The FBI’s Flynn Interview Was Not Legitimate

Tuesday, December 18, 2018
By Paul Martin

By Mark Wauck
AmericanThinker.com
December 18, 2018

As the slow-motion drama of the Michael Flynn prosecution winds slowly toward sentencing today, it has become increasingly clear that the conservative commentariat feels conflicted. On the one hand, they can’t approve of what appear to be lies on the part of Flynn — inexplicable as this appears to have been in the circumstances (Flynn knew that the FBI had a recording of his conversation with the Russian Ambassador).

On the other hand, there seems to be something distinctly fishy about the entire case against Flynn. The evidence of investigative and prosecutorial misconduct — possibly including criminal acts — has become overwhelming. Nor has Robert Mueller’s reply to the Flynn response to the sentencing memorandum allayed any of those misgivings — quite the contrary, as Scott Johnson (one of the Powerline bloggers) puts it:

I find the reply memo to be a shocking document. Something does not compute.

Something is clearly wrong with it all. Whether or not Flynn lied, it all seems so unfair, including the very way in which the agents conducted the interview. Another of the Powerline bloggers, Paul Mirengoff nicely sums up what we instinctively know was going on:

There’s no mystery about what happened to Flynn. Towards the end of the Obama administration, this decorated General and top intelligence official left the government and became the leading critic of the administration’s national security policy.

Compounding his offenses against the deep state, Flynn joined the Trump campaign team. …

For the deep state, this was the last straw. Once Flynn was named Trump’s national security adviser, it sought revenge. …

Yet, the question arises: Is there a legally principled way to address the Flynn situation, one which does justice to Flynn — despite his misconduct — but preserves the integrity of our justice system and, crucially, of our courts? I believe there is and addressed it this past Saturday.

The solution should, in fact, be glaringly obvious, but has escaped notice — most likely because it requires an examination of the basic principles underlying law enforcement in our constitutional system. In our system of law, the State is not authorized to simply test its citizens — citizens are entitled to be left alone unless law enforcement has some articulable reason for approaching them. Let me state this very bluntly, with application to the Flynn case, before examining it in more detail:

False statement traps are not official FBI business. The FBI has no authority to interview random people to see whether they will lie. They must have an articulable reason for the interview to begin — one that flows from their official duties. All else must follow from that.

In light of this principle, the first question that arises with regard to the FBI’s approach to Flynn is clear: What reason did the FBI have to interview Flynn?

The Rest…HERE

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