Justice Department Rebuffs Court Order to Turn Over Flynn Conversations

The Department of Justice has refused to abide by a judge’s
order to make public transcripts of conversations between Michael Flynn and
Russia’s former ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.

The Justice Department also did not make public redacted
portions of the Mueller report pertaining to Flynn, as
ordered by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan earlier this month. Sullivan
had ordered the public release of the materials by Friday.

In a short
court filing reported by The
Washington Post, prosecutors Brandon Van Grack and Assistant U.S. Attorney
Deborah Curtis wrote that the government “is not relying on any other
recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt
or determining his sentence, nor are there any other recordings that are part
of the sentencing record.”

It should be noted that Van Grack was part of Special
Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russia’s attacks against the 2016
presidential election in the U.S. and the possible links to the Trump campaign.

As to the redacted sections of the Mueller report, the
prosecutors said that “limited remaining redactions pertain to sourcing of
information, such as references to grand jury subpoenas.”

Due to the limited scope of the Justice Department’s
response, it’s difficult to immediately determine what prompted the prosecutors
to ignore a federal judge’s order. Nor is it clear how Sullivan will respond.

The conversations between Flynn and Kislyak in December
2016—after Donald Trump had been elected, but before he took office—are at the
center of Flynn’s guilty plea for lying to the FBI. Flynn, who briefly served
as Trump’s national security adviser, eventually began cooperating with
Mueller’s investigation. He has not yet been sentenced.

The Mueller
report mentions these conversations, but an exact transcript has never been
made public. Flynn and Kislyak allegedly discussed sanctions that had been
imposed on Russia by the Obama administration as retaliation for Russia’s
attacks on the U.S. election. Flynn reportedly had asked Kislyak that Russia
avoid escalating the situation following the announcement of the sanctions.
Flynn also discussed Russia’s vote on a U.N.
resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank, according to The New York Times.

Former Justice Department official Joshua Geltzer told the Times that it would be “rare” for the
department to make public the intelligence collection targeting a Russian
ambassador, which is believed to have been the product of a wiretap authorized
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“What you see in [Friday’s] filing is the government trying
to avoid disclosing that material,” Geltzer told the newspaper.

Former U.S. attorney Barbara McQuade told the Post: “I’m sure they spent a ton of time thinking about how to do this — to
protect intelligence equities, to protect their case, to try not to annoy the
judge, to balance all those interests.”

How annoyed the judge actually is over the department’s
response will be a good indicator as to why the order was ignored.

Prosecutors did not ignore, however, an order by Sullivan to
release the full transcript of a voicemail from Trump’s former private attorney,
John Dowd, to Flynn’s attorney in November 2017, about the same time Flynn was
reaching a cooperation deal with federal prosecutors on the Mueller team.

Much of that voicemail already
had been described in the Mueller report.

As reported by the Post,
Dowd had said:

“I understand your situation, but let me see if I can’t
state it in starker terms,” he said, adding that 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,” he added.
“Um, just for the sake of protecting all our interests if we can, without you
having to give up any…confidential information….remember what we’ve always
said about the President and his feelings toward Flynn and, that still remains.”

On Friday, Dowd angrily
responded in a statement saying, “This is clearly a baseless, political
document designed to smear and damage the reputation of counsel and innocent
people.”