Where Is the Flynn 302?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Better late than never (I hope), my weekend column has posted on the website. It deals with the question whether General Michael Flynn actually lied to the FBI agents — including the now infamous Peter Strzok — when they interviewed him in the White House on his third day on the job as national security advisor. The question whether Flynn lied is a separate one from whether he should have been investigated, interviewed, and treated more fairly — it is a separate question from whether the interview was a perjury trap. (When you say something is a perjury trap, by the way, it is usually because someone has made false statements — no need to worry about the trap if the witness has been truthful.)
Now that Flynn and Special Counsel Mueller have filed their pre-sentencing memoranda, we have a full picture of each side’s position. I’ve given a lot of sunlight — including in discussing the matter with Rich on the most recent edition of The McCarthy Report podcast — to the argument made by Flynn’s camp that he is not really guilty of lying to the agents, that he pled guilty due to pressure from Mueller, including that his son might be prosecuted. It is only fair, as Flynn’s sentencing approaches next week, to consider the more likely scenario (the one of which I am now convinced): Yes, he was pressured . . . but he did in fact make intentional misstatements.
My purpose in this post is not to rehash the column. It is to highlight something I address in the middle: the missing FBI report of Flynn’s interview on January 24, 2017 — i.e., the Flynn 302. As I write in the column:
It was only after Mueller was appointed in May 2017 that the investigation of Flynn appears to have picked up steam and a false-statements plea was finally negotiated in late November.
There are many peculiarities about this. Pressing at the moment, for example, is the special counsel’s release yesterday of the FBI report (the “302” form) pertaining to Flynn’s interview. Media reports had said that even though Flynn was interviewed on January 24, 2017, the 302 documenting the interview was not completed until August 22, 2017, seven months later. Clearly, this raises the possibility that the interview report was drafted not when the agents formed their initial impressions, but months later when the special counsel was squeezing Flynn and there was a motive to make the interview appear more deceptive than it seemed at the time.
To my eye, the situation is even more disturbing than the press reporting suggests. It appears that there is no 302 of the Flynn interview . The 302 dated August 22, 2017, which Mueller submitted to the court, documents an interview of Peter Strzok , not of Flynn. It appears that this interview of Strzok took place on July 19, notes of the interview were drafted the next day (July 20), and the 302 was approved and entered into the FBI’s files on August 22. The question obviously arises: Where is the Flynn 302? FBI procedures would have called for a report within a few days of the interview. It is not that there wasn’t one for seven months. For now, it looks like none has been produced at all.
As I add in the column, this deserves attention, and we’ll come back to it, as well as other investigative irregularities, as we get more clarity.
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
Who is online
43 visitors
As the evidence of misconduct by the Mueller team, one can only think back to how Daniel Ellsberg and Bill Ayers got to walk. Thus, Rudy Giulliani can confidently say "after the way these guys were treated there is no way I would allow a Presidential interview - "Over my dead body"!
Another question: There was another agent at the original interview with Strzok. Why hasn't Congress called for him to testify?
Mueller is their golden boy, they don't want to talk about someone that is trying his best to destroy the rule of law/jurisprudence in this country.....
It appears that there is no 302 of the Flynn interview. The 302 dated August 22, 2017, which Mueller submitted to the court, documents an interview of Peter Strzok, not of Flynn
WTH is going on?
When Comey tricked Flynn into the interview there was no intention to charge him, hence no 302. It is when Mueller took over that they needed a 302 so they could claim it was an interview as a suspect in an investigation...... Hence they went back and re-created one.....
If he was a suspect, he should have had at least the WH Counsel with him....
The lack of any 302 from the initial interview proves he wasn't a suspect in anything at the time of the interview. And Comey said as much. but he was tricked into talking to investigators without counsel.
At least that is what appeared to have happened.
UPDATE:
"U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan had ordered the special counsel to turn over all government documents and “memoranda” related to the questioning of Flynn, after his attorneys claimed the FBI had discouraged him from bringing a lawyer to his fateful Jan. 24, 2017 interview with agents at the White House. He eventually pleaded guilty to making false statements about his contacts with Russia's ambassador, in connection with that meeting.
But not included in the filing was an original 302 from the period of the January 2017 Flynn interview.
It's unclear whether the document exists. However, the Strzok interview file appeared to repeatedly refer to a 302 drafted after the Flynn interview. "Strzok conducted the interview and [REDACTED] was primarily responsible for taking notes and writing the FD-302," one section said. Another said that throughout the interview, Flynn did not give any indication of deception and only hedged once, "which they documented in the 302."
James Trusty, a former senior Justice Department official who now works as a criminal defense attorney at Ifrah Law, predicted Sullivan would notice that the 302 submitted Friday is dated seven months after the Flynn interview took place.
“Judge Sullivan has a well-established history of taking on discovery issues head-on,” Trusty said. “So providing a seven-month-old FBI 302 is absolutely going to be a red flag for the judge, and I can’t imagine there are not going to be questions tomorrow about whether there are contemporaneous notes, or a contemporaneous report, that is in the FBI’s possession.”
Stay tuned Tomorrow!