Mueller Special Counsel's "Investigation" of Gen. Flynn Was Its Most Egregious Abuse of Prosecutorial Authority

Note: After I was well underway writing this article it was announced that Gen. Flynn had settled his civil lawsuit against the federal government related to his prosecution by the Mueller Special Counsel. That settlement was not part of my motivation to address this subject and it is not central to my views. I’m considering a second article examining the circumstances of his guilty plea and why it was corrupted by his counsel operating under an undisclosed conflict of interest.

This is the second of what I anticipate will be a handful of articles recounting some of the events involving the Mueller Special Counsel’s Office. An X reader asked that my second article concern the investigation of former National Security Advisor and retired Army General Michael Flynn.

There are several aspects of the Flynn investigation that are worthy of exploring. This article doesn’t attempt to delve deeply into any one of them, but rather traces of arc of the investigation that began — in my opinion — when the Obama Administration first focused on him as a useful target to undermine the Trump Campaign in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton. Later — after Trump won — those same individuals recognized the threat he represented if he became National Security Advisor and unraveled what they had done as the worst political dirty trick in the history of the United States.

I generally discount the more wacko conspiratorial visions of how some individuals came to be in the cross-hairs of the Obama Administration’s Intelligence Community. I focus my attention instead on the obvious facts that, if I was leading the investigation, would draw my attention in the direction of particular individuals as being worthy of scrutiny.

Because I don’t know enough about Gen. Flynn’s responsibilities on active duty other than he was one of the Army’s top general officers on intelligence matters, my assumptions for how he came to be a focus of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in the summer of 2016 are a bit more mundane. My understanding is he was something of a contrarian and critic of Obama Administration and Pentagon thinking on a variety of intelligence matters while on active duty, and most of his active duty colleagues didn’t shed a tear upon learning of his retirement.