A U.S. District Judge in Washington has ordered that the redacted parts of the Mueller report pertaining to Michael Flynn be released.
The judge also ordered the government to release transcripts of conversations between Flynn and the Russian Ambassador to the U.S., and transcripts of phone conversations between Donald Trump’s attorney an Flynn’s attorney. OK, so why is this a big deal?
We know that in the conversation between Flynn and Sergey Kislyak, Flynn urged the Russians to go easy on the United States after the Obama administration had imposed sanctions for election hacking.
But the real headline here could be in the conversations between the two lawyers representing Trump and Flynn. From The Washington Post 202:
“Trump’s then-private attorney John Dowd left a voice mail for Flynn’s lawyer Robert Kelner on Nov. 22, 2017, a few hours after being informed that the former general had withdrawn from a joint defense agreement. It was a clear sign that he was planning to cooperate with the special counsel. Dowd wanted to convey that Trump felt fondly about Kelner’s client, though he had forced him out of the White House earlier that year, and he also demanded to know whether Flynn was going to turn over “information that implicates the president.”
The voice mail is listed as one of the ten possible instances of obstruction of justice from the Mueller report.
“The Mueller report includes this excerpt of Dowd’s voice mail: “I understand your situation, but let me see if I can’t state it in starker terms. … It wouldn’t surprise me if you’ve gone on to make a deal with … the government. … If … there’s information that implicates the president, then we’ve got a national security issue, … so, you know, … we need some kind of heads up. Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can. … Remember what we’ve always said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn, and that still remains .…” (These ellipses and this punctuation are taken directly from the report.)”
We are about to find out what the rest of the voicemail says. Mueller couldn’t validate obstruction because of attorney client privilege. Did Trump tell his attorney to make nice with Flynn? We don’t know.
But there’s more…We also learned from previously redacted parts of the report that we made public about Flynn that ‘he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation.’
That’s a bulletin. Someone in Congress was talking to Flynn? We don’t know who.
All of this is giving Democrats more ammunition to say that the entire report should be released with no redactions. What else is William Barr hiding?
