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      Justice Dept. Aims to Keep Secret Part of Barr-Era Memo on Trump

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      The Biden administration has decided to fight to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to former Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 clearing President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a district-court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. It was written at the same time that Mr. Barr sent a letter to Congress claiming the evidence in the then-still secret report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about what the evidence added up to because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said Mr. Barr was justified in making a decision in order to shape public understanding of the report. “Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Trump-era Justice Department officials.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed multiple actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were clearly sufficient to ask a grand jury to consider indicting him for obstruction of justice.Those actions included attempting to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into falsifying a record to cover up an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller, and dangling a potential pardon at Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.The new Justice Department filing also apologized for and defended its Barr-era court filings about the memo, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson had labeled “disingenuous,” saying that they could have been written more clearly but were nevertheless accurate.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Justice Department said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Mr. Barr’s claim — which he made weeks before releasing the Mueller public — that the evidence gathered showed that Mr. Trump did not commit a chargeable offense of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading.Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure of an internal memo about the matter.Earlier this month, Judge Jackson issued a scathing ruling in that case saying that the Barr-era Justice Department had been “disingenuous to this court” about the nature of the memo in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret under an exemption for pre-decisional deliberations. She wrote that she had made the discovery after insisting that she read it herself.While the Barr-era Justice Department told her the memo concerned deliberations about whether Mr. Trump should be charged with obstruction, the memo itself showed that Mr. Barr had already decided not to do so, and the memo was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to quash the idea. She ordered the entire document released.The Biden-era Justice Department had until Monday to respond. In its filing, it acknowledged that its earlier filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that its “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The decision that Mr. Barr was actually making, the department said, was about whether to decide whether the evidence was sufficient to charge Mr. Trump someday — not whether he should be charged at that moment, since longstanding department legal policy is to consider sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution while they are in office.And, it said, the legal analysis in the second part of the memo — the portion it is appealing to keep secret — was, in fact, pre-decisional, even though the memo was completed after Mr. Barr made his decision, because it memorialized legal advice that department lawyers had previously provided to the attorney general. More

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      Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions

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      Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in a ruling that the misleading statements were similar to others that William P. Barr, the former attorney general, had made about the Mueller investigation.A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.“The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Judge Jackson wrote of Mr. Trump.She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Barr did not return an email seeking comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.Judge Jackson said that the government had until May 17 to decide whether it planned to appeal her ruling, a decision that will be made by a Justice Department run by Biden appointees.The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.At issue is how Mr. Barr handled the end of the Mueller investigation and the release of its findings to the public. In March 2019, the office of the special counsel overseeing the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, delivered its report to the Justice Department. In a highly unusual decision, Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump had illegally obstructed justice.That opened the door for Mr. Barr to take control of the investigation. Two days after receiving the report, Mr. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress saying that Mr. Trump would not be charged with obstructing justice and summarizing the report. Mr. Mueller’s team believed that Mr. Barr’s characterization of the document was misleading and privately urged him to release more of their findings, but Mr. Barr refused.About a month later, around the time that the report was released to the public, Mr. Barr testified to Congress that he had made the decision not to charge Mr. Trump “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers,” and that the decision to clear the president of wrongdoing had been left to Mr. Barr because Mr. Mueller had made no determination about whether Mr. Trump broke the law.Judge Jackson said in the ruling that Mr. Barr had been disingenuous in those assertions, adding that it had not been left to him to make the decision about the prosecution.She also said that in the litigation between the government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department under Mr. Barr had claimed that the memo, written by his top officials, had been about legal advice he had relied on to make the decision and should be shielded from the public.Under federal law, the Justice Department can claim that such advice should be shielded because it is “deliberative” and the possibility of releasing it could keep advisers from giving their unvarnished counsel because they fear it may become public someday.But instead, Judge Jackson wrote, Mr. Barr and his aides had already decided not to bring charges against Mr. Trump. She reprimanded the department for portraying the memo as part of deliberations over whether to prosecute the president. She noted that she had been allowed to read the full memo before making her decision, over the objections of the Justice Department, and that it revealed that “excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the attorney general to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.”The department “has been disingenuous to this court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Judge Jackson wrote.She oversaw the trial of Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. and one of the cases against Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Although Mr. Trump has publicly attacked Judge Jackson, legal experts say she operated as an unbiased arbiter during the Russia investigation.In late March, the judge similarly called into question the credibility of the Trump-era government’s description of documents in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by The New York Times for certain White House budget office emails related to Mr. Trump’s freeze on military aid to Ukraine, which led to his first impeachment.The Justice Department argued that the emails were exempt from disclosure and filed sworn affidavits about their contents by lawyers for the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. But Judge Jackson insisted on reading the emails for herself and wrote that “the court discovered that there were obvious differences between the affiants’ description of the nature and subject matter of the documents, and the documents themselves.”Charlie Savage More

