Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn will be sentenced next month for lying to federal agents after a judge rejected his request to throw out his case.
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington also said that Flynn wasn’t entitled to additional evidence.
“It is undisputed that Mr. Flynn not only made those false statements to the FBI agents, but he also made the same false statements to the vice president and senior White House officials, who, in turn, repeated Mr. Flynn’s false statements to the American people on national television,” Sullivan said in a 92-page ruling.
Flynn, a retired US Army general who served as the president’s first national security adviser, will be sentenced Jan. 28. He was fired three weeks into his job after word of his contacts with then-Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, became public.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI. His sentencing last year was scrapped in the middle of a hearing because Flynn was still cooperating with prosecutors. The judge also had him admit to his guilt again, after his lawyers suggested investigators had tricked him into making a false statement.
Flynn later replaced his lawyers with firebrand conservative attorney Sidney Powell, who sought to rebuild Flynn’s defense by challenging the very basis for the prosecution. She accused the Justice Department of withholding exculpatory evidence and again claimed that Flynn had been deceived by investigators. Powell didn’t return an email seeking comment on Monday.
Sullivan was scathing in his rejection of Powell’s claims, noting at one point in his ruling that the lawyer had “lifted verbatim portions from a source without attribution.”
The case is US v Flynn, 17-cr-232, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).
