Michael Flynn fires legal team with sentencing looming on federal charges

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has fired his legal team as he awaits sentencing for lying to the FBI about his conversations with a top Russian official, according to a new filing Thursday from his longtime attorneys.

The lawyers, Robert Kelner and Stephen Anthony, offered no explanation for their abrupt dismissal in a two-page motion delivered to the federal judge who will mete out Flynn’s punishment stemming from his 2017 guilty plea to special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors.

In their filing, the attorneys said Flynn had notified them that “he is terminating Covington & Burling LLP as his counsel and has already retained new counsel for this matter.”

They did not identify Flynn’s new legal team and declined comment when asked by POLITICO about who now represents the former senior Trump aide, who landed in legal trouble after lying about the subject of conversations he had with high-ranking Russian officials during the 2016 transition.

Flynn’s decision to change attorneys at this late stage is unusual and has triggered speculation in legal and political circles that he’s considering backing out of his plea deal with the government in a play for a presidential pardon. Sometimes defendants switch attorneys for mundane reasons such as financial issues, and Flynn’s allies have complained that the case has essentially bankrupted him.

But the move also comes amid a yawning disconnect between the approach adopted by the well-respected legal team Flynn has used since the start of the Russia probe and the combative rhetoric from many of his friends and family members, who have accused Mueller’s team of deception and argued that Flynn was tricked into pleading guilty. Some have urged Flynn to seek to withdraw his plea.

Jack Posobiec, a pro-Trump provocateur who has joined forces with the Flynn family in calling for the retired Army lieutenant general’s exoneration and pardon, wrote Thursday on Twitter that he was told the new Flynn lawyer is “very high profile and appears on TV regularly.” The post added to the speculation over several familiar faces from the Russia probe, including Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and the husband-wife duo of Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova, informal Trump advisers who nearly joined the president’s legal team last spring.

In a text message to POLITICO, Giuliani said he was not Flynn’s new lawyer. Dershowitz replied that he’s not representing Flynn. DiGenova in an email wrote, “We are not at liberty to discuss.”

Legal experts say the plea deal that Kelner and Anthony cut with Mueller’s team more than a year ago was a generous one, making it possible that Flynn would receive only probation. Trying to back out of the deal now could open Flynn to a variety of charges, including criminal liability related to unregistered lobbying work he did in 2016 on behalf of a foreign client allegedly acting as a front for Turkey.

Flynn’s ex-business partner and the alleged middleman were indicted in the case, but Flynn escaped charges, apparently due to his plea deal. In a joint status report in March, attorneys for Flynn and Mueller told U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan that Flynn could testify in the mid-July trial against his former partner, Bijan Rafiekian.

The Turkey lobbying case is one big reason for the delay in Flynn’s sentencing, which had originally been scheduled for last December but ended up getting postponed after an unexpectedly contentious hearing during which Sullivan repeatedly criticized Flynn, telling him at one point, “Arguably, you sold your country out.”

Sullivan ultimately convinced Flynn to request a delay in his sentencing until he’d done all he could to satisfy the government as part of his cooperation agreement — an offer Flynn has accepted twice.

The next joint status report from Flynn’s legal team and the Justice Department is due June 14. In their letter, Kelner and Anthony noted that Sullivan has the power to deny their motion to withdraw as lawyers if it would slow the trial or harm the integrity of the case, but suggested there was no reason for him to do that.

“As only sentencing remains in this case, sentencing has not yet been scheduled and General Flynn has already retained new counsel, withdrawal at this time would not be prejudicial to any of the parties or otherwise inconsistent with the interests of justice,” the attorneys wrote.

Later Thursday, Sullivan issued a brief one-paragraph order “denying without prejudice” the Flynn lawyers’ motion to withdraw, though it appears the decision centered on a technicality.

Sullivan, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said the attorneys didn’t follow a local rule for the court to include the text of a proposed order for him to sign. They also failed “to indicate the manner in which the motion was served upon Mr. Flynn.”

The fired Flynn lawyers responded with a new motion that included the one-page draft order, as well as a notation that they had emailed and hand-delivered a copy of their filing to Flynn at his home address.

Flynn’s legal team turnover comes as some of his family members have used their Twitter feeds in recent days to air complaints about the federal prosecutors’ decision last week not to comply with a judge’s order to publicly file transcripts of intercepted phone calls Flynn conducted with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition. The prosecution didn’t indicate precisely why it was rebuffing the judge’s request, but said simply that “it is not relying on any other recordings, of any person, for purposes of establishing the defendant’s guilt or determining his sentence.”

Sullivan issued another order Tuesday saying he would not require further filings on the subject. As of this point, Flynn’s defense has not noted any objection to the prosecution’s failure to provide the transcripts.

Flynn’s decision to shift legal teams is a mistake, said Peter Zeidenberg, a Washington defense attorney and former prosecutor in special counsel Pat Fitzgerald’s CIA-leak probe.

“This is a very foolish thing to do. Flynn’s lawyers had positioned him to get probation for a single count of false statements. Given what he was facing, that is remarkable. It will go downhill from there,” Zeidenberg said.

Flynn “simply cannot do any better than that, under these circumstances,” he added. “If he tries to withdraw his plea, he is going to get pummeled. Unless he has gotten some signals that he may get pardoned — always a possibility — this makes no sense.”