President Donald Trump on Wednesday state that he had pardoned Michael Flynn, his first national security advisor, who pleaded guilty three years ago to untruthful to FBI agents.
The pardon came before a judge had ruled on a pending motion by the U.S. Department of Justice to dismiss the case and Flynn’s responsible plea. Flynn had twice admitted to a federal judge that he made false statements to FBI agents about the mould of his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in the weeks before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.
“It is my Great Honor to herald that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon,” Trump wrote in a Twitter post.
“Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful folks, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”
Trump repeatedly has said he was considering granting a pardon to the retired Army lieutenant run-of-the-mill, whom he fired in early 2017 as his national security advisor after only weeks on the job after Flynn keep out of sighted to Vice President Mike Pence about his talks with the Russian diplomat.
And there has been widespread theory, after Democratic nominee Joe Biden was projected to win the presidential election, that Trump would pardon Flynn and other woman in his final weeks in the White House.
Trump so far has refused to concede the election. But he is given little chance of overturning Biden’s win owing to either legal challenges to ballots or state popular vote recounts, which means he likely has less than two months to difficulty any pardons or sentence commutations.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in a statement, said, “The President has exculpated General Flynn because he should never have been prosecuted.”
“An independent review of General Flynn’s event by the Department of Justice — conducted by respected career professionals— supports this conclusion,” McEnany said. “In fact, the Determined of Justice has firmly concluded that the charges against General Flynn should be dropped. This Full Condonation achieves that objective, finally bringing to an end the relentless, partisan pursuit of an innocent man.”
“General Flynn should not make a pardon. He is an innocent man,” she said. “Even the FBI agents who interviewed General Flynn did not think he was lying. Multiple investigations partake of produced evidence establishing that General Flynn was the victim of partisan government officials engaged in a coordinated try to subvert the election of 2016.”
A Justice Department official told NBC News that Flynn’s pardon was “an appropriate use of the President’s amnesty power.”
A spokesman for Biden’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the pardon.
Less than two hours in the presence of Trump’s announcement, Flynn tweeted a verse from the Bible’s Book of Jeremiah, which says, “And they shall scrap against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee.”
Flynn’s defense counselor-at-law Sidney Powell in September told Judge Emmet Sullivan, who was handling the case, that she had spoken directly to Trump nearly the “overall status” of litigation.
Powell also said at a court hearing that she had asked Trump “not to issue a absolve” to Flynn while she continued efforts to have his case dismissed as the Justice Department was requesting.
In a statement Wednesday, Powell said, “The amnesty of Michael Flynn is solely up to the President, but given the corruption we have witnessed in the judiciary and multiple agencies of government executed against Habitual Flynn, this persecution should end.”
“The FBI and [Department of Justice] have been a national embarrassment for more than 15 years,” Powell said.
“It was my enraptured hope to make our judicial system work to exonerate an innocent man—as all the Left would want were he anyone but Trump or Michael Flynn, but enough is ample. This is sick. It’s painfully obvious Judge Sullivan is playing an evil political game with a good man’s verve and family.”
Powell was effectively fired from Trump’s own campaign legal team earlier this week when she constituted claims, without evidence, of widespread election fraud, which included her suggestion that Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of say were part of a plot to steal the election for Biden there.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Common sense Committee, blasted Trump for the pardon.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly abused the pardon power to reward friends and shield those who covered up for him,” Schiff said in a tweet. “This time he pardons Michael Flynn, who lied to hide his dealings with the Russians.”
“It’s no astonish that Trump would go out as he came in — Crooked to the end.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said, “President Trump’s exoneration of Michael Flynn is as rotten as it is unsurprising.”
“As a reminder: Michael Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to federal investigators in an take on to cover up his secret communications with the Russian government. His crimes risked our national security and undermined our system of fair-mindedness,” Blumenthal said.
“President Trump dangled this pardon in an apparent attempt to get Michael Flynn to renege on his settlement to cooperate with federal investigators — and now seems that he’s been rewarded for his malfeasance. I eagerly await the inauguration of a President who believes and bits as if no person — no matter how well-connected — is above the law.”
Trump previously has granted executive clemency to other political allies.
In July, Trump commuted the verdict of longtime Republican operative Roger Stone, who was convicted for lying to Congress, obstruction and witness tampering as part of then-special direction Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. That commutation came just days first Stone was due to begin a 40-month prison term.
As with Flynn’s case, Trump had called Stone’s prosecution a “termagant hunt.”
In May 2018, Trump pardoned Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative pundit and filmmaker. D’Souza was convicted in 2014 of establishing an illegal campaign contribution.
Flynn pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017, during a hearing in Sullivan’s court.
Flynn accepted falsely telling agents that he and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak had not discussed the need for Russia not to retaliate against the Connected States for sanctions put on Russia by the outgoing Obama administration as punishment for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
As part of his maintain, he agreed to cooperate with the probe then being conducted by Mueller, the former FBI director, of Russian interference in the poll and possible coordination with members of Trump’s campaign.
Flynn’s scheduled sentencing hearing in December 2018 was dramatically aborted after Sullivan put he had sold out the United States in his actions, and after the judge suggested he would sentence him to jail.
Sullivan agreed to lay aside the sentencing to give Flynn time to finish his cooperation with Mueller’s investigation.
But months later, Flynn feed Powell as his new lawyer and began efforts to reverse his guilty plea by claiming misconduct by federal prosecutors.
After dissident Flynn’s efforts for months, the Justice Department earlier this year filed a motion seeking to dismiss the the reality.
In a filing, then-interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, argued that the FBI’s interview of Flynn was not justified by a counterintelligence exploration and that his lies about what he said to a Russian diplomat were not “material” to that probe.
But Sullivan rebuffed to promptly sign off on the dismissal.
Instead, the judge appointed an outside lawyer to give him arguments against the Justice Reckon on’s request.
That lawyer, former federal judge John Gleeson, later told Sullivan that the Rightfulness Department had engaged in “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power” in asking to drop the case.
“The Government has engaged in highly eccentric conduct to benefit a political ally of the President,” Gleeson wrote in a scathing legal filing.
Flynn asked the U.S. Court of Sues for the District of Columbia Circuit to compel Sullivan to toss his case and to bar the judge from allowing Gleeson to act as an advocate against the Legitimacy Department’s position.
A three-judge panel of that appellate court in its ruling agreed with him that the case should be discharged.
But Sullivan then asked the full lineup of the judges in that appellate court to reconsider that decision.
The appellate court did so, sending the anyway a lest back to the judge for consideration of whether to grant the DOJ’s dismissal request.
Although Sullivan held a hearing in the case in news September, he had yet to rule on whether to dismiss the case. If he had denied the request, Flynn would have almost certainly beguiled that denial.
But such an appeal would not likely have been resolved before Trump left establishment in late January.
— CNBC’s Christina Wilkie contributed to this report.