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      Book Review: ‘Saving Justice,’ by James Comey

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sU.S. Attorney James Comey in his office, December 2002.Credit…Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 10, 2021, 6:00 p.m. ETSAVING JUSTICETruth, Transparency, and TrustBy James ComeyIn his second debate against Joe Biden last October, Donald Trump inadvertently stated his philosophy of life. The issue was refugees. He said that “low I.Q.” immigrants were the only ones who abided by the law and showed up for their refugee status hearings. A week or so later, The Washington Post reported a similar statement Trump made when he admitted to stiffing his creditors on a Chicago high-rise. He said the chicanery made him “a smart guy, rather than a bad guy.”A smart guy, according to Trump, is someone who is wise enough to cheat. Stupid people abide by the law and attend their refugee status hearings; smart ones abscond. Stupid people pay their debts; smart ones stiff their lenders and dare them to sue. Stupid people believe their elected officials; smart people know the game is rigged. The most distressing aspect of Trump’s enduring appeal, even in defeat, is how many Americans seem to agree with him.The former F.B.I. director James Comey is appalled. In his second attempt at a memoir, “Saving Justice,” there is a story about a small-time drug dealer named Vinnie who is placed in the federal witness protection program. Vinnie begins his new life, falls in love and gets married. The trouble is, Vinnie also was married in his old life. He now has two wives, which makes him a bigamist, which is a crime. “The Department of Justice has an obligation to tell defendants and their lawyers bad stuff about the government’s witnesses,” Comey writes. This is true, even if the “bad stuff” has nothing to do with the facts of the case — Vinnie’s testimony can convict a major drug dealer — and even if the revelation might ruin Vinnie’s new happiness, since Wife No. 2 doesn’t know about Wife No. 1. “I felt sorry for Vinnie in that moment,” Comey concludes. “But the truth was more important than his pain.” We never learn the fate of Vinnie’s marriages or the case in question — he is, after all, in the witness protection program — but Comey hammers the larger point: “The Department of Justice could not accept anything short of the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”Comey’s view of justice — both the concept and the department — is ecclesiastical. U.S. attorneys are members of a sacred order. They make an unequivocal vow to tell the truth, and they do so with a certain style: “They were almost always younger than the other lawyers and stood straighter, buttoned their jackets more quickly, answered more directly, met deadlines and admitted what they didn’t know.”In other words, they are the precise opposite of Donald Trump, who demanded “loyalty” rather than “honesty” from Comey, and fired him as director of the F.B.I. “Saving Justice” is a slight and repetitive book, but not an insignificant one. Comey revealed the crucial moments of his confrontation with the president in his 2018 memoir, “A Higher Loyalty.” They are rehashed here, but within the context of a larger theme: the national descent from strict, fact-based truth into a feckless mirage of “truthiness,” to use Stephen Colbert’s brilliant formulation. Can an institution religiously devoted to the truth, like the Justice Department, survive in a democracy where vast numbers of people believe that the 2020 election was a fraud?Comey is a curious figure. He is smart, admirable, hard-working — and yet slightly smarmy in his rectitude. He begins each chapter with a quote from sources ranging from Virginia Woolf to Malcolm X to the inevitable Dalai Lama. He tries to leaven his supreme pontification with stories of his own flaws, mixed emotions and humility. His height — 6-foot-8 — makes him testy in cramped spaces. His government salary makes it hard for him and his wife to raise five children. Annoyed, he throws his daughter’s obnoxious talking doll out the window of his automobile (of course, he drives back to retrieve it). His pursuit of transparency is rigorous to the point of myopia.But, of course, he is right: You can’t have a working democracy without an agreed-upon standard of truth. You need a “reservoir of trust” in our institutions if the government’s truth-work is to proceed. Conspiracy theories about the Deep State are debilitating. The Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence community have to be perceived as honest to a fault — even about their own faults.Comey is surprisingly tough on Robert Mueller. He believes Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election is devastating, but too complicated for mass consumption. Attorney General William P. Barr spins up a dust storm of inaccuracies while Mueller “chose to submit his unreadable — and unread — report and then go away without a sound,” Comey writes. “He could have found a way to speak to the American people in their language. … Department policy and tradition gave him plenty of flexibility to speak in the public interest. He chose not to, and, in the end, the only voices most Americans heard were lying to them. No truth, no transparency, and Justice paid the price in lost trust.”He should talk. It was Comey’s epic mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email case in 2016 that, arguably, gave Donald Trump the presidency. Comey defends his Clinton actions in both memoirs. He admits only to sins of honesty. The public was clamoring for a judgment. And the F.B.I.’s conclusion, after overwhelming work on the case, was that Clinton had been sloppy but not venal. “If we couldn’t prove bad intent, there was no prosecutable case,” he writes. Comey chose to announce this dramatically, in public, but not without a bone to his fellow Republicans: Clinton had been “extremely careless,” Comey said. He stewed about the adverb, which turned his report into an op-ed. And then, on the brink of the election, he reopened the case. A computer containing more Clinton emails was found in the possession of former Congressman Anthony Weiner, whose wife, Huma Abedin, worked for Clinton. Now, if there ever was a time for transparency, this was it. Comey could have said: “Look, we found no evidence of criminality in the Clinton case, and I would be very surprised — given the nature of the thousands of emails we’ve read — if this new batch proves otherwise. But we’ve got to look at them, and so we will.” Instead, he sent a damning letter to Congress, announcing that the investigation had been reopened. As Comey might say: No context, no transparency.In fairness, there was probably nothing that Comey could say about the Clinton case that would have stanched the “lock her up” conspiracy-mongering. His battle, and Mueller’s, is against a powerful sludge-tide of cynicism that has been flowing, especially in the media, for 50 years — and, for the past four years, from the White House itself. All politicians are crooked, aren’t they? All politicians lie.If nothing else, Comey has laid out the challenge of the next four years. Joe Biden’s quiet humanity will confront a noisy nation where too many citizens have become so sour that they’ve found solace, and entertainment, in an alternative reality. It will not be easy to lure them away from their noxious fantasies, but fact-based truth is not negotiable.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Citing Trump’s Pardon, Judge Dismisses Case Against Michael Flynn

