Tag: Michael Flynn

Michael Flynn’s New Lawyer Seeks Security Clearance, Citing Unknown Evidence

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — A lawyer Michael T. Flynn recently hired said on Monday that she would most likely need a security clearance to review classified materials that were separate from the documents that prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had already handed over in the case.

The lawyer, Sidney Powell, made the unusual disclosure during a hearing in Federal District Court despite prosecutors’ insistence that they included no classified information in the evidence they shared with the defense. Her remarks heightened speculation that Ms. Powell — who has pushed conspiracy theories about the special counsel’s investigation and sells anti-Mueller T-shirts on her website — may be preparing to accuse the government of wrongdoing in Mr. Flynn’s case.

“There is other information,” she said, but she declined to elaborate.

View the complete June 24 article by Michael S. Schmidt on The New York Times website here.

Sidney Powell, Flynn’s New Lawyer, Is Conspiracy Theorist And Fox News Regular

President Donald Trump praised former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s decision to replace his legal team with Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney, conspiracy theorist, and harsh critic of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe who has made dozens of appearances on Fox News and Fox Business in recent years.

“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”

After pleading guilty to charges of lying to the FBI in December 2017, Flynn began cooperating with Mueller’s team. Last week, he fired his legal team, a move that “triggered speculation in legal and political circles that he’s considering backing out of his plea deal with the government in a play for a presidential pardon,” according to Politico.

View the complete June 13 article by Matt Gertz from Media Matters on the National Memo website here.

House panel subpoenas Flynn, Gates

The House Intelligence Committee has issued subpoenas for documents and testimony from former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign aide Richard Gates.

“As part of our oversight work, the House Intelligence Committee is continuing to examine the deep counterintelligence concerns raised in Special Counsel Mueller’s report, and that requires speaking directly with the fact witnesses,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said in a statement on Thursday.

Schiff noted that both Flynn and Gates cooperated extensively with special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, but said that they have so far “refused to cooperate fully with Congress.”

View the complete June 13 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Michael Flynn fires his lawyers

Michael Flynn has fired his lawyers and replaced them with new representation, a seemingly significant development as President Trump‘s first national security adviser awaits sentencing for lying to FBI agents about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

A court filing Thursday revealed that Flynn had notified his attorneys Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony that he is “terminating Covington & Burling LLP as his counsel and has already retained new counsel for this matter.”

It was not immediately clear why Flynn has replaced his lawyers, or with whom. Anthony and Kelner declined to comment in an email when asked by The Hill for more information about the developments.

View the complete June 6 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Trump says he was not warned about Flynn. The Mueller report disagrees.

“It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge. It would have been impossible for me to know this but, if that was the case, and with me being one of two people who would become president, why was I not told so that I could make a change?”

— President Trump, in a tweet, May 17, 2019

The president tweeted that he did not realize Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser, had been under investigation on suspicion of being a Russian agent and that he should have been warned.

This is a puzzling complaint. First, a report issued by a Republican-led House committee — often touted by Trump — disclosed in 2018 that there had been an ongoing counterintelligence investigation of Flynn. So that’s not new information. Second, Trump was warned by President Barack Obama not to hire Flynn — and the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III says that warning actually soured Trump on Flynn.

Here’s what we know about the warnings Trump received about Flynn. In a narrow, technical sense, Trump was not warned that Flynn was being investigated as a possible Russian agent. But there were plenty of other flashing lights that Flynn was trouble — warnings that Trump chose to ignore.

View the complete May 20 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

New court filings in Michael Flynn’s case spell trouble for Trump

It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

President Donald Trump is still in a lot of trouble, and it has nothing to do with Congress. Federal courts continue to reveal new information that appears to show the president’s inner circle and closest allies were deeply involved in efforts to stymie investigations into his administration. With over a dozen investigations ongoing, the Justice Department is still casting a long shadow over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the government to release a transcript of a call in which Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, discussed U.S. sanctions with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Sullivan also ordered the release of a transcript in which Trump’s former personal lawyer, John Dowd, seemed to discourage Flynn from cooperating with federal prosecutors on November 22, 2017.

Flynn ignored Dowd and pleaded guilty on December 1, 2017, admitting he lied to federal investigators about his conversation with Kislyak. In a sentencing memo filed last year, prosecutors said Flynn provided “substantial assistance” in three investigations, two of which are ongoing.

View the complete May 17 article by Joshua Eaton on the ThinkProgress website here.

Newly Unsealed Documents Reveal Fresh Details Of Flynn Cooperation

Court documents from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team revealing details about the cooperation of Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser and campaign aide, were unsealed on Thursday.

The new information shows Flynn was particularly helpful to the team in the investigations of both WikiLeaks and of potential efforts to obstruct his testimony.

Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI, and after that, he became a cooperating witness for Mueller. He has yet to be sentenced for his crime.

View the complete May 16 article by Cody Fenwick on the National Memo website here.

Judge orders public release of what Michael Flynn said in call to Russian ambassador

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that prosecutors make public a transcript of a phone call that former national security adviser Michael Flynn tried hard to hide with a lie: his conversation with a Russian ambassador in late 2016.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered the government also to provide a public transcript of a November 2017 voice mail involving Flynn. In that sensitive call, President Trump’s attorney left a message for Flynn’s attorney reminding him of the president’s fondness for Flynn at a time when Flynn was considering cooperating with federal investigators.

The transcripts, which the judge ordered be posted on a court website by May 31, would reveal conversations at the center of two major avenues of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. So far they have been disclosed to the public only in fragments in court filings and the Mueller report.

View the complete May 16 article by Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman on The Washington Post website here. Matt Zapotosky and Spencer S. Hsu contributed to this report.

The White House lost its narrative on Michael Flynn. So it made up some stuff about James Comey instead.

From the very start of Tuesday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders had no real answers on former national security adviser Michael Flynn. White House hopes that a judge would rebuke the FBI for its treatment of Flynn quickly and rather spectacularly fell apart. Flynn himself told the judge that he didn’t feel duped into lying, as his and Trump’s supporters have alleged. It all rendered Sanders’s argument earlier in the day that Flynn had been “ambushed” pretty well undercut.

So she changed the subject to James B. Comey — and butchered what Comey actually said.

Flynn didn’t make the case the White House desired, so Sanders suggested Comey had. Here’s what she said about Comey, who was FBI director when Flynn lied repeatedly as he was interviewed in January 2017 (emphasis added):

View the complete December 18 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

It took about 20 minutes for a judge to destroy the right’s conspiratorial defense of Michael Flynn

Credit: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Conservatives were giddy about Tuesday’s sentencing hearing … until it started.

Early Tuesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan agreed to delay the sentencing of Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn until March.

In some ways, Flynn’s sentencing will bring closure to one chapter of the ever-expanding investigation by Robert Mueller into the Trump campaign’s efforts to collude with Russia to steal a presidential election. Flynn was the first and most senior Trump administration official to plead guilty to federal charges, in this case lying to the FBI.

But while the hearing was, in some ways, expected to be a formality — federal prosecutors recommended Flynn receive no prison time on account of his extensive cooperation with Mueller’s investigation — Judge Sullivan used his opportunity to meticulously and methodically twist the knife in one of the far-right’s favorite talking points.

View the complete December 18 article by Adam Peck on the ThinkProgress.org website here.