Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. from Washington and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. @adamgoldmanNYT
Attorney General William P. Barr dismissed the charges against Michael T. Flynn, President Trump's first national security adviser, last week.
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Two former law enforcement officials involved in the cases of the onetime Trump advisers Michael T. Flynn and Roger J. Stone Jr. attacked Attorney General William P. Barr's extraordinary intervention in the inquiries, condemning his moves as detrimental to the rule of law and to public confidence in the United States Department of Justice.
In op-ed articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the former officials, Mary B. McCord [local copy] and Jonathan Kravis [local copy], denounced William Barr's move last week [2020-05] to drop a criminal case against Michael Flynn, and Barr's earlier intervention to recommend a more lenient sentence for crimes that Roger Stone committed in a bid to protect the president.
Michael T. Flynn, a former U.S. National Security Advisor, had pleaded guilty twice to lying to Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition. But Justice Department officials took issue with the F.B.I.'s early 2017 interview of Michael Flynn, according to the motion to dismiss the charges signed by Timothy J. Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime adviser to William Barr.
Mary McCord accused the government of distorting her account of that period to help justify dropping the lying charge. Timothy Shea's motion relied heavily on an interview that she had given to the special counsel's office after it took over the case as part of its inquiry into Russian election interference [Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections]. "The account of my interview in 2017 doesn't help the department support this conclusion, and it is disingenuous for the department to twist my words to suggest that it does," Mary McCord, a former career criminal prosecutor, wrote in The Times [U.K.]. Then the acting head of the national security division at the Justice Department, Mary McCord was deeply involved in a debate between the F.B.I. and the department about how to proceed in investigating Michael Flynn.
As part of a deal with prosecutors, Michael Flynn admitted lying to F.B.I. agents during an interview at the about the substance of his phone calls with Sergey I. Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. Michael Flynn had asked Sergey Kislyak's government to refrain from retaliating against Obama administration sanctions imposed in late 2016 as punishment for Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Michael Flynn then lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the phone calls, setting off alarms among law enforcement officials. Concerned that Russia could blackmail Flynn, F.B.I. officials moved to question him as part of its open investigation into Russia's interference.
But Timothy Shea wrote last week [2020-05] that F.B.I. agents had no legitimate reason to question Michael Flynn. The inquiry into Flynn had been on the verge of closing, and Shea said investigators had found nothing to justify extending it or opening a new investigation. "The calls were entirely appropriate on their face," Timothy Shea wrote, adding that Flynn's lies to the F.B.I. were immaterial and should not have been prosecuted.
Mary McCord also sharply rejected that argument. She said the F.B.I. had sufficient reason to question Michael Flynn and his answers were relevant to their inquiry. She also noted that Timothy Shea and William Barr - who has said he decided to move to drop the charges - were silent on whether the F.B.I. acted illegally in questioning Michael Flynn. "William Barr's motion to dismiss does not argue that the F.B.I. violated the Constitution of the United States or statutory law when agents interviewed Michael Flynn about his calls with Sergey Kislyak," McCord wrote.
The move to end Michael Flynn's case also drew the ire of Jonathan Kravis, who helped prosecute Roger Stone, and quit his job after William Barr intervened to overrule prosecutors' sentencing recommendation. Three other department lawyers also quit the case. The "department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law," Kravis wrote of the Flynn case in The Washington Post on Monday [2020-05-11].
William Barr's meddling will have long-term consequences, warned Jonathan Kravis, who was a career public corruption prosecutor. "Your work of investigating and prosecuting criminal cases is hard, and it becomes even harder when witnesses and jurors start to believe that the Justice Department's handling of these cases is infected by politics," he wrote.
Roger Stone, 67, was convicted in 2020-11 of obstructing a congressional inquiry into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. The evidence showed Roger Stone lied under oath, withheld a trove of documents, and threatened an associate with harm if he cooperated with congressional investigators. The prosecutors recommended that Stone be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison, citing advisory sentencing guidelines that generally govern the department's sentencing requests. After President Trump attacked the prosecutors' recommendation on Twitter, William Barr overruled the prosecutors' recommendation. The president then publicly applauded him for doing so, even though the attorney general said he had made the decision on his own and criticized Trump on national television for undercutting his credibility and that of the Justice Department.
Other former Justice Department officials joined in expressing fury at William Barr's handling of the cases. Nearly 2,000 of them, including officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations, signed a letter released on Monday [2020-05-11] asking William Barr to resign, saying he "once again assaulted the rule of law" in asking the court to drop the Flynn case. Other current and former law enforcement officials backed the decision, a Justice Department spokeswoman said. "We have received significantly positive feedback from a wide range of current and former department lawyers and F.B.I. officials who are applauding the recommendation," said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec [local copy].
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