In Leaked Audio, Barack Obama Warns That Donald Trump Is Corrupting the “Rule of Law”

The former president is concerned after charges against Michael Flynn were dropped by the Department of Justice.

Andreas Gebert/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Former President Barack Obama said Friday that the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn means that the “basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.”

The comments were made in a private web chat conversation with members of the Obama Alumni Association, a recording of which was obtained by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff, who wrote about the comments late Friday.

Obama, who had once fired Flynn as his director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for being “chaotic [and] insubordinate,” Isikoff notes, said on the recording that the news about Flynn’s case had been “somewhat downplayed” but was incredibly worrying.

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Obama said. “That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic—not just institutional norms—but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

Isikoff notes that Obama misstated Flynn’s charge: He had pled guilty to lying to FBI investigators, not perjury. Flynn’s guilty plea came in late 2017 after he lied to FBI agents about whether he’d talked with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period in January 2017. As reported by Mother Jones‘ Dan Friedman, in November 2017 Flynn pled guilty to lying to FBI agents about the conversations with Kislyak, while also admitting that he had lied to the FBI about efforts to influence foreign diplomats during a December 2016 UN resolution on condemning Israeli settlement construction. Misrepresenting the truth was a regular habit of Flynn’s. He also admitted lying to the Justice Department in a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing by claiming he was not aware that he was lobbying for Turkey. And he’d lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the call with Kislyak, which Trump acknowledged.

During his sentencing hearing on December 18, 2018, Emmet Sullivan, the federal judge during sentencing, told Flynn that he “arguably … sold [his] country out,” and added that he wasn’t going to hide his “disgust [and] disdain for this criminal offense.” Flynn repeatedly declined to withdraw his guilty plea, and told the judge he didn’t think he’d been set up to lie to the FBI.

Trump has repeatedly said Flynn was treated unfairly by the FBI, and Attorney General William Barr had tasked federal prosecutors with reviewing the case as part of his sustained scrutiny of convictions related to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump associates and the Russian interference efforts in the 2016 US elections. Barr has already forced prosecutors to reduce a sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, causing several federal prosecutors from the case to withdraw in protest. Barr had also previously caused prosecutors in the Flynn case to lower a sentencing recommendation. When the Justice Department moved to drop his case this week, it said in a filing that FBI agents had no valid reason to have questioned Flynn at the time he lied, and therefore couldn’t prove that a crime occurred.

Obama pointed to the Flynn case Friday—and the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic—as why November’s election is particularly important.

“So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do,” Obama said. “Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, ‘Ah, this is the most important election.’ Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it’s the most important election. This one—I’m not on the ballot—but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this happen.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate