General Michael Flynn, retired, is suing key US government institutions, in particular, the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for $50 million. The complaint alleging malicious persecution names, among others, former FBI director James Comey, deputy director Andrew McCabe, and two FBI officials who led the unlawful surveillance of the 2016 Donald Trump campaign, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The FBI’s investigation of Flynn and three other Trump aides led to the national security advisor’s departure from the White House in February 2017. With Robert Mueller’s special counsel office threatening to target his family, prosecutors coerced the 30-year-combat veteran into pleading that he lied to the FBI. Even after the DOJ dropped its charges against Flynn, federal judge Emmet Sullivan continued the case.
Flynn’s own case against the government is in a federal court in Florida, where he now lives, but the DOJ is petitioning to transfer it to its home turf, back to Washington, DC. Reading the media coverage of the current case, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the grotesque cruelty still directed at a man whose reputation was smeared and whose legal bills have cost him and his family a fortune. Since Flynn left government service, his adversaries haven’t let up. And now he’s taking the fight to those who started it —Barack Obama and senior officials from his administration, including the current President of the United States, Joe Biden.
I spoke with Flynn’s attorney Jesse Binnall for a recent episode of my Epoch TV show Over the Target. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
JB: We have filed the lawsuit, we have served it on the Department of Justice, which is currently being represented out of the US Attorney's Office in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. It's being presided over by a neutral federal judge, somebody that's respected by both sides of the aisle. And I think it's a very, very strong case.
But fairness is something that I think, unfortunately, the Department of Justice is afraid of. They know if we get a fair shot, they're going to lose. So they want to transfer this to the venue where all the attacks on General Flynn occurred, where the cabal that went against him were part of the cocktail culture of Washington, DC, which we sometimes refer to it as “the Swamp.”
They say it's for witness convenience, because some of the witnesses — not by any stretch of the imagination, all of the witness — live near the Washington, DC area. But these are all people that can come to Tampa for trial. It's a very easy flight from Washington, DC to Tampa, and witnesses, no matter where we are going to have this case, are going to have to come from all over the country and perhaps even all over the world.
Importantly, it gets the case out of the culture of Washington DC. One of the things that our lawsuit talks directly about is the misconduct of a federal judge. And I don't say that lightly. But Judge Emmett Sullivan in General Flynn's case really behaved in spectacular fashion, something that I've never seen before — a judge where he became so passionately and emotionally involved in this case, starting with calling General Flynn a traitor, and then continuing when the Department of Justice wanted to dismiss the case. He decided to pursue the case himself and appointed effectively his own prosecutor. And then when the case didn't go the way he wanted in the appellate court, he actually started litigating against General Flynn himself.
If the trial gets transferred to Washington, DC, these are judges that share chambers with Sullivan and they know him. They see him every day. They know many of these other actors that are involved in this. The simple fact is, you cannot get a fair trial in Washington, DC if you're Michael Flynn. Everyone knows that, certainly all the Americans who follow his case know that. So if no other reason, the appearance of justice, the appearance of impartiality, which is one of the most important things that our court system looks to —it's not just justice himself, but the appearance of justice — this case needs to stay in Florida. It needs to stay with a judge that's a straight shooter, who’s going to call balls and strikes and isn't favored by one side or the other.
LS: Emmett Sullivan turned the trial into a stage for himself. He basically crossed over from the judicial branch of government to the executive branch of government as a prosecutor. How is that constitutional?
JB: In order to take away somebody's freedom, through the criminal justice system, you have to have agreement among all three branches of government, you have to have the legislative branch that writes a law that says such and such conduct is very clearly unlawful. Then you have the executive branch that says, we believe that this particular conduct violated that law. And then you have to have the judicial branch that sits impartially and listens to both sides.
Not only did Emmett Sullivan effectively take off his robe, step across the aisle, and start acting as a prosecutor. One of the reasons that the Justice Department dropped the charges is because there was no violation of the law. And so in essence, he was also acting as the legislature, he saw somebody he didn't like, politics that he didn't like. And, you know, who cares — if there was no law that prohibited it, he just thought it was wrong. So really, he was acting as the legislature as well. He just completely ignored our entire separation of powers.
