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DOJ [or Flynn’s Team] Altered an Exhibit in the Mike Flynn Case to Support a False Smear of Joe Biden

As noted, Peter Strzok’s lawyer has confirmed something I laid out earlier: DOJ submitted at least two sets of Strzok’s notes in its effort to blow up the Mike Flynn prosecution that had been altered to add a date that Strzok did not write himself.

This post will lay out why it matters.

I discovered that DOJ [or Flynn’s team] had altered Strzok’s notes because DOJ shared — and Sidney Powell submitted in purported support of her claim of prosecutorial abuse — two sets of those notes.

This set, shared on June 23 (the red rectangle is my annotation).

And this set, shared on September 23. Again, my red rectangle shows where DOJ added a date, January 4-5, 2017.

As Strzok’s lawyer, Aitan Goelman, explained that date is wrong.

On at least one occasion, the date added is wrong and could be read to suggest that a meeting at the White House happened before it actually did.

The correct date is January 5, 2017. The notes could not have been written on January 4 because they memorialize a meeting that happened on January 5.

As I demonstrated here, there was never a doubt about the date of the notes. They were written on January 5, 2017, after the meeting in question. The notes clearly match the known details — as laid out in this contemporaneous memo to the file by Susan Rice and elsewhere — of a meeting in the White House, attended by the President, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, and Jim Comey, regarding what to do about the discovery that Mike Flynn had secretly called up the Russian Ambassador and undermined the sanctions President Obama imposed, in part, to punish the Russians for tampering in our election.

In spite of the fact that there was never a doubt that the notes were from January 5, 2017, when DOJ shared the notes with Powell, they claimed that DOJ was uncertain of their date, and claimed falsely they could have been from January 3, 4, or 5.

This page of notes was taken by former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. While the page itself is undated; we believe that the notes were taken in early January 2017, possibly between January 3 and January 5.

Then, having been told, falsely, that the date of the notes was uncertain, Sidney Powell claimed they had been written on January 4, and used that to falsely claim that the idea of investigating Mike Flynn under the Logan Act came from Joe Biden.

Strzok’s notes believed to be of January 4, 2017, reveal that former President Obama, James Comey, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, and apparently Susan Rice discussed the transcripts of Flynn’s calls and how to proceed against him. Mr. Obama himself directed that “the right people” investigate General Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious: General Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak “appear legit.” According to Strzok’s notes, it appears that Vice President Biden personally raised the idea of the Logan Act.

Thus far, all DOJ did was falsely claim not to know key details of this investigation, allowing Powell to set off a frenzy designed to impact the election.

But then DOJ [or Flynn’s team] submitted the second version of the notes and Powell submitted them again, claiming they pertained to a March 2017 meeting.

Now, had DOJ told Powell when they shared the altered notes and told Judge Sullivan, by association, when they filed the notice of discovery correspondence (belatedly) last night that these were annotated copies of Strzok’s notes, they would not be at risk of committing the crime of making false statements by altering a record (the same crime Kevin Clinesmith pled guilty to). Had they just explained, “these come from so-and-so’s investigative notebooks and they show that he, the investigator, [falsely] concluded that the notes could be from January 4, 2017 and that’s why poor Sidney Powell made a false, still-uncorrected attack on Joe Biden in a filing before this court,” then this wouldn’t be a problem. I mean, they’d still have to explain why they submitted an altered copy of the notes, rather than just correcting the record before Sullivan. But it would not amount to a false representation that these were — as Ballantine’s letter to Powell claimed they were — “handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (23501 & 23503).”

But now it is the case that the record before Sullivan shows that DOJ [or Flynn’s team] submitted these altered notes while claiming that they were Strzok’s hand-written notes (having already submitted proof that the annotation is not part of the original).

It’s not just that — as Goelman explained — the notes, “could be read to suggest that a meeting at the White House happened before it actually did.”

It’s that DOJ already did read the notes to suggest a meeting happened before it actually did. DOJ, and by association, Flynn’s lawyer, already made that false claim. And they did so specifically to support an attack on Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Update, 9/30: I’ve altered this to reflect that the alterations to the notes could have come from Flynn’s team, which might explain why Sidney Powell was so nasty about Strzok’s lawyer’s letter yesterday.

In Letter Confirming DOJ Altered Peter Strzok’s Notes, His Lawyer Identifies Additional Privacy Act Violations

Among a slew of last minute documents submitted in advance of today’s hearing in the Mike Flynn case, Peter Strzok’s lawyer, Aitan Goelman, confirmed what I laid out here and here: DOJ altered some of the exhibits submitted in their effort to blow up Flynn’s prosecution.

Some of Mr. Strzok’s notes included in this attachment appear to have been altered. On at least two occasions, there were handwritten additions, not written by Mr. Strzok, inserting dates, apparently designed to indicate the date or dates on which the notes were written. On at least one occasion, the date added is wrong and could be read to suggest that a meeting at the White House happened before it actually did.

Goelman included those both altered records pertaining to Strzok (there may be one related to Andrew McCabe as well), including the one that shows someone wanted to implicate Joe Biden in all this.

That may not be the most important thing Goelman established, however.

Among the things DOJ released the other night was yet another version of the Strzok and Lisa Page texts. When she sent them to Flynn’s lawyers, Jocelyn Ballantine admitted the relevant texts had been provided to Flynn in 2018, before he allocuted his guilty plea a second time.

We are also providing you with additional text messages between former DAD Strzok and Lisa Page (23516-23540). As you know, some of these messages were originally made available to Flynn’s former attorneys on March 13, 2018 through a publicly available link to a Senate webpage. On June 24, 2018, the government provided a link to a second website that contained additional text messages. In an abundance of caution, we are providing you additional text messages in this production; please note that purely personal messages have been deleted from this production.

DOJ seems to have re-released the texts in an effort knit together unrelated actions to suggest they all related to Mike Flynn. Among the texts included in this release, purportedly in support of blowing up Mike Flynn’s prosecution, I can identify texts pertaining to:

  • The investigation into Russia’s attack on the US
  • The Mid-Year Exam investigation into Hillary’s server
  • The general Crossfire Hurricane investigation
  • Extensive efforts to ensure the Crossfire Hurricane investigation remained secret
  • Efforts to ensure that Obama officials didn’t politicize the Mike Flynn intercepts
  • Specific Crossfire Hurricane sub-investigations, including substantial threads pertaining to Carter Page and George Papadopoulos
  • The opening of the Jeff Sessions false statements investigation
  • The bureaucratic set-up of the Mueller investigation
  • References to Kevin Clinesmith (and possibly some references to other Kevins)
  • Substantive critiques of Donald Trump (for example, pertaining to his desire to blow up NATO)
  • Discussions of Trump sharing highly classified Israeli intelligence with the Russians
  • Proactive ethical discussions about how to deal with the appointment of Rudolph Contreras, whom Strzok was friends with, to the FISA Court
  • Leak investigations, both into stories pertaining to Flynn or Trump and stories not related to Trump
  • Unrelated FISA applications
  • 702 reauthorization
  • Apparently unrelated cases, including things like CFIUS reviews

There are long swaths with half the side of the conversation left out, hiding what are clear changes of topic.

Then there are personal details, like talks about showers and anniversaries, as well as some emotional chatter and one declaration of love.

That makes Ballantine’s claim that, “purely personal messages have been deleted from this production,” utterly damning, particularly given the timing, September 23, and the fact that unlike past productions, this was not noticed to the docket in real time.

“Did your anniversary go ok? I don’t really want a lot of deta[]” is by any sane measure a purely personal message. It was not deleted or redacted from this production.

What DOJ decided to do, just days before a decision in the parallel lawsuits Strzok and Page have against DOJ alleging a violation of the Privacy Act for the release of personal information, was to release more personal information, information that had — in the past, under an earlier purported ethics review of what was releasable — been deemed personal information.

DOJ knit together a bunch of texts that DOJ admits were already public before Flynn allocuted his guilty plea a second time, but threw in yet more personal texts.

And then, on September 25, Amy Berman Jackson ruled that Page and Strzok should both get discovery to prove their Privacy Act (and in Strzok’s case, other claims) cases. That makes all of this — all the decisions that led up to to the release of these texts — discoverable in what I assume will be an expanded Privacy Act lawsuit.

It’s unclear what malicious thinking led DOJ to include more texts attempting to humiliate Strzok and Page (even while providing a slew of other information making it clear that Strzok did not have it in for Flynn). But they just likely made this entire process subject to discovery in a lawsuit overseen by Amy Berman Jackson.

The Jeffrey Jensen “Investigation:” Post-It Notes and Other Irregularities

I noted the other day that Jeffrey Jensen had not asked William Barnett some basic questions (such as the import of Mike Flynn’s lies to the decision to interview Flynn or the names of colleagues who had purportedly joked about “wiping” their phones) that you would expect from a half-serious investigation. That’s ironic, since one of Barnett’s allegations about Mueller’s investigators is that they didn’t ask basic follow-up questions (the public record conflicts with a number of Barnett’s claims about the Mueller investigation).

Given my discovery about differences between two versions of Peter Srtzok’s notes purportedly “discovered” in the Jensen investigation, I want to look more closely at what the Bates stamps and Post-It note practices of the investigation suggest about it. I believe I have put all the documents released under the guise of the Jensen investigation here (though have not finished annotating them). I’ve put what delivery correspondence got released explaining those documents below (I’ve updated these on 9/29).

Both Bates series are labeled SCO documents even when they’re not SCO documents

There are actually two sets of Bates stamps among the exhibits submitted in an effort to blow up the Flynn prosecution.

One series includes Bates stamps DOJSCO700021192-21198 (Joe Pientka and Peter Strzok’s notes from Flynn’s interview), DOJSCO700021201-21205 (Peter Strzok’s July 19, 2017 302). and DOJSCO 700022308-12 (a version of the January 24, 2017 Flynn 302). Here’s what the typeface of that Bates stamp looks like:

These reflect documents turned over to Flynn in discovery before Barr started blowing up the prosecution (see this Strzok 302 and his notes included as part of this exhibit). These were all submitted with the Motion to Dismiss on May 7, 2020. The inclusion of documents with an earlier stamp is not at all nefarious. Indeed, it helps to distinguish three different types of documents submitted with the Motion to Dismiss:

  • Documents already turned over to Flynn, which were submitted accompanying the MTD with their original Bates stamp
  • Documents Sidney Powell had asked for but which Emmet Sullivan rejected as Brady discovery; these have no Bates stamp (though Sullivan has reviewed some of these documents)
  • Documents that were “discovered” as “new” to justify the Motion to Dismiss; they have the later Bates stamp

Here’s an example of the Jensen typeface:

Remember: these weren’t new to the FBI Agents or prosecutors on the team. They were just “new” to Jeffrey Jensen, who was brought in from St. Louis just to provide the documents a virgin birth.

