The Flynn Leak Investigation

What happens when FBI isn't interested

As we all know, nobody has ever been held responsible for leaking information about (1) the existence of the December 30, 2016 call between incoming national security advisor Mike Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak; (2) the (false) information that Flynn discussed U.S. sanctions with Kislyak. These leaks were key moments in the 2017 Russia collusion hoax operation. The recent release of documents on seven codename leak investigations by Sean Davis of the Federalist contains some new and interesting details on the “investigation” of the Flynn leaks in the section on the Echos Fate codename (August 13, 2025 link; pdf see pages 70ff).

The new documents shed light on how the FBI, when uninterested, went through the motions of creating an investigation file while taking care not to do anything that might identify the leaker. In this article, I’ll review the investigation.

As a preamble to this review, I’d like readers to reflect on an affidavit by FBI agent Steven Jett (link, January 19, 2021) about government leakers in which SA Jett, after briefly reviewing a series of leading cases, stated that he was “aware of no instance in which a government employee contacted a journalist using the government employee's government-owned email account” and the (obvious) necessity of looking beyond official government accounts for relevant communications:

Indeed, during my conversations with these FBI case agents regarding prosecutions of government employees disclosing classified information to journalists, I am aware of no instance in which a government employee contacted a journalist using the government employee's government-owned email account. Given the general understanding among government officials about banner authorities that allow monitoring of government officials' computers, I believe it more likely those same officials, particularly those who are not assigned to a public affairs office, would elect to use email accounts not affiliated with the government.

While this seems blindingly obvious, keep this issue in mind as we review the “progress” of the Flynn “investigation”.

January 13, 2017 Article and the first Crime Report

The Echos Fate investigation was opened on May 10, 2017 regarding the disclosure of classified information in an article by David Ignatius, Four burning questions on Russia (Washington Post, January 13, 2017 link; archive). The relevant paragraph was as follows:

According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking. What did Flynn say, and did it undercut the U.S. sanctions? The Logan Act (though never enforced) bars U.S. citizens from correspondence intending to influence a foreign government about “disputes” with the United States. Was its spirit violated? The Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

On January 24, 2017 Bill Priestap (Strzok’s superior) issued a Crime Report to Mary McCord (AAG, National Security Division) reporting that the Ignatius article of January 13, 2017 contained classified information.

Priestap’s Crime Report answered an 11- question questionnaire, that was heavily redacted even in the release more than 6 years later:

January 24, 2017 was a busy date in the Russia collusion hoax calendar. It was the very day that (1) the FBI carried out their ambush interview of Flynn, over which Comey and McCabe were both hovering; (2) separately and at almost exactly the same time, FBI was carrying out a lawyered up interview of Igor Danchenko under a Queen for a Day agreement negotiated by DOJ’s David Laufman (who had previously granted similar sweetheart deals to Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills). [As we’ve discussed at length elsewhere, at his interview, Danchenko revealed that he’d never even met Sergei Millian, the ostensible “source” of the collusion allegations in multiple Steele dossier reports with dates ranging from June 2016 to August 10, 2016, and that the information attributed to “Millian” derived from a single 10-15 minute anonymous phone call in late July 2016 which was much more innocuous than the dossier reporting. The FBI’s subsequent concealment of Danchenko’s admissions was one of the key manoeuvres in the Russia collusion hoax.]

Little or nothing appears to have been done for the next 3.5 months following Priestap’s January 24, 2017 Crime Report.

According to the Opening EC, the case was referred to the Baltimore Field Office on May 8, 2017. The Baltimore Field Office issued an Opening EC on May 12, 2017 - now four months since the original article.

On May 19, 2017, the FBI issued a Notification Letterhead Memorandum reporting the opening of a full investigation into the Flynn leak:

Then on May 25, 2017, the FBI issued an Import Form documenting that they had issued a Letterhead Memorandum (LHM) on the opening of the investigation.

