VRPdommy

First, Corney wrote a detailed memorandum of his encounter with the President on the same day it occurred. Corney also told senior FBI officials about the meeting with the President that day, and their recollections of what Corney told them at the time are consistent with Corney's account.271 Second, Corney provided testimony about the President's request that he " let[] Flynn go" under oath in congressional proceedings and in interviews with federal investigators subject to penalties for lying under 18 U.S.C. § I 00 l . Corney's recollections of the encounter have remained consistent over time. Third, the objective, corroborated circumstances of how the one-on-one meeting came to occur support Corney's description of the event. Corney recalled that the President cleared the room to speak with Corney alone after a homeland security briefing in the Oval Office, that Kushner and Sessions lingered and had to be shooed out by the President, and that Priebus briefly opened the door during the meeting, prompting the President to wave him away. While the President has publicly denied those details, other Administration officials who were present have confirmed Corney's account of how he ended up in a one-on-one meeting with the President.272 And the President acknowledged to Priebus and McGahn that he in fact spoke to Corney about Flynn in their one-on-one meeting. Fourth, the President's decision to clear the room and, in particular, to exclude the Attorney General from the meeting signals that the President wanted to be alone with Corney, which is consistent with the delivery of a message of the type that Corney recalls, rather than a more innocuous conversation that could have occurred in the presence of the Attorney General. Finally, Corney's reaction to the President's statements is consistent with the President having asked him to "let[] Flynn go." Corney met with the FBI leadership team, which agreed to keep the President' s statements closely held and not to inform the team working on the Flynn investigation so that they would not be influenced by the President' s request. Corney also promptly met with the Attorney General to ask him not to be left alone with the President again, an account verified by Sessions, FBI Chief of Staff James Rybicki, and Jody Hunt, who was then the Attorney General's chief of staff. A second question is whether the President's statements, which were not phrased as a direct order to Corney, could impede or interfere with the FBI's investigation of Flynn. While the President said he "hope[d]" Corney could "let[] Flynn go," rather than affirmatively directing him to do so, the circumstances of the conversation show that the President was asking Corney to close the FBl's investigation into Flynn. First, the President arranged the meeting with Corney so that they would be alone and purposely excluded the Attorney General, which suggests that the President meant to make a request to Corney that he did not want anyone else to hear. Second, because the President is the head of the Executive Branch, when he says that he " hopes" a subordinate will do something, it is reasonable to expect that the subordinate will do what the President wants. Indeed, the President repeated a version of"let this go" three times, and Corney testified that he understood the President's statements as a directive, which is corroborated by the way Corney reacted at the time. b. Nexus to a proceeding. To establish a nexus to a proceeding, it would be necessary to show that the President could reasonably foresee and actually contemplated that the investigation of Flynn was likely to lead to a grand jury investigation or prosecution. At the time of the President's one-on-one meeting with Corney, no grand jury subpoenas had been issued as part of the FBI's investi ation into Fl nn. But Fl nn's lies to the FBI violated federal criminal law, , and resulted in Flynn's prosecution for violating 18 U .S.C. § 100 I. By the time the President spoke to Corney about Flynn, DOJ officials had informed McGahn, who informed the President, that Flynn' s statements to senior White House officials about his contacts with Kislyak were not true and that Flynn had told the same version of events to the FBI. McGahn also informed the President that Flynn' s conduct could violate 18 U.S.C. § l 001. After the Vice President and senior White House officials reviewed the underlying information about Flynn's calls on February 10, 2017, they believed that Flynn could not have forgotten his conversations with Kislyak and concluded that he had been lying. In addition, the President's instruction to the FBI Director to "let[] Flynn go" suggests his awareness that Flynn could face criminal exposure for his conduct and was at risk of prosecution. c. Intent. As part of our investigation, we examined whether the President had a personal stake in the outcome of an investigation into Flynn-for example, whether the President was aware of Flynn' s communications with Kislyak close in time to when they occurred, such that the President knew that Flynn had lied to senior White House officials and that those lies had been passed on to the public. Some evidence suggests that the President knew about the existence and content of Flynn's calls when they occurred, but the evidence is inconclusive and could not be relied upon to establish the President's knowledge. In advance of Flynn's initial call with Kislyak, the President attended a meeting where the sanctions were discussed and an advisor may have mentioned that Flynn was scheduled to talk to Kislyak. Flynn told McFarland about the substance of his calls with Kislyak and said they may have made a difference in Russia's response, and Flynn recalled talking to Bannon in early January 2017 about how they had successfully " stopped the train on Russia's response" to the sanctions. It would have been reasonable for Flynn to have wanted the President to know of his communications with Kislyak because Kislyak told Flynn his request had been received at the highest levels in Russia and that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to the request, and the President was pleased by the Russian response, calling it a " [g]reat move." And the President never said publicly or internally that Flynn had lied to him about the calls with Kislyak. But McFarland did not recall providing the President-Elect with Flynn's read-out of his calls with Kislyak, and Flynn does not have a specific recollection of telling the President-Elect directly about the calls. Bannon also said he did not recall hearing about the calls from Flynn. And in February 2017, the President asked Flynn what was discussed on the calls and whether he had lied to the Vice President, suggesting that he did not already know. Our investigation accordingly did not produce evidence that established that the President knew about Flynn' s discussions of sanctions before the Department of Justice notified the White House of those discussions in late January 2017. The evidence also does not establish that Flynn otherwise possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive to end the FBI' s inquiry into Flynn' s conduct. Evidence does establish that the President connected the Flynn investigation to the FBI's broader Russia investigation and that he believed, as he told Christie, that terminating Flynn would end "the whole Russia thing." Flynn's firing occurred at a time when the media and Congress were raising questions about Russia's interference in the election and whether members of the President's campaign had colluded with Russia. Multiple witnesses recalled that the President viewed the Russia investigations as a challenge to the legitimacy of his election.