The one “tell” about this Bates stamp is that it incorporates documents that well precede the Mueller investigation, and probably weren’t part of the Mueller investigation, under an SCO stamp.

I guess “BillyBarrBlowsUpBobby3Sticks” would be too obvious.

Bill Priestap’s original notes, with sticky note, has two Bates numbers

Once you get into the Jensen Bates stamp, documents often get submitted over and over. The most remarkable example of that are Bill Priestap’s notes from a January 24, 2017 meeting prior to the Flynn interview. Bates DOJSCO 700023464 was submitted twice (because Flynn’s lawyers screwed up the upload), once as part of Docket #188 and again as part of Docket #190. Then, the exact same document was submitted as DOJSCO 700022702 as part of the Motion to Dismiss.

This is interesting for two reasons. It’s common to find the same document with two different Bates stamp numbers. For example, if four people have received the same email, it may show up in discovery four times, with four different Bates stamps. But that’s more common with electronic files, for obvious reasons.

But this is not multiple digital versions of the same document. Both copies have the same blue sticky note on it, meaning both exhibits were scanned (or were from the same scan).

That wouldn’t be all that weird if the digital exhibits submitted with the Motion to Dismiss had different Bates numbers. But they generally don’t. For example, William Barnett’s draft Closing Communication has Bates stamp DOJ SCO 700023466 in both the exhibit Flynn’s team released on April 30 and the version submitted with the Motion to Dismiss.

The most curious detail of the two instances of the original copy of Priestap’s notes is that the one submitted later, with the Motion to Dismiss, has a much earlier (762 pages) Bates stamp. My eyes are beginning to blur, but I think the one other instance of this involves three documents involving Peter Strzok in advance of the Mike Flynn interview.

The earlier Bates notes might suggest that those select documents from January 23 and 24 were found — perhaps even before Jensen began work — and the disclosure theater in service of the Motion to Dismiss all followed it.

If that’s true, DOJ’s failure to release Priestap’s 302 explaining all this is fairly damning, given that DOJ is suppressing his explanation even while re-releasing the same documents.

DOJ falsely presents annotations as unaltered hand-written notes, misleadingly so with one set of Strzok notes

Which brings me to where I started this rabbit hole: with Jensen’s treatment of hand-written notes. I’ll probably miss something but I think the hand-written notes released by Jensen include:

The interview notes are a different animal (though remember that FBI got the mixed up and no one figured it out for months, possibly until I pointed it out).

Whoever took the Boente notes added a date in real time. That’s likely, though not certain, in the case of Gauhar. Priestap almost certainly dated his own notes (though it’s unclear who put that blue sticky on them).

In the unredacted bits, there is no date on Strzok’s January 25 notes. As noted, the originally released version of Strzok’s notes, which is a scan of the original, has no date (and Jeffrey Jensen provided Sidney Powell a range rather than the obvious date of January 5 for them, so she could make a false claim about Joe Biden).

The copy of Strzok’s March 28, 2017 notes, Bates Stamp 700023501 has the date added. It appears to have been added with a Post-It (annotated in yellow). It also appears that you can see Post-It note tabs (annotated in red) picked up on the copy, some with notes on them.

It appears, then, that someone simply made a copy of the notes without taking them out of a notebook. I have no reason to believe the date is inaccurate, though I am intrigued by the way the redaction obscures what would be the edges of the date Post-It.

The date on Andrew McCabe’s notes, with a Bates stamp 700023502, the next in the series, appears to have been added after the fact by someone other than the person who took the notes. While it has some similarities with the date on the Strzok notes, it doesn’t cross the 7 as one of the two Strzok annotations did, and could easily have been added by whoever filed the notes in real time.

 

Finally, the new version of Strzok’s January 5, 2017 notes, with a Bates stamp 700023503 and so the next in a series, include the added date and some newly unredacted content (inside the red rectangle).

As noted, there is absolutely no doubt that these notes were written on January 5, 2017 (indeed, the newly unredacted details match other versions of this meeting). But after having released an unannotated version of this document, Jensen (or whoever is running this rodeo) decided to release another version that affirmatively misleads about that certainty.

The other instances of these date annotations are not nefarious, as far as I understand it. But pretending there was confusion about the date of these notes served to support an attack on Joe Biden. And rather than clearing all that up, DOJ has done what Kevin Clinesmith faces prison time for having done: alter a record.

It is inaccurate to say these are “Peter Strzok’s hand-written notes” (and, if the McCabe date was added after the fact, those too). Rather, this is a copy of Strzok’s hand-written notes that appear as a page in someone’s investigative notebook, and the date reflects an alteration — not identified to the court — to Strzok’s notes, an alteration that introduces an error.

Let me clear: I don’t think the dates change the investigative significance of these notes. I believe the January 5 notes have zero investigative significance, taken in context. I think the redaction of Brandon Van Grack’s name — if that’s what happened in William Barnett’s 302 — is a far graver example of abuse, because it serves to hide the baselessness of DOJ and Flynn’s complaints.

Rather, all these details reflect what an amateur effort Barr’s effort to blow up Flynn’s prosecution is. These irregularities, while not dramatically affecting the underlying evidentiary claim (excepting Powell’s attack on Joe Biden), suggest that no one is conducting a real investigation that would have to sustain future judicial review. They’re doing nothing except producing propaganda.


April 24: Jocelyn Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

Beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The review by USA EDMO has involved the analysis of reports related to the investigation along with communications and notes by Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) personnel associated with the investigation.

The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March and April 2020 and are provided to you as a result of this ongoing review; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

April 24: Powell submits two documents obtained from Covington & Burling, a Rob Kelner email indicating that C&B has an understanding that Mueller is unlikely to charge Jr, and another letter making it quite clear that Mueller did not make promises.

April 29: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March and April 2020, and are provided to you as a result of this ongoing review; additional documents may be forthcoming.1 These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

1 Note that the enclosed spreadsheet (DOJSCO-700023473 – DOJSCO700023475), which contains messages between and among various Bureau personnel, is an index and another detailed version of these messages is forthcoming.

May 5: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

 As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March, April and May 2020; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

May 18: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we disclosed by letter dated April 24, 2020, beginning in January 2020, at the direction of Attorney General William P. Barr, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri (“USA EDMO”) has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO in March, April and May 2020; additional documents may be forthcoming. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018.

June 23: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed document was obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO during the course of its review. This page of notes was taken by former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. While the page itself is undated; we believe that the notes were taken in early January 2017, possibly between January 3 and January 5. These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018; additional documents may be forthcoming.

June 24: Powell accuses Biden of starting the Logan Act investigation based off false date on Strzok notes.

July 7: Ballantine files notice of discovery correspondence along with that correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Attorney General Tashina Gauhar from a January 25, 2017 meeting (23487-80), notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok from that same meeting (23491-92), an internal DOJ document dated January 30, 2017 (23493-97), and handwritten notes of then Acting Attorney General Dana Boente, dated March 30, 2017 (23498-500). These materials are covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018; additional documents may be forthcoming.

September 23: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (23501 & 23503) and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (23502); and internal text messages between FBI analysts who worked on the Flynn matter (23504- 23516).

We are also providing you with additional text messages between former DAD Strzok and Lisa Page (23516-23540). As you know, some of these messages were originally made available to Flynn’s former attorneys on March 13, 2018 through a publicly available link to a Senate webpage. On June 24, 2018, the government provided a link to a second website that contained additional text messages. In an abundance of caution, we are providing you additional text messages in this production; please note that purely personal messages have been deleted from this production.

September 24: Powell files supplement quoting notice.

The documents include handwritten notes of former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok (23501 & 23503) and former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (23502); and internal text messages between FBI analysts who worked on the Flynn matter (23504- 23516); . . . additional text messages between former DAD Strzok and Lisa Page (23516-23540).

September 24: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. Attached hereto is a summary of the National Security Letters issued by the FBI (23541-42) and a related email (23543-44).

September 24: Ballantine sends Powell notice of the William Barnett 302 without noticing Judge Sullivan an unclassified version was shared with Flynn’s team.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. On September 17, 2020, United States Attorney Jeffery Jenson conducted an interview of Special Agent William J. Barnett. A copy of the report of that interview is attached to this letter. The government is filing a redacted version of this report of interview as an attachment to its supplemental motion to dismiss tonight.

The unredacted version of the report of interview is covered by the Protective Order entered by the Court on February 21, 2018, and is designated “sensitive.”

September 27: Ballantine sends Powell notice of new exhibits without noticing Judge Sullivan of the correspondence.

As we have previously disclosed, beginning in January 2020, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri has been conducting a review of the Michael T. Flynn investigation. The enclosed documents were obtained and analyzed by USAO EDMO during the course of its review. Attached hereto is are notes of three ODAG attorneys, numbered 23559- 23562

September 28: Ballantine files four different notices of discovery correspondence at once (resulting in delayed notification to John Gleeson).

 

Sidney Powell Accuses William Barnett of Committing “Outrageous, Deliberate Misconduct” and Kenneth Kohl Hides Evidence that Brandon Van Grack Did Not

I want to pause for a moment and look at the maneuvers that Billy Barr pulled last night to try to substantiate a reason to blow up the Mike Flynn case.

First, on Wednesday, the less crazy attorneys on Mike Flynn’s team, William Hodes and Lindsay McKesson, moved to withdraw. It’s an awfully weird time for lawyers to withdraw from a case, unless they’re trying to leave town before the shit starts hitting the fan.

Unless I’m missing something, Sullivan has not approved their motion.

Then, last night, Sidney Powell submitted a memo with a bunch of exhibits, every single one of which have Bates stamps reflecting these are SCO documents:

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Exhibit C:

Exhibit D:

Exhibit E:

That means that Mueller team members involved in Flynn’s case would have had access to these documents.

In her memo, Powell argues that the exhibits “establish[] misconduct” and are proof of Brady violations. She emphasizes that these documents were “long concealed by the Special Counsel and FBI.”

On May 7, 2020, the Government moved to dismiss with prejudice the prosecution of General Flynn. ECF No. 198. Until this case is dismissed with prejudice, the Government has a continuing obligation to provide to the defense all evidence that is exculpatory of General Flynn, establishes misconduct by the Government in its many capacities that contributed to this wrongful prosecution, or otherwise is favorable to the defense. Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). The defense has a continuing obligation to make a record that mandates this dismissal— especially in view of this court’s unprecedented procedures and position.

[snip]

These documents provide information long known to the agents and others at the highest levels of the Department of Justice and the FBI; information long concealed by the Special Counsel and FBI. This evidence shows outrageous, deliberate misconduct by FBI and DOJ—playing games with the life of a national hero.

