In a newly admitted “mistake” the defense has decried as “appalling,” the attorneys prosecuting former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn have been forced to admit this week that they “misidentified” the sources of the FBI notes upon which the case against Flynn has been based.
The notes on the conversation with Flynn that the prosecutors believed were written by anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok, the prosecutors admitted in a letter Tuesday, were in fact written by his partner, Joe Pientka. The admission further calls into question Strzok’s credibility, as he had insisted that Pientka was “primarily responsible” for taking the notes and writing the key document in the case, the FD-302 form. The admission also follows the defense’s accusation that the FBI deliberately altered the original 302 form to suggest Flynn had lied about his contact with a Russian ambassador
As reported by National Review‘s Tobias Hoonhout on Wednesday, in a letter sent to Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell, the Justice Department prosecuting attorneys were forced to admit that they had been misidentifying the sources of the notes on the FBI’s January 2017 interview with Flynn for the entirety of the case, some 18 months.
Since the FBI does not record its interviews, such notes stand in place of an official transcript. The notes incorrectly believed to have been taken by Strzok formed the basis of the official FBI document on the interview.
“We were informed that the notes we had identified as Peter Strzok’s, were actually the other agent’s notes (see Surreply, Exhibit 1), and what we had identified as the other agent’s notes were in fact Strzok’s notes (see Surreply, Exibit 2),” the prosecutors admitted to Powell in the letter. – READ MORE