WASHINGTON — Attorneys for a former enterprise accomplice of President Trump’s former nationwide safety adviser Michael T. Flynn who was acquitted on expenses of unlawful overseas lobbying have requested the Justice Division to desert an attraction of the case, saying the investigation was intertwined with the prosecution of Mr. Flynn that the division is looking for to drop.
The request by the legal professionals for Mr. Flynn’s former enterprise affiliate, Bijan Kian, who additionally goes by the title Bijan Rafiekian, is the most recent fallout from Lawyer Common William P. Barr’s transfer final month to withdraw a cost of mendacity to investigators towards Mr. Flynn after a public marketing campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies. Former regulation enforcement officers have condemned Mr. Barr’s effort, which a choose is now scrutinizing, as additional politicizing the historically impartial Justice Division.
In a letter to Jeffrey B. Jensen, the federal prosecutor appointed to assessment the Flynn case, Mr. Kian’s legal professionals argued that due to his findings, the prosecution of their consumer “rests on much more uncertain grounds.”
“If the identical evaluation that yielded these conclusions with regard to Flynn is utilized to the federal government’s strategy” to Mr. Kian, “there might be little doubt {that a} considerably related conclusion have to be reached,” the legal professionals wrote final month, in line with a duplicate of the letter obtained by The New York Occasions.
A spokesman for prosecutors in Northern Virginia, the place Mr. Kian was tried, declined to remark. A Justice Division spokeswoman didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
A jury convicted Mr. Kian of secretly lobbying on behalf of Turkey final 12 months, however a choose threw out the case, saying prosecutors did not current sufficient proof to maintain their expenses. Prosecutors appealed the choose’s ruling, saying it was riddled with authorized errors.
Mr. Flynn was a central determine within the prosecution of Mr. Kian. As he pleaded responsible to mendacity to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, Mr. Flynn additionally admitted that he had violated overseas lobbying legal guidelines whereas working with Mr. Kian, although prosecutors agreed to not pursue these expenses of their plea settlement with Mr. Flynn.
As a part of that deal, Mr. Flynn agreed to testify towards Mr. Kian. However then Mr. Flynn abruptly modified his story on the eve of Mr. Kian’s trial, blaming his earlier legal professionals for submitting inaccurate overseas lobbying disclosure types with out his information. The transfer was a blow to the prosecution’s case.
The about-face was a part of Mr. Flynn’s broader reversal. He moved to withdraw his responsible plea this 12 months, claiming he by no means lied to the F.B.I. about a number of calls with Sergey I. Kislyak, who was then the Russian ambassador to the USA, and that he merely didn’t recall what he stated throughout the conversations. Mr. Barr assigned Mr. Jensen, the highest federal prosecutor in St. Louis, to assessment the matter.
Mr. Jensen really helpful the cost be dropped after discovering paperwork and different proof that the Justice Division stated confirmed that the F.B.I. lacked adequate motive to query Mr. Flynn about his calls with Mr. Kislyak. In figuring out that Mr. Flynn’s lies weren’t materials to an ongoing counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s interference within the 2016 election, the division reversed its place of two years on the matter.
Of their movement to drop the case towards Mr. Flynn, prosecutors argued that the “frail and shifting justifications for its ongoing probe of Mr. Flynn, in addition to the irregular process that preceded his interview, means that the F.B.I. was desperate to interview Mr. Flynn no matter any underlying investigation.”
Mr. Kian’s legal professionals seized on that reasoning to counsel that his prosecution was additionally misguided. They referred to as it “the direct progeny of the investigation and charging of Flynn — a course of that has now been uncovered as basically corrupt.”
Although the federal government’s movement to drop the Flynn case doesn’t point out his lies about his work for Turkey, Mr. Kian’s legal professionals stated the circumstances had been inseparable. In addition they prompt that Mr. Trump’s affect contributed to Mr. Barr’s choice to withdraw the cost towards Mr. Flynn.
“Political notoriety and the love of the president should not affect — a lot much less play the dispositive function in — how the Division of Justice makes choices that go to the guts of the rules of federal legal prosecution,” they wrote.
The legal professionals added: “The prosecution of Rafiekian is a direct consequence of the federal government misconduct uncovered in your assessment of Flynn’s responsible plea.”
Mr. Kian was charged in 2018 with conspiracy to violate lobbying legal guidelines and failure to register as a overseas agent. He was indicted, together with one other man, Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish-Dutch businessman, as a part of a federal investigation into Turkey’s secret 2016 lobbying marketing campaign to stress the USA to expel Fethullah Gulen, a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
Prosecutors accused the 2 males of looking for to hide that Turkish authorities officers had been directing the undertaking, saying that they accepted the funds and Mr. Alptekin recurrently up to date them. The boys paid Mr. Flynn’s agency, Flynn Intel Group, $530,000 for work on the trouble.
Prosecutors start inspecting whether or not Mr. Flynn was working as a lobbyist for Turkey after he wrote an op-ed article for The Hill newspaper on Election Day 2016 attacking Mr. Gulen as a “radical Islamist” and a “shady Islamic mullah.” Individuals who work to affect the federal government on behalf of overseas governments are required to reveal their work to the Justice Division, and Mr. Flynn had not.
Mr. Kian was convicted after a brief trial, however a choose later threw out the costs, saying in a prolonged opinion that prosecutors supplied “no proof that the op-ed had been requested by the Turkish authorities.”
Of their letter on Could 22 to Mr. Jensen, Mr. Kian’s legal professionals railed on the authorities’s choice to maneuver ahead with the case after Mr. Flynn was dropped as a witness.
“This weird sequence of occasions makes clear that the prosecution and purported cooperation of Flynn as the only and unique supply of the choice to cost Bijan Rafiekian was improperly managed and fatally flawed,” they wrote.
Mr. Kian’s legal professionals additionally stated that prosecutors ought to have supplied categorized info that they stated that they had about Mr. Flynn’s communications with Mr. Alptekin and that holding it from the protection was unfair to Mr. Kian.
“The prosecutors tried to make use of this apparently exculpatory proof towards Rafiekian by making the blanket assertion that the undisclosed information — identified solely to the federal government — would additional inculpate the defendant,” they wrote.