Then, later in the night, DOJ released a 302 memorializing a recent interview with William Barnett which I showed  was a self-contradictory shitshow. In the accompanying memo, Kenneth Kohl, Acting Principal Assistant US Attorney in DC, noted that Barnett, “handled the counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Flynn, and was thereafter assigned to the Special Counsel’s Office.”

Pursuant to that continuing review, an interview was recently conducted of the former case agent, SA William Barnett, who handled the counterintelligence investigation of Mr. Flynn, and was thereafter assigned to the Special Counsel’s Office investigating Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential Election.

Which is to say that yesterday, Sidney Powell submitted a brief arguing that William Barnett — her new star witness — engaged in “outrageous, deliberate misconduct,” and then later in the day, DOJ submitted a contradiction-riddled interview with that Agent that Powell had earlier accused of engaging in “outrageous, deliberate misconduct.”

Things get stranger.

In her filing, Powell claims that she has included Exhibits D and C as proof that Flynn satisfied the registration obligation.

Newly produced notes of Peter Strzok show: Strzok met with Bruce Schwartz, Lisa, and George at DOJ on March 28, 2017, where he noted Flynn Intel Group “satisfied the registration obligation” and “no evidence of any willfulness.” Nonetheless, “Bruce” decided to issue subpoenas to Flynn Intel Group “and more.” Exhibits C, D.

Exhibit D seems to show something dramatically different. It seems to show that the AG (that is, Jeff Sessions) met with Turkish Ministers and tried to vouch for Flynn about the secret work that Turkey was doing.

It seems odd to go to the guys who were hoping to keep their relationship with Flynn secret to ask them whether it was secret. Moreover, if they’re the ones vouching for it — and not Flynn’s cut-out, Ekim Alptekin — it would seem to suggest Flynn was working for Turkey, which is what he testified to under oath but not what he wrote on his delayed FARA filing. If so, this doesn’t help Flynn at all. It only serves to hurt him.

Things get stranger still.

Contrary to Powell’s claim, Exhibit C has nothing to do with Turkey. Instead, it’s a set of Peter Strzok’s notes from Jim Comey’s debrief of a meeting at the White House on January 5, 2017.

 

We’ve seen these notes before. They are a copy of notes submitted in June (which also have a — different — SCO Bates stamp on them, indicating that Barnett, the man Powell has accused of “outrageous, deliberate misconduct,” had access to those too).

 

The primary difference, aside from DOJ’s decision to newly release notes indicating that President Obama said to put the right people on this, is that the version submitted last night, the version that Powell claims to be about a March 28, 2017 meeting on Turkey is dated, “1/4-5/17.”

When Powell submitted the notes in June, she said they were proof that Vice President Biden “personally raised the idea of the Logan Act.”

Strzok’s notes believed to be of January 4, 2017, reveal that former President Obama, James Comey, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, and apparently Susan Rice discussed the transcripts of Flynn’s calls and how to proceed against him. Mr. Obama himself directed that “the right people” investigate General Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious: General Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak “appear legit.” According to Strzok’s notes, it appears that Vice President Biden personally raised the idea of the Logan Act.

I noted then that there was no question about date the notes were written, because they obviously describe a meeting that multiple documents (including one that has been public since February 2018, long before Flynn allocuted his guilt a second time) make clear happened on January 5, 2017. Nevertheless, Powell claimed (and set off a predictable resulting frenzy, which was probably the point) that they were proof that Biden had it in for Mike Flynn.

Now, normally, when you make an accusation to a court that later gets debunked, you make a filing with the court admitting you were wrong. In this case, Powell would have also had to admit that anyone who believed these notes were from January 3 — as Jeffrey Jensen had suggested they might be — provably knew fuckall about what he was looking at.

But if Powell were to do that, she’d be admitting that Jensen doesn’t know fuckall about what he is investigating on the same day she accused Barnett to have engaged in “outrageous, deliberate misconduct.” So instead, Powell just slipped the exhibit in with her filing without calling attention to her prior false claims.

But wait. Things get still stranger.

Finally, Kohl submitted the 302 with redactions of the name of an “SCO Atty 1.” Now, it has been the standing rule in DOJ that the AUSAs who worked for Mueller are public. That way Trump can rant about their political leanings at rallies.

Last night, for the first time ever, DOJ has decided that these attorneys are not senior enough to have their names released.

Several of those redactions of “SCO Atty 1’s” name, however, make it clear that the person has a two part last name, one that wraps at the end of a line.

Just one of Mueller’s attorneys has such a name (Adam Jed is the only one whose last name is short enough to fit in the first part of those redactions). That attorney is Brandon Van Grack. Indeed, the 302 from an interview that Barnett discussed in his interview makes it clear that Van Grack was the one Barnett is working with. So along with submitting proof that Barnett engaged in “outrageous, deliberate misconduct” as well as providing proof that Jensen led others to make a material misrepresentation to Emmet Sullivan, Kohl just submitted proof that Van Grack routinely took the side of Barnett. And that he, Kohl, was hiding that.

Call me crazy, but John Gleeson can just look at yesterday’s filings to show that Sidney Powell and Kenneth Kohl are accusing each other and Jeffrey Jensen of misconduct, at the same time that they’re hiding evidence that Van Grack did not engage in misconduct. That’s the the kind of misconduct that Emmet Sullivan might use to justify refusing to dismiss the prosecution.

Update: It’s not really clear whether the Bates reflects documents obtained by SCO or those investigating SCO. If it’s the latter, it raises real questions about whether Strzok’s notes are one or two copies.

Billy Barr Releases 302 that Proves View of Pro Mike Flynn Agent Held Sway in Mueller Report Conclusions

Before I do a deep dive of the 302 that Billy Barr had released in yet another attempt to blow up the Mike Flynn prosecution, let me review the conclusion of the Mueller Report was with regards to whether President Trump even knew about Mike Flynn’s calls with Sergey Kislyak, much less ordered them.

Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn’s calls when they occurred, but the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President’s knowledge.

[snip]

Our investigation accordingly did not produce evidence that established that the President knew about Flynn’s discussions of sanctions before the Department of Justice notified the White House of those discussions in late January 2017.

The conclusion is central to the finding that there was no proof of a quid pro quo. If Trump had ordered Flynn to undermine sanctions — as a sentencing memo approved by Main DOJ explained — it would have been proof of coordination.

The defendant’s false statements to the FBI were significant. When it interviewed the defendant, the FBI did not know the totality of what had occurred between the defendant and the Russians. Any effort to undermine the recently imposed sanctions, which were enacted to punish the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election, could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia. Accordingly, determining the extent of the defendant’s actions, why the defendant took such actions, and at whose direction he took those actions, were critical to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation.

That means the conclusion adopted by the Mueller Report is precisely the one that the FBI Agent who investigated Flynn, William Barnett, held, as described repeatedly in the interview done by Jeffrey Jensen in an attempt to undermine the Mueller prosecution.

With respect to FLYNN’s [redacted] with the Russian Ambassador in December 2016, BARNETT did not believe FLYNN was being directed by TRUMP.

The Mueller Report reached that conclusion in spite of the fact that — as Barnett describes it — in his second interview, Flynn said that Trump was aware of the calls between him and the Russian Ambassador.

During one interview of FLYNN, possibly the second interview, one of the interviewers asked a series of questions including one which FLYNN’s answer seemed to indicate TRUMP was aware of [redacted] between FLYNN and the Russian Ambassador. BARNETT believed FLYNN’s answer was an effort to tell the interviewers what they wanted to hear. BARNETT had to ask the clarifying question of FLYNN who then said clearly that TRUMP was not aware of [redacted]

Barnett then goes on a paragraph long rant claiming there was no evidence that Trump was aware.

BARNETT said numerous attempts were made to obtain evidence that TRUMP directed FLYNN concerning [redacted] with no such evidence being obtained. BARNETT said it was just an assumption, just “astro projection,” and the “ground just kept being retreaded.”

The claim that there was no evidence that Trump directed Flynn to undermine sanctions is false. I say that because Flynn himself told Kislyak that Trump was aware of his conversations with Kislyak on December 31, 2016, when Kislyak called up to let Flynn know that Putin had changed his mind on retaliation based on his call.

FLYNN: and, you know, we are not going to agree on everything, you know that, but, but I think that we have a lot of things in common. A lot. And we have to figure out how, how to achieve those things, you know and, and be smart about it and, uh, uh, keep the temperature down globally, as well as not just, you know, here, here in the United States and also over in, in Russia.

KISLYAK: yeah.

FLYNN: But globally l want to keep the temperature down and we can do this ifwe are smart about it.

KISLYAK: You’re absolutely right.

FLYNN: I haven’t gotten, I haven’t gotten a, uh, confirmation on the, on the, uh, secure VTC yet, but the, but the boss is aware and so please convey that. [my emphasis]

Flynn literally told the Russian Ambassador that Trump was aware of the discussions, but Barnett claims there was no evidence.

Now is probably a good time to note that, months ago, I learned that  Barnett sent pro-Trump texts on his FBI phone, the mirror image of Peter Strzok sending anti-Trump texts.

So Billy Barr has released a 302 completed just a week ago, without yet releasing the Bill Priestap 302 debunking some of the earlier claims released by Billy Barr in an attempt to justify blowing up the Flynn prosecution, much less the 302s that show that Flynn appeared to lie in his first interview with Mueller’s investigators (as well as 302s showing that KT McFarland coordinated the same story).

And the 302 is an ever-loving shit show. Besides the key evidence — that his claim that investigators didn’t listen to him even though the conclusion of the Mueller Report is the one that he says only he had — Barnett disproves his claims over and over in this interview.

Barnett’s testimony substantially shows five things:

  • He thought there was no merit to any suspicions that Flynn might have ties to Russia
  • He nevertheless provided abundant testimony that some of the claims about the investigation (specifically that Peter Strzok and probably Brandon Van Grack had it in for Flynn) are false
  • Barnett buries key evidence: he mentions neither that Flynn was publicly lying about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak (which every other witness said was driving the investigation), and he did not mention that once FBI obtained call records, they showed that Flynn had lied to hide that he had consulted with Mar-a-Lago before he called Sergey Kislyak
  • Jensen didn’t ask some of the most basic questions, such as whether Barnett thought he had to investigate further after finding the Kislyak call or who the multiple people Barnett claimed joked about wiping their phone were
  • Barnett believes that Mueller’s lawyers (particularly Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Weissmann) were biased and pushing for a conclusion that the Mueller Report shows they didn’t conclude, but he didn’t work primarily with either one of them and his proffered evidence against Rhee actually shows the opposite

According to the org charts included in the Carter Page IG Report (PDF 116), it appears that Barnett would have been on a combined Crossfire Hurricane team from July 31 to December 2016; the report says he was working on the Manafort case.

