Obama DOJ officials privately told Mueller they were alarmed by FBI treatment of Flynn

A little-noticed letter from special counsel Robert Mueller's office divulges Obama DOJ concerns about FBI treatment of ex-Trump national security adviser.

Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates and other senior Obama-era Justice Department officials told the Russia special prosecutor in private interviews they had concerns about the FBI’s conduct in investigating former Trump National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, according to memos that paint a dark portrait of the bureau’s behavior.

The documents, which include a letter from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team transmitting exculpatory evidence to Flynn’s defense lawyers in 2018, offer the most detailed montage to date about why Attorney General Bill Barr recently appointed a special prosecutor to review the government’s actions in the Flynn case.

Among other things, the correspondence shows:

• Mueller’s team accepted Flynn’s guilty plea on a charge of lying about his conversations with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak even though agents told DOJ they thought the former general was not lying and simply had a faulty memory.
• DOJ officials believed the threat the FBI was using to prosecute Flynn under an obscure law known as the Logan Act was a “stretch.”
• Flynn was lured by the FBI into a fateful interview with agents believing he was not in legal jeopardy, which caused him not to seek a lawyer.
• Some of the DOJ officials’ assessments to the Mueller team were backed up by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.

The documents add credence to the arguments Flynn’s new lawyer, Sidney Powell, is making that the former national security adviser was coerced into making his 2018 guilty plea and should be allowed to withdraw it.

Yates, the Obama administration holdover, rose in January 2017 to Trump’s acting Attorney General only to be fired by the new president. She described her concerns to the Mueller team about a Jan. 24, 2017 effort by the bureau to interview Flynn about his contacts with Russia without letting him know he was under investigation.

“During an SCO (Special Counsel Office) interview of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Yates said that on January 24, 2017, Comey advised Yates that two FBI agents were on their way to interview Flynn,” a May 2018 Mueller team letter to Flynn’s lawyers stated. “The interview was problematic from Yates’ perspective because, as a matter of protocol and courtesy, the White House Counsel’s Office should have been...

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