Gregg Jarrett, the Fox News legal analyst, told the “Todd Starnes Show” Thursday that the FBI and federal prosecutors decision to withhold key exculpatory evidence in the case against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn should be a shot across the bow to all Americans.
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Flynn pleaded guilty in early 2017 to lying to the FBI about interactions with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Flynn’s lawyers on Wednesday released remarkable emails and handwritten notes. These notes showed top officials in the bureau discussing their approach to Flynn. They asked if their goal was to get Flynn to “lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”
Jarrett said the FBI’s mandate is not to get somebody fired.
“Gen. Flynn was innocent all along and the FBI knew it, and the prosecutors knew it. They didn’t care,” Jarett said. “They hid the exculpatory evidence and they charged an innocent man. They covered it up and coerced Flynn under threat of prosecuting his son to plead guilty knowing, full well, that Flynn committed no crime. This is the worst case of government abuse that I have ever seen.”
Fox News reported that there will be additional exculpatory evidence and pointed out that Attorney General Bill Barr is overseeing the DOJ’s probe into the handling of the case.
President Trump told reporters Thursday that he believed Flynn was “tormented.”
“They came at him with 15 buses and he’s standing in the middle of the highway,” Trump said, according to the AP. “What they did to this man. They tormented him. They destroyed him. But he’s going to come back.”
Jarrett told Todd Starnes that Flynn’s case is a “cautionary tale” for all Americans.
Jarrett wrote in a column for Fox published Thursday that “James Comey’s FBI” knew that Flynn was innocent but were overcome with their “zeal to damage President Trump.”
He wrote that Comey and his confederates devised the scheme after “secretly recording his perfectly legal and appropriate telephone conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, it was leaked to the media. This gave FBI assistant director Andrew McCabe an excuse to contact Flynn to discuss what the press was reporting. It was a clever artifice.”
Jarrett called the unsealed notes a “smoking gun” that lays out how the FBI can covertly weaponize its power based solely on political reasons.
“If people we entrust to enforce and uphold the law are capable of persecuting an honorable three-star general while covering up their mendacious act, imagine what they can do to you,” Jarrett said.