Of all the White House allies who have received lucrative settlements from the Trump Justice Department in response to highly dubious civil lawsuits, the DOJ’s deal with former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is among the most outrageous.
It also apparently has a sequel. Lawfare’s Anna Bower reported:
The Trump administration has agreed to a second settlement with former national security adviser and Trump ally Michael Flynn, according to a court document filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
The settlement relates to a civil suit Flynn brought against the United States government, in which he alleges that the U.S. Army illegally garnished his retirement pay.
It’s not yet clear exactly how much this second settlement will be worth. The latest court documents, filed Friday, said the two sides “have agreed to a settlement in principle,” though they’ll “need more time to finalize and implement the agreed-upon settlement.”
These developments come on the heels of an earlier settlement agreement that was worth $1.25 million, and the fact Flynn is walking away with any taxpayer money at all is awfully tough to defend under the circumstances.
Indeed, in the recent past, the very idea of payouts to Flynn were difficult to imagine.
After Flynn was first charged by federal prosecutors — accused of lying to the FBI about conversations with the Russian government, lying to investigators about being a paid foreign agent and acting illegally as an unregistered foreign agent while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign — he admitted he lied, pleaded guilty twice in open court and became a cooperating witness with then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Flynn later changed lawyers, however, at which point he stopped helping the Mueller probe and decided he was no longer guilty of the crimes to which he had already pleaded guilty. Soon after, then-Attorney General Bill Barr took an interest in the case, and the DOJ announced it was dropping all of the charges against Trump’s former aide.
As difficult as it was to believe, Barr’s DOJ concluded it could not prove Flynn was guilty of crimes to which Flynn had already pleaded guilty. (A retired judge examined what transpired and ultimately accused the DOJ of exercising a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”)
Late on a Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Trump quietly pardoned Flynn. It was among the most corrupt moves the president made during his first term.
The pardon, however, apparently wasn’t enough. Flynn wanted a payout, too, claiming federal law enforcement subjected him to malicious prosecution when they charged him with crimes — and I can’t emphasize this enough — he had twice pleaded guilty to. Trump’s hyperpoliticized Justice Department agreed, in a development Mary B. McCord, an MS NOW legal and national security contributor, described as “a miscarriage of justice.”
The second settlement, in a separate but related case, will add insult to injury.
There was a point between Trump’s first and second terms when he suggested that, should he return to power, he might very well bring Flynn back to the White House. It increasingly appears, however, that Flynn doesn’t need a job, since the president’s team keeps agreeing to send him taxpayer money.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Trump’s Justice Department agrees to a second settlement with Michael Flynn appeared first on MS NOW.