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCiting Trump’s Pardon, Judge Dismisses Case Against Michael FlynnA federal judge portrayed the Justice Department’s prior attempt to drop the case as unlikely to have met legal standards as legitimate.Michael T. Flynn was the only White House official charged in the Russia investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.Credit…Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressBy More

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      Barr Makes Durham a Special Counsel in a Bid to Entrench Scrutiny of the Russia Inquiry

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      Citing Pardon, Justice Dept. Asks Judge to ‘Immediately’ Dismiss Flynn Case

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      WASHINGTON — The Justice Department asked a federal judge on Monday to dismiss the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, citing his pardon last week — and making clear that it broadly covered potential legal troubles beyond the charge Mr. Flynn had faced of lying to federal investigators.“The president’s pardon, which General Flynn has accepted, moots this case,” the Justice Department filing said.Mr. Flynn had twice pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations in late 2016, during the Trump presidential transition, with the Russian ambassador to the United States. His original plea deal also covered legal liability for other potential charges related to his work as an unregistered foreign agent of Turkey in 2016.But Mr. Flynn — whose case became a cause for Mr. Trump and his supporters as they attacked the Trump-Russia investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III — sought to change his plea to not guilty. And Attorney General William P. Barr asked the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, to dismiss the case in a highly unusual about-face for the Justice Department.But the judge instead began a review of the request’s legitimacy, appointing an outside critic — John Gleeson, a former federal judge and mafia prosecutor — who portrayed Mr. Barr’s move as a lawless abuse of power to show special favor to a presidential ally, and urged Judge Sullivan to instead proceed to sentencing Mr. Flynn.Last week, with Judge Sullivan yet to issue any ruling, Mr. Trump instead pardoned his former aide, taking political responsibility for ending the case. As a result, the Justice Department said in a new filing, the entire matter is moot.The filing was accompanied by the text of the pardon itself, which had not previously been released. While Mr. Trump had said on Twitter that he was granting Mr. Flynn a “full” pardon, he left unclear how far that would go in terms of any potential legal jeopardy for Mr. Flynn over other matters for which he had not been charged.The pardon, however, was written broadly not only to cover lying to the F.B.I., but to foreclose any legal jeopardy Mr. Flynn might face from a future Justice Department arising from the Turkey matter, his inconsistent statements under oath to Judge Sullivan and any potential perjury or false statements to Mr. Mueller’s team or to the grand juries it used.In a three-page filing accompanying the pardon, the Justice Department emphasized to Judge Sullivan that the language covered “any possible future perjury or contempt charge in connection with General Flynn’s sworn statements and any other possible future charge” that the judge or Mr. Gleeson “has suggested might somehow keep this criminal case alive over the government’s objection.”Judge Sullivan did not immediately file a response to the new motion to dismiss, and Mr. Gleeson did not respond to an email requesting comment.Andrew Weissmann, a former member of the special counsel team who was not directly involved in prosecuting Mr. Flynn, condemned the Trump administration’s handling of the case after Mr. Mueller’s office shut down.“Trump issued the pardon only after Barr debased the Department of Justice by filing a disingenuous motion to dismiss,” Mr. Weissmann said. “Sullivan will have the opportunity to weigh in on his view of all this when he grants the motion to dismiss based on the full pardon.”But the Justice Department filing signaled that under the Trump administration, at least, the Flynn matter is closed.“No further proceedings are necessary or appropriate, as the court must immediately dismiss the case with prejudice,” it said. More

