DOJ dropping charges against Michael Flynn is great news for America.
Will the tragedy of the effort to destroy General Michael Flynn — the opening salvo in the effort to topple President Donald Trump — turn into a triumph for the American people?
With the extraordinary Department of Justice (DOJ) motion calling for the dismissal of Gen. Flynn’s case with prejudice, we are one step closer to realizing such a stunning reversal.
The motion — in the context of the federal government’s recent, long-overdue divulging of a deluge of damning documents detailing the baseless nature and corrupt elements of the Trump-Russia “investigations” — demonstrates that Gen. Flynn’s case was perhaps the most poisonous fruit of the poisonedRussiagatetree.
It shows that the FBI agents who sought to set a perjury trap for Gen. Flynn should have never stepped foot in his office: “the interview of Mr. Flynn was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn — a no longer justifiably predicated investigation that the FBI had, in the Bureau’s own words, prepared to close because it had yielded an ‘absence of any derogatory information.'”
It shows that the perjury trap they set failed: “we [do] not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.” We already knew the agents did not believe that Gen. Flynn was trying to deceive them; that Gen. Flynn knew they had transcripts of the calls, and therefore would have no reason to dissemble; and that he admittedly lacked a firm recollection of the calls.
It shows that “the FBI kept open its counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn based solely on his calls with [Russian Ambassador Sergei] Kislyak” — calls that were, in the federal government’s words, “entirely appropriate” for a national security advisor-designate to be having — and that the DOJ recognized this in coming to “the general view that the Logan Act” — of dubious constitutionality and for which no American has ever been convicted — “would be difficult to prosecute.”
It shows that senior DOJ and FBI officials engaged in unthinkable chicanery. They did irreparable damage to the very institutions to which many of them have claimed to be so devoted — whether via former FBI Director James Comey’s directive to, brazenly and in violation of protocol, ambush Gen. Flynn, via stonewalling on exculpatory documents, or via tampering with the FBI notes from the illegitimate Gen.
