Two FBI agents’ long-secret handwritten notes of their 2017 interview with Mike Flynn have been declassified and highlight fresh discrepancies with the bureau’s official documents that were used to criminally prosecute President Donald Trump’s first national security advisor and pressure him to reach a plea deal nearly a decade ago.
The notes from former Special Agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka were released Wednesday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force at a time when federal prosecutors are ramping up a grand jury investigation into whether the FBI’s probe of Russia collusion amounted to a criminal conspiracy to falsely impugn Trump and his supporters during the 2016 election and its aftermath.
The contemporaneous notes show differences between what the agents wrote down when they interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24, 2017, and what was recorded in the official typed summary of the interview, known as an FD-302, that was entered into the FBI system more than 20 days later and later used to underpin his prosecution.
Flynn was charged in federal court in Washington, D.C., in November 2017 with one count of false statements to the FBI agents investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
According to prosecutors, Flynn “falsely stated and represented” to agents that he “did not ask the [Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak] to refrain from escalating the situation in response to sanctions the United States had imposed against Russia” for alleged 2016 election interference.
On December 20, 2016, the same day that Flynn had at least one call with Kislyak, the Obama administration expelled 35 Russian diplomats and authorized the government to respond to Russian cyber operations.
But Pientka’s handwritten notes contain a tantalizing notation apparently attributed to Flynn in the interview about his conversation with Kislyak: “Hey, don’t do anything.”
Likewise, the FBI summary report stated that Flynn recalled making four or five calls the day he talked with the Russian diplomat from a Christmas vacation spot in the Dominican Republic. But Strzok’s notes quoted Flynn as saying: “If so, don’t remember. If so, busy place to make phone calls.”
Though Flynn initially pleaded guilty to the charges, he later filed to withdraw his plea under new representation. His new lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that the FD-302, which formed the basis for the charges against her client, had been altered by Strzok, one of the agents who interviewed Flynn, and Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer who did not attend the interview.
Hellbound and Down 