Latest in The Russia Connection
On Wednesday, June 3, at 10:00 a.m., the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first in a series of hearings on oversight of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. The committee heard testimony from Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general.
You can watch a livestream of the hearing here.
The Justice Department on Monday, June 1 filed a brief urging the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to force district court judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn. That move came after the Justice Department moved to drop a charge against Flynn, who previously pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador, and Sullivan declined to immediately abandon the case.
On June 1, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia submitted a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit outlining his rationale for declining to immediately dismiss the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn after the Justice Department moved to drop their charges. A panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit had ordered Sullivan on May 21 to respond to an emergency request by Flynn that the appeals court force him to drop the case.
On Friday, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified and released the transcripts of the December 2016 calls between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The calls are at the center of the ongoing criminal case again Flynn.
If, after careful review, the judge finds that the government’s motion to dismiss the case against Michael Flynn is tainted, he has a duty to deny that motion.
The Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is flawed in many ways, but one of its weakest arguments is that the investigation of Flynn was not properly “predicated.”
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released 57 interview transcripts and several additional documents from the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Under the logic of the government’s motion to dismiss the charges against Michael Flynn, the FBI can’t investigate whether someone is a Russian agent unless it already has evidence that the person is a Russian agent.
Precedent seems to require the dismissal of the Michael Flynn case, but Judge Emmet Sullivan can ask questions first.
The Justice Department makes an unfathomably bad argument in dismissing the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.