Then, he took over the Flynn case. He would have reported up through someone else who also oversaw the George Papadopoulos investigation, but he would not be part of that investigation.

Even after a subsequent reorganization, that would have remained true until the Mueller investigation, when — by his own description — Barnett remained on the Flynn team.

Early in his 302, Barnett described that he thought the investigation was “supposition on supposition,” which he initially attributed to not knowing details of the case. Much later in the interview, he said he, “believed there were grounds to investigate the other three subjects in Crossfire Hurricane; however, he thought FLYNN was the ‘outlier.'” which conflicts with his earlier claim.

By his own repeated description, Barnett did not open the Flynn case and did not understand why it had been opened (he doesn’t explain that this was an UNSUB investigation, which undermines much of what he says). Moreover, his complaints about the flimsy basis for the Flynn investigation conflict with what Barnett said in the draft closing memo for the investigation, which explained that the investigation was opened,

on an articulable factual basis that CROSSFIRE RAZOR (CR) may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.

[snip]

The goal of the investigation was to determine whether the captioned subject, associated with the Trump campaign, was directed and controlled by and/or coordinated activities with the Russian Federation in a manner which is a threat to the national security and/or possibly a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 18 U.S.C. section 951 et seq, or other related statutes.

A key detail here is that Barnett himself said part of this was an attempt to figure out whether Flynn may have unwittingly been targeted by Russia, which makes his focus on crime in the Jensen interview totally contradictory.

Barnett did explain that NSLs were written up in December but pulled back (these were also released last night, though not with the detail that they were withdrawn). He claimed not to know why the NSLs were withdrawn.

A National Security Letter (NSL) had been prepared to obtain “toll records” for a phone belonging to FLYNN. The request was “pulled back” prior to the records being obtained. Peter Strzok (STRZOK) was the individual who ordered the NSL be pulled back. BARNETT was not told why the NSL was pulled back.

In the draft closing that Barnett himself wrote, he explained that because Flynn was not at that point named as a possible agent of a foreign power, that limited the investigative techniques they might use.

The writer notes that since CROSSFIRE RAZOR was not specifically named as an agent of a foreign power by the original CROSSFIRE HURRICANE predicated reporting, the absence of any derogatory information or lead information from these logical source reduced the number of investigative avenues and techniques to pursue.

That’s also another reason (not noted by Barnett in this interview) why he didn’t get a 215 order.

BARNETT chose not to obtain records through FISA Business Records because he advised this process is comparatively onerous.

Note that Strzok’s order to withdraw the NSL is yet more proof that Strzok was not out to get Flynn.

Barnett also confirmed something else that Strzok has long said — that they chose not to use any overt methods during the election (unlike the Hillary investigation).

BARNETT was told to keep low-key, looking at publicly available information.

Again, this adds to the evidence that no one was out to get Trump.

Barnett also explains how Stefan Halper shared information about Flynn, and he — a pro-Trump agent skeptical of the investigation — decided to chase down the Svetlana Lokhova allegation.

The source reported that during an event [redacted] 2014 FLYNN unexpectedly left the event [redacted] The source alleged FLYNN was not accompanied by anyone other [redacted] BARNETT believed the information concerning [redacted] potentially significant and something that could be investigated. However, Intelligence Analysts did not locate information to corroborate this reporting concerning redacted] FLYNN, including inquiries with other foreign intelligence agencies. BARNETT found the idea FLYNN could leave an event, either by himself or [redacted] without the matter being noted was not plausible. With nothing to corroborate the story, BARNETT thought he information was not accurate.

Later on, Barnett seems to make an effort to spin his inclusion of the Lokhova information in the closing memo as an attempt to help Flynn, describing,

BARNETT wanted to include information obtained during the investigation, including non-derogatory information. BARNETT wanted to include [redacted] specifically [redacted] FLYNN. The [redacted] and FLYNN were only in the same country, [redacted], the same time on one occasion and at that time they were visiting different cities.

That is, something in the closing memo that has been spun as an attack on Flynn he here spins as an attempt to include non-derogatory information, to help Flynn.

I find it curious that the main reason Barnett dismissed this allegation is because he found it implausible that a 30-year intelligence officer would know how to leave a meeting unnoticed. But let it be noted that for over a year, Sidney Powell has suggested that chasing down this tip was malicious targeting of Flynn, and it turns out a pro-Trump agent is the one who chased it down.

In many places, Barnett’s narrative is a muddle. For example, early in his interview, he said that he worked closely with Analyst 1 and Analyst 2. Analyst 2 worked on the Manafort investigation. Barnett had to get the Flynn files from Analyst 1, suggesting Analyst 1 had a key role in that investigation. But then later in the interview, after explaining that Analyst 1, “believed the investigation was an exercise in futility,” Barnett then said that Analyst 3 “was the lead analyst on RAZOR.” Barnett described that Analyst 3 was “‘a believer’ due to his conviction FLYNN was involved in illegal activity,” but also described that Analyst 3 was the one who didn’t want to interview Flynn. But then Barnett explains several other people who did not want to interview Flynn, in part because the pretense Barnett wanted to use (that it was part of a security clearance) was transparently false.

Barnett then explains that he did not change his opinion about whether Flynn was compromised based on reading the transcript (it’s unclear whether he read just one or all of them) of Flynn’s call with Kislyak. He explained that he “did not see a potential LOGAN ACT violation as a major issue concerning the RAZOR investigation.”

There are several points about this request. First, Jeffrey Jensen is taking a line agent’s opinion about a crime as pertinent here, after Billy Barr went on a rant the other day about how line agents and prosecutors don’t decide these things (showing the hypocrisy of this entire exercise). Barnett’s account undermines the disinformation spread before that the Logan Act claim came from Joe Biden, disinformation which Jensen himself wrongly fed.  Significantly, Barnett does not appear to have been asked whether he thought the transcripts meant he had to investigate further. 

Barnett says “in hindsight” he believes he was cut out of the interview of Flynn, based solely on the norm that normally “a line agent/case agent would do the interview with a senior FBI official present in cases concerning high ranking political officials.” He doesn’t consider the possibility that Joe Pientka did it because he had been in the counterintelligence briefing with Flynn the previous summer, which is what the DOJ IG Report said.

He then says “There was another reorganization of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation after the 1/24/17 interview of Flynn. This conflicts, somewhat, with both the org charts Michael Horowitz did, but also texts already released showing the reorg started in the first days of January (though the texts are consistent with the initial plan for Barnett and Andy McCabe to interview Flynn and I don’t necessarily trust the DOJ IG Report over Barnett), but that was before a lot else happened.

Only after describing a post-interview reorganization does Barnett raise something that all the public record says happened earlier, that, “The FBI was reacting to articles being reported in the news, most notably an article written by Ignatius concerning [redacted] involving FLYNN to a Russian Ambassador.” But even here, Barnett does not talk (nor does he appear to have been asked) about Flynn lying to the press about the intercepts. In other words, Jensen’s investigators simply didn’t address what every single witness says was the most important factor at play in the decision to interview Flynn, his public lies about the calls with Kislyak.

In one place, Barnett claims that “base-line NSLs” were filed “after the article by Ignatius,” which would put it in mid-January, before the interview. Later, he says that “In February 2017, NSLs were being drafted with [SA3] instructing BARNETT what needed to be done,” putting it after Flynn obviously lied in his interview. At best, that suggests Barnett is eliding the timeline in ways that (again) don’t deal with the risk of Flynn’s public lies about the Kislyak call.

Barnett then claims that McCabe was running this (in spite of the involvement of SA3 and his earlier report — and Horowitz’s org chart, not to mention other evidence documents already released — showing the continued involvement of Strzok). Barnett also backed getting NSLs in early 2017, and even insisted, again, that they should have been obtained earlier. Jensen appears to be making a big deal out of the fact that Kevin Clinesmith approved the NSLs against Flynn in 2017.

BARNETT said he sent an e-mail to CLINESMITH on 02/01/2017 asking CLINESMITH about whether the predication information was acceptable, as it was the same information provided on the original NSL request in 2016. CLINESMITH told BARNETT the information was acceptable and could be used for additional NSLs.

There’s a lot that’s suspect about this line of questioning, not least that the predicate for the investigation as a whole was different than the one for Flynn. But I’m sure we’ll hear more about it.

A Strzok annotation of a NYT article that Lindsey Graham released makes it clear that by February 14, 2017, the FBI still hadn’t obtained the returns from most of the NSLs.

Barnett seems to suggest that as new information came in “in BARNETT’s opinion, no evidence of criminal activity and no information that would start a new investigative direction.” If he’s referring to call records (which is what the NSLs would have obtained) that is, frankly, shocking, as the call records would have shown that Flynn also lied about being in touch with Mar-a-Lago before calling Kislyak. It’s what Flynn was trying to hide with his lies! And yet Barnett says that was not suspect.

Then Barnett moved onto the Mueller team. He starts his discussion with another self-contradictory paragraph.

BARNETT was told to give a brief on FLYNN to a group including SCO attorney Jean Rhee (RHEE), [four other people], and possibly [a fifth] BARNETT said he briefly went over the RAZOR investigation, including the assessment that there was no evidence of a crime, and then started to discuss [redacted — probably Manafort] which BARNETT thought was the more significant investigation. RHEE stopped BARNETT’s briefing [redacted] and asked questions concerning the RAZOR investigation. RHEE wanted to “drill down” on the fees FLYNN was paid for a speech FLYNN gave in Russia. BARNETT explained logical reasons for the amount of the fee, but RHEE seemed to dismiss BARNETT’s assessment. BARNETT thought RHEE was obsessed with FLYNN and Russia and she had an agenda. RHEE told BARNETT she was looking forward to working together. BARNETT told RHEE they would not be working together.

First, by his own description, Barnett was asked to brief on Flynn, not on Manafort (or anyone else); he was still working Flynn and not (if Horowitz’s org chart is to be trusted) involved anymore with Manafort at all. So if he deviated from that, he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do in the briefing, which might explain why people in the briefing asked him to return to the matter at hand, Flynn. Furthermore, in much of what comes later, Barnett claims the prosecutors overrode the agents (in spite of the fact that, as shown, the final conclusion of the report sided with Barnett). But Barnett here shows that from his very first meeting with Mueller prosecutors, he was the one being bossy, not the prosecutors.

Update: I’ve since learned that the redacted information pertains to the Flynn Turkey case. The point about Rhee still stands, however. Rhee was in charge of the Russian side of the investigation. She asked questions about the Russian side of the investigation. She was polite and professional. He responded by being an abusive dick. What this paragraph shows is that Barnett has a workplace behavior problem, and he used his own workplace behavior problem to try to attack the female colleague he was being an asshole to.

