A lawyer for ex-national security adviser Michael Flynn charges that the FBI tampered with notes from his 2017 interview — and is demanding the “entire prosecution” against him be dropped.
First reported by Fox News, attorney Sidney Powell filed a 37-page motion containing the bombshell accusation that the FBI tampered with Flynn’s so-called 302 — a form used by agents to report or summarize interviews.
Powell called on the court to “dismiss the entire prosecution for outrageous government misconduct.”
The interview centered on Flynn’s contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. In December 2017, Flynn pleaded guilty to charges that he lied to the FBI about his Russia contacts during his short stint. He’s due to be sentenced in December.
“Those changes added an unequivocal statement that ‘Flynn stated he did not’ — in response to whether Mr. Flynn had asked Kislyak to vote in a certain manner or slow down the UN vote [on sanctions],” Powell wrote, the National Review reported.
“This is a deceptive manipulation because, as the notes of the agents show, Mr. Flynn was not even sure he had spoken to Russia/Kislyak on the issue. He had talked to dozens of countries.”
“That question and answer does not appear in the notes, yet it was made into a criminal offense,” Powell wrote, the National Review reported. “The draft also shows that the agents moved a sentence to make it seem to be an answer to a question it was not.”
One of the FBI agents involved in the interview was Peter Strzok, who was fired from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative team when text messages disparaging President Donald Trump were discovered between him and FBI colleague Lisa Page.
FBI brass allegedly sent Strzok and another agent to conduct an “ambush-interview” of Flynn to trap him into saying things they could claim were false, Flynn’s legal team says.