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      Trump Pardons Michael Flynn

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      WASHINGTON — President Trump pardoned on Wednesday his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who had twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat and whose prosecution Attorney General William P. Barr tried to shut down.“It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.The presidential pardon appeared to bring to an end the drawn-out legal saga of Mr. Flynn. The Justice Department had moved in the spring to withdraw the charge against him after a public campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies, but the judge overseeing the case, Emmet G. Sullivan, had held up the request to scrutinize its legitimacy.Though Mr. Trump had said that he was “strongly considering” pardoning Mr. Flynn and was said this week to be planning for it, Mr. Barr’s intervention had left open the possibility that his administration could end the prosecution of a presidential favorite without requiring Mr. Trump to take explicit political responsibility for the act.But as the case lingered — delayed first by Mr. Flynn’s unsuccessful attempt to get an appeals court to block Judge Sullivan from reviewing the basis for Mr. Barr’s move, and then by further weeks of inaction from the judge — Mr. Trump ultimately moved to do so after all.Mr. Flynn was the only White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russia investigation that was completed by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Under Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr, the administration has been trying to discredit and dismantle that inquiry. Mr. Trump also commuted the sentence of his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven felonies in a case brought by prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller.John Gleeson, a former federal judge and mafia prosecutor appointed by Judge Sullivan to critique the Justice Department’s attempt to drop the case against Mr. Flynn, argued that the claimed basis for the request made no sense and seemed to be cover for a politically motivated favor. He had said that Judge Sullivan should instead sentence Mr. Flynn — or that Mr. Trump should just pardon him.By doing so, Mr. Trump has now mooted that proceeding, meaning Judge Sullivan will most likely dismiss the matter. The pardon forecloses the possibility of a new legal confrontation over whether the judge could sentence a defendant who had pleaded guilty even though the Justice Department no longer wanted to pursue the case.Several Democratic members of Congress condemned Mr. Trump’s pardon of Mr. Flynn as an abuse of power.“Flynn lied to the F.B.I. about his communications with the Russians — efforts which undermined U.S. foreign policy after sanctions were imposed on Russia for interfering in our elections,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “And Flynn pled guilty to those lies, twice. A pardon by Trump does not erase that truth, no matter how Trump and his allies try to suggest otherwise.”Allies of Mr. Trump celebrated the move on social media, arguing that Mr. Flynn had been treated unfairly. And the White House spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, said in a statement that the pardon brought “to an end the relentless, partisan pursuit of an innocent man.”Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a decorated lieutenant general, was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s campaign. He was rewarded when Mr. Trump named him national security adviser shortly after winning the 2016 election, ignoring warnings from President Barack Obama, who voiced concerns about Mr. Flynn’s management of the intelligence agency.Mr. Flynn was also among a group of associates of the Trump campaign with links to Russian officials whom the F.B.I. scrutinized early in the counterintelligence investigation it opened in July 2016 to try to understand the extent of Russia’s covert interference in the campaign and whether any Trump campaign figures knew about it or were cooperating with it, wittingly or otherwise.It came to light that Mr. Flynn was lying to his colleagues about conversations he had in December 2016 with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. In the calls, Mr. Flynn urged Moscow not to escalate in response to sanctions imposed by the departing Obama administration over Russia’s covert election interference to help Mr. Trump, and raised the possibility that the incoming Trump administration would work more closely with Russia.The pattern of lying raised new suspicions about Mr. Flynn. The F.B.I. sent agents to interview him at the White House even though deliberations with the Justice Department about whether to first tell Mr. Trump’s new White House counsel were not yet resolved. Notes from a meeting related to that interview suggest a purpose of the interview may have been to see whether Mr. Flynn would lie again to the F.B.I. agents — as he did.Despite firing Mr. Flynn, Mr. Trump asked the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to end any investigation into