It was nearly a year ago when Donald Trump’s Justice Department reached a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, the Jan. 6 rioter who was fatally shot by a police officer during the attack on the U.S. Capitol. As part of the agreement, the Republican administration announced plans to give roughly $5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Babbitt’s relatives.
The settlement was awfully tough to defend, especially given the weakness of the civil case, though the developments hinted at a larger issue: Team Trump was on board with the idea of offering generous, taxpayer-funded payments to the president’s political allies.
This week, it happened again. MS NOW reported that Trump’s DOJ has struck a deal with former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. Bloomberg News published a related report:
The Justice Department has reached a financial settlement with Michael Flynn, a conservative activist and former official in the first Trump administration who sought millions of dollars from the government for what he alleged was a wrongful prosecution effort.
Lawyers for the government and for Flynn notified a federal judge in Florida on Wednesday that they had reached an agreement and that it would involve the payment of “settlement funds,” but did not disclose the amount or any other terms.
The brief court filing alerting the court to the financial settlement was posted online Wednesday afternoon.
While we don’t yet know how much money Flynn will get, the fact that he’ll walk away with any amount of taxpayer money is outrageous.
When Americans last heard from Flynn, he was repeatedly asserting his Fifth Amendment privileges during sworn testimony about his efforts after the 2020 election. Among the questions he wouldn’t answer were straightforward inquiries such as, “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power in the United States of America?”
In 2023, however, the former foreign agent decided to file an audacious lawsuit, claiming wrongful prosecution and seeking $50 million.
The complaint appeared baseless. Indeed, after federal prosecutors first charged Flynn — he was accused of lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian government, lying to investigators about being a paid foreign agent and acting illegally as an unregistered foreign agent while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign — he admitted he lied, twice pleaded guilty in open court and became a cooperating witness with then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Flynn then changed his lawyers, at which point he stopped helping the Mueller probe and decided he was no longer guilty of the crimes to which he had already pleaded guilty. Soon after, then-Attorney General Bill Barr took an interest in the case, and the DOJ announced it was dropping all of the charges against Trump’s former aide.
As difficult as it was to believe, Barr’s DOJ concluded that it could not prove Flynn was guilty of the crimes to which Flynn had already pleaded guilty. (A retired judge examined what transpired and ultimately accused the DOJ of exercising a “gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”)
Late on a Wednesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving 2020, Trump quietly pardoned Flynn. It was among the most corrupt moves the president made during his first term.
The editorial board of The Washington Post (back when it was still the editorial board of The Washington Post) wrote soon after about Trump’s America: “Guilty is innocent; lies are truth; traitors are patriots. The question is not whether Mr. Trump has degraded the presidency. The question is how much long-term damage he has done. Will future presidents now feel free to use the pardon power — or the other vast powers of office — with such nakedly crooked motives? How many will calculate that they can make corruption appear to be patriotism as long as enough of the country wants to believe the lies they tell?”
The pardon, however, apparently wasn’t enough. Flynn wanted a payout, too, claiming federal law enforcement subjected him to malicious prosecution when they charged him with crimes he had twice pleaded guilty to.
Thanks to Trump’s DOJ, he’ll now get one.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”