Flynn Prosecutor Steps Down as Case Is Reportedly Being Dropped
Flynn Prosecutor Van Grack Steps Down From Criminal Case
(Bloomberg) -- One of the lead prosecutors in the case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has stepped down, as the case is reportedly being dropped by the U.S. Justice Department.
It’s the latest surprise in a legal proceeding that President Donald Trump has criticized. The Associated Press reported that the government is going to drop its case against Flynn. Brandon Van Grack, the chief of the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act division, filed a notice of his withdrawal Thursday in federal court in Washington, less than a week after unsealed FBI documents fueled renewed claims by Flynn that federal agents had cooked up a bogus case against him in the early days of the Russia probe.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has been weighing Flynn’s request to reverse his guilty plea and toss the case out. Flynn also accused his old law firm, Covington & Burling LLP, of giving him bad legal advice when he reached the plea deal with Van Grack in December 2017.
Van Grack gave no reason for his withdrawal, but there are echoes of another controversial case involving Trump. In February, all four U.S. prosecutors who backed a long prison sentence for Trump ally Roger Stone resigned from the case, after the Justice Department their proposed sentence was too harsh. Many Trump supporters have advocated for the president to pardon Stone and exonerate Flynn.
Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, said last year that Van Grack made incomplete and misleading disclosures of the government’s evidence, and that the FBI “knew its entire investigation of Flynn was a pretext.” She asked a judge to order prosecutors to turn over evidence sought by the defense, hold them in contempt and “dismiss the entire prosecution for outrageous government misconduct.”
The prosecutors have denied engaging in any misconduct. The Justice Department and Van Grack didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has made the Flynn case a centerpiece of his ongoing argument that the Russia probe was a hoax. Last week, after the FBI documents were unsealed, the president tweeted: “What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!”
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 but he reversed course in January before he could be sentenced. Van Grack and another prosecutor, Jocelyn Ballantine, slammed the move, pointing out that Flynn had admitted to the crime while he was under oath and agreed to cooperate in a bid for a lighter sentence.
Powell has claimed that FBI agents created a false summary of their interview with Flynn about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Sergey Kislyak. Powell claims that Flynn didn’t remember making four or five calls to Kislyak from the Dominican Republic after Trump’s election, yet the summary falsely said Flynn remembered the calls.
Powell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Flynn was Trump’s national security adviser for less than a month before resigning over the criminal investigation against him. Trump later urged the FBI director, James Comey, to shut down the investigation. Comey declined and was fired, prompting the Justice Department to appoint Robert Mueller to investigate the firing as part of a broad inquiry into Russian election interference.
Van Grack, who took part in the prosecution of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was tapped last year to run a group of investigators looking for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA, as the act is known, has been on the books since the late 1930s but was lightly enforced until recently.
Van Grack also stepped down from two other Flynn-related cases, in which media companies sought access to sealed records in the Flynn prosecution.
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