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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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      Barr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden, Election

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesElectoral College ResultsBiden’s CabinetInaugural DonationsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Sees ‘No Reason’ for Special Counsels for Hunter Biden or the ElectionThe departing attorney general, William P. Barr, again broke with President Trump on his unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and the need to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president-elect’s son.Credit…Pool photo by Michael ReynoldsDec. 21, 2020Updated 9:12 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr distanced himself again from President Trump on Monday, saying he saw no reason to appoint special counsels to oversee the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., or to investigate Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.At a news conference to announce charges in an unrelated terrorism case, Mr. Barr, who is stepping down in two days, said that he did not “see any reason to appoint a special counsel” to oversee the tax investigation into the younger Mr. Biden.“I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Mr. Barr said. “To the extent that there is an investigation, I think that it’s being handled responsibly and professionally.”He also said that he would name a special counsel to oversee an inquiry into election fraud if he felt one were warranted. “But I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Mr. Barr said.After Mr. Trump’s loss to Mr. Biden, the president and his allies have seized on conspiracy theories about election fraud and considered legally questionable actions to cast doubt on the validity of the outcome or even seek to overturn it. Mr. Barr’s statements, in his final days on the job, seemed to signal that there was no appetite at the Justice Department to be drawn into any such efforts.But it is unclear how much pressure Mr. Trump might put on Mr. Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the current deputy attorney general, who will lead the department on an acting basis for the remaining weeks of the president’s term and whose approach to dealing with Mr. Trump is unknown.At a minimum, Mr. Barr’s statements on Monday give Mr. Rosen cover not to appoint special counsels to look into voter fraud or Hunter Biden, and would make the optics of any decision to go ahead with such appointments more difficult for both Mr. Rosen and Mr. Trump.Mr. Rosen has not signaled his specific intentions. But he has held discussions about the ramifications of appointing a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Hunter Biden, according to a person familiar with those conversations who is not authorized to publicly discuss them.He said in an interview with Reuters last week that he would make decisions on all issues, including the potential appointment of a special counsel, “on the basis of the law and the facts.”Mr. Barr’s comments are certain to further poison his relationship with Mr. Trump, who believes that the attorney general should have more forcefully used the Justice Department to attack Mr. Biden and his family in the weeks before the election and to cast doubt on the results after the votes were cast.Long been regarded as Mr. Trump’s most loyal and effective cabinet member, Mr. Barr, a believer in strong presidential power, brought the Justice Department closer to the White House than any attorney general since John Mitchell, who ran President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign and was deeply involved in Watergate.Mr. Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s investigation into the intersection of Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign amounted to a gift to the president. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr. Trump before its public release and ultimately concluded that the president had not obstructed justice, despite his efforts to shut down the inquiry.The Justice Department’s independent inspector general found that the senior officials at the bureau had sufficient reason to open the investigation. A judge later called Mr. Barr’s summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, misleading.Convinced that the F.B.I. had overstepped its authority in investigating the Trump campaign, Mr. Barr asked a federal prosecutor, John H. Durham, to look into the origins of the Russia investigation. In October, the attorney general appointed him to be a special counsel with a mandate to continue exploring whether the inquiry was wrongfully opened.Mr. Barr broke with longstanding norms when he spent the months leading up to the election echoing Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that mail-in ballots would result in widespread voter fraud. In strikingly political remarks for an attorney general, he later said the country would be “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if the president were not re-elected.He also approved the withdrawal of criminal charges against Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and overruled prosecutors who requested a long sentencing recommendation for Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s longtime advisers.But his relationship with the president fractured after the election after he said in an interview this month that he had not seen voter fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Tensions between them escalated after it became clear that Mr. Barr had kept the investigation in Mr. Biden’s son under wraps during the presidential race. While it is department policy not to discuss investigations that could affect the outcome of an election, Mr. Trump accused his attorney general of disloyalty for not publicly disclosing the matter during the campaign.With the president growing more furious and his allies constantly attacking Mr. Barr on social media and cable news for his perceived disloyalty, the president said last week that Mr. Barr would depart on Wednesday.Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election have grown more frantic since he announced that Mr. Barr would step down. On Friday, he discussed with aides in the Oval Office about naming Sidney Powell to be a special counsel overseeing a voter fraud inquiry. Ms. Powell, who worked as a lawyer for his campaign, has promoted unfounded conspiracy theories that Venezuela rigged the presidential election using doctored voting machines.Ms. Powell met briefly with Mr. Trump on Monday, a person briefed on their discussion said. Separately, the president met with a group of House Republicans, including Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, who is pushing a congressional challenge of electoral votes from a half-dozen battleground states that were won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.Mr. Brooks said that he and “people with firsthand knowledge of voter fraud” met over the course of several hours with Mr. Trump and others. “All in all, our effort to object to states that have such flawed election systems as to render them untrustworthy is full speed ahead,” Mr. Brooks said.The president has raised the possibility of an executive order to have the Department of Homeland Security seize and examine voting machines for evidence of tampering. His personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has also sought to have the department seize the machines, an idea rejected by homeland security officials.On Monday, Mr. Barr said he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.”White House lawyers have told Mr. Trump that he does not have the authority to take these actions, but his allies have pushed the president not to heed their advice.Now Mr. Rosen will have to contend with the possibility that Mr. Trump will run a parallel pressure campaign on the Justice Department.Mr. Rosen, a longtime corporate lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor, had never worked at the Justice Department before he became Mr. Barr’s top deputy in May 2019. His previous government service includes a stint as general counsel of the Transportation Department and of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget under George W. Bush, as well as as the No. 2 official of the Transportation Department under Mr. Trump.The question of how far an attorney general can and should go to further Mr. Trump’s political agenda has defined the tenures of both Mr. Barr and his most recent predecessor, Jeff Sessions. But Mr. Rosen will be stepping into the role at a time when the question is as intense as it has ever been.Unlike Mr. Barr and Mr. Sessions, Mr. Rosen does not have a long relationship with the department and no one is sure how much he is inclined to be a check on the president and protect the long-term interests of the department.Mr. Rosen worked largely in Mr. Barr’s shadow at the department. After Mr. Barr announced that he would leave, Mr. Rosen said that he was “honored at the trust and confidence” that Mr. Trump had placed in him to lead the department and that he would “continue to focus the implementation of the department’s key priorities” and maintain “the rule of law.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Accountability After Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyAccountability After TrumpHow can America rebuild democracy’s guardrails and hold the past administration to account for its lawlessness?The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.Dec. 19, 2020Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesAfter any major national disaster or failure of government, it’s essential to study what happened and why, if for no other reason than to enact laws and policies aimed at preventing the same thing from happening again. From the Warren Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the Church Committee in the wake of the Watergate scandal, from the commission on the Sept. 11 attacks to the commission on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, a thorough official reckoning makes for good government.What could accountability look like in 2021? How does American democracy confront the scale of the damage wrought by the departing president — the brazen obliteration of norms, the abundant examples of criminal behavior, the repeated corruption and abuses of power by the highest officeholder in the land, even after he was impeached?In short, how does America prevent the next Trump administration if it can’t properly hold the current one to account?This is the task facing the country and the next administration, as Joe Biden prepares to assume the presidency after running, and winning, on a platform of national unity and healing. Does restoring the soul of America require an exorcism of the past four years? Or would that only deepen the nation’s divisions, making it impossible to move forward?In a country as polarized as the United States in 2020, making even incremental progress on pressing issues would be a win. We’ve urged Mr. Biden to champion an agenda based on decency. The first step is to dial down the culture wars wherever possible, then pursue a policy agenda where there is ample common ground. But Mr. Biden should also champion accountability after four years that tested the outer limits of what America’s democracy could handle.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesHis victory is itself a powerful form of accountability. A majority of American voters, given the chance to render their verdict on one term of President Trump, rejected his bid for another. Yet defeating Mr. Trump at the polls was only the first step toward recalibrating the country’s moral compass. Two more challenges remain: The first, determining how to investigate the past administration. The second, determining how to ensure that subsequent presidents face more formidable obstacles to wrongdoing than Mr. Trump faced.Any honest accounting of the past four years needs to begin by establishing a shared set of facts about what happened. There is ample evidence already that Mr. Trump and some of his top allies may have broken multiple federal laws by committing campaign-finance violations, lying to federal investigators and obstructing justice, to name a few. Even if he is not prosecuted by federal authorities, Mr. Trump and his businesses face at least two separate tax-fraud investigations in New York. Many of Mr. Trump’s associates have already been convicted of various crimes.Yet there are still many lingering questions, foremost among them: Did the president’s business interests influence his conduct of foreign and domestic policy? The American people have a right to know if that was so.There are also powerful arguments against an administration investigating and prosecuting its opponent. No matter how strong the evidence or how independent Mr. Biden’s attorney general, it will inevitably look to half the country like a political hit job. Perhaps that shouldn’t matter, but from a practical standpoint it’s hard to convince Americans that the Justice Department is not politicized when it’s prosecuting the preceding administration.Then there’s the issue of triage. The moment Mr. Biden takes office he will be saddled with a staggering pileup of emergencies demanding his immediate attention: a pandemic killing thousands of Americans daily; a