Mike Flynn's lawyer tells judge she personally briefed Trump on ex-national security advisor's case and begged the President NOT to pardon him
A lawyer for former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn told a judge Tuesday that she recently updated President Donald Trump on the case and asked him not to issue a pardon for her client.
The attorney, Sidney Powell, was initially reluctant to discuss her conversations with the president or the White House, saying she believed they were protected by executive privilege.
But under persistent questioning from U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, she acknowledged having spoken to the president within the last few weeks to brief him and to argue against a pardon.
U.S. Justice Department lawyers denied any corruption or political motives in efforts to get the federal criminal case against Flynn dropped.
In May, Attorney General William Barr stunned many in the legal community by ordering prosecutors to have the case dropped. Critics have accused Barr of giving special treatment to Trump allies.
Sullivan reserved judgment in the case and did not set a date for the next hearing but indicated he intended to be speedy.
The revelation of Trump being briefed came in a tense exchange between Flynn's attorney and the judge.
Powell at first declined to discuss the substance of her direct conversations with Trump, angering Sullivan when she tried to invoke executive privilege.
'You don't work for the government,' Sullivan told her.
Powell, in a tense exchange with the judge, said she recently met with Trump after the government moved to dismiss the case. She added that Trump campaign attorney Jenna Ellis was also present.
'I spoke with Jenna Ellis and I spoke with the president himself to provide a brief status of the litigation within the last couple weeks,' Powell said.
'Did you make any requests of the president?' Sullivan asked.
'No sir, other than he not issue a pardon,' she replied.
Admission: Under persistent questioning Sydney Powell (left) said she had briefed Donald Trump on her attempt to get Mike Flynn (right) out of his plea deal
Center of case: Flynn has emerged as something of a cause célèbre for Trump and his supporters
Powell also downplayed a letter she sent to Attorney General William Barr and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in June of 2019, in which she let them know she would soon be taking over as Flynn's lawyer and complained that the FBI had tried to entrap her client.
When Sullivan asked her whether she felt her letter to Barr was ethical, Powell replied: 'Perfectly.'
The letter to Barr 'raises questions about motive' for the department to remove career prosecutors from the case, the judge said. He suggested the bar association might take issue with her tactics.
He asked the government to schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss how Barr and Rosen responded.
Powell's discussion of the case with Trump, along with her letter to senior Justice Department officials, are likely to further stoke debate over whether the Trump administration is improperly seeking to dismiss the case for political.
But she called the case a 'hideous abuse of power that continues until this very minute.'
'This is the most egregious injustice I have even seen in my 30-plus years of practice,' Powell said.
The DOJ was represented by a veteran career prosecutor.
'I wanted to appear today because the allegations against our office that we would somehow operate or act with a corrupt political motive are not true,' Kenneth Clair Kohl, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said. 'I've never seen it in my entire career in our office and it didn't happen here.'
He also directly attacked former top FBI officials, including former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former agent Peter Strzok, saying they could not be reliable witnesses for the government if it had proceeded with its prosecution of Flynn.
Unprecedented case: Federal district judge Emmet Sullivan is considering whether to continue and sentence Flynn despite AG Bill Barr trying to drop the prosecution entirely
Powell, meanwhile, also told Sullivan she thought he was biased against Flynn and intended to file a motion soon to ask him to recuse himself.
Barr's unusual move ordering the case be dropped despite the guilty pleas led Sullivan to tap retired judge John Gleeson, whom he instructed to argue against the Justice Department's legal position.
Gleeson on Tuesday urged Sullivan not to drop the case.
'People who don't hang around in federal courtrooms don't really get just how important it is to enter a guilty plea,' he said.
'People can't plead guilty and then show up for sentencing, as this defendant did on December 18, 2018 and see how the wind is blowing.'
Gleeson, has accused the department of acting for political reasons when it moved to drop the case and of shifting its rationale over several months for doing so.
'These reasons are so patently pretextual that the government feels the need to keep coming up with more of them,' Gleeson said.
Lawyers for the federal government revived their efforts to persuade Sullivan that dismissing the Flynn case was in the interests of justice. The lawyers cited what they said was internal uncertainty about whether Flynn had even committed a crime, as well as questions about the credibility of law enforcement officials in the case.
Allegations of improper political motives are 'just not true,' said federal prosecutor Ken Kohl, who identified himself as the most senior career official in the U.S. Attorney's office in Washington.
'I've never seen it in my career in my office, and it didn't happen here,' Kohl said. 'I´m here to say that the U.S. Attorney's office's decision to dismiss this case was the right call for the right reasons.'
Who do we call if he have to prosecute? The DOJ's Ken Kohl suggested that the case would be impossible for the Justice Department to win in the event that it went to trial saying: 'Are we going to call Pete Strzok in this case?' Kohl asked rhetorically. 'Or do we call the deputy director who ordered the interview, Andy McCabe?' Both have been fired
He also suggested that the case would be impossible for the Justice Department to win in the event that it went to trial. He cited the actions of Peter Strzok, an FBI agent who interviewed Flynn but was fired from the bureau because of pejorative texts about Trump, and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired over allegations that he misled the Justice Department's inspector general.
'Are we going to call Pete Strzok in this case?' Kohl asked rhetorically. 'Or do we call the deputy director who ordered the interview, Andy McCabe?'
In recent weeks, as part of the review being conducted by U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen of St. Louis, the Justice Department has identified correspondence that it sees as possibly favorable to Flynn. That includes a recent interview of an FBI agent who was part of the Flynn investigation, and expressed misgivings about it, and also came to believe that the Mueller team exhibited a 'get Trump' attitude.
Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, was charged under former Special Counsel Robert Mueller´s investigation that detailed Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election to boost Trump´s candidacy.
Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his conversations before Trump took office with Sergey Kislyak, who was then Russia's ambassador to the United States, concerning U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia under President Barack Obama.
He was due to be sentenced in December 2018.
Sullivan delayed that until Flynn could finish cooperating with the government in another pending criminal case out of Virginia. But Flynn last year switched lawyers and his new legal team claimed the FBI had set him up.
The Justice Department moved in May to dismiss the case, saying there was insufficient basis to interview Flynn and that the questioning was not relevant to the FBI's broader counterintelligence investigation.
