Sidney Powell (Credit: The Epoch Times)
“Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, presented evidence that shows that prosecutors knowingly pressured him to lie, his lawyer said.
“This evinces the strong inference the prosecutors themselves conspired to cause Mr. Flynn to make false statements,” Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell said in a Jan. 16 court filing (pdf).
(…) The lobbying registration, filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by the Flynn-hired law firm Covington & Burling, pertained to a job that Flynn’s now-defunct consultancy, Flynn Intel Group (FIG), did for Alptekin’s firm Inovo.
Alptekin hired FIG in the summer of 2016 to do research and lobbying focused on an Islamic cleric living in exile in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen runs a group that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blamed for an attempted 2016 coup. Prosecutors said Flynn lied in the FARA forms about the extent the Turkish government was involved with the project.
In June 2019, after Flynn fired Covington and hired new lawyers, led by Powell, prosecutors asked Flynn to testify that he signed the lobbying forms intentionally knowing there were lies in them. He refused, saying he only learned about the issues with the forms in retrospect.
That angered the lead prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, notes from a June 27, 2019 conference call indicate.
But Powell now argues that the prosecutors knew they were asking for a false statement. She filed with the court a draft of Flynn’s Statement of Offense, which shows that the words pertaining to the FARA registration, “FLYNN then and there knew” were cut from the final version.
Moreover, Powell submitted emails that indicate the words were cut by the prosecutors themselves after Flynn’s then-lawyers raised some objections to the draft.
“Point is, they knew that what they were demanding Flynn do was lie about himself and admit he did something that all along he said he didn’t,” Powell said in an email to The Epoch Times. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 1/19/2020) (Archive)