crippled economy, mass unemployment and miles-long food lines; a worsening climate crisis; and the growing threat of right-wing terrorism and racist violence. Then there was this week’s revelation that the Russian government is behind a huge, monthslong cyberattack on dozens of federal agencies and companies, posing what officials called a “grave risk” to the federal government.Despite the challenges, the nation has to move forward.Many of the most needed reforms fall into the same category as those that were adopted in the aftermath of Watergate: reducing the power of the presidency and re-empowering institutions, like Congress, that are supposed to serve as checks on an imperious executive. Those reforms managed to hold the line for a while, but they turned out to be ineffective at reining in a president with Mr. Trump’s sheer tenacity and disregard for the rule of law. While Mr. Trump failed to fully exploit their weaknesses, a more devious and competent demagogue would be much more likely to succeed.Corruption and abuse of power are the most urgent issues in need of addressing.Four years into Mr. Trump’s presidency and nearly five years since he promised to release his full tax returns, the American people still don’t know how much his personal financial interests and entanglements are intertwined with his administration’s domestic- and foreign-policy decisions. He has an affection for strongmen, but is his solicitousness toward leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman a result of something more mercenary? New laws compelling all presidential candidates to release at least 10 years of their tax returns, as well as a comprehensive list of any possible conflicts of interest, financial and otherwise, should be an obvious step toward reform. Legislation should also bar presidents from being involved in overseeing any business while serving in office.These reforms would need to apply throughout the executive branch. As the nation has seen, Mr. Trump’s administration has been awash from the start in self-dealing, ethical investigations and scandals. From cabinet secretaries to agency heads, the list is long, and likely incomplete.The second major area for reform involves presidential abuse of power, which includes everything from violations of the Hatch Act to the destruction of presidential records. The larger concern is the politicization of law enforcement. Mr. Trump was open in his belief that the Justice Department should do his bidding. He pressured his attorneys general, from Jeff Sessions through William Barr, to protect him and his allies and prosecute his perceived enemies. Sometimes they consented. Other times they resisted. But if law enforcement is to operate fairly and effectively, the American people have to see it as independent from politics.Mr. Trump has also abused his power by pardoning friends and associates who have been convicted of serious crimes. More recently he has floated granting pre-emptive pardons to family members and even himself, which may be unconstitutional. Mr. Trump isn’t the first to test the pardon power’s limits, but he has politicized and personalized it to an unparalleled degree. Since the power is essentially absolute, any meaningful change to it would require a constitutional amendment.As for the other reforms, some can be accomplished through executive orders, more stringent regulations or internal agency memos. But the most lasting will have to be enacted through federal laws, like the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a bill Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced in September. The legislation includes many measures that Republicans have supported in the past. Among other things, it would prohibit self-pardons, give Congress more power to enforce subpoenas, reduce the chance of politically motivated prosecutions by requiring more transparency from the Justice Department and provide more protection for inspectors general and whistle-blowers.The problem with passing laws is that you need both houses of Congress, and to date many Republican lawmakers have showed little to no interest in addressing these sorts of abuses. Most of them still refuse to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s victory. Perhaps once they do, the prospect of similar abuses by a Democratic president might give them the incentive they need to get on board with reforms.In the absence of any cooperation from the Senate, Mr. Biden could establish a bipartisan executive commission. Its primary task would be to tell the story of what happened and to propose remedies. It would need to have the power to compel the production of both witnesses and documents, and the mandate to produce as complete and accurate a record as possible of the violations of laws and norms by the Trump administration.It’s been four years since Americans lived under a president who placed the country’s well-being and security above his own personal interests. Simply by occupying the Oval Office, Mr. Biden can begin to repair the damage caused by his predecessor. With every act he takes, he will send an important message to the American people, and the world, about what a president should do — and, perhaps more important, what a president should not do, even if he technically has the power to do it.That’s why Mr. Biden’s victory is significant, apart from any specific reforms. “So much of whether these reforms will be successful and whether the prestige of the presidency and the dignity of the presidency will be respected is not going to depend on legal reform,” said Jack Goldsmith, a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration who co-wrote a book about reconstructing the presidency after Mr. Trump. “It’s going to depend on the identity of the person who’s the president. So not everything can be done by law. Some things need to be done by elections.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Barr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election Interference

