Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz suggested that former special counsel Robert Mueller could lose his bar license if he knew about an alleged plot by the FBI to set up retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Gaetz joined Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro on Saturday and discussed documents that were unsealed last week that showed top FBI officials discussed whether the goal of an interview with Flynn was to “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
“There is one person that I’ve got some questions for, and that’s Robert Mueller,” Gaetz said. “What did Mueller know, and when did he know it? Did he really come before the Judiciary Committee and make those accusations knowing that the Flynn deal was a setup directed by [former FBI Director James] Comey? If he did, Robert Mueller’s own bar license might be in question.”
On Thursday, unsealed documents showed former FBI agent Peter Strzok blocked the FBI from closing its investigation into Flynn after the agency found no “derogatory information” in early January 2017.
Flynn, 61, is fighting to dismiss the government’s case against him. He pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to investigators about his conversations with a Russian diplomat in late January 2017. Flynn told the court earlier this year that he was “innocent of this crime.” He filed to withdraw his guilty plea after the Justice Department asked the judge to sentence him to up to six months in prison — though afterward, the department said probation would also be appropriate. His lead attorney, Sidney Powell, is pressing for the dismissal of his case by arguing that the FBI unfairly treated Flynn.
“Well, we can’t arrest anybody, unfortunately,” Gaetz said. “But we are encouraging the Durham investigation because we do believe that that’s going to lead to the prosecutions that ultimately show why this is the case.”
“But judge, why are we, three years away from Donald Trump’s election, still learning about the things that our own corrupt government did to try to derail him? This is the stuff that should have been out into the open well before now. And so I want to encourage John Ratcliffe, who will be taking over as the director of national intelligence, and I want to encourage Attorney General [William] Barr — don’t be like your predecessors, you know, Jeff Sessions and Dan Coats, who just sat on this stuff. Let’s get it out before the people and show them how devious and how deep the plot was to go after our duly elected president. And it really shows how impressive Donald Trump is fighting through this attack from his own government to go and lead our country through one of, one of the greatest times we had until this coronavirus.”
He added: “I believe that Michael Flynn will either be exonerated or pardoned. All the charges against him should be dropped, and he should be a free man. But if that does not happen, I know that our president has a deep sense of justice, and I know that he would not allow Flynn or [Roger] Stone to go to jail and disproportionately shoulder the burden of the Mueller investigation that now we all know is a joke. Just what we’ve learned since the start of coronavirus is that the Steele dossier was targeted by Russian intelligence and that our own FBI knew that the Steele dossier was targeted by Russian intelligence when they used it as the main fuel to advance the Trump-Russia investigation — despite the fact that there was no collusion and there was no basis to put our country through this. How small do these Democrats look, and do these prosecutors look, and does Jim Comey look now in the circumstance that we are in given all they did to try to railroad the president without facts?”
Gaetz, who is licensed to practice law in Florida, was investigated last year by the state’s grievance committee regarding his intimidating tweet about former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. He was cleared in August.