Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Investigations,
Gen. Flynn Warns Of An FBI Perjury Trap For Trump, 'Like They Tried To Set Me Up' |
With the D.C. Beltway awash in rumors that former President Trump will be indicted after the Nov. 8 midterms, the FBI may have “set a perjury trap” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to his former national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
In
June, the FBI suspected Trump hid classified papers from his
presidential collection that it had subpoenaed on behalf of the National
Archives, which sought them after Trump left the White House. Two
months later, agents raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida,
seizing more than 11,000 documents, of which fewer than 1% were marked
classified.
Now a
federal grand jury is investigating whether Trump and his aides
conspired to conceal the documents from agents and made false statements
when certifying they produced all of them.
Flynn told RealClearInvestigations that the FBI and DOJ are using semantics to target Trump.
Flynn points out that FBI agents in a May 11 subpoena asked Trump for all documents in his custody “bearing classification markings,” as opposed to classified documents, which he says was a carefully worded distinction designed to trip up the former president.
The FBI declined to comment.
What’s the Difference?
Flynn says that Trump and the custodian of his records likely believed many documents were no longer classified or had classification markings that had been voided or revised. Therefore, he speculates, his lawyers searched for and turned over records they believed to still be classified, and in turn, certified that they were in full compliance with the subpoena.
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Christina Bobb, Trump lawyer: Questioned by prosecutors. |
Christina Bobb, one of Trump’s lawyers acting as the custodian of his records, certified in a sworn statement on June 3 that “any and all responsive documents” had been handed over and that none were withheld.
It now appears that the statement was untrue, since many documents
marked classified were still at Mar-a-Lago. Bobb, who has hired a
criminal defense attorney, recently was questioned by prosecutors who
reportedly want to know if Trump directed her to make the statement.
Flynn
said that the parsing of the subpoena suggests trickery. He said agents
and prosecutors were very clever asking for documents that bear
classification markings rather than classified documents, which may have led Trump and his custodian into a "perjury trap."
“The
way they stated specifically what they were looking for — documents
that have classified markings versus classified documents— it is a
semantics drill that a team of smart but corrupt lawyers in DOJ would
come up with,” Flynn said in an interview with RCI.
“The FBI arrives and asks very specific questions and DJT's lawyers think everything is fine when they leave,” he added. "But then they go back to a sequestered grand jury and the entrapment drill begins."
Prosecutors
used similar hedging words to describe the documents seized in the
Mar-a-Lago raid. In an Aug. 25 court filing, Jay Bratt, the Justice
official running the investigation, said that “the government executed a
search warrant at the premises owned by the former president and seized
documents marked as classified.” Again, he did not say they found
classified information.
On June 3, Bratt and a handful of FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago and picked up a batch of documents from Trump and his lawyers, while allegedly thanking them for their cooperation. They advised only that they add a more secure lock to the storage facility.
Flynn said it might as well have been a “sting operation.” If they thought additional documents remained there, he explained, they could have issued another subpoena for them. Instead, they secretly monitored Trump’s security camera footage for months before returning on Aug. 8 with an army of more than 30 armed agents who rummaged through every bedroom and closet at Trump’s home — including those of his wife and son.
Flynn
said the FBI and Justice Department, who prosecuted him for lying to
FBI agents, are using similar tactics against Trump. The charges against
Flynn were later dropped, but the FBI and DOJ succeeded in pushing him
out of the White House. “They are trying to set up the former president
at Mar-a-Lago like they tried to set me up,” Flynn told RCI.
Flynn
is not alone in his suspicions. Some FBI vets point to other signs
their old agency may have played dirty pool at Mar-a-Lago. Former
assistant FBI director Chris Swecker pointed to unredacted portions of
the FBI affidavit supporting the search warrant which suggest that
investigators may have set Trump up for failure. It turns out that
Trump, by keeping the records at his estate, may actually have been
complying with recent Justice Department directives not to move them.
“What
stood out to me in the affidavit was how he was ordered to keep the
records on the premises until further notice and then was hit with a
search warrant because he kept the records on the premises,” Swecker told RCI.
The
affidavit reveals that on June 8, Bratt wrote to Trump’s lawyer
demanding that his papers remain in storage at Mar-a-Lago. “We ask that
the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured
and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to
Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in
that room in their current condition until further notice,” the official
requested.
