As I noted, some of the claims Sidney Powell made today to justify her demand for material that really doesn’t help her client got blown up, including by Emmet Sullivan, before the end of the hearing. Others, such as the fact that Michael Flynn passed a polygraph in April 2016 are undisguised horseshit. How does passing a poly exonerate you from committing a bunch of crimes after you pass it?
But I’m particularly interested in Powell’s complaint that they didn’t get a memo, written on January 30, 2017 clearing him of being a paid agent of Russia. It was another thing Sullivan sniffed out as bullshit during the hearing, noting that that Flynn did not plead guilty to being an agent of Russia. “It has to be more than theoretical relevance,” he politely responded.
Nevertheless the frothy right has seized on it like trained seals.
But it helps Flynn even less than the frothy right thinks.
Obviously, as both Brandon Van Grack and Sullivan noted, he didn’t plead guilty to being a Russian agent. He pled to two other things: lying about being a paid agent of Turkey (while getting top secret briefings during the campaign) and lying about trying to undercut the sanctions Obama imposed on Russia for helping Trump get elected.
But there’s one more problem. Over six months after the Russian agent investigation was closed on January 30, 2017, Rod Rosenstein scoped the Mueller investigation to include four allegations against Flynn.
The Acting Attorney General further clarified the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigatory authority in two subsequent memoranda. A memorandum dated August 2, 2017, explained that the Appointment Order had been “worded categorically in order to permit its public release without confirming specific investigations involving specific individuals.” It then confirmed that the Special Counsel had been authorized since his appointment to investigate allegations that three Trump campaign officials-Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and George Papadopoulos- “committed a crime or crimes by colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” The memorandum also confirmed the Special Counsel’s authority to investigate certain other matters, including two additional sets of allegations involving Manafort (crimes arising from payments he received from the Ukrainian government and crimes arising from his receipt of loans from a bank whose CEO was then seeking a position in the Trump Administration); allegations that Papadopoulos committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government; and four sets of allegations involving Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor to President Trump. [my emphasis]
Two of these are presumably the crimes he pled to, the Turkish foreign agent and lying about his conversation with the Russian Ambassador. One might be his willingness to use his position to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia (lowering US standards on proliferation in the process). The fourth might be his participation in Peter Smith’s efforts to find Hillary’s deleted emails, which included asking Russian hackers for help, but that had only been disclosed at the end of June.
Whatever it is, though, it’s clear there was still plenty for the FBI to investigate long after the “exoneration” in January.
Which may be how the government will respond to Powell’s silly claims — to lay out all the damning information against Flynn.