Barnett’s continued complaints about Rhee (and Weissmann) are nutty given that, as a Flynn agent, he wouldn’t have been working with them.

Barnett claims that,

In March or April 2017, Crossfire Hurricane went through another reorganization. All of the investigations were put together.

The timing coincides with, but the structure does not match, what appears in the Carter Page IG Report (though, again, I don’t necessarily assume DOJ IG got it right).

Then Barnett makes a claim that conflicts with a great deal of public facts:

On 05/09/2017, COMEY was fired which seemed to trigger a significant amount of activity regarding Crossfire Hurricane. Carter Page was interviewed three times and PAPADOPOULOS was also interviewed. Both investigations seemed to be nearing an end with nothing left to pursue. the MANAFORT case was moved from an investigative squad to a counter intelligence squad [redacted] The Crossfire Hurricane investigations seemed to be winding down.

The appointment of the SCO changed “everything.”

At least according to the Horowitz org chart, these weren’t his investigations. A list of interviews shows that FBI had not interviewed the witnesses to Carter Page’s trip before June 2017 (though it is true that the investigation into him was winding down). The details of the Papadopoulos investigation would have shown that it was after at least the first (and given the Strzok note about NSLs) after probably several more interviews before the FBI discovered that Papadopoulos tried to hide extensive contacts with Russians by deactivating his Facebook account. Mueller didn’t even obtain Papadopoulos’ Linked In account until July 7, 2017, and that was just the second warrant obtained by Mueller’s prosecutors, almost three months after he was appointed; that warrant would have disclosed Papadopoulos’ ties to Sergei Millian and further contacts with the Russians. Some of the earliest activity in the investigation pertain to Michael Cohen (in an investigation predicated off of SARs), with the Roger Stone investigation barely beginning in August, neither of which are included in Barnett’s comments. And Barnett makes no mention of the June 9 meeting, discovered only as a result of Congress’ investigations, which drove some of the early investigative steps.

Which is to say, the evidence seems to have changed everything. And yet he says it was Mueller.

And yes, Jim Comey’s firing is part of that. But as to that, Barnett has this ridiculous thing to say:

As another example [of a “get Trump” attitude] BARNETT said the firing of FBI Director COMEY was interpreted as obstruction when it could just as easily have been done because TRUMP did not like COMEY and wanted him replaced.

Well, sure, in the absence of the evidence that might be true. But not when you had Comey’s memos that described how, first of all, Trump had committed to keeping Comey on (meaning he didn’t not like Comey!) but afterwards had tried to intervene in an ongoing investigation. It’s possible Barnett did not know that in real time — it wasn’t his investigation — but it’s not a credible opinion given what is in the memos.

Barnett also claims, as part of his “proof” that people wanted to get Trump that,

Concerning FLYNN, some individuals in the SCO assumed FLYNN was lying to cover up collusion between the TRUMP campaign and Russia. BARNETT believed Flynn lied in the interview to save his job, as that was the most plausible explanation and there was no evidence to contradict it.

Yes. There is evidence. The evidence is that Flynn’s lies hid his consultations with Mar-a-Lago, about which he also lied.

In a passage similarly suggesting that KT McFarland told the same lies that Flynn did because she wanted to get the Singapore job, Barnett seems to refer to (and DOJ seems to have redacted) a reference to Brandon Van Grack (who is the only Mueller prosecutor whose name would span two lines).

If that is, indeed, a reference to Van Grack, then it means DOJ is hiding evidence that Van Grack (along with Strzok) was not biased against Flynn.

Note, too, that Barnett doesn’t reveal that McFarland only unforgot her conversations with Flynn after Flynn pled guilty, which has a significant bearing on how credible that un-forgetting was. Nor does he note that Mueller didn’t charge McFarland with lying. The Mueller Report almost certainly has a declination description for why they didn’t charge McFarland, which (if true), would make a second thing where Barnett’s minority opinion had been determinative for the actual report, in spite of his claim that the prosecutors were running everything.

Finally, the 302 notes that Barnett was asked about whether he “wiped” his own phone.

BARNETT had a cellular telephone issued by the SCO which he did not “wipe.” BARNETT did hear other agents “comically” talk about wiping cellular telephones, but was not aware of anyone “wiping” their issued cellular telephones. BARNETT said one agent had a telephone previously issued to STRZOK.

If this were even a half serious investigation, Barnett would have been asked to back that claim with names. He was not.

What Billy Barr and Jeffrey Jensen have done is show that the only witness they’ve found to corroborate their claims can’t keep his story straight from one paragraph to another, and claims to be ignorant of several central pieces of evidence against Flynn.

That’s all they have.


Given that this post takes such a harsh view on Barnett, reminder I went to the FBI in 2017 regarding someone with no ties to Trump but who sent me a text about (and denigrating) Flynn.

After Bill Barr Minimized Roger Stone’s Threat against Amy Berman Jackson, Emmet Sullivan Got Threatened by a Mike Flynn Supporter

In this post, I showed how Billy Barr justified a lenient sentence for Roger Stone in part by treating threats against judges as a technicality.

As I laid out in this post, prosecutors asked for the following enhancements:

  • 8 levels for the physical threats against Randy Credico
  • 3 levels for substantial interference
  • 2 levels for the substantial scope of the interference
  • 2 levels for obstructing the administration of justice

The last of these, per the original sentencing memo, had to do with Stone’s threats against ABJ.

Finally, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1, two levels are added because the defendant “willfully obstructed or impeded, or attempted to obstruct or impede, the administration of justice with respect to the prosecution of the instant offense of conviction.” Shortly after the case was indicted, Stone posted an image of the presiding judge with a crosshair next to her head. In a hearing to address, among other things, Stone’s ongoing pretrial release, Stone gave sworn testimony about this matter that was not credible. Stone then repeatedly violated a more specific court order by posting messages on social media about matters related to the case.

This enhancement is warranted based on that conduct. See U.S.S.G. § 3C1.C Cmt. 4(F) (“providing materially false information to a magistrate or judge”); see, e.g., United States v. Lassequ, 806 F.3d 618, 625 (1st Cir. 2015) (“Providing false information to a judge in the course of a bail hearing can serve as a basis for the obstruction of justice enhancement.”); United States v. Jones, 911 F. Supp. 54 (S.D.N.Y. 1996) (applying §3C1.1 enhancement to a defendant who submitted false information at hearing on modifying defendant’s conditions of release).

Barr’s memo got to the outcome he wanted by eliminating the 8-point enhancement for physically threatening Credico and the 2-point enhancement for threatening ABJ.

The memo suggested the 8-level enhancement shouldn’t apply, first, because doing so would double Stone’s exposure.

Notably, however, the Sentencing Guidelines enhancements in this case—while perhaps technically applicable— more than double the defendant’s total offense level and, as a result, disproportionately escalate the defendant’s sentencing exposure to an offense level of 29, which typically applies in cases involving violent offenses, such as armed robbery, not obstruction cases. Cf. U.S.S.G. § 2B3.1(a)-(b). As explained below, removing these enhancements would have a significant effect on the defendant’s Guidelines range. For example, if the Court were not to apply the eight-level enhancement for threatening a witness with physical injury, it would result in the defendant receiving an advisory Guidelines range of 37 to 46 months, which as explained below is more in line with the typical sentences imposed in obstruction cases.

[snip]

Then, Barr’s memo argued (and this is the truly outrageous argument) that Stone’s attempts to obstruct his own prosecution overlapped with his efforts to obstruct the HPSCI investigation.

Second, the two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice (§ 3C1.1) overlaps to a degree with the offense conduct in this case. Moreover, it is unclear to what extent the [defendant’s obstructive conduct actually prejudiced the government at trial.]

Effectively, this language treated threats against a judge as unworthy of enhancement.

The Attorney General of the United States found a way to go easy on the President’s life-long rat-fucker by downplaying the importance of threats against those participating in trials.

After an anti-feminist Trump supporter allegedly targeted the family of federal judge Esther Salas in July, Barr claimed to care about such attacks on judges, even though he had treated the threat against ABJ as a technicality.

Unbelievably, the very next week, when Barr lied under oath about treating threats to judges as a technicality, he would have known of another threat against a judge.

Not just any judge.

Another judge presiding over a case against a Trump flunky, Emmet Sullivan. In August, a Long Island man, Frank Caporusso, was charged for threats left on Sullivan’s Chambers phone.

On May 15, 2020, Deputy United States Marshal Louie McKinney, Jr. discovered threatening statements made against Victim One and his staff while listening to voicemails left on Victim One’s Chambers’ telephone line. One voicemail, which recorded a male caller speaking for approximately 30-31 seconds, stated:

We are professionals. We are trained military people. We will be on rooftops. You will not be safe. A hot piece of lead will cut through your skull. You bastard. You will be killed, and I don’t give a fuck who you are. Back out of this bullshit before it’s too late, or we’ll start cutting down your staff. This is not a threat. This is a promise.

[snip]

Investigation also revealed social media accounts that appear to belong to the defendant. These accounts, primarily a Twitter account, contain posts and images calling various politicians and celebrities “morons” and “sycophants.” The last “tweets” were sent on July 3, 2020. Additionally, a twitter reply was sent at 10:48 p.m. on May 14, 2020 (the same evening the voicemail was left).

WaPo’s Ann Marimow first suggested the timing of the threat suggested it was Sullivan and Newsday confirms it.

According to sources, Caporusso accessed the “dark web,” including sites that encouraged people to take action against the judge for his overall handling of the Flynn case.

So after Bill Barr treated a threat against a judge presiding over a Trump associate as a technicality, an apparent QAnon nutter with a long gun responded to Sullivan’s actions in QAnon supporter Mike Flynn’s case by threatening to assassinate Sullivan.

Judge Sullivan Amicus John Gleeson Lays Out How DOJ Is Arguing Against DOJ, then Invokes Barr’s Other Interference

When Judge Emmet Sullivan holds a hearing on DOJ’s motion to dismiss the Mike Flynn prosecution later this month, DOJ will likely refuse to answer any questions about why just Timothy Shea, Bill Barr’s lifelong flunky, signed the original motion to dismiss.

But even without raising that issue, retired Judge John Gleeson — acting as Sullivan’s amicus to oppose the motion — has amplified Shea’s role in his reply brief, submitted today.

He did so by noting that Shea’s argument is fundamentally incompatible with things DOJ claimed before Barr intervened (in filings arguing against Flynn’s Brady claims) and with things DOJ has claimed since (in a response brief signed by AUSA Jocelyn Ballantine).

Effectively, then, Gleeson has laid out that even DOJ believes DOJ lied in their motion to dismiss.

He does so, first of all, with materiality. Gleeson lays out that the government didn’t bother to defend the radical claims about materiality made in the Shea motion.

