When the Justice Department discovered from journalists a storage locker containing evidence against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a search was executed immediately.
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Retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn on Friday filed a suit against the federal government seeking damages over what he called Washington’s “wrongful and malicious” prosecution of him.
“As a direct and proximate result of Defendant’s actions, General Flynn suffered harm,” his attorneys wrote in a filing with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida. “He was falsely branded as a traitor to his country, lost at least tens of millions of dollars of business opportunities and future lifetime earning potential, was maliciously prosecuted and spent substantial monies in his own defense.”
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Five years after the Hillary Clinton campaign-funded collection of Trump-Russia conspiracy theories known as the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed, news outlets that amplified its false allegations have suffered major losses of credibility. The recent indictment of the dossier’s main source, Igor Danchenko, for allegedly lying to the FBI, has catalyzed a new reckoning.
In response to what the news site Axios has called “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history,” the Washington Post has re-edited at least a dozen stories related to Steele. For two of those, the Post removed entire sections, changed headlines, and added lengthy editor’s notes.
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White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.
Sullivan is facing scrutiny, sources say, over potentially false statements he made about his involvement in the effort, which continued after the election and into 2017. As a senior foreign policy adviser to Clinton, Sullivan spearheaded what was known inside her campaign as a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin through dubious email-server records provided to the agencies, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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The race for the GOP nomination for the top Virginia positions is coming to an end, leading to a debate, tours, and a trip to Florida. In the Democratic primary, early voting has already begun, but big nominations are still rolling in.
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Governor Ralph Northam endorsed his predecessor to be his successor. Gubernatorial candidate and former Governor Terry McAuliffe received Northam’s endorsement in a week with several key gubernatorial endorsements. On Thursday, the governor appeared with the former governor in Norfolk.
“We need a leader that can continue this progress. We need a leader that will bring us out of COVID-19, a leader that will help small businesses. A leader that will promote equity in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Terry McAuliffe will do that,” Northam said.
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Once-secret reports show the FBI effort to spy on the Trump campaign was far wider than previously disclosed, as agents directed an undercover informant to make secret recordings, pressed for intelligence on numerous GOP figures, and sought to find “anyone in the Trump campaign” with ties to Russia who could acquire dirt “damaging to Hillary Clinton.”
The now-declassified operational handling reports for FBI confidential human source Stefan Halper — codenamed “Mitch” — provide an unprecedented window both into the tactics used by the bureau to probe the Trump campaign and the wide dragnet that was cast to target numerous high-level officials inside the GOP campaign just weeks before Americans chose their next president in the November 2016 election.
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A federal judge dismissed a criminal case against Michael Flynn on Tuesday, weeks after President Donald Trump pardoned his former national security adviser on charges stemming from the special counsel’s investigation.
The ruling from Judge Emmet Sullivan formally ends Flynn’s three-year legal saga, which began with a plea deal the retired Army general entered on Dec. 1, 2017 in the special counsel’s probe of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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At least five former government officials who are either on President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team or reportedly in contention for a position in his cabinet were involved to varying degrees in handling intelligence related to former national security adviser Michael Flynn, a Daily Caller News Foundation review has found.
Two potential cabinet picks — Sarah Bloom Raskin and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall — and a Biden transition team official — Stephanie L. O’Sullivan — submitted so-called unmasking requests for intelligence about Flynn weeks before the start of the Trump administration, according to a document declassified earlier this year.
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Former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell spoke at a rally for Fourth Congressional District candidate Leon Benjamin on Tuesday night. Men in suits and women in formal dresses enjoyed appetizers as they listened to Powell. She’s also the attorney or former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and is author of Licensed to Lie, a legal thriller/exposé of corruption in the Department of Justice.
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The federal agency that stores records for presidential transition teams volunteered to provide documents to the FBI regarding the Trump presidential transition team in early 2017, in possible violation of an agreement with the Trump campaign to destroy the records, according to a Senate report released on Friday.
The report from Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee says that officials at the General Services Administration (GSA) contacted the FBI on Feb. 15, 2017 to inquire whether they should preserve documents related to Michael Flynn.
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In a dramatic escalation of a long-running feud, lawyers for former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Wednesday filed a motion to disqualify U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan from considering the request to dismiss their client’s case, arguing the jurist has demonstrated “contempt and disdain for the defense.”
The filing by attorneys Sidney Powell and Jesse Binnall came after the defense and judge clashed several times at a hearing last week. It also follows Flynn, retire Army lieutenant general, having tried to get an appeals court to issue a writ of mandamus forcing Sullivan to immediately dismiss the case.
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The FBI’s lead agent on its investigation of Michael Flynn told prosecutors that a confidential source’s allegation about an incident involving the former national security adviser in 2014 was likely false, according to a government document.
