President Donald Trump celebrated his former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s win in a federal appeals court on Wednesday and que...
President Donald Trump celebrated his former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s win in a federal appeals court on Wednesday and questioned when former FBI Director James Comey will be apologizing to the retired three-star Army general.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia found the Justice Department’s decision in May to drop its charges against Flynn should have marked the end of the case.
Further, the appeals court held federal district court Judge Emmet Sullivan was in the wrong to continue it.
In a highly unusual move, Sullivan responded to the DOJ’s decision to end the case by appointing a former federal judge to file a brief arguing why the prosecution should remain in place.
Flynn plead guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with then-Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in the transition period before Trump took office.
In the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case, federal prosecutors argued that Flynn’s behavior as the incoming national security advisor was appropriate and that his calls were not material to the FBI’s underlying counterintelligence investigation about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump first responded to Flynn’s court win on Wednesday, tweeting, “Great! Appeals Court Upholds Justice Departments Request To Drop Criminal Case Against General Michael Flynn!”
The president followed with another tweet, writing, “Is James Comey and his band of Dirty Cops going to apologize to General Michael Flynn (and many others) for what they have done to ruin his life?
“What about Robert Mueller and his Angry Democrat Cronies – Are they going to say, SO SORRY? And what about Obama & Biden?”
In a December 2018 interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Comey admitted that he did not follow protocol when he sent FBI agents to the White House to interview Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, just days after Trump took office.
It is “something I probably wouldn’t have done, or maybe gotten away with, in a more organized … administration,” Comey said.
“If the FBI wanted to send agents into the White House itself to interview a senior official, you would work through the White House counsel, there would be discussions and approvals, and it would be there,” he explained.
“And I thought, ‘It’s early enough, let’s just send a couple guys over.’”
In the DOJ’s court filing seeking to dismiss the charges against Flynn, the department recounted that then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates was “flabbergasted” and “dumbfounded” in January 2017 at the FBI’s decision to question Flynn given that it “should have been coordinated with DOJ.”
Unsealed internal FBI documents released in April showed that a top bureau official had questioned if the “goal” in interviewing Flynn was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
In early January 2017, prior to the Flynn interview, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok reportedly intervened, instructing an investigator not to close the inquiry into Flynn even after no evidence of wrongdoing was found. Strzok wrote in a note to an agent “7th floor involved,” a reference of the FBI’s top leadership.
Flynn may have at least one more legal hurdle to go. The judges making up the D.C. Circuit could agree to conduct an “en banc” review of Wednesday’s decision.
If the judges overrule the three-judge panel, Flynn’s likely only recourse then would be to appeal his case to the Supreme Court.
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