Michael Flynn doesn’t want a pardon from President Trump — but he does want the case against him dismissed.
The fired National Security Adviser’s lawyer told a federal judge Tuesday that she asked Trump not to issue a pardon when she gave him a previously undisclosed “update” on his controversial case.
“I asked him not to issue a pardon and gave him the general update,” Sydney Powell told the judge about the conversation with the president.
The dramatic revelations came as U.S. District Court Judge Emmit Sullivan considered whether to agree to a prosecution effort to dismiss the case. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian envoy during the Trump transition, but later retracted his plea.
Powell claimed it was the first time she spoke to Trump and denied any role in getting Attorney General William Barr to seek to dismiss the case and appoint a team of more-pliant prosecutors.
The defense lawyer also accused of “abject bias” against Flynn and asked him to recuse himself from further deliberations.
Sullivan is expected to rule quickly whether to dismiss the case or not, and if he will step aside. The hearing came after he got a green light from an appeals court to hold it.
Although judges normally defer to a prosecutor’s decision to dismiss criminal cases, Sullivan says he wants to probe whether federal prosecutors improperly acted to corruptly help a friend of Trump.
If he does not dismiss the case, Sullivan will seek more information about how and why prosecutors made the decision to pull the plug on the prosecution.
Flynn was one of the highest-profile convictions secured by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and alleged collusion with Trump’s team.
Prosecutors insist that they did nothing wrong and were not influenced by Trump’s outspoken defense of Flynn.
“It was the right call for the right reasons,” said Kenneth C. Kohl, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for Washington D.C.
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