Special Agent William Barnett said in an interview with a federal prosecutor on Sept. 17 that the Crossfire Hurricane team obtained the information about Flynn from a confidential human source (CHS) who provided information regarding Carter Page.
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An FBI special agent who worked on Crossfire Hurricane told prosecutors last week that he saw little reason to investigate Michael Flynn and that he believed that members of the special counsel’s team prosecuted the former national security adviser in order to “get Trump,” according to a memo released late Thursday.
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A federal appeals court in Washington declined Monday to order the dismissal of the Michael Flynn prosecution, permitting a judge to scrutinize the Justice Department’s request to dismiss its case against President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser.
The decision keeps the case at least temporarily alive and rebuffs efforts by both Flynn’s lawyers and the Justice Department to force the prosecution to be dropped without any further inquiry from the judge, who has for months declined to dismiss it. The ruling represents the latest development in a criminal case that has taken unusual twists and turns over the last year and prompted a separation of powers tussle involving a veteran federal judge and the Trump administration.
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U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH-04) asked Attorney General William Barr about “unmaskings” in a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
The committee grilled Barr on a number of other topics as well, including police reform.
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The Justice Department this week provided Michael Flynn’s lawyers with a long-rumored government memo which shows that FBI officials did not believe that the former national security adviser intentionally lied in a White House interview at the center of his legal battle.
The memo, dated Jan. 30, 2017, and published Friday, also said that FBI investigators did not believe that Flynn was working as an agent of Russia.
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A newly released hand-written note by former FBI agent Peter Strzok from early Jan. 2017 confirms knowledge and direction of the investigation of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn by former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden.
The note was submitted as evidence by Flynn’s lawyers Jesse Binnall and Sidney Powell on June 24 just as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a rare writ of mandamus ordering Judge Emmet Sullivan to dismiss the case against Flynn.
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Two former associates of Michael Flynn have seized on the Justice Department’s motion to drop charges against the retired general to call for relief from charges that they illegally lobbied for the Turkish government.
Bijan Rafiekian, a former Flynn business partner, and Ekim Alptekin, a former Flynn client, claim to be collateral damage in the government’s investigation of Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in December 2017.
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A federal judge on Monday defended his decision not to quickly approve the Justice Department’s request to dismiss its own criminal case against former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn, saying that the department’s reversal was unusual and he wanted to consider the request carefully before ruling on it.
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The FBI lawyer who signed a surveillance order against former Trump aide Carter Page that the Justice Department has deemed invalid submitted his resignation on Friday, the FBI said.
Dana Boente, the FBI general counsel, has recently come under scrutiny over his role in the various investigations against former Trump advisers, including Michael Flynn and Carter Page.
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Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe on Friday sent declassified transcripts of former national security advisor Michael Flynn’s phone calls with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to Congress.
The calls, which took place during the presidential transition period from Dec. 22, 2016 through January of 2017, show that Flynn was concerned about an escalation of hostilities between the two countries after the United States expelled 35 Russian diplomats. The two also discussed Middle East policy at length and working together to defeat a common enemy: radical Islamists. There was nothing discussed in the phone calls, according to the summary, that would have given Obama-era government snoops reason to believe Flynn was treacherously “colluding” or “conspiring” with Russia.
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An FBI offer to pay former British spy Christopher Steele to collect intelligence on Michael Flynn in the weeks before the 2016 election has been one of the more overlooked revelations in a Justice Department inspector general’s report released in December.
The reference to the FBI proposal, which was made in an Oct. 3, 2016, meeting in an unidentified European city, has received virtually no press attention. But it might have new significance following the recent release of government documents that show that Steele peddled an unfounded rumor that Flynn had an extramarital affair with a Russian woman in the United Kingdom.
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A newly declassified document confirms that the Obama administration was spying on Lt. General Michael Flynn even though the FBI had “no indication” that President Trump’s short-lived national security advisor had been colluding with Russia.
According to the document, disgraced former FBI director James Comey told then-President Obama that he had “no indication thus far that Flynn has passed classified information to Kislyak.”
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by Chuck Ross The FBI investigated former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe in March 2017 for an alleged unauthorized leak to the media regarding former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and President Donald Trump, according to documents released Monday. The alleged leak, which has not previously been reported, occurred in…
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by Robert Romano Whatever case Special Counsel Robert Mueller intends on bringing against President Donald Trump, it does not look like it will be a collusion-with-Russia case. So far, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has not brought a case against anybody from the 2016 Trump campaign for assisting Russia with hacking…
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President Donald Trump claimed Sunday that newly released documents about the origins of an investigation of a former adviser’s links to Russia help vindicate his claim that U.S. government investigators were spying on his 2016 election campaign. He contended in Twitter remarks that “as usual,” the documents “are ridiculously heavily…
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