Subsequent to this opening, a subsequent Crime Report added a February 10, 2017 article in Washington Post by the triumvirate of Miller, Entous and Nakashima entitled “National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say” (link; archive). It began as follows:

National security adviser Michael Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Flynn’s communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak were interpreted by some senior U.S. officials as an inappropriate and potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from sanctions that were being imposed by the Obama administration in late December to punish Russia for its alleged interference in the 2016 election.

“U.S. sanctions” were a defined term in Flynn’s subsequent Statement of Offense, which referred specifically to the sanctions against GRU, FSB and associated employees and individuals announced in an Executive Order on December 29, 2016, which was one of several measures announced on December 29, 2016. The expulsion of diplomats was announced in a different executive order. Flynn was aware of this distinction, as evidence in a February 2017 article in Daily Caller.

The eventual release of the transcript of Flynn’s call showed that he did not discuss “U.S. Sanctions” as defined in the Statement of Offense, notwithstanding his plea. Similarly, the 302 of the FBI interview with Flynn showed that he was not even asked about “U.S. Sanctions” as defined in the Statement of Offense. At some point in the proceedings, Mueller attorney Brandon van Grack appears to have become aware of this problem, as he introduced a new defined term “sanctions” to incorporate both “U.S. Sanctions” and the expulsion of diplomats. See my thread from 2020 here (link). In my opinion, Flynn’s lawyers should have insisted on this technical distinction, rather than the more esoteric issues, in their dispute with Judge Emmett Sullivan.

The “Investigation”

The subsequent “investigation” of the Flynn leaks is summarized in the Closing of Investigation LHM (December 5, 2020).

Their “open source research” determined that the classified information was also referenced in three other contemporary articles:

They observed that the information remained classified until June 2020, when most of it (other than “sources and methods”) was declassified.

They determined that the subject pool was comprised of at least 167 individuals and that even this number did not include all individuals involved in “verbal briefings and discussions”.

The FBI then reviewed “over 10,000 [in]ternal government email, call, and Lync message records”, an exercise which “was not successful in narrowing down any persons of interest in the subject pool”. Given SA Jett’s observation that government leakers avoid use of government email and message services for their leaks, any other result would have been astounding.

The FBI also “conducted broad open source research and analysis”, none of which “advanced the investigation”. Something was then redacted - typically anything interesting is redacted. I wonder what it was?

The FBI observed that “most of the prioritized subject pool” had senior positions and “many had official purposes for contacting the media as part of their job duties”. The FBI concluded that it was more or less helpless “absent a confession or admission”.

Closing

During the transition period after the 2020 election, the FBI took steps to close down the senescent Echos Fate investigation. On December 5, 2020, the Closing Letterhead Memorandum was filed (page 84); on December 9, 2020, FBI Headquarters filed Closing Concurrence (page 82); then on December 16, 2020, WFO filed a Closing EC and Closing LHM (page 88) agreeing that “all investigative methods/techniques have been completed and/or discontinued, all leads set have been completed and/or discontinued” and closing the file.

The closing of the investigation attracted some news commentary in early 2021.

In a January 20, 2021 revision (link; archive) of a seemingly unrelated story entitled “Justice Dept. Ends Stock Trade Inquiry Into Richard Burr Without Charges”, New York Times reported the closing of the investigation into the Flynn leak case (“Operation Echo”). This article was covered briefly at Just the News (link).

The article, (apparently) incorrectly, stated that the leak was “under scrutiny” by John Durham.

The Justice Department’s decision in the Burr case came after prosecutors in Washington quietly closed two other politically fraught cases this fall without charges, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday when asked about other delicate cases.

In one inquiry, code-named Operation Echo, investigators opened a leak case into a Washington Post column about phone calls in late 2016 between Sergey I. Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the United States, and Michael T. Flynn, then Mr. Trump’s incoming national security adviser. The leak was one of several matters under scrutiny by John H. Durham, the special counsel investigating the officials who opened the Russia investigation.

