topic to the media. essentially they re saying he d been practices his lies to the press before the fbi shows up to interview him. and that sort of gets into his mindset. again, one of the issues here is always did you intend to make a false statement. that s when they can prosecute you, if you intentionally lied. if you just forgot something and you gave a wrong answer, that s a different thing. but here what they re saying is that you were michael flynn, you were practicing these lies for some time before the fbi showed up at the white house to do this interview. and again, this is again to push back on this idea that he may have been tricked into making these false statements. it s absolutely, as you pointed out, he s not admitted that he made those false statements and there s no mitigation to that. is there any reason to believe that the judge is actually going to now because of the back and forth smack flynn down a little bit? no, he won t. it s kind of an unwritten rule.
lying. general, when you look at these documents and to evan s points, evan and shimon s points that we are getting the details, are you surprised they included those specific documents in this sentencing memo? i would have been had it not come up in michael flynn s memo. they re trying to put out that he somehow was treated unfairly to not tell him it s a crime to lie to us. i think it s very, very smart of them to do this. i think people need to know that you don t have to tell the head of the national security adviser that it s a crime. there s no question that he knew that. he also knew what the interview was about. it s very clear that they told him more than once what exactly they needed to talk to him about. it had been in the press. he knew exactly what he was going to be talking to the agents about and what they were
mitigated. they re saying that the things that the legal team has raised, the questions over whether or not he was warned, whether or not the fbi sort of put hmm at ease and didn t tell him exactly what this was about before they came over, none of that matters. they say michael flynn is a national security adviser for the president, he is a former head of the defense intelligence agency, he s a long-time military decorated military veteran, he should know that lying to the fbi is a crime. so none of that should matter. look, i think what the special counsel is trying to do is get ahead of any issues that the judge might raise as a result of this. they re making sure that the judge gets the clear picture here that what michael flynn did was lie, it s plain and straight lying, it doesn t matter what the circumstances under which those lies occurred.
you don t harm the defendant for things that his lawyers do really. you have to assume that these are strategic documents filed by the legal team. i would say it s a little bit possible if at the sentencing the defendant is always given an opportunity to address the court. if michael flynn stood up and starred going off about some rant about an fbi conspiracy theory and how he was tricked, maybe he would reconsidering. the defendant usually gets the bottom of the range. it would be really unusual for the judge to go above the bottom, which is no time. shimon, a lot of redactions, which was true to the form of the original sentencing memo as well. but this obviously dealing with different documents. what is redacted? what does it suggest? names are redacted. it suggests that other people were involved and being briefed. there s some mention about an argument over how to approach michael flynn on this. there s also a reference to other investigations. they say there are other
you already have michael flynn making their case, his team making their case about this. the president, we ll have to see. you saw him tweet about flynn, saying he believes he is stronger than some of the others, that he s not weak. clearly the president has been supportive of his former national security adviser through this. so we ll have to wait and see how the white house responds. we know you ll continue to read through it. thank you, pamela. what else are you guys seeing? one of the other interesting notes is that in a phone call from january 24th of 2017 when the fbi initial lily reaches ouo lieutenant flynn, they say they want to talk to him and they ask him questions about his conversations with the russians. he said they say that he explained that he had been trying to build relationships with the russians, that he had calls in which he exchanged