May 19, 2020 | 12:54pm | Updated May 19, 2020 | 2:18pm
The Republican chairman of a Senate committee asked the Trump administration to fully declassify an email that President Barack Obama’s national security adviser sent to herself about Michael Flynn shortly before she left office, according to a report.
Sen. Ron Johnson is seeking the email sent by Susan Rice about a Jan. 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting in which Obama and other top administration officials discussed the case against Flynn, who went on to become Trump’s national security adviser.
“I understand your office is currently reviewing a January 20, 2017, email from former national security advisor Susan Rice,” Johnson wrote in the letter to Attorney General William Barr that was viewed by Politico.
“In that email, Ambassador Rice summarized an Oval Office meeting with President Obama and other administration officials that occurred on January 5, 2017. A majority of Ambassador Rice’s email was declassified but a portion of the email remains classified,” wrote Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Johnson, of Wisconsin, said that as more information about the meeting becomes declassified, “it is essential that Congress and the American people understand what occurred” and noted that declassifying Rice’s email “will assist these efforts.”
In a portion of Rice’s email that had been declassified, she said Obama, after a briefing on Russian interference in the 2016 election, had a follow-up conversation with Rice, then-FBI Director James Comey, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and former Vice President Joe Biden.
“President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book,’” Rice wrote. “The president stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.”
Rice noted that there might be information related to Russia that should be held from the incoming Trump administration, writing, “we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia.”
Trump has accused Biden and Obama of trying to sabotage his administration through the Russia investigation.
The president has pointed to documents that show Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was among Obama White House officials who asked for Flynn to be unmasked after his conversations with a Russian ambassador were picked up by the intelligence community.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden,” Trump told Fox Business. “These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt. And we caught them. We caught them.”
Rice and other Obama officials have denied they did anything wrong and said “unmasking” is routine.
The Justice Department has moved to drop the case against Flynn, who was one of the first prosecutions carried out by then-special counsel Robert Mueller, saying the new information released raises questions about the FBI’s interview with Flynn.
It said the interview was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and was “conducted without any legitimate investigation.”
Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
But he changed his plea in January, got a new legal team, and accused the FBI of trying to set him up.