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBarr Says C.I.A. ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining Russian Election InterferenceIn an interview with a Wall Street Journal columnist, the attorney general defended his legacy and criticized the special counsel’s investigation.Attorney General William P. Barr will depart the Justice Department next week.Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesDec. 18, 2020, 7:15 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s examination of the investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has cleared the C.I.A. of suspicions that it targeted President Trump and his associates, Attorney General William P. Barr said in an interview published on Friday.“The C.I.A. stayed in its lane” and he did not “see any sign of improper C.I.A. activity,” Mr. Barr told the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel. His comments made more explicit his disclosure this month that the investigation by John H. Durham, a prosecutor whom Mr. Barr appointed as a special counsel in the case, had narrowed to focus on the F.B.I.Mr. Barr stopped short of fully absolving the C.I.A.; he confirmed that Mr. Durham was reviewing the early 2017 assessment by the agency and other parts of the intelligence community that concluded that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had favored Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.Mr. Barr has drawn criticism for his previous uses of the term “spying” to describe investigative activities, though he has applied it more generally to the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation than to the C.I.A.’s scrutiny of the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference campaign. Mr. Barr reserved harsh judgment for the F.B.I.’s investigation, calling parts of it “outrageous.”Mr. Barr, who will depart office next week, sought to burnish his legacy in the interview. He has been widely criticized for his interventions in cases involving Mr. Trump’s associates, his portrayal of the Mueller report that a judge called “distorted” and “misleading” and other efforts to advance the president’s political agenda, but he insisted he was an impartial arbiter of justice who stopped the Justice Department from being used as a “political weapon.”Mr. Barr said he had planned to stay on as attorney general if Mr. Trump had won re-election but his relationship with the mercurial president had frayed at times, making his continued role as the nation’s top law enforcement officer tenuous.Mr. Barr did not assert that election fraud had played a role in Mr. Trump’s election loss and brushed off the president’s repeated criticisms that he should have disclosed a federal investigation into President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter, which would have violated Justice Department guidelines.While apparently clearing the C.I.A. of any wrongdoing, Mr. Barr has been deeply skeptical of the F.B.I.’s reasoning for opening a counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into whether any Trump campaign associates were secretly conspiring with Russia to tip the election in Mr. Trump’s favor.The investigation should never have been opened, Mr. Barr said. “The idea that this was done with the collusion of the Trump campaign — there was never any evidence. It was entirely made up.”The investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, has fueled similar unfounded accusations that a so-called deep state of government officials were working together to hobble Mr. Trump’s campaign and the administration.But an independent review by the Justice Department’s inspector general determined that officials had sufficient reason to open the investigation and found no evidence that agents acted with political bias. But agents also made serious mistakes in parts of the investigation, including some involving documents related to a wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, which have been amplified by right-wing media and wielded as proof that the F.B.I. was on a witch hunt.Mr. Barr told The Journal that the F.B.I.’s use “of confidential human sources and wiretapping to investigate people connected to a campaign was outrageous.”The inspector general concluded that the use of informants and undercover agents complied with Justice Department and F.B.I. policies but suggested those steps lacked oversight.Mr. Barr’s appointment of Mr. Durham as a special counsel grants Mr. Durham the kind of authorities given to Robert S. Mueller III, the former special counsel who eventually oversaw the Russia investigation. That should ensure that any report written by Mr. Durham is made public, Mr. Barr said.Mr. Barr said that Mr. Durham was focused on a “small group at the F.B.I.” — an apparent reference to the former senior officials who played a role in authorizing Crossfire Hurricane.Mr. Barr said Mr. Durham was also looking at “the activities of certain private actors,” a possible reference to Christopher Steele, a British former spy who helped assemble a dossier of anti-Trump material that was passed to the F.B.I. and used as part of the application to wiretap the former Trump adviser, Carter Page.Mr. Durham has spent significant time examining the dossier, including the actions of F.B.I. officials who came later to understand that it had significant problems but failed to convey that to the secret court that approves the highly classified wiretaps, people familiar with Mr. Durham’s investigation said.As part of his investigation, Mr. Durham prosecuted a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering an email that an agent relied on to renew one of the Page wiretap applications. The inspector general had found the document and referred it to prosecutors.In the interview, Mr. Barr also criticized the appointment of Mr. Mueller, the former F.B.I. director whom Mr. Barr once closely worked with in the early 1990s when he first ran the Justice Department.Mr. Barr said Mr. Mueller should have looked at the information the F.B.I. provided him more critically. “The Mueller team seems to have been ready to blindly accept anything fed to it by the system,” he said.The attorney general derided Mr. Mueller’s prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, who pleaded guilty twice to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with the then Russian ambassador in late 2016 and admitted to illegally lobbying for Turkey.After a federal judge had dismissed Mr. Flynn’s many claims of prosecutorial wrongdoing and F.B.I. abuses in late 2019, Mr. Barr then appointed a U.S. attorney to review the case.Prosecutors then sought to drop the criminal case against Mr. Flynn but before a judge could rule on the matter, Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Flynn, ensuring the Justice Department under the Biden administration could not prosecute him for violating the lobbying laws too.Mr. Barr said the case against Mr. Flynn was “entirely bogus.”The judge overseeing the Flynn case, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, disagreed with Mr. Barr’s sweeping conclusion. In an opinion this month, Judge Sullivan said that the Justice Department’s arguments for dropping the case were dubious and that he likely would have rejected them.The judge also rejected evidence that the department had supplied to the court in an attempt to show that the F.B.I. had tried to entrap Mr. Flynn.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