The Justice Department said Friday it has provided former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s lawyers with several documents unearthed in a review ordered by Attorney General William Barr, indicating the agency may believe exculpatory evidence was not handed over before Flynn pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors did not provide details of the documents in a court filing, but wrote that the information “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.”
Barr appointed St. Louis-based U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen earlier this year to examine Flynn’s case as well as several others. Friday’s filings was the first public acknowledgement that the probe had produced results.
Officials familiar with the review told CNN that Jensen probed whether federal prosecutors and the FBI failed to fulfill their legal obligations by making all possibly exculpatory evidence available with Flynn’s attorneys before he entered his guilty plea and that some of the investigation’s findings indicate missteps.
Flynn has twice pleaded guilty to charges that he lied to the FBI about his interactions with the then-Russian ambassador during the Trump presidential transition. However, he has clamored to reverse his plea after firing his original defense team.
Prosecutors filed a court filing rebutting claims that Flynn was ineffectively represented, though Flynn’s current attorneys maintain his original team failed to adequately present his case.
“[E]vidence that proves Mr. Flynn’s allegations of having been deliberately set up and framed by corrupt agents at the top of the FBI. … The government has deliberately suppressed this evidence from the inception of this prosecution knowing there was no crime by Mr. Flynn,” his current attorneys wrote in a filing.
The prospect that prosecutors did not disclose exculpatory evidence before Flynn’s plea as mandated by law is at the heart of an increasingly public campaign waged by his attorneys and conservative allies alleging that the former Trump administration official is the target of politically motivated prosecution.
However, a federal judge rebutted such claims in 2019, ruling that Flynn “cannot overcome the hurdle [of] showing a reasonable probability of a different outcome.”