Justice Scalia used to talk about this. I was lucky enough to hear him talk about this, where he would say that every two-bit dictatorship has a bill of rights. He would read this beautiful prose that just sounds great from a human rights perspective. And then he’d say, that's from the bill of rights of the Soviet Union. And so everybody has a bill of rights, it means nothing unless you have separation of powers to enforce it. And that's what Mr. Sullivan completely disregarded in his handling of the Flynn case. We can't sue him because of judicial immunity. However, he is still a very, very big part of this case, and to say that it should be handled in his courtroom, where he interacts with his peers on a daily basis is wrong.
LS: When Gen Flynn's case was before Emmet Sullivan, thousands of people were listening in online to hear judges debating it. Millions of Americans were focused on it. This is the first time that many of us had really seen our justice system run amok. Now, it's almost every place we look, we see evidence that our justice system is not what we thought it was. Are we watching something new? Or are we just coming to realize that, unfortunately, there are many, many flaws with our justice system?
JB: I think there have been problems for a while with our justice system, the politicization of it. We've seen the problem expand over the years with federal government agencies having too much power and we know that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it really peaked with the beginning of the Flynn case. And it is continuing to just roll on with what we see now with the attacks on President Trump and other America First Americans in this country.
When it comes to General Flynn, one thing that you can look at is the counterintelligence chief at the FBI at the time, Bill Priestap. He took notes as he was trying to discourage the Strzok-Comey plan of sandbagging General Flynn, and he was pointing out that it was a strategy that would lead to the politicization of the Justice Department and of the FBI, and of the many dangers that would happen if it was an overtly political organization, which unfortunately, I believe it is today. And political not necessarily on behalf of only Democrats, I think it's largely Democrats, but in favor of the Washington, DC establishment, the Washington, DC bureaucracy, run almost entirely by civilian employees.
They want to protect that bureaucracy, and they want to protect the government because it provides them their paycheck, their retirement, but it's also the way they think things should be done. And what they've forgotten is that we have a constitution in this country, where the power is supposed to flow from the people, and the bureaucrats are servants of the people and can be replaced. And instead, in our law enforcement apparatus, they've turned that on its head, and they think that the people can never replace us. We aren't accountable to anyone. And so we will give down the law from on high without any accountability. We see that now very clearly through all levels of the Department of Justice, and especially at the top of the FBI, but unfortunately, it's permeated the entire FBI apparatus as well.
LS: The case is against the Department of Justice and FBI, also against the Executive Office of the former president, Barack Obama. Many have forgotten how central the Obama administration's role was in all this — it wasn't just the Clinton campaign. These were all Obama spy chiefs, even Robert Mueller had been one of Obama's spy chiefs. And the special counsel’s Office is also part of General Flynn’s suit.
JB: What we've done is tell the story of the government's targeting, persecution, and attack on General Flynn. They went after him with no basis — they never had a basis to go after him, we know that from the Durham report, but we could have told you that years ago. They went after General Flynn with FBI agents that were sending scandalous text messages, because they were having an affair with each other, exchanges that we know that they thought were private, and were going to be immune from sunlight. This is really important to remember, because we know that they thought this was private. And we know that they wanted to find a way to make it so Trump would not get elected.
Going after General Flynn was a way for them to do that. And here's one of the most important things: you talked about Obama's various spy chiefs. Michael Flynn was one of those, Michael Flynn ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, and he was fired by Obama. Because Michael Flynn called things as they were when he said the greatest threat to our country, at least back in 2014, was radical Islamic terrorism. Obama flipped out and fired him. Heaven forbid, we actually have a general that doesn't focus on transgender issues and is targeting Americans, but is actually going after our enemies overseas. I mean, that's just beyond the pale. So Obama fired him.
