Michael Flynn lawyer says client was ready to ‘audit’ Obama spy team before total ‘set-up’

(Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Convicted former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has claimed that FBI investigators set him up because of his plans, prior to being booted from the Trump administration, to audit the U.S. intelligence community.

This new revelation in his case reportedly comes from his attorney, Sidney Powell.

“Powell, who took over Flynn’s defense last summer, told the Vicki McKenna Show on 1310 WIBA Madison on Tuesday that her client was ‘totally set up’ because he threatened to expose wrongdoing by top intelligence officials in the Obama administration,” the Washington Examiner reported Wednesday.

“He was going to audit the intel agencies because he knew about the billions [former Obama era CIA Director John] Brennan and company were running off books,” she said.

Listen to the whole interview below:

This claim reportedly matches the reporting of investigative journalist Lee Smith of the Hudson Institute, who for the record used to work as a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and has previously also written for The New York Times.

Speaking with Fox Nation host Maria Bartiromo last November, Smith spoke specifically of the money that was allegedly paid in 2016 to Cambridge professor and reported FBI informant Stefan Halper to spy on then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign.

Powell, who was also present during Smith’s appearance on Fox Nation, remarked that “[t]here’s no telling how many billions of taxpayer dollars they’re running off books for the different intel agencies.”

She also repeated the central claim to her client’s appeal.

“They literally planned and strategized about how to interview General Flynn to keep him relaxed and unguarded at the highest levels of the FBI… [then-special agent Peter] Strzok and [then-Deputy Director Andrew] McCabe met many times to plan it,” she said.

“It was a high-level meeting to calculate and strategize about how to go about that interview to keep him unguarded and without knowing that he was the target of a criminal investigation.”

Evidence previously presented by Powell has suggested that, prior to interviewing Flynn without an attorney, FBI investigators acted as if the interview were to be a casual, off-the-record event.

Yet the contents of that supposedly casual, off-the-record event were later used to charge and eventually convict him of lying to them.

Of course, to this day, Flynn continues to argue he never lied.

“When FBI agents came to the White House on January 24, 2017, I did not lie to them. I believed I was honest with them to the best of my recollection at the time,” he said in a court filing three months ago. “I still don’t remember if I discussed sanctions on a phone call with [then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey] Kislyak nor do I remember if we discussed the details of a UN vote on Israel.”

The claim by FBI investigators was that Flynn lied to them when they questioned him about a conversation he had in late 2016 with Kislyak.

The legal filing called for his guilty plea to be withdrawn.

He argued that he “never would have pled guilty” had been aware that Strzok and McCabe had allegedly set him up.

“My guilty plea has rankled me throughout this process, and while I allowed myself to succumb to the threats from the government to save my family, I believe that I was grossly misled about what really happened,” he wrote.

Among those who believe Flynn’s side of the story is President Donald Trump, who in recent days has signaled on social media that he’s considering offering him a pardon:

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