But then several
weeks later, the FBI asked a magistrate judge in West Palm Beach for
permission to search Trump’s property because there was probable cause
to believe that “presidential records remain at the premises,” according
to the Aug. 5 affidavit.
What’s more, the affidavit complained that Trump’s locked basement storage facility and his office were “not currently authorized locations for the storage of classified information.” Added the Washington-based special FBI agent who swore out the warrant: “I do not believe that any spaces within the premises have been authorized for the storage of classified information at least since the end of FPOTUS’s [Former President of the United States’] presidential administration on Jan. 20, 2021.”
Biden Involved
Despite
repeated and unqualified White House denials that politics played any
role in this drama, Biden was involved in the Mar-a-Lago fray. In April,
correspondence reveals, the Justice Department asked the president to
request that the National Archives provide the FBI access to boxes of
documents Trump had earlier turned over to the White House-controlled
agency. The next month, the FBI subpoenaed Trump for additional records.
Nonetheless, Biden has insisted he and the White House were completely
in the dark about the Mar-a-Lago raid and investigation.
Swecker
doubts the government has a prosecutable case, judging from the
affidavit and other court filings, which make clear the raid developed
from a civil dispute between Trump and the National Archives, which says
it is seeking missing presidential records.
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Merrick Garland, Attorney General: Trying to humiliate Trump? |
He
said he thinks Attorney General Merrick Garland, who personally
approved the unprecedented action against a former president, was trying
to publicly humiliate Trump ahead of the November midterm election,
which features Trump-supporting Republicans in key races.
“I
really think this case is un-prosecutable and was more of a thumb in
Trump’s eye by Attorney General Garland,” Swecker said. It has been
reported that Trump will announce his plans to run again in 2024 after
Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Others, however, are convinced there is sufficient evidence to indict Trump on obstruction charges.
“Not
only did Trump, through his team, falsely represent that all remaining
classified documents were in the envelope they’d turned over, [but]
prosecutors stress that the search 'cast serious doubt on the claim in
the certification that there had been a ‘diligent search’ for records
responsive to the grand jury subpoena,’ ” said former federal prosecutor
Andrew McCarthy, who defended Trump throughout the FBI’s and DOJ’s
discredited Russiagate investigation.
Therefore,
“I believe Trump is likely to be charged with obstruction of justice
and causing false statements to be made to investigators,” he added.
Under the relevant federal statutes,
however, prosecutors must prove that Trump “knowingly” concealed
documents with the intent to obstruct the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
Which is to say they have to produce evidence that the former president
intentionally withheld subpoenaed records and that it wasn’t just an
oversight.
So far, unsealed
court filings do not indicate they have evidence of knowing concealment
by Trump. Prosecutors have been careful to say in their filings that
documents were “likely” concealed and that efforts were “likely” taken
to obstruct the investigation, indicating they still lack solid
evidence. And Trump is not mentioned as a target in any of the filings.
“It
is not clear from the filing if the FBI has evidence of intentional
acts of concealment as opposed to negligence,” George Washington
University law professor Jonathan Turley said.

However,
Bloomberg News recently reported that prosecutors “believe there is
sufficient evidence” to charge Trump with obstruction, according to
“people familiar with the matter” cited by Bloomberg. The outlet said
the team of attorneys handling the case “has not yet made a formal
recommendation” to Garland, who would make the final decision to bring
charges in the politically radioactive case. The stakes couldn’t be
higher. If the attorney general were to charge a former president, he
and his reputation would be on the hook for the highest-profile criminal case in American history.
In
a sign Garland might be serious about indicting Trump, he recently
assigned David Raskin — one of the department’s most experienced
national security prosecutors — to the Trump investigation. Raskin has
successfully prosecuted federal employees whohave kept classified
documents unlawfully.
Prosecutors
have questioned several aides, including the Trump lawyer who signed
the certification letter and a Mar-a-Lago valet who allegedly moved
documents from a storage room. Next, they plan to grill Trump’s
representative to the National Archives, Kash Patel, about how Trump,
his aides and his lawyers dealt with requests from the government to
return the records. Patel, who declined comment, reportedly has agreed
to testify before the grand jury in exchange for immunity from criminal
prosecution. Jurors are deliberating in heavily Democratic D.C.,
increasing the odds of indictment.
