The Trump administration’s decision on Thursday to drop a felony charge against a former White House national security adviser — who twice admitted in federal court to lying to the FBI about his communications with the Russian ambassador — has garnered criticism from an array of legal experts, Democratic lawmakers, former federal prosecutors and former FBI officials.
There has been no such debate in right-wing media, however, which celebrated the news of the Department of Justice dropping the case against retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as supposed proof of their longstanding claims that the entire investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 election was a politically motivated conspiracy against President Donald Trump. To understand how Trump’s DOJ came to make its latest move, you have to understand how right-wing media built an alternate reality around Flynn and the Russia investigation over the past several years.
Fox News pundits and Trump defenders have touted the Justice Department’s move as vindication not only of Flynn but of their own coverage. They’ve demanded that FBI officials suffer consequences for the federal probe.
“This is deep state, the puzzle is complete! They hated the president and they used every opportunity to take him down,” Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said on colleague Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show. Carlson said “there shouldn’t be a debate” about the Flynn case, referring to it as a “setup.” Fox News contributor Sara Carter called the entire investigation a “conspiracy” perpetrated “against the American people,” saying “this is seditious and it’s treasonous and people need to be held accountable.”
Many veteran members of law enforcement don’t see it this way. Greg Brower, the FBI’s former top liaison to Congress who previously served in the Nevada state Senate as a Republican, thinks DOJ’s latest action is “incredibly unusual” and “unprecedented” and said he hadn’t heard of any FBI or DOJ veterans who could think of a similar case. Brower is disappointed that conservative media has pushed the idea that Flynn ― despite twice admitting that he lied to the FBI ― was somehow railroaded.
“They helped create this narrative that was false from its inception, that Flynn was somehow set up and framed by an FBI and then DOJ that deviated from the usual rules and guidelines and had some kind of goal of getting Flynn, and that was never accurate,” Brower told HuffPost. He said the goal of right-wing media “seemed to have been to justify a presidential pardon” for Flynn.
“The real casualty here is truth,” Brower said. “For many, you know, the truth doesn’t seem to matter. These conspiracy theories kind of take on a life of their own and, for many people, become reality and become truth, even though the facts don’t support it. That’s the reality we’re living in right now.”
When Flynn first pleaded guilty back in December 2017, he was represented by well-respected attorneys from the law firm of Covington & Burling. Matters began to shift last summer when Flynn fired those lawyers and hired Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who had worked cases on the Texas-Mexico border before becoming a defense attorney. She represented executives in the Enron scandal and came to believe that prosecutorial misconduct was a widespread problem at the Justice Department, self-publishing a 2014 book called “Licensed to Lie” that focused on corruption by federal prosecutors.
Powell leaned into a media strategy that painted Flynn as the victim of a plot by the deep state. She sold T-shirts featuring cartoons of various DOJ and FBI officials that labeled them “creeps on a mission.” She appeared regularly in conservative media outlets and campaigned against the Justice Department on Twitter, all while raising cash for Flynn’s legal defense fund.
The Justice Department, no doubt, has a problem being transparent about how it punishes prosecutorial misconduct. Decisions about attorney discipline are handled by a secretive internal office that one former federal prosecutor called a “roach motel.” The DOJ inspector general’s office, which has a more public-facing role, isn’t allowed to investigate instances of prosecutorial misconduct, and DOJ has long resisted calls from its inspectors general to change that practice.
The FBI and the Justice Department also made mistakes in the Russia investigation, as laid out in an inspector general report last year. Anti-Trump text messages exchanged by two FBI employees who worked on both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia probe damaged the FBI’s reputation.
But the supposed justification for dropping the charges against Flynn ― namely, that internal FBI notes that ponder whether the “goal” of interviewing Flynn was “Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” ― don’t exonerate the former national security adviser. DOJ now contends that it can’t prove his lies were material to the investigation, despite the fact that Flynn conceded they were material when he pleaded guilty. It’s all quite unusual ― federal prosecutors are rarely eager to help admitted felons get their charges tossed.
Right-wing media has long tried to make a martyr out of Flynn. Taking a cue from Trump’s continued support of him during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, pro-Trump outlets reached for any information they could find to potentially vindicate him or at least obscure the facts around his guilty plea. Flynn, along with his son Michael Flynn Jr., had also promoted far-right conspiracy theorists on social media during the 2016 campaign and many of them championed his cause during the investigation.
The FBI documents made public late last month reinvigorated both the Flynn-friendly coverage and appeals for Trump to pardon him. Pro-Trump pundits and allies framed the one particular note as a bombshell revelation that completely exonerated Flynn ― again ignoring that he’d admitted to wrongdoing.
“Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn is, has always been, an innocent man,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said last week, accusing “deep state bureaucrats” of framing him.
On pro-Trump television network Newsmax, host Greg Kelly and the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph Giuliani condemned the case against Flynn as a “sham” and a “travesty.” Right-wing activist Tom Fitton appeared on Fox Business host Lou Dobbs’ show to say that the “abuse of Trump, people like Gen. Flynn and others” was arguably “the worst corruption in the FBI’s history.” Tucker Carlson, who is also an informal Trump adviser, characterized the FBI’s investigation of Flynn as “how the secret police operate in third world dictatorships.”
Now that Flynn’s case is over, many of those same voices have moved on to demanding consequences for officials who oversaw the Russia investigation and for Obama-era figures who have long been targets of conservative media. Pro-Trump pundits have led a relentless attack on FBI Director Christopher Wray ― who was picked for that job by the president ― calling for him to resign or be fired. Others have suggested some broader conspiracy, with radio host Mark Levin telling Hannity that “this is a massive cover-up of the greatest scandal in American history” and demanding that former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden be questioned.
On Friday, Fox News host Ed Henry said he’d been “tipped off” that Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, was bringing a briefcase of documents to Attorney General William Barr and claimed there were “people around this case suggesting” that those documents would somehow implicate Obama in the Flynn investigation.
As Henry spoke, Fox News rolled ominous footage they’d taken of Grenell walking into the Justice Department.