“A little-noticed letter from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office divulges Obama DOJ concerns about FBI treatment of ex-Trump national security adviser.
(…) Yates, the Obama administration holdover, rose in January 2017 to Trump’s acting Attorney General only to be fired by the new president. She described her concerns to the Mueller team about a Jan. 24, 2017 effort by the bureau to interview Flynn about his contacts with Russia without letting him know he was under investigation.
“During an SCO (Special Counsel Office) interview of former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, Yates said that on January 24, 2017, Comey advised Yates that two FBI agents were on their way to interview Flynn,” a May 2018 Mueller team letter to Flynn’s lawyers stated. “The interview was problematic from Yates’ perspective because, as a matter of protocol and courtesy, the White House Counsel’s Office should have been notified beforehand.
“Yates relayed that the FBI previously had said that notification would mess up an ongoing investigation, but Yates said it was not always clear what exactly the FBI was doing to investigate Flynn.”
The next day, Yates told the Mueller team, the FBI briefed her on what transpired during the Flynn interview and the FBI’s focus on whether he remembered talking to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.
“The gist of what she was told was that Flynn was very accommodating, but the agents had not confronted him directly,” the letter explained. “He was nudged at one point, and he said something like, ‘Oh, thank you for reminding me.’ Flynn denied having a conversation about sanctions. Yates did not speak to the interviewing agents herself, but understood from others that the interviewing agents’ assessment was that Flynn showed no ‘tells’ of lying, and it was possible he really did not remember the substance of his calls with Ambassador Kislyak.”
Mueller would eventually accept a guilty plea from Flynn acknowledging he lied in the FBI interview about his discussions of sanctions with Kislyak. He is now seeking to withdraw that guilty plea.
The comments attributed to Yates in the Mueller letter are far different than the ones she made in May 2017 when she told CNN that Flynn was in a “serious compromise situation, that the Russians had real leverage over him.” You can watch those here.” (Read more: Just the News, 3/17/2020) (Archive)