Michael Flynn court case lives on, rules US federal court

A federal court declined a U.S. Justice Department request to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. The court also threw out a lawsuit by House Democrats against former White House counsel Don McGahn.

|
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, leaves a federal court building after a conference in Washington, Sept. 10, 2019. On Aug. 31, a federal court rejected Mr. Flynn's team's appeal to appoint a different judge to the case.

A federal appeals court in Washington declined Monday to order the dismissal of the Michael Flynn prosecution, permitting a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department’s request to dismiss its case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser.

The decision keeps the case at least temporarily alive and rebuffs efforts by both Mr. Flynn’s lawyers and the Justice Department to force the prosecution to be dropped without further inquiry from the judge, who has for months declined to dismiss it. The ruling is the latest development in a criminal case that has taken unusual twists and turns over the last year and prompted a separation of powers tussle involving a veteran federal judge and the Trump administration.

In a separate ruling Monday, a three-judge panel of the same appeals court again threw out a lawsuit by House Democrats to compel former White House counsel Don McGahn to appear before a congressional committee.

The Flynn conflict arose in May when the Justice Department moved to dismiss the prosecution despite Mr. Flynn’s own guilty plea to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition period.

But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, who had upbraided Mr. Flynn for his behavior at a 2018 court appearance, signaled his skepticism at the government’s unusual motion. He refused to dismiss the case and instead scheduled a hearing and appointed a retired federal judge to argue against the Justice Department’s position. That former judge, John Gleeson, challenged the motives behind the department’s dismissal request and called it a “gross abuse” of prosecutorial power.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers sought to bypass Judge Sullivan and obtain an appeals court order that would have required the case’s immediate dismissal. They argued that Judge Sullivan had overstepped his bounds by scrutinizing a dismissal request that both sides, the defense and the Justice Department, were in agreement about and that the case was effectively moot once prosecutors decided to abandon it.

At issue before the court was whether Judge Sullivan could be forced to grant the Justice Department’s dismissal request without even holding a hearing into the basis for the motion.

“We have no trouble answering that question in the negative,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion for the eight judges in the majority.

The judges also rejected defense efforts to have the case reassigned to a different judge.

In a concurring opinion, U.S. District Judge Thomas Griffith wrote that the court’s opinion did not concern the merits of the Justice Department’s prosecution of Mr. Flynn or even its decision to abandon the case. Rather, he said the question before the judges was a much more simple one.

“Today we reach the unexceptional yet important conclusion that a court of appeals should stay its hand and allow the district court to finish its work rather than hear a challenge to a decision not yet made,” Judge Griffith said. “That is a policy the federal courts have followed since the beginning of the Republic.”

He said it was very possible that Judge Sullivan could wind up granting the Justice Department’s dismissal request and that it would in fact be “highly unusual if it did not, given the Executive’s constitutional prerogative to direct and control prosecutions and the district court’s limited discretion” in cases prosecutors want dropped.

Two judges, Neomi Rao and Karen LeCraft Henderson, each wrote dissenting opinions arguing that Judge Sullivan had usurped his authority by keeping alive a case the Justice Department sought to have dismissed. Both judges were part of a 2-1 ruling in June that ordered Judge Sullivan to dismiss the case.

“In Flynn’s case, the prosecution no longer has a prosecutor,” Judge Rao wrote. “Yet the case continues with district court proceedings aimed at uncovering the internal deliberations of the Department. The majority gestures at the potential harms of such a judicial intrusion into the Executive Branch, but takes a wait-and-see approach, hoping and hinting that the district judge will not take the actions he clearly states he will take.

Mr. Flynn was questioned by the FBI just days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration about his conversations with the then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. pertaining to sanctions that had just been imposed by the Obama administration for Russian election interference.

The private conversation alarmed law enforcement and intelligence officials who were already investigating whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to sway the presidential election in Mr. Trump’s favor. Officials were also concerned by the White House’s public insistence that Mr. Flynn and the diplomat had not discussed sanctions.

Mr. Flynn’s guilty plea to lying to the FBI became a signature prosecution in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. He also agreed to cooperate with the authorities in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence.

But as Mr. Flynn awaited sentencing, Attorney General William Barr appointed a U.S. attorney from St. Louis to investigate the handling of the Flynn case and later endorsed that prosecutor’s recommendation that the case be dismissed.

In May, the Justice Department said it had concluded that the FBI had an insufficient basis to question Mr. Flynn about his conversations with the diplomat, which Mr. Barr has said were appropriate for an incoming national security adviser to have had, and that statements made during the interview were not material to the FBI’s underlying counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign.

Law enforcement officials who were involved in the investigation vehemently disagreed with that conclusion.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: As a public service, the Monitor has removed the paywall for all our coronavirus coverage. It’s free.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Michael Flynn court case lives on, rules US federal court
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2020/0901/Michael-Flynn-court-case-lives-on-rules-US-federal-court
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe