General Politics

By Taylor Bassett - Staff Writer | @bassett_taylor | MadAboutPolitics.com

Yesterday, US Attorney General Bill Barr directed the DOJ to dismiss charges against Trump advisor Michael Flynn that he's already pled guilty to. Barr's history of using the DOJ to undermine prosecutions of Trump associates is as long as his tenure as AG. Barr's devotion to protecting Trump came under added scrutiny in February 2020, when career DOJ prosecutors began quitting over apparent disagreements with Bill Barr about the sentencing recommendations for longtime Trump ally Roger Stone, who was convicted on multiple counts of lying about his contacts with Russian cutout Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I wrote this post explaining that Bill Barr was setting Stone up for a pardon, and why it was important to Trump.


The gist of my Stone post was that Stone poses a danger to Trump as long as he faces the threat of prison time for his conviction because of information he likely possesses about Trump that exposes him politically and legally. It is in Trump's interest, therefore, to make sure Stone expects to be pardoned, and to avoid spending a significant amount of time in prison. The campaign to "exonerate" Michael Flynn almost certainly stems from Trump's anxiety of how Flynn can expose him, both politically and legally. An examination of Flynn's background provides ample reason for Trump to want to keep Flynn happy, and therefore quiet.

Michael Flynn became a secret advisor to the Trump campaign in approximately fall 2015, and was a national security advisor to Trump thereafter until being fired in 2017 shortly after the transition. Flynn was a lieutenant general ("3-star" general) with the Defense Intelligence Agency until he was ousted in 2014 over concerns about his Russian contacts. In the year before he left the DIA, Flynn asked permission to travel to Russia to visit the GRU, Russia's military unit which was later determined by US Intelligence to be responsible for hacking the DNC and DCCC in 2016. Not long after Flynn's departure from the DIA, Flynn began using his foreign contacts for personal profit. He was paid tens of thousands of dollars by Russian connected companies in 2015, including a $45,000 fee for speaking at a gala dinner in honor of RT, Russia's state-owned media company, a dinner at which Flynn was seated next to Putin while working as an advisor to both Carson and Trump. He was hired as an advisor to a private equity group that controlled NSO Group, a cyber-hacking firm run by Israeli intelligence. He was also recruited by Psy Group, an Israeli-run business intelligence company that offered pre-election assistance to Trump on behalf of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in a meeting in Trump Tower. During the 2016 election, Flynn retweeted posts on Twitter authored and promoted by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the other Russian operation known to have interfered in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf. And he was paid over half a million dollars to secretly lobby for the Turkish government during the 2016 election season, which he failed to disclose (and lied in his disclosures about) until 2017. Thus, Flynn was literally a secret foreign agent to Turkey at the time he was also advising Trump's campaign.

One of Flynn's most ambitious projects -- which happened to overlap with his advisory role to the Trump campaign -- was his secret work with ACU Strategic Partners, and subsequently Iron Bridge, to partner with Russia to build over a dozen nuclear reactors in the Middle East. In 2015, Flynn took multiple trips to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel in connection with these deals, all of which he failed to disclose on his security clearance forms during the transition. Flynn's work in furtherance of this project, like many of his foreign work, was largely kept secret during the campaign and thereafter.

Russia's support for Trump in 2016 was almost certainly based in large part upon its expectation that a Trump...