A Positive Move

On Friday, The Epoch Times reported that retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and others, alleging he was maliciously prosecuted. He is demanding at least $50 million in compensation.

The article reports:

“Defendant maliciously investigated and prosecuted General Flynn by initiating and continuing a baseless counterintelligence investigation and by filing a criminal information lacking probable cause,” says the suit, filed on March 3 with the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida (pdf).

The former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) under the Obama administration was investigated by the FBI starting in August 2016 for supposed ties to Russia. In 2017, he was charged with lying to the FBI during an interview earlier that year.

The suit alleges that the FBI, and later prosecutors from the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, investigated and prosecuted him for political reasons, considering him a threat.

“General Flynn—who already had a reputation as a hands-on disruptor at DIA, who had publicly excoriated the politicization of the intelligence community, and who had made clear his desire to overhaul the national security structure and the ‘interagency process’—was a direct threat, not only to the self-interest of entrenched intelligence bureaucracies and the federal officials involved, but to exposing their prior and ongoing efforts to derail and discredit President Trump,” the suit says.

The case against Flynn was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. FBI agents had already decided to close his case by early January 2017, but higher-ups intervened to keep it open on the justification that Flynn may have violated an obscure and antiquated law called the Logan Act by discussing with a Russian ambassador the priorities of the incoming administration during the transition period. DOJ officials at the time rejected the legal theory. The 1799 Logan Act, which prohibits certain kinds of unauthorized diplomacy, may in fact be unconstitutional, several lawyers previously told The Epoch Times. It has never been successfully prosecuted, much less aimed at an incoming national security adviser.

I would like to remind people that in 2018, CNN reported the following:

Gowdy (Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican) also pushed Comey (former FBI Director James Comey) on comments he had made in a New York forum earlier this month, in which he told a moderator his decision to send two FBI agents to the White House without notifying the White House counsel’s office was something he “probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more organized administration.”

“I’m just kind of hung up on the phrase ‘gotten away with,’ ” Gowdy told Comey on Monday in the private Capitol Hill interview, according to the transcript.

I am in favor of this lawsuit. I am also in favor of someone wiping that arrogant grin of James Comey’s face.