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Trump pardons former national security adviser, takes aim at Russia probe

Published:Wednesday | November 25, 2020 | 4:43 PM
Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a thumbs-up as he speaks with retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn during a town hall, Tuesday, September 6, 2016, in Virginia Beach, Virginia. President Donald Trump has pardoned Michael Flynn, taking direct aim in the final days of his administration at a Russia investigation that he has long insisted was motivated by political bias. Trump announced the pardon on Wednesday, November 25, 2020, calling it his “Great Honor.” (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, file)

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump pardoned former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Wednesday, taking direct aim in the final days of his administration at a Russia investigation that he has long insisted was motivated by political bias.

“It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon,” Trump tweeted. “Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!”

Flynn is the second Trump associate convicted in the Russia probe to be granted clemency by the president.

Trump commuted the sentence of longtime confidant Roger Stone just days before he was to report to prison.

It is part of a broader effort to undo the results of an investigation that for years has shadowed his administration and yielded criminal charges against a half dozen associates.

The action voids the criminal case against Flynn just as a federal judge was weighing, sceptically, whether to grant a Justice Department request to dismiss the prosecution despite Flynn’s own guilty plea to lying to the FBI about his Russia contacts.

The move, coming as Trump winds down his single term, is likely to energise supporters who have taken up the case as a cause and rallied around the retired Army lieutenant general as the victim of what they assert is an unfair prosecution.

Trump himself has repeatedly spoken warmly about Flynn, even though special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors once praised him as a model cooperator in their probe into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The pardon is the final step in a case defined by twists and turns over the last year after the Justice Department abruptly move to dismiss the case, insisting that Flynn should have never been interviewed by the FBI in the first place, only to have US District Justice Emmet Sullivan refuse the request and appoint a former judge to argue against the federal government’s position.

In the months since, a three-judge panel’s decision ordering Sullivan to dismiss the case was overturned by the full appeals court, which sent the matter back to Sullivan.

At a hearing in September, Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell told the judge that she had discussed the Flynn case with Trump but also said she did not want a pardon — presumably because she wanted him to be vindicated in the courts.

Powell emerged separately in recent weeks as a public face of Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of his election loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but the Trump legal team ultimately distanced itself from her after she advanced a series of uncorroborated conspiracy claims.

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