General Flynn knew how our bureaucracy was set up and how best to attack it. The unfortunate thing is, he would have been President Trump's greatest asset in those four years, being next to him in the White House, being able to know the bureaucracy and how to fight against it. And so part of the insurance policy I believe, that Page and Strzok talked about, was that if Trump did get elected, how they could chop him off at the knees, and taking out Flynn was one of the ways that there were going to chop him off at the knees.
Obama gave President Trump two pieces of advice, stick with your own people, but don't hire Michael Flynn. And Trump ignores that second piece of advice, and names Michael Flynn the National Security Advisor. Then you get the unmasking of General Flynn by various agents in the government. And then after the FBI admits that there's nothing there and they're going to drop the case, Peter Strzok does everything he can to keep it open and comes up with this crazy idea to go after Michael Flynn for his perfect phone call — to borrow a phrase from President Trump —with Sergey Kislyak [Russia’s then ambassador to the US — LS].
He was doing exactly what you'd want an administration official to do in an incoming administration, to make sure that we have a foreign policy that is safe and consistent. And the FBI comes up with a crazy theory that there's something wrong and then they walk into the Obama White House with that theory. They walk into the Oval Office and you've got Jim Comey there, you've got you've got Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general, and she was going to be the acting attorney general. You have Susan Rice. And you have Vice President Joe Biden, and you have Barack Obama and Barack Obama gives them the instructions. To have the right people on this case to go after General Flynn.
LS: This is right after the election, Donald Trump has been elected president United States, they're still throwing all the Russiagate garbage at him. Barack Obama’s administration is on its way out. And the meeting you're talking about is the January 5, 2017 meeting with Obama, Biden, Comey, Susan Rice, Sally Yates. And this is when Biden talks about charging General Flynn with the Logan Act.
JB: Yeah, you would never actually believe it, this was like a movie or something that the person that comes up with the crazy idea to go after General Flynn for the Logan Act is Joe Biden. And the crazy thing is, it's on January 5, barely two weeks before they leave office. That was the real attempted coup. That was the real attempt to get past the peaceful transition of power. We really need a January 5 commission to investigate what happened on January 5 of 2017.
LS: That is a good way to put it. So January 5, Biden is talking about the Logan Act. A week later, January 12, a story drops in the Washington Post, a David Ignatius column in which he talks about the Logan Act.
JB: The David Ignatius article puts out that General Flynn had this call with Sergey Kislyak. And they discussed sanctions. And in fact, sanctions on that call are never discussed, expulsions were discussed, but not sanctions. And that's very important. There's an important difference. And so that sets the stage and we still don't know at this point, know who the source for Ignatius is. I think a lot of people might have suspicions about who his source was, but we don't know for sure.
And that is really the beginning of their overt attack on General Flynn. The FBI interviews him without going through the normal protocols. And that's also very important. If you're going to have the FBI walk into the White House to interview a senior administration official, you go through certain steps, including contacting White House Counsel. But Jim Comey laughs about this, like it's some big joke about how he thought the administration was still so disorganized and so he could just send a couple guys in there who cornered General Flynn.
One of the important things is that when the FBI does an interview, they generally don't record it. Instead, the agents take notes, and they create something that's called a Form 302. And Peter Strzok wrote the 302. And he wrote several drafts of it, he continued to edit it. He had people who were not in the room edit it as well. Not exactly sure how they knew what was being said — it wasn't recorded. And then we still, to this day, do not have Strzok’s original 302, even though the FBI has a number of procedures in place to make sure that drafts are not lost. Somehow, this draft got lost.
LS: Lots of Americans will be following this case closely.
JB: People say we have a two-tier justice system in this country, but we have a three-tier justice system. We have a middle tier of justice, for average citizens that are just at the whim of the government, and the government is going to go after you, and you don't have the resources to fight them. Then you have the tier that includes people like Joe Biden and Hunter Biden who effectively are above the law, and the system will do everything that they can to protect them.
But then you have people like Michael Flynn and Donald Trump, who with our current justice system, are unfortunately below the law and are effectively in a system where they will not be treated fairly. And that is certainly so in our Washington, DC judicial system. If we are going to want to save the country that our founders fought so hard for, we have got to return real justice to this country where all people are treated equally.
