Reply to Barr Installs Outside Prosecutor to Review Case Against Michael Flynn, Ex-Trump Adviser

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]He left out the Rafiekian trial. Put that timeline in there too.

Or does he not know about it?[/quote]

No he didn't.  Section V in the piece by Eli Lake:

[quote]Flynn had initially registered the Inovo contract in August 2016 through a less stringent law known as the Lobbying Disclosure Act. He did so on the advice of his counsel at the time. And when Flynn took the contract, that advice was sound. The legal environment for FARA registrations was quite permissive at the time. But at the end of 2017, and with Mueller in hot pursuit and with unlimited resources, Flynn—and his son, Michael Jr.—could have found themselves facing years in prison. So Flynn, in financial ruin and wishing to get his son out of Mueller’s crosshairs, agreed to cooperate.

And cooperate he did. Before his first sentencing hearing at the end of 2018, Mueller’s team initially recommended no jail time for Flynn, in part because he was a good cooperative witness. Over time, though, Flynn began to regret his decision. Some of this was because of the failure of Mueller’s investigation to bring a single charge against any American for coordinating with Russia’s influence operation in 2016. Some of it was also because details about the government’s own misconduct in the investigation began to leak out. So in 2019, Flynn ended his relationship with his lawyers from Covington and Burling, the ones who had filed his initial FARA registration forms on the Inovo matter and who had also represented his partner Bijan Rafiekian, who had also been indicted on FARA violations.

Flynn also began to back out of his cooperation with the government’s case against Rafiekian. In July 2019, prosecutors decided they would not call Flynn as a witness and threatened to prosecute Flynn as a co-conspirator. At first Flynn’s lack of cooperation didn’t matter because that same month, a jury found Rafiekian guilty of being an unregistered agent for the government of Turkey. But the judge in the case overturned the jury verdict in a blistering judgment on the prosecution. “The government has failed to offer substantial evidence from which any rational juror could find beyond a reasonable doubt” that Rafiekian was an agent of Turkey

The judge’s ruling was significant for Flynn in one important respect. In 2017, during the run-up to Flynn’s plea agreement, the Wall Street Journal reported that Flynn and his son had been approached by Turkish government officials to try to kidnap Gulen and bring him back to Turkey in exchange for $15 million. A November 10 story in the Journal said that Mueller’s team was investigating the matter. Flynn’s lawyers have categorically said this episode never happened. There is no mention of the episode in the prosecution of Rafiekian. The one on-the-record source for this allegation was former CIA Director James Woolsey, who himself sought a contract with Turkey to defame Gulen.[/quote][/quote]

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