Former national security adviser Michael Flynn should never have been charged with a crime because he didn't commit one, and President Donald Trump was right to pardon him, K.T. McFarland, who served as Flynn's deputy NSA, told Newsmax TV Thursday.
"I think it was the right thing to do to pardon him," McFarland told "John Bachman Now." "It should have been done a long time ago."
Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI not because he was guilty, but because they threatened to "come in and destroy" his son, McFarland added.
"So what would any parent do?" she said. "Pleading guilty or testimony given under duress, or torture, or extortion, or blackmail, I don't think is really valid testimony, so that's why he sought to have his verdict returned."
McFarland said that the pardon was also important because "some of the bloodthirsty people" who tried to prosecute Flynn the first time will be present in a Joe Biden administration.
The investigation that led to Flynn's arrest wasn't about him, however; it was about getting to Trump, said McFarland, because "they didn't think he should be president."
"I'm just sorry the [John] Durham evidence didn't come out before the election," said McFarland. "Does anybody really think that in a Biden administration, with a lot of the same people who were in on this from the beginning of the [Barack] Obama administration, that this report's going to come out?"
McFarland also praised the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision against a New York mandate limiting worshippers in church services in hot spots and said she was grateful to attend church services earlier in the day.
"Our minister read out Abraham Lincoln's proclamation he made in designating the first official Thanksgiving holiday," she said. "If anything was a national emergency, the Civil War was, and he gave thanks to the Lord for the bounty of this nation and for the principles of this nation. ... Even though we're in the middle of a pandemic and even though we have a divided country, even though we're in the middle of our potentially constitutional crisis over the presidency, it was darn good to hear those words."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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