In the document, Flynn’s lead legal representative Sydney Powell contends the very foundation of his prosecution, a 24th January 2017 FBI interview in which the Bureau alleges he lied about speaking with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak in December 2016.
“High-ranking FBI officials orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new President’s National Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of criminal activity - they already had tapes of all the relevant conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn - but for the purpose of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false… It’s well-documented by the evidence already made public, which was long known to the government - yet withheld from the defense - until after Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty…” Powell alleges.
The documentation “already made public” to which she refers includes a “still undisclosed discussion by the lead agent to use news of the ‘Steele dossier as a pretext to interview some people’,”, a “strategically-planned personal call from FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe”, designed to “prevent Flynn from seeking the advice of counsel or notifying the Department of Justice” and “planning and rehearsing tactics” calculated to keep Flynn “relaxed” and “unguarded” in order to mislead him about the significance of the conversation, among other things.
However, Powell also cited previously unreleased evidence indicating Lisa Page, Special Counsel to Deputy Director McCabe, edited the details of Flynn’s ‘302 – the form used by FBI operative to report or summarise interviews they conduct – in conjunction with interviewing agent Peter Strzok. At the time, the pair were engaged in an extramarital affair – text messages they exchanged released in June 2017 also revealed Strzok harboured virulently anti-Trump views, leading to his dismissal from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel probe, and firing from the FBI in August the next year – Page also resigned from the Bureau in May that year after being demoted.
In one hitherto unseen text exchange between the two dated 10th February 2017 provided in the filing, Strzok tells Page to “drop off what you have” so he can “incorporate” the content – in response, she says “I gave my edits to Bill to put on your desk”. A few texts later, Strzok confirms he made Page’s requested edits, stating he also emailed her “an updated 302”.
“I’m not asking you to edit it this weekend, I just wanted to send it to you, and hopefully it doesn’t need much more editing. I will polish it this weekend, and have it ready for Monday. I really appreciate your time and edits,” he concludes.
It’s not entirely certain what prompted the edits, but Powell shockingly suggests the impetus was news reporting that day alleging Flynn discussed sanctions with Ambassador Kislyak, contrary to what Vice President Mike Pence had asserted previously – and a comparison of the 302 before and after Page’s edits seems to strongly support this contention.
“Overnight, the most important substantive changes were made to the 302. Those changes added an unequivocal statement ‘Flynn stated he did not’ in response to whether Flynn asked Kislyak to vote in a certain manner or slow down the UN vote. This is a deceptive manipulation because, as the notes of the agents show, Flynn wasn’t even sure he’d spoken to Russia/Kislyak on this issue. He’d talked to dozens of countries. Second, they added ‘or if Kisylak described any Russian response to a request by Flynn’. That question and answer don’t appear in the notes, yet it was made into a criminal offense...The draft also shows the agents moved a sentence to make it seem to be an answer to a question it was not,” Powell states.
Other elementary changes between the draft and finalised 302 add further fuel to the conspiratorial fire, for in the original, Flynn states he doesn’t remember making four or five calls, but if he did so, it was because his phone service was poor and the line kept cutting out – the amended transcript states the opposite, with Flynn remembering “making four to five calls that day”.
If these changes were made by Page, she would’ve been lying when she told Department of Justice investigators she couldn’t recall whether she did take part in the 302’s amendment, but if she had, the changes would merely have been “grammatical edits as part of a peer review and not substantive”.
The document also takes aim at long-time CIA and FBI operative Stefan Halper for “slandering” Flynn with accusations he had an affair with historian Svetlana Lokhova, who Flynn met at an official dinner at Cambridge University when he was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, and requests the records of Colonel James Baker - Halper’s alleged “handler”.
Furthermore, it states Baker “regularly lunched” with journalist David Ignatius, and “illegally leaked” the transcript of Flynn’s calls with Kisylak to Ignatius, and requests the phone records of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to confirm his contacts with Ignatius. The Washington Post reporter was the first to report Flynn discussed sanctions with Kisylak, attributing the story to “senior intelligence officials” – Clapper is alleged by Powell to have told Ignatius “in words to the effect of ‘take the kill shot on Flynn’.”
Powell ended her incendiary filing by calling for the case against Flynn to be dismissed “in the interest of justice…because of the rampant wrongdoing of government agents from the inception of the ‘investigation’ and prosecution” of Flynn.
“Instead of doing so, the government has continued to defy its constitutional, ethical and legal obligations to this Court and to the defense, and to hide evidence it knows exonerates Mr. Flynn. As is the essence of the problem here, instead of protecting its citizens, the ‘government’ is protecting its own criminal conduct and operatives…He was deliberately targeted for destruction by certain elements in the government for many reasons - not the least of which was his publicly expressed intent to audit the intelligence agencies where billions of taxpayer dollars are unaccounted for,” she concluded.