Due to the limited scope of the Justice Department’s
response, it’s difficult to immediately determine what prompted the prosecutors
to ignore a federal judge’s order. Nor is it clear how Sullivan will respond.
The conversations between Flynn and Kislyak in December
2016—after Donald Trump had been elected, but before he took office—are at the
center of Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI. Flynn, who briefly served
as Trump’s national security adviser, eventually began cooperating with
Mueller’s investigation. He has not yet been sentenced.
The Mueller
report mentions these conversations, but an exact transcript has never been
made public. Flynn and Kislyak allegedly discussed sanctions that had been
imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retaliation for Russia’s
attacks on the U.S. election. Flynn reportedly had asked Kislyak that Russia
avoid escalating the situation following the announcement of the sanctions.
Flynn also discussed Russia’s vote on a U.N.
resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to The New York Times.
Former Justice Department official Joshua Geltzer told the Times that it would be “rare” for the
department to make public the intelligence collection targeting a Russian
ambassador, which is believed to have been the product of a wiretap authorized
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
“What you see in [Friday’s] filing is the government trying
to avoid disclosing that material,” Geltzer told the newspaper.
Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade told the Post: “I’m sure they spent a ton of time thinking about how to do this — to
protect intelligence equities, to protect their case, to try not to annoy the
judge, to balance all those interests.”
How annoyed the judge actually is over the department’s
response will be a good indicator as to why the order was ignored.
Prosecutors did not ignore, however, an order by Sullivan to
release the full transcript of a voicemail from Trump’s former private attorney,
John Dowd, to Flynn’s attorney in November 2017, about the same time Flynn was
reaching a cooperation deal with federal prosecutors on the Mueller team.
Much of that voicemail already
had been described in the Mueller report.
As reported by the Post,
Dowd had said:
“I understand your situation, but let me see if I can’t
state it in starker terms,” he said, adding that if “there’s information that
implicates the President, then we’ve got a national security issue.”
“So you know, …we need some kind of heads up,” he added.
“Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can, without you
having to give up any…confidential information….remember what we’ve always
said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”
On Friday, Dowd angrily
responded in a statement saying, “This is clearly a baseless, political
document designed to smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent
people.”
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