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Prosecutors Attack Michael Flynn’s ‘Extraordinary Reversal’ on His Guilt

Prosecutors Attack Michael Flynn’s ‘Extraordinary Reversal’ on His Guilt

(Bloomberg) -- U.S. prosecutors criticized Michael Flynn’s “extraordinary reversal” in proclaiming his innocence despite his admission of guilt before two federal judges.

In a court filing on Tuesday, prosecutors denied they had engaged in misconduct, as Flynn’s lawyers assert, and attacked their efforts to paint Flynn as innocent of lying to investigators despite his guilty plea.

“The defendant now claims that he is innocent of the criminal charges in this case,” U.S. prosecutors Brandon Van Grack and Jocelyn Ballantine wrote. They said he claimed he was honest during a January 2017 interview “despite having admitted his guilt, under oath.”

A lawyer for Flynn, President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, wants a judge to throw out the case because of prosecutorial misconduct, saying that prosecutors failed to disclose exculpatory evidence before Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to federal agents.

The lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued in an Oct. 24 filing 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 also says 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 prosecutors in contempt and “dismiss the entire prosecution for outrageous government misconduct.”

FBI agents claimed that Flynn made false statements during an interview on Jan. 24, 2017, about multiple topics, yet Powell wrote that her client was “honest with the agents to the best of his recollection at the time, and the agents knew it.”

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.

Prosecutors said Flynn, a former Army general and head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, improperly raised several new arguments and claims recently for the first time. They asked U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington how they should respond in light of his decision on Monday to cancel a hearing set for Nov. 7. He’ll now decide the matter based on the filings submitted to him.

Powell denied in an email that she intends to withdraw Flynn’s guilty plea. Instead, she cited the federal criminal case against the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, which Sullivan threw out in 2009 after prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence.

In the email, Powell said: “I have long maintained General Flynn’s innocence, and the government knows that, but there is no requirement that I withdraw the plea. It is an issue of procedure. The entire prosecution should be dismissed for egregious government misconduct. For example, Ted Stevens did not have to seek or have a motion for new trial granted to have his entire prosecution dismissed.”

Sullivan has set a target sentencing date of Dec. 18 for Flynn.

The case is U.S. v. Flynn, 17-cr-232, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

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To contact the reporters on this story: David Voreacos in New York at dvoreacos@bloomberg.net;Andrew Harris in federal court in Washington at aharris16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jeffrey D Grocott at jgrocott2@bloomberg.net, David S. Joachim, Peter Jeffrey

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