I’m starting my deep dive into the case Sidney Powell tries to make to convince Emmet Sullivan to throw out the guilty pleas Mike Flynn pled to twice (in this post, I laid out how she used a “reply” brief demanding Brady material to make an opening argument in a bid to get the case thrown out).
But in starting my deep dive, I didn’t get two lines into her exhibits before I realized that Sidney Powell, in documents submitted to the court, accused her client of lying to the FBI on January 24, 2017, precisely the crime she says he shouldn’t be held accountable for. At issue is the timeline she created to suggest every single event that happened at FBI between 2016 and 2018 was part of a plot to get her client. The second entry, which describes how Trump accepted the GOP nomination around the same time Lisa Page and Peter Strzok said two bad things about Trump (but not about Flynn), says that Flynn joined the campaign in 2015, though she claims not to know the date.
By setting the date when Flynn joined the campaign to sometime vaguely in 2015, it suggests the government’s interest in his actions leading up to and during the RT Gala in Moscow in December 2015 were part of general animus direct at Trump, and not a legitimate counterintelligence concern about a former General being paid by a foreign propaganda outlet to eat dinner with Vladimir Putin.
Except that detail — that he was already part of the campaign in 2015 — conflicts with something he told the FBI on January 24, 2017: that he wasn’t really part of the Trump campaign yet when, after his former counterpart at GRU, Igor Sergun, died unexpectedly on January 3, 2016, he called Sergey Kislyak to offer condolences.
Back in January 2017, Flynn would have had good reason to distance this call from Trump, because if it happened while he was part of the campaign, it would suggest he and Russia were in discussions even before Russia started stealing emails from Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.
Of particular note, the two other calls he claimed, in his interview with the FBI, were condolence calls actually weren’t, at least not primarily. On those, he was instead discussing policy issues.
But now Sidney Powell, Flynn’s own lawyer, says that’s not true, that he was already part of the campaign when he made this call.
It remains to be seen whether this Powell gambit will work. But accusing her client of lying to the FBI seems like an odd way to prove that only people who have an animus against Flynn would accuse him of lying to the FBI.