Michael Flynn: Dismissing charges against former Trump aide is 'abuse of power', says ex-judge reviewing case

A former federal judge appointed to review the Justice Department's request to dismiss charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn said the department's move should be denied because there is “clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power," the Associated Press has reported.

“The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding,” former US District Judge John Gleeson wrote in a filing on Wednesday, a month after federal prosecutors, influenced by DOJ brass, moved to dismiss the case.

The government's stated grounds for dismissal "contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact. And they depart from positions that the Government has taken in other cases,” Mr Gleeson wrote.

Mr Flynn was indicted in December 2017 for lying to the FBI about his communications with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the bureau's counterintelligence probe into possible ties between Donald Trump's campaign and transition team and Russia.

Mr Flynn was fired by Mr Trump less than a month into his job as national security adviser in 2017 after it was discovered he had also lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his communications with Mr Kislyak and the FBI.

Mr Flynn twice pleaded guilty to the criminal charge against him before later retracting his guilty plea.

In a court filing last month, the DOJ moved to drop the charge against Mr Flynn, arguing in a court filing that it had concluded his 24 January 2017 interview by the FBI that led to his guilty plea was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr Flynn” and that it was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

The presiding judge in Mr Flynn's case, US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, pumped the brakes on dismissing the feds' charges, citing concerns about the government's abrupt reversal of a case that has dragged on for two-and-a-half years.

“It is unusual for a criminal defendant to claim innocence and move to withdraw his guilty plea after repeatedly swearing under oath that he committed the crime,” Mr Sullivan has argued in a previous court filing.

“It is unprecedented for an Acting US Attorney to contradict the solemn representations that career prosecutors made time and again, and undermine the district court’s legal and factual findings, in moving on his own to dismiss the charge years after two different federal judges accepted the defendant’s plea," Mr Sullivan said.

Mr Trump has sought to make Mr Flynn's case a central part of his campaign message that career government bureaucrats were out to undermine his presidency from the start by ensnaring him and his top advisers in federal investigations.

Mr Trump's so-called "Obamagate" theory has not been substantiated despite multiple ongoing Senate investigations and a Justice Department inspector general's report, although the IG has found that key national security surveillance authorities over the last several years have been marked by errors.