Ret General Michael Flynn got screwed

Michael Flynn: newly declassified FBI notes prove he never should have been charged

Retired General Michael Flynn says fully unredacted FBI interview notes, released this week by the White House, show the bureau's own agents knew he did not lie, and that he would never have accepted his 2018 guilty plea had he seen the evidence at the time.

The Trump administration's Government Transparency Task Force on Wednesday declassified the complete, unredacted handwritten and typed notes from Flynn's January 24, 2017 FBI interview, documents that had been partially blacked out for years, even from Flynn's own defense team. Flynn, appearing on the Just the News, No Noise television show that evening, said the newly visible material changes the entire picture of his prosecution under Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The core of Flynn's argument is simple: the agents' own contemporaneous notes show he gave hedged, qualified answers about his December 2016 phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, answers the FBI then repackaged into flat denials in the official typed summary filed weeks later. That repackaging, Flynn contends, manufactured the false-statement charge that upended his life.

Handwritten notes versus the official FBI summary--Two FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, sat across from Flynn in that January 2017 interview. Both took handwritten notes. The FBI later produced a typed summary called an FD-302, the bureau's standard interview report. The FD-302 was not entered into the FBI's system until more than 20 days after the sit-down.

Strzok's text messages and the 20-day gap--

The delay between the interview and the filing of the FD-302 has long raised questions. Text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page, publicly exposed in 2020, shed light on why. Strzok told Page he was "trying not to completely revise" the summary because of its poor original state. Page, who did not attend the Flynn interview, also provided edits, the messages show.

An FBI lawyer who was not in the room editing the official record of a witness interview, weeks after the fact, is not standard procedure. It is the kind of irregularity that, in any other context, would prompt serious questions about the reliability of the document.

In Flynn's case, that document became the evidentiary foundation for a federal felony charge.

Flynn said the declassified documents contain information he had never seen before. "There is a lot of new information that I was not aware of," he said. What specific sections were previously hidden behind redactions, and why the FBI kept them blacked out for years, even from the defendant, remain open questions.

The government eventually paid Flynn $1.2 million and walked away from the conviction.

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