By ERIC TUCKER and JILL COLVIN
President Donald Trump voiced strong support Thursday for his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, raising speculation that a pardon may be coming after Flynn’s lawyers disclosed internal FBI documents they claim show the FBI tried to “intentionally frame” him.
Trump said he believes Flynn should now be cleared in court, but if that doesn’t happen, he as president has “a different type of power.”
“It looks to me like Michael Flynn would be exonerated based on everything I see,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “I’m not the judge, but I have a different type of power. But I don’t know that anybody would have to use that power. I think he’s exonerated.”
Trump has long said he is considering pardoning Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. The president spent Wednesday night and Thursday morning retweeting supportive statements of Flynn and condemned the FBI’s investigation into his onetime adviser
“They came at him with 15 buses and he’s standing in the middle of the highway. What they did to this man,” Trump said at an earlier event at the White House, without specifying what he meant. “They tormented him. They destroyed him. But he’s going to come back.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called into Fox News Channel to react to the release of the FBI documents, saying, “If true, it is extremely troubling.”
“If all this proves to be true, you will have, certainly, a major, major error on the part of top leadership at the FBI, which could well warrant additional charges against them,” he said.
Lawyers for Flynn over the last two days released a series of internal correspondence obtained through a Justice Department review of the handling of the case. They contend the documents bolster their allegations that Flynn was set up to lie when he was questioned at the White House three years ago, and show that agents were prepared to drop an investigation into him just weeks before they set out to question him.
Still, the documents don’t directly address the central allegation in the case — that Flynn lied to the FBI. It’s also unclear how much significance they will carry with the judge, who has already publicly scolded Flynn and rejected many defense allegations of prosecutorial misconduct. The judge, Emmet Sullivan, has not ruled on Flynn’s request to withdraw his guilty plea.
Among the documents is a redacted internal memo from Jan. 4, 2017, saying the FBI was closing out its investigation into whether a subject with the code name of Crossfire Razor was an agent of a foreign power or acting under the direction of Russia. The subject is described as a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who traveled to Russia in 2015.
Flynn’s attorney Sidney Powell confirmed Thursday that Crossfire Razor was Flynn.
But about two weeks later, according to the documents, case agent Peter Strzok told a colleague not to close the case and to “pls keep it open for now.” In communication with FBI lawyer Lisa Page, who expressed surprise the case was still open, Strzok responded, “Yeah, our utter incompetence actually helps us.”
Strzok and Page have attracted Trump’s derision for exchanging derogatory texts about him during the 2016 campaign. Both have since left the FBI.
By later in the month, the FBI determined they wanted to interview Flynn about conversations he had during the presidential transition period with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in which the men discussed sanctions recently imposed on Russia over election interference.
Agents questioned Flynn at the White House on Jan. 24, 2017, when the FBI says he lied about the Kislyak conversations. He later acknowledged misleading federal agents and, at his sentencing hearing a year later, did not contest the way he was interviewed.
But Flynn’s attorneys point to the newly disclosed documents to suggest the FBI had no basis to question Flynn and had already been prepared to close an investigation into him.
“The revelations of corruption by the FBI to intentionally frame Gen Flynn for crimes the FBI manufactured piles on with each new production of documents,” Powell wrote in a statement.
A federal prosecutor from Missouri is reviewing the Justice Department’s handling of the case at the direction of Attorney General William Barr. The department said the documents were provided as part of that review.
