After they advised him to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former national security adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, fired his attorneys from Covington & Burling LLP and hired conservative lawyer Sidney Powell, who has since accused his client’s former lawyers of “ineffective assistance” and “conflicts of interest.”
Now, with the Justice Department ordering that Flynn’s case be thrown out amid new evidence that FBI agents withhold key information and ensnared him in a “perjury trap,” Flynn’s fired lawyers have been asked, and agreed, to reappear before the court as an “interested party.”
Last week, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of the District of Columbia, the judge overseeing Flynn’s case, included Covington & Burling LLP on a list of entities to appear before the court as interested parties. As reported by Law & Crime, the firm submitted a notice of compliance to the court on Thursday.
“By a Minute Order on May 7, 2020 (Dkt. 196) (‘Minute Order’), the Court directed the Clerk of Court to add Covington & Burling LLP (‘Covington’) as an interested party in this matter and directed counsel for Covington to file a notice of appearance on behalf of Covington as an interested party,” the notice submitted by Covington & Burling’s John E. Hall reads. “Undersigned counsel provides this notice of appearance on behalf of Covington, in accordance with the Minute Order.”
While being represented by Covington & Burling’s Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, Flynn initially pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But after replacing Kelner and Anthony with Powell, Flynn has been pushing to retract his plea.
“Mr. Flynn’s guilty plea (and later failure to withdraw it) was the result of the ineffective assistance of counsel provided by his former lawyers, who were in the grip of intractable conflicts of interest, and severely prejudiced him,” Flynn’s new attorneys wrote in a plea withdrawal motion filed in January, as noted by Law & Crime. “That pernicious conflict infected and prejudiced his defense until he retained new counsel in 2019.”
More than three years after the alleged offense, the Justice Department has filed a motion to drop Flynn’s case in light of recently unearthed evidence indicating that the FBI violated the Brady rule against withholding evidence favorable to the defense of the accused and appeared to be setting Flynn up in its now-infamous interview with the Trump adviser.
But Sullivan has tabled the department’s motion, instead inviting “interested parties” to file friend-of-the-court, or amicus briefs.
In response, Powell condemned the “travesty of justice” against his client and called for the court to “immediately” comply with the DOJ.
“This travesty of justice has already consumed three or more years of an innocent man’s life — and that of his entire family,” Powell wrote in a court filing this week. “No further delay should be tolerated or any further expense caused to him and his defense. This Court should enter the order proposed by the government immediately.”
In the motion, Powell pointed out that the same court “has consistently — on twenty-four (24) previous occasions — summarily refused to permit any third party to inject themselves or their views into this case.”
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