Nearly 2,000 former Justice Department and FBI officials on Monday signed a letter demanding Attorney General William P. Barr resign over his decision to drop the prosecution of Michael Flynn as “unprecedented.”
“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 letter said.
The employees called for Mr. Barr to resign and asked Congress to censure the nation’s top law enforcement officer over “his repeated assaults on the rule of law and doing the president’s personal bidding rather than acting in the public interest.”
Mr. Barr last week directed federal prosecutors to abandon their prosecution of Micheal Flynn, who briefly served as President Trump’s former national security adviser.
Flynn admitted that he had lied to the FBI during the presidential transition about his conversations with the former Russian ambassador.
But two previously undiscovered documents turned over by the Justice Department cast doubt over Flynn’s guilt. The documents, filed in federal court, revealed the FBI was about to close the Flynn probe without uncovering any wrongdoing until anti-Trump former FBI agent Peter Strzok demanded it remained open.
The former Justice Department officials who signed the letter urged U.S. Justice Judge Emmet Sullivan, who is overseeing the Flynn case, “to take a long hard look at the government’s explanation and the evidence.”
They said Mr. Barr is using the Justice Department to further the president’s political and personal interests and “has undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the department’s decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case.”
The letter was signed by former Justice Department officials from both Republican and Democrat administrations.
