(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump offered well wishes to his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who has brought on conservative firebrand Sidney Powell as his lawyer ahead of his sentencing for lying to investigators in the Russia probe.
“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war hero who has served with distinction, has not retained a good lawyer, he has retained a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell. Best Wishes and Good Luck to them both!” Trump said on Twitter.
The comments mark Trump’s latest broadside against the FBI and federal investigators who’ve brought charges against Flynn and other Trump associates as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Powell, who hasn’t yet filed formal notice with the Washington federal court where Flynn’s case is pending, is a former prosecutor who on her website boasts of being lead counsel in more than 500 appellate cases. An advocate of conservative causes on Twitter, including the Flynn saga, she published a book last year titled “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.”
A regular presence on Fox News, Powell has been an outspoken critic of the Enron Task Force prosecutions and has accused attorney Andrew Weissmann in particular of overreach. Weissmann was a prominent member Mueller’s team investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and any obstruction of that probe by President Donald Trump.
Flynn’s decision to hire Powell suggests he might return to the theme he sounded a few months ago, that he was set up by duplicitous FBI agents who had an agenda against the president. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan castigated Flynn’s lawyers for that line of argument in open court in December. Flynn pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal agents and cooperated with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.
To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Washington at tdopp@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kasia Klimasinska at kklimasinska@bloomberg.net, Elizabeth Wasserman, Kathleen Hunter
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
Advertisement