This op-ed by a former DOJ official
Cool story. Too bad it's nothing but an opinion piece from the same NYT that has more retractions than any other in the industry.
I'm going to spell it out for you since you obviously only have a one track mind on this.
It is not the job of federal prosecutors to try to prosecute everyone who may be lying about something. If that were the standard, the FBI would have its hands full just in Washington, D.C., policing our elected politicians. Instead, the FBI should only charge witnesses for lying when it is material to the investigation of some other crime. The released note of an FBI official preparing for the Flynn interview asked if agents should get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired. There is no mention of investigating any true substantive crime.
Comey and his aides simply believed that Trump was unfit for office and were determined to use underhanded investigatory methods to oppose him. They hoped they could use Flynn to cooperate in incriminating others in the Trump campaign.
The FBI’s wrongdoing is also strongly supported by the highly suspect means it used to conduct the interview. The agents began the interview under the fiction that they were meeting with Flynn to discuss a business matter in his role as national security adviser,
on his first day on the job, which would have been normal. But the FBI did not notify White House counsel to be present, as required by White House-DOJ rules, and bureau lawyer Lisa Page advised slipping in warnings for the witness rights unobtrusively. And Flynn did not ask for any counsel.
Comey later boasted that he could never have gotten away with this in a more organized administration.
Why did the FBI engage in such lengths? Even after all these shenanigans, the FBI agents concluded that Flynn had not lied. The bureau's leadership revealed their true intentions when they decided to keep the probe open and ultimately handed it over to Mueller’s investigation. Flynn just became a pawn in the broader effort by Comey and Mueller to investigate the claim that Trump had conspired against Russia.
An FBI subfile was created on Flynn, not because of any allegations against him, but because of the general’s known contacts with Russia. Such contacts would hardly be surprising for a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was a Trump adviser rumored to be Trump’s choice for national security adviser if he won the election. The subfile investigation of Flynn was known as Crossfire Razor.
The documents made public last week show that Flynn had already been completely cleared in the Crossfire Razor investigation by Jan. 4, 2017. A draft closing communication was prepared on that date by the Crossfire Razor team, but the decision to close the file had been made well before then. Later that same day Peter Strzok was surprised to discover that the file was still open. Strzok texted Page that our utter incompetence actually helps us.
Strzok ordered that Razor be kept open. It was kept open under the guise of investigating Flynn for a possible Logan Act violation. In short, there was no law enforcement purpose for the Flynn interview. The purpose of the interview was to have Flynn lie and get him fired, which is reflected in notes taken by Bill Priestap, then-director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division and Strzok’s boss.
Somebody then illegally leaked the classified Flynn-Kislyak phone call transcripts to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, suggesting to Ignatius that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act by discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador.
McCabe told Flynn that the quickest way to get this done was to have a conversation between him and the agents only. Comey later admitted that he wanted to catch Flynn off guard in the relaxed unorganized atmosphere of a days-old Trump administration. And that’s what happened.
The officials who interviewed Flynn were none other than Strzok and Supervisory Special Agent Joe Pientka. They reported that Flynn treated them as colleagues and did not act in any way like he was lying about the Kislyak conversations. In other words, he may well have forgotten that he discussed the sanctions with Kislyak.
The documents released last week prove beyond any doubt that Flynn was set up in a perjury trap.
A perjury trap occurs when the facts are known to prosecutors and investigators and the only purpose of the interview is to catch the subject in a lie. This was a false statement trap since Flynn was not under oath, but the principle is the same. In fact, this was worse than the classic perjury trap, because in a perjury trap a legitimate investigation is underway. That was not the case here.