Although the Government attempts to respond to other arguments in my brief, it offers no response here. It does not claim I have misapprehended or misapplied the law. It never explains why one legal rule—the one set forth in its motion—applies to Flynn, while a different legal rule applies to everyone else. It never explains why its own lawyers erred so grievously in stating the law. It never explains why Flynn’s statements, in this setting, were not even capable of affecting the FBI’s general function. The Government’s silence on these crucial points is, by itself, sufficient to establish that its claims about materiality are pretextual.

Then, Gleeson argues that the government not only got the standard wrong, but misstated the evidence. To support it, he did what I’ve been clamoring for for months — he pointed to the government’s own claims about the materiality of Flynn’s lies (though he relies on a different and weaker filing than the government’s most aggressive statement on materiality, which had to he delayed twice to get senior DOJ review), noting that not that long ago the government argued aggressively that Flynn’s lies were material.

I have explained that the evidence demonstrating materiality here is so strong that the Government could satisfy an even tougher standard than the law requires—specifically, by demonstrating that Flynn’s statements had an actual effect on a specific FBI investigation. See ECF No. 225 at 41–42, 48–49. The Court need not take my word alone for this point. It can take the Government’s own word, as set forth in briefs submitted (unlike the Rule 48(a) motion) by the prosecutors who actually investigated this case, explaining that Flynn’s lies in fact affected the FBI’s investigation into contacts between the Trump campaign and the Russian government (a.k.a. “Crossfire Hurricane”). See ECF No. 132 at 10–11 (stating that Flynn’s “false statements to the FBI . . . were absolutely material”).

He also shows that the response brief — the one signed by Ballentine — offers no response on materiality itself but instead, “kick[s] up administrative dust.”

[T]he Government now abandons any discussion of the supposedly “critical”—but actually irrelevant—“predication threshold” that formed the backbone of its original motion. See ECF No. 198 at 16; see also id. at 2–5, 13–18. Instead, the Government refers vaguely to an irrelevant internal draft closing memorandum, “disagreement” about protocol, and other supposed “procedural irregularities,” ECF No. 227 at 2, 26–27, none of which is either particularly irregular or has any legal significance in proving materiality, see ECF No. 225 at 42–44. The Government seeks to conceal its retreat by kicking up administrative dust, but the bottom line is that it no longer stands by its own motion’s implausible reasoning.

Significantly, he mocks what is, in Billy Barr’s little mind, the real reason Flynn’s case should be dismissed: that many of the people who prosecuted Flynn have since been hounded out of government and are suing. Gleeson points out not just that two of them (Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page) are not witnesses to Flynn’s lies, but that in other places the government celebrates the experience of Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka (and had disclosed Strzok’s damning texts before Flynn pled guilty both times).

[T]he Government trots out a new explanation for its materiality rationale. The Government previously claimed to believe that the available evidence, taken at face value, showed Flynn’s statements to be immaterial. But it now says it has a different concern: that the witnesses it would rely upon to introduce the evidence might lack credibility with a jury. ECF No. 227 at 27–28. As this Court well knows, shifting explanations are classic red flags of pretext. See, e.g., Foster, 136 S. Ct. at 1751; Geleta v. Gray, 645 F.3d 408, 413 (D.C. Cir. 2011).

In any event, this claim makes no sense. The Government asserts without explanation that it “would need to prove its case” by calling as witnesses individuals from the FBI whose credibility could be impeached. ECF No. 227 at 27. But two of these “witnesses” were not present for Flynn’s false statements, so it is entirely unclear why their testimony would be required or even permitted (under evidentiary rules) in the Government’s case-in-chief. And more generally the Government’s professed credibility concerns are not plausible. They center on professed evidence of political bias by an interviewing agent that both the Government and Flynn have known about from the start of the case, see ECF No. 122 at 8–9; ECF No. 144 at 25– 34 (this Court discussing, at length, the history of the referenced text messages and why they do not cast doubt on Flynn’s guilty plea), and two pages after assailing the agents’ credibility, the Government does a back-flip to proclaim the very same agents “highly experienced investigators” whose assessment of the interview should be credited, see ECF No. 227 at 30. As I previously explained—without response from the Government—“[n]o competent lawyer thinks this way.” ECF No. 225 at 55.

To defeat the government’s claims that it would have a hard time proving Flynn’s lies were false, Gleeson points out a key disagreement Flynn has with the government. The government (in the form of prosecutor Ballantine, but others signed the brief too) maintains prosecutors did not commit any abuses.

[T]he Government affirmatively rejects Flynn’s own principal account of why his prior admissions of falsity should not be credited: namely, that prosecutors had threatened him with charges against his son. Compare ECF No. 160-23 at 8 ¶ 34 (Flynn Declaration describing “intense pressure,” including “a threat to indict my son Michael”), and id. at 11 ¶ 46 (“I allowed myself to succumb to the threats from the government to save my family . . . .”), with ECF No. 227 at 28 n.1 (“[T]he [G]overnment’s motion is not based on defendant Flynn’s broad allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Flynn’s allegations are unfounded . . .”).

Given that Flynn repeatedly admitted to lying—and given that the Government is unwilling to accept Flynn’s claims about why those admissions were untrue—the Government struggles to offer a coherent account of why it doubts its ability to prove falsity.

Even Billy Barr, in sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, said there were no Brady violations here (though he lied, under oath, about whether files had been withheld from Judge Sullivan).

Having shown how DOJ disagreed with itself on materiality and falsity, Gleeson then notes how DOJ invented a completely new reason — interests of justice — to dismiss the case.

The Government’s Rule 48(a) motion stated that “continued prosecution of Mr. Flynn would not serve the interests of justice.” ECF No. 198 at 12. It then elaborated on the reason: “the Government does not have a substantial federal interest in penalizing a defendant for a crime that it is not satisfied occurred and that it does not believe it can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. The Government thus asserted that the “interests of justice” would not be served by pursuing a case in which the Government doubts it could prove materiality or falsity. See id. at 12–20. No free-standing “interest of justice” policy reason is apparent in the Government’s motion.

But the Government now insists otherwise, asserting that it has always advanced a third “separate” and “alternative” reason for dismissal wholly unrelated to the difficulty of proving the elements of its case. ECF No. 227 at 23, 25–26. While this conclusion would come as a surprise to any careful reader of the Government’s motion, it would not surprise anyone familiar with doctrines designed to uncover pretext. See Foster, 136 S. Ct. at 1751 (where a party’s “principal reasons” have “shifted over time,” it can be inferred “that those reasons may be pretextual”).

And what exactly is the Government’s non-merits reason for dismissal? The answer is unclear, since the Government never quite explains its newly minted rationale in the sole paragraph devoted to it. See ECF No. 227 at 25–26. It gestures vaguely at “enforcement priorities” and “policy assessments,” id. at 24, then rattles off a disjointed string of allegations regarding “circumstances surrounding the interview,” id. at 25. But these are just the same facts that are legally irrelevant to its materiality and falsity assertions. The Government does not explain what additional supposed significance it has suddenly “assess[ed]” those facts to have, or why Flynn’s conviction disserves the “interests of justice,” see id. at 23, given that his guilt is both conceded and readily provable. While the Government conveniently asserts that these “policy assessments” are “quintessentially unreviewable,” id. at 24, it never actually explains what the policy is, what judgment it made, or why the conduct of the FBI agents in question would warrant dismissal of this case given Flynn’s demonstrable and confessed guilt. See id. at 23–26.

Having shown that DOJ (in Ballantine’s reply) already showed that DOJ (in Shea’s motion to dismiss) was wrong, Gleeson notes that DOJ hasn’t even mentioned his arguments showing that there’s a more logical explanation for all this–that Trump demanded it.

As detailed in my opening brief, Flynn is a close ally of President Trump, who personally pressured the FBI director to “let this go” within weeks of Flynn’s crime, who has since repeatedly made clear his desire for Flynn to avoid criminal liability, see ECF No. 225 at 17, 56– 59, and who has expressed a desire to re-hire Flynn within his administration, see Max Cohen, Trump Says He Would Welcome Michael Flynn Back to His Administration, POLITICO (July 15, 2020, 11:08 AM), https://perma.cc/5EG4-CLTQ. Allowing dismissal for these “irregular” reasons would necessarily “implicate this Court” in denigrating “settled, foundational norms of prosecutorial independence.” ECF No. 225 at 59.

The Government does not disagree with any of this—presumably because it cannot. Indeed, the Government nowhere even mentions the President’s personal lobbying, let alone his virulent attacks on those previously involved in this prosecution. Based entirely on evidence already in the public view, the only coherent explanation for the Government’s exceedingly irregular motion—as well as its demonstrable pretexts—is that the Justice Department has yielded to a pressure campaign led by the President for his political associate. This Court need not “exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free” by pretending otherwise. United States v. Stanchich, 550 F.2d 1294, 1300 (2d Cir. 1977). It should instead deny the Government’s request for leave under Rule 48(a) and proceed to sentencing.

Gleeson is exploiting DOJ’s failures to address his claims. But he’s probably right.

Gleeson expands the record to include solid evidence of prosecutorial abuse

Sullivan did not and will not order further discovery in this case. But Gleeson got three key pieces of additional information into his brief. He cited the SSCI Report describing why Flynn’s lies were material.

In its bipartisan report assessing Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee similarly concluded that the “series of communications between Flynn and Kislyak” on sanctions was relevant to assessing “what Moscow sought to gain and the counterintelligence vulnerabilities associated with the Transition.” REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE UNITED STATES SENATE ON RUSSIAN ACTIVE MEASURES CAMPAIGNS AND INTERFERENCE IN THE 2016 U.S. ELECTION, VOLUME 5: COUNTERINTELLIGENCE THREATS AND VULNERABILITIES, S. Doc. No. 116-XX, at 702 (1st Session 2020).

He pointed to Aaron Zelinsky’s testimony describing how Billy Barr personally intervened to sabotage the Roger Stone prosecution.

Most notably, there is now concrete evidence of another prosecutorial decision infected by “heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice . . . based on political considerations.” See Oversight of the Department of Justice: Political Interference and Threats to Prosecutorial Independence: Hearing Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 116th Cong. 2 (2020) (statement of Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, Assistant U.S. Att’y), https://perma.cc/48ZV-23EK. This prosecutorial decision concerned the Government’s sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, another well-connected political ally of the President who committed serious crimes. There, as here, the President publicly assailed the Department of Justice for pursuing the prosecution. And there, as here, the Department of Justice succumbed to that corrupt pressure— though only after all four career prosecutors resigned from the case. As one of those career prosecutors later testified, senior officials at the Department of Justice exerted “significant pressure” to go easy on Stone, against the record of the case, customary prosecutorial practice, and departmental policy. Id. at 2. This occurred “because of [Stone’s] relationship to the President,” id., and “because the U.S. Attorney”—who also signed the Rule 48(a) motion in these proceedings—“was ‘afraid of the President,’” id. at 10.11

And he used that to invoke the case of Geoffrey Berman.

