James Comey had no business meeting with Obama White House on Flynn case, former FBI executive says.
e belated discovery of disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s January 2017 notes raises troubling new questions about whether President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were coordinating efforts during their final days in office to investigate Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn — even as the FBI wanted to shut down the case.
Investigators will need to secure testimony from Strzok, fired two years ago from the FBI, to be certain of the exact meaning and intent of his one paragraph of notes, which were made public in court on Wednesday.
But they appear to illuminate an extraordinary high-level effort by outgoing Obama-era officials during the first weekend of January to find a way to sustain a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in the absence of any evidence of wrongdoing.
The Justice Department says the notes were written between Jan. 3-5, 2017, the very weekend the FBI agent who had investigated Flynn’s ties to Russia for five months recommended the case be closed because there was “no derogatory” evidence that he committed a crime or posed a counterintelligence threat. FBI supervisors overruled the agent's recommendation.
Strzok’s notes appear to quote then-FBI Director James Comey as suggesting that Flynn’s intercepted calls with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak “appear legit,” bolstering other recently disclosed evidence showing the bureau saw nothing wrong with Flynn’s behavior.
The notes also suggest Biden — who once claimed he had no knowledge of the Flynn probe — raised the issue of the Logan Act, an obscure, centuries-old law, as a possible avenue for continuing to investigate Flynn.
And Strzok appears to quote Obama as suggesting the FBI assign “the right people” to pursue the case.
You can read the notes here:
These conversations, if accurately portrayed in the Strzok notes, occurred during the same three-day period in which FBI supervisors overruled their field agent’s recommendation to shut down the Flynn case and pivoted toward the strategy of luring Flynn into an FBI interview where he might be caught lying.
Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer, laid out the potential ramifications of the notes in a court filing on Wednesday, calling the new evidence “stunning and exculpatory.”
“Mr. Obama himself directed that ‘the right people’ investigate General Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious:
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