Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn leaves a red card when he appears before his convict on December 18, 2018 at the US District Court in Washington, USA.
Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
Attorney General William Barr may have had secret information that led the Department of Justice to seek to drop his criminal case against Michael Flynn, a government attorney said Tuesday.
Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Wall revealed the existence of that possible non-public information during an entire appellate court hearing on the question of whether Flynn’s case should be dismissed in federal court, as requested by the Department of Justice.
The DOJ had provided multiple reasons for U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan to drop her own case against Flynn, who had previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
But Wall, who represented the DOJ, told a full panel of judges on the appeal in Washington, DC, that Barr’s ruling on Flynn’s case came “in the context of non-public information from other investigations. . “
“I just wanted to make it clear that it is possible that the attorney general had information for him that he was unable to share with the court,” Wall said, “and so what we put before the court were the reasons we could , but it may not be the whole picture available to the executive department. ”
Should then the DOJ’s request to bring the charges against Flynn immediately, Sullivan had appointed a former judge to make arguments for the view that the case should not be dismissed. Sullivan also let other parties out there weigh in on the question.
In response, Flynn’s attorneys asked the appellate court to compel Sullivan to dismiss the case. A three-judge panel had ruled in favor of Flynn, but the full court later decided to reconsider the case in response to a request from Sullivan’s lawyers.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, said Sullivan “expected” any appearance from the undisclosed impartial adjudicator.
Powell also said Sullivan now has the “now glamorous appearance of bias” for millions of Americans.
But Powell faced a strongly skeptical-sounding group of appellate judges who aggressively questioned her argument that Sullivan did not have much power to do anything other than dismiss the Justice Department’s request to drop his pursuit of Flynn.
“The judge needs to think about it, right? The judge is not just a rubber stamp,” one of the judges asked Powell.
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