the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, and the FBI agents didn’t ask him about Russian election interference. Flynn’s lawyers also argued the FBI had recordings of Flynn’s discussions with the Russian ambassador, so they already “knew exactly what was said,” and there was no need to grill him. The DOJ claimed Flynn’s statements were “absolutely material,” and his false statements “went to the heart” of their investigation.
“The sworn statements of Mr. Flynn and his former counsel belie his new claims of innocence and his new assertions that he was pressured into pleading guilty to making materially false statements to the FBI,” Sullivan said Monday. “And it is undisputed that Mr. Flynn not only made those false statements to the FBI agents, but he also made the same false statements to the Vice President and senior White House officials, who, in turn, repeated Mr. Flynn’s false statements to the American people on national television.”
Sullivan also rejected the defense team’s contention the FBI interview notes may have been deceptively altered to entrap Flynn, saying all the versions of the notes were “consistent and clear” and provided “ample support” Flynn made false statements.
Flynn “fails to explain how most of the requested information that the government has not already provided to him is relevant and material to his underlying offense — willfully and knowingly making materially false statements and omissions to the FBI — or to his sentencing,” Sullivan said.
The judge explained why he was rejecting all 50 Flynn document requests in a detailed seven-page chart at the end of his ruling, calling many of the requests irrelevant to whether Flynn lied to bureau agents in January 2017 while noting Flynn had access to the anti-Trump texts between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page when he reaffirmed his guilt last year.
The ruling is a disappointment for Flynn’s legal team, who hoped the case might turn out similarly to that of former Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens’s conviction was overturned by Sullivan, with the judge even ordering a special counsel to investigate the prosecutors handling the case. During Powell’s first appearance on Flynn’s behalf, Sullivan said he’d read some of Powell’s book titled Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, which included a flattering chapter on Sullivan and Stevens and which she had sent him with an inscription years before.
“This case is not United States v. Theodore F. Stevens, the case that Mr. Flynn relies on throughout his briefing,” Sullivan said Monday.
