And now, the Flynn review

Attorney General Barr has reportedly tasked Jeff Jensen, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, with a review of the case brought against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. We have closely followed the Flynn case, which seems to have involved an operation run against him by the Comey FBI and Obama holdover Sally Yates. One should think that such a review is long overdue. The lead mainstream media story on the review is the Times’s, by the trio of Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo. They report:

Attorney General William P. Barr has assigned an outside prosecutor to scrutinize the criminal case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, according to people familiar with the matter.

The review is highly unusual and could trigger more accusations of political interference by top Justice Department officials into the work of career prosecutors.

Mr. Barr has also installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the people said. The team includes at least one prosecutor from the office of the United States attorney in St. Louis, Jeff Jensen, who is handling the Flynn matter, as well as prosecutors from the office of the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen.

Over the past two weeks, the outside prosecutors have begun grilling line prosecutors in the Washington office about various cases — some public, some not — including investigative steps, prosecutorial actions and why they took them, according to the people. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive internal deliberations.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The rest of the Times story is “context” aimed at discrediting Barr and the review he has commissioned.

Fox News attributes the story of Jensen’s assignment to a senior Justice Department official and adds that “Jensen will be working hand-in-hand with the lead prosecutor of Flynn case, Brandon Van Grack, according to the official.” I’m not sure what that means except that such a review would necessarily entail Van Grack’s cooperation.

Van Grack is a former member of Team Mueller; Politico’s Josh Gerstein noted earlier this week that “Van Grack’s absence from [recent] court filings on th[e current Flynn motion to withdraw his guilty plea] on Sunday led to speculation about his status on the case.” Gerstein adds: “A Justice Department spokesman said Van Grack remained in his Justice Department post overseeing foreign-agent-registration issues. The filing on Wednesday confirmed that he also remains on the Flynn case as a special assistant U.S. attorney based in Washington.”

I would only add this. The Justice Department’s profile of Jensen is posted online here. He is a Trump appointee with ten years of prior service in the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. The profile adds: “Jensen graduated from the Indiana University School of Business before becoming a CPA for PricewaterhouseCoopers. He then became an FBI agent for 10 years and graduated from the St. Louis University School of Law. Jensen served another 10 years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney before going into private practice in 2009.” Jensen worked in private practice at Husch Blackwell in St. Louis. Perhaps one of our friends at the firm can further enlighten us.

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