The article stated that prosecutors had “investigated whether the disclosures came from former Obama administration officials who had access to sensitive information about the phone calls” and that the “investigators ultimately found no wrongdoing”. Both of these statements are contradicted by the new documents which (1) show that the investigators were unable to identify the wrongdoer, not that there was “no wrongdoing” and (2) show no evidence that any “former Obama administration officials” were interviewed in connection with the leak.

Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington investigated whether the disclosures came from former Obama administration officials who had access to sensitive information about the phone calls, according to two people familiar with the investigation. The investigators ultimately found no wrongdoing, one of the people said.

Technofog Theory

In May 2020, Technofog hypothesized (thread) that the original Flynn leak had been to Adam Entous of Washington Post, not to David Ignatius. Technofog’s story was picked up in by Fox News (link).

Technofog had noticed a 2018 presentation by Adam Entous at Georgetown (link) who had recounted that sources were “whispering” to him that there were “mysterious communications” between Flynn and Kislyak -

sources start whispering to me that there were all these mysterious communications between Michael Flynn, who was then the National Security Advisor designate for Trump and the Russian ambassador, Kislyak. ..

…

Initially, I didn’t know what to make of it. ..There were divisions within the newsroom. At that point, I’m at the Washington Post... Why is it news that Michael Flynn is talking to the Russian ambassador? He should be talking to the Russian ambassador. He should be talking to him about saving the children of Aleppo, for example. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t be having that conversation. I was arguing internally that we need something more than just the fact that there was a conversation, but I’m one of many reporters.

Entous explained that, as a news reporter, he didn’t see enough for a news report, whereas Ignatius was writing as an opinion columnist.

A year later, Technofog wrote a follow-up article (link) in which he connected the Flynn leak to a related leak relied upon by the Entous triumvirate in a January 5, 2017 Washington Post story (link; archive).

Technofog observed that Brian Hale, then Director of Public Affairs for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, had speculated in an email to Stephanie O’Sullivan, Clapper, Michael Dempsey, Timothy Barrett, the ODNI Transition Team and DNI-Media, that the leak came from either the White House or a Democrat source associated with the Senate Intelligence Committee:

Technofog, relying on the New York Times reporting of January 20, 2021, incorrectly believed that the leak had been investigated by Durham - which, from the recent releases, we now know not to have been the case. Technofog observed:

The leak was a felony orchestrated for the purposes of damaging the incoming NSA and, thus, the incoming Trump administration. The fallout was enough to get Flynn removed, which prevented him from overseeing the ongoing Carter Page FISA renewals.

While Technofog correctly highlighted the seriousness of the Flynn leaks, he, like so many others, bizarrely fixated on an issue that was irrelevant to the Russia collusion hoax narrative (the Carter Page FISA warrants) and which had no impact on the wider society, while failing to address the fraudulent existence of the Russia collusion investigation itself which was damaged the incoming Trump administration (not the Page FISA warrants).

Conclusion

The new documents on the Flynn leak investigation show that it was not seriously investigated. Based on many previous cases, there was no legitimate expectation that government leakers would document their activities on government-issue email or messages. So the laborious examination of over 10,000 government-issue emails and messages hardly constitutes a serious investigation. Similarly, if insiders in the ODNI hypothesized in real time that leaks were coming from the White House or Senate Intelligence Committee, interviewing several dozen FBI and government personnel wouldn’t accomplish anything.

The most logical first step towards shortening the list from 167 and counting would have been a non-content (2703(d)) warrant for email and phone records of the Washington Post triumvirate (Entous, Miller, Nakashima) - Mueller issued dozens, if not hundreds, of 2703(d) warrants.

In the waning days of the Trump administration, in late December 2020 during the transition period, the DOJ belatedly issued a search warrant for email and phone records for the WaPo triumvirate but for the period April 1, 2017 to July 31, 2017 (archive) that was of interest in the Sirens Lure investigation (see upcoming article.) Washington Post lawyers fiercely fought against this warrant and, needless to say, it was quickly dropped by the incoming Biden administration under Merrick Garland.

The Flynn leaks deserved a serious investigation. But the FBI under Wray and Comey wasn’t interested. So a serious investigation never took place.