WASHINGTON — Two former law enforcement officials involved in the cases of the onetime Trump advisers Michael T. Flynn and Roger J. Stone Jr. attacked Attorney General William P. Barr’s extraordinary intervention in the inquiries, condemning his moves as detrimental to the rule of law and to public confidence in the Justice Department.
In op-ed articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post, the former officials, Mary B. McCord and Jonathan Kravis, denounced Mr. Barr’s move last week to drop a criminal case against Mr. Flynn and his earlier intervention to recommend a more lenient sentence for crimes that Mr. Stone committed in a bid to protect the president.
Mr. Flynn, a former national security adviser, had pleaded guilty twice to lying to F.B.I. agents about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition. But Justice Department officials took issue with the F.B.I.’s early 2017 interview of Mr. Flynn, according to the motion to dismiss the charges signed by Timothy J. Shea, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and a longtime adviser to Mr. Barr.
Ms. McCord accused the government of distorting her account of that period to help justify dropping the lying charge. Mr. Shea’s motion relied heavily on an interview that she had given to the special counsel’s office after it took over the case as part of its inquiry into Russian election interference.
“The account of my interview in 2017 doesn’t help the department support this conclusion, and it is disingenuous for the department to twist my words to suggest that it does,” Ms. McCord, a former career criminal prosecutor, wrote in The Times.
Then the acting head of the national security division at the Justice Department, Ms. McCord was deeply involved in a debate between the F.B.I. and the department about how to proceed in investigating Mr. Flynn.
As part of a deal with prosecutors, Mr. Flynn admitted lying to agents during an interview at the White House about the substance of his phone calls with Sergey I. Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States. Mr. Flynn had asked Mr. Kislyak’s government to refrain from retaliating against Obama administration sanctions imposed in late 2016 as punishment for Russia’s interference in the presidential election.
Mr. Flynn then lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the calls, setting off alarms among law enforcement officials. Concerned that Russia could blackmail Mr. Flynn, F.B.I. officials moved to question him as part of its open investigation into Russia’s interference.
But Mr. Shea wrote last week that agents had no legitimate reason to question Mr. Flynn. The inquiry into him had been on the verge of closing, and Mr. Shea said investigators had found nothing to justify extending it or opening a new investigation.
“The calls were entirely appropriate on their face,” Mr. Shea wrote, adding that Mr. Flynn’s lies to the F.B.I. were immaterial and should not have been prosecuted.
Ms. McCord also sharply rejected that argument. She said the F.B.I. had sufficient reason to question Mr. Flynn and his answers were relevant to their inquiry. She also noted that Mr. Shea and Mr. Barr, who has said he decided to move to drop the charges, were silent on whether the F.B.I. acted illegally in questioning Mr. Flynn.
“Mr. Barr’s motion to dismiss does not argue that the F.B.I. violated the Constitution or statutory law when agents interviewed Mr. Flynn about his calls with Mr. Kislyak,” she wrote.
The move to end Mr. Flynn’s case also drew the ire of Mr. Kravis, who helped prosecute Mr. Stone and quit his job after Mr. Barr intervened to overrule prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation. Three other department lawyers also quit the case.
The “department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law,” Mr. Kravis wrote of the Flynn case in The Post on Monday.
Mr. Barr’s meddling will have long-term consequences, warned Mr. Kravis, who was a career public corruption prosecutor.
“Your work of investigating and prosecuting criminal cases is hard, and it becomes even harder when witnesses and jurors start to believe that the Justice Department’s handling of these cases is infected by politics,” he wrote.
Mr. Stone, 67, was convicted in November of obstructing a congressional inquiry into whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election. The evidence showed he lied under oath, withheld a trove of documents and threatened an associate with harm if he cooperated with congressional investigators.
The prosecutors recommended that Mr. Stone be sentenced to seven to nine years in prison, citing advisory sentencing guidelines that generally govern the department’s sentencing requests.
After President Trump attacked the prosecutors’ recommendation on Twitter, Mr. Barr overruled it. The president then publicly applauded him for doing so, even though the attorney general said he had made the decision on his own and criticized Mr. Trump on national television for undercutting his credibility and that of the Justice Department.
Other former Justice Department officials joined in expressing fury at Mr. Barr’s handling of the cases. Nearly 2,000 of them, including officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations, signed a letter released on Monday asking Mr. Barr to resign, saying he “once again assaulted the rule of law” in asking the court to drop the Flynn case.
Other current and former law enforcement officials backed the decision, a Justice Department spokeswoman said. “We have received significantly positive feedback from a wide range of current and former department lawyers and F.B.I. officials who are applauding the recommendation,” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec.
Katie Benner and Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
