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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation.

The Department of Justice has released a less redacted copy of a memo laying out the scope of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) after the Judiciary Committee chairman requested it. The memo, “The Scope of Investigation and Definition of Authority,” was sent on Aug. 2, 2017, to Mueller by Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general at the time. The unredacted bullet points include four names, beginning with former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. It tasks Mueller with determining whether Page committed a crime by “colluding with Russian government officials” as they interfered...

Explosive, newly unsealed evidence documenting the FBI's efforts to target national security adviser Michael Flynn -- including a top official's handwritten memo debating whether the FBI's "goal" was "to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired" -- calls into question whether Brandon Van Grack, a Justice Department prosecutor and former member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Team, complied with a court order to produce favorable evidence to Flynn. Since February 2018, Van Grack has been obligated to comply with D.C. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan's standing order in the Flynn case to produce...

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley wants to know if former Special Counsel Robert Mueller had access to the newly released FBI documents on former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in which the then-counterintelligence director openly questioned if their “goal” was to “get him to lie.” “New DOJ/Flynn docs are stamped w [sic] SCO as in Special Counsels Office,” Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote on Twitter Thursday, “Did Mueller have these docs? Why did his team sit on them? What else is Mueller team that cost taxpayers $30+ million hiding? The ppl deserve answers 2restore faith in federal law enforcement agencies.” The...

The documents, which were FBI affidavits, were released following a lawsuit brought by several media outlets FBI documents made public Tuesday, show that Roger Stone, shortly after the Mueller Russia collusion investigation began, communicated to Julian Assange, telling the Wikileaks founder that he would step in if prosecutors came after Assange. “I will bring down the entire house of cards,” wrote Stone to Assange in a private Twitter message. “As a journalist it doesn’t matter where you get information only that it is accurate and authentic,” Stone told Assange in a message from the summer of 2017. “Between CIA and...

Michael Flynn is the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern times — an innocent man who was unfairly targeted by the FBI, wrongfully prosecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller, and coerced into a guilty plea under threat. New court documents finally handed over to Flynn’s lawyer contain exculpatory evidence that has been long sought, yet concealed until now. The charge against him should be dismissed. Then, he should sue the very people and government that persecuted him under the pretext of a legitimate prosecution. The unvarnished truth is that the retired Army lieutenant general and...

New facts in the Michael Flynn case call into question the voluntariness of Flynn’s plea. Judge Sullivan should dismiss the charges to send a clear message: Outrageous prosecutorial coercion will not be tolerated. The criminal case against Michael Flynn imploded Friday. First, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia provided Flynn’s legal team with documents discovered by an outside review of the Flynn prosecution — documents withheld for years. Then, Sidney Powell, the attorney who took over Flynn’s defense nearly a year ago, filed new documents in the case, revealing a secret “lawyers’ understanding” not to prosecute Flynn’s son...

The Department of Justice will appeal to the Supreme Court after it was ordered to hand over sealed documents from former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation to Congress. The department on Friday asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to stay its ruling while it petitions the high court. "Whether and under what circumstances Congress may resort to the courts to seek grand jury materials generated in a criminal investigation in aid of an impeachment inquiry is plainly a question of great significance to all three branches of government, as well as to the functioning of the grand jury...

Roger Stone on Friday night said he believes he will die in jail unless he’s pardoned by President Donald Trump. Stone, a longtime friend and former adviser to Trump, was sentenced on Feb. 20 to three years and four months in prison. Stone was convicted on charges including lying to a congressional committee that was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Stone in recent weeks moved for a new trial, pointing out anti-Trump social media posts made by the jury forewoman, and tried getting the presiding judge to recuse herself after she praised the “integrity” of the jurors....

President Trump has sent a letter to congress giving them 30-days advance notice and informing them of the removal of Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson: [image of letter] The necessary, albeit politically controversial, move comes about two months after President Trump assigned Ric Grenell to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; Grenell is ultimately the acting boss of the overall intelligence community. It is likely DNI Grenell provided some key insight into the sketchy background activity in/around Atkinson’s office, and the overall intelligence apparatus writ large. Additionally, former congressman Mark Meadows is now President Trump’s Chief-of-Staff;...

More than an investigation, the Mueller probe was the wellspring of a political narrative. That becomes clearer as time goes by and more information ekes out . . . such as new confirmation that, months before Mueller was appointed in May 2017, it was already well understood in Justice Department circles that there was no case of criminal “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Never was that made more obvious than by the Justice Department’s quiet announcement late Monday, under the five-alarm noise of the coronavirus scare, that it has dropped the special counsel’s indictment of Russian companies —...

The "Russian collusion" case ended in an embarrassing whimper Monday. It turns out that in order to have a "Russian collusion" case, one must have "Russians" and "collusion." As we found out in the Mueller report from last year, there was no collusion with President Trump. On Monday, Mueller's prosecutors admitted they're running out of Russians, too. Left in the wreckage, the first three years of the Trump candidacy and presidency, his reputation, the erosion of confidence in American governmental institutions, his friends and advisors imprisoned on process crimes from the corrupt investigation and Leftist governmental bots who planned it...

The piecemeal release of FBI files in the Russia collusion investigation has masked an essential fact: James Comey’s G-men had substantially debunked the theory that Donald Trump’s campaign conspired with Moscow by the time the 45th president was settling into the Oval Office, according to declassified memos, court filings and interviews. And that means a nascent presidency and an entire nation were put through two more years of lacerating debate over an issue that was mostly resolved in January 2017 inside the bureau’s own evidence files. The proof is now sitting in plain view. In rapid fire sequence in January...

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld a ruling that allows House Democrats to view secret grand jury information from Robert Mueller’s Russia probe that had been redacted from his report. The court’s 2-1 decision agreed with a lower court that the House Judiciary Committee can obtain the information for impeachment investigations of President Trump under an exception for “judicial proceedings,” per the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. ~snip~ The DOJ, opposing the House Democrats, argued that because Trump had already been impeached and acquitted by the time the court was to rule, there was no longer a...

WASHINGTON—A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Congress can have access to grand-jury materials from Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a 2-1 ruling, sided with the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee, which sought access to material that was redacted from the 448-page special counsel report. as well as some of the exhibits and transcripts referenced in the report. ... TO READ THE FULL STORY

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Department of Justice to hand over to him a copy of the unredacted Mueller report and accused Attorney General William Barr of misrepresenting its findings in the days before it was submitted to Congress last year. Judge Reggie B. Walton, a federal district court judge in Washington, said that he could not reconcile Barr's public comments in April 2019 about the report with the actual findings that former special counsel Robert Mueller outlined. "The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the...

House Republicans have found evidence that Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team may have misled the courts and Congress and are considering making criminal referrals asking the Justice Department to investigate those prosecutors, a key lawmaker says. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told Just the News that his team has been scouring recent documents released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s, and found glaring evidence that contradicts claims the Mueller team made to courts and Congress. "We're now going through these 302s, and we're going to be making criminal referrals...

How aggressive was Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation in trying to get convictions? One figure it targeted says she had to leave the United States for a while because she was “traumatized” by a series of “perjury trap” interviews.

K.T. McFarland, conservative politico, pundit, analyst and a former national security figure in President Donald Trump’s administration, told a rapt radio audience just recently that Robert Mueller’s thuggish investigators treated her so poorly, so viciously and so unfairly — trying to get her to cop to crimes she didn’t commit and accuse others of crimes they didn’t commit, either — that she and her husband, minus hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, fled to Scotland to recover and reflect on the New America: the place where civil rights are routinely violated by entrenched, smug bureaucrats.Her story is eye-opening...