Nearly 2,000 former Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations condemned the DOJ and Attorney General William Barr on Monday for moving to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The former officials said Barr “once again assaulted the rule of law” and accused the attorney general of using the department “as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests.”
“Make no mistake: The Department’s action is extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented,” they wrote in a statement published on Medium. “If any of us, or anyone reading this statement who is not a friend of the President, were to lie to federal investigators in the course of a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation, and admit we did so under oath, we would be prosecuted for it.”
The statement is signed by nearly 2,000 former DOJ employees, and the “DOJ Alumni” who posted it said signatories “have been vetted to the best of our ability.”
The DOJ said in a court filing last week that it believed, after uncovering new internal FBI communications, that the bureau’s investigation into Flynn had been conducted improperly.
The former DOJ officials said the department’s “purported justification” for dropping the case “does not hold up to scrutiny, given the ample evidence that the investigation was well-founded and — more importantly — the fact that Flynn admitted under oath and in open court that he told material lies to the FBI in violation of longstanding federal law.”
They urged the judge who will need to approve the DOJ’s motion to “closely examine the Department’s stated rationale for dismissing the charge.”
“While it is rare for a court to deny the Department’s request to dismiss an indictment, if ever there were a case where the public interest counseled the court to take a long, hard look at the government’s explanation and the evidence, it is this one,” they wrote.
The former officials also renewed a call for Barr to resign. They called for Barr’s resignation in February after condemning him for overruling the sentencing recommendation of Roger Stone, a close Trump associate.
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JUST IN: Nearly 2,000 former Justice Dept officials condemn move to drop Flynn case https://t.co/olrqkDgZUl pic.twitter.com/CfYtzu8pE3
— The Hill (@thehill) May 11, 2020
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