Michael Flynn’s Lawyers Escalate Attacks on Prosecutors
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Mr. Flynn hired his new lawyers in June, including Sidney Powell, who has repeatedly attacked the special counsel’s prosecutors in appearances on Fox News. A day before submitting the latest court filings, Ms. Powell retweeted a message that both accused F.B.I. officials of entrapping Mr. Flynn and tried to raise money for his defense fund.
Ms. Powell told the judge, as she had earlier, that she also requires a security clearance and access to classified material related to Mr. Flynn’s conversations with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in the month after Mr. Trump’s election. The lies Mr. Flynn told to F.B.I. agents came in response to questions about whether he and Mr. Kislyak discussed sanctions that the departing Obama administration had just imposed on Russia.
“We must have access to that information to represent our client consistently with his constitutional rights and our ethical obligations,” Mr. Flynn’s lawyers wrote.
The classified transcripts of the calls make clear that the two men discussed sanctions at length and that Mr. Flynn was highly unlikely to have forgotten those details when questioned by the F.B.I., several former United States officials familiar with the documents have said. It was clear, the officials said, that sanctions were the only thing Mr. Flynn wanted to talk about with Mr. Kislyak.
Mr. Flynn’s lawyers also suggested in the filing that the government had exculpatory material, but it is not clear if they consider the transcripts to be that material. Some conservatives have embraced a theory that Mr. Flynn’s nonchalance in the F.B.I. interview, which agents documented because it seemed at odds with how blatantly he was lying, was exonerating.
In court papers, Mr. Flynn’s lawyers asked the judge to compel the production of potentially exculpatory information.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/us/politics/bernie-sanders-iowa.html?emc=rss&partner=rss
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