Rump White House Rewrites History, This Time About
Flynn
Three
years ago, President Trump swiftly fired his first national security adviser,
Michael T. Flynn, for lying to the F.B.I. Ahead of the November election, Mr.
Trump and his allies are now telling a very different story.
By Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti
·
May 14,
2020Updated 6:21 a.m. ET
o
WASHINGTON
— After announcing that the Justice Department was dropping the criminal case
against Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, Attorney
General William P. Barr was presented with a crucial question: Was Mr. Flynn
guilty of lying to the F.B.I. about the nature of phone calls he had with the
Russian ambassador to the United States?
After all, Mr. Flynn had twice pleaded
guilty to lying about them.
“Well,
you know, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes,” Mr.
Barr said in an interview with CBS News. Then he went even further and
described the infamous calls during the Trump presidential transition as
“laudable.”
Mr.
Trump and his allies now accuse the F.B.I. of framing Mr. Flynn, which is part
of the president’s broader campaign to tarnish the Russia investigation and
settle scores against perceived enemies ahead of the November election.
Their
revisionist narrative is in stark contrast to the view held three years ago not
only by top F.B.I. management but also by senior White House officials. Mr.
Flynn, the officials said then, had lied to Vice President Mike Pence and other
aides about the nature of his calls to the ambassador, had lied repeatedly to
F.B.I. agents about the calls, and might have made himself vulnerable to
Russian blackmail.
Revisiting
the chaotic weeks surrounding Mr. Flynn’s ouster — based on recently disclosed
government documents, public statements, court records and interviews — show
how much the original Trump administration concerns about him have been buried
under the president’s cause of portraying the Russia investigation as a “witch
hunt.”
Mr.
Barr, for example, has recently argued that the F.B.I. interview of Mr. Flynn
was not justified because agents who had been investigating him had not found
any wrongdoing and were on the verge of closing the case. When agents found out
about the call with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, they concocted a
reason to keep the case open for “the express purpose of trying to catch, lay a
perjury trap for General Flynn,” Mr. Barr said in the CBS interview.
A
broad array of legal experts disagree. “This case reeks of political
influence,” said Marshall L. Miller, a former top prosecutor in Brooklyn and
the principal deputy of the Justice Department’s criminal division. “Mr. Flynn
admitted twice under oath that he lied to the F.B.I. Political appointees at
D.O.J. are now trying to rewrite the law to erase the crime.”
Mr. Flynn’s troubles began with a phone
call.
It
was Dec. 29, 2016, the day the outgoing Obama administration announced
sanctions against Russia for the country’s widespread effort to disrupt the
2016 presidential election. Mr. Flynn, who was Mr. Trump’s incoming national
security adviser, urged Mr. Kislyak in a phone call not to escalate tensions
with a retaliatory move against the United States — perhaps by kicking American
diplomats and spies out of Russia.
Given
the circumstances, the call was remarkable. The United States government had
just determined that its longtime adversary had launched a concerted effort to
sabotage a presidential election, and the incoming national security adviser
was having a back-channel discussion with a top Russian official that might
lead to the new Trump administration gutting the sanctions its predecessor put
in place to punish the Russians.
Mr.
Flynn chose not to document the calls with the ambassador, a decision that
records from the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III,
show was based on his concern that he might be interfering with the Obama
administration’s foreign policy weeks before Mr. Trump took office. His
concerns were well founded. When President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia did not
retaliate after the Obama administration’s sanctions, President Barack Obama
was perplexed and asked spy agencies to figure out why.
The
F.B.I. unearthed the discussions between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak when
reviewing transcripts of the ambassador’s intercepted calls. F.B.I. officials
discussed interviewing Mr. Flynn, whom agents had been investigating as part of
the bureau’s inquiry into whether any Trump campaign associates had conspired
with Russia during the presidential election.
The
matter took on greater urgency when Mr. Flynn’s discussions with Mr. Kislyak
were revealed publicly by David
Ignatius, a Washington Post columnist.
Top
Trump transition officials — including Mr. Pence as well as Reince Priebus, who
was to be White House chief of staff, and Sean Spicer, the incoming White House
press secretary — questioned Mr. Flynn about the Washington Post column. Mr.
Flynn denied that he spoke about sanctions with Mr. Kislyak, and Mr. Spicer
repeated those claims to members of the news media.