As
for the alleged false statements, legal analysts say the Trump team
left wiggle room in the sworn certification when it claimed a “diligent”
search was conducted. They note that “diligent" is a legally ambiguous
term open to interpretation. And the government itself demonstrated that
searching for the subpoenaed documents was like looking for needles in a
haystack. It took some 35 agents searching Trump’s sprawling estate for
several hours to locate just 100 with classified markings out of 11,000
documents seized,which suggests Trump’s custodian could have reasonably
overlooked them.
Also,
Trump’s presidential papers were “intermixed” in file boxes with
newspaper and magazine articles, photos, various printouts, and other
items making them difficult to identify. The National Archives said 15
boxes retrieved several months earlier from Mar-a-Lago contained
“newspapers, magazines, print news articles, photos, miscellaneous
print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and
post-presidential records” — and most of the boxes included classified
records that “were unfoldered, intermixed withother records, and
otherwise improperly identified.”
Much speculation has been made of 46 "empty folders with classified banners” found in the FBI raid. In
one recent court filing, investigators speculated that classified
“materials may once have been stored in these folders,” suggesting Trump
or his aides removed subpoenaed documents from the folders and secreted
them elsewhere.
But legal
analysts point out that it could also mean that Trump’s team previously
turned over the contents of the folders to the Archives — or to FBI
agents in June. Or it could mean the classified contents were mixed in
with other files or loosely stored in file boxes with other documents,
given that the Archives noted that it found classified records
“unfoldered” in the 15 boxes Trump transferred to the Archives early
this year. Or it could simply mean there was never anything in them.
Prosecutors
have also raised suspicions Trump’s lawyers were trying to hide
something when they allegedly cordoned investigators off from some boxes
kept in a basement storage room during their June 3 visit.
Although agents were permitted to visit the storage room, “the
former president’s counsel explicitly prohibited government personnel
from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the
storage room, giving no opportunity for the government to
confirm that no documents with classification markings remained,” Bratt
said in a court filing. A Democrat, Bratt has donated exclusively to
fellow Democrats, as well as the DNC, according to FEC records.
Trump’s
legal team has told the court that DOJ “significantly mischaracterized”
the June meeting with Bobb and another lawyer, but did not elaborate.
History of Animus
Whatever
the truth of what happened at Mar-a-Lago, it is clear there is a
history of animus between federal law enforcement and Trump and his
aides.
As one of the FBI’s
and DOJ’s original Trump-era targets, Flynn is understandably suspicious
that they may be engaging in similar skulduggery now, possibly setting
Trump up in the Mar-a-Lago imbroglio.
It
appeared to many that the FBI broke normal protocols and essentially
set a perjury trap for Flynn in early 2017, when it sent agents to the
White House to question Trump’s newly appointed national security
adviser over his December 2016 calls with Russia’s U.S. ambassador
during the presidential transition. In those conversations, which
then-FBI Director James Comey privately described as “legit,” indicating
there was no real basis for investigation, Flynn urged Russia not to
engage in an escalating tit-for-tat with the outgoing Obama
administration, which had just issued sanctions against Moscow for
allegedly interfering in the 2016 election.
A
declassified FBI email from counterintelligence official Peter Strzok
dated Jan. 21, 2017 — the day after Flynn took office — reveals that the
FBI schemed to use a “defensive briefing” on a national security issue
for Flynn as a “pretext” to interviewing him about the phone calls,
which the FBI had intercepted, and catching him in a lie. Making false
statements to a federal agent is a felony.
Handwritten
notes from Strzok’s then-immediate boss Bill Priestap reveal the intent
of their planned Jan. 24 meeting with Flynn inside the White House. “What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute [Flynn] or get him fired?” Priestap wrote.
For
such a serious legal matter, the FBI’s own protocols would have
entailed going through the White House counsel’s office. Instead, it
arranged the meeting directly with Flynn, who was flattered to speak
with two national security agents and was unguarded in answering their
questions. Going in, the FBI agreed not to suggest Flynn bring a lawyer
to the interview. And they never instructed him that any false
statements he made could constitute a crime.
Years
later, Comey would brag about sending agents in to ambush Flynn and get
him to allegedly lie about his conversations with the ambassador. “I
sent them,” he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace during a 2018 forum.
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James Comey, ex-FBI director: The Flynn ambush interview was “something I probably wouldn't have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.” |