“Arguably, You Sold Your Country Out”: Could a Judge Override Barr in the Flynn Affair?

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/could-a-judge-override-barr-in-the-flynn-affair

What’s telling about the government’s unprecedented motion, which Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general and longtime Department of Justice official, called “a pardon by another name,” is that it tries really hard to rewrite history, if not ignore it altogether. To the Justice Department, all revolves around a single instance, four days into the new administration, when Flynn, a sophisticated official with decades of government service, including in the nation’s intelligence apparatus, found himself in the crosshairs of an overreaching FBI. “The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” Timothy Shea, the loyalist Barr installed as acting U.S. attorney in Washington earlier this year, wrote. “Moreover, we [do] not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.” No other career official who had been on the case signed the filing—one of them, Brandon Van Grack, a Mueller veteran in the department’s national security division, had abruptly withdrawn from the Flynn case moments earlier on Thursday, in apparent protest of the Justice Department’s reversal.