Days
later, on Jan. 15, 2017, Mr. Pence was asked about the column during an interview
on the CBS News program “Face the Nation.” The incoming vice president said
that he had talked with Mr. Flynn about his calls with Mr. Kislyak, and he said
that Mr. Flynn was unequivocal. “They did not discuss anything having to do
with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against
Russia,” the vice president said.
Mr.
Pence’s interview set off alarms at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. If
Mr. Flynn had lied to the vice president, the Russians knew that and could use
it as leverage over Mr. Flynn. Newly disclosed documents made public in Mr.
Flynn’s criminal case show officials were also concerned that Mr. Pence might
have been lying, as well.
“The
implications of that were that the Russians believed one of two things — either
that the vice president was in on it with Flynn, or that Flynn was clearly
willing to lie to the vice president,” Mary B. McCord, a former top national
security at the time, said in an interview with the
special counsel’s office.
The
F.B.I. decided to try to find out who was lying to whom. James B. Comey, the
bureau’s director at the time, sent a pair of agents to the White House to
speak with Mr. Flynn, who by then was only a few days into his job as national
security adviser. But Mr. Comey made the unusual decision to not notify senior
Justice Department officials about the interview until the agents were already
on their way to the White House — blindsiding and infuriating the officials who
oversee the F.B.I. about a highly sensitive session.
During
the interview, Mr. Flynn was asked about sanctions and other topics. He denied
talking about Russian sanctions, according to documents, even as agents used
his own words from the highly classified transcripts to refresh his memory. Mr.
Flynn seemed relaxed, agents would note, and did not betray any signs of
deception.
But
the F.B.I. reports from the interview did not square with the transcripts of
the phone calls, and soon Trump administration lawyers were discussing whether
Mr. Flynn might have committed a felony by making false statements during the
interrogation.
Mr.
Priebus later recounted to Mr. Mueller’s investigators a meeting with Mr. Trump
in which he told the president about the concerns that Mr. Flynn had lied
during his F.B.I. interview. Mr. Trump was angry, Mr. Priebus recalled, and
said, “Not again, this guy, this stuff.”
Within
days, White House lawyers — including the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn
II — had concluded, after reviewing the transcripts of the calls, that Mr.
Flynn had repeatedly lied about his discussions with Mr. Kislyak. According to
the findings by the special counsel, “McGahn and Priebus concluded that Flynn
could not have forgotten the details of the discussions of sanctions and had
instead been lying about what he discussed with Kislyak.”
Mr.
McGahn and Mr. Priebus decided that Mr. Flynn needed to go and made that recommendation
to Mr. Trump.
On
Feb. 13, after Mr. Priebus told Mr. Flynn that he must resign, he brought him
into the Oval Office. There, Mr. Flynn and the president hugged, and Mr. Trump
said he would give Mr. Flynn a good recommendation. “You’re a good guy,” the
president said, according to the account Mr. Priebus gave to the Mueller team.
“We’ll take care of you.”
Ten
months later, after Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty for lying to the F.B.I. agents
and agreed to cooperate with the Mueller investigation, Mr. Pence said that
removing him from the White House was the right move.
“What
I can tell you is that I knew that he lied to me,” the vice president told CBS
News, “and I know the president made the right decision with regard to him.”
Mr.
Pence no longer holds that view, and his change over time reflects the far more
combative position among Trump administration officials toward the various
investigations into Mr. Trump and his advisers.
As
this shift was occurring, Mr. Flynn jettisoned the legal team that had advised
him to cut a deal with the Mueller prosecutors and hired a new lawyer, Sidney
Powell, who launched a frontal attack on the forces that she believed led her
client into wrongfully admitting to a felony offense.
In
a letter to Mr. Barr last June, days before officially becoming Mr. Flynn’s
lawyer, Ms. Powell wrote that “it is increasingly apparent that General Flynn
was targeted and taken out of the Trump administration for concocted and
political purposes.” The letter was disclosed last year by federal prosecutors
in the Flynn case.
After
Mr. Barr announced his decision last week to drop criminal charges in the Flynn
case, top Trump administration officials — including those who three years ago
believed most vehemently that he should be fired — said that he would be
welcomed back at the White House.
“I
think General Michael Flynn is an American patriot; he served this country with
great distinction,” Mr. Pence said last week in an interview with Axios. “And
for my part, I’d be happy to see Michael Flynn again.”