Mr. Flynn. Details about the president’s request became public a few months later after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey and helped prompt Mr. Mueller’s appointment as special counsel.Although Mr. Trump initially distanced himself from Mr. Flynn, the president later began to disparage the Flynn case as part of his broader attacks on the Russia investigation as a “hoax,” a “witch hunt” and a deep-state plot to sabotage him.Over time, Mr. Flynn’s case became a cause for the right-wing media. Though Mr. Flynn had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate in another criminal trial — as part of a deal to also resolve his liability related to working for Turkey without registering as a foreign agent, while also serving as a top adviser to the Trump campaign — he later hired a new lawyer, Sidney Powell, reversed course and ultimately sought to withdraw his plea.Mr. Flynn was never charged in connection with the Turkey issue. The White House did not immediately release the text of the pardon itself, so it was not clear whether it was written in a way that would foreclose any potential legal liability for Mr. Flynn on that or other matters, like making conflicting statements to Judge Sullivan as part of pleading guilty and then trying to withdraw that plea. Still, Mr. Trump described the pardon as a “full” one.Before Mr. Barr intervened in an attempt to dispose of the Flynn case, Justice Department prosecutors had portrayed his admitted guilt in both matters as a betrayal of trust by a high-ranking official who “failed to accept responsibility for his conduct” and continued to lie.“The defendant monetized his power and influence over our government, and lied to mask it,” they wrote. “When the F.B.I. and D.O.J. needed information that only the defendant could provide, because of that power and influence, he denied them that information. And so an official tasked with protecting our national security, instead compromised it.”At the start of her representation of Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell had written to Mr. Barr, stressing the need to keep the communication secret, and counseled a strategy of replicating the model of the 2008 prosecution of a senator — also before Judge Sullivan — whose case the Justice Department sought to dismiss after conviction but before sentencing based on a finding of prosecutorial misconduct.She asked Mr. Barr to appoint an outside prosecutor to scour the case file for any material that prosecutors should have turned over to the defense. After Judge Sullivan rejected conspiracy theories about prosecutorial misconduct that Ms. Powell put forward, Mr. Barr followed her suggestion and opened a review.The reviewer Mr. Barr appointed produced documents showing that the F.B.I. had been aggressive when it decided to interview Mr. Flynn. While the Justice Department did not say the prior failure to turn over the files amounted to any misconduct, it cited them as providing a basis for Mr. Barr to abandon the prosecution.The department’s claimed rationale centered on the idea that Mr. Flynn’s lies to the F.B.I. were not crimes because they were not material to any legitimate investigation. One of the files showed that the F.B.I. had been moving to close its inquiry into whether Mr. Flynn was a Russian agent before the question arose of why he was lying to colleagues about his calls with the ambassador.That rationale for dropping the prosecution has been widely criticized by Mr. Gleeson and others since the F.B.I. legally needs little basis to conduct a voluntary interview, and because the mystery of Mr. Flynn’s lies to his colleagues about his interactions with the ambassador, in part regarding sanctions for Russia’s election interference, seemed obviously relevant to the larger Trump-Russia investigation.Mr. Gleeson argued that the department was showing special favor for Mr. Flynn because that is what Mr. Trump wanted, and urged Judge Sullivan not to permit the judiciary to be used as cover for a politically motivated intervention — that is what the pardon power is for. Ms. Powell, for her part, portrayed the case against her client as a corrupt and politically motivated conspiracy and accused Judge Sullivan of being biased.The Justice Department was not consulted on the plan to pardon Mr. Flynn but was given notice on Wednesday before the announcement, according to a department official. The department would have preferred to see whether the matter could be resolved in court, the official said.Before taking on Mr. Flynn, Ms. Powell was becoming known for her Fox News appearances bashing the Russia inquiry. She also sold T-shirts attacking Mr. Mueller and his team on her website.Ms. Powell has in recent weeks attached herself to the Trump legal team trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won by a landslide but that fraudulent election software instead gave the victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. After she made particularly wild accusations that even Republican officials had been involved in a payoff scheme, the Trump team disavowed her.Katie Benner and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting. More