11 Perhaps those officials had reason to worry: the President recently fired a prominent and wellrespected U.S. Attorney who was investigating his associates. See Paul Le Blanc et al., White House Admits Trump Was Involved in Firing of Top US Attorney After Trump Claimed He Wasn’t, CNN (June 22, 2020), https://perma.cc/TPB5-ZXGQ.

Had he waited a few hours, he could have cited how John Durham’s deputy, Nora Dannehy, just resigned in part because of political pressure.

While Gleeson has not had the opportunity to develop a record about why this particular Barr intervention is thoroughly corrupt, he manages to show that Billy Barr here argues against Billy Barr, and in similar cases, did have a political purpose.

At the very least, he has succeeded in establishing a record that Billy Barr’s own DOJ disagrees with him.

DC Circuit Sends Flynn Back to Judge Sullivan’s Courtroom

The full DC Circuit (with Greg Katsas recusing) just sent Mike Flynn’s case back to Judge Sullivan. The decision itself is not that interesting because the decision itself is a no-brainer. Flynn (and the government) have alternative remedies available to them, so they should just wait until Sullivan issues an order before seeking that remedy, if appropriate.

The most dramatic claim in the majority opinion is that the case is not moot until the government’s motion to dismiss is granted.

We also hold that the case is not moot. While the Government has filed a motion to dismiss and Petitioner (defendant below) consents, there remains a case or controversy unless and until that motion is granted by the District Court. Cf. Rinaldi v. United States, 434 U.S. 22, 31–32 (1977) (per curiam) (reviewing a district court’s denial of an unopposed Rule 48(a) motion).

The per curiam majority opinion itself is notable for the number of times it lays out ways that Sidney Powell fucked up procedurally (along with the government in some cases): First, in not objecting specifically to the appointment of John Gleeson.

The interest in allowing the District Court to decide a pending motion in the first instance is especially pronounced here, given that neither Petitioner nor the Government raised an objection in the District Court to the appointment of the amicus or more generally to the course of proceedings for resolving the Rule 48(a) motion.

Then, in not challenging Sullivan’s scheduling order as a deprivation of his liberty.

Nor did Petitioner independently challenge before the District Court or this Court the District Court’s orders or their timing on due process grounds as a clearly unwarranted deprivation of liberty.

And finally, in not presenting the harms of the process ordered by Sullivan.

And at this stage, those harms are speculative, especially when the arguments advanced here against that process were not first presented to the District Court by Petitioner or the Government.

There, and later, the panel also described that the harms that a hearing poses to the government are speculative (the kind of judgement that virtually always goes against the non-government party in an appeal).

Petitioner, likewise, argued that the District Judge might “usurp[] the power of the Attorney General to bring additional charges.” Pet’r’s Reply at 18. But those harms are speculative and may never come to pass.

If Flynn doesn’t appeal this, the opinion makes clear, Sullivan can have his hearing and then Flynn (or the government) can file a petition for mandamus.

As others have pointed out, the most important part of this decision is in Thomas Griffith’s concurrence (issued on his last day as a judge, but on the same day he issued a batshit opinion saying that Congress can’t go to court to enforce their own subpoena power). He lays out that the question before the panel is not one of politics, but instead of Constitution.

This proceeding is not about the merits of the prosecution of General Flynn or the Government’s decision to abandon that prosecution. Rather, this proceeding involves questions about the structure of the Judiciary and its relationship to the Executive Branch. There are two central problems in this case: defining the scope of the authority of the Judiciary to inquire into the exercise of a core function of the Executive and deciding how the relationship between the district court and our court shapes a challenge to that inquiry. Those questions are far removed from the partisan skirmishes of the day. The resolution of those questions in this case involves nothing more and nothing less than the application of neutral principles about which reasonable jurists on this court disagree. See Robert H. Bork, Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems, 47 IND. L.J. 1 (1971). And that principled disagreement revisits a long-running debate about the relative powers of the Executive and Judicial Branches. Today we reach the unexceptional yet important conclusion that a court of appeals should stay its hand and allow the district court to finish its work rather than hear a challenge to a decision not yet made. That is a policy the federal courts have followed since the beginning of the Republic, see Judiciary Act of 1789, ch. 20, § 22, 1 Stat. 73, 84; 28 U.S.C. § 1291, and we are aware of no case in which a court of appeals has ordered a district judge to decide a pending motion in a particular way.

It’s unlikely to placate the frothers. But it might lead SCOTUS to deny any appeal.

Jeff Wall: It Would Cause Attorney General Barr Irreparable Harm If He Had to Reveal His Secret Reason He Moved to Dismiss Flynn’s Prosecution

Before I explain the most important takeaway from the Mike Flynn hearing, let me note two points.

First, the Department of Justice is quite clear that none of the materials turned over recently to Mike Flynn were Brady material showing exculpatory evidence. DOJ has disclaimed any prosecutorial misconduct in Judge Sullivan’s courtroom. Bill Barr even said as much, under oath, before the House Judiciary Committee. DOJ has falsely claimed they were “new,” but some of the actual details weren’t even new to Flynn, much less new to DOJ, even if some of the documents were. That’s important because a number of the judges today seem to believe that DOJ wants to dismiss this case because they believe there was misconduct.

Nope.

The government disclosed approximately 25 pages of documents in April and May 2020 as the result of an independent review of this case by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. While those documents, along with other recently available information, see, e.g., Doc. 198-6, are relevant to the government’s discretionary decision to dismiss this case, the government’s motion is not based on defendant Flynn’s broad allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. Flynn’s allegations are unfounded and provide no basis for impugning the prosecutors from the D.C. United States Attorney’s Office.

They want to dismiss the case because they don’t believe calling up the country that just attacked us and secretly undermining the punishment on them, then lying about it, is any big thing.

Second, in the second-to-last release to Flynn of materials that aren’t new but that Billy Barr used to invent a reason to dismiss the prosecution, DOJ either betrayed breathtaking ignorance of the investigation into Flynn, or they lied. In turning over notes from Peter Strzok that clearly memorialize a January 5, 2017 meeting that has been the subject of public disclosure going back years (well before Flynn reallocuted his plea deal), DOJ claimed not to know their date.

The enclosed document was obtained and analyzed by USA EDMO during the course of its review. This page of notes was taken by former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok. While the page itself is undated; we believe that the notes were taken in early January 2017, possibly between January 3 and January 5.

That professed uncertainty led the frothy right to claim that Joe Biden suggested Flynn be prosecuted for the Logan Act, which led to FBI reopening the investigation, which led to his prosecution. It was obvious the notes were from January 5, and I’ve since confirmed that. That DOJ claimed not to know the date of these notes is either evidence that they’re using this process to invent campaign dirt, or evidence that all the people reviewing this material have no grasp on the facts.

Which is to say, the judges have the very mistaken impression that DOJ withheld material they should have turned over, and that DOJ itself has suggested (in the less damning reading of their actions) to have no grasp of basic facts about the investigation into Flynn or even basic physics about time. No. Both claims are, at best, reason to further scrutinize this case.

Even ignoring the fact that DOJ has presented two different explanations for why they want to dismiss a case that they, months earlier, argued merited prison time, taking just the original motion to dismiss on its face value (ignoring the obvious lies in it), three months later, no one understands why DOJ moved to dismiss the case.

That’s important, because Acting Solicitor General Jeff Wall claims it would cause irreparable harm to the Executive Branch if DOJ had to answer any questions about why they dismissed the case.

That matters for two reasons. First, as the attorney representing Judge Emmet Sullivan, Beth Wilkinson, pointed out, what distinguishes this case from a Dick Cheney case that SCOTUS has said threatened the prerogatives of the Executive branch, DOJ has already proven willing to offer up reasons for their motion to dismiss, even if they are, partly, transparently false. DOJ is not claiming that they can’t respond to these questions, they’re offering up explanations unasked, and then objecting aggressively when asked question about those claims.

Indeed, Wall offered up a crazy new detail in this hearing: He implied that, in addition to believing that material lies are not the same for Flynn as other people and that secretly calling up the country that just attacked us to say, “no big deal,” is not alarming, there is also non-public information from other investigations that led Billy Barr to tank the Flynn prosecution.

The Attorney General sees this in a context of non-public information from other investigations.

[snip]

I just want to make clear that it may be possible that the Attorney General had before him that he was not able to share with the court and so what we put in front of the court were the reasons that we could, but it may not be the whole picture available to the Executive Branch.

[snip]

It’s just we gave three reasons; one of them was that the interests of justice were not longer served, in the Attorney General’s judgment, by the prosecution. The Attorney General made that decision, or that judgment, on the basis of lots of information, some of it is public and fleshed out in the motion, some of it is not.

[snip]

If all we had to do was show up and stand on our motion, no, we’ve already said that to the District Court.

Billy Barr has a secret. And that, Acting Solicitor General Jeff Wall suggested, is why a mere hearing on this motion to dismiss would irreparably harm DOJ (even while Wall alluded to the information without being asked).

Wow.

The revised explanation why DOJ can’t prosecute Flynn that Flynn prosecutor Jocelyn Ballantine has offered (one in which the Solicitor General’s Office has also participated) is that DOJ can’t “prosecute” Mike Flynn because DOJ has collected so much impeaching evidence against those who investigated Flynn that they can’t prove the case he has twice pled guilty to even though witnesses like KT McFarland and Mike Pence support their case.

Furthermore, since the time of the plea, extensive impeaching materials had emerged about key witnesses the government would need to prove its case. Strzok was fired from the FBI, in part because his text messages with Page revealed political bias against the current administration and “implie[d] a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, A Review of Various Actions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice in Advance of the 2016 Election xii (December 2018). The second interviewing agent has been accused of acting improperly in connection with the broader investigation. McCabe, who authorized Flynn’s interview without notifying either the Department of Justice or the White House Counsel, was fired for conduct that included lying to the FBI and lying under oath. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, A Report of Investigation of Certain Allegations Relating to Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe 2 (February 2018). In addition, significant witnesses have pending investigations or lawsuits against the Department of Justice, which could create further questions about their testimony at trial. See Strzok v. Barr, Civ. No. 19-2367 (D.D.C. Aug. 6, 2019); McCabe v. Barr, Civ. No. 19-2399 (D.D.C. Aug. 8, 2019); Page v. Dep’t of Justice, Civ. No. 19-3675 (D.D.C. Dec. 10, 2019). Those developments further support the government’s assessment about the difficulty it would have in proving its case to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

That is, Ballantine says DOJ can’t sentence Flynn for his admitted crimes because they’ve also laid out how DOJ has trumped up investigations against all the people who investigated Flynn, and at least three of those people have credible legal claims against DOJ for those trumped up investigations.

