The Silent Special Prosecutor That Got Results

President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington on June 24, 2019. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

Commentary

It was done quietly and with no fanfare. There was no public announcement, and the usual press conference didn’t occur.

It was also done without leaks—a stark contrast to how these kinds of matters are usually handled.

When then-Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller back in May 2017 to be a special counsel that would investigate the various RussiaGate allegations, there was an intense level of media scrutiny from the very start.

That didn’t happen this time. And it was no accident.

This time, a special prosecutor was assigned and dispatched to investigate a very important matter without the media even being aware it was happening.

A special prosecutor is different from a special counsel. The special counsel statute clearly states that the person who is appointed to this role must come from outside of the U.S. government. A special prosecutor, however, can be an employee of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and under the direct authority of the attorney general.

John Durham, who is the U.S. attorney for Connecticut and is currently leading the DOJ’s investigation of the origins of the RussiaGate hoax, has functioned as a special prosecutor in the past, such as when he was tasked by then-Attorney General Janet Reno to investigate how corrupt FBI agents shielded mobster Whitey Bulger.

This time, Attorney General William Barr avoided the limelight and the glare of the cameras as he brought in the seasoned and experienced U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri Jeffrey Jensen and gave him the job of quietly going into the District of Columbia U.S. Attorney’s office and finding out what went on in the controversial Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn case.

That case had so many weird twists and turns during the last three years that it would take a column in itself to cover them all.

Several unusual recent events had occurred involving this U.S. attorney’s office in Washington into which Jensen was dispatched to investigate.

In February, all four of the Mueller special counsel prosecutors handling the case against Trump associate Roger Stone suddenly resigned on the same day.

Barr stated on the record after the resignations of the four prosecutors that he had been misled by the special counsel team, who had briefed him and other top DOJ officials on what their sentencing recommendation would be and made a filing at court asking for a much longer sentence.

Given the kinds of malfeasance and outright gross prosecutorial misconduct that’s been revealed in recent days with how the Mueller prosecutors were conducting their business in the Flynn case, I think it’s safe to say Barr was telling the truth about the Stone prosecutors trying to pull a fast one on him, then resigning in a snit when he called them out publicly.

This history helps explain why Barr opted to send Jensen in incognito. Washington is a town that thrives on an established leak culture.

Barr just completely defeated that leak culture. And he did it in a way that got crucial evidence into the hands of Flynn in a way that not only exonerated the general and completely exposed the conspiracy to entrap him, it simultaneously demonstrated that the Mueller prosecutors had been directly defying Judge Sullivan’s Brady disclosure ruling from February 2017 for more than two years by hiding exculpatory evidence from the court.

On May 7, two things happened almost simultaneously as a direct result of special prosecutor Jensen’s giving sealed documents to the Flynn defense team, and the court subsequently unsealing some of them:

The DOJ filed a brief with presiding Judge Emmet Sullivan asking him to dismiss Flynn’s case.

And the lead Mueller special counsel prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, filed a notice with the court that he was resigning from the Flynn case—and every other case he was handling—effective immediately.

Unlike former special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of angry political partisans disguised as prosecutors, special prosecutor Jeffrey Jensen has not failed at his mission.

And he’s not finished yet. Jensen has alerted both the Flynn defense team and Barr that more documents may be coming soon.

Stay tuned.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion ... But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.