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Jeffrey Jensen, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of
Missouri, will be working alongside the case's lead prosecutor
Brandon Van Grack, a move that comes a month after Flynn told
the court he wanted to withdraw his guilty plea in former
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged
Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
The news of Barr's decision to tap an outside prosecutor on the
Flynn case caps an extraordinary week at the Justice Department.
On Tuesday, the department lightened its sentencing
recommendation for Trump political ally Roger Stone after
criticism from the president that an earlier recommendation for
seven to nine years in prison was too harsh.
The move prompted all four career prosecutors on the case to
withdraw and one of them to quit the government entirely.
Barr on Thursday tried to beat back critics' concerns that he
was doing the president's political bidding by intervening to
help Stone, and said the president's constant tweets on criminal
cases were undercutting his ability to do his job.
The very next day, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in
Washington, D.C. revealed they would not be pressing charges
against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a frequent
punching bag of Trump's, over allegations he misled
investigators about his communications with the media.
Barr's decision to bring in Jensen on the Flynn case, however,
could potentially undercut his efforts to do damage control
after Trump's flurry of tweets on the Stone case.
The Justice Department official stressed that Jensen's role was
not to oversee career prosecutors' work on the Flynn case, but
to work alongside them.
Jensen is assisting the department and prosecution team "to get
a complete and thorough understanding of the facts and the
record in a complicated case," the person told Reuters, speaking
anonymously in order to discuss sensitive personnel matters.
Flynn pleaded guilty in late 2017 to lying to the FBI about
interactions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in
the weeks before Trump took office.
He was supposed to help cooperate with the government as part of
his deal. But he later switched lawyers and tactics, arguing
that prosecutors in the case had violated his rights and tricked
him into lying about his December 2016 conversations with Sergei
Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador in Washington.
The department has repeatedly denied the allegations of
prosecutorial misconduct, and U.S. District Court Judge Emmet
Sullivan rejected all of Flynn's claims in December and set a
sentencing date.
Shortly after that, Flynn filed the motion to withdraw his plea.
Given all of the allegations that the case was mishandled,
Jensen was brought in to help "review the whole thing, soup to
nuts," the person said.
Jensen's involvement in the Flynn case was reported earlier by
the New York Times.
(Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Tom Brown)
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