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WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump claimed a general vindication on Friday (May 8) about the Russian election meddling investigation that he has long branded a hoax and witch-hunt, after the Justice Department suspended the Prosecution of his former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Attorney General Bill Barr’s deeply controversial statement that there was never reason to persecute Flynn, a central target in the Russia investigation, and that the FBI abused his powers, caused outrage in much of the legal community.
But it gave Trump a powerful victory in his three-year campaign to convince Americans that the investigation was a political inquisition designed to delegitimize his presidency.
“Most people knew that from the beginning, and they knew it was just a total hoax. It was a made-up story, a disgrace to our nation,” Trump told Fox News.
“They tried to bring down the President of the United States, a duly elected President of the United States before I won,” he said.
AMMUNITION AGAINST BIDEN
Six months before running for re-election, Barr’s move offered powerful ammunition that Trump indicated he would use against his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who was Vice President of President Barack Obama when the original FBI investigation began in July 2016.
President Donald Trump claimed the claim after the Justice Department dropped the charges against his former assistant Michael Flynn in the Russian meddling investigation. (Photo: AFP / POOL)
“These are dirty politicians and dirty police and some horrible people. And we hope that they will pay a high price someday in the not too distant future,” Trump said of all those involved in the Russia investigation.
“If someone thinks that (Obama) and Sleepy Joe Biden didn’t know what was going on, they have something else to come,” he said.
“I think he and Biden … (were) very involved in all of this.”
SECRET TALKS OF RUSSIA
In closing the Flynn case, Barr plunged a knife into the heart of the justification for Special Adviser Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia.
When completed, Mueller detailed numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia that suggested collusion but did not add to a crime.
Mueller’s investigation, which led to convictions or guilty pleas by five other triumphant partners, had cast a cloud over Trump’s 2016 electoral victory and captivated the nation for two years.
Mueller detailed nearly a dozen acts of alleged obstruction by Trump, but his report did not exonerate the president or conclude that he had committed a crime.
But Barr, who was named attorney general in 2018 after providing legal arguments to the White House against Mueller’s investigation, stated that Mueller found no actionable wrongdoing.
Former special counsel Robert Mueller, who led the investigation into possible collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential race. (Photo: AFP / Alex Wong)
By then, however, Flynn had already pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about his contacts in Russia, and was facing a sentence.
The court had heard substantial evidence about its secret talks in December 2016 with Russia’s envoy to Washington to discuss deals that would undermine then-President Obama’s policy towards Moscow.
However, in an almost unheard-of reversal, the Justice Department on Thursday told the Washington federal district court that Flynn’s guilty plea was debatable, because the investigation was unwarranted to begin.
“We believe it is our duty to dismiss the case,” Barr told CBS News.
“You cannot establish a crime here. They had no basis for the counterintelligence investigation against Flynn.”
‘PURELY CORRUPT’
Despite the evidence accumulated by US intelligence and Mueller, Trump never accepted that Russia interfere to help him in 2016 and that he or his staff should have been investigated.
“You look at Mueller, that was purely corrupt,” Trump said of the special attorney, a former FBI director.
Trump declared victory on Friday, as he did earlier this year after his acquittal from the Senate after being indicted on separate Ukraine-related charges.
Barr, however, received strong criticism.
In a joint comment on the Lawfare website, legal experts called Flynn’s move “surprising,” “strange,” and “dishonest,” noting that it was the second time in two months that Barr overturned one of the remaining prosecutions of Mueller.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who oversaw Russia’s investigation, said Barr’s move “has nothing to do with the facts or the law, it is pure policy designed to please the president,” he said.
The House Judiciary Committee, led by Democrats, called for an investigation into Barr’s “politicization” of the Justice Department on Friday.
Americans “deserve a department that is guided by facts and law, and not by the political interests of the president.”
But conservative Berkeley law professor John Yoo wrote that abandoning Flynn’s prosecution was necessary to help clean up the FBI and the Justice Department.
Yoo called it “an important step to reestablish control over a law enforcement agency that it believed had the right to choose who were acceptable leaders for our nation.”
