Great! Appeals Court Upholds Justice Departments Request To Drop Criminal Case Against General Michael Flynn!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2020
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered the case against former NSA Michael Flynn to be dismissed today. The Department of Justice had requested the case be dismissed but the judge in the case, Judge Emmet Sullivan, refused to honor the request.
The Appeals Court today ordered Sullivan to follow through on the dismissal.
“Upon consideration of the emergency petition for a writ of mandamus, the responses thereto, and the reply, the briefs of amici curiae in support of the parties, and the argument by counsel, it is ORDERED that Flynn’s petition for a writ of mandamus be granted in part; the District Court is directed to grant the government’s Rule 48(a) motion to dismiss; and the District Court’s order appointing an amicus is hereby vacated as moot, in accordance with the opinion of the court filed herein this date,” the order reads.
The higher court found that Sullivan had overstepped his bounds in ignoring the DOJ’s request.
“Decisions to dismiss pending criminal charges – no less than decisions to initiate charges and to identify which charges to bring – lie squarely within the ken of prosecutorial discretion,” it wrote.
“The Judiciary’s role under Rule 48 is thus confined to ‘extremely limited circumstances in extraordinary cases.'”
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak in December 2016, about a month before the Trump administration was sworn in and Flynn became National Security Adviser. It was revealed earlier this year that FBI agents in the case set a “perjury trap” for Flynn in the original interview.
In light of the new evidence the Justice Department requested the dismissal of the case. The Appeals Court agreed.
“Specifically, the government points to evidence that the FBI interview at which Flynn allegedly made false statements was ‘untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn,'” it wrote in the order.