That suggests one of several things.

It’s possible the secret Billy Barr doesn’t want to reveal deals with how 30-year intelligence veteran Mike Flynn sold his services to the government of Turkey while working for Trump, while trying to hide that fact, all without knowing why that’d be a problem. DOJ has not yet backed off the facts Flynn gave the grand jury (another basis for perjury charges against him, in addition to his plea allocutions, which the Circuit judges appeared to miss), and indeed has doubled down on the Bijan Kian investigation. So maybe DOJ is claiming that poor Mike Flynn was compromised by his non-professional partner out of naiveté?

Another possibility is that there are other secret investigations ongoing, whereby poor 30-year defense intelligence veteran General Flynn was targeted by Russian intelligence but was helpless to rebuff their entreaties and so must be forgiven for lying about all that.

A third possibility is that DOJ has been ordered by the President to make sure none of the people who protected him do prison time. Secret reason. Can’t be shared with judges. Checks out!

The most likely secret information Billy Barr is hiding — particularly given Wall’s reference to other investigations — is the Durham investigation, the possibility that John Durham will find something in his investigation into  Trump’s people where DOJ IG found nothing. That means either that Billy Barr took actions in May that John Durham has not charged in the interim three months. Or, that Billy Barr is trying to pre-empt Flynn’s prosecution believing — or expecting — that an investigation that has not yet completed will end up in criminal charges.

If that’s what’s happening, it would suggest that Barr has already decided what the outcome of the Durham investigation will be, prejudging its outcome and effectively neutering Durham, making his prosecutorial decision an afterthought.

Which is why I focused on DOJ’s false claim — possibly attributed to Jeffrey Jensen, the US Attorney Billy Barr directed to find reasons to blow up the Flynn prosecution while Durham continued to work — that Joe Biden raised the Logan Act before the FBI (and ODNI) raised it themselves. In that case, at least, Barr’s selected flunkies have proven themselves to either be willing to misrepresent evidence or to be painfully stupid about it. In that case, a US Attorney deputized into Billy Barr’s projects has admitted to either knowing fuckall or inventing facts for political purpose. That, by itself, raises questions about the presumption of regularity that Barr might otherwise be afforded.

DOJ claims they’ve given abundant reason why they wanted to dismiss the prosecution against Flynn, even though their reasons conflict with all precedent and the record that Bill Barr’s DOJ has established in this case.

But today we learned there’s another, secret, reason why Billy Barr wanted to dismiss the case against Flynn. Even while DOJ has made it clear they are either misrepresenting the record or unfamiliar with it.

Which is all the more reason why Judge Sullivan should have a hearing, and which likely explains why DOJ has claimed, multiple times now, that that would do irreparable harm to DOJ.

HJC Should Ask Bill Barr Why It Would Do Irreparable Harm if He Had to Explain His Actions in the Flynn Case

Unless he comes up with some new excuse, tomorrow Billy Barr will finally show up for an oversight hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

There are a number of sets of questions that commentators have suggested for the hearing (a strategic set of four topics that will show how Barr is hurting the US, an updated set from JustSecurity, some questions about Geoffrey Berman’s firing).

I could come up with similar lists. They’d be long and — by the time anyone executed them competently on the Democratic side — the big media outlets would have already filed their story on the hearing.

One thing that should be included, however, is the letter that Sidney Powell sent Barr and Jeffrey Rosen in June 2019 and Bill Barr’s actions to deliver on her demands in the subsequent year, actions that DOJ itself admits would do irreparable harm if DOJ had to explain.

The letter was effectively a road map of demands, many of them based off hoaxes, almost all of them unrelated to Flynn’s prosecution or false. It later became the Brady demand that Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected in a meticulous opinion last December. In it, Powell demanded that DOJ conduct a review of the prosecution and then dismiss the prosecution.

At the end of this internal review, we believe there will be ample justification for the Department to follow the precedent of the Ted Stevens case and move to dismiss the prosecution in the interest of justice — whether it be we ink a simple joint motion or sua sponte by the Department.

NYT wrote about this letter in June, calling it “little noticed” but predictably not crediting me, who did noticed it and wrote about it repeatedly.

HJC should raise this letter with Billy Barr for several reasons. First, little in the letter turned out to be true. Indeed, DOJ has asserted in court filings that even where documents Powell asked for existed, none of it was Brady material (and in fact, in spite of Timothy Shea’s claim that these materials were new, that was false, meaning DOJ has no justification for flip-flopping on its call for prison time for Flynn from earlier this year). Powell should have gotten none of it, and yet Barr invented an unprecedented process to give it to her and then use it to self-sabotage the case.

More importantly, the way in which Barr has rolled out the release of these documents has served, in part, to hide the shoddiness of Timothy Shea’s motion to dismiss. Based off a misrepresentation of Bill Priestap’s notes, Shea pretended that the interview with Flynn focused exclusively on the Logan Act. That wasn’t even an accurate reading of Priestap’s own notes. Since then, DOJ has released several more documents that make it clear FBI’s focus was on whether Flynn was a foreign agent (and also provide more evidence that the Flynn 302s track the Agents’ description of the interview), documents that undermine their own motion to dismiss. They’ve either withheld a Bill Priestap 302 explaining what happened or Powell has decided it doesn’t help her. And there are more records that they are sitting on that undermine the claims in their motion to dismiss.

Importantly, while DOJ was making claims that Flynn’s lies were not material, John Ratcliffe was releasing documents that explained why they were.  Of particular note, on February 14, 2017 — weeks after all the meetings DOJ has been focused on, Peter Strzok, in an annotation that made it clear he did not have it in for Trump or his flunkies, also made it clear that FBI didn’t have any phone records yet.

We have very few call logs. NSLs have been issued for Manafort, Page, and Flynn, many of which have not yet been returned.

On February 25, notes from Tashina Gauhar make clear, Strzok and Joe Pientka believed Flynn didn’t believe he had been lying. They also judged — not having phone records or much else yet — that they did not think he was an agent, but they needed to verify that.

That got translated into a later draft summary into a conclusion that Flynn wasn’t a foreign agent.

But as FBI would get first call logs (which would reveal Flynn had also lied about being in contact with Mar-a-Lag0) and then his texts (which would make it clear Flynn knew well about the sanctions Obama had imposed), that would dramatically change the import of his lies. By the time he started cooperating, Flynn made it clear that he and KT McFarland had immediately set about trying to cover up the response Sergey Kislyak gave to Flynn’s request.

After the briefing, Flynn and McFarland spoke over the phone. 1258 Flynn reported on the substance of his call with Kislyak, including their discussion of the sanctions. 1259 According to McFarland, Flynn mentioned that the Russian response to the sanctions was not going to be escalatory because they wanted a good relationship with the incoming Administration.1260 McFarland also gave Flynn a summary of her recent briefing with President-Elect Trump. 1261

The next day, December 30, 2016, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov remarked that Russia would respond in kind to the sanctions. 1262 Putin superseded that comment two hours later, releasing a statement that Russia would not take retaliatory measures in response to the sanctions at that time. 1263 Hours later President-Elect Trump tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin).” 1264 Shortly thereafter, Flynn sent a text message to McFarland summarizing his call with Kislyak from the day before, which she emailed to Kushner, Bannon, Priebus, and other Transition Team members. 1265 The text message and email did not include sanctions as one of the topics discussed with Kislyak. 1266 Flynn told the Office that he did not document his discussion of sanctions because it could be perceived as getting in the way of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy.1267 [my emphasis]

KT McFarland’s 302s would show she told the same untruths that Flynn had told, even after he got fired for telling them. More recently, it became clear that the White House scripted Bannon to deny discussing sanctions as well.

Meanwhile, the government is still withholding the first (known) post-election transcript between Flynn and Kislyak, where he first started this game of deal-making with the country that just attacked us.

All these details may not amount to Flynn acting as an Agent of Russia.

Rather, they amount to a concerted cover-up of the White House role in this sanction discussion. That’s a topic that a sentencing memorandum approved by top people in Bill Barr’s DOJ argued was significant and material, because a concerted effort to undermine sanctions on Russia, “could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia.”

The defendant’s false statements to the FBI were significant. When it interviewed the defendant, the FBI did not know the totality of what had occurred between the defendant and the Russians. Any effort to undermine the recently imposed sanctions, which were enacted to punish the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election, could have been evidence of links or coordination between the Trump Campaign and Russia.

The concerted effort to hide the extensive coordination on sanctions — involving at least Flynn, McFarland, and Bannon — was designed hide whether the Trump response to Obama’s sanctions amounted to the kind of quid pro quo Mueller was appointed to investigate. A question on sanctions relief is the single one that Trump totally blew off in his responses to Mueller.

DOJ wants to claim that Flynn’s conversations with Sergey Kislyak were totally normal. But not only are they still hiding at least one of them, but they were utterly material to the Mueller investigation.

But then there’s the final reason why HJC should question Barr about the letter from Sidney Powell that he apparently delivered on a year after she demanded: DOJ itself admitted that explaining DOJ’s actions here would do irreparable harm.

The more interesting argument came from Wall. He argued, repeatedly, that DOJ will be irreparably harmed if Sullivan is permitted to hold a hearing on DOJ’s motion to dismiss. In particular, he seemed horrified that Sullivan might require sworn declarations of affidavits.

As Beth Wilkinson, arguing for Sullivan, mentioned, neither Sullivan nor Amicus John Gleeson has called for such a thing. Both are simply moving towards a hearing scheduled for July 16. Wilkinson also noted that District courts hold such hearings all the time. (And they predictably will have to in another case where DOJ has moved to end a prosecution recently, in which — unlike this case — there appears to have been prosecutorial misconduct, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, which I’ll return to).

Wall is literally arguing that DOJ will be permanently damaged if it has to show up and answer for its actions in this case (in particular, to explain why the prosecutors in this case didn’t sign the motion to dismiss).

That Wall argued so forcibly as to the injury that DOJ would suffer if it had to show up and defend its motion to dismiss is all the crazier given that they didn’t file the petition. The only harm that matters here procedurally is any harm to Flynn, not DOJ, and Powell really made no such case.

Indeed, that’s the reason why the DC Circuit granted mandamus in the Flynn case — not because of any injury that Flynn might face from having Sullivan scrutinize the case, but because having to answer for what Barr did here would — simply having to show up to the kind of hearing that DOJ shows up to every day and answer questions under oath — would do grave damage to DOJ.

HJC should take DOJ at its word. DOJ has confessed their actions can’t withstand the least amount of scrutiny. HJC should demand to know why.