An attorney representing President Trump’s former national security advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is demanding the FBI search its database for missing and/or “manipulated” witness reports.
Set for sentencing in December, Flynn’s legal team has been aggressively pursuing the case and on Monday demanded in a court filing that the bureau thoroughly search its internal “Sentinel database” and turn over “every” document from agents detailing a critical January 2017 White House interview with Flynn, Fox News reported.
This coming after an explosive October court filing from the legal team alleging that FBI officials had manipulated the “302” witness report in the case after the interview.
Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok is at the center of the controversial claim.
More from Fox News:
Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, also asserted that separate handwritten notes from the interview drafted by since-fired FBI agent Peter Strzok and another agent are plainly inconsistent with one another, as well as the final FBI 302 that underpinned Flynn’s guilty plea for one count of making false statements to investigators.
The handwritten notes were produced last week by prosecutors, who called Flynn’s claims that he was tricked into the guilty plea “demonstrably false.”
Although the government has insisted that the FBI’s after-the-fact edits to the 302 report were “largely grammatical and stylistic,” Powell argued that they were in fact highly substantive and improper alterations that inaccurately made it appear that Flynn had issued blanket denials to agents’ questions.
In the filing, Powell said she will file a motion seeking to have the case against Flynn thrown out because of “egregious government misconduct.”
She also argued the FBI could immediately produce the comprehensive “redaction history, audit trail, and metadata” for the Flynn 302, according to Fox News — the Sentinel system should automatically maintain this information.
“The FBI Sentinel system can retrieve any draft,” Powell said. “Drafts are numerically serialized when placed in the system. Those numbers—apparently redacted from the 302 drafts that have been produced—would probably provide further information.”
The 302 report reportedly shows that Flynn lied to the FBI about his communications with Russia’s ambassador on U.S. sanctions against Russia and a United Nations vote on Israel.
Flynn’s calls with the Russian ambassador were wiretapped by the bureau and there was reportedly no wrongdoing found after being reviewed. He would plead guilty to a single charge of making false statements to the FBI about those communications in Dec. 2017.
Not only is Strzok involved in the controversy over the Flynn interview, so too is his former mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page.
More on that from Fox News:
Powell’s main jumping-off point in Monday’s filing was the newly revealed text messages between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which revealed that Page — who was not present for the Flynn interview — had apparently made “edits” to the 302 report. Page told Strzok on February 10, 2017 that she “gave my edits to Bill to put on your desk.”
Later that day, “Strzok went into the office, picked up Page’s edits, and made changes that any reasonable person would deem material to the 302,” Powell wrote.
Specifically, Strzok “added a definitive statement,” asserting in the 302 report that “Flynn stated he did not” ask the Russian ambassador to vote a certain way on a United Nations resolution concerning Israel.
Powell also alleged the handwritten “notes bear no signature and date as required by the FBI, casting doubt on their authenticity.”
“If the signatures and dates are present in the originals, the government has unjustifiably redacted that information, possibly without leaving a black mark to disclose a redaction, which itself is a form of deception,” she wrote in the filing.
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The longest-tenured writer at BizPac Review, Tom grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills.
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