Ken Starr on dismissal of Michael Flynn case
Fox News contributor Ken Starr reacts to Strzok notes that Obama weighs in on Flynn case.
Former independent counsel Ken Starr, a Fox News contributor, told “Outnumbered Overtime” Thursday that the Obama administration should have let President-elect Trump know of their concerns about incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn during the transition period.
“It’s a matter of honor and frankly it’s a matter of patriotism,” Starr said. “President Trump, then the president-elect, is about to take office. If there is a problem that those in power know about, or suspect, or fear, they should promptly bring it to the president-elect’s attention.
“The failure to do so, I believe, was dereliction of duty,” Starr added.
On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ordered a lower court to allow the Justice Department to dismiss its case against Flynn, a ruling Starr described as "a huge step forward."
“What we [now] know," Starr said, "is that there was so little predicate for the concern [about Flynn] to begin with."
Starr pointed to newly uncovered notes from former FBI official Peter Strzok. Flynn's lawyers say the notes indicate that then-FBI Director James Comey appeared to downplay Flynn’s calls during the presidential transition with Russia's ambassador as “legit” during a January 2017 meeting where then-President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Joe Biden also weighed in.
“Of course they were legit, they were entirely proper,” Starr said of Flynn's calls with the envoy, Sergey Kislyak. “We know that now that we have the transcripts, so the entire idea of investigating the national security adviser and the campaign more generally was really extraordinarily ill-founded.
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“It shows remarkably poor judgment on the part of the President of the United States, President Obama,” he continued.
Starr added that former Vice President Joe Biden, “the likely nominee, has a lot to answer for and he has not answered it yet.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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